2211ENGL1415 Contrastive Linguistics (Eng-Vie) – Ms Hoa Ninh

WEEK 11

PRAGMATIC CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

 The big picture 1: How does the author define Pragmatics and context? What are the two areas of study that
Chapter 7 explores?

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I. Speech Act Theory

 The big picture 2: What are ‘speech acts’ and their ‘felicity conditions’?
- Speech acts as an utterance or sentence used á a functional unit in an communicative event.
- Felicity conditions are the conditions which must be fulfilled for a speech act to be satisfactorily performed
or actualized
 A closer look:
1. What is the difference between ‘performatives’ and ‘constatives’ in Austin’s theory?

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2. Distinguish (1) locutionary act, (2) illocutionary act, and (3) perlocutionary act. Examine one utterance in
either English or Vietnamese and analyse its three aforesaid acts.

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2211ENGL1415 Contrastive Linguistics (Eng-Vie) – Ms Hoa Ninh
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3. Provide one example, in either English or Vietnamese, of an indirect speech act.

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4. In Searle’s (1969) classification, what are the five basic types of speech acts/ illocutionary acts? Give
examples for each type.

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5. What are the three types of felicity conditions mentioned in section 7.1.2?

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For more detailed explanations of felicity conditions, please refer to:

Austin, J. L. 1975. How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. R. 1985. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge University Press.
2211ENGL1415 Contrastive Linguistics (Eng-Vie) – Ms Hoa Ninh
II. Conversational Interaction

6. The Structural Components of Conversation: What does the term ‘phatic communion/ communication’
refer to? What are some types of phatic expressions frequently employed in openings and closings?

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For an introduction to Politeness theory and Conversation Analysis, please refer to:

Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.

Leech, G. N. 2014. The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press.

Ten Have, P. 2007. Doing conversation analysis. Sage.

7. Principles of Conversational Organisation: What are the two major theories explicated in section 7.2.2?
Draw a mind map to summarise this section. Are the conversational and politeness maxims universals? Why/
Why not?
2211ENGL1415 Contrastive Linguistics (Eng-Vie) – Ms Hoa Ninh

Produce wordlists
Determine hedges
Count frequency + search for context
Manually filter data
Discuss with researchers (90% agree)
Conduct constrastive analysis