Symbols and abbreviations Foreword John J. Gumperz Introduction to the reissue Notes 1. Introduction 2. Summarized argument 3. The argument: intuitive bases and derivative definitions 4. On the nature of the model 5. Realizations of politeness strategies in language 6. Derivative hypotheses 7. Sociological implications 8. Implications for language studies 9. Conclusions Notes References Author index Subject index.

Politeness : Some Universals in Language Usage

In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory Easy to use, "English Verb Classes and Alternations" sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language Beth Levin is associate professor of linguistics at Northwestern University

English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation

/ have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply a question of highly conventionalized usage which can be taught quite straightforwardly as 'part of the grammar'. The second area ('sociopragmatic failure') is much more difficult to deal with, since it involves the student's system of beliefs as much as his/her knowledge of the language. I argue that it is essential to avoid prescriptivism in this very sensitive area of language in use. To do so we must draw on insights from theoretical pragmatics and develop ways of heightening and refining students' metapragmatic awareness, so that they are able to express themselves as they choose.

https://rodas5.us.es/file/a26cd06f-d80f-47b8-a5f0-fb23430aa5fc/1/thomas_failure_wimba_SCORM.zip/files/thomas_pragmatic_failure.pdf

Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure

Self-Directed Learning, A Guide for Learners and Teachers

Towards an anatomy of impoliteness.

Perspectives on politeness.

What are discourse markers

An approach to discourse markers

As the study of language has evolved from the narrow confines of linguistic form to include the study of language use, researchers have often found themselves either without the theoretical tools needed to pose and discuss the issues or without a research methodology adequate to collect the appropriate data. The study of deference and how it is associated with particular linguistic structures appears to suffer from both difficulties. On the one hand, aside from a few scattered comments in the recent linguistic and language-related literature (cf. Goffman, 1971), there has been no account of what deference is. Moreover, although speakers believe that they understood deference and can recognize it, it is very clear that one cannot follow the linguistic tradition and appeal directly to the intuitions of the native speaker to sort out the degree of deference associated with particular expressions. To be sure, there would be general agreement that the use of 'You ought to do that right now' as a suggestion is far less deferential than suggest that you do that fairly soon', but the use of such intuitions quickly breaks down on the more subtle cases, and judges are inconsistent. Nevertheless, this paper is an attempt to characterize deference and how it appears to be systematically associated with certain types of linguistic forms. We begin by presenting our view of deference, distinguishing it from politeness with which it is often confused. We then report on two experiments involving speakers of Spanish and English in which we employed a pairedcomparison methodology to determine both how deference was associated with certain linguistic forms used for requesting as well as the similarity of the associations across the two languages.

Bruce Fraser

Papers

Perspectives on politeness.

What are discourse markers

An approach to discourse markers

The association of deference with linguistic form

Pragmatic Competence: The Case of Hedging