The role of pragmatic markers in academic spoken interlanguage. A corpus-based study of a group of Brazilian EFL university students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.5162Keywords:
Learner corpus, Academic discourse, PolitenessAbstract
The present work addresses a group of university students of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) on how they use pragmatic markers in their oral productions.The initial hypothesis was that there would be differences both in usage and form in comparison to native speakers. In order to verify our claim, we set off to investigate two corpora: a learner oral corpus being compiled at the Federal University of Minas Gerais/Brazil and a sub-corpus from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE). While Brazilian students overuse items such as maybe and just, the datarecorded in the UK displayed a more varied range of markers and multiword forms. Overall, the findings reinforce the importance of analyzing empirical data for a broader understanding of how native speakers and learners can differ in their oral academic production. The paper also sheds light on language teaching and learning in the academic setting from a pragmatic viewpoint.
References
Agrespi, A. (1990). Categorical Data Analysis. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Aijmer, K. (2002). English discourse particles: Evidence from a corpus (Vol. 10). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.10
Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A. M. (2004). A model and a methodology for the study of pragmatic markers: The semantic field of expectation. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(10), 1781–1805. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2004.05.005
Aijmer, K. (2004). Pragmatic markers in spoken interlanguage. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 3(1), 173–190. DOI: https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.29
Aijmer, K. (2013). Understanding pragmatic markers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748635511
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents (Vol. 84). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.84
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., & Conrad, S. E. Finegan (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Biber, D. (2006). Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5(2), 97–116. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2006.05.001
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085
Brown, P. (2015). Politeness and language. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (IESBS) (pp. 326–330). (2nd ed.) Elsevier. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53072-4
Bublitz, W. (1978). Ausdrucksweisen der Sprechereinstellung im Deutschen und im Englischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111712369
Cunha, G. X. (2015). As relações retóricas e a negociação de faces em debate eleitoral. Confluência, 1(47), 205–238. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18364/rc.v1i47.30
Cortes, V. (2002). Lexical bundles in freshman composition. Using corpora to explore linguistic variation, 9, 131–145. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.9.09cor
Downing, A., & Locke, P. (2006). English grammar: A university course. New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203087640
Erman, B. (2001). Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk. Journal of pragmatics, 33(9), 1337–1359. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00066-7
Fraser, B. (1999). What are discourse markers? Journal of pragmatics, 31(7), 931–952. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00101-5
Fraser, B. (1990). An approach to discourse markers. Journal of pragmatics, 14(3), 383–398. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(90)90096-V
Fung, L., & Carter, R. (2007). Discourse markers and spoken English: Native and learner use in pedagogic settings. Applied linguistics, 28(3), 410–439. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amm030
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face interaction. New York: Anchor Books.
Goffman, E. (1976). Replies and responses. Language in society, 5(3), 257–313. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500007156
Halliday, M. A. K., Matthiessen, C., & Halliday, M. (2014). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203783771
Holmes, J. (1985). Sex differences and miscommunication: Some data from New Zealand. Cross-cultural Encounters: Communication and Miscommunication, (pp. 24–43). Melbourne: River Seine.
Holmes, J. (1986). Functions of you know in women’s and men’s speech. Language in society, 15(1), 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500011623
Holmes, J. (1990). Hedges and boosters in women’s and men’s speech. Language & Communication, 10(3), 185–205. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(90)90002-S
Haugh, M. (2013). Disentangling face, facework and in/politeness. Pragmática sociocultural, 1(1), 46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/soprag-2012-0005
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2006). Análise da conversação: Princípios e métodos. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial.
Kriwonossow, A. (1977). Die modalen Partikeln in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Vol. GAG 214. Göppingen: Kümmerle-Verlag.
Marcuschi, L. A. (1989). Marcadores conversacionais do português brasileiro: formas, posições e funções. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP.
McCarthy, M. & Carter, R. (2006). This that and the other: Multi-word clusters in spoken English as visible patterns of interaction. Explorations in corpus linguistics, 7–26.
O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. (2007). From corpus to classroom: Language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511497650
Oliveira, A. L. Adorno Marciotto, G. X. Cunha, & M. Vieira Miranda (2017). Nominalizations as complex strategies of politeness and face-work in scientific papers written in Brazilian Portuguese. Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos, 59(2), 361–374. DOI: https://doi.org/10.20396/cel.v59i2.8649880
Orfanò, B.M. (2010). The representation of spoken language: a corpus-based study of sitcom discourse [unpublished PhD dissertation], Limerick: Mary Immaculate College-University.
Östman, J. O. (1981). ‘You Know’: A discourse-functional study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pb.ii.7
Ran, Y. (2003). A pragmatic account of the discourse marker WELL. Journal of Foreign Languages, 3, 58–64.
Rayson, P. & Garside, R. (2000). Comparing corpora using frequency profiling. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparing Corpora (pp. 1–6) [held in conjunction with the 38th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2000). 1–8 October 2000], Hong Kong. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3115/1117729.1117730
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Bárbara Malveir Orfanò, Ana Larissa Adorno Marciotto Oliveira, Spencer Barbosa da Silva
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
