Professor Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

Indiana University

Thursday, April 14, 2005

On the Role of Formulas in the Acquisition of Second Language Pragmatics

Professor Gabriele Kasper

University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Friday, April 15, 2005

Speech Acts in Interaction: A Conversation-Analytic Perspective

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

As researchers add studies of acquisition to the growing number of studies in interlanguage pragmatics, the role of formulas in acquisition is often cited. However, the term formula, is used in at least three ways in interlanguage pragmatics: to describe components of speech acts (i.e. semantic formulas, as in apologies, a promise of forbearance, it won’t happen again, or acceptance of responsibility, it was all my fault ); to describe conventional expressions used by native speakers which may constitute both the input and the target (in letters announcing acceptances or rejections, We are happy to inform you or We regret to inform you ); and to describe recurrent strings used by learners at a time when their interlanguage grammar could not have generated the apparent grammar of the string (such as the use of Shall we go? as a request to leave when the learner usually uses single word requests such as Sitting? ) . In this paper, I explore the different approaches to formulas and discuss the various assumptions and predictions made by each. I consider the evidence from interlanguage pragmatics for the different positions, drawing on evidence from studies of formulas more generally, and outline areas for further investigation in L2 pragmatics.

Gabriele Kasper

  Speech act research has been a highly successful undertaking. It has identified many of the conceptual and linguistic resources by which speech acts are regularly accomplished. Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic speech act research has examined which of these resources may be universal, which may be shared by some but not all language and cultural groups, and which may be unique in the pragmatic repertoire of a specific language or community. It has also shed light on the variability of speech act patterns in different social situations and determined some of the factors that influence such variability. As speech acts in only a small segment of the world’s languages and communities have been investigated to date, much remains to be done on this topic.

  Yet the focus on the individual speech act has also been limiting. To a large extent, speech act research has been based on data that are non-interactional by design, such as discourse completion and metapragmatic assessment data. But even interactional data are not necessarily analyzed as interaction, as evident from many studies that extract the focal speech act from its sequential context in natural or elicited talk.

  Conversation analysis (CA) offers an approach to examine speech acts in their interactional habitat. I will illustrate how CA’s methodological principles apply to speech act research and discuss some of the strengths that CA can bring to interlanguage pragmatics.