Chinese comprehenders’ interpretation of underinformativeness in L1 and L2 accented speech narratives

Second language (L2) speakers with foreign accents are well-known to face disadvantages in terms of language processing; however, recent research has demonstrated possible social benefits for foreign-accented L2 speakers. While previous research has focused on the ways in which first language (L1) speakers of English comprehend L2 speech, the present article contributes to this line of research by exploring the ways in which comprehenders from a different culture and linguistic background perceive L2 speech narratives. This study investigates this issue by exploring how comprehenders with Mandarin Chinese as the first language interpret underinformative utterances containing scalar and ad hoc implicature in L1, accent-free L2, and foreign-accented L2 speech narratives. The sentence judgment task with a guise design used written sentences rather than oral utterances as stimuli in order to isolate the role of intelligibility factors. The results indicate that foreign accent confers social benefits on L2 speakers in that their omission of information in communication is tolerated and they are viewed as more likely to possess positive attributes. More importantly, we find that the bilingual characteristics of Chinese participants, as well as the different linguistic complexity of deriving scalar and ad hoc implicature, affect Chinese participants’ explanations of underinformative sentences of L2 speakers. This study contributes to our understanding of L2 language processing

Aspects of confused speech: a study of verbal interaction between confused and normal speakers

This ethnographic study examines talk between normal and confused speakers. Most data derive from loosely structured research interviews, but use is also made of data from household situations. The analysis draws on theoretical traditions which examine everyday social interaction. From this perspective, confused speakers represent a case of naturally occurring deviance which allows for the investigation of 'normal talk' and how speakers deal with its absence. I focus on minimally active, moderately active, and very active confused speakers. All deviate from what ordinary members would commonsensically describe as normal, appropriate talk for the circumstances, in both what they say and how they talk. None of these groups can handle their own biographies, or routine common-sense knowledge, as effectively as ordinary members. However, minimally active speakers abrogate responsibility for context-sensitivity; moderately active speakers seem aware of context issues but may not act in a context-renewing way; while very active speakers seem not to be influenced by contextual issues but maintain a highly active part in the conversation. Normal speakers may take over the management of context for confused speakers, model context-sensitive talk, or withdraw their full participation. Frequently these strategies promote reasonably normal conversational appearances, but they do not entirely make good the impaired identity of confused speakers. My analysis suggests the definition of normal talk is constrained by how participants jointly construct social occasions. Normal speakers appreciate issues of context, acknowledging how it shapes and renews conversation. Confused speakers tend not to be context-sensitive in these ways, and their difficulties in this respect and in the generation of an identity appropriate to the event, creates problems within the conversation both for them and for others

Designing groupwork activities: a case study

This chapter starts from college teachers’ frequent recognition that pedagogic materials, in ‘language through literature’ as in many other fields, often work best when designed with a particular group (or at least kind) of student in mind, and with sensitivity to linguistic, cultural and other factors which characterise a given teaching situation. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the value in targeting materials this way, however, not much importance is given in teacher-development or during in-service training to understanding how workshop materials can be devised rather than merely used. This chapter considers aspects of groupwork-materials design including: choice of passage; devising tasks; implementing the activity in a classroom session; and evaluating the learning which takes place. Discussion is organised around an activity (based on Elizabeth Smart’s 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept', 1945) which was devised by the author for a given occasion. Participants' responses, when the activity was tested in two experimental classes, are reported

Why safety assurances lead to higher risk perceptions: A conversational approach

Safety assurances are meant to decrease people's perceptions of risk. This paper explored the notion that safety assurances may produce the opposite effect - higher perceptions of risk regarding the object of assurance. The project pursued two objectives: 1) to provide a theoretical analysis of the cognitive mechanisms facilitating the unintended effect of safety assurances, and 2) to obtain empirical evidence for this effect in the context of risk communication. Pragmatic theories of speech acts, conversational logic, and common ground provided a theoretical framework that explains this paradoxical effect as the outcome of a hearer's inferences about the meaning of a speaker's communication. Based on a review of empirical evidence for the operation of conversational rules in institutional settings, the paper explored contextual factors that would contribute to the unintended effects of safety assurances in risk communication. Using a simulation approach, a series of four experiments examined the effect of safety assurances on the perceptions of risk regarding future events in a local community. Studies 1 (N = 141) and 3 (N = 411) showed that participants who read an announcement of an upcoming transport of mining wastes through the area, complemented by a safety assurance, perceived the campaign to be more harmful than the participants in control condition who read the announcement without assurance. In Study 4 (N = 516), a similar pattern of higher perceptions of risk was observed for participants who read an article about a restaurant, in which the owners assured the safety of their food. In Study 2 (N = 153), participants read assurances about safety of their drinking water but no significant differences in perceived risk were observed. The studies examined a number of variables that had been found to moderate perceptions of risks. Consistent with prior research, compared to men, women perceived significantly higher risks on several dimensions. The length of residency in the local community moderated the extent of the safety assurances effect. Consistent with the prediction of the conversational framework, long-term residents inferred higher risks and less benefit from future events in response to safety assurances compared to short-term residents. Studies 3 and 4 explored the conditions under which safety assurances would result in lower perceptions of risks. The discussion focuses on the implications of the findings for conversational framework and risk communication and elaborates on methodological limitations as well as directions for future research

Irony in a second language: exploring the comprehension of Japanese speakers of English

This thesis focuses on the extent to which non-native speakers of English understand potentially ironic utterances in a similar way to native speakers. Barbe (1995: 4) sees irony as one of ‘the final obstacles before achieving near native-speaker fluency.’ This assumption is supported by the findings of earlier studies (Bouton 1999, Lee 2002; Manowong 2011; Yamanaka 2003) which assumed a Gricean framework seeing irony as communicating the ‘opposite of what is said’ (Grice 1975, 1978). This thesis adopts instead the relevance-theoretic account of irony as echoic (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2012), arguing that previous work suffers from both problematic theoretical assumptions and flawed experimental methods. The thesis reports the findings of two experiments designed to examine similarities and differences between the responses of non-native speakers of English (here Japanese speakers) and native speakers and how similar or different the effects of prosody are for these groups. The first experiment, conducted by an online survey, provided surprising results, suggesting that Japanese speakers can respond to potentially ironical utterances similarly to native speakers. The second experiment, focusing on the effects of prosody, compared the groups with regard to response trends. Three prosodic contours were used in this study, labelled ‘basic’ (a kind of default, unmarked tone), ‘deadpan’ (with a narrower pitch range), and ‘exaggerated’ (with a wider pitch range). The results indicated that Japanese participants could perceive English prosodic structure in similar ways to native speakers and were affected by prosodic contours in similar ways. It also suggested that Japanese participants were affected less strongly by ‘exaggerated’ intonation and slightly more strongly by ‘deadpan’ tones. These findings suggest that a relevance-theoretic framework provides the means to carry out fuller investigations than carried out previously and to develop a more systematic explanation of the understanding of irony in a second language

When I Die, I Won\u27t Stay Dead: The Poetry of Bob Kaufman

This dissertation begins with the premise that critical attention to the work of Bob Kaufman is long overdue, and that Bob Kaufman is a significant American poet in the African American and Beat traditions. The purpose of this dissertation begins to rectify this need with a study of Bob Kaufman’s verse. My exploration of Kaufman necessitates some pointed attention to the cultural, social, and psychological influences that gave rise to his work, specifically his upbringing in the south, his travels, and the misrepresented times of his life in current biographical entries and some present scholarship. I will also address the notion of him as an oral poet within the context of the African American Oral tradition and the improvisational nature of Jazz music. I will also consider the surrealist impulse in Bob Kaufman’s work. Thus, this dissertation will treat Bob Kaufman’s use of the Surreal and the Jazz idiom as a social and political vehicle for his art. This practice locates him at the heart of modernism, and looks ahead to the postmodern in American Literature. In this regard, I will demonstrate how Bob Kaufman outdistances his Beat contemporaries and pre-figures the Black Arts and Cultural Movement of the 1960s not just in chronological order but in social and political content, and literary practice. My project seeks to understand Bob Kaufman’s overall aesthetic by close analysis of his major themes; linguistic prowess; his often overlooked southern surreal; the collision of music and poetry in his poems; his use of rhythm and typography as structural performance. To this end, I will examine the Solitudes collection with attention to his emphasis on poetic shape, structure and sound, and how to read the influence of Jazz in his printed work. I demonstrate why American literary scholarship should unearth the multi-layered mind field that is Bob Kaufman’s verse

Power and Insight in Jaina Discourse

The essay sets out a programme for the sociolinguistic study of Jain discourse by investigating the question how non-distorted communication takes place in hierarchical structures. The focus is on the role of power in processes of indirect communication. It is addressed by comparing two contrasting models of ideal communication, both serving as measures for distorted communication. On the one hand, Habermas’ dialogical model of the ‘ideal speech situation’, that is, normative orientations presupposed by anyone who wishes to communicate, and, on the other hand, the Jain theory of speaking, which, at first sight, seems to be predicated on particularistic hierarchical, or subject oriented, rather than egalitarian, or intersubjective, normative presuppositions. The comparison focuses on the analysis of the pragmatics of ambiguous speech and the 'expolitation of conversational implicatures' in the Jain scriptures with reference to general norms of Jain discourse and to the fourfold bhāṣā-gupti/mano-gupti in the early canonical Āyāra in particular, the equivalent of the catuṣ-koṭi of Buddhist logic. It is argued that consensus-orientation in Habermas' model and orientation toward non-violence in the Jain model are mutually implicated conditions of any universalistic discourse ethic. The analysis of the socio-cultural reasons for stressing non-violence rather than consensus throws a new light on the pragmatics of both Jain discourse and Jain perspectivist logic, and opens new perspectives for theoretical understanding of Jain-Hindu syncretism and strategic group formation

Pragmatics teaching: on the development of learners’ linguistic competence among selected East London District schools

South Africa was listed amongst the countries with a percentage of students with achievement too low for estimation by “Progress International Results in Reading” in 2011. Meanwhile, there was also an indication that, high school learners in the Eastern Cape Province are highly challenged, as far as their ability to produce speech, as well as the ability to interpret meaning beyond what is literally suggested. Since such difficulties usually pose problems of content understanding, concerned researchers in the field of language took it upon themselves to investigate the underlying cause of the problem, in order to prevent more problems of pragmatics incompetence, such as, problems with social interaction that could retard one’s ability to function independently as an adult. While many studies have been conducted in the area of Pragmatics language competence, this study found it necessary to contribute around this debate. Since the study was two-fold, isiXhosa Home language learners of Grades 10 to 12 were investigated with an objective to determine the extent of pragmatic incompetence and the Teachers were investigated to determine the effectiveness of their teaching of pragmatics language. A number of 108 high school isiXhosa learners, of ages of between 16 and 18 years, from East London Directorate, 36 per Grade, from the three selected schools high schools, were sampled, 36 consisting of 18 males and 18 females per grade from each selected high school. 9 isiXhosa Home Language teachers of between the ages of 45 to 54 years were sampled from the selected schools. This study used an assessment test for the learners and the questionnaire for the teachers, as a means of data collection techniques. The study applied a high consideration of validity as well as of ethical matters in order to ensure the reliability of results. The study found that, isiXhosa Home language learners’ levels of pragmatic competence are high and with the appropriate use of good methods of pragmatics language teaching, learners’ pragmatics competence can develop.This study will be able to encourage syllabus designers to collaborate with subject teachers, beginning right at the inception of the syllabus planning. IsiXhosa language teachers can develop teaching material appropriate for their primary goal, which is the development of pragmatic competence. Further research is recommended to investigate more around this area of study to a point where isiXhosa Home language can be counted amongst the great and valued languages of South Africa