L2 pragmatics as 'intercultural pragmatics' : probing sociopragmatic aspects of pragmatic awareness

One of the important ‘current issues in intercultural pragmatics’ is how conceptual, theoretical, and empirical developments in this field can be used to help reconstitute the teaching and learning of second languages as an intercultural endeavor. The field of intercultural pragmatics raises important questions and presents challenges to prevailing perspectives within language teaching on what it means to know and use languages for intercultural communication, particularly how notions such as pragmatic awareness should be understood. This paper links recent views of pragmatics as social and moral practice (E.g. Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Spencer-Oatey & Kádár, 2016) with sociocognitive perspectives on pragmatic interpretation (Kecskes, 2014; Author 1 2013; Author 2 2018) to offer a reconceptualization of pragmatic awareness for second language learning. The paper draws on data from an English language classroom in Japan to illustrate some of the ways in which collaborative meta-pragmatic reflection in the classroom opens up possibilities for exploring various cultural assumptions drawn from the L1 and L2 that come into play when interpreting aspects of L2 pragmatics. This will be used to suggest a conceptualisation of pragmatic awareness as a layered phenomenon that is inherently multilingual and intercultural

Specific Features of the Text in the Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach

 This article differentiates the concepts of text and discourse, determines the fundamental differences and their relationship. Moreover, the article shows the role of pragmatics, a discipline that develops in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology and opens new ways to consider discourse analysis. In addition, we also discuss the relationship between pragmatics and discourse analysis, focusing on the links between the process of understanding utterances, which is in the realm of pragmatic theories, and the infl uence that is in the realm of discourse. The subject of our consideration is the text, the basic principles of its linguistic interpretation related to discourse, as well as the basic conceptual provisions of the modern theory of discourse

The Role of Pragmatics in Cross-cultural

We here try to find out the role of pragmatics in the cross-cultural contexts. Pragmatics is the way we convey meaning through communication (Deda, 2013). Other factors beyond competence are the adjustments between contexts and situations that can change the ordinary meaning of elements/sentences according to the language situation. The culture of an organization decides the way employees behave amongst themselves as well as the people outside the organization. Pragmatic culture more emphasis is placed on the clients and the external parties. Customer satisfaction is the main motive of the employees in a pragmatic culture. In linguistics, pragmatic competence is the ability to use language effectively in a contextually appropriate fashion. Pragmatic competence is a fundamental aspect of a more general communicative competence

Herstellung eines Phaffia rhodozyma : Stamms mit verstärkter Astaxanthin-Synthese über gezielte genetische Modifikation chemisch mutagenisierter Stämme

Ziel dieser Arbeit war es erstmals durch eine Kombination aus chemischer Mutagenese und gezielter genetischer Modifikation (hier: „metabolic engineering“) einen Phaffia-Stamm herzustellen, welcher über die Mutagenese hinaus über eine weiter verstärkte Astaxanthin-Synthese verfügt. Die von „DSM Nutritional Products“ bereitgestellten chemischen Mutanten wurden analysiert und über einen Selektionsprozess auf Pigmentstabilität und Wachstum hin optimiert, da die Stämme aus cryogenisierter Dauerkultur starke Pigmentinstabilitäten und ein verzögertes Wachstum aufwiesen. Über eine exploratorische Phase wurde die Carotinoidsynthese analysiert und festgestellt, dass in den Mutanten keine Einzelreaktionen betroffen sind, welche für die Heraufregulierung der Carotinoidsynthese in den Mutanten verantwortlich sind. Hierbei wurden Limitierungen identifiziert und diese durch Transformation von Expressionsplasmiden mit geeigneten Genen aufgehoben, um damit eine noch effizientere Metabolisierung von Astaxanthin-Vorstufen hin zu Astaxanthin zu erreichen. Eine Überexpression der Phytoensynthase/Lycopinzyklase crtYB resultierte in einem gesteigerten Carotinoidgehalt bei gleichbleibendem Astaxanthin- Anteil. Durch eine zweite Transformation mit einer Expressionskassette für die Astaxanthin-Synthase asy konnte der Carotinoidgehalt weiter gesteigert und zusätzlich eine Limitierung der Metabolisierung von Astaxanthin-Vorstufen behoben werden, sodass die Transformante nahezu alle Intermediate der Astaxanthinsynthese zu Astaxanthin metabolisieren konnte (Gassel et al. 2013). Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass auch in den Mutanten, aus Experimenten mit dem Wildtyp bekannte, Limitierungen identifiziert und ausgeglichen werden konnten

Emotional inferences by pragmatics

It has for long been taken for granted that, along the course of reading a text, world knowledge is often required in order to establish coherent links between sentences (McKoon & Ratcliff 1992, Iza & Ezquerro 2000). The content grasped from a text turns out to be strongly dependent upon the reader’s additional knowledge that allows a coherent interpretation of the text as a whole. The world knowledge directing the inference may be of distinctive nature. Gygax et al. (2007) showed that mental models related to human action may be of a perceptual nature and may include behavioral as well as emotional elements. Gygax (2010), however, showed the unspecific nature of emotional inferences and the prevalence of behavioral elements in readers' mental models of emotions. Inferences are made in both directions; emotional inferences based on behavior and vice versa. Harris & de Rosnay (2002) and Pons et al. (2003) proved that different linguistic skills –in particular lexicon, syntax and semantics are closely related to emotion understanding. Iza & Konstenius (2010) showed that additional knowledge about social norms affects the participants’ prediction about would be inferred as the behavioral or emotional outcome of a given social situation. Syntactic and lexical abilities are the best predictors of emotion understanding, but making inferences is the only significant predictor of the most complex components (reflective dimension) of emotion comprehension in normal children. Recently, Farina et al. (2011) showed in a study that the relation between pragmatics and emotional inferences may not be so straight forward. Children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and Asperger Syndrome (AS) present similar diagnostic profiles, characterized by satisfactory cognitive development, good phonological, syntactic and semantic competences, but poor pragmatic skills and socio-emotional competencies. After training in pragmatics a descriptive analyses showed the whole group to display a deficit in emotion comprehension, but high levels of pragmatic competences. This indicates a further need to study the relationship between emotion and inference in normal subjects too. We also suggest that while behavioral elements may indeed be of perceptual nature and the inference between emotion and behavior less culturally dependent especially when concerned with basic emotions -the inference concerned with social norms may be more complex and require elaborative inference. We suggest that in further studies a distinction between basic emotions and non basic emotions, social settings and non-social settings should be made. The cognitive models concerned with social action may be of more complex nature, but with recognizable features on lexical and syntactic levels.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Attachment preference in auditory German sentences: Individual differences and pragmatic strategy

Relative clauses modify a preceding element, but as this element can be flexibly located, the point of attachment is sometimes ambiguous. Preference for this attachment can vary within languages such as German, yet explanations for differences in attachment preference related to cognitive strategies or constraints have been conflicting in the current literature. The present study aimed to assess the preference for relative clause attachment among German listeners and whether these preferences could be explained by strategy or individual differences in working memory or musical rhythm ability. We performed a sentence completion experiment, conducted post hoc interviews, and measured working memory and rhythm abilities with diagnostic tests. German listeners had no homogeneous attachment preference, although participants consistently completed individual sentences across trials according to the general preference that they reported offline. Differences in attachment preference were moreover not linked to individual differences in either working memory or musical rhythm ability. However, the pragmatic content of individual sentences sometimes overrode the general syntactic preference in participants with lower rhythm ability. Our study makes an important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics by validating offline self-reports as a reliable diagnostic for an individual’s online relative clause attachment preference. The link between pragmatic strategy and rhythm ability is an interesting direction for future research