Pragmatics: A Resource Book for Students (4th Edition) PDF

‘Joan Cutting and Ken Fordyce have produced a remarkable guide full of critical information for those of us who have a great passion for studying and teaching pragmatics. Tis book translates the complex phenomena of pragmatics into user- friendly language with real-world examples and hands-on activities. Presenting a perfect balance of theory and application, this is a mainstay textbook for students, teachers, and scholars who wish to understand pragmatics both at conceptual and practical levels.’ Naoko Taguchi, Northern Arizona University ‘Pragmatics is no longer just a subject of philosophical enquiry and is now frmly established as the investigation of the real world of everyday language use in all its variety and media of communication. Tis book gives the most up-to-date introduction to a fast-moving feld.’ Michael McCarthy, Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham; Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick; and Visiting Professor in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University PRAGMATICS Routledge English Language Introductions cover core areas of language study and are one-stop resources for students. Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series ofer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries, and key readings – all in the same volume. Te innovative and fexible ‘two-dimensional’ structure is built around four sections – introduction, development, exploration, and extension – that ofer self-contained stages for study. Each topic can also be read across these sections, enabling the reader to gradually build on the knowledge gained. Now in its fourth edition, this best-selling textbook: ❑❑ Covers the core areas of the subject: speech acts, the cooperative principle, relevance theory, corpus pragmatics, politeness theory, and critical discourse analysis ❑❑ Has updated and new sections on intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, critical discourse analysis and the pragmatics of power, second language pragmatic competence development, impoliteness, post-truth discourse, vague language, pragmatic markers, formulaic sequences, and online corpus tools ❑❑ Draws on a wealth of texts in a variety of languages, including political TV interviews, newspaper articles, extracts from classic novels and plays, recent international flms, humorous narratives, and exchanges on email, messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ❑❑ Provides recent readings from leading scholars in the discipline, including Jonathan Culpeper, Lynne Flowerdew, and César Félix-Brasdefer ❑❑ Is accompanied by eResources featuring extra material and activities. Written by two experienced teachers and researchers, this accessible textbook is an essential resource for all students of English language and linguistics. Joan Cutting is a senior lecturer in TESOL at the University of Edinburgh. She studies intercultural pragmatics, vague language, and in-group codes. She is author of Analysing the Language of Discourse Communities (2000) and Language in Context in TESOL (2015), editor of Vague Language Explored (2007), and coeditor of the Edinburgh Textbooks in TESOL series (2013–2017). Kenneth Fordyce is a lecturer in TESOL at the University of Edinburgh. He previously worked as a language teacher in Austria and Japan. His research covers corpus linguistics, pragmatics, and intercultural pragmatics. He has a particular interest in post-truth discourse and the language of truth and lies in politics, the media, and health communication. RO UT LE DG E E NG LI S H LA N GUAGE I N TR O D U C TI O N S S E R I E S C O N S U L T A N T: P E T E R S T O C K W E L L Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, UK, where his interests include sociolinguistics, stylis- tics and cognitive poetics. His recent publications include Te Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), Cognitive Grammar in Literature (2014) and Te Language and Literature Reader (2008). F OU N D I N G E D ITO R : RO N A L D C A RT E R Ronald Carter (1947–2018) was Research Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, UK. He was the co-founder of the Routledge Applied Linguistics, the Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics and the Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics series. TITLES IN THE SERIES: Global Englishes, Third Edition (previously published as World Englishes) Jennifer Jenkins Pragmatics, Third Edition (previously published as Pragmatics and Discourse) Joan Cutting Introducing English Language, Second Edition Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell Language and Law Alan Durant and Janny HC Leung English Grammar, Second Edition Roger Berry Language and Power, Second Edition Paul Simpson, Andrea Mayr and Simon Statham Discourse Analysis, Second Edition Rodney H. Jones Practical English Phonetics and Phonology, Fourth Edition Beverley Collins, Inger M. Mees and Paul Carley History of English, Second Edition Dan McIntyre Language and Media, Second Edition Rodney H. Jones, Sylvia Jaworska and Erhan Aslan Pragmatics, Fourth Edition Joan Cutting and Kenneth Fordyce For more information on any of these titles, or to order, please go to www.routledge.com/series/RELI PRAGMATICS A B A Resource Book for Students C Fourth Edition D JOAN CUTTING AND KENNETH FORDYCE Fourth edition published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Joan Cutting and Kenneth Fordyce The right of Joan Cutting and Kenneth Fordyce to be identifed as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published as Pragmatics and Discourse: a resource book for students by Routledge 2002 Third edition published by Routledge 2015 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cutting, Joan, author. | Fordyce, Kenneth, author. Title: Pragmatics : a resource book for students / Joan Cutting and Kenneth Fordyce. Other titles: Pragmatics and discourse Description: 4th edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge English language introductions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020027069 (print) | LCCN 2020027070 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367207236 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367207250 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003010043 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pragmatics. Classifcation: LCC P99.4.P72 C88 2020 (print) | LCC P99.4.P72 (ebook) | DDC 420.1/45—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027069 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027070 ISBN: 978-0-367-20723-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-20725-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01004-3 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by Apex CoVantage, LLC Visit the eResources: www.routledge.com/9780367207250 For Meimi, Luke, Emiko, Jamie, and Maia From Kenneth Fordyce: I thank Joan for asking me to make a contribution to this latest edition and the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme for giving me the experience (1994–1996) which made me realise the importance of pragmatics. From Joan Cutting: Tank you, Ken, for bringing your expertise to the venture and helping to update the book. Tanks too to Aled for editing again. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Te Routledge English Language Introductions are ‘fexi-texts’ that you can use to suit your own style of study. Te books are divided into four sections: A. Introduction sets out the key concepts for the area of study. Te units of this sec- tion take you step-by-step through the foundational terms and ideas, carefully provid- ing you with an initial toolkit for your own study. By the end of the section, you will have a good overview of the whole feld. B. Development adds to your knowledge and builds on the key ideas already intro- duced. Units in this section might also draw together several areas of interest. By the end of this section, you will have a good and fairly detailed grasp of the feld and will be ready to undertake your own exploration and thinking. C. Exploration provides examples of language data and guides you through your own investigation of the feld. Te units in this section will be more open-ended and exploratory, and you will be encouraged to try out your ideas and think for yourself, using your newly acquired knowledge. D. Extension ofers you the chance to compare your expertise with key readings in the area. Tese are taken from the work of important writers and are provided with guid- ance and questions for your further thought. You can read this book like a traditional textbook – ‘vertically’ straight through from beginning to end. Tis will take you comprehensively through the broad feld of study. However, the Routledge English Language Introductions have been carefully designed so that you can read them in another dimension – ‘horizontally’ across the numbered units. For example, units A1, A2, A3, and so on correspond with units B1, B2, B3, and so on and with units C1, C2, C3, and so on and D1, D2, D3, and so on. Reading A5, B5, C5, and D5, for example, will take you rapidly from the key concepts of a specifc area to a level of expertise in that precise area, all with a close focus. You can match your way of reading with the best way that you work. Te glossary/index at the end, along with the suggestions for further reading, will help to keep you oriented. CONTENTS Contents cross-referenced xiv List of illustrations xvi Acknowledgements xvii A Introduction: concepts in pragmatics 1 1 Context and structure 2 2 Speech act theory 14 3 Cooperative principle 24 4 Politeness and impoliteness 36 5 Corpora and communities 47 6 Critical discourse analysis 61 7 Intercultural pragmatics 72 8 Pragmatics and language learning 84 B Development: studies in pragmatics 101 1 Analysing context 102 2 Using speech acts 105 3 Understanding implicature 108 4 Analysing politeness and impoliteness 112 5 Analysing markers 116 6 Detecting hidden values 123 7 Studying intercultural pragmatics 128 8 Teaching pragmatics 131 C Exploration: data for investigation 137 1 Contexts in writing 138 2 Culture and indirectness 140 3 Flouting and violating 144 4 Politeness and impoliteness 148 5 Variation and multimodal corpora 153 6 Language and power 159 7 Understanding each other 161 8 Pragmatics online and learning 166 xii CONTENTS D Extension: readings 173 1 Conversation analysis and ELF 174 (Anita Santner-Wolfartsberger) 2 Speech acts and conversation analysis 176 (J. César Félix-Brasdefer) 3 Relevance and emotion 184 (Baiyao Zuo and Wen Yuana, Francis Y. Lin, and Richard P. Cooper) 4 Impoliteness and rudeness 192 (Jonathan Culpeper) 5 Corpora and language teaching 207 (Lynne Flowerdew) 6 Multimodal critical discourse analysis 222 (Steve Buckledee and David Machin) 7 African face needs 234 (Karen Grainger, Sara Mills, and Mandla Sibanda) 8 Pragmatic development, ELF, and TBLT 248 (Neil Murray and Marta González-Lloret) References 263 Index 291 CONTENTS CROSS-REFERENCED I N T R O D UC T I O N D E V E LO P M E N T A Concepts in pragmatics B Studies in pragmatics 1 Context and structure Analysing context 2 102 2 Speech act theory Using speech acts 14 105 3 Cooperative principle Understanding implicature 24 108 4 Politeness and impoliteness Analysing politeness and impoliteness 36 112 5 Corpora and communities Analysing markers 47 116 6 Critical discourse analysis Detecting hidden values 61 123 7 Intercultural pragmatics Studying intercultural pragmatics 72 128 8 Pragmatics and language learning Teaching pragmatics 84 131 References Index CONTENTS CROSS-REFERENCED E X P LO R AT I O N EXTENSION C Data for investigation D Readings Contexts in writing Conversation analysis and ELF 1 138 174 Culture and indirectness Speech acts and conversation analysis 2 140 176 Flouting and violating Relevance and emotion 3 144 184 Politeness and impoliteness Impoliteness and rudeness 4 148 192 Variation and multimodal corpora Corpora and language teaching 5 153 207 Language and power Multimodal critical discourse analysis 6 159 222 Understanding each other African face needs 7 161 234 Pragmatics online and learning Pragmatic development, ELF, and TBLT 8 166 248 References Index ILLUSTRATIONS Figures A5.1 Sample of lines containing the verb ‘mean’, in the British National Corpus Sampler 49 B5.1 Sample of Oxford WordSmith Tools 4.0 concordance lines ‘right’ 117 B8.1 Explicit description of English vague language forms and functions 132 B8.2 Excerpt from the British National Corpus Sampler single-line concordance (using Sara-32 concordancer) for ‘thing’ without lef or right sorting 133 B8.3 Real and tidied-up dialogue 133 B8.4 Textbook dialogue 134 C5.1 ‘Ting’ concordance 155 D4.1 Relational work (Watts 2005: xliii) 196 Tables A1.1 Examples of acts and moves 10 A1.2 Adjacency pairs 13 A4.1 Impoliteness formulae and examples 44 A5.1 Te 20 most frequent fve-word clusters from the same Sampler (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 830–831) 50 A5.2 Sample of lines for ‘anyway’ in Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English 53 A5.3 Epistemic forms taken from Gray and Biber’s (2015) list of stance markers 54 A8.1 Profciency level and features of interactional language 93 A8.2 B1-level speakers Veronica and Melissa: in a concert queue 93 A8.3 C1-level speakers Christian and Laurent: diferent ways we use the world around us 94 B5.1 WordSmith 4.0 patterns for ‘right’ 121 B5.2 WordSmith 4.0 three-word clusters for ‘right’ 122 D5.1 A set of results for the function ‘declining an ofer’ retrieved with MCA 215 D5.2 Concordance task for it seems... in published articles and student dissertations 216 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Te authors and publishers wish to thank all mentioned here for permission to repro- duce the following materials: Alby, S., and Léglise, I. (2018) Multilingualism and Translanguaging as a Resource for Teaching and Learning in French Guiana. In Van Avermaet P., Slembrouck S., Van Gorp K., Sierens S., Maryns K. (eds) Te Multilingual Edge of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–137, London. Andersen, G. (2015) Relevance. In K. Aijmer and C. Rühlemann (eds), Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, pp. 143–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BBC Newsnight, Coronavirus: BBC presenter Emily Maitlis criticises ‘misleading’ lan- guage, 9 April 2020. BBC One, Te Andrew Marr Show, 10 May 2020. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/ pdfs/10052001.pdf. BBC Radio, Te Listening Project, 26 April 2020. https://bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p08bh0zg. Bend It Like Beckham, 2002. Written by Gurinder Chadha, Guljit Bindra, and Paul Mayeda Berges Buckledee, Steve. 2018. Te Language of Brexit: How Britain Talked Its Way Out of the European Union. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, pp. 56–57. CBS News, Trump calls coronavirus test ‘perfect’ and compares it to Ukraine phone call, 6 March 2020. https://cbsnews.com/news/trump-calls-coronavirus-test-perfect- and-compares-it-to-ukraine-phone-call/. Culpeper, J. (2008) Refections on impoliteness. Relational work and power. In Derek Bousfeld and Miriam Locher, Impoliteness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 18–33. Reproduced with kind permission. Diao, W. (2016) Peer socialization into gendered L2 Mandarin practices in a study abroad context: Talk in the dorm. Applied Linguistics, 37 (5): 599–620. Diskin, C. (2017) Te use of the discourse-pragmatic marker ‘like’ by native and non- native speakers of English in Ireland. Journal of Pragmatics, 120, October 2017, pp. 144–157. Examples of usage taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) were obtained under the terms of the BNC End User Licence. Copyright in the individual texts cited resides with the original IPR holders. For information and licensing conditions relating to the BNC, please see the web site at http://natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ Excerpt from ‘English Composition Seminar’ (SEM300MU100), MICASE, 15 June 2000. Excerpt from Seinfeld, ‘Te Dog’. Written by Larry David. Episode no. 21, Season 3, Broadcast date: 9 October 1991. http://seinfeldscripts.com/TeDog.htm xviii AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S Excerpt from speech by David Cameron, ‘Prime Minister: Scotland’s future is in Scotland’s hands’, 15 September 2013. Excerpt from Yen-Liang Lin (2017). Co-occurrence of speech and gestures: A mul- timodal corpus linguistic approach to intercultural interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, 117: pp. 155–167. Excerpt is taken from a programme for Peter Pan, performed in Te Royal Lyceum Teatre, Edinburgh (Christmas 1999). Tis excerpt is part of the programme’s description of the cast and the technical support: it describes Mike Travis, on percussion. Extract from Donald Trump’s ‘go back’ comments were ‘genius’, says Nigel Farage, by Press Association. Te Guardian, 3 August 2019. Extract from If greedy doctors go on strike, their patients will never respect or trust them again, by Melanie Phillips. Daily Mail, 17 June 2012. Extract from Miscommunication in a pluralistic society: Remembering John Gumperz, 8 April 2013. Blog of Nicholas Subtirelu, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University. Extract from Tatcher’s impact was felt worldwide, Stephanie Jones-Berry and Ruby Russell, Special for USA TODAY. 8 April 2013. Extract from Te new Indian identity, by Rinku Ghosh. Pioneer, 21 October 2019. Extract from Trump repeatedly fails in attempt to say ‘origins’ then claims noise from wind farms causes cancer, by Tom Embury-Dennis, Independent, 3 April 2019. Extract from Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition’s website. Permission to use this dialogue is granted by the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota. It can be found in the Compliment Sequences module within the website titled Dancing with words: Strategies for learning pragmatics in Spanish. Retrieved from www.carla. umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/Compliments/compliments_home.html. Extract from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd Edition. pp. 36–40. 1995, John Wiley and Sons. Reproduced with kind permission. Extract from Disorders of Discourse by Wodak, Ruth (1996). pp. 101–102. Longman, Pearson Education Limited. Pearson Education Limited. Reproduced by kind permission. Extract from Graeme Greene, BBC Radio Quote.... Unquote, 1979 Extract from John Corbett, Intercultural Language Activities. Cambridge University Press, 2010. p. 23. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Extract from Mark Gevisser, Madiba: A symbol of the power of good. Mail & Guardian, 5 December 2013. Extract from Neil Murray. English as a lingua franca and the development of prag- matic competence, ELT Journal of Pragmatics (2012) 66 (3): pp. 318–326. By per- mission of Oxford University Press, USA. Extract from Te Cassell Dictionary of Anecdotes, edited by Nigel Rees (1999). Te Orion Publishing Group Ltd. Extract from Te Herald, 22/11/2013 ‘Salmond: Scotland’s future is now in Scotland’s hands’. Reproduced with permission of Herald & Times Group. www. heraldscot-land.com. Extract from Te Telegraph, 385,000 Romanians and Bulgarians will come to Britain, report warns, 4 December 2013. AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S xix Extract from Times Higher Education, 06/06/2013 Increase the volume of expert voices to answer UKIP’s sound and fury, Christopher Phelps. Extract from Touchstone Level 2, Student’s Book (Book & CD) by Michael McCarthy Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford. Cambridge University Press, May 2005. p. vi–viii. Flöck, I. and Geluykens, R. (2018). Preference Organization and Cross-Cultural Variation in Request Responses: A Corpus-Based Comparison of British and American English. Corpus Pragmatics 2: 57–82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701- 017-0022-y. From ‘Listening to Lectures’, British Academic Spoken English (BASE), Corpus (2000). University of Warwick. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors and institu- tions across nations, 2nd edition, page 318. Tousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Te Cassell Dictionary of Anecdotes, edited by Nigel Rees (1999). Tis tale was told by Philip French of the Observer (17 April 1994). ISBN: 978-0304351954. Every efort has been made to fnd the copyright holders of materials used in this volume, but the publishers would be happy to hear from any they have been unable to contact and will make any necessary amendment at the earliest opportunity. A Section A INT R O D UCTI ON CO NCEP T S IN P RAG MAT ICS A1 2 INTRODUCTION A1 C O N T E X T A N D ST R UC T U R E A1.1 Understanding concepts ❑❑ Context ❑❑ Language and context ❑❑ Language and structure A1.2 Introduction to pragmatics Te approaches to language description that are described in this book all involve pragmatics. Te frst section of this unit defnes them and should serve as a reference guide to all the units of the book. Let us start by diferentiating pragmatics from discourse analysis. Tey are both approaches to studying language’s relation to contextual background features. In Queen Victoria’s famous words ‘We are not amused’, they would take into account the fact that Victoria had been in a prolonged depression, caused by the death of her husband, Albert, and her courtiers knew this, and that her words were a response to a joke which they had just made. Analysts would infer that the queen’s intention was to stop them trying to make her laugh and lif her out of the depression and that her statement implies a reminder that she has to be respected as queen. Pragmatics and discourse analysis have much in common: they both study context, text, and function. First, let us look at context. Both pragmatics and discourse analysis study the meaning of words in context, analysing the parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical and social world, the sociopsychological factors infuenc- ing communication, and the time and place in which the words are uttered or written (Stilwell Peccei 1999; Yule 1996). Both approaches focus on the meaning of words in interaction and how interactors communicate more information than the dictionary meaning of the words they use. Te speaker’s meaning depends on assumptions of knowledge that are shared by both speaker and hearer: the speaker constructs the lin- guistic message and intends or implies a meaning, and the hearer interprets the mes- sage and infers the meaning (Brown and Yule 1983; Tomas 1995). Context continues to be a vibrant area of research interest, as evidenced by journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, which focuses on how speakers produce and interpret language in con- text. Tis aspect is explored in section A1.3 in this unit, to introduce concepts that are behind pragmatics approaches described in this book. Te second feature that pragmatics and discourse analysis have in common is that they both look at discourse, or the use of language, and text, or pieces of spoken or written discourse, concentrating on how stretches of language become meaning- ful and unifed for their users. Discourse analysis has been used to explore the cohe- sion between linguistic items in the text; cohesion is covered briefy in section A1.4 of this unit, to introduce terms sometimes used in pragmatics studies. Discourse analy- sis calls the quality of being ‘meaningful and unifed’ coherence; pragmatics calls it CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE 3 A1 relevance. Both approaches would take into account the fact that Queen Victoria’s words were intended to be seen as relevant to the courtiers’ joke and to anything that they should say aferwards. Units A3–D3, dealing with the cooperative principle, an area of pragmatics, examine relevance theory, which is the study of how the assump- tion of relevance holds texts together meaningfully. Finally, pragmatics and discourse analysis have in common the fact that they are both concerned with function: the speakers’ short-term purposes in speaking or writ- ing and their long-term goals in interacting verbally or in writing. In the example, the queen’s purpose was to stop the courtiers trying to make her laugh and to make them respect her. Units covering function are A2–D2, on speech act theory. Tis describes what utterances are intended to do, such as promise, apologise, and threaten. Where discourse analysis difers from pragmatics is in its emphasis on the structure of text. Discourse analysis studies how large chunks of language beyond the sentence level are organised. Conversation analysis, which examines the structure of social interaction, would show that Victoria’s response to the joke was not the preferred response: someone telling a joke expects a response containing laughter. Similarly, it would show that her reprimand predicts an apology in response: something like ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty’. Tis framework is explained in section A1.5, because the catego- ries involved are occasionally used in combination with pragmatics approaches men- tioned in this book, and an understanding of the terms is therefore useful. Pragmatics difers from discourse analysis in the importance given to the social principles of discourse. Pragmatics can explain the example thus: the queen com- plied with the social maxims of the cooperative principle, being relevant, precise, clear, and sincere; her courtiers expected her to do so; and she obeyed the social con- ventions involved in the politeness principle, in that her request for the courtiers to stop is sofened by indirectness, which aims to avoid causing ofence. And yet her response is a little abrupt and face threatening, which is impolite. Pragmatics takes a sociocultural perspective on language usage; examining the way that the principles of social behaviour are expressed is determined by the social distance between speakers. It describes the unwritten maxims of interaction that speakers follow in order to coop- erate and be socially acceptable with each other. In this book, units dealing with these issues of pragmatics are A3–D3, on cooperative principle, and A4–D4, on politeness and impoliteness. Studies with a discourse analysis or pragmatics focus can be conducted by using corpus linguistics, which involves the analysis of electronic databases of naturally- occurring spoken and written text varying in size from thousands to billions of words. Corpus analysis enables the discovery of recurring patterns of language use that are ofen diﬃcult to discern without the support of the sorting and organisational power of computers. Corpus linguistics provides a data-driven approach to language analysis, which can investigate the use of language in relation to a wide range of individual and contextual variables, such as social class, genre, register, gender, age, mother tongue or frst language (L1), and profciency level. Corpus linguistics also makes possible a systematic description of language use within communities of practice and has pro- vided insights into the nature and importance of formulaic language. Units A5–D5 deal with corpus linguistics. Units A6–D6 introduce critical discourse analysis (CDA), an ideological approach that examines the purpose of language in the social context, and reveals how discourse A1 4 INTRODUCTION refects and determines power structures. It is relatively rare to include CDA in a book on pragmatics, because some see CDA as an approach quite separate from pragmatics, in that it examines the surface features of grammatical and lexical choices, as opposed to underlying meanings. However, it is described in this book because CDA is concerned with the hidden norms relating to roles and status, which is in line with pragmatics’ focus on language in social contexts. In addition, like other pragmatics approaches, CDA is concerned with sociolinguistics and studies communities of practice. Many of the theories described here originated in studies of Anglo-American con- texts which suggested that the fndings were generalisable to all contexts. Today’s pragmatics studies examine local contexts round the world, taking a multicultural approach. As Kecskes (2014: 3) points out, communication is becoming more and more intercultural because it involves interlocutors who have diferent frst languages, communicate in a common lan- guage, and represent diferent cultures. For that reason, although the book describes some approaches to pragmatics which were conceived in a monolingual framework and presupposed universal rules of communica- tion, it also introduces more-recent theories, which take a more multilingual approach. Tis is illustrated by units A7–D7, which look specifcally at intercultural pragmatics, which is concerned with how language varies according to whether speakers are talking in their L1 to speakers of the same language or whether they are using a lingua franca to be understood by speakers of another language. An awareness of intercultural pragmat- ics diferences is essential for language learners and teachers round the world. Units A8–D8 explore the applications of theory and research to language learning and teaching, suggesting ways that learners can be helped to use the target language pragmatics features but, at the same time, valued as lingua franca users with intercul- tural communicative competence. Unit A8 is divided into sections looking at theories on how pragmatics is learned in a second language (L2) and where pragmatics fts with the development of intercultural competence, how L2 pragmatics can be taught in the L2 classroom, and what pragmatics is taught in a global world, where English is used as a lingua franca in a multiplicity of cultural contexts Since the frst edition of this book was published in 2002, the Internet revolution has in turn led to a revolution in the ways people communicate, whether it be tex- ting, tweeting, messaging, blogging, or posting YouTube videos – now usually termed ‘digital communication’ (Georgakopoulou and Spilioti 2020). Tis fourth edition includes examples taken from these new forms of communication and invites discus- sions from new perspectives on the relationship between language use and contexts of communication. Before we meet these theories, let us consider context and structure, because an under- standing of them can provide a useful background in the understanding of pragmatics. A1.3 Context We said that pragmatics studies deal with the meaning of words in context (the physi- cal and social world) and assumptions of knowledge that speaker and hearer share. CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE 5 A1 Let us start with an example. Te following excerpt is from a conversation between MSc students in the common room of the Applied Linguistics Department of the University of Edinburgh. DM, an English man, had planned to go to Spain for Easter but could not aford the tickets; he tells AF, a Scottish woman, that he ended up going hill walking in Arran, an island of the west coast of Scotland. What knowledge do they assume that they share? AF: (2) So you went to Arran. A bit of a come-down, isn’t it?! ((laughing)) DM: It was nice actually. Have you been to Arran? AF: No I’ve not. (1) Like to go. DM: Did a lot of climbing. AF: // (heh) DM: // I went with Francesca (0.5) and David. AF: Uhuh? DM: Francesca’s roommate. (2) And Alice’s – a friend of Alice’s from London (1). Tere were six of us. Yeah, we did a lot of hill walking. (0.5) We got back (1) er (2) Michelle and I got home she looked at her knees. (0.5) Tey were like this. Swollen up like this. ’Cause we did this enormous eight- hour stretch. AF: Uhm. (Students on hill walking 1996) Typically, there are three sorts of context to observe here: ❑❑ Te situational context – what speakers know about what they can see around them ❑❑ Te background knowledge context – what they know about each other and the world ❑❑ Te co-textual context – what they know about what they have been saying Pragmatic competence is knowing how to use language in socioculturally appropriate ways, taking into account the participants and the context of the interaction. Outside the text: situational context In the excerpt about hill walking in Arran, there is an example of words taking on meaning in the situational context: ‘Tey were like this. Swollen up like this.’ DM must be holding his hands open and rounded to show what Michelle’s knees looked like. Te situational context is the immediate physical co-presence: the situation where the interaction is taking place at the moment of speaking. It is not by chance that DM uses the words ‘like this’. ‘Tis’ is a demonstrative pronoun, used for pointing to something nearby that speaker and hearer can see. An overhearer who cannot see DM’s hands would not know how bad Michelle’s knees were. Let us take an example from written language. You may be familiar with Struwwelpeter, a book from the mid nineteenth century that contains moralistic, humorous tales about naughty children who are punished for their bad behaviour. Tere is one such tale called Te Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup. Te tale begins with Augustus as ‘a chubby lad who ate and drank as he was told, and A1 6 INTRODUCTION never let his soup grow cold’. Ten one day he screams ‘I won’t have any soup today’. Here is verse two: Next day, now look, the picture shows How lank and lean Augustus grows! Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, Te naughty fellow cries out still – “Not any soup for me, I say: O take the nasty soup away! I won’t have any soup today.” Needless to say, by the ffh day, he was dead. Te poem is meant to be read to a child who can look at the book in front of them: the words ‘the picture’ refer to the one in the book, and the name ‘Augustus’ refers to the boy in the picture. Te child who does not look at the picture will not know exactly ‘how lank and lean’ the boy is. Te picture adds a visible situational context. Outside the text: background knowledge context Te second type of context is that of assumed background knowledge. Tis can be either cultural (general knowledge that most people have about areas of life) or inter- personal (specifc and possibly private knowledge about the history of the speak- ers themselves). Let us start with cultural background knowledge. In the excerpt about hill walking in Arran, AF and DM share cultural background knowledge about the low moun- tains on the island: AF does not appear surprised that DM and his friends went ‘hill walking’, that they could walk for eight hours there, or that the walk was strenuous enough to make somebody’s knees swell. If interlocutors establish that they are part of the same group, they can assume mutual knowledge of everything normally known by group members (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Here the community of people who could be assumed to know about the mountains are British people or people who have visited or studied the British Isles. Groups with mutual knowledge vary in size. Let us take the music world as an example. People with an interest in, and knowledge of, African music could constitute a community of millions. In that community, there are smaller groups of people who know all about a particular sort of African music, its singers and bands, its history and geography. In that community, there will be an even-smaller group of people who know every song that a particular African group has recorded and the life histories of each of the band members. Tese social groups are known as communities of prac- tice, defned by broadly agreed common public goals, special mechanisms for com- munication, and a special lexis or vocabulary (see units A5–D5). Let us move on now to the interpersonal background context. In the hill-walking excerpt, we see that AF and DM know who ‘Michelle’ is. Tis is the interpersonal con- text. DM will have told AF in a previous conversation that his wife’s name is ‘Michelle’; he might also have told her where ‘home’ is – AF might have actually been to DM’s home and learned quite a lot about Michelle. Shared interpersonal knowledge is knowledge acquired through previous verbal interactions or joint activities and expe- riences, and it includes privileged personal knowledge about the interlocutor. CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE 7 A1 Tere was a US television advertisement that featured this telephone dialogue between husband and wife: Her: How are you? Him: OK. Her: Did you have friends in and get a video last night? Him: Oh, I had friends in, but we just watched a little TV. Her: Ah, right. Him: Tat was great. How do you feel? Her: OK. It is only when she says ‘OK’ at the end that there is a fashback and we see that she won a gold medal in an Olympics event. At this point, we understand that ‘Oh, I had friends in, but we just watched a little TV’ means ‘I had friends in to watch you play- ing on TV, and I know you won.’ Te interpersonal knowledge shared by a husband and wife is obviously enormous: this is why reference to any part of it can be so vague, implicit, and minimal. Inside the text: co-textual context Te co-textual context is the context of the text itself, known as the co-text. Let us go back to the hill-walking excerpt: DM: // I went with Francesca (0.5) and David. AF: Uhuh? DM: Francesca’s roommate. (2) And Alice’s – a friend of Alice’s from London (1). Tere were six of us. Yeah, we did a lot of hill walking. Here, the personal pronouns ‘us’ and ‘we’ refer back to DM, Michelle, Francesca, David, the roommate, and the friend, who are all mentioned elsewhere in the text. Te interlocutors assume that everyone in the conversation has enough knowledge of what they have been saying to be able to infer who the ‘us’ and the ‘we’ include. A1.4 Language and context Te act of using language to refer to entities in the context is known as reference, an act in which a speaker uses linguistic forms to enable the hearer to identify some- thing. Te speaker uses linguistic forms, known as referring expressions, to enable the hearer to identify the entity being referred to, which is in turn known as the ref- erent. For example, in the words ‘I went with Francesca (0.5) and David’, the frst- person singular personal pronoun ‘I’ is a referring expression which refers to the per- son speaking, who is the referent. Similarly, the proper nouns ‘Francesca’ and ‘David’ are the referring expressions that refer to the two people whose names are Francesca and David, the latter being the referents. Some words actually point to the entity that they refer to; this is known as deixis. Deixis can take its meaning from the context outside or inside the text. Tere are three types: person, place, and time. When we talk of person deixis, we mean the use of A1 8 INTRODUCTION expressions to point to a person with the personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’, and ‘they’: ❑❑ ‘We are not amused.’ ❑❑ ‘So you went to Arran.’ ❑❑ ‘We got back (1) er (2) Michelle and I got home she looked at her knees. (0.5)’ ❑❑ ‘Yet, though he feels so weak and ill.’ Spatial or place deixis is words used to point to a location, the place where an entity is in the context, as in the demonstrative adverbs ‘there’, ‘here’, and the demonstrative adjectives and pronouns ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, ‘those’: ❑❑ ‘Tey were like this.’ ❑❑ ‘Tat was great.’ ❑❑ ‘Cos there’s another one here.’ ❑❑ ‘Right, we’ve got forty-nine there, haven’t we?’ Time deixis is expressions used to point to a time, as in ‘next day’, ‘then’, and ‘now’, evidenced in ‘Next day, now look, the picture shows’. Referring to the context outside: exophora When the referring expression is the frst mention of the referent, in the sense that there is no previous mention of the reference in the preceding text, we call it exophoric reference. Exophora is dependent on the context outside the text, either in the situa- tion or in the background knowledge. Tus, in ‘I went with Francesca (0.5) and David’, ‘I’ is exophoric because the referent is the person speaking. Te nouns ‘Francesca’ and ‘David’ are used as exophoric reference because they point to people who are in the cultural context and are not referred to previously in the text. When a referring item refers to entities in the background knowledge, whether cul- tural or interpersonal, that have obviously been mentioned in a previous conversation or text or have occurred in a shared situation or activity, we call this intertextuality (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). In the US television advertisement mentioned earlier, of the telephone call about the Olympic medal, the ‘that’ of ‘Tat was great’ is an example of intertextuality because it refers back to the wife’s performance in the Olympic event. Te previous text becomes part of background knowledge of the pre- sent text. Since ‘Tat was great’ refers to an event that millions of viewers around the world would have seen, it is in the cultural context. If the husband had been refer- ring to a romantic evening with his wife, the intertextuality would have been interper- sonal. Intertextuality is more ofen interpersonal than cultural, since it usually refers to knowledge gained in previous conversations between the people who are speaking. Referring to the context inside: cohesion Te study of cohesion lies, strictly speaking, within the domain of discourse analysis rather than pragmatics, and for that reason, discussion of it is kept to a minimum in this book. Let us start with grammatical cohesion. We can look at how the co-text hangs together from the point of view of reference. In the excerpt above, the pronouns ‘us’ and ‘we’ refer to items in the same text; this is endophoric reference. Tey refer back to DM, Francesca, David, Francesca’s roommate, the friend of Alice, and CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE 9 A1 Michelle, who are all mentioned elsewhere in the text. When a referring expression links with another referring expression within the co-text, we say that it is cohe- sive with the previous mention of the referent in the text. Tis is what meshes the text together. Tere are two types of endophora. When pronouns link back to something that went before in the preceding text, this is called anaphora, and it is the more frequent of the two types. If one were to say ‘I really loved that tweet. When I saw it, I was in stitches’, the ‘it’ would refer back to the ‘that tweet’. Te other type of endophora, cata- phora, is the opposite – pronouns link forward to a referent in the following text, as in ‘I really loved it. When I saw that tweet, I was in stitches’. Endophoric reference is only one form of grammatical cohesion. Tere are two other forms that are not part of reference: substitution and ellipsis. Let us start with substitution. If one were to say ‘I really loved that tweet. Can’t wait to see the next one’, the ‘one’ would be substituting ‘tweet’, to avoid saying ‘the next tweet’. Te other form of grammatical cohesion is ellipsis. If one were to say ‘I really loved that tweet. Can’t wait to see the next’, that would be ellipsis because instead of saying ‘the next tweet’, one is simply dropping the word ‘tweet’ altogether and replacing it with nothing. Just like substitution, ellipsis avoids repetition and depends on the hearer’s or reader’s being able to retrieve the missing words from the context. Let us now move on to lexical cohesion. Of all the lexical cohesion devices, the most common form is repetition, which is simply repeated words or word phrases threading through the text. Take this example from D.H. Lawrence’s (1981) short story Odour of Chrysanthemums, frst published in 1911: Te child put the pale chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring: ‘Don’t they smell beautiful!’ Her mother gave a short laugh. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the frst time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.’ Here the repeated ‘chrysanthemums’ have the efect of pounding through the text and showing how they have been a repeated feature of the mother’s life. Substitution and ellipsis avoid repetition; lexical repetition exploits it for stylistic efect. Instead of repeating the same word, a speaker or writer can use another word that means the same or almost the same. Tis is a synonym. Again, it avoids repetition. If someone says ‘I really loved that tweet. Tat twitter comment had me in stitches’, they use the words ‘that twitter comment’ to refer to the tweet without being repetitive. Instead of repeating the same word, one can use a superordinate, as in ‘I really loved that tweet. Social media can be so cool’. Te superordinate ‘social media’ is an over- arching category that includes tweets, Facebook comments, blogs, and so on. Te last form of lexical cohesion that we cover here is the general word. Tese can be general nouns, as in ‘thing’, ‘stuf ’, ‘place, ‘person’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’, or general verbs, as in ‘do’ and ‘happen’. In a way, the general word is a higher-level superordinate: it is the umbrella term that can cover almost everything. One could say afectionately ‘I really loved that tweet. Te thing had me in stitches’. General nouns and verbs do not carry much information, although they can communicate attitude and emotion; they A1 10 INTRODUCTION depend on the co-text for their meaning, so they are used when hearers and readers can identify what is being referred to from the rest of the text. A1.5 Language and structure It is worth being familiar with two discourse analysis approaches to the study of how stretches of discourse are organised: exchange theory (ET) and conversation analysis (CA). ET studies patterns of classroom interaction. An understanding of this theory is needed in order to recognise ways of expressing power (see units A6–D6, on critical discourse analysis) and to appreciate methodological suggestions for the teaching of intercultural pragmatic competence (units A8–D8, on pragmatics and language learn- ing). CA examines turn-taking mechanisms and predictable pairs of utterances. An understanding of this is needed for all units in this book (see especially units A7–D7, on intercultural pragmatics). Exchange theory Tis is the approach taken by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) and the Birmingham School of Discourse Analysis, which studied primary school lessons and found a regu- lar structure. Te Birmingham School said that the lesson can be broken down into fve levels of structure. From bottom to top, these are act, move, exchange, transaction, and lesson. Table A1.1 shows examples of acts and moves. Sinclair and Coulthard said Table A1.1 Examples of acts and moves Move Acts Function Example Initiation Inform gives information ‘The purple ones are the taller ones’ Direct gives orders ‘You’ve got to put them on this map’ Elicit requests response ‘Any other colours?’ Cue encourages hearer to ‘Hands up’, ‘Don’t call out’ contribute Nominate names responder ‘Christine?’, ‘Johnny’ Check checks progress ‘Finished?’, ‘Ready?’ Prompt reinforces directives and ‘Go on’, ‘Hurry up’ elicitation Response React nonlinguistic reply to a [nod], [raise hand] directive Reply to an elicitation ‘Purple’ Follow-up Accept shows heard correct ‘Yes’, ‘Good’, ‘Fine’ information Evaluate evaluates hearer’s answer ‘Good’, ‘Interesting’ CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE 11 A1 that the acts tend to be carried out in a fxed order of moves. Tey found three basic moves: the initiation (I) from the teacher (e.g. ‘What’s the past tense of “come”?’), the response (R) from the student (e.g. ‘Came’) and the follow-up (F) from the teacher (‘Good’). Moves combine to make up an exchange, with an initiation–response–fol- low-up (IRF) structure. Exchanges then combine to make the transaction, and a les- son consists of many transactions. ET has limitations as a model of classroom transactions. It does not accommo- date easily to the real-life pressures and unruliness of the classroom, reflect today’s learner-centred classroom, take into account that some classes have a teacher and an assistant, or give space to translanguaging (the process of meaning and sense making whereby multilingual speakers use their languages as an integrated com- munication system). Take a look at the excerpt below, from a French class in a primary school in French Guiana, where the children speak Akulu, an Eastern Maroon Creole (Alby and Léglise 2018). T is the teacher, A the assistant, and S the student. T: qu’est-ce que c’est? / (what’s this?) T: si on ne l’a pas en français donnez-moi en aluku (if you don’t know it in French, say it in Aluku) A: saama sabi fa den e kali a sani de / (who knows what is the name of this?) A: o fa dee kali a sani de / (what is it called?) S: orange (orange) T: merci c’est bien (well done!) A: e f yu na sabi fa den e kali e a sani de na faansi, kali en gi mi na aluku tongo (Who knows what it is called? If you don’t know, say it in Aluku) / [...] T: il parle de la couleur c’est pas grave (he’s talking about the colour, it doesn’t matter) A: pesina (orange) T: pe::sina ok\ bon/ ben en français ça se dit O/RANGE // (orange, okay. So in French, it’s ORANGE) A: pesina (orange) T: on répète/orange / (repeat orange) S: orange (orange) T: c’est l’orange (it’s the orange) A: pesina de kali en orange na faansi (the orange fruit is called orange in French) A1 12 INTRODUCTION Te transaction begins with four initiations, two from the teacher and two from the assistant. Te student then gives the response ‘orange’, and the teacher provides feedback (‘merci c’est bien’ and ‘il parle de la couleur c’est pas grave’), giving a struc- ture (I-I-I-I-R-F). ET is rarely used today to describe classroom interaction, but it has been adapted in some research on formal and ritualistic genres in which one person controls the discourse, such as the interviewer in interviews, the judge in trials, and the doctor with a patient. Conversation analysis Unlike ET, CA has evolved over the last 40 years and is very much alive today. CA looks at social interaction as a linear ongoing event, which unfolds little by little and implies the negotiation of cooperation between speakers along the way. Cooperation in interaction is managed by participants through turn taking. CA assumes that speakers take turns, frst one talking and then another. Te point in an interaction where a change of turn is possible is called a transition relevance place (TRP). Te next speakers cannot be sure that the current speaker’s turn is complete, but they will usually take the end of a sentence or falling intonation and a pause to indicate that the turn is possibly complete. CA studies interruptions and overlaps. When speakers do not want to wait until the TRP, this is called an interruption. In the following example, adapted from Gumperz (1982: 175), the moment when the interruption begins is indicated with a //. B: Yes. Tell, tell me what it // is you want A: // umm. Um, may I frst of all request the introduction please? When hearers predict that the turn is about to be completed and they come in before it is, this is an overlap. In the following example, adapted from Schifrin (1994: 240), the overlap is indicated with a =. Interviewee: But not no more. Yeah = Interviewer: = What happened to them? CA studies pauses. If the pause is intended to carry meaning, analysts call it an attrib- utable silence. Te following exchange demonstrates this: A: Hi. How’s things? Did you have a good time last night? B: (3) Yeah. A: So he asked you out then? B: He did. In it, B pauses for three seconds before her ‘Yeah’, and A rightly attributes to this silence an aﬃrmative answer and positive sentiments. A central area of interest in CA is adjacency pairs. Analysts say that the utterance of one speaker makes a certain response of the next speaker very likely. Adjacency pairs CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE 13 A1 tend to have two parts, the frst part creating an expectation of a particular second part. Tis is known as preference structure: each frst part has a preferred response, as Table A1.2 shows. Te dispreferred responses tend to be the refusals and disagree- ments. Tese are the more unusual responses, and they can be taken as meaningful and/or rude. Table A1.2 Adjacency pairs a question has the preferred response of an answer an offer an acceptance an invitation an acceptance an assessment an agreement a proposal an agreement a greeting a greeting a complaint an apology a blame a denial Adjacency pairs can be seen in all modes of communication. Take this brief email exchange, with its invitation and the preferred response, an acceptance. A: Hi B. Yes, let’s do a 5pm virtual drinkie poo. When do you fancy? A. B: Hi A. What about drinks at 5 on Tursday 14th? Would that work? FaceTime? My mobile is 01234567890*. Best, B. A: Hi B. Yeah great. I look forward to seeing you! * Number anonymised Let us now imagine the following scene in which a husband and wife are reading in the kitchen while their dinner is cooking: Wife: Do you want to test the potatoes? Husband: Can I just fnish this sentence? Wife: Of course. Te question is not met with something that looks like an answer. However, the husband’s question is presumably intended to mean that the husband will check the potatoes once he has fnished his sentence. It implies a positive answer to the question. Conversation analysts examine sequences, which are stretches of utterances or turns. Pre-sequences prepare the ground for a further sequence and signal the type of utterance to follow. Tere are pre-invitations (‘I’ve got two tickets for the rugby match’), pre-requests (‘Bist du heute Abend frei?’ – ‘Are you free tonight?’) and pre- announcements (‘You’ll never guess!’). Insertion sequences embed an adjacency pair within other adjacency pairs, as in A2 14 INTRODUCTION Wife: Do you want to test the potatoes? Husband: Tis is a really interesting article about racism in the police force. Tey’re saying there’s got to be a massive education campaign to change the way people think. Wife: Tere certainly has. Husband: Yeah. Wife: Potatoes. Husband: Fork. Here the husband’s dispreferred response about racism turns into an insertion sequence. Opening sequences tend to contain a greeting, an enquiry afer health and a past reference (as in ‘Salut! Bien dormi?’ – ‘Hi! Sleep well?’). Closing sequences can be long and drawn out, on occasions: A: Anyway, I’m gonna have to go. B: Yeah. See you. A: See you tomorrow. C: What time is it? D: Oh. I’ve lef my lights on. E: Half three. C: Tree. E: Tarrah. (Te British National Corpus 2007: kb1 Albert 1992) CA has been used to analyse institution-centred interactions, such as those in doctors’ oﬃces, the mass media, and educational settings, looking at the relationship between grammar and social interaction in communities of practice (see units A5–D5). A2 S P E E C H AC T T H E O RY A2.1 Understanding concepts ❑❑ Direct speech acts ❑❑ Felicity conditions ❑❑ Indirect speech acts ❑❑ Macro-functions A2.2 Introduction To a hostess who had sent an invitation stating that on a certain day she would be ‘At home’, George Bernard Shaw succinctly replied, ‘So will G. Bernard Shaw’. (Rees 1999) S P E E C H AC T T H E O RY 15 A2 At the risk of killing a funny tale, we can explain what happened here in terms of speech acts. Te hostess’s invitation will have read something like ‘Mrs Eleanor Higgins will be at home 10 April 7–9 pm’, which are words usually taken as performing the speech act of ‘inviting’. Shaw pretended to read it literally as a statement of where she would be and responded in kind; his answer consisted of words to be taken as performing the speech act of ‘declining’. A2.3 Direct speech acts Austin (1962) defined speech acts as the actions performed in saying something. According to speech act theory, the action performed when an utterance is pro- duced can be analysed on three levels. Let us look at the action in the following conversation. Three students are sitting together at the ‘bun lunch’ (Cutting 2000), the social occasion at which a certain university lays out filled rolls and fruit juice on the first day of a course, to welcome students and help them to get to know each other. MM: I think I might go and have another bun. AM: I was going to get another one. BM: Could you get me a tuna and sweet corn one please? AM: Me as well? The first level of analysis is the words themselves: ‘I think I might go and have another bun’, ‘I was going to get another one’, and so on. This is the locution, ‘what is said’, the form of the words uttered. The act of saying something is known as the locutionary act. The second level is what the speakers are doing with their words: AM and MM are ‘asserting’ and ‘expressing intentions about their own action’, and BM and AM are ‘requesting action on the part of the hearer’. This is the illocutionary force, ‘what is done in uttering the words’, the function of the words, the specific purpose that the speakers have in mind. Other examples are the speech acts of ‘inviting, ‘advising, ‘promising’, ‘ordering’, ‘excusing’, and ‘apologising’. The last level of analysis is the result of the words: MM gets up and brings AM and BM each a tuna and sweet corn bun. This is known as the perlocutionary effect, ‘what is done by uttering the words’; it is the effect on the hearer, the hearer’s reaction. Searle (1969) grouped the locutionary act level of speech acts under the follow- ing macro-classes. Declarations Tese are words and expressions that change the world by their very utterance, such as ‘I declare’ and ‘I resign’. Others can be seen in ‘I baptise this boy John Smith’, which changes a nameless baby into one with a name; ‘I hereby pronounce you man and wife’, which turns two singles into a married couple; and ‘Tis court sentences you to ten years’ imprisonment’, which puts the person into prison. A2 16 INTRODUCTION Representatives Tese are acts in which the words state what the speaker believes to be the case, such as ‘describing’, ‘claiming’, ‘hypothesising’, ‘insisting’, and ‘predicting’: ❑❑ I think the only reason people hold onto memories so tight is because memo- ries are the only things that don’t change when everybody else does (Twitter 14 February 2014) ❑❑ Je pense, donc je suis (I think; therefore I am) (Descartes) ❑❑ Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him (Shakespeare, Macbeth) Commissives Tis includes acts in which the words commit the speaker to future action, such as ‘promising’, ‘ofering, ‘threatening, ‘refusing’, and ‘vowing’. ❑❑ Haré todo lo posible te lo juro amor (I’ll do everything possible, I swear, my love) ❑❑ I’ll make him an ofer he can’t refuse (Mario Puzo, Te Godfather) ❑❑ I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you/Till China and Africa meet,/And the river jumps over the mountain/And the salmon sing in the street (W.H. Auden 1958) Directives Tis category covers acts in which the words are aimed at making the hearer do some- thing, such as ‘commanding’, ‘requesting’, ‘inviting’, ‘forbidding’, ‘suggesting’, etc. ❑❑ From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties/And things that go bump in the night,/Good Lord, deliver us (Scottish prayer) ❑❑ rù xiang suí sú (Ancient Chinese proverb meaning ‘when entering a village, follow its customs’ – which is similar to ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’) ❑❑ Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Teir tastes may not be the same (Shaw) Expressives Tis last group includes acts in which the words state what the speaker feels, such as ‘apologising’, ‘praising’, ‘congratulating’, ‘deploring’ and ‘regretting’. ❑❑ A woman without a man is like a fsh without a bicycle (Steinem) ❑❑ Tut mir furchtbar leid wegen der Sache mit Toni (Terribly sorry about the Toni thing) Here is an example from Facebook (4 February 2014 – names anonymised) Ann: So we both forgot our anniversary last week... lovely surprise thanks husbando for an awesome 4 years!! [A photo of a vase of red roses] Betty: How romantic. Wot a guy!! Carol: ahhh well done!! congrats peeps! love you both!! Xx Debbie: Happy Anniversary to both of you. S P E E C H AC T T H E O RY 17 A2 A2.4 Felicity conditions For speech acts to be appropriately and successfully performed, certain felicity condi- tions have to be met. For Austin (1962), the felicity conditions are that the context and roles of participants must be recognised by all parties, the action must be carried out completely, and the persons must have the right intentions. For Searle (1969), there is a general condition for all speech acts: the hearer must understand the language, and the speaker must not be pretending or play acting. For declarations and directives, the rules are that the speaker must believe that it is possible to carry out the action, they are performing the act in the hearer’s best interests, they are sincere about wanting to do it, and the words count as the act. To understand the need for felicity conditions, let us return to the students at their bun lunch: MM: I think I might go and have another bun. AM: I was going to get another one. BM: Could you get me a tuna and sweet corn one please? AM: Me as well? Here we have a directive speech act of ‘requesting’ (‘Could you get me a tuna and sweet corn one please?’), which can be explained by using Austin’s model. Te con- text of the bun lunch is recognised by all parties: it is an appropriate place to talk about the buns and about wanting another one. Te roles of participants are recog- nised: the students are equals, and it is not a great imposition therefore for one to ask another to get a bun. Te persons have the right intentions: BM and AM must trust that MM is indeed going to get a bun, and they presumably intend to eat the buns that they ask for. Te situation can also be explained by using Searle’s model. AM and BM seem to believe that it is possible for MM to get them buns: he has functioning legs, and the buns are not too far away. Tey genuinely want to eat the buns; they are sincere. Teir words count as a request. It cannot be said that BM and AM are performing the act in MM’s best interests, because they are performing it in their own interests. However, they are not asking for the buns in order to burden MM and make it diﬃcult for him to bring all the buns back, and if MM wants to appear sociable and obliging, he is being ofered an occasion to demonstrate it. Let us look at an example of a declarative speech act in which the felicity condi- tions were not fulflled. Tere was a situation reported, in the local press, of a man and woman who discovered, a month before their wedding, that they had not completed all the necessary paperwork and that it would not be ready in time. Tey decided to go ahead with the wedding ceremony as if nothing were wrong and sign the papers later, because all the preparations had been made and they wanted to save face. Tus, the priest’s words ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ did not marry them legally because the papers were missing, and pragmatically because not all the felicity conditions were met. Although the context and roles of participants were recognised by all parties, and the priest was saying the words in the couple’s best interests, the speech act was not successfully performed, because they were ‘putting on a show’ for the beneft of the guests. Te action was not carried out completely, and the priest did not believe that it A2 18 INTRODUCTION was possible to carry out the action, did not have the intention to carry it out, and was not sincere about wanting to do it. A2.5 Indirect speech acts Much of the time, what we mean is actually not in the words themselves but in the meaning implied. In the bun lunch example, we said that AM’s words ‘I was going to get another one’ had the illocutionary force of ‘expressing intentions about his own action’. However, he says this straight afer MM’s ‘I think I might go and have another bun.’ It is possible that he was instead implying that he would like MM to get him one while he was there and save him the bother of getting up, especially as he chose the past continuous tense, which implies ‘before you said that’. If this is so, he is expressing a directive, ‘requesting’ indirectly, with the force of the imperative ‘Get me one’; this is what we call an indirect speech act. Searle said that a speaker using a direct speech act wants to communicate the literal meaning that the words conventionally express; there is a direct relationship between the form and the function. Tus, a declarative form (not to be confused with declara- tion speech acts) such as ‘I was going to get another one’ has the function of a state- ment or assertion; an interrogative form such as ‘Do you like the tuna and sweet corn ones?’ has the function of a question; and an imperative form such as ‘Get me one’ has the function of a request or order. On the other hand, Searle explained that someone who is using an indirect speech act wants to communicate a diferent meaning from the apparent surface meaning; the form and function are not directly related. Tere is an underlying pragmatic meaning, and one speech act is performed through another speech act. Tus, a declarative form such as ‘I was going to get another one’ or ‘You could get me a tuna and sweet corn one’ might have the function of a request or order, meaning ‘Get me one’. Similarly, an interrogative form such as ‘Could you get me a tuna and sweet corn one please?’ or ‘Would you mind getting me one?’ is not simply a question asking about ability; it has the function of a request or order. ‘Can I get you one while I’m there?’ is not a question about what the speaker can do; it is an ofer. Finally, an imperative form in utterances such as ‘Enjoy your bun’ is not an order; it functions as a statement meaning ‘I hope you enjoy your bun’. Similarly, ‘Here, take this one’ is not a command: it can have the function of an ofer, just as ‘Come for a walk with me afer the lunch’ serves as an invi- tation. Some might say that ‘enjoy your bun’ is not in fact an imperative, but rather a subjunctive, as in ‘(I hope) that you enjoy your bun’. Indirect speech acts are part of everyday life in most cultures round the world, although some cultures use more indirectness than others do. A few examples will illustrate how central indirect speech acts are to exchanges in English. Te following excerpt from the novel Regeneration demonstrates that in indirect speech acts, the speaker intends the hearer to understand the underlying meaning. Graves arrives afer Sassoon at the convalescent home and asks, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen anybody yet?’ ‘I’ve seen Rivers. Which reminds me, he wants to see you, but I imagine it’ll be all right if you dump your bag frst.’ (Barker 1991) S P E E C H AC T T H E O RY 19 A2 On the surface, Sassoon’s reply ‘he wants to see you’ is a declarative with the func- tion of a statement and a direct representative describing River’s wishes. However, it appears to be intended as an order or a suggestion to Graves, meaning the same as the imperative ‘Go and see him’, and therefore, it is an indirect directive. Te suggestion is reinforced by the ‘but I imagine it’ll be all right if you dump your bag frst’, which is uttered as if he had actually said ‘Go and see him’. Let us take another example, this time from the thriller Tooth and Nail. Inspector Rebus and Inspector Flight come out of an autopsy: ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lif.’ In his fragile state, Rebus felt this to be the nicest kindest thing anyone had said to him in weeks. ‘Are you sure you have room?’ he said, ‘I mean, with the teddy bear and all?’ Flight paused. ‘Or if you’d prefer to walk, Inspector?’ Rebus threw up his hands in surrender, then, when the door unlocked, slipped into the passenger seat of Flight’s red Sierra. Te seat seemed to wrap itself around him. ‘Here,’ said Flight, handing a hip fask to Rebus. Rebus unscrewed the top of the fask and snifed. ‘It won’t kill you,’ Flight called. Tis was probably true. Te aroma was of whisky. (Rankin 1992) Here again, there is a declarative that is more than a statement: ‘I’ll give you a lif’ is a direct commissive ofering a lif to the inspector and committing himself to a future action, although it could be classed as an indirect directive, carrying the meaning of an imperative such as ‘Get in the car’. More complex is ‘Or if you’d prefer to walk’. It is not half a declarative sentence, and yet it is not just an indirect directive suggesting alternative action either, since it implies ‘If you’re going to be cheeky, I won’t give you a lif’, which is an indirect commissive making a threat. Similarly, ‘It won’t kill you’ looks, on the surface, like a representative describing the contents of the fask, but in fact, the implication is ‘Drink it’, an indirect directive commanding. Film lovers will be familiar with the flm star Mae West, who once said to an admirer, ‘Why don’t you come up and see me some time?’ She did not actually say ‘Come up and see me some time’. Te hearer will, however, have understood the indirect direc- tive inviting, and ignored the direct representative asking why. A2.6 Speech acts and society Social dimensions Indirect speech acts in many languages and cultures constitute one of many forms of politeness, and we will examine this in more detail in units A4–D4, when we look at all the linguistic features of politeness. In most Englishes, indirectness is so much associ- ated with politeness that directives are more ofen expressed as interrogatives than as imperatives. Tis convention is especially the case with people with whom one is not familiar. An interesting case here is the sign to the general public in many restaurants, bookshops and petrol stations that says, ‘Tank you for not smoking’. Te expressive ‘thanking’ speech act is presumably used because it sounds more polite and friendly to all the strangers who read the sign than the impersonal directive ‘No Smoking’. A2 20 INTRODUCTION Other factors that can make speakers use indirect directives, in addition to lack of familiarity, are the reasonableness of the task, the formality of the context, and social distance (diferences of status, roles, age, gender, education, class, occupation, and ethnicity). Social distance can give speakers power and authority, and it is generally those of the less dominant role who tend to use indirectness. In the short story Dealer’s Choice, for instance, a young woman walks into the oﬃce of a private detective, who is older, male, and in a position of authority: She got to her feet. Perched on top of her boxy four-inch heels she just about cleared my armpit. ‘I’ve been hoping to see you, Mr Marlowe. Hoping to interest you in taking a case for me. If you have time, that is.’ She made it sound as though her problem, whatever it was, was just a bit on the dull side, and that if I didn’t have time for it the two of us could forget it and move onto something more interesting. (Paretsky 1995) She expresses her request indirectly, ‘hidden’ under a representative speech act describ- ing herself: ‘I’ve been hoping to see you, Mr Marlowe. Hoping to interest you in taking a case for me.’ Cross-cultural variation Speech acts, their linguistic realisations (how people express them) and their rela- tionship to the social dimensions mentioned earlier are very much bound by culture. Te ways of expressing speech acts vary from social group to social group, country to country, and culture to culture. Tis is a major point to get to grips within speech act theory, and it is one of the main issues that we explore in depth in units A7–D7, on intercultural pragmatics. Let us take a few examples for the moment. In India, the expressive speech act of ‘praising’ and ‘congratulating’ a person on their appearance can be realised by the words ‘How fat you are!’, because weight is an indicator of prosperity and health, in a country where there is malnutrition. In Britain, these words express a speech act of ‘deploring’ or ‘criticising’, since the fashion and diet foods industries, and possibly health education, have conditioned many into thinking that ‘slim is beautiful’. Diferences in speech act conventions can cause communication diﬃculties inter- culturally. Te following example comes from Cuba: person A, a British woman, called the work centre of Juan Perez. B, a Cuban who worked with Juan Perez, picked up the phone: A: Juan Perez está allí? (Is Juan Perez there?) B: Sí sí. (Yes, he is.) A: Éste... podría hablar con él, por favor? (Em... could I speak to him, please?) B: Sí, un momento. (Yes, just a minute.) S P E E C H AC T T H E O RY 21 A2 A’s question ‘Is Juan Perez there?’ is intended as an indirect request for the hearer to bring Juan Perez to the phone. B hears only an interrogative with the function of the direct representative’s checking whether Juan Perez is in his place of work. Te usual way to summon someone to the phone in Cuba is ‘Con Juan Perez, por favor’ (literally, ‘With Mr Perez, please’, meaning ‘I’d like to speak with Juan Perez’). Spencer-Oatey (2000a, 2000b: 1) related how she learned that whereas a British English greeting mentions the weather, as in ‘Hi, bit colder today’, a Chinese greeting mentions the interlocutor’s destination, as in ‘Where are you going?’ When she frst met this expression, she felt it as an intrusive inquiry about her personal life. She later learned that it was simply a friendly greeting, with ‘no expectation that it should be answered explicitly’. Speech acts tend to be highly conventionalised and represented by formulaic phrases in English (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992). If we take the example of requests, the following phrases are frequently observed: ❑❑ Can you [lend me your car]? ❑❑ Could you [lend me your car]? ❑❑ Would you mind [lending me your car]? ❑❑ Would it be at all possible for you to [lend me your car]? All of these phrases, with varying degrees of politeness, are understood as conven- tional phrases expressing requests. For native speakers of English (NSEs), who grow up with frequent exposure to these formulaic phrases, the connection between the form and function is usually unproblematic. However, for L2 learners, research shows that opaque form–function relationships can present diﬃculties, which ofen require teacher intervention and/or explicit feedback for learners to overcome (see units A8– D8 for more detail). A2.7 Limitations of speech act theory When we try to categorise utterances in terms of speech acts, we ofen fnd that there is an overlap and that one utterance can fall into more than one macro-class. Take the following example from the novel Lord of the Flies: “Tey’re all dead,” said Piggy, “an’ this is an island. Nobody don’t know we’re here. Your dad don’t know, nobody don’t know—” His lips quivered and the spectacles were dimmed with mist. “We may stay here till we die.” (Golding 1954) On the face of it, this is a representative, a description of the present state of afairs, when the boy realises that they are all alone on the island, and yet it is a very emo- tive little outburst – the boy is obviously crying, so it could also be classifed as an expressive. Another problem with the speech act model is that it has no provision for the ‘mess- iness’ of everyday spoken language. Utterances such as ‘So there you go’ and ‘You know’ amount to fllers that say little. Tis lack of semantic content makes it diﬃcult A2 22 INTRODUCTION to put them in any of the classifcations, as they are neither representatives nor expres- sives. Tis type of utterance has an interactional, socially cohesive function of avoiding silence, so that all speakers feel comfortable, and it intensifes the relevance of sur- rounding utterances. Tere is not a neat speech act category for it, however. Likewise, backchannels and feedback, the responses that show that the hearer is listening and encourage a speaker to continue talking – such as ‘Was it?’ and ‘Oh really?’ – do not ft neatly into the speech act model either. Tey too have a social function but do not con- stitute a speech act. Te same goes for incomplete sentences, such as ‘But she didn’t do the – er – no’, which does not ft neatly into any category. A lot of what we say in everyday speech is lef unfnished either because we have no need to complete the sen- tence or because we are interrupted. Te following excerpt, from a law seminar on the topic of accomplice liability, taken from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus (2000), has instances of fllers, backchannels, and incomplete sentences. Te lecturer is L, and the students are S1 and S2: S2: // isn’t that implied, surely that /... / implied, that you’re driving a car, you have duties that are implied, not necessarily don’t have to only be statutory um possibility they also have to be implied sort of... L: well umm, that’s an argument although it is slightly odd isn’t to base crimi- nal liability on a duty that’s merely implied // S1: // yeh S2: when I say impli... L: you may not realise you have outset (Listening to lectures, BASE 2000) S2 has diﬃculty formulating his thoughts and on two occasions leaves his sentences incomplete: ‘to be implied sort of...’ and ‘when I say impli...’. Te lecturer opens his comment with a fller ‘well umm’. S1 just contributes a ‘yeh’ backchannel. All of this is perfectly normal in real-life spontaneous talk, yet it is diﬃcult to categorise each utter- ance in terms of speech acts. Finally, since speech act theory predates the technological era of computer-medi- ated communication and mobile devices, it does not have a category to deal with mul- timodal electronic communication features such as emojis, ClipArt, and photos. Take this WhatsApp (a messenger app for smartphones) interaction between cousins, one in the UK and one in the US: UK cousin: Happy Women’s Day [ClipArt rose] US cousin: You happened to catch me up at 3.34am! I never nap and then end up going to bed at 8pm so I’m up and refreshed now. US cousin: Y sí, Feliz Día de la Mujer! (And yes, Happy Women’s Day!) UK cousin: [photo of her daughter and small granddaughter] US cousin: Sweeeeet! US cousin: So fashionable; jacket & sneakers UK cousin: Cool and classy, that’s Susie* *Name of granddaughter, anonymised S P E E C H AC T T H E O RY 23 A2 Here we have the UK cousin ‘congratulating’ and adding a ClipArt rose, but it is unclear whether the rose has its own illocutionary force and, if so, what it might be. Similarly, it is unclear whether the photo of the daughter and granddaughter is the equivalent of silently handing over a mobile phone with a photo in face-to-face communication or whether, semiotically, it has a representative ‘describing’ function and an expressive function of showing pride and joy. Te same dilemma would occur when analysing the Facebook example in section A2.3 beginning ‘So we both forgot our anniversary last week’, with the photo of the vase of red roses used to demon- strate expressives. A2.8 Macro-functions Over and above speech acts, there are two main macro-functions of talk. Brown and Yule (1983) describe them as the transactional and interactional functions. Te transactional is the function which language serves in the expression of content and the transmission of factual information. Here is a purely transactional excerpt from China Daily (9 December 2019) which reports on the 25th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Te excerpt transmits the words of Harjeet Singh without giving an opinion: Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change for nongovernment agency ActionAid International, said industrialized countries needed to do more “to sup- port countries in the Global South to transition to greener economies”. But Singh said that “there remains a lack of clarity on fnance and technology transfer from developed countries”. Te interactional function is involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes, showing solidarity and maintaining social cohesion. Speakers establishing common ground, sharing a common point of view, and negotiating role-relationships are speaking with an interactional purpose. For example, emails tend to start with words that have an interactional function: Espero que al recibo de esta te encuentres bien al igual que la chiquitica. Nosotros bien en lo que cabe. (I hope this fnds you well, and also the wee one. We’re as well as can be expected.) In fact, most talk has a mixture of the two functions: there seems to be a cline from the purely transactional to the purely interactional. At the extreme of the transactional end of the scale is the language in use when a police oﬃcer is giving directions to a traveller and a doctor is telling a nurse how to administer medicine to a patient. At the extreme end of the interactional end is what is known as phatic communion, language with no information content used purely to keep channels of communication open. Brown and Yule (1983: 3) give the following example: When two strangers are standing shivering at a bus-stop in an icy wind and one turns to the other and says ‘My goodness, it’s cold’, it is diﬃcult to suppose that the A3 24 INTRODUCTION primary intention of the speaker is to convey information. It seems much more reasonable to suggest that the speaker is indicating a readiness to be friendly and to talk. Brown and Yule point out that much of everyday human interaction is characterised by the primarily interpersonal rather than the primarily transactional use of language. A3 CO O P E R AT I V E P R I N C I P L E A3.1 Understanding concepts ❑❑ Observing maxims ❑❑ Flouting and violating maxims ❑❑ Relevance theory A3.2 Introduction Te excerpt that opens this unit comes from a sociological survey of the living condi- tions of senior citizens in Scotland and factors afecting their housing satisfaction. X is the interviewer, and Y is a woman living in sheltered housing, which is made up of apartments for retired people, with a warden living on site who is responsible for keep- ing an eye on them and alerting public services if they need help: X: Do you fnd the place is warm enough? Y: Yes, oh yes. Very comfortable, I think. It’s all that you need really, you don’t need any more. X: And you say that the warden is a nice person. Y: Oh yes, you will get other opinions, but that’s my opinion. X: Well you can’t please everybody can you? Y: She’s been very good to me. X: What would the other people say? Y: Ah well I don’t know. I wouldn’t like to repeat it because I don’t really believe half of what they are saying. Tey just get a fxed thing into their mind. But it’s always been, I mean, we had another one – this is our second one. But if she’s of ill and that it’s, oh of ill again and I mean she’s got certifcates to prove it. But they just seem, what irks them really is we can’t get a warden that will be overnight you see. X: Right, sort of 24 hours, 7 days a week. (Wilson and Murie 1995) Verbal exchanges, whether interviews, conversations, or service encounters, tend to run more smoothly and successfully when the participants follow certain social conventions. Tis interview is no exception. Te interviewer asks questions, and the woman gives answers that give just the right amount of information and that are rel- evant to the question, truthful, and clear. When asked if the place is warm enough, for C O O P E R AT I V E P R I N C I P L E 25 A3 example, her answer ‘Yes, oh yes. Very comfortable I think’ says all that is needed; she is presumably being honest; she is keeping to the topic established by the interviewer; and she is not saying anything ambiguous. She is following the conversational maxims of the cooperative principle (Grice 1975). Let us look at the four maxims of the prin- ciple, by seeing how they are observed. A3.3 Observing the maxims Te frst maxim of the cooperative principle is the maxim of quantity, which says that spe

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