Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics

The emotional weight of I love you in multilinguals’ languages

“…As was mentioned before, a lot of research has been carried out in interlanguage pragmatics on a variety of speech acts (Barron, 2003;Barron and Warga, 2007), including certain acts which could potentially be emotional like complaining, or complimenting. However, the emotional aspect of the speech act is usually ignored or underplayed.…”

“…This definition of pragmatics is often quoted (cf. Barron, 2003;Garces-Conejos Blitvich, 2006;Kasper andRose, 2001, 2002), probably because it encompasses all the crucial aspects of pragmatic research without linking it to a particular paradigm in the field. Interestingly, the first part of the definition ''the study of language from the point of view of users'' seems to suggest that the epistemological stance in pragmatics research is the emic perspective, where the researcher aims at describing participants' behavior in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to them and where participants' voice and opinions are heard (Pike, 1967).…”

“…The following definition of pragmatic competence proposed by Barron (2003) in her book Interlanguage Pragmatics may give us a clue: ''Knowledge of the linguistic resources available in a given language for realizing particular illocutions, knowledge of the sequential aspects of speech acts and finally, knowledge of the appropriate contextual use of the particular languages' linguistic resources' ' (2003:10). The focus is on the knowledge of the L2 learner or user.…”

Developing Pragmatic Competence Using EFL Textbooks: Focus on Requests

“…2 above). However, although representing a "magic word" for many [15], the use of the form please underlies some pragmatic constraints which are not addressed in the textbook series. Please is namely both an illocutionary force indicating device [IFID] signaling that a particular utterance is intended as a request and also a transparent mitigator.…”

“…In addition, a slightly higher use of grounders (explanations) was recorded in Ogiermann's English data [14] relative to her German data. Finally, Barron [15] found higher levels of syntactic downgrading in Irish English requests realized with query preparatory strategies relative to German NS levels (cf. also [16] for similar findings for British English and German).…”