Superficial intersubjectivity in ELF university dormitory interactions (original) (raw)
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Negotiating Interpersonal Relationships in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Interactions
2016
In the discourse of English as a lingua franca (ELF), interactants will tend to bring with them the linguistic and cultural conventions they associate with communication in their own communities. These conventions are likely to differ in certain respects. When different sets of usage conventions come into contact and into conflict with each other, problems arise. The question then arises of how people position themselves and negotiate interpersonal relationships in ELF interactions when they do not share common linguacultural assumptions and practices. This paper reports on the first stage of an exploration of this issue. It considers how far the various perspectives on pragmatic interaction that are offered by three different approaches [namely the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975 [1989]), the Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson, 1978 [1987]) and the Accommodation Theory (Giles and Coupland, 1991) might provide an appropriate framework for the description of positioning in ELF interactions, by relating the concepts and findings of this literature to a sample of ELF data from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE).
Nordic Journal of Linguistics
This paper explores issues of intersubjectivity and shared understanding as they arise in dyadic spoken interaction. Using data from Swedish conversations, we approach the topic by focusing on the functions of a reactive construction that occurs in situations when a linguistic expression (x) has been used in a prior utterance, and this expression is found to be only partially acceptable in the situation at hand. It is therefore reacted to by one of the interlocutors, and negotiated in a new turn initiated byx-å-x, i.e. a unit in which two identical copies ofxare conjoined byå‘and’, and then expanded by a supporting argument. The pragmatic functions of the construction include that of suggesting a sufficient clarification of what should be a reasonable situated meaning and an intersubjective basis for ensuing talk.
Batziakas, B. (2016) Achieving Politeness in ELF Conversations: A Functional-Pragmatic Perspective.
In: Tsantila, N., Mandalios, J. & Ilkos, M. (Eds) ELF: Pedagogical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Athens: Deree - The American College of Greece Press, pp. 220-226, 2016
This paper sets out to look at the naturally occurring audio-recorded discourse from a group of international students at the University of London, while they were holding meetings in order to establish an international students society (part of a PhD research project). In particular, it looks at instances in which these international students were drawing lexis from all across their linguistic repertoire, and in doing so they were managing to achieve politeness in their conversations. In the main part of this paper below, first, there is a review of some of the major politeness theories in sociolinguistics, as well as a discussion of how politeness has been investigated in ELF conversations between speakers from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Building on these considerations, there follows an analysis of the way that politeness was achieved in two extracts from the participants’ meetings. As it was found, the overall pragmatic function of ‘achieving politeness’ was further broken down into two sub-functions. The first one was ‘displaying discursive sensitivity through avoiding profanity’, and the second one was ‘increasing politeness through showing awareness of the interlocutors’ linguistic background’.
Discourse Reflexivity - A Discourse Universal? The Case of ELF
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2010
This paper is concerned with metadiscourse, or discourse reflexivity, as a fundamental property of human communication. It assumes that lingua franca evidence is useful for discovering essential, possibly universal aspects of discourse, since participants must adapt to highly diverse and unpredictable circumstances while maintaining communicative efficiency. Metadiscourse is clearly not a feature speakers can dispense with, as is seen in the study reported here. Since ELF speakers cannot rely on much shared linguistic or cultural knowledge with their interlocutors, they need to secure mutual understanding by explicitness strategies, such as discourse reflexivity. This study shows that analysing interaction in dialogic speech events reveal important uses of metadiscourse that have not surfaced in earlier studies, which have used written monologues as their principal source of data. A much more prominent 'otherorientedness', or orientation towards intercolutors, is evident in dialogue than in monologic language. The tendency of discourse reflexivity to collocate with hedges is also supported here.
Interactive repair among English as a lingua franca speakers in academic settings
Brno studies in English
The paper presents the results of research which studies the use of English as a lingua franca in spoken academic discourse interactions, providing a deeper insight into the interactional practices utilized in the process of achieving the communicative purpose(s) of international university seminars. Drawing on audio-recorded data collected from English-taught seminars at the University of Ostrava and using conversation analytic procedures, the research explores the character and functions of interactive repair and its role in increasing mutual understanding and preventing communication breakdown in lingua franca academic talk. The article discusses strategies of providing language support and/or feedback to one's communicative partners in negotiating both meaning and form of talk, and offers findings which portray ELF speakers as competent communicators adaptable to different sociopragmatic contexts.
In the present text, some recent changes in the perspective taken by psycholinguists in the study of language and communication are discussed. T heir interests seem to gradually shift from the study of language processing as an isolated and independent phenomenon towards inclusion of more interactional factors being indispensable components of interpersonal communication and involved in the process of communicative alignment. A lignment is here understood as a complex phenomenon that goes beyond increasing similarity of mental representations and related communicative behaviour. It simultaneously occurs on many levels and in various modalities, including those traditionally excluded from language study. A s a consequence, it implies not only more flexibility in the study of interpersonal communication but it also means a shift in the psycholinguistic methodology and probably also in the widely accepted picture of language and its limits. Keywords: interactivity, alignment, entrainment, dialogue
What " What? " Tells Us About How Conversationalists Manage Intersubjectivity
When studying how conversationalists assess mutual understanding, research has focused on one type of evidence: next-turn talk. This article identifies another, antecedent type of evidence involving how talk is produced by reference to repair-opportunity spaces that are systematically provided for by conversation's generic organization of repair. As current speakers talk, recipients claim understanding ex silentio on an action-by-action basis as they forgo each next repair-opportunity space-that is, as they 'withhold' talk at each next transition-relevance place. This conversation-analytic article supports its argument through an analysis of multi-action/TCU turns generally, and specifically when recipients initiate repair on such turns with: 'What?' In these cases, people respond by repairing only the most proximate action in their prior turn, which indexes their understanding that people who initiated repair understood relatively distal actions. Data are drawn from naturally occurring, ordinary, telephone conversations between friends and family members. Data are in American and British English.