Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning

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Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning

Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning

Edited by

Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya and María de la O Hernández López

Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning, Edited by Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya and María de la O Hernández López This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya and María de la O Hernández López and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0972-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0972-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii List of Figures............................................................................................. ix List of Tables............................................................................................... x Introduction ............................................................................................... xii The Editors Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Social Cognition and Second Language Learning Victoria Escandell-Vidal Part I: Cognitive Issues on L2 Teaching Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 42 Cross-Cultural Differences in Conceptualization and their Application in L2 Instruction Alberto Hijazo-Gascón Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 60 Immigration and Conceptual Metaphors: A Critical Approach to Ideological Representation María D. López Maestre Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 87 Understanding and Overcoming Pragmatic Failure when Interpreting Phatic Utterances Manuel Padilla Cruz Part II: Teaching Languages across Cultures Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 110 The Acquisition of Pragmatic Competence from a Strategic Perspective: Apology, A Case in Point Abdelhadi Bellachhab

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 128 Learning how to Promise: A Didactic Approach to the Teaching of Speech Acts Carmen Maíz Arévalo Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 141 The Interlanguage of Complaints by Catalan Learners of English María Sabaté i Dalmau Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 165 Learner Strategies in L2 Pragmatics: The Case of Spanish Compliment Responses Bryant Smith Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 181 Modality is more than Modal Verbs: A Pragmatic Approach to the Teaching of Adverbial Modality Carmen Maíz Arévalo and Jorge Arús Hita Part III: Intercultural Aspects of Communication Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 198 Intercultural Pragmatics in Academic Curriculum – A Hard Nut to Crack? Beata Karpi!ska-Musia" Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 221 Stereotypes of Communicative Styles: Japanese Indirectness, Ambiguity and Vagueness Barbara Pizziconi Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 255 On Intercultural Disagreement: Interaction and Inertia Albin Wagener Part IV: Teaching Languages for Academic and Specific Purposes Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 280 Pragmatic Markers in Academic Discourse: The Cases of well and the Spanish Counterparts bien and bueno Begoña Bellés-Fortuño and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez

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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 305 Between the Academy and the Front Page: The Double Discourses of Political Communications Research Ruth Breeze Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 321 Pragmatics and ESP Teaching: Politeness in English-Spanish Business Correspondence Mª Sol Velasco Sacristán Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 337 Advances in Intercultural Communication Research and Training based on Computer Simulation of Real Business Settings Victoria Guillén-Nieto, Pedro Pernías-Peco, Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Judith Williams-Jellyman Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 362 The Anecdote as Humorous Narrative: Structural and Socio-cultural Features of Anecdotes written by Native and Non-native Writers of English Laura Hidalgo Downing Part V: Other Methodological Issues on Pragmatics Teaching Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 388 Is it possible to Formalize Pragmatics? Implications for Computer Assisted Language Learning Gemma Bel-Enguix and M. Dolores Jiménez-López Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 408 Implications of Dual-process Theories to Working Memory Capacity and L2 Speech Production and Acquisition Kyria Finardi Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 427 The Transmission Model of Aducation: A Cognitive Approach Graciela Nuez Placeres, María Clara Petersen and Juani Guerra Contributors............................................................................................. 445 Editors ..................................................................................................... 450 Index........................................................................................................ 451

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 2-1: Body heat for lust Illustration 2-2: Advertisement with the metaphor DESIRED PERSON IS AN OBJECT

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1-1: Network of connexions Figure 1-2: Learners’ processing Figure 2-1: Basic components of communicative competence Figure 5-1: Representation/reconstruction of the meaning of apology Figure 7-1: Average number of main strategies per situation, in each group Figure 7-2: Average number of main strategies per situation Figure 7-3: Complaint realisation choices per group (%) Figure 11-1: From linguistic signs to values – cooperative frame and concomitant values Figure 11-2: From linguistic signs to values – competitive frame and concomitant values Figure 12-1: Diagram of systemic conversations Figure 12-2: Redundancy model Figure 13-1: González’s (2005) proposal of the distribution of markers in the discourse structure components Figure 13-2: DM classification model (Bellés-Fortuño 2007) Figure 13-3: Pause-filler classification under the operator category (BellésFortuño 2007) Figure 16-1: Hofstede’s value dimension scores for Spain and UK Figure 16-2: Graphic Adventure Diagram Figure 16-3: Scene Diagram Figure 18-1: Membrane System Figure 20-1: Shannon and Weaver (1949) communication model. Figure 20-2: Container schema Figure 20-3: Domain reduction Figure 20-4: Metaphor and metonymy interaction. Figure 20-5: Metaphor and metonymy interaction Figure 20-6: Transmission model ICM

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2-1: A comparison of English and Spanish metaphors for lust Table 6-1: Linguistic realisation of ‘promises’ at sentence level in Spanish and English Table 7-1: The complaint speech act set, summarised from Olshtain and Weinbach (1993: 111) Table 8-1: Frequency of compliment response use by strategy Table 8-2: CR strategies used by level to a teacher Table 8-3: CR strategies used by level to a classmate of the opposite sex Table 8-4: CR strategies used by level to an elderly family friend Table 8-5: CR strategies used by level to a same-sex best friend Table 8-6: Frequency of CR use by strategy and scenario Table 9-1: Uses of ‘certainly’ Table 9-2: Spanish translations of ‘certainly’ Table 9-3: Uses of ‘ciertamente’ in Spanish originals Table 9-4: Types and tokens of ‘ciertamente’ in CREA Table 9-5: Types and tokens of ‘certainly’ in Maíz and Arévalo’s corpus. Table 10-1: Characterization of variables – chosen questions Table 10-2: Relation between subjects and techniques of teaching culture which are NOT applied Table 12-1: Summary of samples gathered by De Pembroke and Montgomery Table 12-2: Summary of inertia process Table 13-1. Total and average number of words (w) and time (in minutes) per LE in the NAC Table 13-2. Total and average number of words (w) and time (in minutes) per LE in the SC Table 13-3: ‘well’ pause-filler operator results in the NAC Table 13-4. ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ pause-filler operators results in the SC Table 14-1: Moves used in introductions Table 16-1: Levels of analysis Table 16-2: Value dimensions having an effect on human communication and social interaction Table 16-3: Value dimensions and orientations having an effect on intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons Table 16-4: Value dimensions and orientations having an effect on intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons

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Table 16-5: Hypothetical correlation of culture-specific values with language-specific behaviour Table 17-1: Structural elements of a narrative (adapted from Butt et al. 2000) Table 17-2: Prototypical structure of humorous anecdotes Table 17-3: Recursive pattern of humorous anecdotes Table 17-4: Distribution of preferred patterns in anecdotes Table 17-5: Choice of specific sections in the anecdotes Table 17-6: Distribution of the evaluation in the anecdotes Table 17-7: Position of the punchline line in the anecdotes Table 17-8: Number of punchlines/jabl ines in the anecdotes Table 17-9: Type of event in the anecdotes Table 17-10: Butt of the humours anecdote Table 17-11: Kind of humour in the anecdotes

INTRODUCTION INCORPORATING PRAGMATICS 1 TO FOREIGN/SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING REYES GÓMEZ MORÓN, MANUEL PADILLA CRUZ, LUCÍA FERNÁNDEZ AMAYA, MARÍA DE LA O HERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ

1. Pragmatics and Foreign/Second Language Teaching The relationship between Pragmatics and Foreign or Second Language Teaching (F/SLT, henceforth) seems to have been very clear since the origins of both disciplines. One of the major aims of F/SLT undoubtedly is the development of the students’ communicative competence. Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) initially defined this competence as consisting of four interrelated sub-competencies: grammatical competence, or mastery of the linguistic code of the language that is being learnt; sociolinguistic competence, or knowing the sociocultural rules of use of the L2; discourse competence, or being able to produce unified written or spoken texts, both in terms of coherence and cohesion, and strategic competence, or commanding certain verbal and non-verbal devices in order to compensate for possible communication breakdowns, insufficient mastery of the L2 or to enhance communication. Later on, Bachman (1990) proposed that language knowledge comprises two main kinds of knowledge that learners of an L2 must internalise: a) Organisational knowledge, which amounts to knowing how the formal structure of an L2 is controlled so as to produce and/or 1

The authors would like to express their thanks to Dr María Elena Placencia (Birkbeck College, University of London) for her useful comments and revision of this introductory chapter.

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recognise grammatically correct sentences and organise these in texts. It subsumes a grammatical and a textual knowledge, similar to Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale’s (1983) grammatical and discourse competences, respectively. b) Pragmatic knowledge, which involves knowing how words and utterances can be assigned specific meanings in context and function as the vehicles of their users’ intentions. As the previous knowledge, this one is also structured in others: lexical knowledge, which amounts to knowing the meaning of lexical items and using them figuratively; functional knowledge, or knowing how to relate utterances to their speakers’ intentions; and sociolinguistic knowledge, similar to Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale’s (1983) sociolinguistic competence. Elaborating on these two models, Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) suggested a more encompassing model of communicative competence, which they conceive and represent as a sort of pyramid enclosing a circle and surrounded by another circle. Its inner circle is discourse competence, the three points of the pyramid are sociocultural, linguistic and actional competences, and the outer circle is strategic competence, “[…] an everpresent, potentially usable inventory of skills that allows a strategically competent speaker to negotiate messages and resolve problems or to compensate for deficiencies in any of the other underlying competencies” (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995: 9). Discourse competence refers to the ability to select and arrange lexical items and syntactic structures in order to achieve well-formed spoken or written texts. For an L2 learner to become competent in terms of discourse, s/he must be able to master such important aspects of language as cohesion (anaphoric/cataphoric reference, ellipsis, conjunction, etc.), deixis (personal, spatial, temporal, etc.), coherence (theme-rheme development, management of old and new information, temporal continuity, etc.), genre structure (the kind of discourse s/he is facing: narrative, interview, report, etc.) and conversational structure (how to take turns, hold/relinquish the floor, interrupt, perform openings, etc.). Linguistic competence concerns the very foundations of communication, basically the phonological, lexical and morpho-syntactic elements of a language and how they are reflected in writing. For an L2 learner to become linguistically competent, s/he must know the sound inventory of the L2, its spelling rules, the meaning of its lexical items and routines, how to order them so as to form phrases and sentences, the elements that can or cannot collocate with others, etc.

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Actional competence, in turn, corresponds to “[…] matching actional intent with linguistic form based on the knowledge of an inventory of verbal schemata that carry illocutionary force (speech acts and speech acts sets)” (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995: 17). Accordingly, a learner must know how to greet other individuals, make introductions, express/acknowledge gratitude, compliment or congratulate, extend/accept/decline invitations, ask/give information, explain/discuss information, agree/disagree with other individuals, express/find out about his feelings or those of other interlocutors, suggest, request, give orders, persuade, encourage/discourage, complain, criticise, or blame among many other language functions but, more importantly, how such functions are performed by means of specific speech acts and the conversational sequences or moves of those speech acts. Sociocultural competence alludes to the ability to produce utterances that are appropriate to the sociocultural context in which communication takes place, i.e. to the social contextual factors such as participants’ age, gender, power or distance; stylistic factors such as politeness conventions and strategies, degrees of formality or field-specific registers; cultural factors such as awareness of dialect or regional differences in the target language, differences and similarities in terms of usage of communicative strategies between the L1 and the L2, social and institutional structure of the target culture, etc. Finally, strategic competence is “[…] knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them” (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995: 26). This overarching competence is formed by avoidance or reduction strategies, such as topic avoidance and message abandonment; achievement or compensatory strategies, such as circumlocution, approximation, restructuring of messages or literal translation from L1, among others; stalling or time-gaining strategies, such as the use of fillers, gambits or hesitation devices; self-monitoring strategies, such as self-initiated repair or self-rephrasing, and interactional strategies, such as appeals for help when the non-native speaker (NNS, henceforth) does not know a word, meaning negotiation strategies (repetition requests, clarification requests, etc.) or comprehension checks. As the study of meaning in context, how individuals use language depending on specific psycho-sociological factors (power, distance, imposition, affect, etc.) and how they understand language and come to a particular interpretation out of the (many) competing ones that utterances may have (e.g. Leech 1983; Levinson 1983; Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Mey 1993; Thomas 1995), Pragmatics has indeed had, and still has, many implications for the development of learners’ communicative

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competence. As can be seen from the various components that the three different conceptions of communicative competence include, Pragmatics is indeed central, if not essential, to the development of learners’ communicative competence in their L2. In fact, practitioners in the field have repeatedly underlined the need to sensitise L2 learners to specific aspects of particular speech acts in the target language, such as their routinised nature, the semantico-syntactic formulae frequently used to perform them, their integrant conversational moves and sequences, what motivates their performance or avoidance in specific contexts – i.e. when, where, how and with whom they can perform or avoid them, etc. (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1982, 1983; Thomas 1983, 1984; Olshtain and Cohen 1990; Harlow 1990; Jaworski 1994; Citron 1995; García 1996; Riley 2006, among many others). They have also underlined the need to be acquainted with the interactive or sociocultural principles underlying language usage in the target culture. In fact, there is a seminal branch of Pragmatics, known as politeness theory, which has examined the different rules or principles governing linguistic behaviour in diverse cultures (e.g. Lakoff 1973, 1977; Leech 1983; Spencer-Oatey 2000, 2008; Spencer-Oatey and Jiang 2003), how such rules or principles are reflected in the selection of a wide range of linguistic strategies aimed at avoiding interactive conflict between interlocutors (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and a plethora of politeness phenomena in different languages. Pragmatists working in this area constantly emphasise the need to incorporate the explicit teaching of politeness in course programmes and in the L2 class as a way to contribute to the development of the students’ pragmatic consciousness or metapragmatic abilities (e.g. Sharwood-Smith 1981; Thomas 1983; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Kreuz and Roberts 1993; Meier 1995, 1997; Garcés Conejos 2001a, 2001b; Bou Franch and Garcés Conejos 2003). But not only is the development of learners’ pragmatic consciousness or metapragmatic abilities an urgent need in F/SLT; teachers must also get a thorough and solid training in and knowledge of pragmatics that enables them to address their learners’ needs, lacks, problems and deficiencies when interacting in the L2 (Garcés Conejos 2001b; Bou Franch and Garcés Conejos 2003). Over the last years, many calls have been made to incorporate pragmatic issues to the teaching and learning of second languages (see Barron 2001; Trosborg 1995; Rose and Kasper 2001; Kasper and Rose 2002; Bardovi-Harlig and Hatford 2005, among many others), as a result of evolving frameworks in cognitive and social pragmatics, on the one hand, and social psychology of language, on the other hand, which reflect the dynamism and complexity of communication in situ. Efficient F/SLT

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must include all those pragmatic factors that affect interaction in order to obtain satisfactory results not only in the classroom but, more importantly, when learners use their L2 in real and authentic contexts. The growing interest in interdisciplinary studies (pragmatics and language instruction) has been intensified since the appearance of Pragmatics in Language Teaching (Rose and Kasper 2001), as it showed that, whatever the linguistic aspect that is at stake, it is clear that there are no concluding results to be applied to the classroom. Likewise, language acquisition studies appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, as far as pragmatic aspects are concerned. What is clear, however, is that cultural and contextual aspects of language cannot be deliberately ignored by the instructor, as defended by Bardovi-Harlig (2001) and Rose (2005): “[…] second language learners who do not receive instruction in pragmatics differ significantly from native speakers (NSs, henceforth) in their pragmatic production and perception in the target language” (Rose 2005: 386).

2.

The current volume

This volume stresses the need and importance of incorporating Pragmatics to F/SLT. It gathers twenty chapters resulting from the effort of researchers whose main interests and concerns revolve around areas such as Intercultural Pragmatics, Cognitive Pragmatics, Social Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics (IP), Languages for Academic or Specific Purposes and F/SLT Teaching. They offer additional evidence of the advantages of dealing with pragmatic issues in the F/SL class or adopting a pragmatic perspective for teaching specific aspects of the F/SL. The volume is thematically organised in five broad parts, although some of the papers could have perfectly been ascribed to others owing to their multidisciplinary approach. Each of those sections aims at reconciling those aspects that are in the process of being studied and applied to F/SLT, namely, cognitive aspects that may help understand how pragmatics is internalised or influences learners’ L2 comprehension and performance; problems and difficulties that arise when performing specific speech acts or linguistic functions in an L2, their implications for F/SLT and how adopting a pragmatic perspective may contribute to solve them; issues to be taken into account when dealing with intercultural communication in F/SLT; teaching an L2 for specific or academic purposes taking into account pragmatic aspects, and other methodological issues such as the use of new technologies to deal with pragmatic aspects. All these issues show the wide range of factors and topics that must be

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taken into account when teaching and learning pragmatic aspects of second languages. Mª Victoria Escandell-Vidal opens the volume with the introductory chapter “Social cognition and second language learning”, in which she explains how intercultural pragmatics focuses on the diversity of conversational styles in different cultures and the consequences of such diversity in situations where members of various cultural groups interact. According to the author, the privileged data in this area usually come from the analysis of fragments of actual conversations (business communication, classroom interaction, etc.). The observable communicative behaviour is, however, only the external manifestation of a complex set of internal processes. Her aim is to add a cognitive dimension to the overall picture. The recent development of Social Cognition as a multidisciplinary research field –a field in which Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology and Linguistics explore the cognitive bases of social interaction– offers a new perspective for a proper understanding of both the unity and the diversity in social behaviour. After presenting some of the major findings of social cognition, Escandell-Vidal examines their implications for intercultural pragmatics, and their contribution to some controversial issues, such as the debate about learnability.

2.1.

Part I

After that introductory chapter, the reader will find the first part, entitled “Cognitive Issues on L2 Teaching”. It contains three chapters that adopt a cognitive perspective and therefore focus on the need to consider cognitive aspects of communication in F/SLT. The first two chapters are connected because they deal with a topic such as metaphor, which has recently awoken the interest of cognitive linguists. Chapter two, “Cross-cultural differences in conceptualisation and their application in L2 instruction”, by Alberto Hijazo Gazcón, is a crosscultural and cross-linguistic study of the concept of ‘sexual desire’ based on Csábi’s (1998) analysis of English ‘lust’. The cognitive theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Barcelona 2002; Cuenca and Hilferty 1999; Kövecses 2000a, 2000b) considers that metaphors are conceptualising mechanisms that help to understand complex concepts through simple ones, by mapping a source domain into a target domain through different correspondences. Metaphors are not mere ornamental devices, but express key concepts or evaluations, and are a stable part of our category system (Boers and Lindstromberg 2006). In fact, a field such as that of human feelings and emotions is mainly expressed by metaphors

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(Kövecses 2000a, 2000b; Soriano 2004; Barcelona 1992). Although some metaphors seem to be universal, culture variation plays an important role in conceptualising abstract concepts and creating extensive meanings. For that reason, the study of metaphors is an important issue to cross-cultural studies, the author claims. Furthermore, metaphoric intelligence seems to contribute to the development of communicative strategies such as word coinage and paraphrase, so learners awareness of differences in conceptualization could also imply an improvement in their strategic, and hence, communicative competence (Littlemore 2001, 2004). Since conceptual metaphors often have an important cultural background, if L2 students do not have access to that shared cultural knowledge and expectations, they will probably misinterpret their meaning. In the first part of the paper, the author presents a detailed description of ‘sexual desire’ in Spanish. Following Csábi’s (1998) methodology, he draws the metaphors forming his corpus from Spanish romantic novels. Then, he offers a contrastive comparison between English and Spanish lust metaphors, which highlights the differences in its conceptualization and frequency. In the second part of the paper, Hijazo Gazcón examines how the results of his study can be applied to different fields such as Translation, Second Language Acquisition and teaching/learning pragmatic and sociocultural skills. He shows that the study of metaphors can help to understand extensive meanings in other languages and develop strategic skills in communication. In the third chapter, “Immigration and conceptual metaphors. A critical approach to ideological representation”, María Dolores López Maestre explores some of the conceptual metaphors resorted to by a group of University students in extended essays on the topic of immigration. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the author examines conceptual metaphors from a critical point of view, using analytical procedures from Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Her aim is to explore not only the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of immigration in the discourse of students, but also to unveil the ideology and socio-cultural values conveyed by their choice of analogical mappings and corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions. Since the connection between metaphors and ideology is an area particularly fruitful to be explored, López Maestre hopes to show with her paper how studies on intercultural communication and immigration can benefit from a fusion of methods from critical discourse analysis and the so called ‘cognitive turn’, so prominent in the linguistic panorama recently. She firstly deals with methodological questions related to the sample studied, explains how the material was collected and offers information about the informants

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who participated in her project. After examining aspects of the theoretical framework, the author also shows the different stages in the design of her research project and provides a list of the candidate metaphors she considered for investigation. From them, she selects and concentrates on two of the most prominent conceptual metaphors that appear in the discourse of her informants, ‘Immigration is war/fight/conflict’ and ‘Spain is a container’, for these two conceptualisations often portray a discriminatory and negative view of immigration. Finally, the author reflects on the ideological power of metaphors to represent experience and the need to develop a critical attitude to the metaphors people use, especially at University. The author argues that, since Language and Literature departments play a crucial role in the development of a linguistic awareness with regard to intercultural issues, teachers should help students become aware of the importance of using a stylistically appropriate language that is respectful to the multicultural experience, and train them to avoid racism, xenophobia and other discriminatory practices. Finally, the fourth chapter addresses one of the problems when using and understanding an L2: pragmatic failure. Focusing on the hearer and understanding, and assuming that the ‘phaticity’ of an utterance depends on the communicative circumstances in which it is produced and is therefore negotiated by participants, Manuel Padilla Cruz argues that many utterances intended as phatic can be misunderstood by non-native (NN, henceforth) hearers. This may originate pragmatic failures which can negatively affect communication. “Understanding and overcoming pragmatic failure when interpreting phatic utterances” suggests centring on hearers’ interpretive strategies as a preventive way to avoid undesired communicative misunderstandings in intercultural communication between NNSs alone or NNSs and NSs. After briefly reviewing some of the most relevant contributions addressing pragmatic failure, he centres on phatic utterances and summarises some of the extant approaches to this sort of utterances ranging from Malinowski’s (1923) work on phatic communion to Žegarac (1998) and Žegarac and Clark’s (1999) relevancetheoretic approach to phatic communication. In that revision, the author highlights the importance and risks of phatic utterances for communication. Then, adopting a relevance-theoretic approach to communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995), he moves on to explain why and how hearers may recover unintended non-phatic interpretations from utterances whose speakers intended as phatic or, the other way around, why and how they may recover phatic interpretations from utterances whose speakers intended as non-phatic. He argues that what Sperber (1994) calls naïve and optimistic hearers may recover those wrong

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interpretations if, as a result of the expectations of relevance that utterances generate, they believe that their interlocutors are competent and benevolent and stop their processing when obtaining interpretations that appear optimally relevant to them but are not the ones that their interlocutors intended. Next, focusing on communication between NNSs or NNSs and NSs, he proposes that the cognitive strategy that Sperber (1994) labels cautious optimism can help them avoid misunderstandings when interpreting phatic and non-phatic utterances. Such strategy consists of a competent attribution of intentions and is called for when speakers are not competent in their L2. It leads hearers to reject the interpretation of an utterance that accidentally achieves an optimal level of relevance and is not the intended one and look for another that is indeed the intended one. The author thus illustrates that cautious optimism can help NN hearers overcome cases of both accidental relevance and accidental irrelevance when processing specific utterances and suggests to teach learners to become cautious and optimistic hearers.

2.2.

Part II

Classroom interaction offers teachers interesting and revealing data to be used as a starting point in order to develop learners’ pragmatic competence, teach an L2’s pragmatic principles or the way in which specific speech acts are performed in the L2. The second part of the book, “Teaching Languages across Cultures”, includes five chapters that tackle learners’ performance in specific speech acts or linguistic functions, examining how they acquire pragmatic principles and exploring the factors influencing their performance in different L2s. The first chapter of this section, “The acquisition of pragmatic competence from a strategic perspective: apology, a case in point”, by Abdelhadi Bellachhab, presents a study which draws particularly on two convergent approaches concerned with the development of pragmatic competence from a strategic perspective. The first approach assumes that communication is fundamentally strategic, as manifested through speech act realization and communication in general. The second approach draws inspiration from the evaluation criterion proposed by Galatanu (2007) to determine pragmatic competence. According to that criterion, the evaluation of pragmatic competence can be measured by the fluent (and relevant) production of discursive sequences according not only to the context of communication but also to the argumentative protocol of lexical meanings (Galatanu 2007). Bellachhab’s aim is to investigate the links which might exist, on the one hand, between strategic competence –

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manifested through communication strategies (Canale and Swain 1980; Bachman 1990) – and the development of pragmatic competence. On the other hand, the author tries to establish a link between the discursive construction at the level of argumentative associations produced by learners of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) and its discursive deployment/actualisation in verbal interactions. In order to explore those links, a cross-sectional research has been made to study the speech act of apology in interactions of advanced Moroccan FFL learners. In “Learning how to promise: a didactic approach to the teaching of speech acts”, Carmen Maíz Arévalo focuses on the analysis of promises both from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective, while also looking at concrete examples from different English textbooks (levels A2 and B1). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001) pictures learning a foreign language as a combination of linguistic, social and pragmatic competence. Within this framework, communication is regarded as the ability to use the correct linguistic structures but also in the appropriate contexts. Thus, under the heading of ’everyday English’ most English textbooks teach learners how to perform different functions such as complaining, apologising, refusing and so on, even from the most elementary levels. Promises, however, have been slightly neglected despite the fact that, in English, they play a significant role in macrospeech acts such as apologies and refusals. Linguistically, this chapter analyses two hundred examples from the Corpus de Referencia del Español actual (CREA) and the Bristish National Corpus (BNC) at sentence level in order to contrast the main realisations of this speech act both in English and Spanish and the possible linguistic transfers Spanish students might make. Pragmatically, it analyses the main uses of promises –both as macro and micro speech acts– in both languages to conclude that they perform a very different function in both cultures. Thus, whereas in Spanish promises usually appear as major speech acts, in English they are also prone to form part –as micro speech acts– of acts such as apologies and refusals. In these cases, they function as face repairing devices, since the addressee’s face has been threatened and damaged either by the refusal or by the speaker’s previous action, hence the need for apologising. On the other hand, it can be observed that in Spanish –on the whole a more positive-politeness culture– apologies and refusals do not necessarily involve promising. These differences in use might make Spanish students appear rude to NSs even though they do not intend to do so, causing a significant pragmatic failure. The next chapter is “The interlanguage of complaints by Catalan learners of English”, by María Sabaté i Dalmau. IP is gaining a position of

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its own due to three major factors: growing awareness of multilingual societies, migration movement processes and globalisation processes. Many of the studies on complaints stem from a willingness to demonstrate that linguistic differences between people sharing different politeness systems can lead to intercultural misunderstanding. Complaints require a high level of pragmatic competence in any language, both for NSs and NNSs, because they have to do with sorting out the norms of behaviour that have to be shared daily within society, family, friends, or multilingual workers. Given their importance in everyday communication, it is crucial that L2 speakers master this speech act in order to avoid the types of stereotyping that have been highlighted in many studies on interlanguage (IL) complaints. The author analyses the IL of complaints by Catalan learners of English with two main objectives in mind. On the one hand, she attempts to highlight the importance of understanding the NN production of IL complaints in intercultural communication in depth in order to avoid the kinds of stereotyping outlined above, and, more generally, miscommunication or misunderstanding. On the other hand, she also provides detailed descriptions of the difficult aspects of acquisition, development, and mastering of this specific speech act by three groups of Catalan learners of English, which can be understood as pedagogical tools that can hopefully have some practical applications for the teaching of the English complaint system. Bryant Smith’s chapter, “Learner strategies in L2 pragmatics: the case of Spanish compliment responses” deals with the effect of language transfer that the first language has while learners are attempting to acquire the pragmatic and politeness principles that are central to the target language and culture. One speech act that is particularly of interest to researchers is compliment responses because they require a great deal of pragmatic insight by the speaker and therefore are often rich with data. Smith attempts to bring together the research that has been done on this speech act and clarify it using data from American learners of Spanish in a FL classroom at the university level. Although collecting data from learners is not a new concept, this cross-sectional study of learners at four (beginner, beginner-intermediate, intermediate, advanced) stages of learning will help to fill a void in existing research on the role of language transfer in pragmatic acquisition, as well as the correlation between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence. Results from a compliment response survey administered to American native Englishspeaking learners of Spanish at LSU from varying levels is analysed and compared to control data from native English and Spanish speakers. This research illustrates that in the second language classroom, pragmatic

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accuracy in the L2 often does not simply emerge with grammatical instruction. Instead, Smith’s data show that explicit instruction might be a better tool for pragmatic accuracy in compliment responses. His results have pedagogical implications, since pragmatic competence largely remains an overlooked aspect of second language acquisition in the language classroom. This study also attempts to clarify how pragmatic language transfer from the first language affects these speech acts in the L2. Smith’s data show that the native language plays a major role in the pragmatic forms used in the second language and that these new forms often incorrectly mimic compliment responses in the native language. “Modality is more than modal verbs: a pragmatic approach to the teaching of adverbial modality”, by Carmen Maíz Arévalo and Jorge Arús Hita closes the second part of this volume. This work argues that modality has been one of the most widely studied issues in English linguistics, as shown by the extensive bibliography devoted to the topic and exemplified by already classical studies such as those published by Coates (1983), Perkins (1983), Palmer (1990), Westney (1995) and Bybee and Fleischman (1995), or more recent ones such as those by Papafragou (2000), Facchinetti et al. (2003), Facchinetti and Palmer (2004) and Marín Arrese (2004), among others. It has long been acknowledged that mastering a foreign language is a combination of competences, as stated by the Common European Framework of Reference (2001: 108). For the realisation of communicative intentions, users/learners need a variety of competencies: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. In this chapter, the authors deal with those three competencies assuming that the correct understanding and use of the modal adverb ‘certainly’ involves mastering the three of them. Finally, Maíz Arévalo and Arús Hita also aim at applying the results of the analysis to two core subjects that integrate the syllabus of English Studies: Translation and Contrastive Linguistics. In both cases, their research might help students observe the differences between the expression of modality in Spanish and English and how these differences can be overcome when, for instance, translating a text from one language into the other.

2.3.

Part III

“Intercultural Aspects of Communication” is the title of the third part of this volume. It comprises three chapters that focus on NNSs’ use of L2 with other NNSs or NSs, centring on miscommunication. Interactional data obtained when people from different cultures communicate through a lingua franca are used to examine how pragmatic principles surface. It is

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believed that, since English is considered to be a lingua franca, there is no real model to follow in terms of cultural aspects (Alptekin 2002). Nonetheless, classroom studies unveil the existence of an inappropriate pragmatic transfer when learning an L2 (Crandall and Basturkmen 2004). That means that students are not aware of such aspects of communication, unless they are explicitly taught. That is why studies addressing pragmatic issues in language learning and teaching try to cover those weaknesses in teaching, as well as in the creation of new materials. As Crandall and Basturkmen state, “[…] the conventional approach to teaching speech acts in most currently EAP [English for Academic Purposes] speaking textbooks is inadequate. The language input in the textbooks tends to consist of lists of ‘useful expressions’. The textbooks seem to wrongly assume that all they need is to be given the phrases to do so” (2004: 44). It is not only lists of useful expressions that must be revised, but also new approaches to teaching that include emergent technologies and devise context-based approaches where cognitive, social, cultural and psychological aspects are integrated, so that the language used when teaching may be closer to reality than it is in traditional teaching. Beata Karpi!ska-Musia" opens this part with “Intercultural pragmatics in academic curricula– a hard nut to crack?”. The author explains how global reality and globalist discourse affect almost all human spheres of private, social and professional lives nowadays. In its theoretical section, this chapter tries to take a comprehensive look at some ways in which globalization has affected human life, with special focus on educational demands and expectations directed at FL teachers. Language teachers are mediators among numerous cultural realities represented by their students, being essential to become an ‘intercultural speaker’. In order to achieve this goal, teachers need to undergo a psychological shift into the direction of an open and flexible observer who is sensitive to intricacies of human interaction, able to decode the pragmatic implications made crossculturally and ready to modify own attitudes in the process of ‘life-long learning’. Building such a profile of a foreign language teacher is a demanding task, requiring multiple competencies. Apart from communicative and linguistic competence, a teacher needs to gain an intercultural pragmatic competence. The second part of the article consists of a description of a research carried out among students and teachers of a Foreign Language Teacher Training Department at the University of Gdansk (Poland). Both target groups were asked to specify their opinions concerning the contents, meaning, position and importance ascribed to training intercultural pragmatic competence at an academic level. The distributed questionnaires tested four variables concerning the definition of

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intercultural awareness and competence, self-evaluation as to being interculturally sensitive, university as an institutional background for training this ability and evaluation of methodology, i.e. ways of teaching intercultural pragmatic competence. The outcomes of this research brought about a few interesting implications for further pedagogical practice referring to the subject matter. At the same time, they also showed that working on standardized ways to introduce intercultural pragmatic competence into academic curriculum is still quite a ‘hard nut to crack’. In “Stereotypes of communicative styles: Japanese indirectness, ambiguity and vagueness”, Barbara Pizziconi approaches a topic of central importance to intercultural communication: stereotypes. She shows that the stereotype of reserved and evasive Japanese people, whose language naturally fosters ambiguity and an intuitive and indirect style, pervades popular as well as pedagogical discourse. Despite evidence that, depending on the situation, Japanese can be fairly direct, this persistent stereotype often acquires normative status in language and culture instruction. While acknowledging research that disproves the stereotype and notes instances of Japanese directness, this chapter maintains that such widespread perception of indirectness must also be recognized and explained. Quantitative research, based on analyses of the presence or absence of specific linguistic markers, may fail to account for the subjective nature of perceptions of indirectness. The fact that linguistic meanings can be scattered throughout the utterance, and emerge from the interaction of utterances with situational and relational variables, entails that what is perceived as an indirect style may go ‘under the radar’ if examined only at the level of linguistic forms. Moreover, stereotypes typically do not distinguish between descriptive and evaluative facts; statements about the communicative style attributed to the Japanese fail to question the argumentative positioning that evaluative comments invariably entail. The chapter presents various conceptualizations of ‘indirectness’, which characterize it as a solution to some sort of interactional tension. It then describes an ethnographic interview conducted by the author with two NSs of Japanese and, through an analysis of this conversation, the author tries to provide a reasoned interpretation of the mechanisms responsible for the her own perception of indirectness during the face-to-face encounter, characterized in terms of ‘frames’ of interpretation, i.e. participants’ understanding of and expectations about the nature of the activity under way, including its goals and the allowed contributions. Additionally, the discussion uses Jackendoff’s (2007) composite notion of social values to show how an individual’s (verbal) behaviour can be taken to signal a number of

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different types of the values s/he entertains: affective, normative, utilitarian values etc. This can account for similarities as well as differences to the value systems of other individuals within the same group or culture, and permits to avoid essentializing and stereotyping statements, in and outside the language classroom. Albin Wagener closes this part with “On intercultural disagreement: interaction and inertia”. The author states that intercultural interactions often trigger disagreement, mainly based on misunderstandings regarding the interactants’ cultural, social and individual schemes. Every individual involved in interaction implicates her/his own cultural codes, leading to a possible confrontation. However, instead of trying to redefine a new way of interacting, speakers often might repeat their own schemes over and over again, in order to verify their validity and to re-create a well-known environment, while the situation may place them in a position of utter discomfort. According to the author, if we analyze the situation from a systemic perspective, we may find out that this reproduction occurs because individuals (who might be considered as systems of their own) try to maintain their sphere of knowledge and comfort inside the ongoing interaction. This attitude might obey to pragmatic and systemic principles; nevertheless, it prevents the disagreement from being resolved and adds a phenomenon of inertia to the discordant interaction. While speakers try to resolve this situation of discomfort by maintaining their own cultural codes, the possibility of a pragmatic hindsight may seem to appear as an unlikely option for disagreement resolution. In order to verify these theoretical proposals, Wagener introduces a case study reported by Emmanuelle de Pembroke et Montgomery (1996), who spent time analysing the cultural differences and difficulties experienced by American and Japanese immigrants living in Paris. This example features several disagreements reported by a Japanese man dealing with French coworkers. While the Japanese man may find it difficult to stand back from a daily situation of discomfort, his French co-workers are also experiencing the same situation of discomfort, though from a different point of view. However, every communicational sign or act produced in that intercultural interaction may set a global inertia leading to a possible amplification of conflict, due to an ongoing repetition of schemes. According to Wagener, in a situation where every speaker needs to be reassured, that solution (which implies insistent cultural markings) not only amplifies the feeling of discomfort, but may also lead to a situation where conflict might emerge as the only possible resolution, for an interactional system which may be unable to renew itself.

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Part IV

The fourth part of this volume is entitled “Teaching Languages for Academic and Specific Purposes”. It gathers five chapters. Languages for Academic/Specific Purposes is an area of study within the larger area of Applied Linguistics research which overlaps with other fields of linguistic analysis. This is the case of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Pragmatics. From the early 1960’s, ESP has grown to become one of the most prominent areas of EFL teaching today (Dudley-Evans 1998). Emerging out of Halliday et al. (1964) work 50 years ago on registers, ESP started life as a branch of English Language Teaching (ELT), promising a stronger descriptive foundation for pedagogic materials. Then Swales (1986, 1988, 1990) and Bathia (1993) called for more attention to the communicative purpose of the communicative event. Both ESP and EAP examine the way in which members of particular discourse communities use language varieties (genres) to communicate in their pursuit of common professional or work-related goals. Since the late 1980’s, ESP has established itself not only as an important and distinctive branch of ELT, but has also incorporated most of the work on discourse and genre analysis, as well as the results of corpus linguistics. As Hyland (2007) notes, ESP has developed rapidly in the past fifty years to become a major force in ELT and research. At the centre of research in ESP are often considerations about pragmatic effects (Tarone 2005). As Widdowson (1998) points out, the study of ESP is inherently a study in pragmatics, since special purpose genres have their origins in pragmatic principles of communication. In the first chapter of this part, “Pragmatic markers in academic discourse: the cases of well and the Spanish counterparts bien and bueno”, Begoña Bellés-Fortuño and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez focus on the study of spoken academic discourse (Crawford 2004; Swales 2004) and, more concretely, the genre of lectures. The authors aim at analysing the use of some linguistic features in lectures such as Pragmatic Markers (henceforth PMs). As lecturers of EAP and NSs of Spanish, the authors have identified some NN lecturers’ needs when lecturing in English as well as some interference from their L1, in this case, Spanish. What they present here is a contrastive analysis between Spanish and English lectures on the use of ‘well’ and its counterparts in Spanish ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ functioning as pragmatic markers (Schiffrin 1987; Portolés 1998; González 2004, 2005) or, as they call them here, operators (BellésFortuño, 2007). ‘Well’, ‘bien’ and ‘bueno’ in spoken academic discourse are mostly used as pragmatic markers of the inferential component,

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facilitators or pause-fillers within the framing relational function of speaker-hearer and/or speaker/speech. To carry out the study, BellésFortuño and Fortanet-Gómez have gathered a total amount of 24 lectures from the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences; 12 of these lectures are English lectures taken from the MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic and Spoken English); the Spanish corpus represents the other 12 lectures taken from the MASC (Multimodal Academic and Spoken Corpus) at Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain). Results show that while ‘well’ is one of the most frequently used pragmatic markers in the English lectures, the Spanish corpus reveals two pragmatic markers according to frequency rate and with the same number of instances: ‘bueno’, and ‘bien’. Some of the arising questions are (i) whether ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ can be used as counterparts for ‘well’ in Spanish, and (ii) in which context ‘well’ and ‘bueno’ or ‘bien’ express a similar pragmatic meaning. The authors conclude that the results derived from this analysis can give insights to the way spoken academic discourse at a tertiary level is used; and moreover, they can be of help to Spanish lecturers teaching in English or native lecturers of English wanting to lecture in Spanish. Within ESP, research article introductions have proved fertile ground for researchers. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to research paper introductions in the Social Sciences. The chapter by Ruth Breeze, “Between the academy and the front page: the double discourses of political communications research”, considers the case of political communications research. The study explores the discourses of the hybrid discipline of political communication through analysis of the introductions to 50 research articles from this area. The analysis builds on Swales’s (1981) ground-breaking work on the CARS (create a research space) move structure of introductions in empirical disciplines –establishing a territory by claiming centrality or making topic generalizations, establishing a niche by identifying a research gap or raising a question, and occupying the gap or promising to answer the question that has been identified– but develops a deeper understanding of moves 1 and 2 which reveals the existence of rhetorical patterns in which the author may look inward, to the culture of the academic discourse community, or outward, to the real-world issues at stake, or endeavor to keep both within the field of vision. The pattern which emerges indicates that claims to academic importance are obligatory in this discipline, while claims to real-world importance are also highly recommended. Arguably, writers in this area have to negotiate two very different cultures, that of academia and that of media and politics, and the discourses they negotiate reflect their understanding of their role as commentators and their perception of their own position as

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interpreters of cultural phenomena for the academy and for wider audiences. Finally, the author offers conclusions referring to the consequences of her findings for the teaching of academic writing. She recommends teachers to conduct genre and discourse analyses of target text types before advising students as to the rhetorical strategies to adopt. In “Pragmatics and ESP teaching: politeness in English-Spanish business correspondence”, Mª Sol Velasco Sacristán investigates the genre of business letters and, more specifically, its pragmatic dimension with regard to the notion of politeness. Certainly, the best known of politeness models is Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987), where politeness is defined as redressive action taken to counterbalance the disruptive effect of ‘facethreatening acts’ (FTAs). They depict two types of ‘politeness strategies’ (i.e. ‘negative’ and ‘positive’), which are considered to be universal. Obviously, conventions of politeness vary considerably between language communities, not least in their linguistic form. This can be clearly appreciated in cross-cultural business correspondence. Surprisingly, despite the importance of linguistic politeness in cross-cultural business correspondence, few studies have so far applied politeness theory to its study (Maier 1992; Pilegaard 1989, 1990, 1997; Bargiela-Chiappini 1996; Marcén Bosque 1997, 1999, 2001; Yeung 1997; Hong 1998; Valero Garcés 1999; Saorín Ibarra 2003; Fuertes-Olivera and Nielsen 2008; Velasco Sacristán, 2008). This is by no means a trivial question in terms of pedagogy. In fact, business correspondence handbooks only focus on issues of form ignoring the crucial matter of politeness (Hagge and Kostelnick 1989; Maier 1992; Rodman 2001; Saorín Ibarra 2003; Ancarno 2005). As a result, business letters written by NNSs, even those which are grammatically flawless, may be perceived negatively by their readers because of the inappropriate use of politeness strategies. In view of this situation, and using Marcén Bosque’s (1997) study of the manifestations of politeness in English business letters, the author proposes some tasks and activities to help Spanish learners of Business English acquire mastery over the use of polite expressions in business letters written in English. In the next chapter, “Advances in intercultural communication research and training based on computer simulation of real business settings”, Victoria Guillén-Nieto, Pedro Pernías-Peco, Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Judith Williams-Jellyman explain that in the information society at the beginning of the 21st century, as companies grow within the global market, business people are faced with the challenge of exchanging information and establishing international business relations with entrepreneurs who speak other languages and come from other cultures. In international business settings people in general communicate in English, which is

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considered to be today’s ‘lingua franca’ of the academic, cultural and professional world. However, intercultural communication means something more than making use of a lingua franca to communicate with other people. A company’s export activities and business relations are quite likely to be put at risk by the most subtle aspects, which are sometimes invisible but deeply rooted in the human nature of the participants in discourse: namely, their particular cultural frames, beliefs, values and, more significantly, the way in which such aspects are made visible at the pragmatic level of language use. Findings from European studies such as ELUCIDATE, a Leonardo Da Vinci programme, revealed that the UK and Spain are the two countries in the EU that show the largest percentage of loss in business turnover due to the above mentioned communicative and cultural barriers. That is why cultural sensitization and communicative competence in English and/or Spanish in international business settings are two fundamental social needs that have attracted the interest of researchers in English and Spanish for Specific Purposes in recent times. Pedagogic innovation is needed as regards the teachinglearning methodology with which cultural awareness should be developed in our multilingual and multicultural Europe. Therefore, according to the authors, computer simulation of real business settings may indeed be a suitable learning tool for academic and professional people in general and business people in particular, who need to use English and/or Spanish as the lingua franca in their daily activities, for it promotes communication in a fully contextualized way. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the two main areas of the research project COMINTER-SIMULNEG, namely designing a cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication between Spanish and British people, and developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. To conclude this part of the volume, readers will find a chapter that approaches writing in a specific genre such as anecdotes. Laura Hidalgo Downing describes in “The anecdote as humorous narrative: structural and socio-cultural features of anecdotes written by native and NN writers of English” some of the relevant features of humorous anecdotes by examining a sample of 17 anecdotes written by Spanish university learners of English and 10 anecdotes written by American students, plus an anecdote written by a lecturer. With regard to the structure, the analysis of the sample reveals that most of the anecdotes can be said to have a prototypical narrative structure with a punchline typically situated in the resolution. Thus, the previous sections (opening set up, orientation, complication) provide the background and development of a problem

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which reaches a crisis point which is then solved in the resolution by defeating previously created expectations. The anecdote may be closed by a coda with an evaluation of the event. Some of the anecdotes, however, had a different structure, which the author has termed ‘recursive’ as it consists of a general introductory section followed by three or more short anecdotes with almost a joke format. It could also be seen that native writers show a preference for framing the structure of the anecdote in clear opening and closing sections which typically carry the evaluation of the event. NN writers include evaluative language throughout the anecdote, typically in the orientation, complication and coda. Regarding sociocultural aspects of the humorous event, while there are similarities between native and NN anecdotes in the choice of events which have to do with physical exposure (nakedness or being in underwear), there are also differences in some of the remaining categories, as NN writers include nonsense and absurd and attacking a target, while native writers write about unfamiliar experiences and experiences in other cultures. The author finds some indications that there could be differences not only between native and NN anecdotes but also between female and male writers, as there were differences in the preferences for focusing the butt of the humour on self or other and the humorous event was only felt to be embarrassing by some female writers, but not by male writers. According to the author, these findings may provide a useful starting point for the exploration of both narrative structure in native and NN writers of English and a discussion of socio-cultural aspects surrounding the perception and representation of events as humorous.

2.5.

Part V

The last section of this volume discusses issues related to the implementation of new technologies that can be applied in F/SLT, implications of theoretical models and new conceptions of the teaching activity. Under the title “Other Methodological Issues on Pragmatics Teaching” readers will find the last three chapters of this volume. Gemma Bel-Enguix and M. Dolores Jiménez-López propose in “Is it possible to formalize pragmatics? Implications for computer assisted language learning” to use a framework developed in the field of computer science in order to get a formalization of pragmatics: membrane systems. Taking into account the role of computers in our everyday life, it is very important to develop computational linguistic methods and tools that can be used in intelligent computer assisted language learning. Now, in programming computers to interact with humans in natural language, one

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of the major difficulties is the problem of providing the machine with enough knowledge of the world. It is quite hard to give the computer the ability to produce both appropriate utterances and appropriate interpretations of utterances from the communicative point of view. The solution to these problems implies to search for a mechanism able to formalize pragmatics. Membrane Systems can be defined as a powerful generation device based in the behaviour of cellular membranes. Membrane computing can be included in the area of natural computing. Despite its microbiological inspiration, the model is described as a mathematical and formal computational device. Membrane systems provide a powerful framework for formalizing any kind of interaction, both among agents and among agents and the context. Their flexibility and intuitive functioning makes them very suitable for applications, not only to computer science, but also for computing real life events like interaction between societies. For Linguistics, the main advantage of membranes over other generative methods is that membranes can be understood as contexts, providing a suitable framework for the formalization of pragmatics and interaction between different agents or contexts. Those features of membranes make them a suitable framework to deal with pragmatic issues. The last goal of the authors is to provide a formal model of context with the explicitness, formality and efficiency that are required for the computer implementation of pragmatics. They claim that the interplay between methodologies for teaching languages and techniques coming from the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing can help in the hard problem of teaching/learning pragmatics, having important implications in the fields of intercultural pragmatics and language teaching. Next, in “Implications of dual-process theories for working memory capacity and L2 speech production and acquisition”, Kyria Finardi reviews implications such theories and draws some conclusions for L2 speech production and acquisition. The author starts by explaining that dualprocess theories of the mind postulate two distinct cognitive systems: a memory-based system and a rule-based system. Whereas the former learns regularities in a slow, effortless, incremental and automatic fashion, the latter learns novel information and forms episodic records manipulating symbols in a fast and controlled way. A central tenet of these theories is, according to the author, that behaviour is determined by the interplay of automatic and controlled processing. Psycholinguistic evidence shows that language acquisition relies on these two systems to process language, with the memory-based system being used to learn lexicon and the rule-based system to learn grammar (Ullman 2001). Following Skehan (1998), the

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author argues that L2 acquisition may also be understood as the transfer of items from the rule-based system to the memory-based system, and viceversa. In the case of adult L2 learners, L2 acquisition differs from L1 both quantitatively and qualitatively because of a possible critical period. During L1 acquisition, children go from a stage of lexicalisation to another of syntacticalisation of their linguistic repertoire, before re-lexicalising language again, thus, processing information in the memory-based or rulebased system depending on processing conditions. In L2 learning, however, the movement from lexicalization to syntacticalization and relexicalization will not happen unless contrived by language production which forces the L2 learner to process information at a syntactic level. Finardi also points out that in L2 learning meaning has priority over form and, in the context of a limited capacity cognitive system, focus on form will only take place when there are enough attentional resources to process the form. Then, she discusses studies on individual differences in working memory capacity, which view the idea of controlled attention as one of the major contributors to differences in working memory capacity (Barrett et al. 2004); studies on the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 speech production, which have found statistically significant correlations between working memory capacity and different aspects of L2 speech production such as fluency, complexity and accuracy of L2 speech (Fortkmap 2000; Finardi and Prebianca 2006), and some of her previous work (Finardi 2007, 2008), in which she found statistically significant correlations between working memory capacity and the acquisition of a syntactic rule in L2 speech. This leads her to conclude that the studies she reviews in her paper show that skilled performance – in this case, L2 speaking – can be seen as the interplay of controlled and automatic processes which will be required differently during performance and acquisition, depending on working memory capacity, motivation and processing conditions. In the last chapter, “The transmission model of education: a cognitive approach”, Graciela de la Nuez, Mª Clara Petersen y Juani Guerra deal with notions of cognition as a social activity applied to SLA. Since cognition is not limited to the person’s mind, it must be true that the linguistic activity it produces is essentially collective. The socio-cultural characteristic of cognition demands, for instance, that the educational system trains students to reach comprehension through distributed activities such as reading, questioning and answering. Each of the activities performed in a class section leads to the desired goal of comprehension. Basically, human languages exist only in the form of social activity (Anderson 2005). The authors face the current problem of

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the failure of Spanish university students to communicate orally in ESL in a simple dialogue situation after ten years of obligatory learning English. In their view, this handicap reveals the lack of teaching effectiveness of the Spanish educational system. Such failure means that the main difficulty teachers still face is a conceptual one due to the traditional influence of the dualistic view of mind and body as two different ontological entities. Cognitive science provides valuable and accurate information to expose the cognitive foundations in which second language teaching is performed. The authors intend to reveal that mental models, so deeply entrenched in our cognitive sociocultural system, underlying the practice of education in Gran Canaria (Spain), are still based on the traditional transmission model of education. So they suggest working with a new model of mind from Cognitive Theory which could provide the necessary tools to accomplish an effective teaching system of ESL in Spanish universities. They analyze the traditional model of education with the analytic tools provided by cognitive linguistics and propose how cognition should be understood in the educational field in order to further create new methodologies. To do that, they analyze the conduit metaphor within the traditional model of education which they see as connected with the Spanish folk conception of mind. Then, they identify metonymies within the ’jug and mug’ model in order to map the interaction between metaphors and metonymies found in the traditional transmission model of education. That mapping suggests a new approach to mind as it conceptually roots our real understanding of this model in order to improve educational effectiveness. In sum, the contents above synthesised illustrate the wide array of theoretical perspectives, research approaches and methodological issues to tackle pragmatic phenomena in F/SLT. Undoubtedly, these will be a stimulating contribution to researchers and scholars working in the fields of Pragmatics and F/SLT, as they suggest novel insights into and integrative perspectives on existing theoretical frameworks, address important problems and challenges that both language learners and teachers may find, and offer new empirical evidence on phenomena already analysed, which can be useful for devising innovative methodological approaches.

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References Alptekin, C. “Towards intercultural communicative competence in ELT”. ELT Journal 56/ 1 (2002): 57-64. Ancarno, C. “The study of academic e-mails and conventional letters: contrastive analysis of four conversational routines”. Ibérica 9 (2005): 103-122. Anderson, M. L. “How to study the mind: an introduction to embodied cognition”. In Brain Development in Learning Environments: Embodied and Perceptual Advancements, edited by F. Santoianni and C. Sabatano, 65-82. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005. Bachman, L. F. Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Bardovi-Harlig, K. “Evaluating the empirical evidence. Grounds for instruction in pragmatics?” In Pragmatics in Language Teaching, edited by K.R, Rose and G. Kasper, 13-31. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bardovi-Harlig, K. and B. Hartford. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk. Routledge, 2005. Barcelona, A. “El lenguaje del amor romántico en inglés y en español”. Atlantis 14 1/2 (1992): 2-27. —. (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: Cognitive Approaches. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Bargiela-Chiappini, F. “Requests and status in business correspondence”. Journal of Pragmatics 28 (1996): 635-662. Barret, L., M. Tugate, and R. Engle. “Individual differences in working memory capacity and dual-process theories of the mind.” Psychological Bulletin vol.130 (2004):553-573. Barron, A. Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: Learning how to Do Things with Words in a Study Abroad Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Bathia, V.K. Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman, 1993. Bellés-Fortuño, B. “Discourse markers within the university lecture genre: A contrastive study between Spanish and North-American lectures” PhD diss., Universitat Jaume I, 2007. Blum-Kulka, S. “Learning to say what you mean in a second language: a study of speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language”. Applied Linguistics 3 (1982): 29-60. —. “Interpreting and performing speech acts in a second language: a cross-cultural study of Hebrew and English”. In Sociolinguistic and

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Language Acquisition, edited by N. Wolfson and E. Judd, 36-55. Rowley: Newbury House, 1983. Blum-Kulka, S., J. House and G. Kasper (eds.). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: Ablex, 1989. Boers, F. and S. Lindstromberg “Cognitive linguistic applications in second or foreign language instruction: rationale, proposals and evaluation”. In Cognitive Linguistics. Current Applications and Future Perspectives, edited by G. Kristiansen, 305-358. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. Bou Franch P. and P. Garcés Conejos. “Teaching linguistic politeness: a methodological proposal”, IRAL 41 (2003): 1-22. Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. “Universals in language use: politeness phenomena”. In Questions and Politeness, edited by E. Goody, 56-311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Bybee, J. and S. Fleischman (eds.). Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995. Canale, M. “From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy”. In Language and Communication, edited by J. C. Richards and R. W. Schmidt, 2-28. London: Longman, 1983. Canale, M. and M. Swain. “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing”. Applied Linguistics 1 (1980): 1-47. Celce-Murcia, M., Z. Dörnyei and S. Thurrell. “Communicative competence: a pedagogically motivated model with content specifications”. Issues in Applied Linguistics 6/2 (1995): 5-35. Citron, J. L. “Can cross-cultural understanding aid second language acquisition? Towards a theory of ethno-lingual relativity”. Hispania 78 (1995): 105-113. Coates, J. The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm, 1983. Council of Europe. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Crandall, E. and Basturkmen, H. “Evaluating pragmatics-focused materials”. ELT Journal 58/1 (2004): 38-49. Crawford, B. “Interactive discourse structuring in L2 guest lectures: some insights from a comparative corpus-based study”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004): 39-54.

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Csábi, S. Conceptualization of Lust in English. Vienna: Semiotische Berichte, 1998. Cuenca, M. J. and J. Hilferty Introducción a la lingüística cognitiva. Barcelona: Ariel, 1999. De Pembroke et Montgomery E. Vers une pédagogie de la communication interculturelle. Paris: ANRT, 1996. Facchinetti, R. and F. R. Palmer (eds.). English Modality in Perspective: Genre Analysis and Contrastive Studies. Frankfurt an Main: Peter Lang, 2004. Facchinetti, R., M. G. Krug and F. R. Palmer (eds.). Modality in Contemporary English (Topics in English Linguistics 44). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Finardi, K. “Working memory capacity and the retention and acquisition of a syntactic structure.” Unpublished Research Paper. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2007. —. “Working memory capacity and the acquisition of a syntactic rule in L2 speech”. Unpublished Research Paper, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2008. Finardi, K. and G. Prebianca. “Working memory capacity and speech production in L2: evidence from a picture description task”. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem 14 (2006): 231- 260. Fuertes-Olivera, P. A. and S. Nielsen. “Translating politeness in bilingual English-Spanish business correspondence”. Meta 53(3) (2008). Galatanu, O. “For an argumentative semantics in the approach of the concept of ‘advanced learner’ of a foreign language”, paper presented at the international symposium “Retour aux variétés avancées dans l’acquisition des langues secondes”, Aston University, Birmingham, June 2007. Garcés Conejos, P. “The teaching of pragmatic aspects in the ESL classroom: a critical review”. In Teaching of English in a Spanish Setting edited by H. Ferrer Mora et al., 79-94. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2001a. —. “Aspectos de la enseñanza de la pragmática o cómo enseñar a comunicarse efectivamente en una L2”. Revista de Enseñanza Universitaria. Número Extraordinario (2001b): 129-144. García, C. “Teaching speech act performance: declining an invitation”, Hispania 79 (1996): 267-279. González, M. Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative: the Case of English and Catalan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. —. “Pragmatic markers and discourse coherence relations in English and Catalan oral narrative”. Discourse Studies 7/1 (2005): 1461-4456.

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Hagge, J. and C. Kostelnick. “Linguistic politeness in professional prose: A discourse analysis of auditors’ suggestion letters with implications for business communication pedagogy”. Written Communication 6 (1989): 312-339. Halliday, M., A. McIntosh and P. Strevens, P. The linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longman, 1964. Harlow, L. L. “Do they mean what they say? Sociopragmatic competence and second language learners”. The Modern Language Journal 74/3 (1990): 328-351. Hong, W. “Politeness strategies in Chinese business correspondence and their teaching applications”. Foreign Language Annals 31 (3) (1998): 315-325. Hyland, K. “English for Specific Purposes. Some influences and impacts”. In International Handbook of English Language Teaching, edited by J. Cummins and C. Davison, 391-402. Springer International Handbooks of Education, 2007. Jackendoff, R. Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure. MIT Press, 2007. Jaworski, A. “Pragmatic failure in a second language: greeting responses in English by Polish students”. IRAL 32/1 (1994): 41-55. Kasper, G. and S. Blum-Kulka. (eds.). Interlanguage Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kasper, G. and K. R. Rose. Language Learning. Pragmatic Development in a Second Language. Michigan: Blackwell, 2002. Kövecses, Z. Metaphor. A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002a. —. Metaphor and Emotion. Language, culture and body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002b. Kreuz, R. J. and R. M. Roberts. “When collaboration fails: consequences of pragmatic errors in conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics 19 (1993): 239-252 Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lakoff, R. T. “The logic of politeness; or, minding your p’s and q’s”. In Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting, 292-305. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1973. —. “What you can do with words: politeness, pragmatics, and performatives”. In Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions, and Implicatures, edited by A. Rogers et al. 79-105. Arlington, TX: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1977. Leech, G. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983.

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Levinson, S. C. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Littlemore, J. “Metaphoric intelligence and foreign language learning”. Humanising Language Teaching 3/2 (2001): http:/www.hltmag.co.uk/mar01/mart1.htm. —. “The misinterpretation of metaphors by international students at a British university: examples, implications and possible remedies”. Humanising Language Teaching 6/3 (2004): http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sept04/sart6.htm. Maier, P. “Politeness strategies in business letters by native and non-native English speakers”. English for Specific Purposes 11 (1992): 189-205. Malinowski, B. K. “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”. In The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, edited by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, 451-510. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1923. Marcén Bosque, C. “Estrategias de cortesía en la correspondencia comercial inglesa”. In Lingüística aplicada en su contexto académico, edited by J. Piqué Angordans and J. V. Andreu-Besó, 418-425. Valencia: NAU Llibres, 1997. —. “Linguistic politeness in professional written communication: A crosscultural study of British and Spanish business correspondence”. In Enfoques teóricos y prácticos de las lenguas aplicadas a las ciencias y a las tecnologías, edited by A. Bocanegra Valle, M. C. Lario de Oñate and P. López Zurita, 196-201. Salamanca: Tesitex, 1999. —. “Requested messages in written business communication. A crosscultural study of British and Spanish correspondence”. In Discourse Analysis and Terminology in Languages for Specific Purposes, edited by J. C. Palmer Silveira, S. Posteguillo Gómez and I. Fortanez Gómez, 217-223. Castellón: Universitat Jaume I, 2001. Meier, A. J. “Passages of Politeness”. Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 381-392. —. “Teaching the Universals of Politeness”. ELT Journal 51 (1997): 2127. Mey, J. L. Pragmatics. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Olshtain, E. and A. D. Cohen. “The learning of complex speech act behaviour”. TESL Canada Journal 7/2 (1990): 45-65. Palmer, F. R. Modality and the English modals. 2nd edition. London: Longman, 1990. Papafragou, A. Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Oxford: Elsevier, 2000. Perkins, M. Modal Expressions in English. London: Pinter, 1983.

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Pilegaard, M. “Intekulturel kommunicakation og høflighed” [Intercultural communication and politeness]. Hermes 3 (1989): 219-245. —. „Pragmatiske aspekter of virksomhedens eksterne kommunikation. Sprolig !flighed I relation til anmodniger” [Pragmatic dimensions of external business communication. Linguistic politeness in requests]. PhD diss. The Aarhus School of Business., 1990. —. “Politeness in written business discourse: a textlinguistic perspective on requests”. Journal of Pragmatics 28 (1997): 223-244. Portolés, J. Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel Practicum, 1998. Riley, P. “Self-expression and the negotiation of identity in a foreign language”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (2006): 295-318. Rodman, L. “You attitude: A linguistic perspective”. Business Communication Quarterly 64 (4) (2001): 9-25. Rose, K. R. “On the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics”. System 33 (2005): 385-399. Rose, K. R. and G. Kasper (eds.). Pragmatics in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Saorín Ibarra, A. M. “Las cartas de queja en el aula de inglés para turismo: Implicaciones pedagógicas basadas en el uso de recursos de cortesía”. Ph D. Dissertation, University of Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana, 2003. http://www.tdx.cesca.es/TDX-1113103-120432 (accessed April 22, 2006). Schiffrin, D. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Sharwood-Smith, M. “Consciousness-raising and the Second Language Learner”. Applied Linguistics 2 (1981): 159-168. Skehan, P. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998. Soriano, C. “The Conceptualisation of Anger in English and Spanish. A Cognitive Approach”. PhD Diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2004. Spencer-Oatey, H. (ed.). Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport Through Talk Across Cultures. London: Continuum, 2000. Spencer-Oatey, H. D (ed.) Culturally Speaking. Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Spencer-Oatey, H. D. and W. Jiang “Explaining Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Findings: Moving from Politeness Maxims to Sociopragmatic Interactional Principles (SIPs)”, Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 1633-1650. Sperber, D. “Understanding verbal understanding”. In What is intelligence?, edited by J. Khalfa, 179-198. Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1994. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson Relevance. Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson Relevance. Communication and cognition. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Swales, J. M. Aspects of Article Introductions. The University of Aston: Aston ESP Reports 1, 1981. —. “Citation Analysis and Discourse Analysis”. Applied Linguistics 7 (1986): 39-56. —. (ed.). Episodes in ESP. A Source and Reference Book on the Development of English for Science and Technology. New York London: Prentice Hall, 1988. Swales, J. M. Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. —. Research Genres. Exploration and Application. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Tarone, E. “English for Specific Purposes and Interlanguage Pragmatics”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by K. Bardovi-Harlig and B. Hartford, 157.174. Routledge, 2005 Thomas, J. “Cross-cultural pragmatic failure”. Applied Linguistics 4 (1983): 91-112. —. “Cross-cultural discourse as ‘unequal encounter’: towards a pragmatic analysis”. Applied Linguistics 5/3 (1984): 226-235. —. Meaning in Interaction: an Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1995. Trosborg, A. Interlanguage Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Ullman, M. “The Declarative/Procedural Model of Lexicon and Grammar.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 30 (2001): 37-68. Valero Garcés, C. (1999). “Comunicación intercultural: ¿cartas comerciales monócromas o polícromas?”. In Lengua para fines específicos (VI). Investigación y enseñanza edited by S. Barrueco García, E. Hernández Longas and L. Sierra Ayala, 119-124. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 1999. Velasco Sacristán, M. “Metodología didáctica del IPA: Anisomorfismos interlingüísticos de la cortesía comunicativa en la correspondencia comercial inglés-español”. In Estudios de metodología de la lengua inglesa IV coordinated by L. Pérez Ruíz, C. Estébanez Estébanez, 357365. Valladolid: Servicio de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editorial de la UVA, 2008. Westney, P. Modals and Periphrastics in English. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995.

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Yeung, L. N. “Polite requests in English and Chinese business correspondence in Hong Kong”. Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997): 505-522. Žegarac, V. “What is phatic communication?”. In Current issues in relevance theory, edited by V. Rouchota and A. H. Jucker, 327-361. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998. Žegarac, V. and B. Clark. “Phatic interpretations and phatic communication”. Journal of Linguistics 35 (1999): 321-346.

CHAPTER ONE SOCIAL COGNITION AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING VICTORIA ESCANDELL-VIDAL

1. Introduction As most teachers do, in the first day of class I ask my students to fill in a form with some basic information about them. Among other things, I ask them about their command of foreign languages, just to see what kind of academic literature they will be able to read. One of those students wrote the following as an answer: English: I can speak, understand, read, write, tell jokes and get angry. My student was, as you can imagine, a jokester, but nevertheless he hit the bull’s-eye: there is more to the full command of a foreign language than the well-known four abilities, there is crucially the ability to socially interact in an appropriate way. It is no news that patterns of communicative behaviour can change from language to language and from culture to culture. Different cultural groups have developed different communicative practices, rooted in different views on values, beliefs, attitudes, power relations, etc. Therefore, when faced with interaction in a different language/culture, most of us experience the feeling of not being at ease, and we all can report problems like the following: ! Being unable to understand and interpret other peoples’ thoughts, feelings and actions ! Having difficulty using or understanding facial expressions, tone of voice, jokes and sarcasm, common phrases and sayings (tending to understand them literally)

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!

Not understanding some unwritten social rules, such as standing too close to another person, or starting an inappropriate topic of conversation ! Appearing to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as the result of the inability to express feelings, emotions or needs in the expected way ! Appearing to be insensitive as the result of not having recognised how someone else is feeling Thus, success in intercultural communication crucially depends, among other things, on the ability of the speakers to be aware of such differences and to try to avoid the possible misunderstandings that can arise. An essential task in the learning of a foreign language is, therefore, to know and be able to cope with such cultural differences. Cross-cultural studies and intercultural pragmatics focus on the diversity of conversational styles in different cultures and the consequences of such diversity in situations where members of various cultural groups interact with each other. The privileged data in this area usually come from the analysis of fragments of actual conversations (business communication, classroom interaction, etc.). Observable communicative behaviour is, however, only the tip of the iceberg, i.e., the visible and external manifestation of a more complex reality. A full understanding of how social behaviour and social abilities can be taught and learnt requires a capacity to identify the internal parameters that govern social interaction (cultural bases) and the internal capacities (neural bases) that underlie communicative behaviour. The submerged iceberg is examined by social cognition studies. Social cognition is a new, though already well developed, multidisciplinary research field that builds on several other disciplines, such as neurophysiology, psychology and biology. Under the label of social cognition there is a wealth of investigation around the cognitive bases of the human capacity to behave adequately in the social milieu: “Social cognition encompasses any cognitive process that involves conspecifics, either at a group level or on a one-to-one basis.” (Blakemore et al. 2004: 216). More specifically, SC involves the individual’s cognitive relationship to the social corpora (family, friends, institutions, etc.) and the ambient postulates that inform a culture, its technology, and the complex manifold of artefactual and environmental considerations that are transpersonal. There are two inextricably linked aspects to this: (a) the examination of the individual mind’s processes, encoding, and storage of social information; and (b) the examination of how the individual mind is influenced by social interaction. (Marsch and Olof in press)

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The cultural side of social cognition (i.e., the role of culture in shaping conversational styles) is well known to linguists, and thus intercultural studies have largely benefited from the insights from sociologists and ethnographers1. In contrast, scholars with a linguistic background (including pragmatists and second language teachers) are less familiar with the physical, neurological bases of social cognition; and yet, they provide crucial information about the underpinnings of social behaviour. The aim of this paper is to add the cognitive dimension to the overall picture. I want to invite you to dive into deep waters and to explore the underside of the submerged iceberg. My aim is to offer a general perspective of the fundamental questions and the main findings in the field of social neuroscience, on the assumption that any consideration about social interaction and second language learning must be based on what current research has revealed about the physical bases of our social ability. My purpose is to identify the issues that are directly relevant to our views on pragmatics and second language learning. I will begin by presenting a state-of-the-art of social cognition from the point of view of neuroscience (section 2). Next, I will dwell on the development of social abilities in native speakers; this will include a discussion on how culture enters into the picture and relates to the neural underpinnings of human social abilities, how culturally determined skills are acquired and how the processing of social stimuli works (section 3). Before proceeding to the conclusions, I will explore the implications for second language learning: how the learner’s brain manages to deal with the difficulties of learning, what the processing strategies are, and what can be done to facilitate learning (section 4).

2. The neural bases of social cognition 2.1. The story of Phineas Gage I will begin by introducing Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860), from New Hampshire, who worked as a foreman in the construction of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Vermont. His story is one of the most famous in the annals of medicine as the survivor of a horrible accident2.

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See, among many other, Hofstede (2001), Nisbett (2003), Spencer-Oatey (2005, 2007). 2 See Damasio (1994), Damasio et al. (1994), Macmillan (2000), Adolphs (1999, 2006).

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As reported on “The Boston Post” on 14th September 1848, 25-year old Gage was the victim of an explosion that shot a metal rod through his head. The iron bar entered under the left cheek bone and exited through the top of the head, and was later found some 30 yards from the site of the accident. Gage was momentarily stunned, but regained full consciousness within minutes and was able to talk and walk. To everyone’s amazement and against all expectation, he survived. After some minor problems, by 1st January 1849 Gage was leading an apparently normal life: he could move and talk as before, and his intelligence, memory and learning capacities remained miraculously unaffected. He lived in reasonable physical health for another eleven years. However, a crucial change was soon noticed by the people close to him. This change was reported by his physician, Dr John M. Harlow: His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.” (...)The equilibrium between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seems to have been destroyed. (Harlow, J.M. (1868): "Recovery from a Passage of an Iron Bar through the Head" Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society 2: 327-347.)

So Gage, who had previously been considered a diligent, responsible, reliable, polite person, became irreverent, profane, irresponsible and socially inappropriate after the accident. Gage’s story is doubly significant to the history of medicine: first, as the survivor of a tremendous accident; and second, because he provided Dr. John Harlow the foundation for establishing a direct correlation between a particular type of brain damage and the loss of social abilities. Thus, Gage’s story represents the emergence of modern social neuroscience. Natural as it might seem today, the conclusion that there may be a direct link between the brain and social behaviour was hard to believe in the mid of 19th century, and Dr. Harlow was never given much credit:

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“[…] the intellectual atmosphere of the time made it somewhat more acceptable that there was a neural basis for processes such as movement or even language rather than for moral reasoning and social behaviour.” (Damasio et al. 1994: 22) In fact, as Adolphs (1999) points out, the change in Gage’s personality remained a mystery until it could be interpreted in the light of similar patients in modern times. Antonio and Hanna Damasio, Ralph Adolphs and their colleagues, who work at the University of Iowa and the Caltech Institute, re-opened Gage’s case and investigated his skull using modern neural imaging techniques (Damasio et al 1994; Damasio 1994). They conclude that the affected brain region was the prefrontal cortex. This finding is consistent with what these researchers had previously found about people with lesions to the same brain area3: modern patients with this sort of injury have serious difficulties organising and planning future activity, exhibit socially inappropriate behaviour and are characterised by a lack of concern for others, i.e., they are unable to function in society due to a severe “defect in rational decision making and the processing of emotions” (Damasio et al 1994, Damasio 1994). Like Gage, these patients develop something that’s been dubbed “acquired sociopathy.” They perform normally on IQ tests, and have normal language, memory, and perception, but are unable to guide their behavior with respect to other people. They can’t make decisions that are in their best interests, typically fail to hold a job, and are unable to maintain lasting social relationships. (Adolphs 2006: 15)

At this point, the sense in which this story is relevant for our current purposes should be clear. What neuroscientists have found is, first, that our social behaviour can be explained in neuroanatomic terms –an idea that was difficult to accept not only in the 19th century, but even today, since we still tend to understand ourselves in dualistic terms (i.e., in terms of a dichotomy between body and mind; Damasio 1994); and second, that our social ability is not merely the result of the operation of a general, allpurpose, cognitive device that simply has to learn a given set of social rules, but of a dedicated system specialised in dealing with social information. Any damage to the physical organisation of this system

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3 The findings in Damasio et al (1994) have been used and subsequently developed in much research work and further implementations. Wagar and Thagard (2004) have developed a computational model for decision making. The results of Damasio et al. (1994) have been contested by other researches, but the debate concerns neuroanatomic details that are not relevant for my current purpose.

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correlates with a failure in social interaction, leaving other capacities unaffected. And if this system is lost, its functioning cannot be regularly taken over by other brain areas.

2.2. “The woman who knows no fear” 4 Almost in the same year that they were publishing their results about Gage, Ralph Adolphs and the Damasios were working on a different case, which represents a significant story as well. The patient is known as S.M., a 43-year old woman. She is reported to be a woman “[…] with normal IQ, a high-school education, […] stable and cheerful, with no indication of depression […]. Her visual-perceptual discrimination was normal.” (Adolphs et al. 1994: 669). None of these features seem to be particularly noticeable. However, she has earned a place in the history of medicine as the woman who knows no fear… or at least, who cannot recognise a fearful expression in a face. When she was 30 and while she was recovering from epilepsy at hospital, her doctors found that she suffered a rare disease (Urbach-Wiethe disease), which caused the accumulation of calcium in a particular region of her brain, namely in her amygdala, an almond-shaped organ that is primarily related to the processing of emotions; as a consequence of the disease, her amygdala was destroyed. Adolphs and his colleagues asked her permission to carry out a series of experiments and test one of their hypotheses about the role of the amygdale in social cognition. What they found was really amazing: she could not identify negative expressions in a face. She was baffled by any picture showing a fearful expression. She also had problems perceiving other "negative" emotions if expressed in combination with other types of feelings, such as anger and surprise. In contrast, she could identify positive emotions, such as happiness, and she could also recognise familiar faces. The conclusion of this study is the following: From our results, the amygdala appears necessary both to recognize basic emotion of fear in facial expressions, and to recognize many of the blends of multiple emotions that the human face can signal. The amygdala may be an important component of the neural systems subserving social cognition in part because fine-grained recognitions of the emotion signaled by faces

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This title heading is borrowed from an article by Jennifer Altman on this topic (New Scientist magazine, 17 December 1994, page 20).

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is essential for successful behaviour in a complex social environment. (Adolphs et al 1995: 672)

S.M. and the neuroscientists’ team have been collaborating since then. In 2005 they found that her inability to recognize fearful expressions was due to impairment in the fixation on the relevant features of the faces (Adolphs et al. 2005). Whereas normal people tend to focus on the eyes and the mouth, patients with amygdala lesions tend to fix their attention on the nose instead, a feature of the face which is clearly less relevant to the recognition of emotions. In 2007 a new experiment was carried out (Spezio et al. 2007) to gain further understanding of the problem. Instead of using photographs of facial expressions, the scientists tested S.M.’s reactions in real life social interaction. Since their working hypothesis was that her impairment caused a failure to fixate informative features of the faces, they used an eye tracker device to record the fixation of her eyes during the interaction. What they found is that her injury did not cause a reduction in “[…] overall gaze to the face during conversations, but instead changed the way gaze was deployed to the face”. “S.M. made nearly no fixations on the eyes during a social interaction […], but spent most of the time looking at the mouth.” (Spezio et al. 2007: 3394, 3996) The story of S.M. represents a further instance of how social cognitive neuroscience has addressed the question of identifying the neural bases of our social behaviour by investigating more specific and basic aspects. This particular research has shown that other brain areas, such as the amygdala, are relevant for a normal social interaction since they are responsible for the processing of some emotions. Eye contact is a major ingredient in face-to-face interaction, and constitutes a pre-requisite for the recognition of the emotions in facial expressions5.In fact, the expressions shown on our faces are so important to the modulation of the verbally communicated content that emoticons have been created to try to convey basic emotion in written texts.

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The finding that the amygdala plays a major role in social cognition in human interaction is consistent with previous work on primates. As reported in Cacioppo and Bernston (2005), rhesus monkeys with lesions in the amygdala lack the ability for effective social interaction. As a consequence, they are ostracised by their conspecifics and perish without the support of their troop. This is due to the crucial role of the amygdale in the normal perception and production of expressive displays and behaviour. Macaque monkeys with lesions in the amygdale are uninhibited animals.

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2.3. “Through the mirror” Consider now a totally different situation. At a clothing store, a man is looking at himself in a mirror while wearing a t-shirt with a tag from the shop. What is he doing? What does he intend to do? What might happen next? All these are questions that any of us can answer without much difficulty. But there is yet another question which does not seem that easy: How do we know all this? How do we know what he is thinking and what he intends to do? Can we actually read someone else’s mind? A decade ago most neuroscientists and psychologists would have explained this ability as the result of a rapid reasoning process, not unlike the kind used, for instance, to solve a logical problem. Nowadays, the answer is a very different one. Let’s move from the United States to Europe, to Italy. By the same years in which the Iowa and Caltech research team were investigating on Gage and S.M., the researchers of the Neuroscience Department of the University of Parma, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, among others (Gallese 2007; Gallese et al. 1996, 2001, 2004; Rizzolatti et al. 2006) were working on hand and mouth movements with macaque monkeys. They were investigating the brain areas related to movement, particularly the neurons that control movement in goal-directed actions, such as grasping a piece of fruit. Almost by chance, the Parma team found that the very same neurons that activate when an individual is performing an action also fire when the individual sees someone else perform the same action. This means that the motor cells are active not only when making a movement, but also when watching it. The same neurons were immediately sought for, and found, in the human brain as well. Since these neurons in some sense reflect other individual’s actions, they were labelled mirror neurons. Thus, mirror neurons provide a new answer to the question of how we know what is in someone else’s mind. Our mind-reading capacities come from the activation of motion-related neurons. Thus, when we see a goaldirected action performed by another individual, we do not merely guess what is s/he doing, we do not (explicitly and consciously, or implicitly) reason about her/his intentions, but rather we have “[…] a direct internal experience” of the action itself (Rizzolatti et al. 2006: 56), which explains why we can understand it in such a quick and easy way. Mirror neurons provide the neurological link between intention and action. This correlation can be found not only for simple actions, but extends to more complex series of events. The effect is that there are specific chains of mirror neurons that appear to encode full templates for specific actions and their goals. Therefore, if an action (for instance,

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grasping a cup) can have different goals (to drink from it or to clean it), a different chain will be formed for each one: Interestingly, we found that most of the neurons we recorded discharged differently during the grasping part of the monkey’s action, depending on its final goal [grasping a piece of fruit to eat it, or to place it in a container]. This evidence illustrated that the motor system is organized in neuronal chains, each of which encodes the specific intention of the act. (Rizzolatti et al. 2006: 59)

In this sense, as can be easily gathered, neural chains are highly relevant to the understanding of social behaviour, including socially determined courses of actions. Moreover, recent research has shown that mirror neurons play a significant role not only in the interpretation of actions, but also in the understanding of emotions. Thus, the same mirror neurons that fire when experiencing a particular feeling –for instance, pain (Singer and Frith 2005) or disgust (Wicker et al 2003)–, also fire in the brain of those who observe the experiencer of the feeling. Psychologists had always talked about empathy and emotional contagion; now we have a more precise understanding of how empathy and emotional contagion work. Taken together, such data strongly suggest that humans may comprehend emotions, or at least powerful negative emotions, through a direct mapping mechanism involving parts of the brain that generate visceral motor responses. Such a mirror mechanism for understanding emotions cannot, of course, fully explain all social cognition, but it does provide for the first time a functional neural basis for some of the interpersonal relations on which more complex social behaviors are built. (Rizzolatti et al 2006: 60)

2.4. “Rain Man” The reader will probably remember the following scene from a famous film: [A character has stopped in the middle of the street because the sign said DON'T WALK. An angry driver is yelling at him] Motorist: Hey you! Hey dipshit! Move it! You ain't gonna move, I'll move you! Raymond: Have to get to K-Mart. 400 Oak Street. The sign said 'Don't Walk'. Have to get to K-Mart. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095953/quotes)

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The scene comes from Rain Man (Barry Levinson 1988), an Academy Award winning film. This movie introduced the problem of autism to the general public through the character of Raymond, played by Dustin Hoffman. The conversation between Charlie (Raymond’s brother, played by Tom Cruise) and Dr Bruner can illustrate the folk view on autism: Charlie: He's not crazy, he's not retarded but he's here. Dr. Bruner: He's an autistic savant. People like him used to be called idiot savants. There's certain deficiencies, certain abilities that impairs him. Charlie: So he's retarded. Dr. Bruner: Autistic. There's certain routines, rituals that he follows. Charlie: Rituals, I like that. Dr. Bruner: The way he eats, sleeps, walks, talks, uses the bathroom. It's all he has to protect himself. Any break from this routine leaves him terrified. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095953/quotes)

Autism6 is a brain development disorder that occurs in differing degrees and comes in a variety of forms, usually known as “autistic spectrum disorders” (ASD), and which are commonly characterised by a triad of impairments (Frith et al. 1991; British National Autistic Society: http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=211):

1. Social communication: People with autism have difficulties with both verbal and non-verbal language. Many have a very literal understanding of language, and think people always mean exactly what they say. They can find it difficult to use or understand: ! facial expressions or tone of voice ! jokes and sarcasm ! common phrases and sayings; an example might be the phrase It’s cool, which people often say when they think that something is good, but strictly speaking, means that it’s a bit cold. 2. Social interaction: People with autism often have difficulty recognising or understanding other people’s emotions and feelings, and expressing their own, which can make it more difficult for them to fit in socially. They may: ! not understand the unwritten social rules which most of us pick up without thinking: they may stand too close to another person for example, or start an inappropriate subject of conversation

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Frith et al (1991), Frith and Happé (1995), Frith (2003).

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!

appear to be insensitive because they have not recognised how someone else is feeling ! prefer to spend time alone rather than seeking out the company of other people ! not seek comfort from other people ! appear to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as it is not always easy for them to express feelings, emotions or needs. 3. Social imagination: Social imagination allows us to understand and predict other people’s behaviour, make sense of abstract ideas, and to imagine situations outside our immediate daily routine. Difficulties with social imagination mean that people with autism find it hard to: ! understand and interpret other peoples thoughts, feelings and actions ! predict what will happen next, or what could happen next ! understand the concept of danger, for example that running onto a busy road poses a threat to them ! engage in imaginative play and activities: children with autism may enjoy some imaginative play but prefer to act out the same scenes each time ! prepare for change and plan for the future ! cope in new or unfamiliar situations. From the above list, the reader can immediately see ways in which autism is relevant to the understanding of the neural underpinnings of social cognition: autism is an impairment of social cognition with a biological origin; in other words, autism can be defined as a genetic deficit in the ability to predict and explain the behaviour of other humans in terms of their mental states, i.e., a sort of mindblindness, as Baron-Cohen (1995) dubbed it. Autism is to social cognition what Broca’s aphasia is to grammar7. Interestingly enough, Williams syndrome, which is a genetic disease resulting from the deletion of some genes on chromosome 7, instantiates the inverse pattern of autism: Williams syndrome patients show mental

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Patients with Broca’s aphasia “[…] produce little (or at least labored) speech, which is poorly articulated and telegraphic, involving omission of so-called 'function' or 'closed-class' words (articles, auxiliaries, etc.). Their speech relies heavily on nouns, and (to a far smaller degree) verbs. Their written communication follows this same production-comprehension dissociation, with impaired writing but often less severe disturbance to reading” (Swinney 1998: 31).

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retardation together with hypersociability and strengths in language, music and face recognition; that is, serious impairments in non-social domains together with very unusual social skills and with “[…] an exaggerated interest in other people and remarkable expressiveness and social communicative abilities.” (Adolphs 2003: 176) The dissociation between social and the rest of cognitive abilities is a further argument for the modularity of social cognition8. All the findings about mirror neurons, the relevance of the amygdala to the processing of faces and emotions (especially, fear and other threatening stimuli), and the role of the frontal lobes in social behaviour have shed new light on autism as an impairment in the ‘social brain’, as Ashwin et al. (2007) call it. In addition, the fact that autism does not necessarily correlate with mental retardation or deficits in other cognitive skills, such as language, reasoning or memory offers an argument for the specificity of social abilities. Thus, taken together, all these facts provide compelling evidence for the autonomy of the systems supporting social cognition.

2.5. The ‘social brain’ 2.5.1. A human-specific, universal system It is time to recapitulate on the data we have discussed so far in the previous sections, and to draw some consequences from it. Since the midnineties cognitive neuroscience has developed very fast. Meaningful correlations among certain brain areas and social behaviour have been discovered which provide partial, but very significant, answers to the question of what the neural bases of social cognition are9. The stories of Phineas Gage and S.M., and the discovery of mirror neurons, are representative instances of the kind of issues that cognitive neuroscientists deal with. The conclusion seems straightforward: what has been identified and described is a universal, human-specific set of biological mechanisms that

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Adolphs (2003), Meyer-Lindenberget al. (2005), Karmiloff-Smith (2007); Bellugi et al. (2007) 9 According to Caccioppo and Bernston (2005: xiii), the main findings are “[…] that the brain determines social behaviour, that there are dissociable systems in the brain for social and non-social processing, […] for face and object processing […], for the perception of biological and non-biological movement, and that the perceptions of biological movement can automatically elicit imitations and empathy”.

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determine social behaviour. Our ability to behave in society in an appropriate way does not merely depend on general, all-purpose cognitive capacities; on the contrary, our brain contains neural systems that specialise in processing different kinds of socially relevant information. We humans have biological, innate predispositions for certain abilities10, such as recognizing faces and emotions, following eye gaze, acting out a fictitious situation or identifying the intentions of others; and there are also innate constraints and predispositions that allow infants to learn about specific kinds of recurrent features of the social world quickly and efficiently, as Schaller et al (to appear) point out. None of these skills can be understood as a result of instruction; they are instances of nothing more than the normal development of the normal capacities of all members of our species, just like being able to speak or to stand up and walk on our feet.

2.5.2. A specialised, modular domain The specificity of these systems also suggests that social cognition should be conceived of as a modular mechanism or, more precisely, as a domain-specific capacity. A domain is a functional or anatomical component dedicated to the processing of a particular class of data. It processes only the sort of information to which it is sensitive: for instance, vision (a well-established modular domain) is sensitive to shape, colour and light patterns only; other simultaneous, but non-complying stimuli (for instance, auditory stimuli) cannot be processed by the visual system. A domain deals with information of a specific kind and format only, which means that it imposes certain conditions on the input. In addition, domains process their data in an automatic, predetermined way. Finally, domainspecificity allows for a further prediction as well. A modular cognitive

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10 “Six-month-old infants perceive animate action and follow gaze direction, which enables them to build up experiences on the basis of which they predict people’s actions in familiar contexts. By 9 months of age, infants understand that people have goals and persist in behaving until they see that their goal has been reached (avoiding obstacles and persisting past accidents and failures in the process) – being happy when the goal is reached and disappointed if it is not. By 14 months of age, infants begin to understand full-fledged intentional action – including the rudiments of the way people make rational decisions in choosing action plans for accomplishing their goals in particular reality contexts and selectively attending to goal-relevant aspects of the situation. This kind of understanding leads to some powerful forms of cultural learning, especially imitative learning […]” (Tomasello et al. 2005: 680). See also Saxe (2006).

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ability can be lost without any significant loss in other cognitive abilities. In this sense, a domain is a dissociable system. Indeed, this is precisely what we find: social abilities can be lost as the result of an injury or a disease, as illustrated by Gage’s and S.M.’s stories, or as the result of a genetic disorder, as shown by autism.

2.5.3. An adaptive evolution The emergence of such a specific and complex system for managing social interaction comes as no surprise from an evolutionary perspective. All the species that live in groups have to find a solution for the tension between two opposing factors: on one hand, collaboration among group members can enhance prospects for survival; but, at the same time, other members can be potential competitors as well. As Schaller et al (to appear: 2) point out, our brain evolved […] to help our ancestors make functional decisions in an environment that included other people as a prominent feature. Some of those people were relatives; some were strangers. Some were socially dominant; some were meek. Some were potential allies; others were potential enemies. Some were potential mates; others were potential competitors for those mates. Many aspects of human cognition – especially the processes that define the conceptual territory of social cognition – are adapted to the recurrent problems and opportunities posed by these other members of ancestral human populations.

While some species, such as bees, display rigid behaviour, we humans have developed more complex and flexible forms of behaviour. In this sense, social cognition is the response to the “[…] especially challenging demands of a complex social life of constant competition and cooperation with others in the social groups.” (Hermann et al. 2007: 1360). The human solution requires, as Adolphs (2001: 231) states, “[…] the ability to construct representations of the relations between oneself and others, and to use those representations flexibly to guide social behavior.”

3. The development of social abilities The previous considerations support the view that social cognition is a universal system. However, this universality can be found “[…] primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviours”, as Barkow et al. (1992: 5) put it. Of course, all neuroscientists acknowledge the importance of the cultural context within

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which an individual grows up, as the complementary environmental counterpart of the innate cognitive capacity.

3.1. The acquisition of culture In fact, normal human development depends crucially on both biological and cultural inheritance: social cognition will not mature adequately if it is not deployed in a social milieu. This is known as the Dual Inheritance Theory (Tomasello 1999). In other words, the development of an individual depends on the social and cultural context within which s/he grows. What we usually call culture is a collection of ways of thinking and behaving that members of a group share as a result of the process of socialisation and that determine their beliefs and behaviour11. It is commonly agreed that individuals acquire the set of norms and values of their culture. In fact, social cognition allows for an extraordinary degree of variation across cultural groups. As Tomasello (1999: 518) has pointed out, “[…] human cultural traditions and artifacts accumulate modifications over time, whereas this does not seem to be the case for nonhuman primate cultural traditions”. This is indeed a unique feature of human social cognition, a feature that Tomasello et al. (2005: 721) called ‘locality’. “Individual groups of humans develop their own unique ways of symbolizing and doing things – and these can be very different from the ways of other groups, even those living quite nearby.” Cultural diversity can be explained in terms of different ranking of values in different cultures. Ethnographers and scholars working on intercultural pragmatics have largely examined the relation between cultural features and communicative behaviour, so this is a topic that I will not pursue here. Becoming a “normal” member of a group requires “learning” to think, believe and act as other members in the group do. But how does this process take place? From the point of view of social neuroscience the relevant problem is how culture interacts with the social neural system; more specifically, how culture gets incorporated into the ‘social brain’. A frequent answer among anthropologists has been that cultural values and ways of thinking are representations which get communicated and

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See Janney and Arndt (1992, 1993), Jackendoff (1992); see also Piller (2007) for a critical view.

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transmitted from individual to individual and from one generation to the next in an epidemiological way: Consider a social group [...]. Each member of the group has, in his or her head, millions of mental representations, some short-lived, others stored in long-term memory and constituting the individual's ‘knowledge’. Of these mental representations, some — a very small proportion — get communicated repeatedly, and end up being distributed throughout the group, and thus have a mental version in most of its members. When we speak of cultural representations, we have in mind — or should have in mind — such widely distributed, lasting representations. (Sperber 1994: 33).

This account, however, puts too much emphasis on the representational, explicit side of culture. I do not mean to contend the idea that there are indeed cultural representations that are transmitted as such, but rather to suggest that this is not the main way in which most cultural values and routines are internalised. In addition, an approach in terms of epidemiological propagation of representations would entail that learning the values of a different culture is merely a matter of identifying the relevant set of representations and incorporating them into the individual’s mental database without any further effort. However, the difficulties that the learners of a foreign language experience show that things cannot be that simple. Other philosophers have proposed a different account. Bourdieu (1990: 55), for instance, emphasises the role of practice: The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices —more history — in accordance with the schemes engendered by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.

This account focuses on the implicit and non-representational side of the acquisition of culture, which may be a desirable move, but the proposal is not clear enough about the actual way in which this sort of implicit learning takes place.

3.2. The formation of mirror neuron chains The approaches put forward by anthropologists and philosophers to the problem of how cultural values are internalised are speculative hypotheses.

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Modern social neuroscience can provide a more convincing explanation with a sound empirical support. This new explanation is based on what has been discovered about mirror neurons. As the reader will remember, mirror neurons activate when an individual sees a goal-directed action performed by another individual; in the observer’s brain the neurons fire that are active when the individual is performing the action her/himself. In complex activities, mirror neurons have been found to form chains that, in some sense, “encode” particular sequences of related actions. A complex activity is, then, stored as a single chain of simpler subevents. Now, in children, the acquisition of the social patterns of their culture is carried out through a process of implicit learning, by which they internalise the practices of their group. Implicit learning, such as the kind that takes place in family life, is the result of the formation of millions of stable neural chains of mirror neurons. The same procedure extends to all kinds of social behaviour, which ensures the propagation of culturespecific practice. The activation of mirror neurons and the formation of neural chains constitute the biological device that underlies our innate ability to learn and internalise cultural experiences. A number of properties of the development of social cognition can be immediately related to the underlying neurological process. To begin with, it can account for the fact that social learning is primarily implicit. The process of formation of mirror neurons chains is an innate, automatic response, and requires neither the existence of any explicitly represented event, nor the subject’s awareness or her/his motivation to learn. The fact that social learning is basically a kind of implicit learning does not mean, of course, that explicit reinforcement has no role at all in the transmission of cultural patterns, or that explicitly taught representations should be completely discarded. Indeed, it is obvious that the explicit communication of cultural values has a privileged place in institutional education; however, it should be kept in mind that this sort of socialisation practice is a secondary source for social learning, not an inherent requisite for human social cognition to develop in a normal way. Second, chain formation provides empirical support for the idea that knowledge is organised in larger units that include sequences of events, participants and relations, in a way that reduces processing effort and allows predictions about the expected course of events. When a link in a neural chain is activated, the whole chain and its intermediate links are

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activated as well, so the internalised outcome is made readily accessible, with no need to access any explicit representation of the whole event12. Third, it can explain a feature of the acquisition of social abilities, namely that this acquisition process develops in a very fast way. This is so not only “[…] because there are so many ways to acquire it: directly from experience and indirectly from observation or cultural transmission” (Frith and Frith 2006: 39), but rather because we humans have a specific, dedicated system for social cognition that favours the acquisition of socially relevant skills. It has been shown by Mesoudi et al (2006) that information with a social load, such as gossip, is transmitted and remembered in a more accurate way than any kind of factual information. Our cognition is, therefore, biased towards socially related knowledge. The emergence of this system appears as the evolutionary response to the need to attune every individual to the systems of the other members of the group in a relatively short period of time. Fourth, it can account for the stability of implicit knowledge as well: once acquired, it is very difficult to modify this kind of knowledge, let alone remove it. This is probably so because neural chain formation is not merely a way to store information: it is not just like putting new books on a shelf or saving new files in a computer. Chains of neurons are both the information and its own support. When a chain is formed, the physical organisation of the brain itself changes to some extent13. This feature will prove to be crucial for the understanding of the differences between native and non-native learners. And last, but not least, it provides an explanation not only for the acquisition of patterns of action, but also for the acquisition of patterns of emotions and of emotion display. As mentioned before, mirror neurons also play a major role in the understanding of emotions, so the previous considerations can be extended to the way in which emotions are displayed and understood. Mirror neurons provide an explanation for some

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This does not mean, of course, that individuals cannot have conscious access to the contents of a script, with a complete representation of its constitutive parts and the relations among them; rather, what it predicts is that representation is not a necessary requisite for the internalisation of a complex activity. 13 This is true for different kinds of learning. Research carried out on London taxi drivers has shown that “part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than nontaxi drivers and its size is related to the time the person has been driving taxis” (Blakemore and Frith 2005: 462). The acquisition of navigational abilities, however, does not come for free: “[…] a different part of the hippocampus was found to be smaller in taxi drivers. So, there might be costs when one part of the brain develops and grows through experience.”

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external manifestations of empathy as well. When two persons empathise, they tend to display the same emotions, adopt the same gestures, and behave in a similar way. This sort of behavioural contagion is the result of the attunement in their mirror systems14. Thus, children implicitly learn how to react in different situations, how emotions are manifested, what emotions can be displayed and what should be avoided. To sum up, chains of mirror neurons are, thus, at the basis of implicit learning, and make it possible to explain how implicit knowledge is acquired and organised, for both actions and emotions.

3.3. The processing of social information In the previous section, an answer has been offered to the problem of how culture is incorporated into the ‘social brain’. But there is still a relevant question: once an individual has matured in her/his culture, what are the processes that take place in her/his brain when dealing with socially relevant stimuli? Though neuroscientists have found compelling evidence that the perception of a stimulus with a social load triggers the activation of all the brain areas that are involved in social cognition (orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, premotor cortex), they cannot provide a detailed answer to this question. They can, however, offer some significant hypotheses. The ’social brain’ can be conceived of as a postperceptual processing device, which receives visual information and relates it to information from other brain systems (memory, attention, decision making…). It is responsible for linking perceptual representations to behaviour on the basis of the emotional or social value of the stimuli. According to Adolphs (1999, 2001, 2003) and Frith and Frith (2006), the stimulus is first recognised and evaluated to yield a global representation. Such global representations can be seen as the result of a process of categorisation, i.e., of identifying and labelling the stimulus. The way in which the stimulus is categorised determines the subject’s response to it and her/his subsequent behaviour. Categorisation is an automatic process, one that is far beyond the conscious control of the subject, as is the identification of visual stimuli. This sort of process is called stimulus-driven, or “bottom-up”. For instance, current research has shown the important role of the amygdala in processing stimuli related to danger and threat, as a built-in feature of primate cognition --a feature that

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See Russell et al (2003), Frith and Frith (2006).

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enhances the individual’s prospects for survival by prompting a rapid and automatic reaction. This does not entail that culture has no bearing on categorisation; on the contrary, both basic instinctive responses and culture-sensitive information come into play. In fact, automatic responses can be modulated by implicitly acquired knowledge. For example, fear seems an instinctive reaction; however, the set of animals that are considered threatening depend heavily on culture, so the responses of their members, though automatic, are the result of a cultural view of danger. This is true even for facial expressions, as Adolphs et al. (1995: 672) have suggested, “Facial expressions can convey both basic emotions whose expression and recognition may be partly innate, as well as subtler emotions whose meaning is partially determined by culture.” The same goes for social stereotypes. A stereotype represents a quickand-simple way to categorise people about whom one knows little as individuals; it makes it possible to guide and predict behaviour, even if one can be aware of the fact that stereotypes are too simplistic and very often plainly incorrect. They are not individual constructions, but complex, culturally learnt categories that represent shared conceptualisations and produce automatic reactions: they are a further instance of how our brain tends to privilege efficiency over accuracy. However, bottom-up processes do not represent the whole story. There is more to social processing than automatic responses, be they instinctive or implicitly learnt. Research on the way we judge people has shown that explicitly acquired knowledge can affect social behaviour in a conscious way as well. Frith and Frith (2006) point out that the perception of outgroup members can elicit both positive and negative feelings. For instance, viewing a face from another race unconsciously produces activation of the amygdala as some sort of threatening stimulus; however, there is empirical evidence that people try to suppress this response by activating a conscious process of self-regulation that reanalyses the stimulus and the global categorisation delivered by the automatic systems, and tries to find new assessment of the individual by explicitly including other considerations. This kind of process, which does not depend on the properties of the stimulus, but rather on the knowledge of the subject, is called task-driven or “top-down” process15. The effect of top–down processes on all our predictions of social behaviour is an example of a general cognitive process that applies to all the information that we process, either from the physical or from the social

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See Semin and Cacioppo (2008).

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world. Thus, top–down processes allow us to become aware of what we are doing and in this way allow us to repair and redirect inappropriate but powerful automatic responses. (Frith and Frith 2006: 44)

One of the most salient features of social cognition is the fact that it responds not only to perceptual, physical properties of stimuli, but also to learnt social judgements with no perceptual motivations. There are a number of categories, such as those related to social roles, which do not necessarily have a direct, visible correlate, but are ultimately a product of the brain itself; however, they have a central function in our behaviour. A young doctor will be approached preferably as a doctor (which is something that you cannot see, but have to know), than as a young individual (which is something you can directly perceive). In such cases, additional information is used to go beyond what can be directly perceived, a crucial step for guiding behaviour in social interaction. In this way, social cognition both creates specific categories and provides the mechanisms for dealing with them, including the need to inhibit automatic responses. This shows the tension between stimulus-driven processing and the sensitivity to culture-created distinctions. To sum up, as Adolphs (2001: 231) puts it, Social cognition guides both automatic and volitional behavior by participating in a variety of processes that modulate behavioral response: memory, decision-making, attention, motivation and emotion are all prominently recruited when socially relevant stimuli elicit behavior.

Thus, social cognition draws on both biology and culture, and brings into play both automatic and conscious processes. The relationship among these categories is not a simple one, since there is not a direct, one-to-one mapping. The intertwining can be appreciated from several points of view: on the one hand, what is learnt through exposure to a given culture is acquired through a biologically determined set of devices; on the other hand, a significant part of the knowledge we acquire as members of a culture is internalised and yields automatic responses; and finally, conscious thinking can inhibit automatic reactions. This complex network of connexions can be represented as in the following diagram:

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Figure 1-1: Network of connexions

4. Implications for second language learning Neuroscientists have found brain areas dedicated to the processing of socially relevant data that are to some extent independent from other cognitive abilities; the ‘social brain’ follows specific paths of development and specific processing routes. It is time to explore the implications of such a system for second language learning. As mentioned in the Introduction, the problems in the acquisition of a second language that both teachers and student report are the following (repeated here for convenience): ! Being unable to understand and interpret other peoples thoughts, feelings and actions ! Having difficulty using or understanding facial expressions, tone of voice, jokes and sarcasm, common phrases and sayings (tending to understand them literally) ! Not understanding some unwritten social rules, such as standing too close to another person, or starting an inappropriate topic of conversation ! Appearing to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as the result of the inability to express feelings, emotions or needs in the expected way ! Appearing to be insensitive as the result of not having recognised how someone else is feeling The first significant fact is the striking resemblance between this list and that which enumerated impairments in autism. What this reveals in an obvious way is that the difficulties that learners experience are problems with social cognition, as if the whole social brain collapsed when speaking a different language. Why is this so?

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4.1. Mirror neurons and second language learning Mirror neurons proved to be a relevant system for implicit learning, including all sorts of practical and social learning. We should therefore expect that the mirror system could contribute to facilitating the learning of a foreign language and to acquiring its social practices. However, it seems that this prediction is not borne out, as the difficulties experienced by learners show. Rather, what has been commonly assumed is that there is a critical period for language learning, and after that period, the ability to learn decreases significantly. In fact, transfer from the first language into a second language, and from the common social practices of one’s native culture into another culture, indicates that, once established, the values of a language and a culture can hardly be modified16. Once such assumptions are formed, they remain relatively stable and their influence on social interaction becomes almost automatic. Events that contradict them do not change them, but tend rather to be interpreted as incorrect, ununderstandable, or abnormal. (Janney and Arndt 1992: 31)

Is there any biological explanation for this somewhat unexpected fact? Nowadays, most neuroscientists believe that critical periods are not completely rigid and inflexible; they are not critical, just especially ‘sensitive’, and relate to biological changes in the brain’s ability to be shaped by experiences17. In a developmental study about the adolescent brain, Blakemore and Choudhury (2006) have reported the existence of a number of significant neural changes linked to puberty and adolescence. Their findings strongly suggest that the social system, once initialised with the input data from the individual’s native environment, might lose the capacity for incorporating new data after puberty, so social cognition tends to fossilise. This is not unlike what can be found in the domain of grammar: there is a critical period in the acquisition, so once the individual has acquired a particular grammar, or particular phonological system, s/he cannot build a different one on the same innate basis: “Much like sound categorisation during language acquisition […], experience with executive functions and certain social cognitive skills might be much more difficult to incorporate into brain networks once they are established after puberty.” (Blakemore and Choudhury 2006: 307) This may come as a rather unexpected fact. There has been common agreement on the specificity of grammar as a modular system, and on the

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See, for example, Kasper (1992), Escandell-Vidal (1996b). Blakemore and Frith (2005).

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particular development of paths and periods for its acquisition18. Social routines have been considered, on the contrary, as external norms, as a set of non-constitutive, conventional routines merely “added” in interaction. The neural specificity of the systems involved in social cognition and their dissociation from other cognitive capacities have shown that the social brain is not very different from the language faculty. A new piece of evidence has thus been found that completes the picture of social cognition and supports its specificity as a neural system. Now the question is why it should be so: why social cognition should come with an “expiry date”. A tentative answer could be provided along the following lines. The social neural system has to be attuned to the patterns of the group in a relatively short period of time; its mission is to deliver fast, simple and stereotypical responses to familiar situations, without having to calculate every situation anew, which would result in a slow and effortful social processing19. It might well be, then, that evolution has favoured a system that is extraordinarily active during a given period of time only–in which it has to establish the relevant chain connections,but that cannot keep this high level of activation forever. In addition, as was mentioned before, the internalisation of native culture patterns does not merely fill available gaps on a shelf, but builds the adequate shelf. Brain resources are powerful, but limited, so there is always a cost to any cognitive operation. This can explain why chains of mirror neurons, once created, can hardly be modified at all.

4.2. A different processing strategy This does not entail, however, that learning after puberty is impossible, or that mirror neurons stop working after that age. In fact, there are many

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DeKeyser (2000). This is, at least, what can be hypothesised in view of the following considerations: The prefrontal cortex participates in implementing a particular mechanism by which we acquire, represent, and retrieve the values of our actions. This mechanism relies on generating somatic states, or representations of somatic states, that correspond to the anticipated future outcome of decisions. Such ‘somatic markers’ steer the decision-making process toward those outcomes that are advantageous for the individual, on the basis of the individual’s past experience with similar situations. Such a mechanism may be of special importance in the social domain, where the enormous complexity of the decision space typically precludes an exhaustive analysis (Adolphs 2001: 235) 19

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different things we usually learn as adults, such as accountancy, laws, or driving a car. And mirror neurons keep doing their job as facilitators of learning through imitation. A crucial difference, however, can be found between social abilities, on the one hand, and the acquisition of factual knowledge and practical skills, on the other, which crucially do not involve social information. As for social information, the fact that the storage of new patterns is not completely free and available after a given period does not turn learning into an impossible task. It may still be possible, but through a different strategy, namely, by using the same system that stores factual information. In other words, we can learn the norms of interaction of a different culture, but we can no longer benefit from the quick-and-ready organisation and processing routines of our social systems. Instead, we have to store such norms as (regular) factual information, not as implicit knowledge. This is, indeed, what we presumably do, as Blakemore and Frith (2005: 462) point out: We also assume that there is, in addition, an all-purpose ‘mind-machine’ that is not specifically geared to particular stimuli, but can cope with almost anything. This is like a general learning system that simply responds to associations of experience. Again speculatively, we suggest that this general mechanism might take over if a module is faulty. It would make any learning different from normal fast learning, but still feasible.

This would explain why late learning of social norms is “[…] different from the type of learning that occurs naturally during sensitive periods.” (Blakemore and Frith 2005: 461). In addition, it will be consistent with DeKeyser’s (2000: 518) findings: “Learners with high verbal ability can use explicit learning mechanisms to bypass the increasingly inefficient implicit mechanisms.” The difficulties for late learning of the social patterns of a different culture are not limited to the inability to internalise new information in an implicit way after a given period; if that was not enough, a further problem arises, namely the fact that the automatic social devices of the learner will still continue using her/his native, internalised cultural values, which can be very different from those of the target language and culture, and which will cause transference and intercultural misunderstandings. To avoid them, the learner will have to set up a secondary self-regulation process in order to inhibit the automatic response whenever it is inadequate to the newly acquired norms. This will require first building an explicit representation of the situation and all socially relevant details, then

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inhibiting her/his automatic responses and finally replacing them by consciously monitored reactions. This would explain both the persistence of pragmatic transfer (even across various generations of immigrant families, as Kasper, 1992 has reported), and the slow and effortful interaction of non-native speakers. What is different in learners’ processing is the division of labour between conscious and automatic processes in social interaction: conscious processes take control of the interaction, and top-down and monitoring tasks have a leading role in avoiding the interference of internalised, automatic processes based on the social categories of their first language. This situation can be summarised in the following graph:

Figure 1-2: Learners’ processing

4.3. What can teachers do? Social cognition can, thus, explain the difficulties that learners of a second language experience. Can it also provide some suggestions for teachers to facilitate learning? Answering this question would require an experienced second language teacher, which unfortunately, do not have. However, some tentative hints can be offered about how to maximise the possibilities of social cognition. 4.3.1. The nature of input The first consideration has to do with the nature of the input. Most current approaches to second language teaching emphasise that the student has to learn from real life situations: purely structural learning (such as the kind normally used for learning Latin or Ancient Greek) can hardly develop communicative competence. This idea receives further support

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from what social neuroscientists have discovered. The mirror system activates with goal-directed actions, so any kind of learning will presumably be enhanced and facilitated if linked to concrete tasks. Goaldirected activities in which language itself is not in focus, but is a means to achieving a superordinate purpose have every chance of producing better results. The methods based on activities with a motor counterpart, such as in the classical ‘total physical response’ method (Asher 1969), could possibly exploit the mirror system in an even deeper way. True, those methods will not adjust the social cognition values overnight, but nevertheless they will foster implicit learning by boosting the associative links between language use and social experience. Also related to the nature of the input is the role of conscious learning and awareness. The emphasis on implicit learning, practical abilities and communicative methods has pushed the role of the explicit representations to the background, and explicitly taught content has been neglected in some influential methods. However, current approaches to social cognition have shown the significant role of conscious self-regulation and of topdown (task-driven) processing in inhibiting undesired automatic reactions, as a means of attempting to avoid intercultural misunderstandings. In fact, if implicit learning capacities are not available for social cognition after a given period, and if the social patterns of a different culture have to be learnt, explicit representations will have to play a major role. Raising awareness about cultural differences and the social parameters governing them is a necessary step towards social adequacy in a foreign language20. 4.3.2. The learner’s profile Apart from the nature of the input, the nature of the learner has to be taken into account as well. The development pattern of social cognition as a biological system suggests that there should be significant age differences in the way a new language and its culture are learnt, depending on the activation status of implicit learning mechanisms. The prediction is that children will learn more deeply and adults will learn faster. This is in fact what has been suggested in the literature on the psychology of learning: “Children do better in terms of ultimate attainment because many elements of language are hard to learn explicitly […]; adults learn faster because their capacities for explicit learning let them take shortcuts” (DeKeyser 2003: 335). The prediction is that children will learn more

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Advantages of explicit learning can also be found for grammar, and apparently we are witnessing the birth of a new ‘focus-on-form’ era (DeKeyser, 2007).

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deeply and adults will learn faster. This is in fact what has been suggested in the literature on the psychology of learning: “[...] full-scale immersion is necessary for children to capitalize on their implicit learning skills, and formal rule teaching is necessary for adolescents and adults to draw on their explicit learning skills.” The fact that late learning has to resort to explicit representations does not necessarily entail that these should remain conscious forever. In fact, explicitly learned abilities become automatic when repeated. This is what happens, for instance, when learning to drive a car: sequences of movements have to be explicitly learned, together with conditions and restrictions on performance. But after some practice, all these tasks are carried out with less and less effort, until they become automatic. Such unconscious actions, without having exactly the same status as implicitly acquired patterns, eventually become routine and produce the effect of smooth interaction. 4.3.3. Scripts as analytical tools Both for those learners that require implicit scenarios and for those that need explicit representations, teachers may find the notion of script as an analytical tool very useful. This notion was borrowed from Artificial Intelligence: “A script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in particular contexts […] a predetermined stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation” (Shank and Abelson 1977: 41). For the AI developers, a script was a means to analyse, describe and model the way in which knowledge is stored, organised and retrieved, which can provide a common template for the computational implementation of behaviour. The fact that, at a neural level, learning can be seen as a process of formation of chains of mirror neurons provides empirical support for the notion of script as an adequate concept in the account of social behaviour. The notion of script has also been adopted by a number of researchers in the field of pragmatics. It has the obvious advantage of allowing both analysing and describing whole situations as sequences of features, conditions, participants and activities, and conceiving sequences of events as single processing units. In this sense, it has turned out to be a powerful conceptual instrument21. On the one hand, scripts can explain an individual’s behaviour and her/his understanding of similar behaviour in

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See Tannen (1993), Escandell-Vidal (1996a), among many others.

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others; scripts represent as well the main source of expectations regarding courses of actions: it is very easy to show that when presented with a familiar activity, we all know what comes next; finally, scripts provide an elegant explanation of cultural differences. In addition, the notion of script can be further extended to the analysis of emotions, as Russell (1991, 2005) has suggested. There is “[…] great similarity, but not always identity, across cultures in the way in which emotions communicable by facial expression are categorized. There is also, surprisingly, evidence for differences as well” (Russell 1991: 426). Thus, to account for cross-cultural diversity, Russell has suggested that emotions are not simple concepts, but rather have to be analysed in more basic features, in a way not unlike the sequences of actions that make up complex activities. In this sense, he suggests that the notion of script can be also useful to explain the differences in the categorisation of emotions, which should be understood as a sequence of subevents rather than as homogeneous concepts. As Russell (1991: 442) puts it, In happiness, you desire something, get it, feel pleasure, smile, and, perhaps feel kind toward others. For other concepts, the story is more complicated. Jealousy might include anger, but jealousy implies a surrounding situation, a social relationship involving three people, specific motives, behaviors, and consequences. These implications must be understood to know what the word jealousy means.

The same explanation goes for the norms that different cultures establish about the control of emotional expression, which Russell calls display rules: These display rules might dictate that at a funeral, for example, grief should be inhibited, displayed, or exaggerated. Peoples of different cultures thus expect different behavioral consequences of specific emotions. Again, I propose that these expectations are incorporated into the meaning of terms and that this aspect of meaning can vary with culture. (Russell 1991: 444)

So, display rules can vary from culture to culture, but once they have been internalised, they automatically determine behaviour, with no need for conscious access to any sort of explicit representation. Finally, it is worth devoting a few words to the debate about the notion of culture and its role in intercultural communication. Some scholars reject the common, “essentialist” view of culture as a set of norms and

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representations shared by the members of a group22, which they find too static and artificial. They reject as well the “[…] pervasive association between ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘misunderstanding’” (Piller 2007: 214). Instead, they defend a constructivist approach, in which culture is conceived of as a dynamic notion that speakers construct in discourse. So, the idea that in intercultural communication there are two different systems of values that can enter into conflict should be replaced by a scenario in which negotiation and the search for a common ground and a shared context have a leading role. Perhaps that would be a desirable situation, but it does not seem feasible at all. To begin with, negotiation and the search for a common ground both require, to some extent, laying one’s cards on the table: this means that the interlocutors should have an explicit representation of the current situation, of what is shared and what is not, and how to build a common ground, which is precisely the kind of approach to culture that one was supposed to try to avoid. Inevitably, each participant will enter the communicative exchange with some initial assumptions, most of which are not even consciously and explicitly represented by the participants themselves; native speakers have implicitly learned the patterns of their group, so they do not usually have conscious access to the particular values and settings that determine their social behaviour.

5. Conclusion It is time to conclude. The findings in the field of social neuroscience suggest that our understanding of social cognition has to be articulated in a way that should be compatible with its dual nature, i.e., as a biological system and as a product of culture; as a processing device with a neural basis, and as a social mirror that depends on the exposure to a specific culture for its development and operation; as innate feature of neural architecture, and as an emergent social construction; as a universal faculty and a culture-specific set of skills. The result is a complex processing system, in which predetermined responses, implicitly acquired routines

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Piller (2007: 211) considers the following definition of culture as the prototype of the essentialist view: […] the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, social hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relationships, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. (Samovar and Porter 2003: 8, quoted by Piller 2007: 211)

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and explicitly learnt norms all have a precise role in the production and understanding of social behaviour. Many of the ideas that had usually been taken for granted about social cognition were–we know now--hypotheses and superficial speculations that did not hold any water. What we currently know about the neural underpinnings of human social abilities casts new light on these issues: some of those ideas are being questioned, whereas others have received empirical support. Current research has provided a more solid foundation to the debate and a firmer ground on which to establish new approaches to social behaviour and intercultural communication. Among those findings, the one with the most far-reaching theoretical consequences is that social cognition qualifies as a domain specific system, with its own procedure and its own processing paths. In this sense, social and grammatical faculties have proven to be more similar than what had been assumed. In addition, a new approach to the division between body and mind, between biology and psychology will no doubt be a central topic for debate in the coming years. The central role of the mirror system in understanding the behaviour of others has influenced our view on cognition from an approach based on representations towards the idea of embodiment. All this perfect machinery for picking up and internalising social norms of behaviour can collapse as the result of certain diseases or accidents; in such cases, the result is not very different from what happens to learners of a second language: for some period, their social ability seems to have disappeared. Not only do they lack the set of internalised patterns of the target culture, but their own cultural experience does not prove helpful either in intercultural communication. These kinds of learner difficulties find a natural explanation in terms of the properties of the underlying social system. However, the brain can resort to different strategies to alleviate those problems. Our current understanding of how our social brain works has largely benefited from what neuroscientists have discovered in the last decade: they have offered many sound answers to a host of intriguing questions; and yet there is still much to learn. This is what makes the research in the field of social cognition and second language learning a fascinating enterprise.

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Wicker, B., Ch. Keysers, J. Plailly, J.-P. Royet, V. Gallese and G. Rizzolatti .“Both of us disgusted in my insula: the common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust”. Neuron 40 (2003): 655–664.

PART I: COGNITIVE ISSUES ON L2 TEACHING

CHAPTER TWO CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN CONCEPTUALIZATION AND THEIR APPLICATION IN L2 INSTRUCTION! ALBERTO HIJAZO-GASCÓN

1. Introduction The Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Barcelona 2002; Cuenca and Hilferty 1999; Kövecses 2000) considers that a metaphor is a conceptualizing mechanism that helps to understand complex concepts through simple ones, by mapping a source domain into a target domain through different correspondences. Metaphors are embedded in our discourse and often used to express key concepts or evaluations. Although some metaphors seem to be universal, culture variation plays an important role in conceptualizing abstract concepts and creating extensive meanings. Then, the study of metaphors is an important issue to cross-cultural studies (Kövecses 2005; Ibarretxe Antuñano 2008). Metonymy is another cognitive device that structures our conceptual domains. In this case, the activations will be done within the same domain. Since metonymies are structuring the domain of Lust as well, some of them will be collected here. But it is important to note that this paper is focused on metaphors and it will not enter into the discussion of differences in the status of metaphors and metonymies.

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! This paper is based on the paper presented to the doctorate course “Tipología y semántica: la conceptualización del mundo y el significado desde el punto de vista interlingüístico” given by Dr. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). I would like to thank her for her help and support in elaborating this paper.

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2. Metaphors for lust in English and Spanish This paper studies how Lust is conceptualized in English and Spanish. Csábi (1998) establishes a corpus for Lust metaphors in English and compares the use of frequency of these metaphors in two different genres, romantic novel and pornographic. Her classification by frequency was collected in Kövecses (2005). In this study, Csábi’s methodology and classification is applied to the study of Lust metaphors in Hispanic language and culture. Through the present study for Spanish, it is observed if cultural variation is possible in metaphors that refer to a domain, which is a taboo itself: Sexual Desire. In order to do so, a corpus of conceptual metaphors and metaphoric expressions is collected from three romantic novels by Corín Tellado, one of the most famous Spanish author in this genre. This corpus will allow us to see whether English and Spanish metaphors coincide and if they are used with the same frequency in both languages. Furthermore the structure of each conceptual domain will be taken into account, showing which metaphors are valid for each part of the domain. It should be noticed that this study is preliminary since the comparison with the English corpus is limited. The Spanish corpus contains only 120 metaphors and metonymies while Csábi’s comprises 370 examples in two different genres. This quantitative difference must be explained before comparing both corpora and it should be present along this paper. Table 21 compares the frequency of metaphors and metonymies (marked with an asterisk) for Lust found in English and Spanish. The number of examples found for each metaphor is indicated in brackets.

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Metaphors for lust in English (Csábi 1998) FIRE/HEAT (65) She yielded to his fiery passion. HUNGER/EATING (50) He prepared to satisfy their sexual hunger.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/WILDNESS (25) He moved with animal ferocity

BODY HEAT FOR LUST (25) * His masculinity made her body go hot. WAR (21) He took her mouth in a preliminary conquest. INSANITY (20) She had turned him into a raving maniac.

NATURAL FORCE (19) She felt the flood.

RAPTURE (18) He gave her a drugging kiss.

OPPONENT (17) He struggled against his lust.

Metaphors for lust in Spanish FIRE/HEAT (22) Aquella cercanía encendía sus sentidos. ‘That nearness lighted her senses’ PHYSICAL AGITATION FOR LUST (13) * Se estremeció al oír su nombre de los labios de él. ‘She shuddered when she heard her name from his lips’. AWAKENING FROM LETHARGY/ TURN TO LIFE (13) Stephen había despertado en ella sensaciones que no creía posibles. ‘Stephen aroused in her feelings that she did not believe possible’. RAPTURE (8) Su cabeza daba vueltas. ‘She felt dizzy.’ POSSESED OBJECT (8) Recordó cómo Gareth la había poseído. ‘She remembered how Gareth had possessed her’. OPPONENT (7) Le arrebató de golpe toda la resistencia que había reunido. ‘He snatched her all the resistance she had collected’. NATURAL FORCE (6) Ella sintió que su cuerpo estallaba en oleadas de placer. ‘She felt how her body exploded in waves of pleasure’. CONTAINER/CONTAINED ELEMENT (6) Sentía que estaba a punto de estallar. ‘She felt about to burst’. PAIN/TORMENTOR (5) Sintió una aguda punzada de deseo. ‘He felt a sharp pain of desire’.

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!

PHYSICAL AGITATION FOR LUST (17) * A hot shiver went through her.

PAIN/TORMENTOR (16) His touched tormented her.

CONTAINER (15) Her passion exploded.

UNITY/BOND (12) Their bodies collided and merged into one fiery entity. POSSESED OBJECT (10) She wanted him to let him have her.

PHYSICAL FORCE (10) There was no denying the power of his sexual magnetism.

GAME/PLAY (9) “I´m not playing your games”, she said. MAGICIAN (7) Their lovemaking had been magic.

INTERFERENCE WITH ACCURATE PERCEPTION FOR LUST (6) * She lost her ability to think.

PHYSICAL FORCE (5) Ella no era consciente del magnetismo de sus ojos. ‘She was not aware of her eyes` magnetism’. DISCOVERY/DIFFICULT GOAL TO REACH (5) Como si sus cuerpos fueran un oasis tras haber caminado largo tiempo por un árido e inalcanzable desierto. As if their bodies were an oasis, after being walking for a long time through a dry and unachievable desert. WAR (4) Él estaría contando a sus amigos la batalla que había ganado. He would be telling his friends about the battle he had won. BODY HEAT (4) * Estaba a su lado, sintiendo su calor. He was next to her, feeling her heat. HUNGER/EATING (4) Seguía sintiendo hambre de los labios de Elena. ‘He kept feeling hunger for Elena´s lips’. TABOO/FORBIDDEN OBJECT (3) Era una forma de prohibirse volver a pensar en Gareth. ‘It was a way of forbidding herself to think in Gareth’. ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/WILDNESS (2) No podría controlar sus reacciones. ‘She could not control her own reactions’. GAME/PLAY (2) Los mismos juegos amorosos en los que él la había iniciado. ‘The same love games in which he had initiated her’. WOMEN SEXUALITY IS A FLOWER (2) Bajo su mirada había florecido como una maravillosa flor nocturna. ‘Under his look, she had blossomed like a wonderful night flower’.

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TRICKSTER (5) She bewitches men.

SOCIAL SUPERIOR (5) She was driven by lust.

TRICKSTER (1) ¿No te bastó con seducirme con tus sucias artimañas? ‘Was it not enough to seduce me with your dirty tricks?’ INTERFERENCE WITH ACCURATE PERCEPTION FOR LUST (1) * Ella tenía algo que le desconcertaba y le atraía. She had something that disconcerted and attracted him. MAGICIAN (1) Los mismos juegos amorosos en los que él la había iniciado como un profano ritual. ‘The same love games in which he had initiated her as a profane ritual’.

Table 2-1: A comparison of English and Spanish metaphors for lust

3. Parts of the target domain Sexual Desire is a wide domain and therefore it is important to see how metaphors and metonymies structure the domain. Desire itself, participants and different stages in the domain are relevant for certain metaphors, and these are exclusively used to structure one part of the domain. For example, DESIRE IS AWAKENING is only available for the start of the feeling of desire and not for all parts of the domain. Other metaphors can be applied to different phases or to both participants. It is the case of LUST IS CONTAINED ELEMENT for the Desire itself is a contained element, but the desiring person is a container, within the same metaphor. The same can occur in other cases such as SEXUAL DESIRE IS RAPTURE, rapture is the moment in which the desire becomes true and the previous phases to rapture correspond to the start of the feeling, or SEXUAL DESIRE IS FIRE / HEAT, the start of desire is lighting the fire, the lack of lust is cold… It is important to bear in mind the different distribution of these metaphors in the organization of this domain since it can have an effect on the frequency of use of the metaphors. In sum, the parts of the domain established here are: desire itself, participants (who desires and who is desired) and different stages of the desire (beginning, consummation and end). It has been observed how most metaphors tend to specialize in one part of the domain or two, establishing a special relation with some parts of the

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domain: desiring person and desired person; beginning of desire and realization of desire, and so on. As a consequence, a metaphor used for the desiring person is bound to be used for desired person as well, rather than for any other part of the domain. In any case, three metaphors have been found as the most “polyvalent” in our corpus since they appear in three parts of the domain: DESIRE IS OBJECT (applied to the participants and to the moment of realization, as taking possession of the object). The other two are used in the three temporal phases of the domain: DESIRE IS OPPONENT (beginning of the fight, fight and end of the resistance to the opponent) and DESIRE IS WAR (beginning, war and end).

4. Differences between the Spanish and English corpora In this section the differences between both corpora will be analyzed. Some of the metaphors and metonymies appear in one of the corpus but not in the other. It will be showed how the lack of some metaphors in the corpus does not imply the inexistence of these metaphors in that language.

4.1 English metaphors that do not appear in the Spanish corpus DESIRE IS INSANITY, DESIRE IS BOND and DESIRE IS SOCIAL SUPERIOR have not been found in the Spanish corpus. However, it does not mean that these metaphors are not known in the Spanish language. In fact, the metaphoric expressions given by Csábi for English can be easily translated into Spanish. The CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual, ‘Current Spanish Reference Corpus’1) was consulted to show that these metaphors are possible in Spanish, too: Deja que la locura te invada, interpreta la danza de los siete velos, hazle algún numerito o dile palabras fuertes. (Magdalena Reyes, Spain 1995). ‘Let insanity invade you, perform the seven veils dance, make him a scene or tell him strong words ’ Por las noches, aparte de fundir nuestros cuerpos con más o menos convicción en la gran cama turolense. (Carmen Martín Gaite, Spain 1992). At nights, apart from uniting our bodies, with more or less conviction in the big bed in Teruel. Un voraz apetito sexual me dominaba. (Ramón Hernández, Spain 1995).

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http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html

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‘A voracious sexual appetite dominated me’.

Then, there are two possible explanations to this fact. One is the limited dimension of the present corpus. On the other hand, their lack here could imply that they are not among the most prototypical in Spanish. Future studies will tell us which of these two possibilities is the right one.

4.2 Spanish metaphors that do not appear in the English corpus In the current study four domains have been found only in Spanish to conceptualize sexual desire: SEXUAL DESIRE IS AWAKENING OF LETHARGY SEXUAL DESIRE IS A DISCOVERY/DIFFICULT GOAL TO ACHIEVE SEXUAL DESIRE IS A TABOO/PROHIBITED ELEMENT WOMEN´S SEXUALITY IS A FLOWER As in the case of the metaphors that do not appear in the Spanish corpus, the fact that these metaphors are not found in the Csábi’s and Kövecses’ papers does not mean that they do not exist in English. It rather points out that its frequency is low in English and therefore, there is a difference in its use if a comparison with Spanish metaphors is held. It has been done a preliminary research in the British National Corpus2 for the four metaphors and it has been found an example for the first one: The body builder, wrestler, aerobics queen and Madonna use their bodies to control the responses of others: to arouse feelings of fear, jealousy, admiration and desire in others. Status: what it is and how to achieve it. Davies, Philippa. London: Piatkus Books, 1991, 2381 s-units, 36076 words.

In any case these searches should be improved in the future. In the two analyzed corpora, some differences have been found. Tough these metaphors might be produced in those languages and they simply do not appear in the corpora due to its limited extension, it is important to highlight that it is not aimed here to see if these metaphors are possible in these languages (because they probably are). What is being shown here is that the frequency with which they are used is minor than in the other cases.

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http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk

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5. Differences in frequency of use in Spanish and English lust metaphors After having analyzed the data and the differences in quantity in the corpus, the next step is to check out whether these languages tend to use some of these Lust metaphors more often than others. It has been found that the source domains most frequently used in Spanish are FIRE/HEAT, PHYSICAL AGITATION, AWAKENING FROM LETHARGY/ TURN TO LIFE, RAPTURE and POSSESED OBJECT. Comparing them with the five most used in English in Csábi´s corpus FIRE/HEAT, HUNGER/EATING, ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/WILDNESS, BODY HEAT and WAR, it can be concluded that the metaphor LUST IS FIRE/HEAT is common to both languages and it might be considered as a universal, at least within the Western Culture. However, it could be interesting to point out that some frequent domains in English are not so in Spanish: HUNGER and ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, for example, appear in the corpus as minor metaphors in Spanish. Even the fourth and fifth domains in English, that is, the metonymy LUST IS BODY HEAT and the metaphor LUST IS WAR are at the same level as LUST IS HUNGER in the Spanish corpus with only four examples each. On the other hand, it can be seen how the most frequent domains in Spanish do not coincide with the most frequent in English: RAPTURE, PHYSICAL AGITATION and POSSESED OBJECT are in the middle of Csábi´s list and the second metaphor in use in Spanish. LUST IS AWAKENING does not appear in the English corpus, so its frequency in that language must be low. As a conclusion, it can be seen how cultural variation can be found in different languages within the same conceptual domain. It is true that our experience as human beings makes our conceptualization of the world similar, but each culture makes variation arise with differences in metaphors, frequency of use and specializations of different parts of the domains3. Even in domains with high importance of human experience such as perception verbs, it has been shown how differences in the use of the senses depending on the culture can vary. It has been pointed out how a universal-thought metaphor as SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING should be extended to PERCEPTION IS UNDERSTANDING (IbarretxeAntuñano 2008). In the case of LUST it has been seen how all the metaphors found in both corpora are understandable in both languages (even those that are not

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A more detailed view of cultural variation in metaphors can be seen in Kövecses (2005)

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found in the corpus in the other language)4. Moreover, LUST IS FIRE/HEAT is clearly the most used metaphor in English and Spanish. The differences are in the frequency of use. In the second part of this paper, it will be shown how the study of these differences is useful to Second Language instruction, especially to the development of language learning strategies.

6. Cognitive linguistics applied to second language teaching 6.1 Cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics Cognitive Linguistics has caused an important change in the development of Applied Linguistics contributing with a new point of view to Second Language teaching. Some of the interesting points that link this theory with Applied Linguistics have been collected by F. Boers and S. Lindstromberg (2006). These items are: - Language is considered an integral part of cognition as whole. So language learning will be improved thanks to the application of general theories of cognitive processing. - The idea of an acquisition faculty which leads to essentially the same results in L1 or in L2 acquisition. - No dichotomy between grammar and lexis. This will be useful especially in the study of semi-fixed multiword expressions, i.e. idioms. - No distinction between ‘dictionary meaning’ and ‘encyclopaedic meaning’. Then, words and patterns are nodes in semantic networks. If one is activated the others will follow it. That implies that language instruction aims at depth of linguistic knowledge and pedagogical exploration of inter-subjectivity. - The importance of figurative meaning in semantics of languages and in patterns of thought. So metaphor and metonymy will be useful to the development of communicative competence, as will be seen later. - Semantics is a matter of conceptualization of speakers and their construction of the world under the influence of culture-specific

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Although it has been shown that the same metaphors do not necessarily appear in all different varieties of the same language, see, for example, Hijazo-Gascón´s (forthcoming) comparison between Chilean and European Spanish metaphor for lust.

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preferences, subjectively and anthropocentrically. This points out the importance of cross-cultural perspective in L2 instruction. - The central role that motivation plays in Cognitive Linguistics can have an important pedagogical potential. It can help learners reach a deeper understanding of linguistic phenomena. Moreover, motivation can be a useful device to retention and processing of the information and it can contribute to reach pragmatic and cultural awareness. From these cognitive theoretical items pointed by Boers and Lindstromberg, many applications have been proposed, mainly in the field of polysemy (including prepositions, phrasal verbs, verbs and discourse connectors), idioms and constructions. Furthermore, cognitive applications have also reached other skills such as reading comprehension or raising cultural awareness (see Boers and Lindstromberg 2006). Indeed, it is especially interesting the study of the acquisition of figurative meaning by children and their pedagogical application (Piquer-Píriz 2008).

6.2 Metaphor and Strategic Competence The study of metaphor is considered important for the development of different skills, specially reading comprehension (Boers and Lindstromberg 2006; Littlemore 2001). Cameron (1999: 111) claims that “[…] readers may try metaphoric processing as one strategy for dealing with interpretation problems [in discourse]”. Thus, it seems clear how the study of metaphors helps to comprehension, but it enriches language production, too. If it is true, it means that the study of metaphors contributes to all levels of communicative competence and increases their fluency and effectiveness. Littlemore (2001) studies the benefits of metaphor applied to language instruction. and proposes the term metaphorical intelligence, to refer to the ability of interpreting, producing and appreciating metaphors5. This concept relies on the psychological processes of loose analogical reasoning and divergent thinking. Littlemore states that effective communication in a L2 involves the ability to use both novel and frozen metaphors, i.e. those new and those of common use in the language by native speakers. In a more recent paper, Littlemore (2004) studies how metaphor is an important source of misunderstanding for international students. Key concepts are often expressed through metaphors and non-

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Metaphoric intelligence is proposed within Gardner´s (1983) theory of multiple intellingences. He argues that people vary in terms of visual, verbal, mathematical, kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and rhythmic intelligence. Metaphoric would be the ninth type of intelligence.

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native speakers usually miss them. Following her thesis, the grounds of metaphorical expressions are mostly due to cultural conventions. Then, non-native speakers do not have access to the shared cultural knowledge and shared expectations of the speakers in the target language. The only way that learners have to compensate this lack of information is by using different strategies: imagery, literal interpretation, their own background knowledge or overall context. Metaphor plays an important role in some of these strategies, such as word coinage or paraphrase. If the students use these resources, they will be able to express a wider variety of concepts in the second language (Littlemore 2001) One of the goals of this paper is to show the awareness of metaphors in L2 instruction can be highly useful to reinforce these language learning strategies. It must be pointed out that strategic competence is one of the four levels that compose communicative competence in the model by Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) as shown in Figure 2-1.

Communicative Competence

Grammatical Competence or Accuracy

Sociolinguistic Competence

Discourse Competence

Strategic Competence

Figure 2-1: Basic components of communicative competence These authors claim that strategic competence is “[…] made up of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence”. (Canale and Swain 1980: 30). Oxford (1990) studies the importance of learning strategies as active and self-directed tools to develop communicative competence. She also classifies these strategies into direct (memory, cognitive and compensation strategies) and indirect (social, affective and metacognitive

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strategies). Furthermore she proposes several activities and trainings to achieve this strategic competence. My hypothesis in this paper is that this strategic competence can be reinforced by conceptual metaphor and metonymy and metaphorical intelligence.

6.3 How to apply this study to second language learning? The differences in conceptualization of Lust in English and Spanish can be used in a language class. Since the important differences are found in their frequency and not in the metaphors themselves, activities based on the understanding and use of these metaphors can be a good training to the development of language learning strategies. Following Oxford’s classification (1990), the study of metaphors for Lust6 can reinforce these strategies: DIRECT STRATEGIES: - Memory strategies: They help learners to remember vocabulary or constructions needed to achieve fluency and linguistic competence. They enable L2 speakers to have a store to retrieve in communication. o Creating mental images: associating and elaborating. Metaphors can be very useful here, since this strategy is about linking one piece of new information with concepts already stored in memory. These associations can be either simple, complex, strange… what is important is that they are meaningful for the student. Metaphors can help since their correspondences and mappings between domains can make students be aware of a meaningful relation between pieces of language and help them to remember. o Applying images and sounds: using imaginary and semantic mapping. The mind´s storage capacity for visual information exceeds its capacity for verbal material (Oxford 1990: 40). The use of pictures or comics in class can be helpful to remember abstract concepts, and some of these pictures can be based on conceptual metaphors or metonymies. Semantic mappings can be even

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I will focus here on metaphors for lust, but these strategies can be applied to metaphors for any other emotion or to any kind of conceptual metaphor. The main claim of this paper is to show that working with conceptual metaphors in L2 Teaching can foster the development of the strategic competence.

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drawn in the board when a metaphor with many correspondences appears. An example is shown in illustration 2-1 in which the metonymy BODY HEAT FOR LUST is showed.

Illustration 2-1: Body heat for lust -

Cognitive strategies: As Oxford argues, cognitive strategies are essential in learning a language. They are used, among other skills, to understand the meaning of a new expression or to create a production in the second language. o Analyzing and reasoning: ! Analyzing expressions. It implies the use of the meanings of various parts of an expression to understand the whole. It is useful in languages that often use composition, i.e. German. The practice with metaphors might make students be aware of the importance of relations in language and make them improve this strategy. ! Analyzing contrastively. It consists of comparing elements: sounds, meanings, grammar… of the target language with elements of the first language in order to determine differences and similarities. This strategy is important to avoid the use of “false friends” in L2. A cross-linguistic study, as the one

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presented in this paper, can be a good ground to prepare activities that could activate this strategy. ! Translating and transferring. These two strategies are based in the use of the mother language to understand or produce an expression. These are risky strategies because they can provoke mistakes or misunderstandings due to false friends, differences in structures… Again, a contrastive study can be the first step to design activities, which mean a first step for students to make hypothesis of the target language, prevent the mistakes… Compensation strategies: They are used to make up for the limitations in the learners´ knowledge when they are communicating. o Guessing intelligently: these strategies have been also known as ‘inferencing’. The learner can guess the meaning of an oral or written discourse by either using linguistic clues or using other clues (context, situation, text structure, personal relationships, topic or “general world knowledge”). Metaphors can give clues to guessing intelligently as well. o Overcoming limitations in speaking and writing: these are the strategies studied by Littlemore (2001) included in her metaphoric intelligence. Coining words is about making up new words to communicate the desired idea. Using a roundabout or Synonym (Littlemore speaks of paraphrase) means getting the meaning by describing the concept. Both can be fostered by the use of metaphors in class.

INDIRECT STRATEGIES: - Social strategies: Since communication involves a social dimension, it is important to use social strategies. o Empathizing with others: developing cultural understanding and becoming aware of others´ thoughts and feelings. These strategies can be worked out in class through metaphors. It can be especially interesting to work with a topic such as lust, since the expression of it can vary in different cultures and the taboos can be very different.

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6.4 Activities Based on Oxford’s model, different activities in class are proposed in order to develop the strategic skills of the students. Only the strategies that can be of special interest to be realized by metaphors are mentioned. Littlemore´s proposals (2001) can be applied to the semantic field of Lust. She proposes that the use of argumentative text can be interesting since they are often based on one or two conceptual metaphors. The use of the genre in the current study, Corín Tellado’s romantic novels for Spanish or an equivalent English author can be useful to activate cognitive and compensation strategies in reading comprehension. It would be also possible to use romantic films in order to practice listening comprehension as well. Oxford (1990) proposes how to promote guessing by means of different strategies such as previewing questions before listening or reading, interrupting the story in the middle to ask for predictions or giving the ending to guess the beginning, asking which picture corresponds to what they are hearing or reading and so on. Working with advertising can be interesting, too, especially as Littlemore proposes with images, giving them pictures of items for which they do not know the concept in the second language and ask them to describe it in pairs, in order to guess what it is. The interpretation of an advertisement and the role that the image plays in it can be important to develop the strategies for analyzing expressions and guessing intelligently. Moreover, the production of an advertisement with its different elements: slogan, picture, sounds… can be important to the development not only of memory but also of cognitive and compensation strategies. A possible example could be the advertisement shown in illustration 2-2, since the metaphor showed in the slogan is PERSON DESIRED IS AN OBJECT which was very polemical and finished with a change in the marketing line of the brand. And of course in any of these activities the social strategies of emphasizing with others will be fostered, as they imply a new point of view from the second culture. The understanding of lust and sex varies from one culture to another and the ways of expressing desire can provoke serious problems in communication, since a taboo is difficult enough to be treated in our own language, it becomes even harder in the case of a second language.

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Illustration 2-2: Advertisement with the metaphor DESIRED PERSON IS AN OBJECT

7. Conclusion In this paper it has been showed how conceptualization of Emotions varies in English and Spanish. The domain of Lust has been studied and it has been seen how the main metaphors coincide in both languages, i.e. LUST IS FIRE/HEAT is the most frequent in both languages and other coincide as well: LUST IS POSSESSSED OBJECT, LUST IS HUNGER. The same occurs with some metonymies such as PHYSICAL AGITATION FOR LUST or BODY HEAT FOR LUST. However, there are some other metaphors that do not coincide. It is the case of LUST IS INSANITY, DESIRE IS BOND, DESIRE IS SOCIAL SUPERIOR that appear in the English corpora but not in the Spanish one. On the other side, LUST IS AWAKENING, LUST IS A DISCOVERY, LUST IS A TABOO and WOMEN´S SEXUALITY IS A FLOWER have been seen in the Spanish corpus but not in English. This does not mean that these metaphors are not available in the other language, but they show that it exist a variation between language and cultures in the domain of Lust, at least in the frequency of use of these metaphors. . In the second part of the paper, the contrastive study of Lust metaphors has been linked to Second Language Instruction. It has been explained how the study of metaphor can be a good tool to improve the development of the strategic competence. Following Oxford’s (1990) model of language learning strategies, it has been shown how metaphors contribute to some of the memory, cognitive, compensation and social strategies. Finally

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some activities to foster strategic competence based on metaphors have been proposed.

References Barcelona, A. “El lenguaje del amor romántico en inglés y en español”. Atlantis 14 1/2 (1992): 2-27. —. (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: Cognitive Approaches. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Boers, F. and S. Lindstromberg “Cognitive linguistic applications in second or foreign language instruction: rationale, proposals and evaluation”. In Cognitive Linguistics. Current Applications and Future Perspectives, edited by G. Kristiansen, 305-358. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. Cameron, L. “Identifying and describing metaphor in spoken discourse data”. In Researching and Applying Metaphor, edited by L. Cameron and G. Low, 105-134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Canale, M. and M. Swain “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing”. Applied Linguistics 1/1 (1980): 1-47. Csábi, S. Conceptualization of Lust in English. Vienna: Semiotische Berichte, 1998. Cuenca, M. J. and J. Hilferty Introducción a la lingüística cognitiva. Barcelona: Ariel, 1999. Hijazo-Gascón, A. “Conceptualization of Lust and its applications in Advertising. A cross- and intra-linguistic study”, forthcoming. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. “Vision metaphors for the intellect: are they really cross-linguistic?” Atlantis 30/1 (2008): 15-33. Kövecses, Z. Metaphor. A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002a. —. Metaphor and Emotion. Language, culture and body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002b. —. Metaphor in Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Littlemore, J. “Metaphoric intelligence and foreign language learning”. Humanising Language Teaching 3/2 (2001): http:/www.hltmag.co.uk/mar01/mart1.htm. —. “The misinterpretation of metaphors by international students at a British university: examples, implications and possible remedies”. Humanising Language Teaching 6/3 (2004):

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http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sept04/sart6.htm. Piquer-Píriz, A. M. “Reasoning figuratively in early EFL: some implications for the development of vocabulary”. In Cognitive Linguistics Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology, edited by F. Boers and S. Lindstromberg, 219-240. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Soriano, C. “The Conceptualisation of Anger in English and Spanish. A Cognitive Approach”. PhD Diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2004.

CHAPTER THREE IMMIGRATION AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION MARÍA D. LÓPEZ MAESTRE

1. Introduction This article presents an exploration of some of the conceptual metaphors resorted to by a group of English Philology students at the University of Murcia (Spain) in extended essays they were asked to write on the topic of immigration. Following an interdisciplinary approach, I examine conceptual metaphors from a critical point of view, using analytical procedures from critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, with the aim of exploring not only the conceptualisation of this phenomenon in the discourse of our students but also unveiling the ideology and socio-cultural values conveyed by their choice of analogical mappings and corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions. I believe that this critical consideration of the way metaphors about immigration reflect attitudes and cultural values is significant for a number of reasons. Immigration, apart from being an important topic of study within the academic field of intercultural relations, is also a very important issue in Spanish society today. For our country it is a relatively new phenomenon. It is well known that throughout history many Spaniards had to migrate to other countries because of forced exile or in search of better life and working conditions. Nowadays, however, this situation has been reversed. A much improved economic and political panorama has made Spain a country attractive to immigrants from a wide variety of nationalities. This and the fact that the number of immigrants has substantially increased in recent years has brought about a new situation

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which entails a societal and cultural scenario very different from the one prevailing just a few decades ago. Within this context, the university as an institution, now more than ever, has a very important role to play in promoting and fostering tolerance, mutual respect, appreciation of cultural diversity and cooperation among people from different cultural backgrounds. We have a privileged position from which to engage actively in such important issues as the promotion of intercultural relations and intercultural dialogue between the local and the immigrant population. In particular Language and Literature Departments, being specially concerned with the teaching of language, literature and culture, have a role to play in developing language awareness with regard to intercultural issues. That is, we should help our students to become aware of the importance of using a stylistically appropriate language that is respectful to the multicultural experience, training them to avoid racism, xenophobia and other discriminatory practices. Sooner or later they will engage in public speaking, either as teachers, translators, interpreters, intercultural mediators or in other professions, therefore they should be aware of the ideological power of language, so that they do not perpetuate but deconstruct and challenge pernicious use of linguistic practices which portray an unfair and negative image of immigrants that could hinder intercultural relations. In Murcia the question of immigration is as important as it is on a national level, since there has been a substantial increase in immigration quite recently. The population has become more varied and enriched with the arrival of people from other cultures. In my opinion, now we have a wonderful mixture of persons from different backgrounds, which makes our region a more interesting and fascinating place to live in. But, as a teacher I wonder what the perception of our students is. How do they feel about the phenomenon of immigration? Is their perception negative or positive? Do they perceive the question of immigration as a problem or as a benefit? How do they feel about “these other people” with whom we now share our lives? Are the immigrants perceived as being distant, separated from “us” by differences in culture and traditions? Are the students conscious of the benefits of multiculturalism? Or do they react with fear and other negative emotions? etc. To answer these questions I thought it would be interesting to ask my students to write an extended essay where they could express their ideas, attitudes and opinions on the subject of immigration. These essays would also give me the chance to look at and study the socio-semiotic discoursal representation of immigration they construct. Following an interdisciplinary

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approach which combines insights from different perspectives their discourse can be scrutinized to explore linguistic choices and potential ideological representation and implications. In this sense their essays provide very interesting material for a discourse analysis from a critical point of view. Due to limitations of space, I deal with just one particular but highly illuminating aspect of the discourse production of the students: their use of some conceptual metaphors. Metaphors are such a powerful vehicle for ideological representation that they are particularly worthy of investigation. Therefore here I deal with the metaphorical conceptualisation students make to refer to immigration from a critical point of view, considering the ideology, value judgements and socio-cultural evaluations conveyed by both metaphorical linguistic expressions and the source and target domains chosen as analogical mappings. I believe this exploration about the way essays and metaphors reflect attitudes and cultural values is useful for teachers and students alike. For teachers, these essays provide valuable information to identify the needs for pedagogical intervention. They can tell us a great deal about linguistic usages that convey prejudices, racism or other discriminatory values. For students, the essays provide class material to be worked on and analysed when dealing with the topic of language and ideology and in particular immigration, intercultural relations and intercultural dialogue. In this way, the students are given the chance to analyse critically their own language/metaphors, style and ideology. It is not the language of other people. It is their own and their classmates’ language, they are confronted with, to look at what values, stereotypes and prejudices they show in their discourse. I believe essays like these can serve as the basis for a more personal approach which seeks to make them reflect upon their own moral and ethical responsibility in these matters. In my opinion, the discourse of English Philology students is also worth investigating for other reasons. English Philology students are in contact with both the Spanish and English culture. To a greater or lesser extent they have lived the “intercultural experience”. To improve their command of the English language, they have to travel abroad, as part of an Erasmus Exchange Programme or for other reasons. Therefore generally they have had the experience of being a foreigner for a while. They know the difficulty of getting by in a foreign country if they are not proficient in the language; how stressful it is not knowing the culture of the country they live in; how disconcerting it can be not knowing certain social customs and conventions etc. For all these reasons, a priori we can expect them to be especially sympathetic and understanding to the question of

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immigration. This makes their discourse even more interesting to be investigated to see the actual discourse they produce as well as the metaphors they resort to. Just before moving on to the discussion of the data, a brief consideration about the organization of this article seems in order here. It must be noted that, first, I deal with methodological questions related to the sample studied, explaining how the material was collected and giving information about the informants that took part in the project. Then I examine aspects of the theoretical framework this research is based on. I also show the different stages in the design of the research process and provide a list of the candidate metaphors I considered for investigation. Since, due to space limitations, I cannot study all the candidate metaphors in the list, in the section devoted to the discussion of the data, I explore two of the most prominent conceptual metaphors that appear in the discourse of our students: IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT and SPAIN IS A CONTAINER. These two conceptualisations are worth considering critically since they often portray a discriminatory and negative view of immigration that should be looked at. Finally in the concluding section I reflect upon the ideological power of metaphors to represent experience and the need to develop a critical attitude to the metaphors we use.

2. Methodology 2.1. Material: sample collection method As was mentioned above, the informants selected for this project were students in the 5th year of English Philology at the University of Murcia who were asked to write an extended essay on the topic of immigration. This exercise was part of the coursework they do for stylistics prior to the study of a unit on style and ideology, where students have the chance to reflect upon the interrelation between language, power and ideology in both literary and non-literary texts. Here aspects of language and ideology are explored in connection with transitivity, modality, lexical categorization, the use of the passive voice, intransitive clauses, pronouns, presuppositions and inferences, metaphors etc. The students were given one hour to plan and write their essays and were instructed to write on a fairly general topic: Immigration- positive (if any) and negative (if any) aspects. To ensure the anonymity of the process and give them the chance to express their opinions on the matter freely and without any constraints, they were asked not to supply their names.

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Participation was voluntary. Several students totally refused to take part in the project and they were allowed to leave the classroom. For example, there was a student who said that s/he lived in a village with one of the highest rates of immigration in Murcia. S/he was too emotional about this subject and felt unable to write on it. So the number of students who finally took part in the project was 35. 35 essays were written and I identified them only by a number. It must be emphasised, however, that this article shows the initial stage of what is a more extended project which covers a critical discourse analysis of the discourse of immigration produced by English Philology students during a period of five academic years 2003-2008. The essays explored in this paper were written in the spring term of 2004, during class-time. Finally, it must also be noticed that in the processing and digitalisation of the material, the teacher’s intervention was kept to a minimum and only those language mistakes which hindered comprehension were corrected.

2.2. Theoretical framework As far as methodology is concerned, an interdisciplinary approach was applied, linking critical discourse analysis (CDA henceforth), cognitive linguistics (Cog Ling henceforth) and corpus linguistics in what I believe offers a clearer and more fruitful approach to the consideration of the socio-cultural and ideological values conveyed by conceptual metaphors in discourse. CDA provides the main theoretical framework for our research. Along with other practitioners of CDA, as Fowler et al. (1979), Fowler (1991), Van Dijk (1993), Fairclough (1989, 2003), Fairclough, and Wodak (1997), Wodak and Meyer (2001) etc., I am particularly interested in issues of discourse, power and ideology. Ideology is an important, but nevertheless slippery concept in CDA. CDA analysts have been criticized for using such a term on the basis of its elusiveness and the difficulties they face in giving a clear-cut scientific definition. Here I do not refer to this concept as a false distorted consciousness in the Marxist sense, I simply take it to mean common values and assumptions shared collectively by a community (Simpson, 1993:5). An ideology therefore derives from the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs and value-systems which are shared collectively by social groups (Simpson 1993: 5). Considered in this way, ideology is almost inevitable in language use. Ideas do not merely float in the air. Ideas are produced and simultaneously reproduced in social and cultural situations by speakers who make selections from the various linguistic options their language system makes

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available and, in doing so, are positioned through their use of language in different ways in these situations. Therefore particular linguistic or stylistic choices are not value-free selections; they can work to conceal or reveal certain realities or world views rather than others, establishing or reinforcing ideologies in the process and particular points of view (Carter and Nash 1990: 2-24). Metaphors are particularly revealing in this respect, since they reflect attitudes and socio-cultural values too, and therefore have a potential for ideological representation. In this article I am going to explore the metaphors used by our students according to the basic tenets of the cognitive theory of metaphor as developed by writers such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), Kövecses (2000, 2002, 2005), Gibbs (1994), and others. For cognitive linguists, metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in our conceptual system whereby we ordinarily understand one domain of experience in terms of another discrete domain (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs 1994). The notion of “mapping” refers to a set of conceptual correspondences that can be established between source and target domains, whereas the term “metaphorical expression” is reserved, in particular, for those linguistic expressions (a word, phrase, or sentence) which are the surface realisation of such a cross-domain mapping. To account for the fact that several metaphorical expressions usually activate the same conceptual metaphor, the mnemonic label TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN is used (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). It must be noted, therefore, that metaphorical mappings “involve a set of relations rather than single attributes so that what is transferred is a knowledge of a set of properties, their behaviour and interrelationships as they are known in the source domain” (CharterisBlack 2004: 13-14). From the point of view of the study of ideology, this approach to metaphor is particularly interesting for CDA studies, since metaphorical analogical mappings and their correspondences can tell us a great deal about knowledge, social issues and ideology. Analogical mappings give us insights for perspectives commonly shared by members of a community on which correspondences are based. This role of metaphor as a cognitive heuristic is particularly worthy of note. Its relevance in shedding light on social issues is made manifest by a developing line of socially cognitive research on issues such as security policy (Chilton 1996; Chilton and Ilyin 1993; Thornborrow 1993), unemployment (Straehle et al. 1999), racism (Van Teeflen 1994), political discourse (Chilton 2004; Charteris–Black 2004, 2005), gender (Koller 2004), genetics (Adolphs 2006), immigration (O’Brien 2003; Santa Anna 1999; Charteris-Black 2006), etc.

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It is also interesting how metaphors can highlight or hide certain aspects of the conceptualisation of phenomena which can reveal attitudes and ideological positioning. A critical consideration of the values conveyed by the choice of source domain can be enlightening in this respect, especially in connection with naturalised values and assumptions. This is significant since the danger with the metaphors we live by is that their usage is often conventionalised to such an extent that ideological implications pass by unnoticed, are “naturalised” (Fairclough 1989: 120) and taken for granted as normal and common sense. This makes conceptual metaphors acutely damaging when the image they portray is negative, unfair and detrimental to the social issues they are meant to represent. No doubt the link between metaphors and ideology is an area that can be fruitfully explored and it is here where CDA and Cog Ling can unite for a common goal. Such a combined approach promises rewarding insights into the consideration of the ideological consequences of cognition and their impact on culture and society. Having clarified aspects of theoretical framework and terminology, let us move on to consider some final questions related to corpus linguistics, which are methodologically important. As mentioned in the introduction, corpus linguistics has provided us with useful analytical procedures for the processing and analysis of the material that have complemented other manual operations, greatly simplifying the task of compiling and sorting out the material. Our project was carried out in several stages, which combined a manual more subjective approach with a computerized analysis of the lexical choices in the corpus. Bearing in mind the findings of the literature on the subject, a manual inspection was carried out first to establish the relevant areas to be studied. This made it possible to set up a list of conceptual metaphors as well as relevant “keywords” which I thought required investigation. Once a conceptual metaphor was spotted, it was considered a candidate metaphor and was included in the list mentioned above, which served as a basis for subsequent automatic analysis to establish frequency of use and concordances. When digitalized, the essays provided a small corpus of 15,326 running words. The number of different words was 1886. Subsequently two files were produced: One to be processed with WordSmith Tools! and the other, a PDF document, to be processed with Adobe Acrobat!. WordSmith Tools! suite of text analysis software made it possible to obtain quick information about lexical frequency, key words and concordance lines. In particular frequency lists were very useful in providing clues as to which words were worthy of investigation as

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potential metaphors. The empirical data obtained in this way was used to corroborate the findings initially made in a manual way as well as to supply additional information about the actual linguistic usage in texts. The list of candidate metaphors produced included the following: CANDIDATE METAPHORS: IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT IMMIGRATION IS A NATURAL DISASTER IMMIGRATION IS A DISEASE CONTAINER METAPHOR: LOCALS ARE IN/IMMIGRANTS ARE OUT LOCALS ARE IN THE MIDST/IMMIGRANTS ARE FAR SPAIN/MY TOWN IS A HOUSE LOCALS ARE LANDLORDS-LADIES/IMMIGRANTS ARE GUESTS (often, NEGATIVE EVALUATION) (Negative + problematic+ threatening) IMMIGRATION IS A VALUABLE OBJECT IMMIGRATION IS A BUSINESS TRANSACTION (often, POSITIVE EVALUATION), etc. WordSmith Tools! was very effective for the processing of the material. However, one of its drawbacks, as is often the case with computer searching facilities, is that it provides very limited information about the context in which the metaphorical linguistic expression appears. When searching for concordances, it is possible to know the words used before and after within a range of 25 words. Although useful for other purposes, this is a drawback for the analysis and investigation of metaphorical linguistic expressions in connection with culture and ideology, because it is very difficult to know if the item in question is used metaphorically or not since the context of use is often too limited. For this reason, we used the possibilities offered by Adobe Acrobat! software to help to find the particular passage where the concordance line was extracted: this made it possible to obtain pragmatic information about the context more easily and with greater speed. This procedure was very helpful since it greatly facilitated the task of deciding whether a particular item was metaphorical or not and what the ideological implications of the use of the metaphor were. Finally to conclude this brief consideration of methodological issues, I have summarised the stages of the research process as follows:

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STAGES IN THE RESEARCH PROCESS: 1. Manual inspection. Selection of candidate metaphors. 2. With WordSmith we produced: Frequency lists of words (also provided clues as to candidate metaphors). Concordance lines. 3. With Adobe Acrobat: We extracted the context of the keyword (number of the essay, the paragraph the word was used in etc.).

3. Discussion of the material Although all the metaphors in the list of candidate metaphors provided above would deserve a detailed exploration, due to limitations of space, I shall concentrate on two metaphors that are particularly prominent in the discourse of our students: IMMIGRATION IS A WAR / FIGHT / CONFLICT and SPAIN IS A CONTAINER. They are also worthy of being selected for examination because, in my opinion, many of the metaphorical linguistic expressions they generate convey negative evaluations related to an unfair and discriminatory representation of immigration as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Therefore these are structures that demand attention from a pedagogical point of view, requiring greater teacher intervention. They should be discussed in the classroom to enable students to become aware of the ideological power of metaphors and of how important it is to use alternative representations and avoid certain metaphorical linguistic expressions due to the potential negative values that can be conveyed. Let us start with IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT. The manual inspection and frequency lists produced point to a metaphorical conceptualisation of immigration as a WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT. To confirm this hypothesis, I decided to explore the lexis of conflict in the corpus to see whether words from this lexical field were used figuratively. In particular I checked the metaphorical use of the following terms: Invasion/invade; enemy; opposite/oppose/opposed; clash; against; fight/combat/battle; threat/threatened/ threaten. The results found point to a discourse of confrontation present in the compositions of the students, since we found metaphorical linguistic expressions which are the realization of the IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT conceptual metaphor in 54.3% of the essays.

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The resulting metaphorical structures arise basically from the conceptual domain of WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT whereby immigration is understood as a conflict or clash between two antagonistic or opposed forces. It is presented as a war/fight/conflict between opponents who (according to the logic of the source domain) try to defeat each other. As a result, there is a mapping whereby entities in the domain of immigration correspond to entities in the domain of war/fight/conflict. The mapping basically preserves the image-schematic structure of the source domain because the image schematic structure of the source domain is projected onto the target domain, thus giving us the following correspondences: " Immigrants activities are a war/fight/conflict that must be repelled/fought against. " Immigrants attack and invade (towns/country). " Immigrants and locals are rival enemies/opponents. " Immigrants’ activities are a threat/a conflict. " Locals fight and defend themselves. Let us look at some passages to illustrate the use of this conceptual metaphor. In an essay, the student wrote: When you walk on the streets and most of the times you get them saying something and looking or staring at you. My town is completely invaded. If you go out on a Saturday or Sunday in the afternoon there aren’t any people anywhere. It is full of Moroccans and Ecuadorians as well as people from Peru, etc. Essay 17

In this passage we can see how, due to this vision of immigration in antagonistic terms, the town this student lives in is portrayed with a battle image as having been invaded. The evaluative adverb “completely” leaves no doubt as to the modality conveyed by the sentence which shows the town as having been taken by immigrants who apparently are everywhere. This is also a realization of the container metaphor, THE TOWN IS A CONTAINER, whereby the town is a container full of immigrants who leave no space for the local population. It is also unfortunate that, in this passage, the immigrants are not given the status of persons as, quoting the words of the student, “there aren’t any people anywhere”: Hence, the immigrants are here the subject of a dehumanisation process whereby they are deprived of their status as human beings, their human condition being obliterated and taken away from them. In the following example the student has also resorted to war/conflict imagery to conceptualise aspects of this phenomenon through the use of the word enemy to refer to people with different religious ideas. Cultural

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and religious differences are thus seen as the source of a problematic relationship: […] for them Catholic people are considered an enemy, so it is just a way of seeing things. Essay 30

It is interesting how the student here is speaking about what s/he assumes is the opinion of the “others”, but does not provide any reference as to whom s/he refers in particular. This is one of the most dangerous ideological generalizations that can ever be made, particularly pernicious since such opinions could be based on stereotypes, beliefs, and false ideas with little justification. The lexical item clash is also worth commenting on. In my opinion it can also be related to an antagonistic discourse of fight and conflict whereby differences in ideas, culture, religion, languages can be interpreted as metonymically referring to the sound of swords clashing when opponents fight. According to the logic of the source domain, once the immigrant is depicted as an “enemy”, it makes sense to conceptualise differences as metonymically provoking a “clash of ideas and beliefs”. This can be seen in the following passages as a way of illustration: Obviously, the arrival of people from different nationalities to a country, particularly when it takes place on a large scale, always brings about both positive and negative aspects, due to the clash of cultures, languages, religions, etc. Essay 13 […] there is a constant clash among the majority of Spanish people who are Catholics and this minority which consists of people from different ethnic groups. Essay 29 The clash is due to religion, mostly. Muslims are said to be very fanatic and it is agreed by almost everyone that they loathe Catholics, that Catholic do not like them very much. Culture is another fact. There are aspects of Arabic culture that Catholics cannot put up with. This does not mean that the Arabic Culture is worse. It is simply different. Essay 30

In line with this antagonistic view, we find the use of other terms such as oppose, opposite, opposed and against, also used, in my opinion, to emphasize differences and confrontation: It has been said that, when immigrants enter Spain, they must adapt to our culture or else return to their homeland, since they are completely opposite to us. Essay 21

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In my opinion, Spanish society is very racist and it has lots of prejudices against all kinds of immigrants. Essay 19 I’m not completely against them, but in my opinion if somebody goes to another country in order to look for a better way life they must try to adapt themselves to the new country or at least not to oppose them. I mean that sometimes immigrants don’t like the culture of the country they have migrate to but they should at least respect it, and of course they mustn’t try to impose their culture in the new country. Essay 2 I’m not against immigration because in some ways it is not as bad as many people think. Essay 2

Several of these passages are also particularly noticeable not only for the metaphors but for the use of mitigation strategies to ameliorate and qualify statements. In essay 2 the student wrote, “I’m not against immigration because in some ways it is not as bad as many people think”. Here the residual implication is that it is still bad, harmful and negative in some way. Maybe not “[…] so bad as many people think” but still negative and problematic. Examples like these are interesting because they show how ideology is complex and indirect and can not be read directly from linguistic items, since an apparently innocuous statement can carry dangerous ideological presuppositions based on generalizations concerning mental processes (Simpson 1993: 91, 2004: 23) that are supposed to take place in the mind of many people, but which are not adequately referenced. Fortunately, not all passages with against show such a negative approach, there are other cases where the students show concern and call for a more sympathetic and supportive view of immigration, as can be seen in the passage below. These are also linguistic usages that should be discussed in class to counterpart other more negative statements: Arguments against immigration are often based on an emphasis on nationality which is exclusive and dangerous. The association of immigration with criminality entails a danger in itself that could lead to xenophobia. So people should be aware of that and be careful not to favour these kinds of attitudes. It is necessary to be concerned with the real situation of these people and feel a sense of empathy towards them. Essay 3

Carrying on with our discussion about antagonistic discourse, we can mention the use of the term impose in the following examples:

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The use of expressions with impose is consistent with this discourse of confrontation I have been commenting on. The students say that immigrants want to impose their culture and way of life on the local population, and obviously this is a fact that nobody likes, especially when immigrants think they are the “owners” of the new city. The volitional nature of the process is expressed in such an unequivocal and absolute way that the intentional nature of the process is left in no doubt. And obviously this manifest intention to impose something not wanted is annoying and induces fears of losing control and of having to put up with an undesirable situation. Therefore, in line with this position, it makes sense to portray immigration as a threat, something to be feared, menacing and scary: threat scored four hits in our database (0.03%), threatened 2 (0.01%), menacing 1; fear 5 (0.03%); scared 2 (0.01%): When we talk about the negative aspects we must not only focus on the situation of immigrants but also on the opinion of some Spanish people who see immigration as a threat to society in general and to their jobs in particular. Many Spanish workers complaint that they may lose their job. Essay 26 This is when lots of factors come into action, among them the threat of their own identity or the fear of being rejected. At the same time, this threat of one’s identity is as well present in Spanish people. Essay 27 As for mentioning some disadvantages, one of the most important problems immigration causes is that people feel threatened by living with foreign people in the same city or village. It leads to insecurity on the streets and violence of some groups against foreigners, but it does not mean that immigrants are to blame for this. Essay 11 Obviously, not all immigrants are from the same country, although the ones I am referring to are from Africa. I live near Cruz Roja Hospital and I

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am scared of going out alone at night because of them. They are also brave and they tell you insults and bad things when you pass by. Essay 1

To sum up, these examples show how students resort to an antagonistic discourse of confrontation whereby immigrants are viewed as enemies, posing a threat, a menace to the general population. However, the very acceptance and use of this metaphor has serious ideological implications. Fights and wars, by their very nature, recall images of hostility and aggressiveness; their imagery leaves little room to conceive of immigration in terms of joint problem solving and harmonious cooperation. The problem is, as Gibbs states, that because “conceptual metaphors reflect unconscious schemes of thought, people are often unaware of the metaphorical nature of their speech, which can mislead them about the consequences of these metaphors” (Gibbs 1994: 142). The danger of using metaphors like the ones quoted above is that the particular value system they are based on is simply taken for granted and not questioned at all. And this is precisely what makes metaphors more dangerous, since they present value judgements as being commonsensical and natural. The students should reflect upon these issues, deconstructing assertions and questioning the values conveyed. Metaphorical linguistic expressions such as these present immigration in negative terms and may have consequences hindering social relations and posing obstacles to intercultural dialogue and to our living together in harmony. In our consideration of a few more conceptual metaphors, another aspect that must be noted, which can probably be related not only to this antagonist representation but also to other metaphorical linguistic structures we shall see later, is the perception of mass immigration as the source of great concern. Obviously the greater the number of immigrants, the worse the situation/invasion will get, according to students who stated that: Spain is receiving everyday the arrival of thousands of people mostly from Africa and South America […] the phenomenon becomes the origin of many problems when it is not controlled rightly. Essay 10 Massive waves of immigrants can change an entire country. This can be seen by the recipient country as a threat to their identity and way of life. For example, the African immigration in Spain can have serious consequences for the maintenance of the Spanish traditions and experience as a country. Essay 28

This last example is particularly revealing. Firstly, because the use of the word “massive” gives an indication of the excessive nature of the

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phenomenon. This word scored four hits in our database, being used in the following contexts: “massive immigration”, “massive character”, “massive entrance”, “massive waves”. The perception the students seem to have is of hundreds, of thousands of people every day entering the container that is our land/town/country – a metaphor that shall be explored later. Secondly, because by means of the wave metaphor immigration is portrayed as if it was a natural disaster, maybe even a tsunami. This characterization makes it possible to describe an increase in the rate of migration in a vivid and emotional way, establishing a rhetorical contrast between a situation where there was less immigration with one where there is more, at the same time highlighting the emerging nature of the phenomenon as a scary disaster scenario threatening to flood the surrounding areas with people, which is perceived as a threat to identity and way of life: However, there are many people who fear that one day their culture could fade away. This type of fear is ordinary among people who have not been in contact with other people from different races or cultures. This situation clearly happens in Spain. Essay 30

“Massive waves can change the entire country” the student wrote (essay 28 quoted above). This linguistic representation is also significant because of its use of a material event process (Simpson 1993:89) which, due to its metaphorical nature, has the potential to leave agentivity unclear. Thus, it dehumanises the immigrants who are not represented as subjects of human life stories but as a natural catastrophe, which induces extreme fear and horror related to imagined terrors that something dangerous can happen that will leave behind massive destruction and devastation. By means of this metaphor local people are shown as being under the threat of being ideologically and culturally engulfed or damaged by the massive waves of immigrants entering the country. Native culture and traditions are thus portrayed as being at risk of fading away, disappearing as if diluted in the massive waves. Fortunately, the use of this conceptual metaphor in our corpus was not prominent. “Wave” was only used in essay 28 and no instances of “flood”, “swamp”, “tide”, “flow”, “influx” or other liquid metaphors were found in the corpus. The next group of metaphorical linguistic expressions I would like to deal with has to do with the representation of Spain as a container: SPAIN IS A CONTAINER. On the basis of the data found we can affirm that it is a prominent metaphor, often resorted to by the students in their discourse, whereby the local population is inside the container whereas the immigrants are outside, often trying to enter into the locals’ container

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space. This gives us the mapping LOCALS ARE IN/ IMMIGRANTS ARE OUT. An example can be found in the following passage: For the last few years, immigration in Spain has been a very controversial issue. There are all kinds of opinions about it and the authorities don’t know how to deal with it. It has got to a point in which it’s impossible for them to control the number of immigrants coming into the country. Essay 19

As Chilton (2004: 118) notes there is a spatial containment schema which grounds such conceptualisations of one’s country as a closed container that can be sealed or penetrated. This conceptualisation seems to be grounded in bodily experience. It is well known how cognitive linguists have revealed evidence of the body itself being conceptualised as a container – and even of words themselves being conceptualised as containers of meaning that are physically moved in communication (the “conduit” metaphor, cf. Reddy 1979). Thus, this container experience, based on personal experience of the body as a container, has been extrapolated in a metonymic way to the country we live in, all this with important ideological and socio-cultural implications as we shall see below. The notion of a container implies: " There is an inside and an outside. " The space inside of container may be full or empty. " Substances can be put in or taken out/ entities can enter in and out of the container. " There may be pressures on the container from the inside (maybe due to lack of space) etc. To identify the realization of this metaphor we checked the figurative use of terms such as: In; out; inside; outside; outsider; enter / entering/ entered / entrance; come in; incoming; fit into; full. By means of this metaphor the immigrant can be represented as being an outsider, as in the passages below: As they are poor, they become marginalized and are regarded as outsiders. The worst situation is when the immigrant does not even find a job. They stay in the country and they feel the pressure of their families. In some cases, the immigrant is forced to enter the world of delinquency. Essay 18 However, people from Morocco or Ecuador do not transmit positive feelings to us. Regarding this last group of people we could say that one of the negative aspects is their failure to adapt. Normally they come here because they want to look for ways to improve their way of life or merely to find a job. They probably just want to work in order to have something

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This second example is a particularly extreme case. The student takes for granted that immigrants from Ecuador feel like outsiders, that is the “problem”. His/her argumentation is solely based on a generalized mental process, not even on a verbal process, but a mental process (Simpson 1993: 91, 2004: 23) which takes place in the mind of who knows whom, unspecified immigrants of this nationality who are portrayed as intentionally bringing in “their own culture and way of life”. The bringing in of substances or other entities is also typical of the container representation. In this case by means of a material action intentional process (Simpson 1993: 89), immigrants are portrayed trying to bring into the container their own culture and way of life with them, as if this was or could be an intentional choice, something done on purpose. The student does not seem to realise that our culture is part of who we are and cannot be brought in or out: it is simply an essential and consubstantial part of us, of our identity as human beings. Apart from culture, other undesirable actions liable to be brought in by immigrants are criminality, delinquency, violence or even xenophobia, as we can see in these passages: On the other hand, this mixed society can also bring about negative consequences. Most immigrants come to our country to find a job and we are willing to live here peacefully and harmony with everybody. However, there massive entrance into the country, many of them illegally, forces them to live in awful conditions and many turn to delinquency in order to survive. This creates a bad image of immigrants and therefore leads to a situation of xenophobia among the Spanish population. Their difficulties in finding a job also turn immigrants to illegal activities. Essay 24. This change is usually most of the time accompanied with the incomprehension of some intolerant, narrow-minded people who think that all immigrants want is to bring delinquency, violence, danger into the country, but the fact is that they work under the worst conditions you can possibly think of, the jobs nobody wants to do. Essay 20

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As we have seen above, the existence of a container implies both an inside and an outside and therefore it also implies both the “us” and the “them” so often referred to in the literature. The penetration of the boundary of a container seems to convey the idea of the “them” symbolically entering the “us” inside the container, where the society, culture and traditions of the local population are located. Outside there are “the others”, with a different culture, language and way of life. As a result of this conceptualisation, we find metaphorical linguistic expressions which highlight movement towards the container from an external source, and show the immigrants as entering, trying to get into/enter into the locals’ container space. The problem arises when the inside of the container is perceived as being full, maybe due to lack of control on the part of the government or security forces or because the immigrant does not fit into the inside space available. Then there seems to be the perception that there is no space available for the local population. Inside the container the newcomers enter in competition for resources and public services, such as housing and school places, or even public areas such as streets and parks. Therefore not fitting into the inside of the container space can be interpreted as posing a threat to the identity of both groups: […] the difficulty when trying to find a job, the poor salaries when they find one, etc. This makes immigration become a problem. Together with this, there is the fact that immigrants don’t always seem to fit into the country where they arrive. This is when lots of factors come into action, among them the threat of their own identity or the fear of being rejected. At the same time, this threat of one’s identity is as well present in Spanish people. Essay 27

It is even worse when the container is perceived as being full due to too many immigrants coming in, as was the case with a passage mentioned before in connection with war/conflict imagery, where the student said: “my town is completely invaded. […] It is full of Moroccans and Ecuadorians as well as people from Peru, etc.” (essay 17), thus linking war imagery to the container schema, whereby as the result of a massive invasion the container is shown as being full with immigrants –the inner space totally occupied. When superimposed with attributes such as doors, gates, landlords, the container schema easily transforms into such an emotional construct as a house, hence making it possible the use of actions such as enter or entered we find in the following passages: Nowadays, immigration is a problem that Spanish society has to deal with. In the last few years hundreds and hundreds of immigrants entered our

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Chapter Three country. When we try to analyse the problem in order to look for a solution we find different opinions and different aspects too. Essay 26 The situation is completely out of control. It is obvious that the exact number of immigrants entering the country illegally is not known but those who get arrested and caught and reach the Spanish mainland in a very unfortunate situation, without money, without documentation, without anything. Essay 19

A house always belongs to somebody. Metaphorical linguistic expressions based on this conceptualisation (IMMIGRANTS ARE GUESTS/LOCALS ARE LANLORDS/LADIES) generate a discourse which is consistent with the expression host countries, whereby the immigrant is presented as being a mere guest in the country s/he goes to. The connotative implications of the word host, implying a courteous welcoming attitude, seem ironic in this context. On the whole, such discursive practices are also consistent with other expressions where, as with the landlord/guest dualism, the local population is always put first, given priority, whereas the immigrant is presented as a second-class citizen. The implications are clear: the landlord/lady has full right to the property and resources etc., while the immigrant is just “invited” to share the leftovers –for example jobs not wanted. So it is quite logical that jobs should be reserved for the proprietors, who should have first pick and only leave what they do not want for themselves to the invited or maybe unwanted guests. Such conceptualisation perhaps explains the resentment towards those immigrants who “think” they are the “owners” of the new city: The different cultures and traditions are important factors related to the separation between natives and immigrants, because most of the time- they don’t adapt themselves to the culture of the country they come to, and what they try to do is to impose their beliefs and way of live on the natives, and this is a fact that nobody likes, especially when immigrants think they are the “owners” of the new city. Essay 9

In the passage above it is also interesting to note how differences in culture and traditions are seen as producing a separation between locals and immigrants. It is as if immigrants and locals were in separate containers which are portrayed as being apart, with no contact with each other –incidentally due to the immigrants’ incapacity for adaptation, whatever that is supposed to mean. This is coherent with the discourse of exclusion and segregation related to the use of the pronouns “we” vs. “they”, “us” vs. “them”. “They” are different, far and intentionally distant,

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hence the metaphors of distance and separation used in the following passages: Besides, since they do not approach us, we cannot talk with them about those subjects. All this creates a series of prejudices which are really difficult to overcome. Essay 4 Nevertheless, in my opinion, people from Morocco seem to be intentionally more distant. Essay 4 Having said that, in my view, the major problem with immigration arises when this does not take place and the integration or the merging of communities or cultures is replaced by segregation, isolation and stigmatization of the new communities. Essay 13 These are the negative things that create a gap between host of the great societies which prevent citizens from receiving a better understanding. Essay 20 […] we could even mention terrorism. Muslim countries and western countries are separated more and more by this. Essay 7 Fanaticism is the biggest problem we have to face when speaking about immigrants in Spain; they come from North Africa and their religious beliefs are Muslim. Their way of life is so different to ours that sometimes it creates a civilization gap that produced tension between both cultures, for instance the role of woman in both societies is completely different. Essay 20

As we can see here, not only do pronouns emphasize the distance between “them” and “us”, but also metaphorical linguistic expressions speak of separation and a civilization gap between containers intentionally separated, apart and with little contact. The association of criminality/terrorism and immigration, we find here, is particularly pernicious and unjustifiable by any standards, just as it is to make generalizations such us “Muslim countries” and “western countries” which imply an artificial antagonistic representation based on the “assumed” homogeneous nature of all “western” and “Muslim countries”. Such simplistic confrontational discourse does more harm than good hindering understanding and harmonious cooperation between human beings, and seriously misrepresenting the multicultural experience. Such structures must be deconstructed and challenged in the classroom so as to help students develop an awareness of the implications that such representations convey.

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4. Conclusion In this article I have reflected upon the negative representation of immigration prompted by the use of several conceptual metaphors in the essays of our students. I have examined their usage and have also discussed the ideological values conveyed, by paying attention to sociocultural representations which are potentially unfair and discriminatory. I have found that a container schema seems to be very important in this respect as it operates as a unifying mental schema which links in a coherent way several other metaphors such as SPAIN IS A CONTAINER, war/conflict metaphors, liquid and natural disaster metaphors etc. For example, the container schema relates to the war/conflict metaphor, as it makes it possible to depict the host countries as containers vulnerable to attack by an external force, an enemy force which is trying to force its way into its inside space. The walls of the country represented as a container are ideally strong and rigid but also under constant threat of perforation and rupture and therefore in need of continuous support and reinforcement and defence. Thus the container representation activates subliminal fears related to the need to protect what is inside (family and group, territory, resources, jobs etc.) from an “assumed” external enemy/danger that is outside. Container representations can also be related to liquid and natural disaster metaphors (floods and tidal waves etc.) because the emotion of fear can be jointly aroused by disaster and containment scenarios through the perforation of a boundary around the container allowing the inflow or outflow of liquids. The country can therefore be depicted as a container to the point of being filled by immigrants, almost overflowing with thousands of them who are portrayed as trying to come in. Such figurative uses of a language are ideologically powerful devices. They evoke strong emotions related to subliminal fears that immigration may provoke harmful effects on the population, activating related fears of loss of dominance and control and resistance to social change. As a result, the metaphorical linguistic structures produced seem to reinforce the myth that immigration is excessive and support the argument that it should be controlled, stopped – or even be reversed. Such a negative view has been found to be consistent with the lexical representation of immigration in such negative terms as “problem” (one of the most frequently used words in the essays) as well as with reiterative calls for greater control and adequate management of this phenomenon. The conceptual metaphors we have been looking at show very well the ideological power of language to represent experience, signalling the potential they have to unify information with human emotions and basic

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instincts aroused by desires, fears etc. Hence they show us the need for a critical attitude and the importance of developing a critical perspective on the question of language and ideological representation. Charteris-Black (2004:42) says that the evaluations that are conveyed by metaphors are important in forming certain ways of looking at the world, so we must be aware of such attitudinal evaluations and maintain a critical stance towards these uses of language: Critical Metaphor Analysis is a way of revealing underlying ideologies, attitudes and beliefs –and therefore constitutes a vital means of understanding more about the complex relationships between language, thought and social context.[…] Such awareness may lead us to take a critical stance towards these uses of language […]The development of such critical abilities is central, and not peripheral, to those involved in language education. (Charteris-Black 2004: 42)

I could not agree more. In this respect I believe the critical analysis I have carried out here can be applied to classroom teaching at University level and be a useful tool for pedagogical purposes. Through the analysis of their own language (looking at the values, stereotypes, prejudices they show in their discourse/metaphors), the students can be made aware of issues of ideology in connection with immigration and intercultural relations. Their essays can serve as the basis for a more personal approach that seeks to get them to reflect upon their own moral and ethical responsibility in these matters. The analysis of their own linguistic choices also seeks to make students aware of how improper certain uses of language are when referring to human beings, how important it is to deconstruct stereotypes and false generalizations ingrained in the linguistic medium that result in a discriminatory representation of certain social groups. Structures that misrepresent the multicultural experience should be highlighted and challenged in the classroom. Indeed, a critical reading of texts, a healthy procedure of vigilance, a responsive and responsible attitude should be encouraged and promoted by teachers and educational institutions alike. Such critical awareness can ultimately lead to solidarity and social change, since it opens up the possibility for alternative, more positive and enriching constructions of reality.

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CHAPTER FOUR UNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMING PRAGMATIC FAILURE WHEN INTERPRETING PHATIC UTTERANCES MANUEL PADILLA CRUZ

1. Introduction Pragmatic failure, as Thomas defines it, is “[…] the inability to understand what is meant by what is said” (1983: 93). It occurs when a hearer fails to understand the exact proposition that the speaker intended to communicate with a contextualised utterance or when he fails to capture the intended pragmatic force of an utterance. Two types are normally distinguished: ‘pragmalinguistic’ failure, which arises when a non-native speaker or L2 learner inadequately transfers linguistic strategies from her L1 to the L2, and ‘sociopragmatic’ failure, which is caused by differing perceptions of what counts as appropriate linguistic behaviour in specific contexts (Thomas 1983: 99). While in the first type of pragmatic failure strategy selection, frequency, order or content of strategies or intonation patterns used, among many others, play a crucial role (Riley 2006; Tran 2006), in the second type L2 learners may transfer their L1 rules of speaking or sociocultural competence when performing or understanding communicative acts in their L2 (Takahashi and Beebe 1987; Wolfson 1989; Beebe et al. 1990; Riley 2006). This clearly indicates that there is a cross-linguistic influence in the learners’ L2 discourse and comprehension (Takahashi and Beebe 1993), for their knowledge of a language and culture other than the L2 affects their linguistic production and understanding (Kasper 1992: 207; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993: 10). Such an influence can surface when learners lack knowledge of the L2 rules of use and hence have to rely on their L1 pragmatics to apply it in their interlanguage (Olshtain and Cohen 1989; Tran 2006). Over the past decades, pragmatic failure has received due attention

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from many researchers, who have examined the L2 performance of learners of many different languages and cultural backgrounds in an overwhelmingly rich variety of speech acts that includes, but is not limited to, apologies (e.g. Cohen and Olshtain 1981; Olshtain 1983; García 1989; Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu 2007), compliments (e.g. Nelson et al. 1996), refusals (e.g. Beebe et al. 1990; Kwon 2004), requests (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1982, 1988; Tanaka 1988; Færch and Kasper 1989; Hong 1997; Kasanga 1998), or the expression of gratitude (e.g. Eisenstein and Bodman 1993) in many different interactive contexts (e.g. Hale 1996; Arent 2000; Kasanga 2001). Most of these works focus on the effects that the linguistic behaviour of more or less competent L2 learners may have upon their (non-)native hearers. Their authors seem to agree that, while in some circumstances pragmatic failure may have relatively unimportant consequences and lead to (very) hilarious misunderstandings, in others it does have more serious repercussions and may result in misunderstandings leading to surprise, amazement, frustration, dissatisfaction or even interactive conflict and communication breakdown, since deviations from the expected or appropriate communicative practices in a community “[…] will immediately be regarded as ‘strange’ or –depending on the degree of ‘error’– inexplicable, stupid, crazy, and so on” (Riley 2006: 314). Regarding hearers, what can be found in those works are brief analyses and reflections about their possible or actual reactions to a linguistic behaviour or a style that differs from what they would have expected for a certain context in their culture or sociocultural group. This paper does not centre on learners’ performance, but on hearers, regardless of whether they are native or non-native. As opposed to the many existing works on pragmatic failure, it reflects on the ways in which hearers can overcome conversational misunderstandings arising from the (mis)use of phatic utterances by L2 learners of English or from an insufficient processing of those utterances. It argues that one of the interpretive strategies available to hearers described by Sperber (1994) and Wilson (1999) –namely, ‘cautious optimism’– can satisfactorily help (non)native hearers overcome conversational misunderstandings and pragmatic failures when processing utterances that their non-native interlocutors would have expected them to assign a phatic interpretation. It firstly explains what phatic utterances are, how and why utterances receive a phatic interpretation, their importance for social interaction, the tendencies in their usage in the UK and USA and the possible risks that they may involve for interaction. Secondly, based on some of the tenets of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004), it discusses how hearers may achieve phatic interpretations and recover

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social information using the simplest interpretive strategy used in comprehension. Finally, it reflects on how hearers may overcome two types of pragmatic failures arising from the occurrence of those utterances in conversations.

2. The importance and risks of phatic utterances for social interaction Initially, utterances are assigned a phatic interpretation or taken to be tokens of phatic communion when their propositional content is obvious or trivial, as it does not transmit factual information that significantly improves the hearer’s world view (e.g. Malinowski 1923; Turner 1973; Leech 1974; Hudson 1980; Coulmas 1981; Edmondson and House 1981). For this reason, phatic utterances have been customarily considered linguistic devices that are mainly aimed at maintaining the interactive contact between interlocutors, and one of the most frequent examples of interlocutors’ communicative behaviour when they meet and do not really have anything interesting to say, or just want to avoid the uncomfortable tension that silence may originate (Malinowski 1923). In relevance-theoretic terms, utterances receive a phatic interpretation when they only ‘make manifest’ assumptions that are already manifest to interlocutors1, or, in other words, when interlocutors are already acquainted with the information that they transmit (Žegarac 1998; Žegarac and Clark 1999). Therefore, the relevance of phatic utterances does not lie on their propositional content, or on the speaker’s ‘informative intention’, but on the very act of speaking. Their relevance resides in the speaker’s ‘communicative intention’, in the fact that she says something to the hearer and thus shows her want to interact with him2. Phatic utterances are very important linguistic devices for social interaction because they create ties of union between interlocutors (e.g. Leech 1983; Silva 1980; Schneider 1988; Coupland, Coupland and Robinson 1992; Coupland, Robinson and Coupland 1994)3 and transmit 1

The relevance-theoretic notion of ‘manifestness’ alludes to the potentiality of being mentally represented by an individual (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). 2 A speaker’s ‘informative intention’ is her intention to make manifest a series of assumptions to the hearer, whilst her ‘communicative intention’ is her intention to make manifest to the hearer that she indeed has that first intention (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). 3 For a relevance-theoretic account of these communicative effects, see Padilla Cruz (2005, 2007a).

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indexical information about their social roles, attributes, etc. (Laver 1974, 1975). In addition, they may also implicitly communicate information about the politeness system in which interaction takes place (Padilla Cruz 2004a, 2007b). Laver (1974, 1975) has shown that the use of phatic utterances in the UK and US obeys various tacitly established interactive norms. When interlocutors are interacting in what Scollon and Wong-Scollon (1995) label a ‘solidarity politeness system’, they normally resort to ‘personal’ phatic utterances, i.e. phatic utterances about themselves (their look, clothes, likes, dislikes, etc.) (1-2). When they are interacting in a ‘deference politeness system’ (Scollon and Wong-Scollon 1995), they tend to use ‘neutral’ phatic utterances, i.e. utterances about different aspects of the spatio-temporal setting where the conversation is taking place (the weather, sports, recent news, etc.) (3-4). Finally, when interlocutors are interacting in a ‘hierarchical politeness system’ (Scollon and WongScollon 1995)4, individuals seem to abide by two other norms. On the one hand, when the more powerful interlocutor addresses the less powerful, the former individual appears to be allowed to use phatic utterances about the latter individual, what Laver (1974, 1975) terms ‘other-oriented’ utterances (5-6). On the other hand, when it is the less powerful individual that addresses the more powerful individual, the inferior may use phatic utterances about herself, i.e. ‘self-oriented’ utterances (7-8), but should avoid other-oriented ones. This enables her to avoid invading the other’s psychological space and originating a possible interactive conflict. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Oh, Mary! I do love your new apartment. That skirt is cute, isn’t it? Boring match yesterday! It seems as if it is going to rain. Wow! What a flat! Oh, my God! Look at that chandelier! Isn’t it great? I prefer a cup of tea in the mornings. Oh, I do not like those muffins.

Norms like these must be part of the wide set of cultural 4

Politeness systems are defined on the basis of the values that the sociological variables ‘power’ and ‘social distance’ acquire in interaction. Thus, a solidarity politeness system is characterised by a low value of both variables [-P, -D], a deference politeness system is characterised by a low value of the former variable and a high value of the latter [-P, +D], and a hierarchical politeness system is characterised by a high value of the former and a low or high value of the latter [+P, +/-D].

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metarepresentations that the individuals belonging to a certain sociocultural group, in this case the British and the Americans, possess (Sperber 1996; Padilla Cruz 2004b, 2004c), just as they store information about what counts as an offence in their community, how they should apologise for it, how they can thank someone for something, welcome someone, etc. Such metarepresentations considerably influence their communicative behaviour and condition their interpretation of subsequent linguistic (or other) behaviour, as they enter and feed the inferential processes intervening in utterance interpretation. Thanks to them, the processing of utterances which, apparently, do not significantly modify their knowledge of the world can induce hearers to draw conclusions about the social reality in which they interact, which makes those utterances worth processing (Padilla Cruz 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). Elsewhere, following recent relevance-theoretic work, I have called those conclusions ‘social effects’ (Padilla Cruz 2008). Communication is an extremely risky activity because utterances can have many interpretations, even if the speaker intends to communicate only one of them and that interpretation may be clear and straightforward to her. Prompted by the expectations of relevance that an utterance generates, the hearer decodes it, pragmatically enriches the ‘logical form’ that he obtains from its decoding5, assigns a speech-act or propositionalattitude description to it and recovers any implicit content in order to arrive at a specific interpretation6. Under normal circumstances, he does so by following the interpretive path that requires the least cognitive effort possible and results in a satisfactory amount of ‘cognitive effects’7. When he arrives at an ‘optimally relevant’ interpretation of an utterance, he stops his processing and may think that that is the interpretation of the utterance that the speaker may have intended to communicate (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson 1999; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). Concerning the phatic interpretation of utterances, there are some linguistic routines or formulae that in many cases make it possible for utterances to be regarded as phatic almost automatically, which consequently facilitates their correct understanding (Edmondson and 5

In relevance-theoretic terms, a ‘logical form’ is a structured set of concepts (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). 6 Although enumerated in this order, these processes need not be performed sequentially, but can take place simultaneously. 7 These are the strengthening of previous information, the contradiction and subsequent rejection of previously held information, or the derivation of new information from the joint interaction of recently processed and already possessed information (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995).

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House 1981; Schneider 1988). Moreover, their appearance in specific conversational phases such as the opening or the closing phase of conversations, or as constituents of fixed or frozen adjacency pairs in those phases, increases the likelihood that hearers perceive them as phatic and correctly interpret them as such (Kasper 1984). That an utterance is correctly interpreted as phatic is also possible because of the activation of the appropriate interactive frames and the selection of an adequate processing strategy –bottom-up or top-down (e.g. Kasper 1984). This notwithstanding, there is no specific type of utterance that can be said to be inherently phatic. Individuals resort to many comments, remarks or statements with rather diverse contents or topics to engage in phatic communion (Schneider 1988). Besides, phatic utterances are not exclusively restricted to the opening and closing phases of conversations. Therefore, the ‘phaticity’ of utterances is a characteristic that interlocutors have to negotiate as a conversation takes place and unfolds (Coupland, Coupland and Robinson 1992; Coupland, Robinson and Coupland 1994). If phatic utterances do not constitute a class of utterances characterised by special formal properties and do not appear in predictable places in conversations, they may give rise to many misunderstandings and pragmatic failures. To illustrate this, consider the following examples: (9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

This bus is always late! Your new coat is cute. This way is so long! It is cold in here. My legs are not fit for these slopes!

Each of these utterances may be interpreted as phatic in a suitable context. (9) may be perfectly interpreted as phatic, for instance, in a bus stop where two individuals are waiting for a specific bus and they equally know that it is delayed. (10) may be assigned a phatic interpretation if it appears at the opening phase of a conversation or if the hearer is aware that the new, recently bought coat he is wearing at that moment is one of the kind the speaker likes. (11) can have a phatic interpretation in a situation in which two individuals have been walking for a more than reasonable time and the speaker has previously mentioned that it is taking them longer than expected to get to their destination. (12) may equally be phatic if the two interlocutors are already acquainted with the fact that the room where they happen to be is cold. Finally, (13) can be perceived as phatic if the two individuals interacting know that it is hard for the speaker to go up the slopes in question. Nevertheless, in addition to having those phatic interpretations, and provided the necessary contextual factors

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obtain, (9) can be perfectly understood as an genuine complaint about the delay of the bus, (10) as a sincere compliment on the hearer’s new coat, especially if he did not expect the speaker to like it, (11) as an indirect suggestion or request to go a different way, (12) as an indirect request to switch the heater on or to close the window, and (13) as an apology for not being able to follow the other interlocutor’s pace. Under such interpretations, these utterances may also result in cognitive effects that the hearer might not obtain from their phatic interpretations. These examples show that in many situations any individual may hesitate about the exact interpretation that his interlocutor could have envisaged for utterances likes these. They can perfectly have both a phatic and a non-phatic interpretation, if the necessary conditions apply, as a consequence of the pragmatic ambivalence of utterances (Leech and Thomas 1990; Thomas 1995). If native speakers of a language can certainly have problems when assigning a (non-)phatic interpretation to utterances like these, problems may also arise in interaction between native speakers and learners or in interaction between learners. Consequently, both native and non-native hearers may fail to correctly process utterances that their interlocutors intend to be interpreted as phatic and, in fact, they do so in many circumstances. The occurrence of some utterances at specific conversational phases can help hearers correctly process those utterances as phatic, but not so in many other cases. Their (non-)native interlocutors may not follow norms and behavioural patterns like those that Laver (1974, 1975) identified when using phatic utterances and choose types of phatic utterances that would not be expected in some social contexts. This may lead hearers to undesired interpretations. In other cases, they may only recover a phatic interpretation of those utterances, stop there their processing, as they would regard that interpretation as optimally relevant, and not exploit those utterances so as to obtain social effects. All these virtual problems that hearers may find when interpreting phatic utterances should induce us to wonder how they assign phatic interpretations to utterances under normal circumstances, what cognitive strategy/ies they employ to do so and how they can overcome possible interpretation problems or difficulties. The relevance-driven comprehension process (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004) and the cognitive strategies suggested by Sperber (1994) and Wilson (1999) can shed some light on these issues. The strategy of ‘naïve optimism’ can help us understand why individuals accept one correct or erroneous interpretation, while the strategy of ‘cautious optimism’ can help us understand how individuals can overcome pragmatic failures and

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possible conversational misunderstandings originated by a misuse of phatic utterances8. I turn to a discussion of these two strategies in relation to the usage of phatic utterances in the next two sections.

3. Naïve optimism and the phatic interpretation of utterances Under normal circumstances, a hearer searches for the interpretation of an utterance that seems to him sufficiently relevant. When he finds that interpretation, he thinks that it is the interpretation that the speaker intended to communicate and considers it to be her informative intention. If he does not find an optimally relevant interpretation, communication does not succeed. When processing utterances, the easiest and simplest cognitive strategy available to hearers is what Sperber (1994) calls naïve optimism. A naïve and optimistic hearer presupposes that his interlocutor is both ‘competent’ –i.e. that she has an adequate command of the grammatical norms and rules of use of her language– and ‘benevolent’ –i.e. that she will not intend to deceive him. As a result, that hearer will take for granted that his interlocutor will try to avoid misunderstandings and guide him to the interpretation that she intends to communicate following the interpretive path that yields the greatest number of cognitive effects in exchange for a reasonable amount of cognitive effort. In turn, a competent and benevolent speaker is one who checks that the information that she intends to communicate will in fact turn out relevant to the hearer, and that he will recover it instead of other possible interpretations. Recall utterances (9-13) above, which can perfectly have either a phatic or a non-phatic interpretation given the necessary conditions. A competent and benevolent speaker may simply intend to communicate to the hearer with each of those utterances that she just wishes to keep the interactive contact with him. In that case, the complaint interpretation of (9), the compliment interpretation of (10), the suggestion/request interpretation of (11, 12) and the apology interpretation of (13) would be unwarranted. If the hearer is naïve and optimistic, he will follow the interpretive path that provides him with a satisfactory amount of cognitive 8 Sperber (1994) describes a third interpretive strategy called ‘sophisticated understanding’. Since that strategy enables a hearer to recover an interpretation that the speaker does not want or expect him to recover for some reason –she is not benevolent or wants to deceive her interlocutor– it will not be taken into account for the purposes of this paper.

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effects in exchange of an acceptable amount of cognitive effort. During that process, he may realise that he is already aware of what the speaker refers to, since the assumptions that those utterances make manifest are already manifest to himself. Consequently, he may directly conclude that the speaker’s intention when using one of those utterances is precisely that one, as those utterances do not significantly alter his world view, and stop his processing. When he recovers that interpretation and considers it optimally relevant, he will not think of any other possible alternative interpretation, as this would detract from optimal relevance. He will believe that the speaker’s intention is indeed to talk to him just to keep the interactive contact, show a friendly attitude or avoid the unpleasantness of silence in that situation. However, if during that interpretive process he does not realise that the assumptions that those utterances make manifest are already manifest to him, he can perfectly end up recovering an unintended interpretation and considering it optimally relevant. Although a naïve and optimistic hearer can potentially reach an interpretation along those lines when processing utterances actually intended by the speaker to be interpreted as phatic, he can also obtain social effects regarding, for instance, the sort of social relationship existing between him and the speaker. For a competent and benevolent speaker to transmit information about politeness systems, she must verify that the type of phatic utterance she intends to resort to in a conversation –neutral or personal, self- or other-oriented– corresponds to the type of utterance that can be used in the politeness system that she wishes to establish, maintain or modify with her interlocutor. In other words, she has to access assumptions about the interactive context, infer the politeness system existing between her and the hearer and check that the type of phatic utterance that she intends to use is allowed by the cultural metarepresentations referring to interaction with a particular individual in a specific social context (14). In addition, she must also check that the hearer has an easy and immediate access to those contextual assumptions and cultural metarepresentations, as they will influence the hearer’s interpretation of the utterance she resorts to and can help him recover or prevent him from recovering that social information. Finally, that competent and benevolent speaker must select the utterance that best matches the politeness system that she wishes to establish, maintain or modify (15), so that the hearer inferentially obtains the desired social effects (16). A naïve and optimistic hearer will obtain those effects if he assumes that the speaker’s intention is to make him recover that social information, i.e. if it is part of her informative intention, and that the only optimally relevant interpretation that she might have wanted to

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communicate is the one that he recovers9. Following the interpretive path that he thinks requires least cognitive effort and yields a reasonable amount of cognitive effects, he will access as many manifest contextual assumptions and cultural metarepresentations regarding the use of phatic utterances in a particular social relationship as necessary and will infer information about the politeness system that the speaker wishes to establish, maintain or modify. If he does not access such contextual assumptions and cultural metarepresentations, he might not obtain those effects. (14) a. I do not know if my interlocutor has more power than me. [contextual assumption] b. My interlocutor and I have not met before. [contextual assumption] c. There is a deference politeness system between my hearer and me. [inference] d. In a deference politeness system the appropriate behaviour is to begin a conversation by means of a neutral phatic utterance. [cultural metarepresentation] e. In a deference politeness system personal phatic utterances should be avoided. [cultural metarepresentation] (15) Frosty morning! (16) a. I do not know if my interlocutor has more power than me. [contextual assumption] b. My interlocutor and I have not met before. [contextual assumption] c. There is a deference politeness system between my interlocutor and me. [inference] d. In a deference politeness system neutral phatic utterances are preferred. [cultural metarepresentation] e. My interlocutor wishes to establish a deference politeness system with me. [inference]

In the examples and situations discussed so far, speakers are supposed to behave both competently, because they command the language they speak and the rules governing the use of phatic utterances, and benevolently, because they do not want to deceive their interlocutors and give them the impression that there exists a politeness system that does not really exists between them. However, speakers do not always behave competently when interacting, for they may not be aware of the constraints 9

As Wilson puts it, “[The speaker] has spoken competently if the first interpretation that [the hearer] finds relevant enough is the intended one; she has spoken benevolently if this interpretation not only seems relevant but is genuinely so” (1999: 137).

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operating on certain linguistic behaviours in specific situations in their culture, take into account some of the features of the situation in which interaction takes place, foresee the contexts that hearers will most easily and quickly access to interpret utterances or select the most adequate utterance that leads hearers to recover specific social information (Sperber 1994: 192). This may bias hearers and make them obtain undesired interpretations. If this is something that can quite frequently happen between native speakers of a language, in the case of interaction between natives and L2 learners who do not have a good command of the target language and its cultural system, or interaction exclusively between L2 learners, the probability that non-native speakers behave incompetently may dramatically increase. As mentioned above, that incompetence can have negative consequences because both native and non-native hearers may recover interpretations that significantly differ from those that their interlocutors might have intended to communicate. In some cases, an L2 learner may use an utterance expecting the hearer to interpret it as phatic, but may not be aware of some contextual factors that make him process it as non-phatic. Or, viceversa, the L2 learner may expect her interlocutor to process an utterance as non-phatic and is not aware that the assumptions that her utterance makes manifest are already manifest to him, so that he interprets it as phatic. In other cases, L2 learners either do not take into account the values of the sociological variables determining politeness systems or wrongly select a type of phatic utterance that does not correspond to the politeness system that they have established with their interlocutors without the intention to redefine it. The inadequate usage of a specific phatic utterance in a specific politeness system can give rise to pragmatic failures and many conversational misunderstandings in which hearers may recover a series of ‘prejudicial implicatures’ (Escandell Vidal 1996; Jary 1998) that may seriously affect interaction. However, they can overcome them by resorting to another interpretive strategy, which Sperber (1994) terms ‘cautious optimism’.

4. Cautious optimism and pragmatic failure caused by the (mis)use of phatic utterances When pragmatic failure occurs, a hearer can feel induced to attribute to his interlocutor beliefs –‘prefailure’ beliefs, as Field (2007) calls them– and intentions that she might not actually have. He may do so on the basis of an appreciated mismatch between the linguistic stimulus that the speaker selected to achieve a particular communicative goal and his cultural metarepresentations about interaction. Such metarepresentations

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can encourage the hearer to anticipate that the other individual will behave in a specific way or to expect a certain outcome from her linguistic behaviour in a given situation. If the speaker’s actual behaviour does not correspond to the hearer’s anticipations or expectations, they become the reason for the hearer’s subsequent surprise and frustration, which he tries to justify by attributing some beliefs or intentions to the speaker (Field 2007: 134). In extreme cases, an (erroneous) attribution of beliefs or intentions can even affect the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s personality. Nevertheless, “[…] there is no compelling reason to conclude that such attributions imply that […] actions are guided by occurrent beliefs” (Field 2007: 133). Misunderstandings arising from pragmatic failure can be reasonably overcome by resorting to cautious optimism. This cognitive strategy is “[...] a special case of competent attribution of intentions” (Sperber 1994:192). By using this strategy, the hearer attributes to the speaker the intention to communicate an interpretation of an utterance that would have achieved an optimal level of relevance and that he would have accessed more directly and with less cognitive effort instead of another interpretation which, at that moment and under specific communicative circumstances, he must accept as the most relevant one. Cautious optimism is necessary when the speaker has not thought of another utterance that leads the hearer to recover the cognitive effects that she intended to produce with less effort, or when she has not taken into account some contextual elements that favour an alternative interpretation instead of the desired one. This strategy enables the hearer to overcome two types of misunderstandings: ‘accidental relevance’ and ‘accidental irrelevance’ (Wilson 1999: 137). In what follows I will discuss how (non)native hearers can overcome these two types of misunderstandings when processing phatic utterances produced by L2 learners.

4.1. Overcoming accidental relevance of (non-)phatic utterances Cases of accidental relevance arise when the first interpretation that appears to the hearer to be relevant enough is not the one that the speaker intended to communicate. A naïve and optimistic hearer would accept that first interpretation as optimally relevant and would identify it with the speaker’s informative intention. On the contrary, an optimistic and cautious hearer is able to go a step further and wonder whether the first interpretation that seems to him optimally relevant is in fact the one that the speaker really intended to communicate. If not, he is entitled to consider an alternative interpretation.

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An optimistic and cautious hearer is able to overcome pragmatic failures, in which an L2 learner’s formulation of an utterance ostensively but inadvertently favours an unintended interpretation. In the case of pragmatically ambivalent utterances like (9-13), which can give rise to different competing interpretations, a (non-)native hearer can hesitate between a phatic and a non-phatic interpretation. If he is naïve and optimistic and does not realise that those utterances make manifest assumptions that the L2 learner thinks are already manifest to him, he may assign to those utterances the complaint-, compliment-, suggestion/request- or apology-interpretations. He will do so if, following the interpretive path that requires least effort and yields an acceptable amount of cognitive effects, those interpretations are the first to come to his mind and he finds them relevant enough. He would accept them and would not think that the L2 learner might have expected him to interpret those utterances differently, just as tokens of phatic communion. On the other hand, if the (non-)native hearer is cautious and optimistic, he may realise that the assumptions that the L2 learner makes manifest to him with those utterances are already manifest to himself, conclude that her intention is to avoid an uncomfortable interactive silence and opt for a phatic interpretation in spite of formulations that may have initially prompted him to accept those other non-phatic interpretations as optimally relevant. An optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer is also able to overcome those cases in which the L2 learner’s (unfortunate) selection of a type of utterance for a specific social context ostensively but inadvertently makes him draw some unexpected or undesired conclusions. He can refuse the first interpretation of an utterance that appears to him relevant and makes him conclude that the L2 learner’s informative intention is very different from the one which she actually has, and considers another alternative interpretation that enables him to keep the presumption that the learner is behaving benevolently. Nonetheless, he may think that she is incompetent. In a given politeness system, for which the cultural metarepresentations spread throughout the individuals of a group establish a type of phatic utterance as preferable and adequate, a naïve and optimistic (non-)native hearer could interpret a dispreferred phatic utterance as inadequate on the grounds of those metarepresentations. Thus, in a hierarchical politeness system in which he is the superior and his interlocutor is the inferior, he could expect a self-oriented phatic utterance (17) from the L2 learner. If she addresses him by means of an other-oriented utterance (18), he could find a conclusion such as (19) optimally relevant:

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That naïve and optimistic (non-)native hearer could even think that his interlocutor has not behaved benevolently and, therefore, attribute to her the intention to invade his psychological space, to be rude or impolite on purpose, which would certainly have negative consequences for their social relationship. However, an optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer can consider assumptions such as those in (20) as ‘alternative implicatures’ (Yus Ramos 1999a, 1999b) when processing an utterance such as (18) in that politeness system, instead of considering (19): (20) a. My interlocutor does not want to be rude/impolite to me; she has just (unknowingly) chosen a wrong phatic token to begin this conversation. b. My interlocutor thinks she can use an other-oriented phatic token to begin a conversation with me.

That (non-)native hearer could also have found a conclusion like (19) optimally relevant on the basis of the cultural metarepresentations that he would have accessed. However, he realises that that is not the conclusion that the L2 learner might have intended or expected him to derive and considers an alternative one. Such conclusion makes it possible for him to still see his interlocutor as benevolent, although not fully competent, and prevents him from attributing to her an intention to offend him which she did not actually have. As can be seen, in cases like these cautious optimism can enable (non)native hearers to recover the intended interpretation of utterances that may be pragmatically ambivalent in a given communicative situation because the L2 learner has not taken into account some contextual features and has formulated her utterance in a way that favours an alternative, but equally possible, interpretation. This strategy can also enable (non-)native hearers to dismiss an undesired interpretation that could lead them to attribute to their incompetent interlocutors certain prefailure beliefs or intentions that would have guided their actions. If hearers attributed those beliefs or intentions to their interlocutors, they could form an inadequate idea of their interlocutors’ personality.

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4.2. Overcoming accidental irrelevance of phatic utterances As mentioned above, cautious optimism also makes it possible for the hearer to overcome cases of accidental irrelevance. Such cases arise, for instance, when he thinks that the speaker only transmits information that is already known or when she makes a slip of the tongue (Wilson 1999). In these circumstances, a naïve and optimistic hearer would only consider the linguistic evidence of the utterance and, as a consequence of its apparently low level of informativeness, would not obtain cognitive effects that satisfy his expectations of relevance. On the contrary, an optimistic and cautious hearer notices the apparent irrelevance of an utterance and asks himself which other adequate interpretation the speaker could have intended to communicate so that the utterance would have achieved an optimal level of relevance. This interpretive strategy is also decisive for the interpretation of phatic utterances and the recovery of social effects. Apparently, phatic utterances only make manifest assumptions that are previously manifest to interlocutors, so such utterances might be considered irrelevant by some individuals. An optimistic and naïve hearer accesses the assumptions that a phatic utterance makes manifest and, since they are already manifest to him, he may think that the L2 learner’s intention is just to keep the interactive contact. From the processing of that utterance he might only obtain what Yus Ramos (1999a, 1999b) calls an ‘involuntary explicature’. That would prevent him from grasping any implicit content that his interlocutor may intend to communicate –in this case, information about their social relationship. On the contrary, when facing an apparent case of irrelevance, an optimistic and cautious (non)native hearer would go one step further and expand his interpretive context, incorporating assumptions referring to both interlocutors’ power, social distance or affect, as well as cultural metarepresentations referring to politeness system and interaction within them. In that way, he can relate those assumptions to the assumptions made manifest by the phatic utterance and obtain social effects that satisfy his expectations of relevance. Accordingly, an optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer would expand his context so as to solve the apparent irrelevance of (21) in a context where it is mutually manifest to both interlocutors that the blouse to which the utterance alludes is beautiful, and would move from an interpretation such as (22) to another such as (23). He would do so because of the cultural metarepresentations about the establishment or existence of a particular politeness system and the type of utterances that could be expected in it:

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Chapter Four (21) Beautiful blouse! (22) My interlocutor is willing to communicate with me. (23) My interlocutor may wish to maintain a solidarity politeness system with me.

The speaker’s informative intention may be rather diffuse or difficult to pin down in some communicative circumstances, so it is the hearer’s task to make an appraisal thereof as exact as possible. She may also make weakly manifest some of the assumptions constituting her informative intention and expect the hearer to use them in order to get the intended interpretation of her utterance. However, the hearer may not use them or use some unintended implicatures on his own responsibility and, hence, misunderstand her utterance. When facing a case of accidental irrelevance, an optimistic and cautious hearer is able to incorporate to his interpretative context cultural metarepresentations that allow him to obtain social effects concerning the politeness system that the speaker intends to establish, maintain or modify, or about the speaker’s (im)polite attitude. This should not mean that a naïve and optimistic hearer is not able to recover those effects in exchange of a reasonable amount of cognitive effort if the utterance generates enough expectations of relevance. If that hearer recovers them, he may attribute the speaker the intention to transmit those assumptions to him. The speaker’s informative intention is a first-level metarepresentation of another representation formed by the assumptions that she intends to make manifest to the hearer. In turn, her communicative intention is a second-level informative intention, as it is her intention to make mutually manifest her informative intention (Sperber 1994: 193). In linguistic communication the hearer must discover which the speaker’s actual informative intention is. In order to do so, he must carry out an inferential process in which he takes the speaker’s informative intention as a premise and comes to a conclusion about that intention. As a consequence, he will be able to attribute that informative intention to the speaker. In that inferential process, the hearer uses a first-level metarepresentation so as to obtain a second-level metarepresentation: (24) [S intends [me to believe/think [the blouse is beautiful]]]

When interpreting an utterance that appears to be phatic, an optimistic and naïve (non-)native hearer reaches this second level of metarepresentation. However, an optimistic and cautious hearer takes this second-level metarepresentation as a premise for a new inferential process because he thinks that the interpretation of the utterance that he has

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recovered and finds relevant enough is not the interpretation that his (in)competent interlocutor intended to communicate. Consequently, he searches for another interpretation that is indeed optimally relevant. This means that he rejects the conclusion that the optimistic and naïve hearer would have drawn and considers another possible interpretation. An optimistic and cautious hearer needs another level of metarepresentation that makes it possible for him to solve his interlocutor’s incompetence in the two cases mentioned (Wilson, 1999: 137-138), either because an incompetent or not fully competent learner has selected an utterance that leads him to obtain an undesired interpretation or because that incompetent or not fully competent learner has produced an irrelevant utterance. Communication is an intentional activity which not only presupposes the existence of an informative intention in one of the interlocutors, but also the existence of an intention that the other individual recognises that very intention or, in other words, her communicative intention (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Sperber 1994; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). If a (non-)native hearer assumes that an L2 learner is competent and benevolent, he does not need to metarepresent her thoughts, but to recover an interpretation that he considers relevant and to think that it is the learner’s informative intention. On the contrary, if a (non-)native hearer assumes that the learner is benevolent but incompetent, then he will think that she may have intended to communicate another different interpretation that would have in fact achieved an optimal level of relevance.

5. Conclusion Most works on pragmatic failure underline the need to develop L2 learners’ ‘metapragmatic awareness’ so as to make them conscious of the importance of correctly knowing their L2 and applying its conventions of use, as well as of the repercussions that an undesired influence of their L1 may have upon their interlocutors’ perception of their personality. Regarding hearers, those works only dwell on the possible or actual evaluations that they could make of their more or less competent interlocutors’ linguistic behaviour, but do not say much about how they could contribute to make interaction smoother and softer by overcoming pragmatic failures, or the cognitive strategies they could resort to in order to do so. This paper has discussed how hearers can take advantage of one of the interpretive strategies suggested by Sperber (1994) and Wilson (1999) in order to overcome pragmatic failures stemming from an inadequate usage

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of utterances envisaged as phatic by L2 learners. It has argued that cautious optimism is a strategy that can successfully help (non-)native hearers obtain alternative interpretations to other interpretations that, unfortunately, achieve an optimal degree of relevance in certain contexts. Being cautious and optimistic, hearers do not need to attribute to their interlocutors certain prefailure beliefs or intentions that would have allegedly guided their behaviour, an attribution that could induce them to form an erroneous conception of their personality. L2 learners should therefore be trained to become optimistic and cautious hearers who are be able to metarepresent their interlocutors’ beliefs and intentions and thus consider alternative interpretations of apparently irrelevant utterances that can implicitly communicate additional social information or of utterances that accidentally achieve an optimal level of relevance under an unexpected or undesired interpretation because of a wrong choice of their linguistic form. Teaching them to be cautious and optimistic, teachers will progressively make learners understand that they should not look for alleged beliefs or intentions that could have guided their interlocutors’ linguistic behaviour, but that their behaviour is in some cases the result of an uninformed wrong habit, whose potential consequences they could even ignore.

References Abercrombie, D. “Phatic communion”. In Concise Encyclopaedia of Pragmatics, edited by J. L. Mey, 672-673. Oxford: Elsevier, 1998. Arent, R. E. “Understanding misunderstanding in the Ammani bargaining event: pragmatic failure or instrumental rudeness?”. Disarat, Human and Social Sciences 27 (2000): 222-243. Beebe, L. M., T. Takahashi and R. Uliss-Weltz. “Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals”. In Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language, edited by R. Scarcella, E. Andersen and S. D. Krashen. Rowley: Newbury House, 1990. Blum-Kulka, S. “Learning how to say what you mean: a study of speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language”. Applied Linguistics 3 (1982): 29-59. —. “Interpreting and performing speech acts in a second language: a cross-cultural study of Hebrew and English”. In Sociolinguistics and Language acquisition, edited by N. Wolfson and E. Judd, 36-55. Rowley: Newbury House, 1988. Cohen, A. D. and E. Oshtain. “Developing a measure of sociocultural competence: the case of apology”. Language Learning 31 (1981): 113-

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134. Coulmas, F. (ed.) Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communicative Situations and Prepatterned speech. The Hague: Mouton, 1981. Coupland, J., N. Coupland and J. D. Robinson, J. D. “How are you? Negotiating phatic communion”. Language in Society 21 (1992): 207230. Coupland, J., J. D. Robinson and N. Coupland. “Frame negotiation in doctor-elderly patient consultations”. Discourse and Society 5 (1994): 89-124. Edmondson, W. and J. House. Let’s Talk and Talk about it. A Pedagogic Interactional Grammar of English. München: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1981. Eisenstein, M. and J. Bodman. “Expressing gratitude in American English”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 64-81. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Escandell Vidal, M. V. “Towards a cognitive approach to politeness”. Language Sciences 18 (1996): 629-650. Færch, C. and G. Kasper. “Internal and external modification in interlanguage request realisation”. In Corss-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 221-247. Norwood: Ablex, 1989. Field, R. W. “Pragmatic failure and the attribution of belief”. Journal of Philosophical Research 32 (2007): 133-143. García, C. “Apologising in English – Politeness strategies used by native and non-native speakers”. Multilingua 8 (1989): 3-20. Hale, S. “Pragmatic considerations in court interpreting”. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 19 (1996): 61-72. Hong, W. “Sociopragmatics in language teaching: with examples of Chinese requests”. Journal of the Chinese Language Tearchers Association 32 (1997): 95-107. Hudson, R. A. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Jary, M. “Is relevance theory asocial?”. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 11 (1998): 157-169. Kasanga, L. A. “Requests in English by second language users”. ITL, Review of Applied Linguistics 119-120 (1998): 123-153. —. “Intercultural sociolinguistics and communication research in South Africa: its relevance to academic settings and the service industry”. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 19 (2001): 253-273. Kasanga, L. A. and J. C. Lwanga-Lumu. “Cross-cultural linguistic

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realisation of politeness: a study of apologies in English and Setswana”. Journal of Politeness Research 3 (2007): 65-92. Kasper, G. “Pragmatic comprehension in learner-native speaker discourse”. Language Learning 34 (1984): 1-20. —. “Pragmatic transfer”. Second Language Research 8 (1992): 203-231. Kasper, G. and S. Blum-Kulka (eds.). Interlanguage Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kwon, J. “Expressing refusals in Korean and in American English”. Multilingua 23 (2004): 339-364. Laver, J. “Communicative functions of phatic communion”. Work in Progress 7 (1974): 1-17. —. “Communicative functions of phatic communion”. In Organisation of Behaviour in Face-to-face Interaction, edited by A. Kendon, R. M. Harris and M. R. Key, 215-238. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Leech, G. Semantics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. —. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983. Leech, G. and J. Thomas. “Language, meaning and context: pragmatics”. In An Encyclopaedia of Language, edited by N. E. Collinge, 173-206. London: Routledge, 1990. Malinowski, B. K. “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”. In The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, edited by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, 451-510. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1923. Nelson, G. L., M. Al-Batal and E. Echols. “Arabic and English compliment responses: potential for pragmatic failure”. Applied Linguistics 17 (1996): 411-432. Olshtain, E. “Sociocultural competence and language transfer: the case of apology”. In Series on Issues on Second Language Research, edited by S. D. Krashen and R. C. Scarcella, 232-249. Rowley: Newbury House, 1983. Olshtain, E. and A. D. Cohen. “Speech act behaviour across languages”. In Transfer in Language Production, edited by H. W. Dechert and M. Raupach, 53-67. Norwood: Ablex, 1989. Padilla Cruz, M. Aproximación pragmática a los enunciados fáticos. Enfoque social y cognitivo. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2004a. —. “On the social importance of phatic utterances: some considerations for a relevance-theoretic approach”. In Current Trends in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics, edited by P. Garcés Conejos, R. Gómez Morón, L. Fernández Amaya and M. Padilla Cruz, 199-216. Seville: Research Group “Intercultural Pragmatic Studies”, 2004b. —. “Phatic utterances and cultural knowledge: some remarks for a new

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relevance-theoretic approach to phatic communication”. In Actas del XXVII Congreso Internacional de AEDEAN, edited by A. R. Celada, D. Pastor García and P. J. Pardo García, CD ROM edition. Salamanca: Editorial Ambos Mundos, 2004c. —. “On the phatic interpretation of utterances: a complementary relevance-theoretic approach”. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 18 (2005): 227-246. —. “Metarepresentations and phatic utterances: a pragmatic proposal about the generation of solidarity between interlocutors”. In Current Trends in Pragmatics, edited by P. Cap and J. Nijakowska, 110-128. New Castle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007a. —. “Phatic utterances and the communication of social information”. In Studies in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics, edited by P. Garcés Conejos, M. Padilla Cruz, R. Gómez Morón and L. Fernández Amaya, 114-131. New Castle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007b. —. “Social effects: a relevance-theoretic perspective”. In Proceedings of the 31st AEDEAN International Conference, edited by M. J. Lorenzo Modia, 699-709 A Coruña: Universidade, 2008. Riley, P. “Self-expression and the negotiation of identity in a foreign language”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (2006): 295-318. Schneider, K. P. Small Talk. Analysing Phatic Discourse. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1988. Scollon, R. and S. Wong-Scollon. Intercultural Communication. A Discourse Approach. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. Silva, O. “Phatic language: a preliminary contrastive analysis between English and Spanish”. Lenguaje y Ciencias 20 (1980): 105-112. Sperber, D. “Understanding verbal understanding”. In What Is Intelligence?, edited by J. Khalfa, 179-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. —. Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson Relevance. Communication and Cognition. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Takahashi, T. and L. M. Beebe. “The development of pragmatic competence by Japanese learners of English”. JALT Journal 8 (1987): 131-155. Takahashi, T. and L. M. Beebe. “Cross-linguistic influence in the speech

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act of correction”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 138-158. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Tanaka, N. “Politeness: some problems for Japanese speakers of English”. JALT Journal 9 (1988): 81-102. Thomas, J. “Cross-cultural pragmatic failure”. Applied Linguistics 4 (1983): 91-112. —. Meaning in Interaction: an Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1995. Tran, G. Q. The Nature and Conditions of Pragmatic and Discourse Transfer Investigated through Naturalized Role-play. Muenchen: Lincom, 2006. Turner, R. Stylistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Wilson, D. “Metarepresentation in linguistic communication”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999): 127-161. Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. “Relevance theory”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2002): 249-287. Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. “Relevance Theory”. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by L. Horn and G. Ward, 607-632. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Wolfson, N. Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL. New York: Newbury House, 1989. Yus Ramos, F. “Towards a pragmatic taxonomy of misunderstandings”. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 38 (1999a): 217-239. —. “Misunderstandings and explicit/implicit communication”. Pragmatics 9 (1999b): 487-517. Žegarac, V. “What is phatic communication?”. In Current Issues in Relevance Theory, edited by V. Rouchota and A. H. Jucker, 327-361. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998. Žegarac, V. and B. Clark. “Phatic interpretations and phatic communication”. Journal of Linguistics 35 (1999): 321-346.

PART II: TEACHING LANGUAGES ACROSS CULTURES

CHAPTER FIVE THE ACQUISITION OF PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE FROM A STRATEGIC PERSPECTIVE: APOLOGY, A CASE IN POINT ABDELHADI BELLACHHAB

1. Introduction Within the scope of thirty years Interlanguage Pragmatics (IP henceforth) seduced and still charms a large number of scholars belonging to different areas of research. A hybrid domain, it seeks inspiration particularly in Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and above all, pragmatics. This increasing interest in IP gave rise to considerable interrogations whether in instructional milieus or elsewhere. The eminent importance it received in Language Acquisition literature (Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Bardovi-Harlig 1999; Kasper and Rose 1999; Rose 2000; Rose and Kasper 2001) illustrates well, on the one hand, the notable progress in theoretical pragmatics (Austin 1962; Searle 1969, 1976; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983), and proves, on the other hand, the great will to enrich, in a methodical way, studies done before. However, despite the importance of a large scope of studies done in IP they seem to be of a descriptive/comparative nature rather than explanative/ interpretative one, though they sometimes provide, as Bardovi-Harlig (2001:13) notes, “[…] a common analytic framework which facilitates comparison between studies.” Allusion here is made to the interesting quantity of research done within cross-cultural range. Ellis (1994), in this respect, maintains that in spite of the large number of studies having IP as their subject of research few of them tried to deal with the “process” of acquiring pragmatic competence. There is much more interest in IP as a product rather than a process. Therefore, could we still

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hope for a systematic research which attempts to explicit the different acquisitional procedures and mechanisms underlying IP?

2. Study scope Given the importance that we attach to IP insofar as its development is concerned, our study is part of a body of research taking place within a large and newly created program called CAPSA-Lang1, a program which is located at the crossroads of two disciplinary interfaces: ! The interface between semantic theory and discourse analysis. ! The interface between analytic didactic (the analysis of discursive practices within didactic communication) and second/foreign language acquisition. CAPSA-Lang, in fact, has two main objectives which are closely interwoven. The first one seeks developing the links between fundamental research in semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and on the other, in second/foreign language acquisition. The second tries to promote methodological programs in French as a Foreign Language (FFL)2 teaching. Insofar as interpersonal communication is concerned, our research study is, to a large extent, based on Leech’s (1983) view of pragmatics as “interpersonal rhetoric”. This view conceives of interactants as social actors accomplishing their goals not only by satisfying them but also by paying attention to their interpersonal relation with their partners. Up until now, numerous studies examined apology in instructional contexts3. Most of them, however, tend to investigate IP from a rather narrow perspective limited to whatever has to do with linguistic realisation of apology in a comparative framework without, for all that, trying to give practical explanations of what might underlie apology performance. Some studies, despite their restricted number, offer quite possible clarifications relating to pragmatic competence acquisition and development, either from a discursive (House 1993; Zuengler 1993) or cognitive (Bialystok 1990; Schmidt 1993) point of view.

1

CAPSA-Lang stands for the Acquisition of Argumentative Pragmatic and Semantic Competence. 2 FFL stands for French as a Foreign Language. 3 See Cohen and Olshtain 1981; Fraser 1981; Olshtain and Cohen 1983; Olshtain 1983, 1989; Bergman and Kasper 1993; Trosborg 1995.

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2.1 Objectives Within the framework of CAPSA-Lang program4, we project three complimentary goals: scientific, pedagogical, and strategic. This study, in fact, tries to offer, in one way or another, some leads of reflexion in the middle of a mass of IP studies. Scientifically speaking, this is an endeavour to test our hypotheses (discussed later on) concerning basically the links between the acquisition of pragmatic and semantic competence. We are therefore looking to determine the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the development of these competencies. From a pedagogic point of view, we tend to promote the elaboration and the conception of a new curriculum, as is suggested by Robinson (2001). First of all, we opt for developing activity units in FFL class based on a more structured integration of speech acts within the whole fabric of the curriculum, a structured integration which takes into account not only the grammatical dimension of speech act realisation but also the sociocultural one. Secondly, the elaboration of a new curriculum needs organising the activity units in terms of time sequences for the sake of an optimal operation within the learning period. We finally try to focus more than ever on the learner’s role in assimilating (and analysing) a given language other than his/her mother tongue by examining his learning motivations and wants. Finally, we advocate, in a strategic way, the development of the different links existing between research in semantics, pragmatics, and FFL/FSL5.

2.2 Research questions and assumptions This study addresses three central questions in connection with the different components of communicative competence (Hymes 1971; Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Bachman 1990; Bachman and Palmer 1996), mainly pragmatic, semantic, and strategic competence. We thus formulate our main concerns as follows: ! Is there any parallelism between semantic and pragmatic competence? In other words, does second/foreign language learner develop necessary abilities to produce and acknowledge 4

The CAPSA-Lang program was first initiated by O. Galatanu on the occasion of the international symposium “Retour aux variétés avancées dans l’acquisition des langues secondes”, Aston University, Birmingham, June 2006. 5 FSL stands for French as a Second Language.

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discursive sequences including semantic relations, either “normative” or “transgressive” while he/she develops a “functional knowledge” with regard to speech act realisation, and respects the contextual adequacy of linguistic forms? ! Are there any links between strategic and pragmatic competence? ! Is there any relationship between discursive representations and communicative strategies maintained by second/foreign language learners? Now that we have presented our research questions, we can then advance three respective assumptions. The assumptions focus particularly on factors responsible for pragmatic competence development in relation with other elements constituting communicative competence, whether a declarative constituent or a procedural one. Initially, we suggest that a “rich” and “analysed”6 linguistic representation of a certain grammatical rule or a semantic relation (synonymy, hyponymy, etc.) for instance, manifested at the level of discursive constructions, does not alone guarantee pragmatic competence development. Such an assumption implies that a fluid production, even relevant, of speech acts does not reflect necessarily a good mastery of pragmatic competence. The thesis that we put forward here is an allusion to the “appropriateness” criterion advanced by Hymes (1971). Therefore, fluency and relevance at the pragmalinguistic level are two criteria still pending and in need of reinforcement by another criterion, this time, of a sociopragmatic nature. Eventually, we presume that poor grammatical and/or semantic resources are not the only responsible for poor pragmatic competence.

2.3 Theoretical and methodological framework 2.3.1 Theory To do this research study our approach is based on a theoretical framework of a double interface. Two models, we assume, come together in such a way to propose a sort of explanation to the process of meaning construction via learners of FSL/FFL apology realisation. First of all, Bialystok’s processing model (Bialystok 1983, 1990, 1993) is here considered. It assumes that mastery of communicative competence depends essentially, but not exhaustively, on mastery of two underlying processing components, namely Analysis of linguistic knowledge and 6

The term “analysed” is borrowed from Bialystok (1993).

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Control of linguistic processing. These two components are two cognitive processes acting on mental representations in the sense that they respectively analyse and control learner’s knowledge of language; they are accordingly responsible for linguistic performance; their operation may vary from one learner to another and from one context of language use to another (Bialystok 1990). As for its goal, this model seeks to fulfil two main functions. First, it aims at describing learner’s language processing aptitude in terms of cognitive mechanisms responsible for language acquisition and use. In other respects, the model attempts to introduce an analysis of language functions in order to determine the needs required from learners (Bialystok 1993). Insofar as it its functioning is concerned, Bialystok’s model of processing discerns between two cognitive mechanisms: ! Analysis of linguistic knowledge: a process concerned with expliciting and analysing learner’s implicit knowledge. It is a structuring, a restructuring process charged with the analysis and reorganisation of mental representations for the sake of a better comprehensibility. ! Control of linguistic processing: a process to control learner’s attention and then reorient it towards relevant information for appropriate assimilation. A major mechanism of this process is “selective attention” (Bialystok 1990: 125). The main role of this mechanism is to decide between a large amount of information of a competitive nature7. Learner is here to pay attention to only some aspects of information exposed, of course according to its degree of relevance. The second theoretical model we adopt in this study owes its origins to two approaches: discourse analysis and lexical semantics. This model, called Semantics of Argumentative Probabilities (SAP), conceived and developed by Galatanu since 1999 (Galatanu 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2006) sets up a model of representation, construction, and reconstruction of lexical meaning from the various occurrences of use of a given lexeme (Galatanu 2007: 91). SAP attempts to establish a model of discourse representation as a context for manifestation of semantico-discursive mechanisms of meaning construction and reconstruction of sense (Galatanu 2007: 94). The representation of the SAP model contains three intertwined layers:

7

A multitude of information about linguistic elements, paralinguistic elements, etc.

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! ! !

Core: represents traits of semantic categorization which constitutes its essential properties. Stereotypes: stand for an open set of associations of elements from the Core with other representations. Argumentative Probabilities (AP): are discursive sequences introducing associations of a given word and any element of its Stereotypes.

2.3.2 Method This study is based on two types of data collected at the university of Arts and Social Sciences in Beni-Mellal, Morocco. The first type consists of transcripts of data collected by means of videotaped simulated interactions. These simulated role-plays consisted of six scenarios featuring two students enacting roles of different social distances and different social statuses. 20 advanced students in their fourth year of university study at the French language Department participated in this study. This first kind of data is used to analyse learners’ apology realisation; an analysis which permits the examination of interlanguage development. The second type of data is collected by means of a written questionnaire divided into two sections: one section dedicated to interrogating learners’ declarative knowledge vis-à-vis their representation of the act of apology, and another section devoted to stimulating argumentative associations from students by giving them three words pertaining to “apology”, namely “apology/apologize”, “regret”, and “offense”. The aim behind the use of this questionnaire is trying to establish links between mental representations conveyed by discursive sequences elaborated by learners and the process of L2 acquisition. In other words, what is this relationship existing between learners’ linguistic attitude and the cognitive mechanisms underlying it?

3. Introductory definitions 3.1 Apology Speech acts have been and are still being studied from different perspectives, in reference to different theoretical frameworks, with different methodologies. This variety testifies to the richness of theoretical resources one might adhere to. Within this sort of hybrid approaches, we opt for an eclectic approach for our definition of apologizing. We attempt

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to bring together different theoretical paradigms in order to identify the various aspects characterizing the speech act of apologizing whatever the socio-cultural context may be. In this regard, apologizing can be defined as an expressive act representative of a “remedial exchange” concerned with transforming what we might consider as offending to what might be considered as acceptable (Goffman 1967). Addressed to an offended party, it expresses a communicative intention translated via an illocutionary act, the force of which is to transform what was offensive to what might be forgivable. It is indeed the acknowledgment of such an intention by the offended that apology takes shape. Apologizing is principally a consecutive act which presupposes a prior offending act. Nevertheless, it sometimes presumes a simultaneous or future offense. Whatever apologizing it may be, prior, simultaneous or consecutive, its goal remains the restoration of the ritual equilibrium of interaction. This restoration is carried out by means of symbolically neutralizing the offending act. In fact, when offending someone, we are brought_ if we wish the ritual equilibrium be re-established_ to compensate for our offense. Bergman & Kasper, in this respect, define the speech act of apologizing as “[…] compensatory action to an offense in the doing of which S was causally involved and which is costly to H” (1993: 82).

3.2 Communication strategies It is undoubtedly admitted that interlanguage is, by definition, a deficient system; a deficiency which raises different problems for learners as far as the expression of certain communicative intentions in L2 is concerned. Facing this sort of dilemma, learners develop a number of linguistic, psycholinguistic, or interactional measures/means to preserve equilibrium and harmony in their interventions, and to fill the gaps that might possibly occur in their communication system. All of these measures are called Communication Strategies. They are a means of problem solving. They are considered as “a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his meaning when faced with some difficulty” (Corder 1977). These strategies can be triggered either by lack of linguistic or sociolinguistic rules, or by a dysfunction at the level of planning and execution of illocutionary goals, both referential and relational (Færch and Kasper 1983). An essential element of strategic competence, communication strategies are systematic compensatory means enabling speakers to “[…]

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manage communicative asymmetry” (Springer 1998: 78); the latter might be subject to certain dysfunctions affecting one or both of the two levels of message production (Levelt 1989), i.e. conceptualization and formulation. At the macroplanning level, learners might make mistakes not only on elaborating their communicative intention in the form of goals, but also on selecting relevant information for transmitting their intention. At the microplanning level, difficulties might occur when trying to structure communicative goals and assigning selected information with the right reference.

4. Apology realisation 4.1 Apology strategies Considerable research on linguistic and communicative strategies used in apologies (Fraser 1981; Cohen and Olshtain 1981, 1993; Olshtain and Cohen 1983; Owen 1983; Trosborg 1987; Holmes 1989; Nonoyama 1993; Meier 1998; Márquez Reiter 2000; Rose 2000; Rojo 2005) resulted in suggesting different strategy classifications. Far from being exhaustive, we will be content with introducing the following classification of apology strategies based on Olshtain and Cohen (1983), a classification adopted by many studies attaining to apology realisation in different languages/cultures. With the exception of the offender’s willingness not to apologize, there exist generally five strategies summarizing the way we apologize. This strategy set contains two major strategies and three particular ones in the sense that these latter are more context-dependant. The first major strategy, namely the Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID), includes, among others, the formulaic, routinized forms of apology, and explicit performative verbs. The second major one is the expression of responsibility by means of admitting negligence or lack of foresight. Both of these strategies are potentially capable of expressing apology whatever the situation may be. The other three strategies, namely explanation, offer of repair, and promise of forbearance, are particularly situation-specific, and “[…] will semantically reflect the content of the situation” (Olshtain 1989: 157). In addition to these five strategies, apologies can be intensified or downgraded. The intensification can operate internally as follows: (1) I am really sorry. Or externally as the following (Olshtain 1989: 158): (2) I am sorry, but you really shouldn’t get insulted by such remarks.

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Downgrading can take the form of expressing doubt about the severity of the offense, or even its existence (example 2) illustrates downgrading).

4.2 Learners’ apology realisation 4.2.1 Linguistic realisation Our analysis of the first type of data (simulated role-plays) illustrates a predominance quasi total of one of the major strategies of apologizing, notably Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices. These devices oscillate between routinized forms such as expressing remorse as in the following example: (3) Situation: someone is complaining about the noise made by his/her neighbour. Voisin: eh pauvre voisine! Arrête de faire du bruit! Vous nous avez dérangé. Laissez-nous dormir un peu. Voisine: eh, je suis désolée. Eh, d’accord. Je vais essayer de baisser la musique. Je suis désolée. C’est mon anniversaire. Or using a performative verb as is exemplified in the following: (4) Situation: a student forgot to bring the book he had borrowed from his/her professor. Professeur: alors, j’espère que vous m’avez ramené mon livre. Étudiant: excusez-moi monsieur, je suis très désolé. Je l’ai oublié. Secondly, learners tend to explain and justify their offenses; their explanations are usually accompanied by certain devices indicating the illocutionary force of apologizing. Examples 3) and 4) illustrate this compound strategy of apology, combining a major strategy, namely the use of IFIDs (excusez-moi; je suis très désolé), and explanation (je l’ai oublié; c’est mon anniversaire) as a secondary strategy. Our group of learners seemed to manifest a certain interest for internal modification so as to intensify the illocutionary force of their apologies. These intensifying modifications take the form of simple adverbs emphasizing the offender’s degree of sincerity. The example below show the way participants intensified their apologies: (5) Situation: someone is complaining about the noise made by his/her neighbour. Voisin: mais c’est votre anniversaire. C’est pas mon affaire. Il y a des gens qui dorment et qui vont se réveiller tôt. Donc ils auront du travail. Voisine: d’accord, je suis très désolé, vraiment désolé, mais je vais essayer de baisser la musique.

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Finally, Moroccan learners of French appeal more or less to some offers of repair. The very limited use of this secondary strategy may possibly be due to constraints relative to role-play elaboration; constraints which may unconsciously influence apology realisation. We will see later that the use of this minor strategy, as is the case for other strategies, is subject to influence of no social variable8. That is to say, learners do not manifest any sensitivity to social variables (social distance, social power, severity of offense). Their strategies of apology remain obviously invariable despite the alternation of social variables. 4.2.2 Use of communication strategies It is noteworthy at this stage that the recurrent use, in our data, of a certain apology strategy, especially IFIDs, does not necessarily mean that it is a matter of one and unique communicative intention which is that conveyed by learners. Learners’ communicative intentions may vary in terms of the illocutionary force conceptualized at the macroplanning level; that is, at the level of elaborating intentions into goals. This, in fact, suggests that learners make use of certain semantic formulae such as routinized forms to express a set of varied pragmatic functions. Through our analysis of Moroccan learners’ apology realisation9, we noticed a kind of stability of routinized semantic formulae conveyed during verbal interactions, a stability which aroused our astonishment. We noted that learners, when apologizing, do not react according to situational variations necessitating very likely formal and functional modifications. In spite of the diversification of role-play situations in terms of social variables, learners show a limitation of pragmatic functions corresponding to the same illocutionary act. To compensate for this lack of knowhow relative to the asymmetry between the realisation of a certain pragmatic function and its corresponding realisation form, learners do resort to “reduction strategies” (Faerch and Kasper 1983) serving sometimes to reduce the meaning wanted (functional reduction), and sometimes to simplify formal modes of apology (formal reduction).

8

Different situations with different sociopragmatic criteria are suggested within the framework of role-plays in order to vary apology situations. 9 We contented in our analysis of data of the major aspects prevailing in the apologies of Moroccan learners of French without for all that insisting on doing meticulous classification of their strategies of apology. Our main concern is to study the links existing between the phase of apology conceptualisation and its formulation.

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As far as functional reduction is concerned, learners, despite a sufficient linguistic competence owing to their advanced level, seem to be unable to adapt their apologies according to the different socio-cultural variables easily perceived through role-play situations. It turned out that they do not dare, it seems to be, run the risk of adjusting their realisations according to the social distance of the interlocutors, the social power exercised by one on the other, and the degree of offence severity (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987). This reserved attitude of learners reveals penury on the sociopragmatic level which they make up for by means of the most direct strategy (IFID). Learners enacting the role of offenders prefer threatening their own positive face by functionally reducing their communicative intention, thus apologizing directly, to threatening the offended positive face. Learners tend, while opting for a formal reduction strategy, to use simple expressions, even routinized and conventional. They manifest almost no predisposition to alter or modify their apologies according to the situational information given. It is therefore notable that learners choose simple formulae when apologizing to the detriment of complex and precise ones. To maintain a satisfactory level of fluency during interaction, they opt for reduction strategies and abstain, thus, from elaborating their apologies in terms of complexity and precision. 4.2.3 Apology representation The second type of data collected by written questionnaires enabled us to determine the occurrences of the lexeme “apology/apologize”, first within learners’ discursive sequences, and then in their definitions of the same lexeme. The purpose behind the analysis of learners’ apology representation is to draw links between how apology is represented by learners and how it is actually conveyed and formulated during interaction. In this way, we came out with the following representation of the lexical meaning of apology:

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Core: Positive axiology: emotional and moral S regrets X10

where X is axiologically negative where X relates to the one who regrets

S expresses remorse (shows that one is responsible) Stereotypes: S regrets X

Then S acknowledges X Then S begs pardon Then S will repair X Then S explains X

S expresses remorse

Then S feels guilty Then S wants to cease X Then S wants to restore equilibrium

Argumentative Probabilities: To apologize

Then to acknowledge X Then to feel guilty Then to want to repair X Then to want to cease X Then to beg pardon

Figure 5-1: Representation/reconstruction of the meaning of apology (Based on Galatanu’s Semantics of Argumentative Probabilities model)

It is obvious, from this reconstruction of the meaning of apology, that argumentative probabilities (AP), generated through discursive sequences as a result of the association between the core and the stereotype, were activated, and even maintained in the discursive occurrences of learners. We may notice, furthermore, from the argumentative probabilities described above that learners’ representation of apology gathers a varied set of strategies in the form of conceptual entries relevant for the

10

S is the offender, X is the offence.

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realisation of apology. The question to be raised here is thus: does a rich and structured representation secure a correct and appropriate realisation?

5. Discussion The study we undertake here allows us to approach the process of meaning construction from two different perspectives. It suggests interpretations that might explain or at least explicit, within the sphere of interlanguage, how such a process of meaning construction takes place. From a cognitive point of view, two reasons may explain the excessive use of direct strategies of apology despite variation of social criteria. First of all, learners seem to perform deficient computations vis-à-vis the elaboration and analysis of the situation of communication. The erroneous assessment of this situation is likely to emanate from a deficient or illstructured representation of the different contextual components constituting the situation. Secondly, in spite of learners’ advanced linguistic competence, they fail to adjust, in an appropriate way, the pragmalinguistic / sociopragmatic coordination; that is to say the adaptation of apology form so as to correspond to the meaning projected. This kind of inadequacy occurs probably because of a misplaced control11 at the level of form/meaning correspondence. From a semantico-discursive point of view, learners seem to circulate a limited set of discursive devices in the form of communication strategies. These strategies served as discursive mechanisms of the activation of the meaning of apology. However, despite the richness relative to the argumentative probabilities activated in learners’ discursive occurrences, and which reveals a rich and stable representation, their actualisation during interaction proves to be quite limited. This, in fact, reflects non analysed representative content insofar as apology realisation in FFL is concerned, especially on the socio-cultural level. To bring up the question of fluency12 that we evoked above and the links between it and pragmatic competence, we will advance two major assumptions. First, we suppose that fluency is characteristic of a high level of control of processing. Second, this latter, as we have seen that with Bialystok (1990, 1993), presuppose a selective attention to information. In other words, control of processing suggests that learners pay attention and 11

Here the term “control” is used in the same way as Bialystok (1993). Fluency is here used in its large sense; it is the result of automatic development of different language routines that, as time goes by, do not require a certain attention, but rather a substitution of algorithmic procedures sensitive to different rules by a processing which depends essentially on memory (Logan 1988). 12

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select only relevant data from the input they receive. Taking these two assumptions into account, we draw the conclusion that learners when apologizing fail to reach a compromise between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects, a failure illustrated by appealing to reduction strategies. In light of this observation, it seems to us that learners fail to pay attention to the right choices and to necessary relevant information such as social distinctions liable to facilitate learners’ task to apologize appropriately.

6. Conclusion Throughout this study we attempted to examine the acquisition and the development of apology in French as a Foreign Language (FFL) in terms of three components of communicative competence, i.e. pragmatic, semantic, and strategic competence. The analysis we led here emphasizes, first, the need to set up certain links between these different elements which constitute, together with a pertinent linguistic and discursive knowledge, the backbone of a balanced communicative competence; it emphasizes at the same time the need to meticulously investigate the different cognitive and discursive mechanisms underlying the construction of apology in interaction. The establishment of these links is here to make three tasks easier. First and foremost, it will explain how interlanguage functions, what the main elements involved in this process are, and how they interact with each other. The second task is pedagogic; the answer to these three questions is likely to facilitate the elaboration, design, and development of language curricula. Finally, the need to establish, or to at least localise these links encourages multidisciplinary research collaboration, whether in theoretical or applied research areas. Relating to results obtained through this study, three main points are here clarified. They offer explanations to the problems evoked earlier in this paper. Results indicate that fluency cannot predict an optimal pragmatic competence, especially at the sociopragmatic level. Further, results proved that a semantic knowledge manifested in the discursive construction of lexical meaning of apology needs analysis, structuring, and restructuring on the part of learners. Such a process of knowledge restructuring, be it linguistic, semantic, discursive, pragmatic, or strategic, if performed optimally, may secure an appropriate realisation of apology.

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References Austin, J. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Bachman, L. Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Bachman, L. and A. Palmer. Language Testing in Practice: Designing and Developing Useful Language Tests, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Bardovi-Harlig, K. “Exploring the interlanguage of interlanguage pragmatics: A research agenda for acquisitional pragmatics”. Language Learning 49 (1999): 677-713. —. “Evaluating the empirical evidence: grounds for instruction in pragmatics?”. In Pragmatics in Language Teaching, edited by K., R. Rose and G. Kasper, 13-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bergman, M. and G. Kasper. “Perception and performance in native and nonnative apology”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 82-107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bialystok, E. “Some factors in the selection and implementation of communication strategies”. In Strategies in Interlanguage Communication, edited by C. Færch and G. Kasper, 100-118. London: Longman, 1983. —. Communication Strategies: a Psychological Analysis of SecondLanguage Use. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. —. “Symbolic representation and attentional control in pragmatic competence”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 43-57. Oxford: Oxford, 1993. Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. “Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena”. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, edited by E. Goody, 56-311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Canale, M. “From communicative competence to language pedagogy”. In Language and Communication, edited by J. Richards and R. Schmidt, 2-27. London: Longman, 1983. Canale, M. and M. Swain. “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing”. Applied Linguistics 1 (1980): 1-47.

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Cohen, A. and Olshtain, E. “Developing a measure of sociocultural competence: The case of apology”. Language Learning 31 (1981): 113-134. Cohen, A. D. and E. Olshtain. “The production of speech acts by EFL learners”. TESOL Quarterly 27/1 (1993): 33-56. Corder, S. P. “Simple codes and the source of the second language learner’s initialheuristic hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 1 (1977): 1-10. Ellis, R. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Færch, C. and G. Kasper. “Plans and strategies in foreign language communiation”. In Strategies in Interlanguage Communication, edited by C. Faerch and G. Kasper, 20-60. London & New York: Longman, 1983. Fraser, B. “On apologizing”. In Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, edited by F. Coulmas, 259-271. The Hague: Mouton, 1981. Galatanu, O. “Le phénomène sémantico-discursif de déconstructionreconstruction des topoï dans une sémantique argumentative intégrée”. In Langue Française 123 : La sémantique du stéréotype, edited by O. Galatanu and J. M. Gouvard, 41-51. 1999. —. “Signification, sens et construction discursive de soi et du monde”. In Signification, sens, formation, edited by J.M. Barbier and O. Galatanu, 25-44. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000a. —. “Langue, discours et systèmes de valeurs”. In Curiosités linguistiques, edited by E. Suomela-Salmi, 80-102. Université de Turku: Publications du Département d’Etudes Françaises 3, 2000b. —. “La dimension axiologique de l’argumentation”. In Hommage à Oswald Ducrot, edited by M. Carel, 93-107. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002. —. “Sémantique des possibles argumentatifs et dénomination”. In Au carrefour du sens. Hommages offerts à Georges Kleiber, edited by M. Riegel, C. Schnedecker, P. Swiggers and I. Tamba, 499-510. Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2006. —. “For an argumentative semantics in the approach of the concept of ‘advanced learner’ of a foreign language”, paper presented at the international symposium “Retour aux variétés avancées dans l’acquisition des langues secondes”, Aston University, Birmingham, June 2007. Goffman, E. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior. New York: Garden City, 1967.

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Holmes, J. “Sex differences and apologies: one aspect of communicative competence”. Applied Linguistics 10 (1989): 194-213. House, J., “Toward a model for the analysis of inappropriate responses in native/nonnative interactions”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 161-183. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Hymes, D. On Communicative Competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 1971. Kasper, G. and S. Blum-Kulka (eds.). Interlanguage Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kasper, G. and K. Rose. “Pragmatics and second language acquisition”. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 19 (1999): 81-104. Leech, G. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983. Levelt, W. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge: MA, MIT press, 1989. Levinson, S. C. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Logan, G. D. “Toward an instance theory of automatisation”. Psychological Review 95 (1988): 492-527. Márquez Reiter, R. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Analysis of Requests and Apologies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Meier, A. J. “Apologies: what do we know?”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 8/2 (1998): 215-231. Nonoyama, F. “Apologies: toward communicative competence”. The Bulletin of Nihon Fukushi Daigaku 88/2 (1993): 195-217. Olshtain, E. “Sociocultural competence and language transfer: the case of apology”. In Language Transfer in Language Learning, edited by S. Gass and L. Selinker, 232-249. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1983. —. “Apologies across languages”. In Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, edited by S. Blum-Kulka, J. House and G. Kasper, 155173. Norwood: NJ, Ablex, 1989. Olshtain, E. and A. Cohen. “Apology: a speech act set”. In Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition, edited by N. Wolfson and E. Judd, 18-35. New York: Newbury House, 1983. Owen, M. Apologies and Remedial Interchanges. Berlin: Mouton, 1983. Robinson, P. “Task complexity, cognitive resources, and syllabus design: a triadic framework for examining task influences on SLA”. In Cognition and Second Language Instruction, edited by P. Robinson, 287-318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Rojo, L. “Te quería comentar un problemilla... The speech act of apologies in Peninsular Spanish: A pilot study”. Hipertexto 1(2005): 63-80. Rose, K. R. “An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22/1 (2000): 27-67. Rose, K., R. and G. Kasper. Pragmatics in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Searle, J. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. —. “A classification of illocutionary acts”. Language in Society 5 (1976): 1-23. Schmidt, R. “Consciousness, learning and interlanguage pragmatics”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 21-42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Springer, C. “Recherche didactique et sciences du langage: questions d’évaluation”. In Actes du 2e Colloque de linguistique appliquée, Les linguistiques appliquées et les sciences du langage, 76-87. Université Strasbourg 2: Cofdela, 1998. Trosborg, A. “Apology strategies in non-native/native speakers of English”. Journal of Pragmatics 11/1 (1987): 147-167. —. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Zuengler, J. “Explaining NNs interactional behaviour: the effect of conversational topic”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 184-195. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER SIX LEARNING HOW TO PROMISE: A DIDACTIC APPROACH TO THE TEACHING OF SPEECH ACTS CARMEN MAÍZ ARÉVALO

1. Introduction It goes without saying that speaking a foreign language correctly does not only involve mastering its vocabulary and grammar but also having the ability to interact in a correct way and communicate smoothly while avoiding misunderstandings. In other words, as teachers of English as a foreign language (TEFL), we should certainly focus on our students’ acquisition of linguistic competence but very importantly on their acquisition of pragmatic competence (Hymes 1974) too. In many cases, it is a frequent experience to have very proficient students who do sound rude or impolite even if they do not intend to do so. Teaching speech acts in the EFL classroom is therefore essential if we want our students to “speak English”. Due to the influence of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF henceforth) and its highly communicative approach, more and more textbooks are increasingly including what they name “functions of language” or, in pragmatic theory, “speech acts”. These functions are based on what are considered basic communicative needs such as complaining, apologising, asking for information and so on. Most of the textbooks consulted for the present paper include these under the heading of “real English” or “everyday English” among others. On the other hand, current research projects such as CARLA (http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/why.html) are working on corpora of real data to determine the pragmalinguistic reality of speech acts. There seems to exist a shared belief that native English speakers just know intuitively how to interact in their language and should be able to explain

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the social use of the language to the learners. However, this commonly shared belief is not necessarily true; in fact, a native speaker's intuition is sometimes unreliable. In the present paper, we shall focus on the analysis of a particular speech act–promises–working on approximately a hundred real examples from the British National Corpus (BNC henceforth). The analysis of the examples will help determine the prototypical linguistic realisation of promises in English together with the context where they usually appear, e.g. when they form part of a macro-speech act such as an apology. Secondly, we shall compare these realisations in English with a hundred Spanish examples taken from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA henceforth) to observe whether or not the linguistic realisations of this speech act are similar in both languages and how this linguistic transfer can affect students either positively or negatively. The reason why promises rather than other speech acts have been chosen for this study are mainly two: on the one hand, because promises have generally been neglected in the EFL classroom although they play an important role in macro-speech acts such as apologies–one of the basic speech acts students learn at lower levels –and on the other, because of the cultural differences in English and Spanish regarding the use of promises, which might lead to our students’ failure in pragmatic competence and to instances of impolite –albeit unintended–behaviour on their part. As for the structure of the chapter, the first two sections deal with the definition of promises as speech acts, their linguistic realisation–at clause level–both in English and Spanish and the way these different realisations can affect our students’ linguistic competence. Section four deals with promises from a pragmatic point of view and analyses the differences in use between Spanish and English while concentrating on how these differences might lead to a failure in pragmatic competence. Finally, section five presents the conclusions of the study and suggests some didactic approaches and pointers to future research.

2. What is a promise? In Searle’s taxonomy, promises are included within the group of commissive speech acts. In fact, they are frequently considered as the best example of this group since they involve the speaker’s commitment to a future action. Furthermore, this act of commitment to a future action on the part of the speaker is accepted as universal independently of the interlocutors’ cultural origin.

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Chapter Six The force of pledge is universal, for to pledge is to commit oneself strongly to doing something. Just as each possible natural language must give to its speakers adequate means of expressing all the truth functions of the elementary propositions that they can express in that language. (Vanderveken 2001: 36)

However, even though promises are clearly identifiable speech acts, they have been much neglected in English textbooks1, which–especially at lower levels such as A2 or B1–tend to focus on other speech acts such as requesting, inviting, suggesting, complaining and so on. It could indeed be argued that promises do not belong in this group of “basic survival” speech acts. However, despite the fact that promises as such are apparently a slightly more specific type of speech act, it is also undeniable that they very frequently form part of macro-speech acts. In other words, when native speakers perform speech acts such as apologies or refusals, these macro-speech acts are usually integrated by different micro-speech acts, one of which tends to be promises. In terms of politeness, this is explained by the fact that the addressee’s face has been threatened by the speaker’s refusal or his/her previous actions in the case of apologies. Thus, promises act as a way not only to restore the addressee’s damaged face but also as a reinforcement of positive politeness–i.e. the interest in the addressee’s well-being (Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983) and therefore play a significant role within other speech acts. If expected by the addressee, their absence might be considered as rude behaviour on the part of the speaker and lead to pragmatic failure.

3. Linguistic realisation of promises and students’ linguistic competence 3.1. Linguistic realisation of promises in English Much has been said about the relationship between form and function in language and it is agreed that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between them, i.e. the same form can fulfil different functions, especially if we take context into account. Some authors even claim that the “[…] surface structure of [...] sentences can be misleading.” (Vanderveken 2001: 26-27). While this might be occasionally true, it is also the case that 1

The textbooks consulted were: Framework (A2), English File (B1), Headway (pre-intermediate), Face to Face (A2) and Clockwise (B1). As for the levels, they are the ones established by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

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the surface structure is what addressers and addressees use and listen to and there are cases where, even though the deep structure might be the same, the different surface structures also serve different communicative purposes as in the following example: (i) (ii)

Irak has been invaded. The USA has invaded Irak.

In the present paper, we shall adopt the view that there are systematic– even cognitive–links between speech act types and sentence-types. As argued by Kissine (2005: 1): Even if it is certainly illusory to seek a one-to-one correspondence between speech act types and sentence-types […], there are, without any doubt, systematic links between the declarative mood and assertive acts, between the imperative mood and directive acts, and between the interrogative mood and questions.

This is particularly evident in the case of promises where the only possibility of realisation is the declarative mood. Furthermore, the syntactic choices employed in the realisation of promises seem to be relatively limited. As shown by the analysis of the BNC data, it can be claimed that promises in English have the following realisations at clause level: (i) The most frequent realisation is the use of the performative expression “I promise” followed by an embedded clause whose verbal predicate includes the modal operator will. Alternatively, the embedded clause can become an independent clause with the performative ellipted. However, it seems easier for students to identify certain speech acts with their corresponding performative verbs. Examples: I promise you we will look after her (performative verb present) Don’t worry. I’ll help you with your homework (absence of performative)

(ii) The second most frequent realisation is that where the speaker only employs the performative verb, frequently as a preferred response to a previous request by the interlocutor. However, this can be regarded as a different use since it occurs in adjacency pairs, but usually not as an initiating turn (Tsui 1994).

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Examples: All right, I promise. I promise, she answered with a reassuring smile. I promise, she muttered.

(iii) It is also relatively common to find the use of an infinitive after the performative expression. The infinitive is the non-finite form more clearly projected towards the future. This is even reinforced in English by the use of the particle to which iconically shows this future projection. Examples: Now I promise to devote myself to bringing down the costs of your mortgages because I believe that people should be able to own their own homes and to own them cheaply. And I promise to help with the washing up.

As shown in the corpus, the structure with infinitive seems to be more common as a complement of the noun phrase with the noun promise as its head. When this is case, these expressions cannot really be considered as prototypical promises, since they are not speaker-centred and they do not benefit the hearer, on the contrary, their illocutionary force is usually that of a directive: Examples: All I ask is your promise to allow me safely out of the stockade. But you would have to keep your promise to do it, you know.

(iv) The subordinate clause preceeds the performative verb, which thus becomes rheme. In this case, the promise seems reinforced since the speaker leaves the performative in the final position of the sentence, where it becomes more salient according to the principle of end-focus (Downing 2006). The speaker seems to be reinforcing their commitment while reassuring the hearer, whose expectations are contradicted. On the whole, this structure helps reinforce the commitment of the promise but it is slightly less frequent.

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Examples: I won’t laugh I promise! But I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’ll make it all up to you one day, I promise. I won’t let her get away with this, I promise you.

(v) The performative expression is simultaneously theme–i.e. it occupies the initial position of the sentence and rheme–i.e. it is repeated at the end of the sentence. The accumulative effect of performative verbs together with the syntactic preferrence for the two most salient positions in the sentence: the beginning (theme) and the end (end-focus) help reinforce the speaker’s commitment. As expected, this is the least frequent structure (only 2% of the cases)2. Examples: I promise I won’t ruin it, I promise I promise you you’ll be pleased, I promise.

To sum up, it can be claimed that there is a major linguistic realisation of promises in English at clause level, with some variations that help add more emphasis to the commitment. Thus, the most prototypical realisation is: [performative] + I will + infinitive As already pointed out, the performative expression “I promise” can also be extraposed (right-dislocation) or even repeated in order to achieve more emphasis and reinforce the speaker’s commitment. On the other hand, the use of the performative expression by itself is more frequently found when the promise acts as a preferred response in an adjacency pair.

2

Both (iv) and (v) can be considered as variations of the main realisation: ‘performative + embedded clause with will as operator’.

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3.2. Linguistic realisation of promises in Spanish The first significant difference we observe between English and Spanish data is the fact that in Spanish the most common linguistic realisation is the use of the performative followed by an infinitive, as shown by the following examples from the CREA: Yo prometo ser un niño ser un niño disciplinado, ordenado y estudioso. Yo prometo someterme del todo, íntegramente a los mandatos de mi maestro, de mis padres y de las Autoridades. (Translation: I promise to be an obedient, tidy and hard-working boy. I promise to submit myself totally, completely to my teacher’s, my parents’ and the authorities’ commands) Para esta noche prometo sudar y un buen montón de ritmo (Translation: For this evening I promise to sweat and a great deal of rythm) Pero hay poetas en los que coincidirían mayoritariamente. Esos poetas me parece que están todos en mi última antología (prometo no reincidir) (Trans: But there are poets they would mostly agree. I think those poets are all included in my latest antology – I promise not to relapse)

As in English, the use of a subordinate clause following the performative is also common. However, the verb of the subordinate clause can be either a future form–equivalent to English will –or the verbal periphrasis ir a (to be going to), as illustrated by the following examples also quoted from the CREA: En nombre de todos los competidores prometo que tomaremos parte en estos Juegos Olímpicos respetando y actuando bajo las reglas que los gobiernan. (Translation: On behalf of all the competitors, I promise that we will take part in these Olympic games respecting and acting under their rules.) Yo te prometo que serás la primera persona en conocer la noticia. (Translation: I promise you that you will be the first person to hear the news.) Y, bueno, le prometo que yo droga no voy a tomar (Translation: And well, I promise you that I am not going to take any drugs).

The common use of the periphrasis in Spanish frequently leads students to transfer these expressions into their English expression of

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promises, producing ungrammatical sentences such as: ‘I promise I’m not going to do it again’, which are non-existent in the BNC. As in English, adjacency pairs also seem to favour the use of the performative in isolation as a preferred response to a previous request or directive. Curiously, the question ¿me lo prometes? (i.e. do you promise?) is never answered simply yes/no in the corpus but with a performative expression, which seems to reinforce the speaker’s commitment towards the addressee. However, it should be pointed out that all these examples in the corpus belong to fictional language–either theatre plays or dialogues in a novel. It is not certain whether the addressee’s responding move may be similar in the case of everyday language, as shown by the following examples from the CREA: S: ¿De verdad me dirás lo que viene ahora? (Translation: Will you really tell me what’s next?) H: Te lo prometo. (Translation: I promise you) S: Prométeme que no te irás. Que me darás tiempo para rectificar. H: Te lo prometo. No me iré. Y la niña tampoco. (Translation: S: Promise me you won’t leave. That you’ll give me time to mend it. H: I promise you. I won’t leave. And neither will the child.)

Finally, we can also find examples where the performative verb is followed by a noun phrase in the function of direct object. This is common when the noun forms part of a collocation where the infinitive does not need to be explicitly mentioned since it is easily retrivable for the speaker. As opposed to the previous case, which seems to be particularly related to fictional discourse, this can be found in all registers, as illustrated by the examples below: Prometo un delantero de categoría. (Translation: I promise a good forward) Prometo una segunda entrega, especialmente jugosa. (Translation: I promise a second part, specially juicy.) Os prometo firmeza y prudencia. (Translation: I promise you firmness and prudence) A mi me traen a Ulises el viento y el oleaje. Lo recibo, lo abrazo, le prometo la juventud eterna. (Translation: Ulysses is brought to me by the wind and the waves. I receive him, hug him, promise him the eternal youth.)

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4. Cultural differences and pragmatic failure Quite remarkably, one of the first speech acts students of English are required to master is apologies, which form part of the can-do statements at such an early stage at the A2 level in the Common European Framework (2001). However, it is only in Face to Face (A2) that promises are included as part of the whole act of apologising, which is further divided into three main micro-speech acts: (1) Apologize: I’m sorry to be late (2) Give a reason: I missed my bus to school (3) Promise: I promise it won’t happen again! Refusals are also macro-speech acts frequently integrated by different micro-speech acts such as the promise of future acceptance: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Acceptance: I’d love to but Refuse: I’m afraid I can’t go to the cinema with you tonight. Give a reason: I’ve got an exam tomorrow and I must study a lot. Promise: I’ll call you next week and see if we can do something then.

Clockwise Intermediate points out the fact that “[…] there are different social ‘rules’ in different countries for refusing invitations and requests” (2003: 48) and presents different ways of “saying no” in different cultures to raise students awareness of pragmatic differences. Quite remarkably, one of the Spanish students quoted in the book (ibid.) claims that: “I’d just say no. If they’re your friends, then they’ll understand. If they’re not, then it doesn’t matter anyway.” However, in the English corpus, we do find examples of apologies as macro-speech acts consisting of different micro-speech acts such as promises: Example 1. I understand, I said, I promise I’ll always play with you from now on. Example 2. Sorry I wanna read this, I promise I’ll be there in a minute.

Most often, however, Spanish students simply apologise by uttering an apology without even giving a reason, much less a promise of future compliance. The same can be said of refusals, even at higher levels. The main reason for this absence is mainly cultural. In fact, it is very common in Spanish just to apologise without any further ado and promises are

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certainly uncommon as part of Spanish apologies, even if there are some isolated examples in the corpus: Mi presidencia es transitoria. Yo soy un militar y no estoy capacitado para gobernar. Sólo he pretendido liberar al pueblo de la dictadura y prometo entregar el poder, tan rápido como sea posible, a los que sí están capacitados para gobernar este país. (Translation: My presidence is temporary. I am a soldier and I am not capable of governing a country. I have simply intended to release my people from dictatorship and I promise to give back the power, as soon as possible, to those who are indeed able to rule this country.)

These examples, however, are not only scarce but also belong to a more formal discourse. Thus, whereas in everyday English apologies and refusals are quite frequently accompanied by promises, they are not in Spanish. This pragmatic negative transference might lead our Spanish students to do exactly the same in English, without realising that native speakers might expect some kind of face repairment and as a result, they might appear as impolite even if they do not intend to do so. Classroom instruction on speech acts can therefore help learners to improve not only their performance in the foreign language but also their interaction with native speakers, even at lower levels.

6. Conclusions As shown by the analysis, prototypical promises seem to share very similar linguistic realisations in both languages (use of the infinitive, use of subordinate clauses in future tenses and so on) although percentages reflect that there are quantitative differences regarding the preference for one form instead of another. Thus, whereas Spanish speakers fluctuate between the use of the infinitive and of subordinate clauses in future tenses as well as other syntactic realisations, English speakers clearly seem to favour the use of subordinate clauses with the modal will instead of the infinitive or noun phrases. Table 6-1 sums up the different realisations in numerical terms:

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infinitive subordinate clause only performative noun phrase formulaic TOTAL

Spanish 28% 26% 26% 16% 4% 100%

English 11.25% 57.5% 25% 6.25% 0% 100%

Table 6-1: Linguistic realisation of ‘promises’ at sentence level in Spanish and English The comparison of figures shows that in English the preferred linguistic realisation of promises is the subordinate clause accompanied by a performative expression. Whereas the other realisations are relatively common, they are nonetheless less frequent and varied than in Spanish, which might lead Spanish students to a non-prototypical realisation in most cases and, consequently, to sound “more foreign” and linguistically less competent. Especially at low levels, we should therefore focus on this structure while comparing it to the Spanish ones, in order for our studens to be aware of the differences between the same speech act in the two languages. Besides their differences regarding linguistic realisations, we should also take seriously into account the pragmatic differences derived from cultural diversity. In general terms, Spanish culture has often been described as more prone to positive politeness–i.e. avoidance of distance– as opposed to the British culture, when on the whole a more negativepoliteness approach seems to be preferred in most contexts, as argued by numerous authors such as Hickey (2005) or Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2004), just to quote some of the most recent publications. This different approach to politeness explains why Spanish promises usually act as independent major speech acts since they are in the interest and welfare of the addressee whereas in English, they frequently form part of facethreatening macro-speech acts such as apologies and refusals and function as a repair strategy of the addressee’s damaged face. The absence of promises in Spanish apologies and refusals might lead our students to omit promises when realising these speech acts and to sound impolite even when far from wanting to sound that way.

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References Austin, J. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Bach, K. and R. M. Harnish. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1979. Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Council of Europe. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Downing, A. and P. Locke. A University Course in English Grammar. London: Routledge, 2006. Grant, C. K. “Promises”. Mind 58 (1949): 359-366. Grice, P. “Meaning”. The Philosophical Review 64 (1957): 377-388. Guerini, M. and C. Castelfranchi. “Promises and threats in persuasion”. Pragmatics and Cognition Journal 15/2 (2007): 277-311. Hancher, M. “The classification of cooperative illocutionary acts”. Language in Society 8 (1979): 1-14. Hickey, L. Politeness in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Hymes, D. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. Kissine, M. “Promises and predictions: deriving deontic commitment from epistemic possibility”. Proceedings of the 9th International Pragmatics Conference. Riva del Garda, 2004. Leclerc, A. “Verbal mood & sentence mood in the tradition of universal grammar”. In Essays in Speech Act Theory, edited by D. Vanderveken and S. Kubo, 63-84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Leech, G. Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman, 1983. Márquez Reiter, R. and M. E. Placencia (eds.). Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Maíz, C. “El sistema dialogal en los Canterbury Tales”. PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2001. Pérez Hernández, L. “The directive-commissive continuum”. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 23 (2001): 77-98. Pretz, V. “Promises and threats”. Mind 86 (1977): 578-581. Searle, J. Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 [1969]. Tsui, A. English Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Vanderveken, D. “Universal grammar and speech act theory”. In Essays in Speech Act Theory, edited by D. Vanderveken and S. Kubo, 25-62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Wierzbicka, A. English Speech Act Verbs. A Semantic Dictionary. New York: Academic Press, 1987.

Corpora The British National Corpus. (1991). Oxford University Press, Longman, Chambers-Larousse, Lancaster University and British Library. [Available on-line from http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/] Corpus diacrónico del español. (2007). Real Academia Española de la Lengua: Banco de datos (CORDE). [Available on-line from http://www.rae.es]

Textbooks Forsyth, W. Clockwise Intermediate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 (6th edition). Goldstein, B. Framework Level 2. London: Richmond Publishing, 2003. Oxenden, C. and C. Latham-Koenig. English File. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 (14th edition). Redston, C. and G. Cunningham. Face-to-face Pre-intermediate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Soars, J and L. Soars. Headway Pre-Intermediate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 (4th edition).

CHAPTER SEVEN THE INTERLANGUAGE OF COMPLAINTS BY CATALAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH1 MARIA SABATÉ I DALMAU

1. Introduction Mainstream second language acquisition research traditionally neglected the importance of intercultural communication, especially when two distinct politeness systems come into play. The importance of pragmatic competence has only recently been addressed, and interlanguage (henceforth IL) pragmatics has been the most recent area of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and L2 teaching to be discovered. This growing issue of interest among second language acquisition (henceforth SLA) researchers can now be found in a multidisciplinary range of fields including social psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology, discourse analysis, translation, business pragmatics, and second and foreign language teaching. Interlanguage pragmatics (henceforth IP) is gaining a position of its own due to three major factors. Firstly, there is a growing awareness of multilingual societies. Pragmatic competence, which was traditionally thought to be necessary only to avoid breaches of etiquette when interacting with native speakers (henceforth NSs), is now seen as essential for establishing fertile grounds for interaction between interlocutors from different backgrounds. In Murphy and Neu’s words, “[…] perhaps it is past time to also argue for the instruction of native speakers in the understanding of, and tolerance for, non-native speakers’ productions” (1996: 212). Secondly, migration movement processes have brought about new studies on intercultural communication. Most studies on non-native 1

This project is funded by research grant 429-01-1/07, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose support is here acknowledged.

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complaints demonstrate that differences in linguistic behaviour between persons from different backgrounds lead to cross-cultural misunderstanding and stereotyping. Phonological, morphosyntactic or lexical non-target-like performances by non-native speakers (henceforth NNSs) of English are normally regarded as signs of L2 low command, but pragmatic inadequacy is consistently interpreted as rudeness (Barron 2003). Thirdly, globalisation processes are currently leading to an enormous diversity of communicative situations involving the use of English as a lingua franca. This can be seen, for instance, in recent studies on business pragmatics, where IL complaints have become an issue of great importance in the training of multilingual workers in European customer services (cf. Trosborg 2003). Many of the studies on IL complaints stem from a willingness to demonstrate that linguistic differences between people sharing different politeness systems can lead to intercultural misunderstandings. Most researchers have tried to unveil mutually unfavourable stereotyping in multilingual or migration contexts through the study of IL complaints, because the speech act of complaining is “[…] pregnant with potential for misunderstanding and conflict” (Gershenson 2003: 276). Complaints require a high level of pragmatic competence in any language, both for NSs and NNSs, because they have to do with sorting out the norms of behaviour that have to be shared daily within a society, a family, friends, or multilingual workers. Given their importance in everyday communication, it is considered crucial that L2 speakers master this act in order to avoid the types of stereotyping that have been highlighted in many studies on IL complaints, a summary of which is provided below. House and Kasper (1981: 158) observed that NSs of English considered German speakers of English ‘impolite’ when carrying out requests and complaints in English. Frescura (1995: 98) found that, when complaining, English-speaking persons in Canada were stereotyped as ‘controlled’, ‘polite’ and ‘calm’ by Italian immigrants, whereas these Italians were judged as ‘rude’ and ‘volatile’ by speakers of other languages in Canada when carrying out the same speech act (henceforth SA). Gershenson studied IL complaint behaviour as realised by Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel. She encountered that Israelis found the exSoviets’ linguistic behaviour “[…] insincere and manipulative, with antipathy and mistrust”, whereas the Russian-speaking newcomers judged the Israelis’ linguistic behaviour as “[…] rude and pushy” (2003: 275). Murphy and Neu (1996) demonstrated that Americans judged complaints by Korean speakers of English as being “[…] too rude, careless, aggressive, non-credible” and “disrespectful”. Finally, Clyne (1994: 50)

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found that Australians called British English immigrants ‘whingeing poms’, because it was believed that they find many things in Australia disagreeable. This paper analyses the interlanguage of complaints by Catalan learners of English with two main objectives in mind. On the one hand, it attempts to highlight the importance of understanding the non-native production of IL complaints in intercultural communication in depth in order to avoid the kinds of stereotyping outlined above, and, more generally, miscommunication or misunderstanding. On the other hand, this study also provides detailed descriptions of the difficult aspects of the acquisition, development, and mastering of this specific speech act by three groups of Catalan learners of English, which can be understood as pedagogical tools that can hopefully have some practical applications for the teaching of the English complaint system. In the next section, the research questions and the theoretical assumptions in this cross-sectional study are developed in more detail. In section 3 the speech act of complaining is defined, and a brief overview of some of the previous complaint studies investigating developmental aspects of the acquisition of pragmatic components by non-native speakers is also provided. After the presentation of the specific methodological aspects of this paper (section 4), the findings on the interlanguage of complaints by Catalan learners of English are presented, and three sets of results are discussed in section 5. Finally, the article concludes with the suggestion that optimal convergence toward target-like performance can occur at a proficiency stage, at least for several pragmatic components that constitute the speech act of complaints.

2. Aims of this study and research questions This cross-sectional study investigates the developmental stages of the acquisition of pragmatic competence and new politeness systems in an L2. More specifically, it focuses on the realisations of the speech act of complaining by three groups of undergraduate Catalan learners of English differing systematically in terms of L2 proficiency, years of exposure to English, and use of English for social purposes. It examines the average number of main complaint strategies per situation and group in 12 different face-threatening contexts and analyses the lexical choices of complaint realisations along the parameters ‘social distance’, ‘power’ and ‘sex’ of the addressee. This paper also analyses some sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic non-target-like performances. Besides, it investigates any regular

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developmental stages in the acquisition of pragmatic competence by contrasting the learners’ performance at each level. Finally, this study highlights some instances of the learners’ cultural interference and pragmatic transfer from Catalan across levels. For this purpose, it also includes a cross-cultural comparison between the British and the Catalan complaint speech act sets, non-existent in Catalan2 and, in English, in the process of being redefined. In the light of the results of several studies on complaints (cf. Clyne, Ball and Neil 1991; Boxer 1993; Olshtain and Weinbach 1993; Frescura 1995; Trosborg 1995; Murphy and Neu 1996; Gershenson 2003; and Geluykens and Kraft 2003) it is hypothesised that: 1. The average number of strategies per situation will increase progressively with proficiency. 2. All groups will have all the range of strategies that constitute the act of complaining available, and will use them productively (i.e. an ‘explicit complaint’, an ‘accusation’, a ‘threat’). 3. The groups with a higher level of proficiency are likely to show sociopragmatic non-target-like performance, whereas pragmalinguistic inadequacy is normally associated to lower level learners. 4. There will be a tendency to move from direct to less direct complaint strategy choices with increasing proficiency. 5. The weighting of contextual parameters will be one of the most difficult tasks to master, and it is expected to account for much cultural interference, especially among learners with a high level of L2 linguistic competence. Within the field of IP, many studies have assumed that NSs’ norms are the adequate target for NNSs, and have explained any difference between NNSs’ and NSs’ performance as faulty and erroneous, a view which underlies the ‘difference=deficit’ hypothesis, so long adhered to in IP research (Kasper 1992). ‘Optimal convergence’ (in order to avoid miscommunication) rather than total convergence toward target language norms appears to be a more desirable goal. In this paper the learners’ behaviour will be described at a point where L2 production is likely to bring about pragmatic transfer and stereotyping, away from a normative approach. Terms such as ‘error’, ‘deviation’ or ‘deficiency’ will not be employed. Finally, the term ‘failure’ will be replaced by the term ‘nontarget-like performance’, understood as necessarily interlocutor-alienating.

2 For the scarcity of studies on Catalan speech act sets see Payrató (2003) and Bassols (2001).

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3. Complaints Researchers working on IL complaints show an agreement in that “[…] the speech act of complaining has been little studied in the field of crosscultural and interlanguage pragmatics” (Tatsuki 2000: 1003), with two noticeable exceptions: House and Kasper (1981) and Olshtain and Weinbach (1987), cited in Olshtain and Weinbach (1993). Studies on the speech act of complaining started within the field of cross-cultural pragmatics (House and Kasper 1981; Olshtain and Weinbach 1993; Frescura 1995; Murphy and Neu 1996; Gershenson 2003), or within the analysis of the weighting of different sociocultural values by two or more groups of informants from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds (including German, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Danish). Most of these investigations are ethnographic in nature and include analyses of whole real life exchanges (e.g. Boxer 1993). The majority of these studies analyse complaints in a single social situation, and on the whole, the set of informants that they include is small and located in a mostly English-speaking country. They all aim at unveiling instances of negative attributions and miscommunication in migration contexts. There is one study that presents an approach to IL complaints from a psychological perspective, too (Tatsuki 2000). Finally, only one study from the field of linguistic anthropology specifically compares IL complaint performance by three groups of learners at three different levels of proficiency (Trosborg 1995). IL complaint studies come from different fields of research and focus on descriptive findings rather than developmental issues. IL complaint researchers explain scarcity of studies as stemming from the fact that facethreatening acts (FTAs) are more difficult to study than other SAs (Geluykens and Kraft 2003). Other FTAs such as apologies have the advantage that they contain a clearly identifiable IFID (i.e. illocutionary force indicating device), an explicit apology, that can be coded into a lexico-syntactic list forming a closed set of routinised realisations for each language (e.g. ‘Sorry’). In complaints, the IFID and the main strategies that constitute the speech act set for complaining are identifiable. However, a closed list of complaints cannot be conformed because they are generally indirect in their form. All these facts make the definition of a complaint difficult to capture: complaints “[…] elude formal definition” (Edwards 2005: 7). In fact, which coding list for complaints is more adequate and what exactly a complaint is are still an issue of debate. Moreover, complaints have proved to be very difficult to distinguish from other SAs. For instance, Brown and Levinson (1987) regarded complaints,

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criticisms and accusations as distinct from one another, whereas the researchers who have carried out studies with naturally-occurring complaints show that such acts can indeed overlap (cf. Drew 1998, Edwards 2005) . The definition most researchers have agreed upon was put forward by Olsthain and Weinbach (1993: 108). It has been used for the investigation of complaints intralingually, cross-culturally and in L2 or FL: In the speech act of complaining, the speaker (S) expresses displeasure, annoyance –censure- as a reaction to a past or ongoing action, the consequences of which are perceived by S as affecting her unfavourably. This complaint is usually addressed to the hearer (H) whom the S holds, at least partially, responsible for the offensive action.

According to the notion of complaint that will be followed throughout this paper, this speech act indicates that the speaker’s wishes do not correspond to those of the hearer. This includes disapproval, criticism, reprimands, accusations and insults as an integral part of complaints in this study (i.e. face to face, speaker to hearer, direct accusatory complaints3). Austin’s classification (1962) already stated that complaints are a ‘statement of reaction’ -‘behabitives’ (Clyne 1994). In this definition, a complaint is in essence post-event, and it has an expressive and an assertive function because it expresses the psychological state of the speaker. Since they express grievance, culpability and negligence (to mention but a few), complaints include some type of moral judgement and censure. A complaint is also anti-hearer (House and Kasper 1981). Thus, it is a conflictive type of illocution (Leech 1983: 104), because it can go counter the goal of maintaining harmony between interactants by breaking ties of affection and co-operation. A complaint goes against the ‘hearersupportive maxim’, but in turn the complainer is justified because the complainee has already transgressed such maxim by committing an offence. Thus, complaints are described as a struggle to regain one’s face. So far this description of complaints shows that researchers tended to view them as intrinsically impolite: “[…] to threaten or curse someone in a polite manner is virtually a contradiction in terms” (Leech 1983: 105). However, one can complain and yet remain polite, since it might well be 3

For the purposes of this paper, only the notion of complaint postulated by Olsthain and Weinbach (1993) will be employed here. Complaints which are targeted to a third party, prospective and indirect complaints (cf. Boxer 1993 and Boxer 1996), telephone mediated complaints (cf. Márquez Reiter 2005), or full complaint sequences which include, for instance, counter-complaints (cf. Dersley and Wootton 2000) are out of the scope of this article.

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the case that the appropriate way of complaining is by threatening the other’s face without mitigation. For example, Laforest showed that among family members in Québec complaints are realised by attacking the complainee directly: “[…] the most abrupt realisation of the act of complaining does not seem to bother the participants to any great extent” (2002: 1603).

3.1. The speech act set of complaining There has been no consensus as to which are the main strategies that constitute the speech act of complaining. Each set revised appears to be data-driven rather than having been checked in a systematised way. In this sense, cross-cultural comparisons and comparisons between IL complaint performances become a difficult task. It is also remarkable that the number of main strategies that have been postulated ranges from four (Murphy and Neu 1996) to eight (Trosborg 1995), and that the type of strategies each researcher includes in the set also seems to be very different from one another. The speech act set employed in this study is the most frequently cited in many IL complaint studies as the baseline to investigate IL features at different levels of proficiency. It is taken from Olshtain and Weinbach (1993: 111) and contains five types of complaint realisations, organised along a continuum according to the degree of face-threat that the complainer takes to express censure. It is not taken as a politeness scale for complaints. The set is summarised in Table 7-1:

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Examples4

1. Below the level of reproach: a) No explicit mention of offender or offence b) General remark left open to interpretation c) Avoidance of reprimand; no breach of harmony 2. Expression of annoyance or disapproval: a) Vague or indirect expressions to avoid conflict b) ‘Wrongness’ or offender unspecified c) General annoyance is clearly expressed 3. Explicit complaint: a) Complainee openly blamed b) No instigation of sanctions c) Offender, offence, or both are clearly stated 4. Accusation and warning: a) Open face-threat b) Potential sanctions are implied

“Such things happen” “Don’t worry about it, there is no real damage” “M’he adonat que s’ha acabat la llet” [I realised that the milk is finished]

5. Immediate threat: a) Complainer openly attacks complainee b) No mitigation

“Such lack of consideration!” “This is really unacceptable behaviour” “Aquesta habitació és una cort de porcs!” [This room is a pigsty!]

“You are inconsiderate!” “You shouldn’t have postponed such an operation” “No li hauries d’haver deixat” [You shouldn’t have lent it] “Next time I will let you wait for hours!” “Vindré i et pegaré si no calles!” [I’ll come and beat you if you don’t shut up] “You’d better pay the money right now!” “You’re an idiot!” “Ets un porc!” [You’re a bastard!]

Table 7-1: The complaint speech act set, summarised from Olshtain and Weinbach (1993: 111)

A complaint can be modified internally by two main types of modality markers, ‘downgraders’ and ‘upgraders’, which are of crucial importance. However, modality markers are out of the scope of this study5.

4

No codification was encountered in Catalan. Examples in Catalan are taken from Payrató (2003), with the English translation provided in square brackets. 5 For modification in complaints see House and Kasper (1981), Trosborg (1995), Olshtain and Weinbach (1993), Geluykens and Kraft (2003) and Gershenson (2003).

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4. Methodology Five groups of informants participated in this study: a control group of NSs of British English (GB), a control group of Catalan NSs (CAT), a group of Catalan learners of English at an intermediate (I), an advanced (A), and a proficiency level (P). 30 second-year undergraduate NSs of British English who were undertaking a wide range of degrees, 6 males and 24 females, comprised the corpus for the GB group. Most of them were Erasmus students at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). They had a mean age of 21.2 years and had a basic-intermediate level of Spanish, French, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Italian and Portuguese. 27 third-year undergraduate Catalan NSs also taking a wide range of degrees at the UAB and other Catalan universities, with a mean age of 21.9, 7 males and 20 females, provided the corpus for the Catalan control group. They also spoke several foreign languages at an intermediate-advanced level: English, French, Italian and Galician. 17 undergraduate students of Humanities from the UAB, 9 females and 8 males, with a mean age of 24, who had been studying English for an average of 9.2 years at high-school (7 had attended a language school) and did not use English outside the classroom, comprised the intermediate level corpus. They were taken randomly from two classes of the first year subject ‘Modern Foreign Language (English)’, a weekly 3-hour English course. 5 had been to an English-speaking country for a week (in average), on holidays. They had basic-intermediate knowledge of French, Italian and German. 21 undergraduate students of English Studies at the UAB, taken randomly from two classes of the second-year subject ‘Instrumental English II’, 1 male and 20 females, with a mean age of 20, provided the corpus for the advanced level. They had been studying English for an average of 9.8 years (2 at university). They had spent a month in an English-speaking country, in average, and used English for social purposes. 8 had never been abroad. 14 had studied or were studying EFL in a language school. They received English input for a mean of 4 hours a day. 14 spoke German, French and Italian at a basic-intermediate level. 23 second-cycle students who were finishing their BA in English Studies at the UAB, 3 males and 20 females, with a mean age of 22.1, completed the questionnaire for the proficiency group. They had studied English for 12 years and a half -4.5 at university, in average- and, apart from their university classes 6 hours a day, all except for 3 had been studying in a language school, too. 5 had never been to an English-speaking country; 6 had lived abroad for an academic year and the rest had spent at least a

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month and a half in an English-speaking country. 19 had regular contact with English NSs. In average, they used English 5.3 hours a day. They had basic-intermediate knowledge of French, Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese and Galician. Homogeneity of informants was ensured by means of a comprehensive background questionnaire, and the levels of English in the case of the experimental groups were stated according to the university placement tests. They were similarly familiar with the situations provided in the questionnaires, and had the same age and the same experience as university students. Therefore, their answers were considered comparable. It should be acknowledged that there was a gender bias in the two control groups and in two experimental groups, where the females clearly outnumbered the male participants. This might have had an affect on the results that will be presented in section 5. For this reason, no claims on the basis of the learners’ (i.e., the speaker’s) gender have been made in this study. The corpus comprises 118 open-ended discourse completion tasks (DCTs) with no hearer response6. Informants were allowed to write as much as they wanted, and had the possibility of opting out. They were provided with the vocabulary they did not know, and the researcher monitored the data collection process. Two versions were used: the English version for the British control group and the three experimental groups of Catalan learners (the latter having the instructions in Catalan), and its translation into Catalan for the Catalan control group. The Catalan DCT was validated by a previous pilot study conducted by 6 professors at the UAB and by 3 Catalan undergraduates. Each questionnaire contained 12 complaint situations already validated by several researchers (House and Kasper 1981, Boxer 1993, Trosborg 1995, Olshtain and Weinbach 1993, Bergman and Kasper 1993, Frescura 1995, Tatsuki 2000, Geluykens and Kraft 2003 and Gershenson 2003). Each referred to manifestations of socially unacceptable behaviour, and was explicitly designed to elicit complaint strategies according to a fixed social setting per situation encompassing all the possible constellations of contexts along the parameters ‘social distance’ (SD) and ‘power’ (or dominance). A third variable was included: the gender of the complainee (not the complainer), on the grounds that “[…] there has been little work on gender-specific realisations of FTAs” (Geluykens and Kraft 2003: 253). ‘Social distance’ is binary-valued: -SD is employed among friends, relatives and co-workers, and +SD among unknown people or acquaintances. The variable ‘social dominance’ has three possible values: 6

For a discussion of the validity of DCTs, see, e.g., Kasper and Dahl (1991).

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x>y for speaker dominant interactions; xy; M). 12. A worker whose superior and co-worker failed to pass on an important message to him/her. (-SD; x