24.739, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Pragmatics: Trosborg (2010)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-739. Fri Feb 08 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.739, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Pragmatics: Trosborg (2010)

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Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:47:48
From: Susanne Mühleisen [susanne.muehleisen at uni-bayreuth.de]
Subject: Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-3597.html

EDITOR: Anna  Trosborg
TITLE: Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures
SERIES TITLE: Handbooks of Pragmatics 7
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2010

REVIEWER: Susanne Mühleisen, Universität Bayreuth

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, quite a number of linguistic disciplines have seen the
publication of large handbook projects in order to document the state of the
art of the specific field and make available current international research to
students and scholars alike. The field of pragmatics forms no exception to
this trend, with an ambitious, multi-volume ‘Handbook of Pragmatics’ series
currently being published by de Gruyter Mouton. One of the challenges of such
a project is to segment the complexities and interrelated key topics of a
field into digestible morsels without too many overlaps, repetitions and
redundancies. The general editors of the project, Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H.
Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider explain their concept of the nine volume project
in their preface: the first three volumes lay out the ''foundations of
pragmatics,'' (2010: vi) with a volume of that title (‘foundations’) forming
the beginning, followed by speech actions (vol. 2) and discourse (vol. 3) as
micro and macro level foundations. Next in line are cognitive (vol. 4),
societal (vol. 5), and interactional (vol. 6) perspectives. The last three
volumes, finally, are dedicated to discussing variability from a cultural and
contrastive (vol. 7), a diachronic (vol. 8) and a medial perspective (vol. 9).
Three volumes were published in 2010 (vols. 6, 7, and 8), and two, including
the foundation volume, followed in 2011 (vols. 1 and 5), while the remaining
four (2, 3, 4, and 9) are due to appear in late 2012 and 2013.

SUMMARY

Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures (vol. 7), edited by Anna Trosborg,
was one of the first volumes in this series available to the reader. Its focus
on cultural and contrastive variability promises to bring together studies on
cross-linguistic and cross-cultural pragmatics. As the editor points out in
her introduction, ''in principle, all aspects of pragmatics may be subjected
to cross-cultural comparison, but interest has centered on two dominant areas,
namely speech act theory and Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness'' (3).

These two areas, however, are also the explicit focus of two other volumes,
(vol. 2 and vol. 6). The topics in this volume mainly cover interlanguage
pragmatics, and particularly, pragmatics in L2s and in education and business,
even though speech acts and politeness theory are often underlying themes. The
concentration on interlanguage pragmatics makes sense considering the
long-standing interest of the editor who, as early as 1995, authored a study
on the subject (Trosborg 1995). In her introduction, Trosborg sets out to
define the differences between the central terms in the volume: contrastive,
cross-cultural, and intercultural pragmatics. The first of these types is
defined as follows: “[c]ontrastive pragmatics analysis points to language
differences as linguistic phenomena” (2). On the other hand, the latter two
terms deal with the study of pragmatics phenomena which relate to cultural
differences: “cross-cultural pragmatics is used to designate comparative
cultural studies obtained independently from different cultural groups”; and
“intercultural pragmatics is saved for intercultural interaction where data is
obtained when people from different cultural groups interact” (2). The
relationship between language and culture is seen here in an emphatically
straightforward way (“Language is culture -- culture is language. Culture and
language are intertwined and shape each other. The two are inseparable [...],”
(2)), which does not take into account the complexities of, for instance,
pluricentric languages, multilingual settings, or postcolonial situations.

The 628-page volume consists of altogether 21 contributions by renowned
authors in the field which are grouped together in four different parts.
Section I (Contrastive, Cross-cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics) seeks to
follow a development from contrastive to intercultural interactions and
therefore appears as the least thematically homogeneous group. Anna Wierzbicka
(“Cultural scripts and international communication”), well known for her work
on cultural scripts, uses this tool for a comparison of various speech
practices (e.g. making a request, making personal remarks) in different
languages. Rong Chen carries out a cross-cultural investigation of a
particular speech act in her article, “Compliment and compliment response
research: A cross-cultural survey.” Rosina Márquez Reiter and Kang-kwong
Luke’s contribution focuses on pragmatic differences in organisational
features of a classic in conversation analysis, telephone conversation
openings. Their survey not only includes various languages/cultural
backgrounds of callers but also a range of different institutional settings
(e.g. calls to help lines, general service calls, calls to and from call
centres). Unlike cross-cultural investigations of politeness issues, studies
on intercultural (im)politeness are relatively scarce. Michael Haugh’s chapter
on this issue addresses the difficulties in bringing together a micro
perspective (i.e. interactions between individuals) and a macro perspective
(i.e. expectations about language use across various cultural groups) and
comes up with a number of proposals for the reconciliation of these
perceptions. Rong Chen’s second article in the section, “Pragmatics between
East and West: Similar or different?,” provides an overview of the
long-standing East-West debate, particularly in politeness studies. Finally,
Helen Spencer-Oatey’s “Intercultural competence and pragmatics research:
Examining the interface through studies of intercultural business discourse”
prepares the ground for Section IV through her discussion of various
frameworks for conceptualising intercultural competence in business
communication.

Section II (Interlanguage Pragmatics) is devoted to the study of non-native
speakers’, or L2 speakers’, use and knowledge of pragmatics. Kathleen
Bardovi-Harlig’s contribution, “Exploring the pragmatics of interlanguage
pragmatics: Definition by design,” provides an overview of research that has
been done in this area and gives a quantitative analysis of topics and methods
covered in 152 research articles published in different academic journals in
the last three decades. Beatriz M. M. de Paiva (“Theoretical and
methodological approaches in interlanguage pragmatics”) matches her
predecessor’s quantitative analysis with a qualitative overview of the field
and argues for an integration of the insights of interlanguage pragmatics,
cross-cultural pragmatics, and contrastive pragmatics. Linda Yates’s chapter
deals with “Pragmatic challenges for second language learners,” and especially
adult L2 learners in the areas of speech acts and politeness issues. One of
the more specific areas of interlanguage pragmatics is the acquisition of
terms of address in a second language, which is explored by Margaret A. DuFon.
She includes insights of L2 speakers’ terms of address productions from
classroom studies, computer-mediated communication studies, and studies on
students’ performance in this area during or after studies abroad. Naoko
Taguchi provides an overview of the development of the field of interlanguage
pragmatics since the early 1990s and compares findings of 21 longitudinal
studies in the field. A particular focus of the combination of L2 research and
pragmatics can be found in Juliane House’s investigation of the pragmatics of
English as a lingua franca (ELF). Today, ELF speakers outnumber native
speakers of English by far, making ELF studies particularly interesting for
interlanguage pragmatics.

Section III (Teaching and Testing of Second/Foreign Language Pragmatics) takes
up the issue of the development of learners’ communicative competence in a
second (or third) language. In her chapter “Assessing learnability in second
language pragmatics,” Satomi Takahashi examines the effects of pedagogical
intervention in L2 pragmatics and the factors which limit its success by
comparing 48 studies with an experimental design. Speech acts and their
significance in L2 classroom instruction is the focus of Esther Usó-Juan and
Alicia Martínez-Flor’s contribution, “The teaching of speech acts in second
and foreign language instructional contexts.” Winnie Cheng and Pang Cheng look
at error correction and self-repair in “Correcting others and self-correcting
in business and professional discourse and textbooks.” After a comprehensive
overview of relevant studies in this area, the authors add results of an
analysis of self-correction in two different corpora, the Business sup-corpus
of the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English and the Hong Kong upper form
textbook corpus. In the last chapter of this section, “Testing interlanguage
pragmatic knowledge,” Jianda Liu provides an overview of interlanguage
pragmatic competence assessment in 16 studies in which English is the target
language.

The fourth and last section focuses on applied pragmatics in a business
environment (Pragmatics in Corporate Culture Communication) as a highly
significant and expanding field. Firstly, Hilkka Yli-Jokipii gives an overview
of how pragmatic research methods have been used in corporate or business
communication. Secondly, Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen and Maria Isaksson take
a look at “Credibility in corporate discourse,” and illustrate the pragmatic
strategies by which credibility is produced and manifested in corporate
discourse. Crisis and risk communication as relatively new areas of study are
addressed in Finn Frandsen’s and Winnie Johansen’s contribution, “Corporate
crisis communication across cultures.” Christa Thomsen then applies a
cross-cultural perspective on the pragmatics of Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) and introduces the most important theoretical and
methodological approaches to the concept of CSR. The final chapter uses a
particular example of the construction of CSR in Patricia Mayes’s “Corporate
culture in a global age: Starbucks' ‘Social Responsibility’ and the merging of
corporate and personal interests.”

EVALUATION

The volume’s strong focus on interlanguage pragmatics and pragmatics in a
corporate communication setting might have been reflected more in its title
since “Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures” seems to suggest attention to
mainly cross-cultural research. For those whose interest lies in pragmatics in
L2s and in education and business environments, however, this is the volume in
the series to select.

It is one of the challenges of handbooks to balance overview of theory and
methods with succinct and interesting examples of original research. This is
best achieved in Trosborg’s volume in chapters which deal with a particular
language practice, such as, for example, Rong Chen’s chapter on compliment and
compliment response research. Here, the reader gains a detailed overview of
findings from a cross-cultural perspective, which demonstrate the varieties of
ways in which speakers compliment and respond to compliments in English, other
European languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as in Turkish,
Persian and Arabic. This diversity in complimenting behaviour notwithstanding,
Chen offers a number of generalizations which can be drawn from this rich
field of research. They concern: a) limitations with regard to the number of
syntactic structures and lexical items in compliments and compliment responses
across languages; b) limitations with regard to the topic addressed in the
speech act; c) the relationship between complimenter and complimentee,
including social factors such as gender and social hierarchy; d) the emergence
of taxonomies of compliment responses; and e) ways to scale languages in terms
of their pragmatics of compliments. Chen thus succeeds in giving the reader
not only a comprehensive overview of the field, with examples from a wide
range of languages and contexts, but also in providing analytic conclusions
from the findings of existing research. Further highly useful articles deal
with distinct language situations, such as in Juliane House’s “The pragmatics
of English as a lingua franca.” In contrast to such exemplary articles with a
strong speech act or language situation focus, some of the contributions in
the handbook attempt to provide a comprehensive, sometimes quantitative,
overview of a topic, which then leads to enumeration at the expense of an
analytic perspective.

In general, however, the handbook succeeds in providing a thorough and
welcomed overview of many established and emergent issues in the field of
cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics within the last two decades. It is
therefore highly valuable for both the interests of advanced scholars and for
classroom teaching. Many of the topics of research, like pragmatic issues in
the study of corporate risk communication, are relatively new and there will
certainly be more to come in the next decade or two. Consequently, the state
of the art given in handbooks should not be regarded as a static and final
conclusion, but rather as a promise of future, dynamic research.

REFERENCES

Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage pragmatics: requests, complaints, and
apologies. Berlin: de Gruyter.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susanne Mühleisen is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of
Bayreuth. Her research interests include language contact (including pidgins
and creoles), sociolinguistics, pragmatics, translation theory, and English
word-formation. She has published on pragmatics and politeness issues in
postcolonial situations, especially the Caribbean.








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