Pragmatics
Define Pragmatics.
The study of contextual and speaker meaning
Consider the following dialogue:
Jack: “Your phone is ringing!”
Jill: “I’m in the bath.”
Jack: “OK.”
What Discourse Analysis concept allows us to understand this dialogue despite so much being left unsaid?
Coherence
African American English and Chicano English are examples of which kind of dialect?
Ethnic Dialects
Both English and French are the official languages of Canada. Thus, Canada is officially a _________ country.
bilingual
Give an example of overgeneralization that a child might say.
Foots / goed
Give an example of a direct speech act.
Open the door.
_________ can be defined as “conventional knowledge structures that exist in memory.”
Schema
Dialect refers to systematic differences between two varieties of a particular language in which linguistic domains?
Phonology, Vocabulary, Grammar/Syntax
Requests, commands, and questions are examples of which Pragmatics concept?
Speech Acts
What are the articulatory features (e.g., voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation) of the phone [g]?
Voiced velar stop
Give an example of an indirect speech act.
When we think of eating at a restaurant in the United States, there are certain actions like sitting down at a table, ordering food, eating the food, and paying the bill as well as phrases like Are you ready to order and Could we get the check that come to mind. What is this series of conventional actions that take place within a schema called?
Script
Consider the following sentence uttered by a bilingual English-Spanish child to her parents:
“Yo fui el line leader en la escuela hoy.”
(Translation: I was the line leader at the school today.)
This example of mixing two languages together in a systematic fashion is known as ______.
Code-switching
What are Grice's 4 conversational maxims?
Quantity
– as informative as required, no more, no less
Quality
– no false or inadequately supported info
Relation
– relevant in terms of conversation
Manner
– clear, brief, and orderly
In the following sentence:
The worker completed their weekly tasks.
there are _____ free morphemes and _______ bound morphemes.
6 free, 4 bound
Refer the following dialogue below between and EL student and an American ESL teacher. This conversation takes place after a speaking lesson.
Student: Teacher, you must help me with my pronunciation now. (Line 1)
Teacher: Well, I am a bit busy right now. (Line 2)
The student’s statement in (Line 1), “You must help me with my pronunciation now,” can be considered rude from an American perspective. Which Pragmatics issue can explain why this statement can be interpreted as being rude?
Consider the dialogue below and choose the appropriate maxim that is violated by the expression of B.
A: Which college do you go to?
B: I love sunny days!
Maxim of relation
True/False: Standard American English is more logical than Southern American English.
False
What do we call our ability to modify our speech style toward or away from the perceived style of the person (s) we are talking to?
Speech Accommodation
An EL student writes the following sentence in an essay:
*I am in the United States since 2015.
In your written feedback, you correct the sentence to: I have been in the United States since 2015. What is the name of the tense that describes situations that began in the past and continue to the present that the EL has issues with?
Present Perfect
Consider the following dialogue below between an EL student and an American ESL teacher.
Student: Teacher, you must help me with my pronunciation now. (Line 1)
Teacher: Well, I am a bit busy right now. (Line 2)
Student: What are you busy with? (Line 3)
Teacher: Um, I’m grading your exams. Maybe we can practice later. (Line 4)
From an American perspective, which Gricean maxim does the student violate in (Line 3) by asking, “What are you busy with?”
Maxim of quantity
Consider the following EL writing response to the prompt, What is your favorite color and why?
Sample 1:
"My favorite color is blue. Blue sports cars go very fast. Driving in this way is dangerous and can cause many car crashes. I had a car accident once and broke my leg. I was very sad because I had to miss a holiday in Europe because of the injury.”
How would you characterize Sample 1 in terms of coherence and cohesion?
C: I noticed in my own family that my: - that my older sister who lived in Kentucky for the longest has a very strong Southern accent, or Kentucky accent. Whereas the rest of us pretty much lost it. = One time I noticed that -
Z: So you had?
C: Yes. ( ) And then I noticed when I am around people who have an accent I often speak that way a little more.
Z: Still? So you didn't ( ).
C: It depends on the situation. I: tend to: respond to, I think. Whenever I am around someone who has an accent. Or if: - It just slips out, sometimes.
What sociolinguistic phenomenon accounts for C's accent shift?
Speech accommodation - Convergence
Consider the following quote from a Turkish student studying in an American university discussing differences writing in the United States and Turkey:
“In America I have noticed that the writing professors want short, concrete, understandable sentences. ….But in Turkish, what we do is we use long and elaborate sentences because we think that it’s more poetic and it flows better that way..."
Which Gricean maxim is this student most likely to violate from an American rhetorical perspective?
Maxim of manner
Consider the following words in French: /bo/ for beau (“handsome”) and /bõ/ for bon (“good”). The tilde above the symbol /õ/ indicates a nasalized vowel. What do these words tell us about the distribution of /o/ and /õ/ in French?
/o/ and /õ/ are phonemes in French.