Examines the pragmatic uses of narrative structures in the written stories of native-English speaking and native-Spanish speaking college students. It is shown that there are subtle differences in the way that the two groups use structures, suggesting that native-English and native-Spanish narrators have differing perceptions of themselves and…

Refusals among speakers of English and Arabic are studied in three samples: native English speakers in the United States and Egypt; Arab students of English in both countries; and Arabic speakers in Egypt. Pragmatically unsuccessful strategies are analyzed from data gathered by a discourse-completion task. (18 references) (Author/LB)

It is shown that, although native English speakers routinely use subject-verb-object questions for specific functions and in informal discourse, this question form rarely appears in textbooks or presentations used in English-as-a-Second-Language classrooms. Thus, language presented in these classes may not expose students to the complete range of…

The culturally marked discursive style in Italian and English public service encounters are contrasted by concentrating on the management of request-compliance and request-noncompliance. Linguistic realization of "evidentiality" (the expression of attitudes toward communicated information and the information source) is analyzed from bookstore…

Recent research has shown that transfer operates on the discourse as well as the phonological, semantic, and syntactic levels. This is the case with relative clauses (RCs) used by Chinese students of English. RCs are less frequent in Chinese and their low incidence in interlanguage production by such students is a case of transfer, not avoidance.…

The degree to which television conversations follow the rules of naturally occurring conversation is investigated. The occurrences of 1 type of pragmatic behavior (the dispreferred behavior of refusing social invitations) in 25 television conversations are compared with a theoretical description of such conversational strategies. (seven…

Reports on a project incorporating pragmatic analysis into the second language classroom. Cooperative learning groups of first-year ESL students in a composition class analyzed variation in the use of linguistic features across a set of texts. Exercises of this type are asserted to be useful in promoting awareness of the different potential uses…

Examines differences in the rhetorical structures of English and Japanese newspaper editorials by (1) measuring and describing textual features; and (2) conducting an experiment in which native English speakers and bilingual English-Japanese speakers reordered the scrambled texts of editorials. Results indicated that certain rhetorical patterns…

Discusses the importance of conversational implicatures in cross-cultural communication and argues that the use of opened-ended questions to study such implicatures is inherently flawed. It is asserted that multiple-choice tests are better investigational devices, and an ongoing investigation of the cross-cultural interpretation of implicature…

Compares patterns of subject position pronominalization and zero anaphora in English in stories written by monolingual U.S. students and bilingual Mexican students at grades 6 and 12. The possibility of both sentential and discourse level transfer effects resulting from the fact that Spanish allows subject deletion is investigated as is the…