Introduction

[Russell Arent]

I have several interests related to discourse studies: 1) genre analysis in
the school of Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993); 2) politeness (Brown and
Levinson, 1987) and rudeness (Beebe, 1995); 3) pragmatic failure (Thomas,
1983, 1984); and 4) sociolinguistics along the lines of Hymes (1974).

My Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Minnesota was entitled "The
Pragmatics of Cross-Cultural Bargaining in an Ammani Suq: An Exploration of
Language Choice, Discourse Structure and Pragmatic Failure in Discourse
Involving Arab and Non-Arab Participants".  I am especially interested in
cross-cultural variation in the frequency and sequencing of moves within
the same communicative event.  I also agree with Beebe (1995) that a
distinction between pragmatic failure and rudeness is analytically useful.

Regards,

Russ Arent


References

Beebe, L. (1995).  Polite fictions: Instrumental
	rudeness as pragmatic competence. In Alatis,
	J.E., C.A. Straehle, B.Gallenbergerm and M.
	Ronkin (Eds), Georgetown University Round
	Table in Language and Linguistics 1995,
	pp.154-168. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP.
Bhatia, V.J. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use
	in professional settings.  London: Longman.
Brown, P., and S. Levinson. (1987).  Politeness:
	Some universals in language use.  Cambridge: 	CUP.
Hymes, D. (1974).  Foundations in sociolinguistics.
	Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis.  Cambridge: CUP.
Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure.
	Applied Linguistics, 4:91-112.
Thomas, J. (1984). Cross-cultural discourse as
	'unequal encounter': Towards a pragmatic
	analysis.  Applied Linguistics, 5:226-235.

--------------------------
Dr. Russell Arent
Director, College ESL
Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics
Department of English, Riverview 106
St. Cloud State University, 720 Fourth Ave.So.,
St. Cloud, MN 56301-4498
(320) 255-3245