Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese learners of English at low L2 proficiency level and at high L2 proficiency level and how L1 pragmatic transfer is related to their L2 proficiency. Ten low proficiency learners of English, ten high proficiency learners of English,ten native speakers of English and ten native speakers of Chinese participate in this study. Requests are collected by means of a discourse completion test questionnaire and are analysed in terms of requestive semantic formulas based on the taxonomy of request strategies, internal modifiers and external modifiers. The research results reveal that L1 pragmatic transfer decreases with the increase of L2 proficiency such as learners' use of direct strategies, lexical and phrasal downgraders, imperatives and grounder and no clear relationship is found between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency in terms of the other request strategies, internal modifiers and external modifiers. These results provide partial support to negative correlation hypothesis -high proficiency L2 learners are less likely to transfer their native language pragmatic norms since they have enough control over L2.
This study pragmatically makes a descriptive analysis of metadiscourse in academic lectures from the perspective of the relevance-adaptation theory. Based on the relevance theory and the adaptation theory, the relevance-adaptation model is constructed to explore the occurrence, the pragmatic description and the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures. The data is collected from George Lakoff’s 10 academic lectures on cognitive linguistics at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2004 and some academic lectures audio-taped in classrooms. The results of the study show that 1) the occurrence of metadiscourse in academic lectures is pervasive; 2) the process of choosing appropriate metadiscourse is dynamic and the result of searching for relevance and making contextual adaptations – the process of searching for relevance of metadiscourse is measured in terms of three pairs of the distinctions, namely, contextual effect and processing effort, explicature and implicature, and conceptual meaning and procedural meaning, and contextual adaptations of metadiscourse are constrained by such factors as linguistic reality, psychological motivations and social conventions; 3) the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures is an active discourse constructor.
This study investigates the acquisition of discourse markers by Chinese learners of English in terms of gender, style and individual identity. The subjects of the study are 15 female university students and 15 male university students. The data is collected by means of audio recording in the classroom discussion and in the interviews. The examined discourse markers are like, yeah, oh, you know, well, I mean, right, ok and actually , and a total of 1292 tokens for these discourse markers are identified in the subjects' classroom discussion and in the subjects' interviews. The results of the study show that: (1) the female subjects use discourse markers more frequently than the male subjects. (2) all the subjects employ discourse markers in the interviews at a higher rate than in the classroom discussion. (3) the subjects' individual identity has the effects on their use of discourse markers. (4) the subjects display their individual variations in their frequencies of discourse markers in the interviews and in the classroom discussion respectively. KEYWORDS: discourse marker, acquisition, Chinese learner of English, sociopragmatics. RESUMENEl presente estudio investiga la adquisición de los marcadores discursivos de los estudiantes chinos de inglés en lo relativo al sexo, el estilo y la identidad individual. Las personas investigadas son 15 estudiantes universitarias y 15 estudiantes universitarios. Se recogen los datos mediante grabación de audio en forma de discusión en clase y entrevista. Los marcadores discursivos investigados son: like, yeah, oh, you know, well, I mean, right, ok y actually. En la discusión y la entrevista, se identifican 1292 marcadores discursivos. El resultado del estudio demuestra que: (1) Las personas investigadas femeninas utilizan los marcadores discursivos con más frecuencia que los masculinos. (2) Todos los sujetos investigados utilizan los marcadores discursivos en la entrevista con más frecuencia que en la discusión en clase. (3) La utilización de marcadores discursivos de los sujetos investigados está influida por la identidad individual. (4) Los sujetos investigados muestran variación de frecuencia en el uso de los marcadores discursivos en la entrevista y la discusión en clase.PALABRAS CLAVE: los marcadores discursivos, la adquisición, estudiantes chinos del inglés, la pragmática social.
This study presents a semantically-oriented theoretical and descriptive study of tense backshift and its literary effects in FID. Based on Fludernik's study (1993), the detailed linguistic indicators of FID are described in order to provide the criteria for data collection for this study. The data are FID passages collected from four canonical English novels: Austen's Persuasion, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. A theory of tense semantics underlying FID is explored, and the literary effects of tense backshift in FID are examined. The results of this study show that: (1) the mechanism of tense backshift in FID is tense backshift from absolute tense defined by the default temporal reference point t 0 in present time domain in the narrator's intensional domain into relative tense defined by the central time of orientation in past time domain in the represented character's intensional domain; and (2) the literary effects of tense backshift in FID, analysed in terms of relative past tense, relative lazy past tense, relative past progressive tense and relative past future perfect tense are shown to be effects of remoteness, terseness, close-up and irony respectively.
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