Communicative competence and cross-cultural pragmatic issues

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

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

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

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

Celce-Murcia (2008)

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

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

Pragmatic differences across cultures Deborah Tannen level of indirectness tolerated paralinguistic signals of different speech acts 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 Ethnocentric view of speech acts Cross-cultural differences in directness Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! 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?

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. Underlying beliefs individualism collectivism „compromise”

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