Ms Nguyen Le Bao Ngoc Pragmatics revision Cross-cultural Pragmatics

CROSS-CULTURAL PRAGMATICS
WHAT TO COVER?

❑ Cross-cultural communication and Cross-cultural pragmatics

❑ Discourse analysis

❑ Coherence

❑ Background knowledge

❑ Cultural schemata

Cross-cultural pragmatics versus Intercultural pragmatics

What is the difference?
➢ Cross- cultural pragmatics compares different cultures, based on the investigation of certain
aspects of language use, such as speech acts, behaviour patterns, and language behaviour.

➢ Intercultural pragmatics focuses on interactions among people from different cultures, speaking
different languages.

Cross- cultural pragmatics Intercultural pragmatics

▪ considers each language and ▪ focuses on the communicative process

culture separately
▪ investigates the speech production
▪ analyses the differences and
▪ and comprehension of interlocutors who represent
similarities between various
different cultures and languages, and use a common
entities
language (lingua franca) for communication

Cross-cultural pragmatics: the study of differences in expectations based on

cultural schemata.
The concepts and terminology provide the basic theoretical framework, but the
realization of those concepts differ substantially from one language to another.
Example:

1. An Indonesian student, wanting to politely refuse your offer of a cigarette, says, ʹThank youʹ.

2. An Australian (male) ESL teacher is explaining something to an Arabic speaking male student.
The student stands about 1/2 metre away.
Ms Nguyen Le Bao Ngoc Pragmatics revision Cross-cultural Pragmatics

3. An Australian factory‐floor foreman compliments a Thai worker on a job well done. The Thai
says: ʹOh no, I did it very badlyʹ.

4. After students in an advanced ESL class have worked through this morningʹs newspaper editorial
about a NSW government decision on educational policy, their Australian teacher sets out her
own opinions on the subject, and then asks the students to comment and discuss. The (mainly
Chinese) students remain silent.

5. More example (page 88)

Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis covers an extremely wide range of activities, from the narrowly focused investigation
of how words such as ‘oh’ or ‘well’ are used in casual talk, to the study of the dominant ideology in a
culture in a particular setting.

Discourse analysis focuses on the record (spoken or written) of the process by which language is used in
some context to express intention.

❑ Pragmatics: focus specifically on the aspects of what is unsaid or unwritten, yet communicated,
within the discourse being analyzed.

❑ To carry out the pragmatics of discourse, researchers have to go beyond the primarily social
concerns of interaction and conversation analysis, look behind the forms and structures present
in the text, and pay much more attention to psychological concepts such as background
knowledge, beliefs, and expectation.

Coherence
❑ Coherence: what is said or written will make sense in terms of normal experience of things.

❑ Example:

a. Plant sale: selling plant

b. Garage sale: selling garage?

=> Coherence emphasizes on familiarity and knowledge.

Background knowledge
❑ The ability to arrive automatically at interpretations of the unwritten and unsaid must be based
on pre-existing knowledge structures.

❑ These structures function like familiar patterns from previous experience.

❑ => schema (plural schemata)

❑ Schema: a pre-existing knowledge structure in memory

❑ If the schema has a fixed, static pattern, it is called a frame.

Ms Nguyen Le Bao Ngoc Pragmatics revision Cross-cultural Pragmatics

❑ A frame: shared by everyone within a social group.

❑ Example: a frame for an apartment as in “Apartment for rent, $500, fully furnished”

❑ $500 per Week? Month? Year?

❑ Script: a more dynamic types of schemata

❑ Script is a pre-existing knowledge structure involving event sequences

❑ Example: going to a doctor’s office, a movie theatre, a restaurant, a grocery store,etc.

❑ Cultural schemata is developed in the context of one’s own experiences.

❑ Example: “free good” schemata