Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal

137-167

Authors: Roni Danziger and Zohar Kampf

The contrastive study of interpretive constructs, the end products of evaluative processes, enables identification of patterns of meaning-making that may result in cross-cultural misunderstandings. The study focuses on judgments of flattery in Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic. Using contrastive metapragmatic methodology, it examines how flattery is used and perceived in two neighbouring speech communities with different cultural speaking styles: Israeli dugri (and its related firgun) and Arabic musayara. Findings indicate more similarities than differences in the performance and evaluation of flattery, with a slight departure with regard to evaluation and stance. We hypothesize that following the asymmetrical contact between Hebrew speakers and Arabic speakers in Israel, younger Arabic speakers tend to adopt the majority group’s patterns of politeness.

200-226

Authors: Wei Ren and Saeko Fukushima

This study investigates Chinese and Japanese requests in social media communication, focusing on the requests made between university students. The data consisted of 300 social media requests made by 30 Chinese university students and 304 social media requests made by 30 Japanese university students, respectively. The findings revealed that the Chinese and Japanese participants displayed more similarities than differences regarding the request strategy that they preferred to use among peers on social media. Both groups employed direct requests the most frequently, followed by conventionally indirect requests. Non-conventionally indirect requests were used the least frequently by both groups. The Japanese participants employed twice as many external modifiers as their Chinese counterparts. In contrast, the Chinese participants used considerably more lexical/phrasal internal modifiers than the Japanese participants. The findings are discussed in relation to factors such as social distance, living arrangements and new technologies.

1-23

Authors: Naoko Taguchi and Shuai Li

This state-of-the-art paper discusses common approaches to the assessment of pragmatic competence. Two approaches have dominated the assessment practice in the field of second language (L2) pragmatics. One approach, rooted in the tradition of contrastive pragmatics, involves comparing and contrasting L2 learners’ pragmalinguistic forms with those of native speakers to determine whether L2 forms approximate native speaker forms. The other approach, rooted in the tradition of performance-based assessment, involves using a rating scale to evaluate L2 pragmatic performance based on multiple criteria (e.g., clarity of intention, formality level of expressions, and interaction abilities). Focusing on the area of speech act assessment, this paper presents an overview of these two approaches, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. By doing so, the paper intends to illustrate the interface between contrastive pragmatics and L2 pragmatics. The paper concludes with critical insights in terms of what is missing in these approaches under the current trend of globalization and intercultural communication.

52-80

Authors: Ian Walkinshaw and Andy Kirkpatrick

This study explores the conversational humour of Asian multilinguals using English as a lingua franca (ELF) – specifically, their use of (im)politeness strategies to humorously maintain, neglect or affront their target’s face. The Asian ELF data come from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), which comprises naturally occurring data of English being used as a lingua franca by Asian multilinguals. These data are compared with similar instances drawn from existing Australian humour studies. Our qualitative analysis reveals significant insights into how (im)politeness (both actual and pretended) are utilised as humour strategies by Asian ELF speakers compared with Australian English users.

106-132

Authors: Yan Wang

Based on the systemic functional framework, this paper attempts to compare verbal projection in two comparable translated texts of a detective story entitled A Scandal in Bohemia, one from the early 20th century (henceforth TT1) and the other from the early 21st century (henceforth TT2). Approximately one hundred years apart, these two translations are strikingly different in their language use, with classical Chinese being used in TT1 and plain (colloquial) Chinese being used in TT2. By analysing and comparing the lexicogrammatical features of the verbal clauses in the two translated texts, this paper summarises the choices made by the translators in these two different historical moments: when translating the source text, TT1 translators show more flexibility by incorporating more addition and omission into their translation than TT2 translators.