Communicative competence and crosscultural pragmatic issues Communicative competence

Communicative competence and cross-cultural pragmatic issues

Communicative competence l „An aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meaning interpersonally within specific contexts” (Dell Hymes , 1967) l CALP and BICS

Canale & Swain (1980) l Grammatical competence l Discourse competence l Sociolinguistic competence l Strategic competence

Communicative language ability (Bachman, 1990) Knowledge structures Language competence Strategic competence Psychophysiological mechanisms Context of situation

Bachman, 1990 Language competence Organisational Grammatical Textual - Vocab - Cohesion - Morphology - Rhetoric - Syntax - Phonology /Graphology Pragmatic llocutionary - Ideational - Manipulative - Heuristic - Imaginative Sociolinguistic - Dialect - Register - Naturalness - Cultural references & figures of speech

Celce-Murcia (2008)

Tokyo Hotel l You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid. l Is forbidden to steal hotel towels please. If you are not person to do such thing please not to read notice. l Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.

l Our wines leave you nothing to hope for. l Special today - no ice cream. l Order your summer suit. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation. l Specialist in women and other diseases.

Pragmatic differences across cultures Deborah Tannen l level of indirectness tolerated l paralinguistic signals of different speech acts l different cultural expectations - stereotypes (the pushy New Yorker, the stony American Indian, the inscrutable Chinese)

Example 1: TAKING THE FLOOR Indian English (by raising volume) British English (by repeating the introductory phrase)

Example 2: ‘Thanksgiving dinner’ situation A: In fact one of my students told me for the first time, I taught her for over a year, that she was adopted. And then I thought – uh – THAT explains SO many things. B: What. That she was – A: Cause she’s so different from her mother B: smarter than she should have been? Or stupider than she should’ve been. A: It wasn’t smart or stupid, Actually, it was just she was so different. Just different. B: [hm]

Anna Wierzbicka l Ethnocentric view of speech acts l Cross-cultural differences in directness Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Will/Won’t/Would you sit down? Please, have a little more! You must! Would you like to have some more? How about a beer? What’s the time? You wouldn’t happen to have the correct time, would you?

l Indirectness and politeness You are to get off. Not to show oneself to me here! Why don’t you bloody get off? Get off, will you. l Underlying beliefs individualism collectivism „compromise”

Michael Clyne l l l Should you not make your utterance more informative than required? (How are you? ) Should you always be truthful? (I’m fine thanks) Should you always be relevant and straightforward? (Arab business, collectivism)

Goals of a pragmatic theory l produce a classification of speech acts, l analyse and define speech acts, l specify the various uses of expressions, l relate literary and direct language use to ¡ ¡ ¡ linguistic structure, the structure of the communicative situation, the social institutions, speaker-meaning, implication, presupposition and understanding.