Pragmatics - Volume 19, Issue 4, 2009

This study investigates evaluation of attentiveness by British and Japanese university students. Attentiveness (kikubari) (defined as a demonstrator’s preemptive response to a beneficiary’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations) is demonstrated without being requested and it is one of the important politeness strategies. A questionnaire including six attentiveness situations was distributed to 74 British and 138 Japanese participants, who were asked to evaluate the attentiveness situations on a five-point Likert scale and to state the reasons for their evaluation. The Likert-scale evaluations were analyzed using a three-way ANOVA and subsequently, the reasons for evaluations were analyzed qualitatively. It was anticipated that the Japanese would evaluate attentiveness more positively than the British, as attentiveness has been important in Japanese culture. The results, however, did not necessarily confirm this. That is, there were significant differences between British and Japanese participants in four situations, the British participants having evaluated attentiveness more positively than the Japanese participants in two situations and the reverse being the case in two other situations.

This paper examines the act of complimenting and responding to compliments among Singapore Chinese. To this end, I explored naturally occurring compliment exchanges during the Chinese New Year (CNY) period. These exchanges are not only gender-sensitive, but age- and generation-sensitive as well. The CNY celebrations are governed by certain conventions, exchanging compliments being one of them. The conventional setting helps us understand the functions of compliments and the nature of their responses better, thus avoiding overgeneralizations. Compliments and their responses in the CNY context appear to play an important mainly phatic role. This study suggests that (a) married females pay and receive most compliments and (b) the most common compliment topic centers on their children’s academic achievement and potential career success rather than appearance (Holmes 1988) or possessions (Herbert 1991). In addition, most responses are of the non-acceptance type with downgrading, which is in line with findings from other researchers (see, e.g., Gu 1990; Chen 1993). A survey carried out on these non-acceptance responses shows that informants understand them as being largely conventional and formalistic rather than literal in nature, probably due to the conventional setting. This speech event of compliments and their responses is a mirror of cultural values (Manes 1983), revealing that the Chinese-speaking community of Singapore places high importance on children’s socio-economic success and practices conventional humility.

Most cross-linguistic studies of speech acts have dealt mainly with two languages, a native language and a second or foreign language (Carrell and Konneker 1981; Castello 1981; Blum-Kulka 1982; Daikuhura 1986; Eisenstein 1986; Wieland 1989; Chen Rong 1993, 2001; Sifianou 2001; Lee 2004, 2005). Neither have they dealt with an African language as the first language. The present study investigates a multilingual situation where the native speakers of Ciluba, French, and English are compared to the trilingual speakers of the three languages in terms of the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining. It considers the social beliefs of the subjects of the four language groups for the realization of the two speech acts. The study is part of a larger study that was designed to discover the norms of the three languages under investigation and to see how people speaking a second and a foreign language, with different levels of fluency in each, can participate in the activity of the speech communities of the two languages without violating their socio-cultural norms, and what impact, if any, their knowledge of these languages has on each of the languages they speak. Data for the larger study was collected by means of a written questionnaire, role plays, and direct observation. The data and results presented and discussed in this paper come from the written questionnaire administered to the monolingual English and French speakers and trilingual speakers native in Ciluba; and from the same version of the questionnaire administered orally to the monolingual Ciluba speakers. It was found that for the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining, Luba socio-cultural beliefs were different from those of English and French, which are similar. In contrast to French and English, in Ciluba social distance and relative power between the participants play an important role in deciding whether the speech acts can be performed or not. The results also revealed that, despite the difference which exists between Ciluba and the other two languages, i.e., French and English, some subjects from the group of Ciluba monolingual subjects showed some similarities with the groups of French and English monolingual subjects in their responses to some items in the questionnaire. This deviation of some of the native speakers of Ciluba from their social beliefs was hypothesized to be a result of their contact with an urban environment and its mixed culture.

This paper presents EXMARaLDA, a system for the computer-assisted creation and analysis of spoken language corpora. The first part contains some general observations about technological and methodological requirements for doing corpus-based pragmatics. The second part explains the system’s architecture and gives an overview of its most important software components – a transcription editor, a corpus management tool and a corpus query tool. The last part presents some corpora which have been or are currently being compiled with the help of EXMARaLDA.

This paper shows that some Japanese non-fiction writers are using various structural characteristics of spoken discourse in their writing. Their written discourse includes non-canonical word order and long sentences that are produced by combining a series of clauses. Their sentences may lack case or topic marking particles, but they may contain clause-final particles. Their discourse looks like it may have gone through a dynamic, on-going formation process because it includes reformulation and changes in the structure in midstream. It is proposed that writers who adopt such an approach are deliberately blurring the boundary between speech and writing for multiple reasons. They may be exhibiting their creativity and innovation as well as their anti-establishment ideology. Vernacular style writing may also be an attempt to engage, involve, and connect with their readers. Further, they may be reflecting as well as expressing contemporary society in which orality is viewed favorably and as a result, writing in general has become increasingly more casual than before. The phenomenon discussed in this paper may be viewed as a reflection of erosions and shifting of traditional genres.

This paper focuses on a relatively new and much discussed phenomenon on Flemish television: The practice of intralingual subtitling of Dutch, i.e. Dutch subtitling of native speakers of (varieties of) Dutch. Our study investigates the linguistic determinants of intralingual subtitling and subsequently confronts actual subtitling practice with viewer needs. The analyses reveal a striking inconsistency between intralingual subtitling practice in fiction versus non-fiction programs. This appears to be symptomatic of a tension between the official language policy in Flanders and present day linguistic reality. As such, subtitling practice subtly reflects the existence of shifting linguistic norms in Flanders.