Pragmatics in Academia: The Role of Gender and Power Relations in the Use of Implicatures

“Waiting to see me?” asked Dr. Beebe. Was it an implicature or a speech act? Was the utterance intended as an invitation—Come in—or as a request for information—Are you here to see me? I stood up and followed Dr. Beebe into her office. This very first encounter ushered pragmatics into my life. It was also my first step in discovering many different aspects of interaction, and later on, it allowed me to go in my research where others feared to tread, so to speak. Doctor Beebe’s passion for pragmatics, and her ability to ignite her students’ desire to pursue questions relevant to their lives, has kept many of us in her camp. The findings that will be presented in this paper come from my first research study inspired by Dr. Beebe’s class on pragmatics

The Myths of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages?

In this book, the renowned scholar and author of many texts on the topic of gender differences in language use, Deborah Cameron, presents and challenges some of the most known and spread gendered ‘myths’ such as that women are by nature more cooperative, talkative and polite than the opposite sex (p. 11). Her particular interest is language interaction so she skilfully examines data gathered from public and private settings including home, work, and urban schools.

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Using Holland’s DEFT Model as a Reader Response Tool in the Language Classroom

Language students tend to struggle with literature because they find psychological and socio-cultural implications embedded in literary texts difficult to understand and discuss (Kramsch, 1996). This paper suggests that psychoanalytic literary criticism may offer a reading framework that could mitigate the struggle and allow for a deeper level of personal and social exploration of literary works. The DEFT model (Defense, Expectations, Fantasy and Transformation), as one type of reader-response approach to reading that draws on the psychoanalytic framework, might make the reading of literature easier because of its potential to offer to students strategies for finding a point of entry into the text. According to DEFT, the inability to find a point of entry into a new reading may be one of the reasons for finding a literary piece difficult, for ‘disliking’ or outright rejecting it. This qualitative study shows how the DEFT approach, originally created for native speakers but thus far little researched in relationship to non-native speakers, can be used to facilitate the reading of literary works in a language course.