This is a study of two Australian learners of Indonesian during a short stay abroad. It examines their contrasting success in acquiring L2 address terms, in tandem with their contrasting experiences of the L2 culture setting. It thereby helps explain the persistent finding of great individual variation in L2 gains--and in particular pragmatic…

Research on the routines of doctor-patient consultations has been conducted in language and culture concordant dyads and in dyads where either doctor or patient uses a foreign language; yet there is an absence of scholarly engagement with consultations where both participants are using a foreign language. In seeking to address this gap, this…

This paper examines the use of Japanese addressee honorific in several social contexts (e.g., family dinner table and faculty meetings) and considers the relationship between social norms and variations. It attempts to reconsider the notion of discernment (Ide, 1989, 2006) in line with Bourdieu's (1977) conception of "habitus,"…

Through a reexamination of the relationship between politeness and femininity in Japanese, this study considers some of the major theoretical issues concerning linguistic politeness in general. While politeness has been regarded as a central feature of Japanese women's speech, recent research has shown that politeness is a speech norm for…

In recent years, politeness theory has increasingly focused on speakers' own conceptualizations of polite behavior, viewing politeness concepts as a type of language ideology. This article examines the construction of Japanese politeness concepts in the business etiquette training provided for new employees in Japanese companies. Drawing on…

There has been considerable research both intra- and inter-linguistically on hedging in a variety of languages (e.g. Myers 1989; Markannen & Schroder 1997; Hyland 2005), primarily concentrating on its use in academic writing and identifying cultural differences in the propensity to hedge between different communities of practice. Furthermore,…

This study explores how a group of learners of English as a second language (ESL) criticize in everyday situations compared to the native speaker (NS) with a view to expanding the range of speech acts under inquiry in the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) literature. Data were collected from five NSs of New Zealand English and five intermediate…

Existing studies on doctor-client interactions have largely focused on monolingual encounters and the interactional effects and functions of the languages used in the communication between doctors and their clients. They have neither, to a large extent, examined the several codes employed in single encounters and their pragmatic roles nor given…

The study analyses teenagers' e-mail requests during academic cyber-consultation, exploring how the performance of request modifiers is influenced by participants' perceptions of the degree of imposition of the speech act and social distance with the recipient. A total of 295 e-mail requests, 145 produced by British English speakers…

The aim of this study was to explore pragmalinguistic strategies employed by a group of Iranian English language learners when making refusals to invitations, requests, offers and suggestions in their first (Persian) and second (English) languages. Data were collected from 86 participants through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The social…

This study explores the pragmatic awareness of instructed L2 learners of Greek (economic migrants) by examining the extent to which these learners display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical violations. Methodologically, the study is largely based on the Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei (1998) study on pragmatic…

Discourse markers play significant roles in any spoken interaction. This research examines the functions of the discourse markers (DMs) well, now and and used as turn-initial interruptive devices in a Malaysian radio discourse. Using Schegloff's (2002) framework of what constitutes an interruption in turn-taking and previous studies on the…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases stylised African American…

Whereas the speech act of refusal is universal across language, the politeness value and the types of linguistic forms used to perform it vary across language and culture. The majority of the comparative pragmatic research findings were derived from one single source of data (i.e., either production data or perception data). Few attempts have been…

Extending Lee's (Pragmatics 15: 395-422, 2005) work, the researcher further investigates the requestive behaviour of a group of Cantonese learners of English (CLEs) in Hong Kong in terms of their strategy and linguistic preference. The data were collected from a discourse completion test (DCT). Their requestive behaviour is studied in three…