25.2249, Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Kecskes & Romero-Trillo (2013)

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Subject: 25.2249, Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Kecskes & Romero-Trillo (2013)

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Date: Wed, 21 May 2014 23:59:09
From: Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei [leilakhabbazi_o at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-4137.html

EDITOR: Istvan  Kecskes
EDITOR: Jesús  Romero-Trillo
TITLE: Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics
SERIES TITLE: Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP] 16
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei, University of East Anglia

SUMMARY

The book under review consists of 20 articles looking at current issues in the
realm of intercultural pragmatics. The volume is organized in three sections:
the linguistic and cognitive domain, the social and cultural domain, and the
discourse and stylistic domain. In their introduction, the editors indicate
that the purpose of the book is to look at intercultural interaction from a
multilingual rather than a monolingual perspective. The chapters in the book
provide insightful analyses of real language situations in different
languages.

The first section, which looks at linguistic and cognitive aspects of
intercultural pragmatics, consists of six articles. In the first article
‘Hate: Saliency features in cross-cultural semantics’, Fabienne Baider
attempts to define Cypriot-Greek and Franco-French intra-culturality on the
basis of oral and written data in reference to the emotion called “hatred”.
The oral data comes from the most conventional conceptual associations related
to hate in lexicographic definitions, common sayings, and proverbs. The
written data comes from the most frequent conceptual associations in the three
most popular daily newspapers in the two countries. The writer observes
differences in conceptualizing the words examined and attributes these
differences to the different models of social interactions in French and
Greek-Cypriot cultures and different cultural attitudes towards emotional
expressions. The author also examines saliency in each cultural community with
regard to one’s age and sex. She concludes “in order to understand, teach and
learn differences, we need as much to describe the core meaning common to both
communities, as well as the socio-cultural differences built into this
meaning” (p. 23).

The second paper of the first section is by Valandis Bardzokas and is entitled
‘The semantics and pragmatics of casual connectives: Conceptual and procedural
aspects of Modern Greek ‘γιati’ and ‘epeiδi’’. In this paper, the writer
contrasts the two causal markers ‘γιati’ and ‘epeiδi’ in Greek (both
translated as ‘because’ in a wide range of contextual applications) with the
aim of uncovering finely grained distinctions in causal meanings. Using
Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) proposal for the distinction between conceptual and
procedural meaning, the writer examines the use of the aforementioned
connectives in various contexts and concludes that these connectives are not
intersubstitutable because ‘epeiδi’ “constitutes a vehicle of conceptual cause
realizing fully propositional conjunctive relations”, while ‘γιati’ encodes
“either a procedural constraint in linguistically undermined conjunctive
environments or conceptual information” (p. 52).

In the third article, ‘Being cooperatively (im)polite: Grice’s model in the
context of (im)politeness theories’, Marta Dynel argues that some post-Gricean
theories on (im)politeness (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1987; Lakoff 1973, 1977,
1989; Leech 1983; Watts 1992, 2003) are based on unfounded interpretations and
modifications of the Gricean account and that politeness and impoliteness are
rational communicative behaviours which exhibit no incongruity with the
Cooperative Principle. Dynel proposes that (im)politeness can be viewed in the
light of Grice’s original work on communicative rationality and
intentionality, which underlie literal/explicit or implicit meanings.

The fourth article is by Joana Garmendia and is entitled ‘Irony: Making as if
we pretend to echo’, which analyses some examples of irony using Sperber and
Wilson’s (1981) “Echoic Mention Theory” and Clark and Gerrig’s (1984)
“Pretense Theory”. The author concludes that although echo and pretense are
not necessary to ironic utterances in general, they do play an essential role
in some cases of irony. In order to explain both types of irony, Garmendia
proposes “Asif”-Theory, which is grounded in Grice’s (1967/89) claims about
irony.

In ‘Pragmatic awareness: An index of linguistic competence’, Elly Ifantidou
first provides the theoretical framework for a pragmatic, genre-driven
instruction and evaluation tool targeting academic learners’ pragmatic and
linguistic competence. In doing so, she redefines pragmatic competence as a
complex ability that includes pragmatic awareness, meta-pragmatic awareness
and meta-linguistic competences. Ifantidou uses pragmatic awareness as a means
of evaluating both pragmatic and linguistic competence. After providing
theoretical background, the author provides experimental evidence of its
effects when put to practice. For this purpose, the writer uses a pragmatic
task (genre conversion) and compares it to two language tasks: outline summary
and data description. She concludes that genre conversion can be more reliably
used as an indication of pragmatic and linguistic competence in terms of
reception and production.
 
In the final article of the first section, ‘Context dynamism in classroom
discourse’, Laura Maguire and Jesús Romero-Trillo explore the acquisition of
English by children in a bilingual school in Madrid through the lens of the
Dynamic Model of Meaning (DMM). They discuss examples of successful and
unsuccessful teacher-pupil interactions and conclude that English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) learners need to share the same common ground, that is, the
same linguistic, private and situational contexts in order to achieve
successful communication in the classroom. They take a complementary approach
to the DMM model by identifying three modifications that affect common ground:
the language proficiency of the interlocutors, the speakers’ maturity, and the
activities carried out in the classroom context.

Section two consists of 6 articles focusing on the socio-cultural aspects of
intercultural pragmatics. The first chapter is by Lucía Fernández-Amaya  and
is entitled ‘Simultaneous speech in American English and Spanish telephone
closings’. The purpose of the study is, firstly, finding out the frequency and
types of simultaneous speech in the two sets of data, and, secondly, examining
Spanish and American speakers’ perceptions of this interruptive behavior.
Fernández-Amaya concludes that simultaneous speech is commonly used by
speakers to collaboratively maintain the floor. The author discusses the
results from the point of view of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness
Theory and maintains that simultaneous speech may not be perceived as a
violation of turn-taking principles, but rather, it should be perceived as a
positive politeness strategy creating a sort of bond between speakers when
interacting with relatives and friends.

The second chapter in this section is by Maicol Formentelli and is entitled ‘A
model of stance for the management of interpersonal relations: Formality,
power, distance and respect’. Maintaining that existing theories of stance
neglect the sociolinguistic features of the broader context of situations, the
writer presents a model of stance that captures the links between the
sociocultural and contextual components of situations and the expression of
interpersonal meanings. This model of interpersonal stance is implemented
along the four central parameters of formality, power, distance, and respect,
as justified by social and contextual categories. The writer, then, examines
some excerpts of naturally occurring English Lingua Franca (ELF) with
reference to the proposed model.

‘The Russian social category ‘svoj’: A study in ethnopragmatics’, by Anna
Gladkova, is devoted to discussing the meaning and cultural salience of the
social category ‘svoj’ using an ethnopragmatic approach. The author proposes a
semantic analysis of the term ‘svoj’ and explains speech practices associated
with it. The aim of the study is to show how this social category term reveals
Russian cultural values and attitudes.

The fourth article in this section, by Marinelly Piñango, is entitled
‘Outlining and proposing the constructs of institutional framework and
institutional practice for the study of intercultural communication’. The aim
of the article is to outline and propose an institutional framework and
institutional practices for the study of intercultural pragmatics. The writer
believes that misunderstandings happen in intercultural communication because
participants who assign different meanings, values, and functions to different
things may possess different institutional frameworks and practices. Piñango
illustrates the above-mentioned point by referring to a book on parenting
written by a Chinese mother and the subsequent reaction of American society.

Geneviève Tréguer-Felten’s article, ‘Can a lingua franca bridge the
communication gap between corporations set in different cultures?’,
investigates the cultural implications of using ELF for French and Chinese
corporations as a means of communication. The writer chooses rhetoric, and
more specifically, Aristotelian “ethos”, as a point of comparison. The author
maintains that the rhetorical context in which discourse is set is of utmost
importance since it influences the meaning values of lexical terms, the
discourse, and the audience’s perception. She concludes that “ELF alone cannot
bridge the communication gap between corporations set in different cultures”
(p. 280).

The last paper in this section, ‘Variational pragmatics in Chinese: Some
insights from an empirical study’, is by Wei Ren, Chih-Ying Lin and Helen
Woodfield. It focuses on the actional level of Variational Pragmatics (VP) by
studying the speech acts of compliments and refusals between Mainland Chinese
and Taiwan Chinese undergraduate students. The intralingual analysis of the
data suggests some similarities and differences in the explicit/implicitness
and direct/indirectness of the Chinese and Taiwanese modes of compliments and
refusals.

The third section presents eight articles revolving around discourse and
stylistics in intercultural pragmatics. In the first chapter, entitled ‘The
evaluative function of cohesive devices in three political texts’, Ana Belén
Cabrejas Peñuelas and Mercedes Díez Prados attempt to find out to what extent
cohesion and evaluation are intertwined. They study three political texts --
‘The Gettysburg Address’, ‘I have a dream’ and Obama’s ‘Inaugural Address’ --
using Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) coding system, and Martin’s (1994)
classification of evaluative resources. They conclude that “the aesthetic
effect achieved by an effective use of cohesive devices may incline the
listener to share the valued defended by the orator. That is the power of
effective rhetoric, which, in a global world like ours, can become
intercultural rhetoric” (p. 339).
 
The second chapter in this section, ‘Relational work in anonymous,
asynchronous communication: A study of (dis)affiliation in You Tube’, is a
joint paper by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Patricia
Bou-Franch. They conduct a micro-analysis of the communication used to
construct dis/affiliation in YouTube postings. They believe that on YouTube,
disaffiliation may be conveyed through impoliteness strategies and affiliation
through politeness strategies. They combine the frameworks of Brown and
Levinson (1978/1987), Culpeper (1996) and van Dijk (1998) in order to explain
how dis/affiliation is constructed at the micro-level. They then relate it to
the construction of social identity.

The article entitled ‘Manipulation and pragmatics in political discourse’, by
Agnieszka Grzywna, explores speeches of the prime ministers of Spain and
Poland with the aim of revealing the influences and origins of political
discourse and manipulation from a pragmatic perspective. The author concludes
that the orators used a variety of tools to attract attention, to convince,
and to manipulate; however, the most important point is that a proper text
interpretation depends on cultural environment and traditions.

Victoria Guillén-Nieto, in her article entitled ‘Intercultural business
pragmatics: The case of the business letter of introduction’, focuses on the
business letter of introduction (BLI) in order to explain the problem of
mistranslation. The writer analyses three excerpts: a BLI (of a Spanish toy
company) originally written in Spanish, the English translation of the Spanish
BLI, and a reproduction of this BLI written in English done by a specialist
informant from the toy making sector in the UK. Guillén-Nieto examines these
excerpts in terms of text length, genre rhetorical patterns, type of language
used to linguistically embody moves, and interactional metadiscourse patterns
indicating the writer’s stance. Observing differences in the way a BLI is
written in Spanish and Anglo-Saxon professional writing cultures, the author
suggests that the following factors may influence the different socio-cultural
expectations in the two cultural communities: an uncertainty avoidance index,
individualism, and masculinity. The writer recommends that companies should
hire highly qualified language consultants, translators, and interpreters in
order to meet their market expansion requirements.

In ‘Zoo-pragmatics: Performative acts among animals’, Katya Mandoki attempts
to prove that performativity (as intentional communicative action) need not be
a verbal form exclusively belonging to humans. In her article, Mandoki first
proposes Jakobson’s (1960) functions as performatives. In the second part of
her paper, the author argues that there are two conditions for performative
acts: directionality and communicability, both of which need not be
exclusively verbal. In the last part of her paper, some non-verbal speech
acts, including expressives, commissives, directives, assertives,
declaratives, metalinguistic, phatics, and poetics are illustrated among
animals.

José Santaemilia Ruiz and Sergio Maruenda Bataller’s article is entitled
‘Naming practices and negotiation of meaning: A corpus-based analysis of
Spanish and English newspaper discourse’. The aim of the writers of this paper
is to document and analyze the concepts, the discursive processes, the
ideological tensions and the semantic negotiation resulting from two legal
measures granting full marriage rights to gay couples in the UK and Spain. For
this purpose, they combine Critical Discourse Analysis and Relevance-Theoretic
Lexical Pragmatics (Carston 2002; Sperber & Wilson 1998; Wilson 2003; Wilson &
Carston 2007) to analyze key semantic sets regarding naming practices for
‘people’ and ‘relationships’ in Spanish and British newspaper discourse.

Carmen Santamaría-García, in her chapter entitled ‘A compelling need to
evaluate: Social networking sites as tools for the expression of affect,
judgment and appreciation’, explores the expression of evaluation on Face Book
(FB). The writer applies Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory to the
study of evaluation and carries out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of
the data. The analyses reveal that social networking site (SNS) users make
frequent use of appraisal resources and positive politeness strategies “in
order to claim common ground and establish rapport “ (p. 462). The writer also
observes some new ways of expressing appraisal, like using emoticons, and
concludes that the success of social networking sites “may lie in their use of
the formal features in order to stimulate engagement of users through the
communication of attitude” (p. 467).

The last paper of this edition is entitled ‘Strategies of discursive
manipulation in the headlines of articles about Russia in the quality British
press’. In this article, Alla Smirnova combines Intercultural Pragmatics and
Critical Discourse Analysis in order to show how discursive strategies in the
headlines of 80 articles devoted to the Russian President, Dimitry Medvedev,
in British quality newspapers function to mediate dialogue between cultures.
The findings of the research suggest that the following discursive strategies
are used: metaphor, analogy, stereotype, allusion, and irony. Using examples
from the corpus, the writer illustrates how these discursive strategies become
a means of power abuse in the sphere of intercultural communication. The
corpus analysis suggests that these strategies were used to delegitimize the
Russian president and, consequently, the country as a whole.

EVALUATION

As the title of the book suggests, this volume brings together research on a
variety of issues in intercultural pragmatics in real language situations. It
focuses on intercultural communication from a variety of perspectives. The
articles in the volume focus on a range of written and spoken texts, including
those that are political, computer mediated, and business-centered.

Some of the articles in the volume are particularly interesting because they
apply intercultural pragmatics to practical domains. For example, Geneviève
Tréguer-Felten’s article discusses the common problem of miscommunication in
business environments, and Carmen Santamaría-García looks at evaluation and
politeness strategies in the widely used social networking sites.

In sum, this book will be of primary interest to researchers of pragmatics
around the world working on intercultural communication. The results gained
from the articles based on corpus analysis, for example, Guillén-Nieto’s work
on intercultural business pragmatics, and Tréguer-Felten’s article on using
EFL to bridge the communication gap between corporations, could be of interest
beyond academia. This book will likely have limited use as a textbook, except
for advanced graduate-level seminars.

REFERENCES

Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.

Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and
Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness
phenomena. In Esther N. Goody (ed.), Questions and politeness. Strategies in
social interaction, 56-289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language
usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit
communication. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Clark, Herbert H. and Richard J. Gerrig. 1984. On the pretense theory of
irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(1). 121-126.

Culpeper, J. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25.
349-367.

Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Grice, P. 1967. Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Grice (ed.),
Studies in the way of words, 41-57. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard
University Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Thomas
Sebeok (ed.), Style in language, 350-377. New York: Wiley.

Lakoff, R. T. 1973. The logic of politeness: Minding your p's and q's. Papers
from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 292-305.
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Lakoff, R. 1977. What you can do with words: Politeness, pragmatics and
performatives. In R. Rogers, R. Wall and J. Murphy (eds.), Proceedings of the
Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions and Implicatures, 79-106.
Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Lakoff, R. T. 1989. The limits of politeness. Multilingua-Journal of
Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 8, 101-129.

Leech, G. N., & Leech, G. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.

Martin, J. R. 1994. Course notes for the subject ‘Writing’ (Master’s thesis)
MA in Applied Linguistics Program. Linguistics Department. University of
Sidney.

Martin, James R. and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation.
Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1981. Irony and the use-mention distinction. In P.
Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 295-318. New York: Academic Press.

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1998. The mapping between the mind and the public
lexicon. In Peter Carruthers and Jill Boucher (eds.). Thought and language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 184-200.

Van Dijk, T. 1998. Opinions and ideologies in the press. In Allan Bell and
Peter Garrett (eds.), Approaches to media discourse 21-63. Oxford: Blackwell.

Watts, R. 1992. Linguistic politeness research Quo vadis? In Richard Watts,
Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich (eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in Its
History, Theory and Practice, xi-xlvii. Berlin: Mouton.

Watts, R. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, D. 2003. Relevance theory and lexical pragmatics. Rivista di
linguistica 15(2).

Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics:
Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts (ed.).
Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 230-259.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei finished her PhD in language and linguistics at the
University of East Anglia/UK in Dec. 2011. The title of her thesis is
'Interactional Variation in English and Persian: A Comparative Analysis of
Metadsicourse Features in Magazine Editorials'. It focuses on comparing and
contrasting the use of interactional devices in English and Persian, and
discussing the similarities and differences in the light of the cultural
expectations and political settings in some British and Iranian news magazine
editorials. Her first thesis-driven paper ‘Propositional or Non-propositional,
That is the Question: A New Approach to Analyzing Interpersonal Metadiscourse
in Editorials’ was published in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2013. She is
interested in the following subject areas: intercultural communication, the
expression of interactional metadiscourse in the media, particularly the
press, patterns of cross-cultural variation in British and Iranian discourse.








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