Pragmatic Strategies and Linguistic Structures in Making ‘Suggestions’: Towards Comprehensive Taxonomies

Abstract

This paper analyses and upgrades taxonomies of strategies and structures for the speech act of suggesting based on existing taxonomies and classifications in the pragmatics research literature. Previous studies have focused mainly on linguistic structures used to perform the speech act of suggesting. Thus, there seems to be a need to provide a more comprehensive set of taxonomies for structures as well as strategies that can be used in EFL/ESL classrooms and for research on the speech act of suggesting. To this end, the speech act of suggesting is defined first and the features of this speech act are discussed. Second, the most recent classifications proposed for structures and linguistic realization strategies for suggestions were analysed and contrasted and a more comprehensive taxonomy of structures and linguistic realization strategies is provided, based on previous taxonomies. Finally, taxonomy of politeness strategies in making suggestions are provided, based on recent studies in cross-cultural pragmatics research.

Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice

“…Narrative Discourse Narrative discourse is known to contain higher instances of advice that is given implicitly (Abolfathiasl and Abdullah, 2013). For instance, the following is a different reply to the same post dicussed in Figure 2: (15) I talked on Reddit with others to get support and ideas .…”

“…Otherwise, a range of pragmatic strategies are adopted as noted by Abolfathiasl and Abdullah (2013), including the use of questions, imperatives, conditionals, etc. :…”

“…Both sentences that follow the advice sentences lend support to the advice, rather than containing advice towards a course of action themselves. People also give advice in different ways (Abolfathiasl and Abdullah, 2013), often implicitly like in the following reply to a question titled Parenting with a history of depression?, where advice is implicitly conveyed via personal experience:…”

An epistemic illumination of the acceptance of advice in Chinese phone-in counseling for family problems

“…There are a large number of foreign linguistic researches concerning advice discourse, but Chinese academic circle seldom pays attention to such discourse (Ren, 2014: 49). As for the researches of advice interaction, most scholars focus on the face work, linguistic realization and strategies, power relationship and sequence organizations of advice discourse/interaction, such as Brown and Levinson (1987), Heritage and Sefi (1992), Hutchby (1995), Ding (2001), Yu (2009), Abolfathiasl and Abdullah (2013), Shaw et al (2015), Tanaka (2015), Zalaltdinova (2018), et al A few scholars have studied the responses to advice, such as Jefferson and Lee (1981), Li (2010), Heritage and Lindström (2012), Shaw and Hepburn (2013), Henricson and Nelson (2017), Hepburn et al (2018), etc. These studies analyze the linguistic realization and strategies of accepting or resisting advice and the impact of these responses on the development of subsequent sequence organizations, which enables us to better understand the types and linguistic forms of the responses to advice, but scholars’ explanations of these utterances are often limited to the theories of power, identity and social distance of interactants, and the theoretical perspective is relatively narrow (Ren, 2014: 53).…”

Types of speech acts and principles of mother’s politeness in mother and child conversation

“…Certain types of speech acts will appear in sentences spoken in mother and child conversations. Abolfathiasl and Abdullah (2013) explain that, first, speech act theory put forward by Austin which explicitly states that speech acts are divided into three, namely locution, illocution and perlocution. While Searle (1975) has another opinion.…”