“[She] said : ‘take the test’ and I took the test”. Relational work as a framework to approach directiveness in prenatal screening of Chinese clients in Hong Kong

In this paper we apply the framework of relational work, or the work individuals invest in maintaining their relationships (Locher and Watts 2005), to the analysis of prenatal screening (PS) for Down Syndrome of Chinese clients in Hong Kong. PS has traditionally followed a nondirective principle that calls for an unbiased presentation of information and women’s autonomous decision- making regarding testing. However, in Chinese contexts, healthcare providers appear extremely directive; and women, in turn, explicitly express their expectations of being led in decision-making (Zayts et al. 2013). These observations lend support to previous politeness studies of Chinese institutional contexts wherein hierarchical communication has been described as “listening-centered, asymmetrical and differential” (Gao and Ting-Toomey 1998: 48). More recent politeness studies, however, warn against such stereotyping at a cultural level (Eelen 2001; Mills 2003, 2004; Watts 2003). In this paper, rather than using culture as an a priori explanatory variable to account for the directive stance of the healthcare providers, we argue that using the framework of relational work enables researchers to focus on how meaning is created and negotiated at the micro-level of an interaction, and to move away from “grand generalizations” about culture specific behaviors and expectations

Insistence among family and friends in Quiteño Spanish: from connectedness to empowerment?

Drawing on sociopragmatics and some ethnographic work in communication studies, in this paper I examine the occurrence of insistence in interactions among family and friends in middle-class Quiteño society (Ecuador) in relation to suggestions, offers and invitations. I interpret insistence in these contexts as a marker of affiliation through which an interpersonal ideology of connectedness (cf. Fitch, 1998) is recreated. However, I find that there is some generational variation in the use of this practice. I suggest that this may be an indication of a possible shift in interpersonal ideology –from connectedness towards empowerment– gradually taking place in middle-class Quiteño society

Explaining cross-cultural pragmatic findings: moving from politeness maxims to sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs)

This paper focuses on how culture can be treated as an explanatory variable in cross-cultural pragmatic studies. It starts with a review of pragmatic maxims [Grice, H. Paul, 1989. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, 1967. (Reprinted in Grice, H.P. (Ed.), Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 22–40); Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman; Journal of Pragmatics 14 (1990)237], discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the concept. It then presents the findings from a British-Chinese replication of Kim's [Human Communication Research 21(1996)128] cross-cultural study of conversational constraints, and argues that the notion of maxims should be reconceptualised as sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs). The notion of SIPs is defined and explained, referring to the sociopragmatic-pragmalinguistic distinction [Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman; Applied Linguistics 4(1983)91] and other cross-cultural pragmatic approaches [House, Julianne, 2000. Understanding misunderstanding: a pragmatic-discourse approach to analyzing mismanaged rapport in talk across cultures. In: Spencer-Oatey, H. (Ed.), Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. Continuum, London; 145–164; Journal of Pragmatics 9 (1985)145]. SIPs are also discussed in relation to Brown and Levinson's [Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. CUP, Cambridge (Originally published ad ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomenon’ In: Goody, E. (1987), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. CUP, New York.)] perspectives on the impact of culture on language use. The paper ends with a call for more research to establish on an empirical basis the types of interactional principles that exist, and their interrelationships

LECTURERS’ POLITENESS STRATEGIES AND STUDENTS’ COMPLIANCE IN ENGLISH FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE (EFL) CLASS

The aim of this study is to find out the politeness strategies used by the teachers and students, and how the politeness affects to the student’s compliance. The focus is on directive and expressive speech acts in English for Foreign Language (EFL) Class. The subjects of this study were three lecturers and the students of three English classes. In data collecting procedure, the researcher used observation techniques. The observation was used to record the audio and video of teaching and learning process from the beginning until the end of the class. The audio-record of teaching and learning process will be transcribed into convention transcript, and then the transcript will be selected and classified into ten maxims in doing politeness strategies.  The analytical part adopts the viewpoints of Leech’s (2014) “The Components Maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness”. In the data analysis, it is found that 1) the teachers used ten maxims in their communication to the students. They are tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim agreement maxim, Obligation (of S to O) maxim, sympathy maxim, modest maxim, Obligation (of O to S) maxim, Opinion reticence maxim, and feeling reticence maxim. 2) The lecturers dominantly used tact maxim in their directive speech acts to the students. The last part of this paper aims at summarizing the implications that this paper, its theoretical summary, and its research, have for teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class

Request formation in Ecuadorian Quichua

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach

Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolect” (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ‘n-gram textbites’, small textual segments that characterise that author’s writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material

A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF DIRECTIVE UTTERENCE USED BY ENGLISH TEACHER AT MADRASAH ALIYAH PONDOK PESANTREN AL-KAMIL

This research was intended to describe types of speech acts performed by English lecturers in learning process at Madrasah Aliyah Pondok Pesantren Al-Kamil. This research was descriptive qualitative. The data of this research were the English utterances performed by English Teachers. The researcher obtained the data by means of observation technique. In observation technique the researcher used recording instruments, sound recorder, to record the classroom dialogues. Next, the researcher writes some data into note to as a additional data report The researcher analyzes the directive speech act in this research using Kreidler’s theory (1998). Based on the observation, the researcher found three types of directive speech act. They are command/order, request, Warning or prohibitation. In conclusion, the researcher found directives speech act from observation are 3 utterances are command/order (2,80%) , 2 utterances are requesting (1,87%), 1 utterance is warning (0,93%), and 101 utterances are unidentified (94,39%

Mobilizing student compliance : On the directive use of Finnish second-person declaratives and interrogatives during violin instruction

Drawing on video-recorded violin lessons as data, the article describes the violin teacher’s use of Finnish second-person declarative and interrogative directives in mobilizing student compliance. The data show that the declarative directives are regularly used when (1) the student is already engaged in the task at hand and (2) the nominated actions concern the basics of violin playing. The paper argues that these directives are thus not only about mobilizing recipient action locally but also about establishing normatively-desired behavior more generally. The interrogative directives, then again, are typically used when (1) there has been a momentary shortcoming in the student’s prior behavior and (2) the nominated action is a one-time accomplishment facilitating the smooth unfolding of the instructional encounter.Peer reviewe

Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please

This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analysed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and modal verb type. Differences in use of please between the two varieties of English can be accounted for by viewing this as a marker of conventional politeness rather than face-threat mitigation in British English, and of relationship asymmetry in American English