In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

This study investigated the relationship between language proficiency and negative pragmatic transfer from a first language (L1), focusing on the speech act of refusal as realised by American learners of Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) in Egyptian Arabic. Twenty American AFL learners (10 intermediate and 10 advanced) and 2 baseline groups (10…

This study compares how the native speakers of Thai (TTs) and American (AEs) as well as the Thai learners of English as a foreign language with high exposure to English (TEHs) and those with the low exposure (TELs) perform the speech acts of compliments (Cs) by taking the context of age into their consideration. The data were collected by means of…

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

A study comparing the request strategies of native and non-native speakers of English and Spanish is reported. Subjects were 29 American and 78 European students with varied first languages, enrolled in English and Spanish courses at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Data were obtained using a general background questionnaire and a…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…