1. PRAGMATICS

2. 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

3. Communicative competence (Celce-Murcia, 2008:36)
SOCIOCULTURAL
COMPETENCE
LINGUISTIC
COMPETENCE
DISCOURSE
COMPETENCE
FORMULAIC
COMPETENCE
STRATEGIC
COMPETENCE
INTERACTIONAL
COMPETENCE

4. Interactional competence
Speech acts: expressing intentions
Implicature: reading between the lines
Conversation management
Non-verbal communication
Grice’s Interaction
Theory (1975)
Maxims of
Quality
Quantity
Relevance
Manner
Cooperation

5. Sociocultural competence
Dialect
Can I help you duck?
Register
Naturalness
Good bye, birthday boy!
Pá’, viszlát, jó napot!
I just love that levander shirt! (F/M)
Cultural references & figures of speech
I need it like a hole in my head.

6. 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)

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

8. Attention and interest: Hungarian
polite listening/interest:
waiting for the other person to finish
accompanying with signals of acknowledgement
“cross-chatting” is acceptable

9. 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]

10. Ethnocentric view of speech acts?
Please, have a little more! You must! (P)
Would you like to have a Coke? (E)
No, no, thanks! (P) Vs. I’d prefer not to.(E)
Open your books! vs. Would you like to open your books? (H)
Intellectual traditions behind
expectations of directness
Generational difference
Please stop it! Could you put on your boots alone? (H)

11. Should you not make your utterance more informative than required
Should you not make your utterance more informative than required? (How are you?)
Should you always be truthful?
(I’m fine thanks. No, I really couldn’t take more)
Should you always be relevant and straightforward? (Arab business, collectivism)

12. 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.