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Interlanguage Pragmatics

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Interlanguage
Pragmatics
EDITED BY
Gabriele Kasper
and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1993

Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Interlanguage pragmatics / edited by Gabriele Kasper
and Shoshana Blum-Kulka.
p. cm. ISBN 0-19-506602-2
1. Interlanguage (Language learning) 2. Pragmatics. 3. Speech
acts (Linguistics) I. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana.
P53.15193 1993
410.4'4—dc20 92-34791
1 35798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

CONTENTS
Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction, 3
Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
I
Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage
Pragmatic Development, 19
1 Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics, 21
Richard Schmidt
2 Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control
in Pragmatic Competence, 43
Ellen Bialystok
II Speech Act Realization, 59
3 Expressing Gratitude in American English, 64
Miriam Eisenstein and Jean Bodman
4 Perception and Performance in Native and Nonnative Apology, 82
Marc L. Bergman and Gabriele Kasper
5 Interlanguage Features of the Speech Act of Complaining, 108
Elite Olshtain and Liora Weinbach
6 Interlanguage Requestive Hints, 123
Elda Weizman
1 Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Speech Act of Correction, 138
Tomoko Takahashi and Leslie M. Beebe
III Discourse Perspectives, 159
8 Toward a Model for the Analysis of Inappropriate Responses
in Native/Nonnative Interactions, 161
Juliane House
9 Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior:
The Effect of Conversational Topic, 184
Jane Zuengler

vi
Contents
10 The Metapragmatic Discourse of American-Israeli Families
at Dinner, 196
Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Hadass Sheffer
11 Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity, 224
Guy Aston
ABOUT THE AUTHORS, 251

Interlanguage Pragmatics

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Interlanguage Pragmatics:
An Introduction
GABRIELE KASPER and SHOSHANA BLUM-KULKA
The Scope of Interlanguage Pragmatics
Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) is a second-generation hybrid. As its name betrays,
ILP belongs to two different disciplines, both of which are interdisciplinary. As a
branch of Second Language Acquisition Research, ILP is one of several specializations
in interlanguage studies, contrasting with interlanguage phonology, morphology,
syntax, and semantics. As a subset of pragmatics, ILP figures as a sociolinguistic,
psycholinguistic, or simply linguistic enterprise, depending on how one
defines the scope of "pragmatics." For thorough discussion of definitional issues,
see Leech (1983) and Levinson (1983). The perspective on pragmatics we adopt is
an action-theoretical one, viewing pragmatics as the study of people's comprehension
and production of linguistic action in context. Interlanguage pragmatics has
consequently been defined as the study of nonnative speakers' use and acquisition of
linguistic action patterns in a second language (L2) (e.g., Kasper, 1989b). Yet tying
interlanguage pragmatics to nonnative speakers, or language learners, may narrow
its scope too restrictively. As Blum-Kulka (1991; Blum-Kulka & Sheffer, Chapter
10) demonstrates through the case of American immigrants to Israel, speakers fully
competent in two languages may create an intercultural style of speaking that is both
related to and distinct from the styles prevalent in the two substrata, a style on which
they rely regardless of the language being used. The intercultural style hypothesis is
supported by many studies of cross-cultural communication, notably interactional
sociolinguistics (e.g., Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1985) and research into the pragmatic
behavior of immigrant populations across generations (e.g., Clyne, 1979;
Clyne, Ball, & Neil, 1991). It also receives strong anecdotal support, worthy of
systematic investigation, by highly proficient nonnative speakers whose L2 conversational
behavior carries interlanguage-specific traits, and who claim at the same
time that they do not abide by native norms any more when conversing in their
native language. For instance, one of us was told by several of her Chinese students
that in response to invitations and offers they wish to accept, they no longer engage
3

4 Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction
in ritual refusal, as required by traditional Chinese culture. Some of her Japanese
students claim that they are much more direct in their interaction in Japanese than they
used to be before extended exposure to Western ways. Emerging intercultural styles,
so prevalent in the international academic community, deserve interlanguage pragmaticists'
close attention. Hence, it appears useful to include under ILP the study of
intercultural styles brought about through language contact, the conditions for their
emergence and change, the relationship to their substrata, and their communicative
effectiveness. A look at the literature on ILP (cf. the overview in Kasper & Dahl,
1991), however, suggests that the populations studied have invariably been nonnative
speakers, reflecting the status of ILP as a branch of second language research. While
the present collection largely follows this line, Blum-Kulka and Sheffer (Chapter 10)
extend the perspective to include native speakers' intercultural styles.
Furthermore, according to researchers' labeling of their objects of study, ILP
predominantly refers to the comprehension and production of linguistic action,
including discourse regulation. An area of study that most investigators would
clearly recognize as "pragmatic" yet that is not usually included under ILP is
communication strategies. The de facto separation of pragmatics and communication
strategies in second language studies reflects different alignments chosen by
researchers in each area. The study of communication strategies has predominantly
been grounded in psycholinguistic models of cognitive processing (e.g., Poulisse,
1990; Bialystok, 1990), whereas ILP has derived its theoretical and empirical foundation
from general and especially cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g., Blum-Kulka,
House, & Kasper, 1989). For the most part, research on communication strategies
has examined learners' solutions to referential problems; ILP has focused on the
illocutionary and politeness dimensions of speech act performance. While this
division of labor reflects different research traditions, it has little theoretical support.
In Bachman's (1990, 84ff.) model of communicative competence, for example,
pragmatic competence, a component of language competence, subdivides into
sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence, which in turn entails the ability to
express a variety of communicative functions, such as making reference. Strategic
competence is seen as processing ability, operating on the language competence in
its entirety and including "strategic" solutions to comprehension or production
problems. In this volume, strategic aspects of speech act performance and discourse
participation are examined by Weizman (Chapter 6), Aston (Chapter 11), and
House (Chapter 8); processing considerations for pragmatic development are proposed
by Schmidt (Chapter 1) and Bialystok (Chapter 2).
Pragmatic Comprehension
Domains of ILP
Early studies focused on learners' attribution of illocutionary force and perception
of politeness. Research on the attribution of illocutionary force has centered on the
comprehension of indirect speech acts, factors contributing to ease or difficulty of
pragmatic comprehension, the role of linguistic form and context information, and

Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction 5
learner variables influencing force attribution. Carrell (1979) demonstrated that
advanced L2 learners have complete access to conversational implicature, and make
full use of their inferential ability in the comprehension of indirect speech acts. The
only stumbling block for these learners was the "pope answer," a highly culturespecific
violation of the maxim of relation. Bouton (1988) was interested in the
impact of cultural background on the comprehension of indirect answers. He found
a significant difference between six groups of learners from different cultural backgrounds
and native speakers of American English. Comparison of the learner
groups showed similar perceptions for German, Spanish-Portugese, and Taiwanese
learners, differing from those of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese learners from the
People's Republic of China. In addition to influence from learners' cultural background,
Bouton also established an effect for type of implicature. Comprehension
was easiest when the relevance maxim had been violated, whereas understated
negative evaluation, a violation of the maxim of quantity, was more difficult to
understand, for nonnative speakers as well as native speakers. In examining the
relative effect of linguistic form and context information on learners' perception of
indirect requests, Carrell (198 la, b) found that learners primarily relied on linguistic
utterance features, regardless of their linguistic and cultural background, age, and
proficiency. Her findings are at odds with those established by Ervin-Tripp, Strage,
Lampert, and Bell (1987), who found that children acquirifig their first (LI) and
second language strongly base their pragmatic comprehension on situational information,
disregarding form. Other studies in developmental pragmatics (e.g., Reeder
& Wakefield, 1987) support Ervin-Tripp et al.'s results (cf. Bialystok, Chapter 2).
The apparent conflict in outcomes of Carrell's and Ervin-Tripp et al.'s studies can be
reconciled by invoking Gibbs's (e.g., 1984) Conventional Meaning Model. In a
series of experiments, Gibbs demonstrated that listeners directly access nonliteral
meanings if linguistic forms and situational contexts are conventionalized. Absence
of familiar and appropriate contexts and novel, nonconventionalized utterances
requires (sequential) processing of literal and nonliteral meaning. Carrell's studies
precisely illustrate the second condition, since the highly abstract task her subjects
were faced with could only be solved via bottom-up processing. Ervin-Tripp et al.'s
task conditions, on the other hand, fullfil the criteria that would bias listeners
toward immediate processing of indirect meaning: the indirect requests were embedded
in everyday situations familiar to the children, allowing them to apply
situational schemata to their understanding of directive utterances. In partial replication
of Gibbs's research on the processing of conventionally indirect requests (e.g.,
1983), Takahashi and Roitblat (1992) examined through latency measurement
whether Japanese learners of English reconstruct implied requestive force by processing
both literal and implied meanings or immediately recover the nonliteral
meaning (see also Takahashi, 1990, for a review of the literature on nonliteral
utterance comprehension). Models of pragmatic comprehension, representing a variety
of theoretical orientations, are reviewed by House (Chapter 8), who also offers
an analysis of learners' pragmatic comprehension in ongoing interaction.
In all of the studies cited above, English figures as L2. The only study on force
attribution by learners of a different target language is a small investigation by
Koike (1989), who examined how beginning classroom learners of Spanish with

6 Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction
English as LI understood a Spanish request, apology, and command. Learners
correctly identified the illocutions in 95% of the cases or better. In seeking cues to
decide on force, learners were shown to rely most frequently on formulaic illocutionary
force indicators such as "por favor" and "lo siento," and on words with key
prepositional meanings.
A related line of inquiry has examined how learners assess the politeness value
of different speech act realization strategies. While most of the research on force
attribution has studied on-line utterance comprehension, politeness perceptions have
been investigated through off-line metapragmatic judgment tasks such as card sorting
(Carrell & Konneker, 1981; Tanaka & Kawade, 1982), paired comparison
(Walters, 1979), multiple choice (Tanaka & Kawade, 1982), and rating scales
(Eraser, Rintell, & Walters, 1980; Rintell, 1981; Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1985;
Kitao, 1990). Results confirm learners' ability to distinguish different degrees of
politeness in conventions of means and forms, although their perceptions do not
always agree with those of native speakers. Japanese learners of English largely
agreed with American native speakers in their relative politeness judgments of
syntactic modes (imperative, declarative, interrogative), the politeness marker
"please," and of deferential address terms, but they differed in the politeness values
attributed to request modification by tense and modals. Whereas American informants
perceived positively worded requests as more polite than negatively worded
ones, this assessment was not shared by the Japanese raters. Negative politeness
strategies (Brown & Levinson, 1987) were rated as more polite by Americans and
Japanese in the United States than by Japanese in Japan (Kitao, 1990).
Learners' differential politeness perceptions have been attributed to a variety of
factors. Learners were found to differ in the extent to which they base their politeness
perceptions in L2 on those in LI. Spanish learners of English did not transfer
their LI perceptions of formally equivalent requestive strategies to L2, rating their
Spanish requests as more deferential than their English counterparts (Eraser et al.,
1980). Learners of Hebrew, who appeared to base their politeness perceptions of L2
requests and apologies initially on LI, increased their tolerance for directness and
positive politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987) with length of residence in the target
community (Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1985). Length of residence rather than L2
proficiency accounted for differential politeness perceptions in learners and L2
native speakers. The rec.eiver's age and sex influenced politeness assessment in
Spanish learners' perception of English requests, whereas no such effects were
noticeable in suggestions (Rintell, 1981). Comparing the perceptions of politeness
in request strategies by Japanese EFL and ESL learners, Kitao (1990) found that
exposure to English accounted for different ratings between those groups.
In addition to learners' assessments of pragmalinguistic information, a few
studies have also examined nonnative speakers' sociopragmatic perceptions. Probing
into learners' "universal" and culture-specific assumptions about apology frequency
and realization, Olshtain (1983) found that for Russian learners of Hebrew,
the event rather than culture and language were the decisive variables. Englishspeaking
learners felt less need to apologize in Hebrew than in English, thus suggesting
a culture-specific approach. Asked to assess the weight and values of
contextual factors in apologizing, German learners of English were found largely to

Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction 7
agree with native speakers of British English, except for degree of imposition
involved in the apology, which the German raters found to be consistently higher
than the English judges (House, 1988). Ratings of contextual factors in apologies
were also provided by Thai learners of English and American native speakers
(Bergman & Kasper, Chapter 4). The factor on which these informants differed
most was obligation to apologize. Japanese learners of English reported that in
American society, refusal was a more socially acceptable act than in Japan, and
could therefore appropriately be carried out more directly (Robinson, 1992). There
are very few studies that examine learners' sociopragmatic perceptions by direct
probing, such as rating tasks (e.g., House, 1988; Bergman & Kasper, Chapter 4;
Olshtain & Weinbach, Chapter 5) and self-report in interviews (Cohen & Olshtain
1991; Robinson, 1992). Many more studies infer learners' L2 sociopragmatic
knowledge through their production. Thus Beebe and collaborators (e.g., Beebe,
Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990; Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a, b), focusing on the
effect of status on the performance of face-threatening acts by Japanese learners of
English, found that the Japanese informants style-shifted more according to interlocutor
status than speakers of American English (but see Takahashi & Beebe,
Chapter 7, for a counterexample). What research still needs to demonstrate is how
learners' sociopragmatic perceptions change over time, and how such change is
reflected in their linguistic action patterns.
Production of Linguistic Action
The available evidence suggests that regardless of a particular L1 and L2, and of the
type of learning context (naturalistic vs. instructed), learners have access to the
same range of realization strategies for linguistic action as native speakers, and
demonstrate sensitivity to contextual constraints in their strategy choice (Blum-
Kulka, 1982; Kasper, 1989b; Rintell & Mitchell, 1989). The main obstacle to
learners' exploiting their "general pragmatic knowledge base" (Blum-Kulka, 1991)
appears to be their restricted L2 linguistic knowledge, or difficulty in accessing it
smoothly (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1982; Koike, 1989; Edmondson & House, 1991). But
other factors intervene: a lack of L2 pragmalinguistic sophistication, combined with
negative transfer of sociopragmatic norms from LI or nonnative perceptions of L2
sociopragmatic norms, or even purposeful loyalty to LI cultural patterns, may yield
deviations from native use at high proficiency levels as well (Blum-Kulka, 1991).
While ILP research has by now covered a wide variety of typologically different
Lls, there is still only a handful of languages studied as L2: in addition to different
national varieties of English, a few studies have examined Hebrew (Blum-Kulka,
1982, 1991; Olshtain, 1983; Olshtain & Cohen, 1989; Olshtain & Weinbach, Chapter
5), German (Faerch & Kasper, 1989), Norwegian (Svanes, 1989), Spanish
(Koike, 1989), and Japanese (Sawyer, 1992) as targets. Until the scope of target
languages has been considerably broadened, universality claims need to be voiced
with caution.
Learners' distribution patterns of strategies and forms have been shown to vary
from those of native speakers. Some studies report that learners prefer more direct
modes of conveying pragmatic intent than native speakers; others suggest the oppo-

8 Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction
site. Preference for higher directness in IL than in both or either LI or L2 has been
documented in learners' requests (Tanaka 1988; Koike, 1989; Fukushima, 1990),
making and rejecting of suggestions (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990), refusals
(Robinson, 1992), and a variety of conflictive acts (Kasper, 1981). By contrast,
nonnative speakers of Hebrew preferred less direct requests (Blum-Kulka, 1982,
1991) and complaints (Olshtain & Weinbach, Chapter 5) than native speakers.
Explanations of these findings have been sought in the scope of learners' linguistic
IL knowledge, transfer from LI, and perceptions of what is sociopragmatically
appropriate in the target community. Some studies noted differences in politeness
approach between native speakers and nonnative speakers. Venezuelan Spanishspeaking
learners of English systematically used positive politeness strategies when
apologizing to a host for not having attended her party, whereas American English
native speakers preferred a negative politeness approach (Garcia, 1989). Conversely,
in pre-trial interviews, Athabaskan defendants employed negative politeness
strategies, whereas white defendants as well as the interviewers deployed more
positive politeness (Scollon & Scollon, 1983). In order to repair uncomfortable
moments in academic advising sessions at an American university, students who
were native speakers of English predominantly relied on positive politeness strategies,
while Taiwanese students adopted a negative politeness approach (Fiksdal
1990). Less reliance by nonnative speakers on positive politeness has also been
observed in the performance of corrections by Japanese speakers of English (Takahashi
& Beebe, Chapter 7). American informants in status-higher positions tended
to preface a correction by a positive remark, whereas Japanese nonnative speakers
used this solidarity strategy very infrequently.
Nonnative speakers' strategy choice is sometimes less responsive to contextual
factors than native speakers'. Japanese learners of English used the same (direct,
barely mitigated) requestive strategies in conversation with status-unequal and socially
distant interlocutors as with status-equal and familiar coparticipants, whereas
American English controls varied their request behavior in the two conditions (Tanaka,
1988). Japanese learners of English also underdifferentiated their realizations
of offers and requests in three conditions of social distance (Fukushima, 1990). In
expressing gratitude, native speakers of American English varied the length of their
speech activity according to degree of indebtedness; no such effect was found for
nonnative speakers of different linguistic backgrounds (Eisenstein & Bodman 1986,
Chapter 3; Bodman & Eisenstein, 1988).
The quality and range of linguistic forms by which linguistic action can be
implemented and modified has consistently been shown to differ between native
speakers and nonnative speakers, the nonnative speakers' repertoire typically being
more restricted and less complex than native speakers' (Scarcella, 1979; Kasper,
1981; Blum-Kulka, 1982, 1991; Schmidt, 1983; House & Kasper, 1987; Trosborg,
1987, Faerch & Kasper, 1989; Eisenstein & Bodman, Chapter 3). While some of
these findings may simply reflect the state of learners' lexical and syntactic knowledge,
the issue becomes a clearly pragmalinguistic one when learners demonstrably
"know" a particular lexical item or syntactic structure yet use it in a way that does
not convey the intended illocutionary force or politeness value. In the interlanguage

Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction 9
of nonnative speakers of Hebrew, requests are lended an unintended whining emphasis
by the use of "bevakasha" (please) in sentence-initial (rather than intra- or
postsentential) position, and such pragmalinguistic deviations are singled out by
native judges as "nonnative" (Blum-Kulka, 1991). One area where insufficient
control of pragmalinguistic knowledge is particularly obvious is that of pragmatic
routines. Coulmas's (1981) contention that routine formulas are a serious stumbling
block for nonnative speakers has been supported by nearly every ILP study (e.g.,
Scarcella, 1979; House, 1988; Eisenstein & Bodman, 1986; Kasper, 1989a;
Wildner-Bassett, 1984; Fukushima, 1990), yet there has been little systematic investigation
of this phenomenon. There is evidence of learners supplying near-literal
translations of LI routines: for example, the German, "entschuldigen Sie bitte"
(English, "excuse me, please") instead of "I'm sorry" (House, 1988); of using a
translation equivalent for an LI routine where none is used in L2, such as prefacing
a high-imposition request with "I'm sorry" (from Japanese "sumimasen" or
"gomennasai" [Fukushima, 1990]); and of failing to use any kind of routine where
one would be required, such as failing to offer an expression of gratitude (Kasper,
1981). Bodman and Eisenstein (1988) observed that in the attempt to express gratitude
in English, learners would use literal translations of LI proverbial expressions
in written production questionnaires but not in role-plays, which displayed considerable
disfluencies but no overt use of LI proverbs (also Eisenstein & Bodman,
Chapter 3).
At the nonroutinized end of speech act production, learners have been found to
engage in more speech activity than native speakers. The "waffle phenomenon"
(Edmonson & House, 1991) has been noted in requests (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain,
1986; House & Kasper, 1987; Faerch & Kasper, 1989; Weizman, Chapter 6),
apologies (House, 1988, Bergman & Kasper, Chapter 4), and complaints (Olshtain
& Weinbach, Chapter 5), as well as in referential communication (Bongaerts, Kellerman,
& Bentlage, 1987; Tarone & Yule, 1987; Yule & Tarone, 1990). According
to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986), waffling is proficiency-dependent, being
strongest at an intermediate stage when learners possess the linguistic means to say
as much as they wish, yet at the same time feel more of a need to be explicit about
their communicative goals and the reasoning behind them than more acculturated
nonnative speakers do. Edmondson and House (1991) point out, however, that the
waffling effect in speech act realization is observable only in learners' written
responses to production questionnaires, not in role-plays. This observation corroborates
Bodman and Eisenstein's findings about the differential use of proverbial
material in written and oral-interactive production, and the much shorter contributions
made in role-plays by nonnative speakers in comparison with native speakers
(Eisenstein & Bodmann, Chapter 3). In Edmondson and House's analysis (see
Bergman & Kasper, Chapter 4, for more discussion), learners' extensive use of
supportive strategies in the absence of formulaic routines suggests that nonroutinized
material functions to compensate for the lack of automatized discourse
routines. It will be worthwhile for IL pragmaticists to examine whether this hypothesis
bears out across languages and tasks, and whether it interacts with factors such
as proficiency and length of residence.

10 Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction
Development of Pragmatic Competence
The bulk of ILP research focuses on nonnative speakers' use of pragmatic knowledge
in comprehension and production, rather than on development. This focus is
also adopted by the data-based studies in this book. Of the available developmental
investigations, some cross-sectional studies did not find proficiency effects in
learners' strategy selection (Takahashi & Beebe, 1987; Trosborg, 1987; Svanes,
1991) whereas others did (Takahashi & DuFon, 1989; Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper
& Ross, in press). However, developmental effects were observable in learners'
repertoires of pragmatic routines and modality markers (Scarcella, 1979; Trosborg,
1987). Possibly, the inconsistent results reflect instrument effects and the difficulty
of determining precisely learners' proficiency levels across studies. The few longitudinal
studies to date indicate distinct developmental patterns in learners' request
realization (Schmidt, 1983; Ellis, 1992) and use of a sentence-final particle in
Japanese (Sawyer, 1992). They strongly suggest the need for more longitudinal
studies in naturalistic settings, observing learners from the very beginning of their
language acquisition process. Equally important as a reliable and valid empirical
data base is a theoretical framework to account for pragmatic learning. In this book
two such frameworks, grounded in different models of cognitive processing, are
proposed by Bialystok (Chapter 1) and Schmidt (Chapter 2; see also Kasper &
Schmidt, 1992).
Pragmatic Transfer
Influence from learners' native language and culture on their IL pragmatic knowledge
and performance has been amply documented. Because of its potential risk to
communicative success, the focus has been on negative transfer; that is, the influence
of LI pragmatic competence on IL pragmatic knowledge that differs from the
L2 target. Positive transfer, that is, pragmatic behaviors or other knowledge displays
consistent across LI, IL, and L2, have received less attention. We think this is
so because positive transfer usually results in communicative success and therefore
is less exciting to study. Furthermore, it is methodologically difficult to disentangle
positive transfer from universal pragmatic knowledge and generalization on the
basis of available IL pragmatic knowledge.
Negative transfer has been attested to at the sociopragmatic level, influencing
learners' perception of status relationships (Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990;
Takahashi & Beebe, Chapter 7), of the appropriateness of carrying out refusals
(Robinson, 1992), of the need to apologize (Olshtain, 1983) and to express gratitude
(Eisenstein & Bodman, Chapter 3); their lack of accommodation to target norms for
complimenting, responding to compliments, and negotiating invitations (Wolfson,
1989); their choice of politeness style (Garcia, 1989; Olshtain & Cohen, 1989,
Blum-Kulka, 1982) and of particular strategic options (House, 1988; Beebe, Takahashi,
& Uliss-Weltz, 1990). Evidence for pragmalinguistic transfer at the level of
form-force mapping has been less documented in the literature than anecdotal
accounts would suggest (Blum-Kulka, 1982; Faerch & Kasper, 1989 in requesting;
House, 1988; Olshtain & Cohen, 1989 in apologizing; Bodman & Eisenstein, 1988,

Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction 11
in thanking); possibly learners' proficiency levels in most ILP studies were too high
for negative form-force transfer to occur. Most of the reported pragmalinguistic
transfer affects the strategic options and forms that modify the politeness value of a
linguistic act. Learners' choices of semantic formulas and linguistic tokens for
apologizing were influenced by LI patterns (Olshtain & Cohen, 1989; Trosborg,
1987; House, 1988; Bergman & Kasper, Chapter 4; Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper
& Ross, in press). LI lexical and syntactic material used to mitigate requestive force
was transferred to learners' IL request performance (Blum-Kulka, 1982; Blum-
Kulka & Levenston, 1987; Faerch & Kasper, 1989). Questioning patterns employed
in Japanese to express disagreement were used as disagreement strategies in Japanese
learners' English (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989b).
Although the literature abounds in evidence for pragmatic transfer, little has yet
been done to investigate more closely the conditions under which pragmatic transfer
is or is not operative. Whereas there is some indication from performance data
(Kasper, 1981; House & Kasper, 1987; Faerch & Kasper, 1989) and retrospective
reports (Olshtain, 1983; Cohen & Olshtain, 1991; Robinson 1992) that learners
invoke criteria such as assessment of linguistic and cultural distance, and of the
specificity or sameness of pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic patterns in L1/L2,
there is only one study to date that systematically examines pragmatic transferability.
Takahashi (1992) found that the transferability of conventionally indirect
requests from Japanese to English was highly context-dependent, and varied with
learners' proficiency and familiarity with the situation.
At a conceptual level, it is important to note that "negative" pragmatic transfer
does not necessarily reflect lack of competence in the pragmatics of the target
community. When nonnative speakers communicate in a style different from native
ways of speaking, it is a matter of attribution if this style is seen as lacking in some
way, or just different, and if its maintenance over time is considered negatively, as
fossilization, or positively, as a marker of cultural identity. The degree of sociocultural
accommodation to the L2 culture may be as well a matter of choice as of
ability. A foreign accent, for example, can well shield a nonnative speaker, identifying
her as nonnative, and thereby flexing the norms by which she is judged and
lending her a certain latitude in choosing her ways of speaking. The desirable goal
for the high-proficiency second language speaker, be it in contexts of immigration
or in the use of L2 in cross-cultural communication, may well be that of disidentification,
rather than absolute convergence. There is thus much room for future
research, which will be necessary in order to advance beyond merely ascertaining
pragmatic transfer to understanding its differential modes of operation and symbolic
functions.
Communicative
Effect
Grammatical or phonological IL deviations from target language norms have the
"advantage" of being easily recognizable by native speakers. A "nonnative" identification
also serves to protect such speakers from the risk of the peculiarities of their
speech being attributed to flaws in their personality, or ethnocultural origins. Higher
levels of L2 proficiency allow for ease of communication, but still leave open the

12 Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction
possibility of pragmatic failure at the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic level
(Thomas, 1983). Differing from grammatical errors, pragmatic failure is neither
easily recognizable by interlocutors without training in pragmatics, nor explained
away by recognizing the speaker as nonnative. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986)
explain pragmatic failure as linked to cultural variability in the implementation of
Grice's (1975) conversational model: certain types of pragmatic deviations from
target norms, such as the learner's tendency to verbosity (discussed above) are seen
as violations of a cultural norm for the balance required between the maxims of
clarity and quantity. Others (e.g., Riley, 1989) are concerned with defining the
scope of communicative behavior amenable to pragmatic failure, insisting that both
verbal and nonverbal phenomena be included. Interactional sociolinguistics has
provided rich evidence for miscommunication resulting from interlocutors' differences
in the use of contextualization conventions (Gumperz, 1982) and different
conversational styles (Tannen, 1981; 1985). While disturbing in everyday communication,
incompatible styles, resulting in mutual misreadings of the other person's
intention and attitude, can have serious consequences in gate-keeping encounters,
leading to unfavorable outcomes for the client (Erickson & Shultz, 1982; Scollon &
Scollon, 1983).
There have been three major approaches to the study of pragmatic failure.
Miscommunication research as referred to above provides micro-sociolinguistic
analyses of naturalistic encounters, minutely identifying problematic features at the
levels of prosody, pragmatics, syntax, lexis, discourse organization, conversational
management, and nonverbal behavior. Qualitative analysis of performance data is
sometimes combined with quantitative measures of particular features and with
retrospective interviews of the participants. Micro-sociolinguistic analysis ascertains
conversational style differences and identifies instances where such differences
become problematic, but does not usually inquire into the origin of different conversational
styles. A second approach is contrastive pragmatics, involving the crosscultural
and cross-linguistic comparison of speech act realization patterns through
identifying similarities and differences between the pairs or groups of languages
studied. Such research is purely descriptive, having no predictive power for the
study of IL pragmatics and actual communicative practices in cross-cultural encounters
but serving an important hypothesis-generating and explanatory role in studies
of interlanguage pragmatic performance and knowledge. In order to study the
relationship between learners' prior knowledge and pragmatic performance, a third
line of investigation needs to be called upon: ILP. In its canonical form, ILP
research, following received methodology in interlanguage studies (Selinker, 1972)
by comparing learners' IL production and comprehension with parallel LI and L2
data, provides the methodological tool to determine where and how learners' pragmatic
performance differs from L2, and to establish where IL specific behaviors
appear to be influenced by learners' LI knowledge. (As argued above, determining
with any certainty whether or not transfer has actually been operative requires
additional measures, such as retrospective reports and transferability studies.) Furthermore,
ILP can establish which IL-specific pragmatic behaviors reside in sources
other than transfer (e.g., see Kasper, 1981; Blum-Kulka, 1982; Schmidt, 1983;
Olshtain & Cohen, 1989).

Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction 13
However, just as contrastive pragmatic study is unable to identify pragmatic
transfer, learner-focused ILP, unless supplemented by other measures, such as
ratings of learners' performance by native speakers (Fraser et al., 1980; Eisenstein
& Bodman, 1986, Chapter 3), cannot make claims about communicative effect.
"Negative" pragmatic transfer may or may not result in pragmatic failure. Erickson
and Shultz (1982) demonstrate that successful co-membershiping can neutralize
communicative style differences. Tannen (1985) cites examples of "negative" transfer
that lead to positive attributions (reminiscent of "charming" foreign accents),
and styles that, though different, are complementary rather than conflicting, thus
leading to successful outcomes. Clyne (1979) concludes that communication conflict
arises not so much from local differences in linguistic action patterns but from
features that impinge on interlocutors' perceptions of power, trust and solidarity.
While there is a legitimate ecological interest in the identification of miscommunication
and its causal relationship to LI communicative practices, nonnative
communicative styles, whether transfer-induced or not, do not necessarily result in
pragmatic failure. The time-honored contrastive equation "difference = negative
transfer = error" has proved to be just as little true for pragmatics as for other
domains of nonnative language learning and use, though it has an indisputable
heuristic value.
To summarize, the strength of interactional sociolinguistics is identifying pragmatic
failure; of contrastive pragmatics, identifying cross-cultural and crosslinguistic
pragmatic differences and similarities; and of ILP, identifying learnerspecific
pragmatic behaviors and their relationship to learners' LI and L2. A fullfledged
research program that sheds light on the relationship between cross-cultural
differences, IL-specific pragmatic features, including transfer, and communicative
effects will usefully combine methods from all three areas of investigation.
Reflecting the various approaches employed in studying interlanguage pragmatics,
this book is organized into three parts: (I) Cognitive approaches to interlanguage
pragmatic development, (II) Speech act realization, and (III) Discourse perspectives.
For an overview of the chapters, the reader is referred to the introduction to
each part.
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Interlanguage Pragmatics: An Introduction 17
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I
COGNITIVE APPROACHES
TO INTERLANGUAGE
PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT
Although there is a comprehensive literature on children's development of pragmatic
competence, little work has been done on the acquisition of pragmatic ability by
adult second language learners. Schmidt (Chapter 1) and Bialystok (Chapter 2)
discuss two central issues in adult pragmatic learning, each proposing a different
theoretical framework to address the problem. Schmidt explores the role of conscious
awareness in the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Based on a critical
examination of recent work in experimental psychology and support from diary
reports, Schmidt concludes that the necessary condition for pragmatic learning to
take place is attention to the pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic information to be
acquired. While implicit and incidental learning seems possible, noticing and generalizing
about relevant features in the input is highly facilitative. Schmidt's analysis
has important implications for research methodology in pragmatics and language
teaching. Theory and cited illustrations encourage the use of self-report as a method
of data collection in interlanguage pragmatics. For second language instruction,
Schmidt's analysis indicates activities that alert the learner to pragmalinguistic and
sociopragmatic features as well as a consciousness-raising approach to the teaching
of L2 pragmatics.
Bialystok examines the learning task in the pragmatic domain of adult second
language learners as opposed to child first language acquirers. Applying her twodimensional
model of language learning and use to pragmatics, she concludes that
the learning problem for children acquiring their first language and adults learning a
second language is quite different. Children primarily need to develop an analyzed
knowledge of form-function mappings. For them, acquiring pragmalinguistic resources
and their contextual distribution patterns takes precedence over the need to
develop the control strategies required for efficient use of pragmatic knowledge.
With adults, the order of learning tasks is reversed. While they also have to acquire
new pragmalinguistic knowledge, their primary problem appears to be one of control,
increasing their ability to process pragmatic information smoothly in contexts
and making socially and contextually appropriate selections of linguistic forms.
19

20 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
Schmidt's and Bialystok's proposals offer different but compatible approaches to
pragmatic interlanguage development: Schmidt is concerned with the conditions for
initial intake; Bialystok addresses the cognitive dimensions on which pragmatic
interlanguage competence evolves. Both approaches, we hope, will inspire databased
studies of adult pragmatic learning.

1
Consciousness, Learning
and Interlanguage Pragmatics
RICHARD SCHMIDT
During the past decade, the study of interlanguage pragmatics has produced important
empirical findings, primarily through the identification and comparison of
speech act realization patterns in various languages based on data from both native
and nonnative speakers. In addition to this focus on product, some attention has
been paid to the processes of comprehension and production in second language
pragmatics (Faerch & Kasper, 1984, 1989; Kasper, 1984). In contrast to these
concerns, there has been little discussion of how pragmatic abilities are acquired in
a second language.
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which consciousness may be involved
in learning the principles of discourse and pragmatics in a second language.'
The role of conscious and nonconscious processes in the acquisition of morphosyntax
has been hotly debated within the field of second language acquisition (Krashen,
1981, 1983; Munsell & Carr, 1981; Rutherford & Sharwood Smith, 1985; Seliger,
1983; Sharwood Smith, 1981), but these debates have ignored pragmatic and discoursal
abilities. My discussion will of necessity be speculative, drawing on current
theories of the role of consciousness in human learning in general, drawn primarily
from cognitive science and experimental psychology, with some suggestions for the
extension of general principles to the learning of pragmatics. This is an issue with
important pedagogical implications. In second language teaching, as Richards
(1990) points out, there are currently two major approaches to the teaching of
conversation in second language programs. The first is an indirect approach, in
which conversational competence is seen as the product of engaging learners in
conversational interaction; the underlying assumption is that the ability to carry on
conversation (which includes pragmatic ability and other factors as well) is something
that is acquired simply in the course of doing it. In practice, this leads to the
use of group work activities or other tasks that require interaction. The second, a
more direct approach, focuses explicitly on the strategies involved in conversation
and emphasizes consciousness-raising concerning these strategies.
21

22 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
Is Pragmatic Knowledge Conscious or Unconscious
Wolfson has argued that native speaker knowledge of what she calls rules of speaking
(which include both pragmatic and discoursal rules) is mostly unconscious:
Rules of speaking and, more generally, norms of interaction are ... largely
unconscious. What this means is that native speakers, although perfectly competent
in the uses and interpretation of the patterns of speech behavior which prevail
in their own communities are, with the exception of a few explicitly taught
formulas, not even aware of the patterned nature of their speech behavior. [Native
speakers] . . . are not able . . . to describe their own rules of speaking. (Wolfson,
1989, 37)
Wolfson cites several types of evidence in support of her claim that speakers do
not have reliable information concerning the ways in which they use language:
people who are bilingual or bidialectal may switch from one language or variety to
another without being aware of it and cannot accurately report their use of these
languages or varieties (Blom & Gumperz, 1972); native speakers often report that
they typically use or do not use specific forms, but their descriptions do not match
reality (Wolfson, D'Amico-Reisner, & Huber, 1983); even highly trained linguists
who rely on intuition to describe such phenomena as the differences between men's
and women's speech (e.g., Lakoff, 1973) may find their intuitions proven incorrect;
textbook writers, who almost always rely on intuition rather than empirical data,
provide information regarding language use that is frequently wrong (Cathcart,
1989; Holmes, 1988; Williams, 1988).
There are several reasons why we should expect native speakers' intuitions
about these matters to be fallible. First, there is the obvious problem of the intrusion
of prescriptive norms, stereotypes, and folk-linguistic beliefs; when asked what they
do, informants are likely to report what they think they should do. Second, this kind
of introspection violates basic principles distinguishing between potentially accurate
and inaccurate verbal reports (Ericsson & Simon, 1984; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977),
because such intuitions are general rather than specific, retrospective rather than
concurrent, and sometimes call for information that could not be reported even if the
other conditions were met. Ericsson and Simon (1984) propose that the only information
that is potentially available for accurate self-report is information that is
attended to in short-term memory in the performance of a task. In other words, in
order to give an accurate report of your own performance, you must have been
paying attention and aware of what you were doing at the time. Speech act realizations
and other aspects of rules of speaking are often produced by fluent speakers
with little conscious reflection or deliberation during their performance, and are
therefore not accurately reportable. If accurate self-reports are limited to reporting
information that has been stored as a result of one's own conscious thought processes,
intuitions about the linguistic behavior of groups are particularly suspect
(Cameron, 1985).
The evidence cited by Wolfson (1989) shows that native speakers do not necessarily
have access to their own rules of speaking, but it fails to show that speakers
never have any access to such rules. Blum-Kulka (Chapter 10) and Olshtain and

Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics 23
Blum-Kulka (1989) have argued that Hebrew-English bilinguals in Israel exhibit
heightened metapragmatic awareness and are aware of their code-switching behavior.
Odlin suggests that linguistic forms that are important for communicative competence
are, in general, highly salient and accessible to awareness, which may be
why the metalanguage observed in anthropological linguistics tends to describe
linguistic functions more accurately than linguistic form (Odlin, 1986). The fact that
communicative behavior is sometimes accurately reportable is also compatible with
the principle that accurate self-report depends on information that is attended to
during performance. Pragmatic and discoursal knowledge is not always used automatically
and unreflectively. Conversations vary a great deal in terms of spontaneity
and planning (Ochs, 1979). Some people preplan telephone conversations, and
writing involves a great deal of conscious deliberation and choices in discourse
organization. There are many occasions on which particular care is given to producing
appropriately polite language. Students may worry about how to address professors,
and many aspects of the use of personal address are not unreflecting
responses to a determining context but represent strategic and sometimes manipulative
choices (Kendall, 1981).
Pragmatic knowledge therefore seems to be partly conscious and partly accessible
to consciousness, although it cannot be the case that all pragmatic knowledge is
accessible to consciousness. Just as linguists seek to discover general principles of
language that are reflected in the effortless control of grammar by native speakers
but of which they have no conscious awareness, research in pragmatics seeks to
identify patterns and general principles that native speakers are equally unable to
articulate based on introspection. However, even if a great deal of pragmatic knowledge
is held implicitly and cannot be articulated, this does not tell us how such
knowledge was established. Skillful performance that currently relies on automatic
processing and makes little demand on either attention or consciousness may have
originated from conscious declarative knowledge (Lewis & Anderson, 1985). General
principles, patterns, and rules of pragmatics may be beyond the reach of
introspection, but this does not inform us of the possible role that awareness of
crucial features of language rules, however incomplete and transitory, may play in
the establishment of such knowledge (Munsell & Carr, 1981).
Consciousness and Principles of Language Learning
Our ordinary language use of words like conscious, consciousness and consciously
is ambiguous. This is one reason why theorists in psychology and applied linguistics
have preferred to use related technical terms such as explicit versus implicit knowledge
(Bialystok, 1979, 1981;Krashen, 1981; Odlin, 1986; Sharwood Smith, 1981),
controlled versus automatic processing (Bialystok, Chapter 2; Bialystok &
Bouchard-Ryan, 1985; Carroll, 1981; McLaughlin, Rossman & McLeod, 1983;
Posner & Klein, 1973; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977); declarative versus procedural
knowledge (Anderson, 1982; Ellis, 1989b; Faerch & Kasper, 1984; O'Malley,
Chamot & Walker, 1987), serial versus parallel processing (McClelland,
Rumelhart, & the POP Research Group, 1986), and so on. Unfortunately, the use of

24 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
technical terms does not by itself eliminate the ambiguities. Odlin (1986) has
discussed the various ways in which the contrast between explicit and implicit
knowledge has been understood, and Norman and Shallice (1986) have identified
ambiguities inherent in the concept of automatic processing, some of which are
exact parallels to the ambiguities of consciousness. Since a great deal of debate
about conscious and unconscious processes has been fueled by conceptual and
definitional disagreements (Bowers, 1984; White, 1980), it is preferable to grapple
with these issues directly, rather than masking them with alternative terms.
It seems to me that when we speak of having been conscious of something, we
most often mean that we were aware of it, that we subjectively experienced it as part
of the "stream" of consciousness (Battista, 1978; James, 1890; Natsoulis, 1987).
However, when we speak of having done something consciously, we may mean
either that we did it with awareness of what we were doing or that we did it
deliberately. This is one of the main ambiguities involved in most discussions of
consciousness: consciousness as awareness versus consciousness as intent (Ceci &
Howe, 1982). When we speak of consciousness as awareness, there is also a
question of the degree or level of our awareness. We may mean that we simply
noticed the occurrence of something or that we had a more abstract understanding of
it (Bowers, 1984). Therefore, when we speak of language learning as being conscious
or unconscious, we might be thinking of several distinct aspects of the
problem of consciousness in learning, including at least the following: whether a
learner is trying to learn something; whether the learner is aware that he or she is
learning; whether the target language forms that are learned are consciously noticed
or picked up through some kind of subliminal perception; whether learners acquire
general rules or principles on the basis of conscious understanding and insight or
more intuitively; or whether learners are able to give an accurate account of the rules
and principles that seem to underlie the construction of utterances.
There is experimentally based literature from psychology that bears on all of
these issues, along with a small amount of evidence from second language acquisition
studies. It is useful to summarize the relevant research in terms of three
principal distinctions.
Conscious Perception versus Subliminal Influences in Learning
My personal choice of a label for the key concept here is noticing, although there
are a variety of technical terms for this, including focal awareness (Atkinson &
Shiffrin, 1968), episodic awareness (Allport, 1979), conscious perception (Dixon,
1971) and apperceived input (Gass, 1988). Each of these constructs presupposes the
allocation of attentional resources to some stimulus and identifies the level at which
perceived events are subjectively experienced and are reportable by the person who
experiences them. 2
Events may remain unnoticed for several reasons—because attention is directed
elsewhere, because the information is too complex to be processed, or because it is
presented too quickly or too softly to be consciously seen or heard. While it is
virtually impossible when observing naturalistic language learning to know exactly

Consciousness, Learning, and Intel-language Pragmatics 25
what the learner has or has not noticed, the existence of unnoticed information can
be established under experimental conditions by the failure of subjects to report their
awareness of a stimulus if asked immediately following its presentation. This criterion
of subjective awareness can be contrasted with an objective measure of perception,
which various experimenters have argued is best established by a subject's
ability to discriminate among two or more alternative stimuli in a forced choice task
(Cheesman & Merikle, 1986; Eriksen, 1960; Moore, 1988).
Although many theorists believe that unconscious learning (in some sense)
predominates in second language learning, it is very unlikely that what language
learners consciously perceive or notice in input is unimportant for learning. A more
difficult question is whether it is necessary to notice what is said in a language in
order for that information to be stored in memory and to play a role in language
learning, or whether it is also possible for some learning to be based on unnoticed
information, information that is perceived at some level and perhaps processed
subliminally without being consciously registered.
There is a widespread belief (at least in North America) that the existence of
subliminal learning of some kind has been established for decades. In the 1950s,
Packard objected to the covert manipulation of consumers through the use of subliminal
messages in advertising (Packard 1957), a theme expanded upon by Key
(1973). Beginning in the 1980s, subliminal audiocassettes were aggressively marketed
that promised everything from cures for obesity and drug addiction to enhanced
visual acuity, improvement in examination performance, and more effective
language learning. However, there seems to be virtually no scientific support for
claims of behavior modification through subliminal messages. Moore has reviewed
the research on subliminal techniques in advertising, concluding that the advertising
stories everyone has heard about (such as the stimulation of movie theater patrons to
buy popcorn or softdrinks through subliminal messages) are apocryphal. Such techniques
probably never were used, and even if they were, "there is no evidence that
subliminal messages can influence motivation or complex behavior" (Moore, 1988,
293). Merikle has examined commercially distributed "subliminal" audiotapes and
subjected them to both psychophysical experimentation and spectographic analysis,
reporting that the cassettes analyzed contained no embedded subliminal messages
whatsoever that could conceivably influence behavior (Merikle, 1988, 355).
There is a well-attested phenomenon of subliminal perception. Stimuli that are
presented too rapidly for conscious detection or in competition with tasks that are
assumed to consume all attentional resources may activate existing memory structures
and associations (Dixon, 1971, 1981; Marcel, 1983). Eich (1984) has reported
experiments in which pairs of words were both presented to the unattended channel
in a shadowing task, one of which was ambiguous (e.g., fair or fare), while the
other word biased its less common interpretation (e.g., taxi). Recognition of both
members of such pairs was poor but in a spelling test subjects were biased in the
direction of the disambiguated meaning. These and other similar demonstrations
show that words that are not consciously perceived or noticed can be processed to
the level of word meaning. However, all demonstrations of subliminal perception so
far have involved subtle effects resulting from the unconscious detection and pro-

26 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
cessing of very familiar stimuli. Such effects do not imply the creation of new
memory structures, the establishment of new associations, or the learning of new
concepts (Ericsson & Simon, 1984; Underwood, 1976, 1982), and certainly nothing
remotely analogous to learning a second language.
At the present time, the available evidence is compatible with the strong assertion
that there is no such thing as subliminal language learning or any other kind of
subliminal learning. Second language forms that are not noticed do not affect
learning. This allows the concept of intake in second language learning to be
defined in terms of what the learner attends to and notices (Schmidt, 1990).
Explicit versus Implicit Learning
The contrast between subliminal learning and implicit learning, or learning without
understanding, has to do with the level of awareness involved. I use noticing to
mean registering the simple occurrence of some event, whereas understanding
implies recognition of a general principle, rule, or pattern. For example, a second
language learner might simply notice that a native speaker used a particular form of
address on a particular occasion, or at a deeper level the learner might understand
the significance of such a form, realizing that the form used was appropriate because
of status differences between speaker and hearer. Noticing is crucially related
to the question of what linguistic material is stored in memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin
1968; Kihlstrom, 1984); understanding relates to questions concerning how that
material is organized into a linguistic system.
Implicit learning refers to nonconscious generalization from examples. The
general phenomenon of implicit learning has been well established in the psychological
literature and is viewed as a natural product of attending to structured input
(Hartman, Knopman, & Nissen, 1989; Reber, 1989). There is a gathering consensus
within psychology that the mechanisms of implicit learning probably involve the
strengthening and weakening of connections between nodes in complex networks as
the result of experience, rather than through the unconscious induction of rules
abstracted from data. An example of this recent shift in perspective can be seen in the
work of Reber, who has carried out numerous experiments involving exposing
subjects to strings of letters generated by an artificial grammar. After training,
subjects were able to make accurate judgments about the well-formedness of novel
strings, without being able to articulate the rules of well-formedness (Reber, 1976;
Reber, Allen & Regan, 1985; Reber, Kassin, Lewis & Cantor, 1980). Until recently,
Reber (1976) argued that knowledge resulting from implicit learning was encoded in
the form of unconscious abstract representations. In a more recent publication,
Abrams and Reber (1988) have suggested that implicit learning as demonstrated in
these experiments probably rests upon some kind of covariation counter, a system that
logs both event frequencies and event co-occurrences. One model that simulates the
mechanisms currently believed to underlie implicit learning is Parallel Distributed
Processing (PDP). PDP has been used to model the acquisition of the German definite
article (MacWhinney et al., 1989), the past tense in English (Rumelhart & McClelland,
1986), the development of visual word recognition skills (Seidenberg & Mc-
Clelland, 1989), and the acquisition of gender in French (Sokolik & Smith, 1989).

Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics 27
Explicit learning, that is, conscious problem solving, relies on different mechanisms,
including attempts to form mental representations, searching memory for
related knowledge and forming and testing hypotheses (Mathews, Buss, Stanley,
Blanchard-Field, Cho & Druhan, 1989; Johnson-Laird, 1983). Both implicit learning
and explicit learning have particular strengths. Implicit learning appears to be
superior for the learning of fuzzy patterns based on perceptual similarities and the
detection of nonsalient covariance between variables, while explicit learning is
superior when a domain contains rules that are based on logical relationships rather
than perceptual similarities (Mathews et al., 1989).
Intentional versus Incidental Learning
Whereas the concepts of subliminal and implicit learning are both related to the
consciousness as awareness, incidental learning refers to consciousness as intent. If,
as I have claimed, it is necessary to notice the occurrence of linguistic forms in order
for them to serve as intake for learning, is it also necessary to deliberately pay
attention to such features in order to notice them More generally, is it necessary to
want to learn in order to learn
This is not so difficult a question as the others I have raised. In many cases, it
does not matter if a language learner intends to pay attention or not. A language
learner's limited processing abilities may make it impossible to notice something
regardless of an intent to do so. There are other cases in which some task to be
performed forces the learner's attention to be focused on some pieces of information
rather than others, and in such cases, what is stored in memory is the information
that must be attended to in order to complete the task (Ericsson & Simon, 1984); the
learner's intention to learn is irrelevant (Anderson, 1985). On the other hand, there
are many situations in which a language learner is free to opt in and out of learning
contexts and to pay attention or not, depending on one's personal hierarchy of deep
goals and momentary dispositions (Baars, 1988; Kahneman, 1973; Kihlstrom,
1984); in such cases paying attention is crucial.
Extensions to the Learning of Pragmatics and Discoursal Rules
I have argued that linguistic forms can serve as intake for language learning only if
they are noticed by learners; that paying attention to such forms is certainly helpful,
but not necessary if other factors in the learning context focus attention on them so
that they are noticed; and that general principles of the organization of language may
be discovered through the use of either explicit or implicit learning mechanisms. I
have also suggested that even in cases where what native speakers "know" about the
pragmatic principles of their language is inaccessible to consciousness, such knowledge
may nevertheless be based on insights and understanding at the time of learning.
What evidence is there that these claims are relevant for the learning of pragmatics

28 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
First Language Learning of Pragmatics
Research on the acquisition of first language pragmatics suggests that both noticing
and some level of understanding are important in such learning. Clark (1978) has
observed that the types of metalinguistic abilities shown by preschool children are
primarily related to communicative interaction rather than grammatical form. The
ethnographic literature on language socialization shows that an important childrearing
goal is to develop the child's communicative competence. Demuth (1986)
has reported on the prompting routines for appropriate verbal behavior that play an
active role in the social development of Basotho children. Ochs (1986) has described
the ways in which Samoan caregivers use prosodic strategies for teaching
children how to encode affect-laden utterances. Clancy (1986) has shown how
Japanese mothers interweave questions and declarative hints to socialize children in
the use of indirectness. Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo (1986) describes how Kawara'ae
caregivers use repeating routines to teach children what to say and when to say it.
These and many similar reports suggest that while parents and other caregivers use
different socialization strategies in different cultures, there is probably universal
validity to the observation of Gleason and Perlmann:
Unlike the acquisition of syntax, semantics, and even some sociolinguistic rules,
when it conies to speaking politely adults do not leave it to the child to construct
the rules on his or her own. Here, they take an active, even energetic part in
directly instructing their children in the use of the various politeness devices.
(Gleason & Perlmann, 1985, 102)
Snow, Perlmann, Gleason and Hooshyar (1990) have examined parent-child
interactions in 110 families in order to see what kinds of information concerning
politeness strategies are made available to children from their interaction with
parents. Assuming that the basic dimensions of power, social distance, and degree
of imposition underlie the general rule system for politeness, Snow et al. looked for
evidence for three types of information that might be made available to children:
direct teaching of general rules of politeness, manipulation of the dimensions of
politeness so that the relevant covariations were made more salient, and information
about the use of specific forms. Snow et al. found that the first type of information
was rare, but that there was plentiful evidence in their data that children were
explicitly told what forms to use in particular situations, and that correlations
between forms and the dimensions of politeness were made salient in interaction.
These findings suggest (though they do not prove this point) that children are not
only exposed to but also notice surface forms. Children are also presented with
information that could be used to induce more general principles (through either
implicit or explicit learning mechanisms), but are not taught the underlying principles
directly.
Second Language Learning of Pragmatics
Since adults can report their understandings much more readily than children, it
ought to be possible to examine the role of noticing and understanding in the
development of pragmatic ability by adult second language learners directly, by

Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics 29
asking learners to report their experiences. Even so, the relevant data are difficult to
obtain, requiring both a sound methodology for eliciting self-reports (Faerch &
Kasper, 1987) and opportunities to catch learners in the actual process of learning,
rather than simply performing their current competence. Unfortunately, there have
been few studies of any aspect of the phenomenology of second language learning
and no studies at all which have attempted systematically to ascertain what learners
have been conscious of as pragmatic principles were learned.
Anecdotally, there is evidence for a relationship between what learners notice
and understand about pragmatics and discourse and what is learned. The following
six examples are from my own experience, either as a language learner or from
interacting in English with second language speakers with different linguistic and
cultural backgrounds; they concern interactions about which I wrote brief notes to
myself shortly after they happened. The first four examples represent the coincidence
of recognition and insight with rapid learning; the last two represent instances
of less successful learning.
(1) In the course of a 22-week stay in Brazil, during which I progressed from no
proficiency at all in Portuguese to the S-2 level on the FSI scale (see Schmidt &
Frota, 1986, for details), I kept a language learner's diary. Several entries illustrate
the phenomenon of being told about some aspect of the pragmatics of Brazilian
Portuguese in class and then almost immediately noticing it in input, such as the
following:
Journal entry, Week 6. This week we were introduced to and drilled on the
imperfect. . . . The basic contrast seems straightforward enough: ontem eufui ao
clube ["yesterday 1 went to the club"] vs. antigamente eu ia ao clube ["formerly I
used to go to the club"]. L gave us a third model: ontem eu ia ao clube ["yesterday
I was going to the club"], which L says is a common way of making excuses. . . .
Wednesday night Amos came over to play cards, and the first thing he said was eu
ia telefonar para voce ["I was going to call you"], exactly the kind of excuse L
had said we could expect.
(2) I noted in my diary several times the difficulties I had with telephone
conversations, especially in knowing when and how to end a conversation (Schmidt
& Frota, 1986, 276). I knew that with friends the closing move would be for both
parties to say ciao, but I could never identify the point at which I could say it, so I
would often stand holding the phone waiting patiently for the other person to say it
first. Finally, during the last week of my stay, a friend came to my apartment and
used my telephone to make several calls. I listened carefully, and noticed that in two
successive calls, shortly before saying ciao, my friend said the phrase entdo td,
which means no more than "so, then." Suspecting that this might be a preclosing
formula, I immediately called another friend and after a few minutes of talk, said
entdo td, paused briefly and plunged ahead with ciao in the same turn. It worked,
and after that I had no trouble at all getting off the phone efficiently. I subsequently
asked several native speakers how to close a telephone conversation. None could
tell me, but when 1 suggested the use of entdo td, they agreed that was right.
(3) Midway through my stay in Brazil, I took a trip to another city for several
days, and later wanted to send postcards to people I had met there. I wrote a few
cards, and then asked a native speaker to rewrite one for me. I noticed that he began

30 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
rephrasing my message with the expression E ai, como estdo ("So, how are
you"), so I did the same with each subsequent card. A week after sending the
cards, I got a call from one of the recipients (a native speaker of English who was a
long-term resident in Brazil) who began the conversation by commenting that my
Portuguese must be improving rapidly, given the colloquially appropriate style of
my postcard.
(4) On the first day of a 2-week trip to Thailand, I presented a paper at the end of
the day at a national conference. After the lecture, several Thais with whom I would
be working for the following week approached me and made some brief remarks in
English (I know no Thai) and then slipped away. I found myself standing by myself
much quicker than I expected, and had the unsettling feeling that my talk must have
been very poorly received. I returned to my hotel feeling quite depressed about this.
That evening, I looked over some materials that I had collected during the day,
including an article by Sukwiwat and Fieg (1987) on greeting and leave-taking in
Thai. Sukwiwat and Fieg pointed out that conversations are closed quickly in Thai
but tend to be drawn gradually to a close in English, so that Americans are often
taken aback by what appear to be abrupt, brusque, and sometimes rude departures.
Thais, on the other hand, think that American leave-takings drag on excessively and
involve unnecessary verbiage. I immediately realized that I might have misinterpreted
the significance of what had happened earlier. For the remainder of my
stay, I tried my best to beat the Thais at their own game by closing conversations
faster than they could, for example, by suddenly announcing, "well, I'm leaving
now." I never succeeded in getting away faster than they did, but my disquiet at this
aspect of Thai behavior evaporated and I suffered no discomfort from behaving in a
way that would be rude by my own cultural norms.
(5) Between the early 1960s and mid-1970s, I lived mostly in Arabic-speaking
countries and became fairly proficient in both Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. In
some varieties of Arabic, parents and other relatives may address children with what
Ayoub (1964) has called bipolar kin terms, ego addressing alter with the term that in
its literal sense would be appropriate for alter addressing ego; e.g., a grandfather
may address his granddaughter with a term equivalent to "grandpa." This occurs
when the senior wants the junior to do something, but chooses a conciliatory request
form, metaphorically reversing the power relationship between the two—what
Brown and Levinson (1987) would call a point-of-view operation. I knew of this
phenomenon only from Ayoub's article, however. I never noticed parents using it
with their children in either Egypt or Lebanon, although I often observed parents
and other family members interacting with children. Years later, I noticed the use of
such a form when visiting friends from Lebanon in California. Playing in the
swimming pool, the mother said to her son, in English, "Okay, Baron, swim down
the other end of the pool now, Mommy." I have since been assured by speakers of
both Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic that they do use such forms, but second language
speakers of Arabic whom I have asked have reported that, like me, they have
never noticed it being used.
(6) In several publications (Schmidt, 1983, 1984), I reported on a case study of a
Japanese learner of English whose overall level of communicative competence was
superior to his rather rudimentary control of English grammar. In looking at the
development of pragmatic ability by my subject, Wes, I found that he often used

Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics 31
hints that native speakers of English, including myself, did not realize were intended
as directives. For example, once in a theater, Wes turned to me and asked me
if I liked my seat. I responded that my seat was fine, not realizing at all that he was
indirectly requesting that we change places. After many years of interacting with
Japanese speakers of English, I think that I now recognize such hints on most
occasions, but this learning process has been slow.
All of these anecdotes indicate an apparently very close connection between
noticing what was present in input and learning. Each case of successful learning
also involved more than just noticing the forms used, but also an appreciation of
their functional meaning: that an imperfective signaled an excuse, that entao td was
a preclosing device, that e af was useful for greetings, that an abrupt departure did
not necessarily imply a problem. Two of my Portuguese examples also illustrate
intentional rather than incidental learning—I was deliberately seeking speech routines
for openings and closings, and discovered them. By contrast, in the case of
abrupt Thai departures, the learning was incidental; I had no prior awareness of a
learning problem or intent to learn anything. 1 noticed the behavior and may or may
not have carried on some conscious inferencing in arriving at my conclusion that my
poor lecture lay behind it (those thought processes are not recoverable), but my
corrected understanding of the significance of such behavior was fortuitous and the
information was externally provided. In the case of the Portuguese imperfect used
for excuses, explicit information about pragmatic function seems to have made the
input more salient, though it is virtually certain that such forms were in input all
along.
In contrast to the Thai example, externally provided information about Arabic
bipolar kin terms had no effect on my learning. I never noticed their occurrence in
the dialects to which I was exposed, and they never became part of my competence
in Arabic. This example suggests some of the difficulty in accounting for what
becomes conscious and what does not. This is a complex issue beyond the scope of
this paper, but part of such an account would include Baars's observation that events
remain unnoticed if they are either uninterpretable in context or so stable as to be
part of the context (Baars, 1983). The Arabic use of bipolar kin terms seems to be
especially opaque to native speakers of English, who find them nearly uninterpretable.
3 In the case of both Thai departures and Wes's hints in English, the problem lay
not in noticing what was said but in understanding what was intended. The interpretation
of hints is problematic for native speakers as well as learners (Ervin-Tripp,
1972), but it is not clear to me why externally provided information was sufficient to
block future inferences from abrupt departures to perception of a problem in the
case of my Thai example, whereas knowledge about Japanese speech behavior at a
similar level of generality did not lead quickly to the establishment of the appropriate
inferencing behavior.
Explicit and Implicit Learning of General Principles
While all of my examples involve understanding in the sense of matching surface
forms with meaning, none of them are good examples of generalization from specific
examples to more general principles. However, there are cases in which the

32 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
learning of pragmatics and discourse must involve such generalization, for example,
not just the recognition and use of frozen routines such as entao td and e ai, como
estdo, but learning less frozen formulas, as well as fully productive structures for
speech act realizations.
A good example of the involvement of consciousness in generalizing a formula
has been provided by Ferguson (1976) in recalling his learning of Arabic root-echo
responses. There are numerous adjacency pairs in Arabic in which a greeting,
compliment, or other initiating utterance requires a formulaic response that contains
a lexical item (usually a verb) derived from the triconsonantal root of the most
important lexical item in the initiating utterance. On one occasion, Ferguson bought
an article of clothing in a market, and when the purchase was complete, the seller
said to him "mabruuk" (congratulations). He did not know the response formula for
this, but did know that an appropriate response form would be one which contained
the root BRK from the first part of the adjacency pair. By analogy with several other
response formulas that he did know, he guessed what the root-echo response form
might be. Ferguson comments:
Probably 'alia ybaarikfiik was the root-echo response to BRK. I tried it, and the
smile showed I had given the right reply. The whole analysis took only a split
second, and was just like getting an instance of grammatical concord or case
government right. (141)
This is an example of conscious problem solving or explicit learning, but I have
indicated that implicit language learning is also possible. It may be useful, therefore,
to spell out in some detail how more general principles of pragmatics might be
acquired without being conscious of them.
Following Fox (1987) and Spolsky (1989), I suggest that some pragmatic and
discoursal principles are better represented as associative networks rather than as
prepositional rules, and that connectionist models are promising in accounting for
those aspects of pragmatic knowledge that do appear to be unconscious. This may
involve less of a paradigm shift in the areas of pragmatics and discourse than in
syntax, since researchers in pragmatics have had a less fixed notion of what is meant
by a "rule" of pragmatics than have syntacticians, and relatively little attention has
been given to consideration of how such rules might be represented psychologically.
Some ethnomethodologists have rejected the concept of rules as conceived in formal
logic as a model of social action (Mehan & Wood, 1975). Probabilistic network
approaches have been suggested for the analysis of code-switching (Dearholt &
Valdes-Falles, 1978); and Pomerantz (1978) has described compliment responses as
the result of the cooperation of multiple constraints. Each of these approaches is
compatible with a connectionist interpretation.
There is one type of representation of pragmatic rules that I think is psychologically
implausible, but that can also be recast in network form. The distribution
of address forms has been represented by both Geoghegan (1971) and Ervin-Tripp
(1972) in the form of a flowchart, illustrating decision points in the form of serially
ordered binary selectors. For American English, Ervin-Tripp indicates that the first
question to be asked is whether or not the addressee is a child or adult; then, if an
adult, whether the interaction takes place within a status-marked setting; if the
setting is not status-marked, whether the addressee's name is known; if the name is

Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics 33
known, whether the addressee is kin; if not kin, whether the addressee is a friend or
colleague; if so, whether the addressee is of higher rank; and so on, finally exiting
the system with an appropriate address form. Ervin-Tripp (1972) and Geoghegan
(1971) state explicitly that while paths through the flowchart represent rules, such
flowcharts are like a formal grammar in representing a logical model and are not
intended as psychological models of decision making.
There are various problems with these models. Kendall (1981) has pointed out
that they are too deterministic, and that a factor called "dispensation," meaning
essentially to disregard all other factors, is introduced to get around the problem of
variability. Positing serially ordered selectors also implies complete scalability
(each selector must be listed only once, and selectors encountered first in the
flowchart must outweigh all subsequent selectors in their influence), which cannot
be empirically supported. For the present discussion, the most important drawback
to such models is that they are unlikely to have any psychological reality. While
conscious choices of which address forms in unclear situations might indeed involve
sequential consideration of the types of selectors contained within flowcharts, there
is little reason to suggest that automatic choices are made on the basis of speeded-up
serial processing; most psychological accounts of automatic processing assume that
parallel processes dominate. However, flowcharts such as those suggested by Ervin-
Tripp (1972) and Geoghegan (1971) can easily be restructured into connectionist
architecture, and the choice of address forms can be reconceptualized as a network
of unordered connections between features of social context (addressee age, rank,
marital status, etc.) and linguistic outputs. Some connections between social context
features and address forms may be so heavily weighted that the connection is almost
categorical, while others may be very weak, leading to fuzzier, less determinate
outcomes.
Other kinds of pragmatic knowledge that may be similarly represented include
the complex patterns of covariation among features of social context and the linguistic
realizations of speech acts that have been empirically documented by analysis of
CCSARP data (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989). The theoretical framework
proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), which attempts to relate a very wide range
of pragmatic realizations to variation in three basic contextual features—social
distance, power, and culture-specific evaluations of threat to face—is a similar case
since these cooperating (or conflicting) constraints exert probabilistic influences.
If we assume that associative network models have some face validity as a
model of implicit pragmatic knowledge, we may then ask how such knowledge may
be acquired, and specifically the role that consciousness is likely to play in the
establishment of a network. There is some evidence from experimental psychology
that bears on several aspects of this question.
(1) Do learners have to keep track (consciously, by counting) of the frequency
with which contextual or pragmatic features occur The answer to this is almost
certainly no. Learners may be able to make reasonably accurate estimates of the
relative frequency of such things, but they do not do so by counting, and it is widely
accepted that attention to a stimulus event is sufficient to trigger the automatic
(effortless and unintended) encoding of its frequency of occurrence (Hasher &
Zacks, 1984).
(2) Do learners need to notice the specific relevant pragmalinguistic or contex-

34 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
tual features of an event in order to trigger such encoding of frequency This
question is somewhat controversial, but the answer is probably yes. Hanson and
Hirst (1988) point out that an event may be thought of as a cluster of attributes. They
report experiments supporting the hypothesis that attention to specific stimulus
attributes is necessary in order to encode frequency information for those attributes.
(3) Do learners need to understand the significance of co-occurring linguistic
and social context features in order to acquire a network of complex covariations
This is perhaps the most interesting question, and strikes to the heart of what is
meant by implicit learning. Experiments in implicit learning suggest that implicit
learning may be self-organizing, and that it is not necessary to realize the significance
of one event for another in order to establish connections.
Lewicki (1986) has reported a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the
nonconscious detection of covariations involving social stimulus material. Subjects
were presented with a series of descriptions of persons which mentioned a number
of psychological and social characteristics. Some of these traits were manipulated
by the experimenter, either to confirm or disconfirm preexisting stereotypes. After a
learning phase, subjects rated new stimulus material. The experiments showed that
correlations built into the personality descriptions during the learning phase influenced
judgments in the testing phase. By running different versions of the same
basic experiment, Lewicki was able to assess subject awareness at various points in
learning. Subjects did notice the manipulated traits (as intended by the experimenter)
and were momentarily aware of their co-occurrence in single stimulus descriptions.
That is, they were able to recall both of them when questioned immediately
after exposure. 4 However, the subjects were unaware of any systematic relationship
between the manipulated traits. When told that some traits (out of a large number
used as descriptors) had been systematically manipulated by the experimenter,
subjects were unable to identify which ones had been manipulated.
Analogously, we can specify the minimum requirements of learning an address
system (or any other system of complex covariations) in a second language. If the
task is to acquire an address system in which the ingroup/outgroup distinction is
relevant or in which address forms systematically vary by sex of addressee, learners
must attend to and notice in input both the linguistic forms and the relevant contextual
features. This may mean attending to features of context that either are not
relevant or are defined differently in the native language, so that learning a new
pragmatic system often entails learning how to make new interpretative assessments
of the world. However, it does not seem to be necessary for learners to make any
conscious connection between the address forms encountered and the contextual
factors that are correlated with such forms. For example, in learning the address
system of Japanese, when you hear someone you know as Mr. Morita addressed as
Morita-kun, where kun is an address form, you must notice both the form and the
relevant contextual factors (these include sex, age, and rank of both speaker and
addressee, intimacy, tone, and setting) if this is to be intake for learning, but need
not draw the conclusion that Morita was addressed that way because of any of these
factors.
Nevertheless, it would certainly be extremely helpful to be consciously aware of
such connections. It is sometimes argued that implicit learning is superior to conscious
problem solving (Krashen, 1981), but this seems to be true for only some

Consciousness, Learning, and Intel-language Pragmatics 35
types of learning tasks. Reber has reported several times that subjects learning
artificial grammars under an implicit learning condition (subjects were told to
memorize examples, which presumably interfered with any attempt to analyze the
input) were better able to recognize valid new strings generated by the grammar than
those subjects who were told to try to figure out the rules of the underlying grammar.
However it cannot be assumed that subjects who attempted to discover the
rules succeeded in doing so. In a recent publication, Reber (1989) makes exactly
this point. Arguing that the particular artificial grammar to be learned was constructed
in such a way that subjects were unlikely to be able to find the rules they
were searching for, Reber now argues that "looking for rules will not work if you
cannot find them," but "looking for rules will work if you can find them" (Reber,
1989, 223). McLeod and McLaughlin (1986) report anecdotal evidence for the
frequent occurrence of rapid restructuring following "clicks of comprehension."
Conclusions
The data from experimental psychology clearly support a conservative hypothesis
that whatever learning might result from unattended processing is insignificant
compared to the results of attended processing. The data seem to me to be also
compatible with two much stronger hypotheses, that attention to input is a necessary
condition for any learning at all, and that what must be attended to is not input in
general, but whatever features of the input play a role in the system to be learned.
For the learning of pragmatics in a second language, attention to linguistic forms,
functional meanings, and the relevant contextual features is required. I also claim
that learners experience their learning, that attention is subjectively experienced as
noticing, and that the attentional threshold for noticing is the same as the threshold
for learning. Finally, I argue that, while incidental and implicit learning are both
possible, consciously paying attention to the relevant features of input and attempting
to analyze their significance in terms of deeper generalizations are both highly
facilitative.
I do not claim that the anecdotal examples from my own language learning
experiences prove these points, because the most that language learner diary reports
can establish is that learners have noticed crucial facts about language use. What is
needed is much more systematically gathered data on what learners notice (and are
able to report) and what they do not notice (are unable to report) as they are
learning. 5 Suspicions have been voiced that "it is doubtful that [introspection] can
shed light on how the learner moves from one state to another, i.e., how input
becomes intake" (Ellis, 1989a). I think that investigation of the learner's thoughts at
such points of change is just what needs to be investigated. Even the harshest critics
of reliance upon introspective methods agree that individuals do know the focus of
their attention at any given point in time, as well as the content of their current
thoughts, emotions, evaluations, and plans (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) and that these
conscious thought processes can be reported. A priori conclusions that there will be
no relationships between such phenomena and language development are unwarranted.
No strong prescriptions for the teaching of second language pragmatics can be

36 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
drawn from this discussion, but some general observations seem in order. Simple
exposure to sociolinguistically appropriate input is unlikely to be sufficient for
second language acquisition of pragmatic and discoursal knowledge because the
linguistic realizations of pragmatic functions are sometimes opaque to language
learners and because the relevant contextual factors to be noticed are likely to be
defined differently or may be nonsalient for the learner. Second language learners
may fail to experience the crucial noticings for years. The fact that this does not
seem to happen in first language learning is attributable not to any sort of pragmatics
acquisition device, but to the efforts that parents and other caregivers make in order
to teach communicative competence to children, using a variety of strategies.
Motivation is an important determinant of the allocation of attentional resources
(Crookes & Schmidt, 1991). Because of the close connections among pragmatic
realization strategies, assessments of role and status relationships between speaker
and hearer, and the expression of personality, it is likely that there is a stronger
relationship between motivation, acculturation and other affective factors in the
development of pragmatic and discoursal ability than in other aspects of language
learning, such as syntax (Schmidt, 1983). Those who are concerned with establishing
relationships with target language speakers are more likely to pay close attention
to the pragmatic aspects of input and to struggle to understand than those who are
not so motivated. But since intentional learning is unnecessary when some task
causes attention to be focused on what is to be learned, one way to develop pragmatic
competence in classroom contexts could be through task-based language teaching
(Long, in press). Tasks can be selected that focus the learner's attention on pragmatic
forms, functions and co-occurring features of social context.
Explicit teacher-provided information about the pragmatics of the second language
can also play a role in learning, provided that it is accurate and not based
solely on fallible native speaker intuitions. Explicit teaching is often more efficient
than attention to input for identifying the pragmalinguistic forms of the target
language. The understanding of general rules and patterns may be unnecessary for
learning, but Grossberg (1988) has argued that the learning mechanisms modeled in
connectionist networks are slow because they result only from gradual changes in
the bottom-up adaptive weights of the network, whereas top-down processes such
as focused attention and expectations greatly speed up and actively reorganize the
way in which input is processed. This is not to claim that explicit knowledge
somehow "becomes" implicit knowledge, but to recognize a synergistic relationship
between the mechanisms of implicit and explicit learning (Mathews et al. 1989),
which justifies a consciousness-raising approach to the teaching of pragmatics.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Michael Long, Paul Munsell, and Danny Steinberg for very helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
2. I owe the distinction made here between information that is perceived and information
that is noticed to Bowers (1984), who argues that information becomes conscious when it is
processed to the level of short-term memory and selectively attended to. Bowers also distin-

Consciousness, Learning, and Interlanguage Pragmatics 37
guishes between two senses of unconscious, referring to information that is unnoticed and
information that is unappreciated or uncomprehended, and I have drawn upon his model in
my description of subliminal versus implicit learning.
3. When I have presented this example to native speakers of English, they have often
assumed that the mother must have meant for her son to "swim to Mommy," but this is not a
correct interpretation; that is, this is not an example of a missing preposition.
4. In another series of experiments, Lewicki (1986) attempted to demonstrate that information
which is presented subliminally or which is not attended to may also lead to learning.
These experiments did not successfully demonstrate learning, but some interesting subtle
effects were found. Subjects responded more slowly to questions mentioning those stimulus
traits that had been presented subliminally. Lewicki argues that this demonstrates the internalization
of weak processing algorithms, which could eventually result in more demonstrable
learning effects. Such an experimental demonstration would disprove my claim that there is
no subliminal learning whatsoever. Baars (1988) has claimed that this zero-point question is
essentially unanswerable and has obscured the more important and answerable question of
whether more conscious involvement is needed to learn more information, the answer to
which is clearly affirmative.
5. Michael Long (personal communication) has pointed out to me that language learners
may sometimes produce a vocabulary item in a second language that they did not know they
knew until that moment, not being sure that it is right and certainly not knowing how it ever
got into the mental lexicon. However, the issue of whether the learner noticed such a lexical
item in input (which must have occurred, if my account is correct) is quite separate from the
question of whether the learner will be able to say much later when it was encountered. We
know all sorts of things without being able to recall the circumstances under which we
acquired that knowledge.
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2
Symbolic Representation
and Attentional Control
in Pragmatic Competence
ELLEN BIALYSTOK
Pragmatic competence entails a variety of abilities concerned with the use and
interpretation of language in contexts. It includes speakers' ability to use language
for different purposes—to request, to instruct, to effect change. It includes listeners'
ability to get past the language and understand the speaker's real intentions, especially
when these intentions are not directly conveyed in the forms—indirect requests,
irony and sarcasm are some examples. It includes command of the rules by
which utterances are strung together to create discourse. This apparently simple
achievement to produce coherent speech itself has several components—turntaking,
cooperation, cohesion.
These three aspects of pragmatic competence converge most prominently on the
ability to use and interpret nonliteral forms, such as metaphorical uses of language
and indirect requests. Native speakers are expected to see through the forms to
retrieve the speaker's intentions. When listeners fail to do this, conversation (and
sometimes more than just conversation) breaks down.
All three aspects of pragmatic competence are implicated in some respect for all
conversation, but the challenge is greater when the conversation includes nonliteral
forms to signal indirect requests. It is at these times that the ability to perform
according to pragmatic rules is more rigorously tested. To participate successfully in
such conversations, speakers need to have mastered the three aspects of language
listed above. First, speakers must be capable of using language for different purposes
so that the speech act of requesting is properly distinguished from other
intended effects of language use. Second, speakers must be capable of modifying
the form of the request to reflect social aspects of the context, embedding the
request in the forms necessary to indicate the socially expected degree of politeness
or deference. Finally, speakers must be capable of participating in an interaction
following the conventions of conversation in order to make the request.
Descriptions of how speakers come to use and understand indirect and meta-
43

44 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
phoric speech provide an important component of the explanation of the development
of language proficiency both for children learning a first language and adults
learning a second language. For children, this skill is reflected in their ability to
understand the intention of forms used in the following types of conversations
(examples taken from Shatz, 1983, 843):
(1) MOTHER: He's three and three-quarters. (Child looks puzzled).
MOTHER: How old are you
CHILD: Four and two dollars.
(2) EXPERIMENTER: (inquiring about a 3-year-old's ability): Can you tie your shoes
CHILD: They are tied.
This chapter will examine the nature and development of the linguistic representations
that underlie pragmatic competence, specifically the competence involved in
the use and interpretation of indirect and metaphoric speech. Knowledge for rules of
use must be learned, represented, and transformed in the same way as the knowledge
that controls other, more formal, aspects of the linguistic system. How is this
knowledge represented, how do these representations change for speakers of a
second language, and how do these representations support the use and interpretation
of nonliteral speech This chapter will begin with a brief summary of the
descriptions offered for children's development of pragmatic abilities. I shall organize
this summary around children's developing competence with the three aspects
of pragmatic ability identified above: increase in the variety of speech acts, greater
modification of speech according to the context, and mastery of conversation and
discourse. In the next section, I outline a model of language processing. Finally, I
shall apply this model to the problem of adult second language learners' development
of pragmatic competence.
Children's Pragmatic Competence
The most frequently studied aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to make
use of a variety of language functions. These functions have been identified and
classified in various taxonomies. Searle's (1979) five-part classification system
provides a moderate number of distinctions and is widely used. He includes the
following as a finite and exhaustive list of possible speech acts: representatives,
directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. Other systems differ in
number and detail. Halliday (1975), for example, considers the relevant distinctions
to be among the ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions of language. The
point, however, remains essentially the same, namely, that these categories constitute
different linguistic functions that native speakers would normally be expected to
master.
How do children master the variety of language functions that native speakers of
a language routinely express According to Clark and Clark (1977), the speech of
young children learning their first language at the earliest stages is mostly confined
to assertions (representatives) and requests (directives). Early assertions generally
indicate the existence of objects, describe their location, or comment on their

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 45
properties. Requests are typically motivated by needs or wants, asking for food,
drink, toys, and the like.
Within this limited number of categories and primitive syntactical resources for
language structure, children manage nonetheless to express a range of semantic
relations. These semantic relations are perhaps a better estimate of the children's
ability to manipulate language to express a variety of intentions. Bloom (1973)
astutely pointed out that when her daughter Kathryn said "mommy sock" on two
different occasions, her intention in each was quite different. In one case, Kathryn
was describing the spatial relation between an object and a location, and in the
other, the interactive relation between an actor and an object. Similarly, a young
child's utterance of "apple" can serve as a request, a declaration, or a question in
different circumstances. In the preschool years, therefore, the range of pragmatic
functions that children typically engage in is more limited than the range of semantic
relations they express through these functions. Nonetheless, these semantic
relations still constitute a finite set, including such intentions as presence of object,
location of object, request for action, request for information (Bloom, 1973; Bowerman,
1973; Schlesinger, 1971).
In spite of these limitations, Shatz and McCloskey (1984) argue that young
preschool children know a great deal about different speech acts. They point out that
by age 2 children are able to distinguish between such speech acts as questions and
nonquestions regardless of how they are formed. There were even some children
under 2 years who were found to discriminate between types of questions—yes/no
questions from wh- questions. Shatz and McCloskey claim that these achievements
indicate that "young children's responses are not governed by a literal interpretation
strategy" and that they have an "early understanding of the constraints of discourse"
(25). These two insights correspond to the second and third aspects of pragmatic
competence identified here.
As children enter the school years, there is an expansion in the range of language
functions available to them. This increase is achieved in two ways: by adding new
speech acts to the repertoire, such as commissives and expressives, and by learning
to use a wider range of formal structures to express the speech acts they have already
been using. This addition of new and more flexible resources to express old intentions
enhances the child's pragmatic competence, even without the addition of new
speech acts. By the early school years, children's control over a variety of speech
acts is fairly impressive, although the use of declarations is still rare.
The second aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to adjust the form of
speech to comply with contextual factors. This manipulation is most clearly signaled
by children's ability to use and interpret such forms as indirect requests. As
this aspect of competence is developing, young children often make conspicuous
errors, such as the frequently cited example of the following telephone conversation:
(3) CALLER: Is your mother home
CHILD: Yes.
In this case the child has failed to identify the question as an indirect request for
action.

46 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
The development of children's use of requests and the variety of direct and
indirect means for expressing those requests is an impressive achievement in the
preschool years. Becker (1982) documents the changes that occur in children's
formulation of requests from the earliest attempts based only on gestures, sounds,
and primitive utterances such as "more," to requests based on well-formed syntactic
structures, and by about age 3 to the inclusion of some indirect requests. By age 5
children's command of requests is quite sophisticated, including a variety of indirect
forms, hints and utterances that involve sequencing several steps to achieve the
requested goal. The proportion of indirect to direct requests increases between the
ages of about 3 and 5 years, but then remains relatively constant until about 8 years.
Ervin-Tripp (1977) documents as well the development of children's ability to
both produce and interpret indirect speech. She points out that there is considerable
variability among children in this development and identifies some of the social and
contextual factors that account for that variability. Perhaps more surprising is variability
in the interpretation of indirect speech that she attributes to linguistic differences,
even by the same children (Ervin-Tripp, 1989). She reports that French-
English bilingual children in Switzerland interpreted indirect speech correctly in
French, accounting for such devices as irony and sarcasm, but incorrectly in English,
taking the speech for its literal rather than its intended meaning.
The third aspect of pragmatic competence is understanding the structure of
conversation: What are the rules that govern how to structure discourse and participate
in conversations Knowing how to carry on a conversation includes knowing
the rules for mechanical aspects, such as turn-taking, as well as linguistic aspects,
such as coherence and knowledge of adjacency pairs, or what kinds of utterances
are expected to follow others. McTear (1984) summarizes these achievements by
claiming that the important feature of children's developing conversation is their
increased awareness of and use of the contingency relations that characterize normal
conversational interactions.
Bruner (1983) claims that a great deal of the knowledge about conversations is
learned in infancy. Adults and infants engage in conversation-type activities that
include turn-taking, focusing on common objects, and vocalization (simply cooing
or gurgling for the infant). From this basis, he argues, the essential dynamics of
conversation are learned and easily transferred to linguistic interactions.
Even with the prelinguistic experiences in which Bruner invests so much explanatory
power, children must still learn the rules that govern linguistic conversations.
Bloom, Rocissano, and Hood (1976) studied the development of discourse coherence
by children to determine the extent to which utterances were appropriately
related to preceding utterances. They found that children were contributing to conversations
with considerable accuracy by the age of two. Shatz and McCloskey
(1984) point to the need for specific knowledge of conversational rules; such knowledge
is learned from early on but is certainly not complete in the preschool years:
Speaking appropriately, then, is not just a matter of speaking grammatically or
matching forms in initiation with forms in response. Appropriate language behaviour
also involves knowledge of the conversational rules, conventions, and social
circumstances governing linguistic interactions. (19)

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 47
There is some dispute about when these rules are learned. McTear (1984) attributes
knowledge of them to preschool children but Ackerman (1981) defers their emergence
until the school years.
In summary, children continue to advance in their mastery of pragmatic uses of
language through the preschool and early school years. They learn to use a wider
range of speech acts, they learn to modify the forms of their utterances to accommodate
social aspects of language use and to interpret indirect forms, and they learn the
conventions for participating in conversations. Although the rudiments of all these
abilities are evident from a very early age, possibly from the child's first words, real
competence with these pragmatic functions of language cannot be claimed to be
complete until the school years. Adult second language learners must also gain
control over the pragmatic uses of language in contexts, but they certainly do not
begin with a childlike naivete about the social uses of language. What sort of
explanation, then, could account for development of pragmatic competence both by
children who are learning their first language and by adults who already have
mastered another linguistic system
Learning and Using Language
The analysis of pragmatic competence presented here is based on a model of
language processing that we have been using as the framework for research into a
variety of aspects of language acquisition and use. The model has two sides to it and
requires two kinds of descriptions. One of these is the description of learner competence.
For this purpose, the goal of the model is to describe the processing ability of
language learners in terms of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for learning and
using language. The second is the description of task demands. For this purpose,
language functions are analyzed for the cognitive demands they place upon learners.
Different uses of language involve different processing abilities of language
learners; the assumption is that these demands can be systematically determined and
analyzed for their difficulty. Language proficiency, then, is considered in terms of
the fit between the processing abilities of the learner and the task demands imposed
by a specific language use situation. Where the two are congruent, learners will
perform well; where the task demands are excessive relative to the learner's ability,
learners will struggle.
The descriptions that are applied to these two sides of the problem (namely,
speakers learning and using a language and the tasks they are mastering) are based
on two cognitive components of language processing. These processing components
are the basis for both assessing learners' abilities and determining task difficulty.
The processing components are called analysis of knowledge and control of
processing. Each component is specialized for a different aspect of the complex
process of learning and using a language. Moreover, each processing component
develops with experience and maturity on its own course. The development of these
two processing components is normally correlated, as children generally move in a
roughly synchronous manner toward greater mastery of each. Some situations,

48 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
however, accelerate the development of one of them and create an imbalance in the
learner's ability to process language. These imbalances would either enable children
to succeed or prevent them from performing in language use situations that would
normally be expected for children whose development followed the more usual
course.
Analysis of knowledge is the process of making explicit, or analyzing, a
learner's implicit knowledge of a domain. As a result of the process of analysis,
mental representations of a domain of knowledge become both more explicit and
more organized around formal (abstract) categories. For language, knowledge of the
linguistic system becomes explicit in terms of the constituents and categories that
make up the language (words, letters, phonemes) and in terms of the rules that
govern the structure and combination of those categories (subject-verb-object—
SVO, negation). None of this explicitness is necessary for the uses of language
undertaken by young children. One does not need explicit access to these concepts
and rules in order to produce grammatical sentences or understand conversation.
Once a domain has been analyzed, that knowledge can be used for functions not
supported by implicit representations. The behavioral outcome of high levels of
analysis is the ability to articulate structural principles of organization for the
domain. At the same time, new operations become possible only with greater levels
of analysis. Advanced or specialized uses of language, such as literacy skills, are
based on more analyzed representations of language than are necessary for children's
earlier uses of the system. The construct of analysis is compatible with
theoretical notions of linguistic structuring by children posited by Berman (1986),
Bowerman (1982), Karmiloff-Smith (1986), and others as well as the explication of
implicit representations in other cognitive domains, such as classification, as described
by Gelman and Baillargeon (1983).
Control of processing is the process of controlling attention to relevant and
appropriate information and integrating those forms in real time. Language presents
multiple sources of information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, and part of effective
language processing is being able to attend to the required information without
being distracted by irrelevant or misleading cues. Oral language, for example,
provides potential information about meanings as well as formal information about
the words and structures chosen, the style of speech used, and features of the
pronunciation. Carrying on a conversation, however, requires that attention be
directed primarily to the meanings.
Donaldson (1978) contends that children need to develop control over attentional
procedures to succeed in school and to progress in many of the tasks usually
associated with Piagetian operational thought. These include such tasks as classification
and conservation. The construct is similar to the executive control schemes,
such as those posited by Case (1985), which regulate the selection and coordination
of lower level schemes responsible for problem solving. The difference between
executive schemes and control in the present system is that control of processing is
not hierarchically related to other schemes. Rather, it exists at the same level as a
different but equivalently powerful aspect of processing (cf. Jackendoff, 1987). In
this sense, control of processing is the selective attention to the relevant aspects of a
representation for the purpose of carrying out a specific task.

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 49
In my research into children's language development, I have investigated the
role of the two processing components in the development of children's language
proficiency. In this way, I have shown that children's progress with such activities as
learning to read and developing metalinguistic awareness can be traced directly to
their progress in mastering each of these component processes (e.g., Bialystok
1986, 1988). When tasks (such as understanding written texts or performing specific
metalinguistic judgments) are analyzed for the demands they place upon each of the
processing components of analysis and control, the result is generally that children
who have been shown by means of independent measures to possess sufficient levels
of the relevant processing component are the children who are likely to succeed on
the language task.
Consider, then, the development of each of the processing components in somewhat
more detail. Regarding the process of analysis, the changes in representation
of language brought about through analysis of the linguistic system can be divided
into three levels of representation (Bialystok, 1991), I have called these conceptual
representation, formal representation, and symbolic representation. In conceptual
representation, language is organized only around the meanings it represents. Language
is transparent and representations of meanings are based on semantic and
conceptual information carried through the language. This kind of representation is
children's first access to language. They understand language in context almost
regardless of the specific forms being used. Similarly, children are not aware of the
words they use to express their intentions, and the categories they form are built out
of the semantic properties of those intentions, not out of the formal means for
expressing them. In this view, oral uses of language can proceed from conceptual
representations.
Formal representations are coded in terms of the structure of language. The
categories that organize the representations are the formal categories of language
itself: language is made of words and sounds, rules of order must be observed when
forming sentences, and the like. Children have formal knowledge of language
structure when they can identify letters and tell you what sound a letter makes, count
the number of words in a sentence, and detect and possibly correct grammatical
violations. This level, then, refers to explicit knowledge of language structure and
corresponds most closely to what most investigators mean by metalinguistic knowledge.
In symbolic representation, the coding is a relation between a form and a
referent. Symbolic representation is an explicit accounting of the way in which
language refers. The knowledge of letters coded at this level is a symbolic relation
between a form (the letter) and the sound it signifies (the referent). The representation
is in the form of the relation stands for. Words are symbols that stand for
meanings, so a symbolic coding of a word explicitly includes this relational property.
Symbolic representation involves understanding that letters and written words do
not have meaning in themselves but rather signify words and concepts that do have
meaning. It is an advance for children to move from understanding letters and
sounds as objects (the letter B makes the sound "b") to understanding letters as
symbols (the letter B stands for the sound "b"). Symbolic representation deals
directly with the problem of how language refers. In these terms, children may

50 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
become literate only when their representations of linguistic knowledge have become
analyzed to the point that the written forms for the language are understood as
symbols and not merely as formal objects.
Control of processing develops as well throughout childhood. As children move
from using language as a strictly oral system to becoming acquainted with its
written and formal properties, new attentional strategies are required. Reading, for
example, demands a delicate balance between attention to the semantic and formal
properties of the written text. Children's competence in early reading can be traced
in part to their level of control of processing (Bialystok & Mitterer, 1987).
If this model of language processing is applied to the development of pragmatic
competence, then the abilities subsumed under descriptions of pragmatic competence
must be stated in terms of their basis in levels of analysis and control. If these
two processing components are responsible for language performance, then they
must also be responsible for the pragmatic abilities of language users. Moreover,
both components must be integrated into the account of pragmatic competence,
even if it turns out that there is an imbalance in the levels of each that speakers must
attain. Accordingly, two issues must be addressed. First, it is necessary to determine
the ways in which representations of language must change to support the pragmatic
functions of language and the level of analysis necessary for these uses. Second, it is
necessary to determine the attentional strategies that must be developed to use
language appropriately in contexts and the way in which these strategies relate to the
ones normally used during conversation. These analyses will allow one to determine
the level of proficiency within these two processing components necessary to demonstrate
pragmatic competence and also permit a more detailed description of the
processes that adult second language learners must master in order to achieve this
competence.
Processes in Pragmatic Competence
Throughout the descriptions of children's mastery of the three aspects of pragmatic
competence described in the first section, two factors were consistently cited in one
way or another. First is the need for children to expand their linguistic resources.
Shatz and McCloskey (1984), for example, attribute the improved ability of older
children to interpret speech acts to their increased vocabulary. These children have
developed a range of possible acceptable responses to various forms, and these
forms are selected more appropriately on the basis of contextual cues.
Second is the ability to select between two possible interpretations of an utterance.
In the case of the indirect request given in (3), for example, the choice is
between the literal meaning (Is your mother home) and the intended meaning (Call
her to the telephone). Shatz and McCloskey (1984) make the following claim for
development: "Children's earliest appreciation of speech acts, then, depends on
their ability to attend to either contextual or surface features of an utterance. Their
responses grow more sophisticated as their capacity to process information selectively
from additional sources develops" (30).

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 51
These two aspects of development correspond more or less to advances in
analysis and control respectively. Shatz (1983) similarly points to this kind of dual
achievement for an explanation of the development of pragmatic competence: "A
theory of the acquisition of communicative competence, then, must make reference
to children's representational and processing capabilities as well as to the content of
their social and linguistic knowledge" (844). Consider, then, some of the processing
demands made upon analysis and control by pragmatic competence.
For pragmatic knowledge, conceptual representation is the stage in which utterances
can be formed to satisfy specific speech acts but the speaker is focusing on
the intended meaning and not on the forms being selected to express that intention.
Formal representations are organized around categories. At this stage, speakers are
able to classify a group of utterances as being requests or assertions and are aware of
the relation between direct and indirect speech acts. The representation of utterances,
that is, can be in terms of the illocutionary force of those utterances. For
symbolic representation there is additionally an explicit representation for the relation
between the pragmatic intention and the forms used to achieve that intention.
Representations at this level could include the relation between explicit devices such
as politeness markers and their modifying effect on the interpretation of utterances
in specific contexts. At this explicit relational level of representation, the learner
would also have direct access to a repertoire of alternative forms of expression that
indicate more or less the same intentional content. The critical aspect of the representation
at this level is not the explicit forms or speech acts known by the learner as
was the case for the formal level, but rather the relation between these forms and the
meaning they convey in contexts. Such representations would make explicit the way
in which different forms, such as politeness markers, modify the social interpretation
of the utterance.
Pragmatic competence is an achievement that depends minimally on formal
representations, but ideally on symbolic representations. The interpretation of
meaning in contexts is inherently a relational problem. Specifically, it involves the
relation between a set of linguistic forms and the meanings intended by those forms
in specific contexts. The representation that underlies this performance consists of a
relation between a given meaning and a range of possible forms that give rise to that
meaning. Selecting the appropriate form requires an assessment of contextual and
social factors. Thus the mapping is not between form and meaning—the usual
problem in semantics—but between form and social context, with meaning held
constant across intentions within a socially defined situation. Put this way, the
problem for pragmatics is to develop the resource of equivalents from which selections
can occur. The richer the repertoire, the greater would be the pragmatic
competence.
Children need to learn all of this. Children acquire pragmatic competence by
building up their representations of the linguistic system through all three stages.
First they simply understand meaning in contexts. Macnamara (1972) cited this
ability to understand utterances in context regardless of forms as the very basis of
language acquisition. Next they learn about different speech acts and different forms
and realize that these signal different meanings. But the relation between these

52 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
forms and contexts is not worked out until this knowledge is represented symbolically.
At this stage, selection from the formal alternatives can be deliberate and
effective, and comprehension can be more accurate.
Becker (1982) offers a description of pragmatic development based primarily on
children's development of requests that is largely compatible with the view being
described here. She points out that children's first requests are "unanalysed wholes"
that eventually become decomposed to create new forms. Children build up more
complete representations that allow them to manipulate the components of these
wholes: "Toddlers can vary their requests systematically in several ways, which is
only possible once they have acquired a more abstract system" (30). This "more
abstract system," I would argue, is the formal or symbolic representation that is the
result of the process of linguistic analysis.
Children younger than 5 years old, according to Gordon and Ervin-Tripp (1984)
do not, theoretically, have the processing ability to manage indirect requests, such
as "It's cold in here." Yet, children under 5 years of age routinely produce and
understand these forms correctly. How is this possible The solution offered by
Gordon and Ervin-Tripp is that these children have learned direct mappings between
forms and functions and can use and understand them in familiar activities and
interactions. They argue that for these children, the form "it's cold in here" is not an
indirect request at all, but a perfectly direct means of achieving a goal.
Shatz (1978) addresses the same question and suggests that 2-year-olds' (appropriate)
responses to such forms as indirect requests may be based more on primitive
response strategies than on inferential analysis and propositional content. Children
may respond on the basis of some prototypical meanings (Shatz & McCloskey,
1984) that are suggested by the situation and not respond to the forms of language
being used. Children may have heard sentences like "Can you talk on the telephone"
in contexts in which action rather than a verbal answer was expected, creating a bias
toward that response. This bias overestimates children's ability to interpret the
illocutionary force of such indirect requests.
On both these views, children's language competence is consistent with the
argument that their knowledge of the pragmatic functions of language is based on
conceptual representation, not formal or symbolic representation. Therefore, while
children may appear to function appropriately, they cannot be described as having
pragmatic competence. With conceptual representations, children are not even
aware that the form is functioning as a request. When children come to understand
that this form is one way of achieving a request, then their representation of that
relation can be said to be formal. Symbolic representation would be signaled by the
speaker's ability to deliberately select unusual or indirect forms, to manipulate
aspects of the request such as the politeness or deference implied, or to understand
the relation between the formal features of the utterance and its illocutionary function.
Adult second language learners generally begin the task of mastering the pragmatic
structure of the new language at the second (formal) level of representation
and attempt to develop a symbolic representation from that system. Children begin
with the problem of "how to mean," how to interpret indirect requests, how to string
together discourse into conversation. Adults learning a second language have al-

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 53
ready sorted out the nature of meaning and already have explicit formal categories
for concepts corresponding to speech acts. They may even have explicit categories
for the formal pragmatic markers, such as politeness terms, used in the second
language. The problem for adults is to learn the symbolic relation between forms
and contexts appropriate to the second language. This may also entail expanding
formal linguistic resources by learning new forms of expression or new sets of
equivalents for given expressions in much the same way that vocabulary is learned.
Some forms can even be learned in terms of a social context: when in a restaurant
we say it this way.
The claim here is strong regarding the amount of learning that is a precondition
to pragmatic competence for children. In this view, children's knowledge of language
must be drastically restructured and organized around a new set of formal
explicit categories before children can even develop the symbolic representations
that underlie real pragmatic competence.
Adult learners of a second language also need to develop more analyzed representations
of the language. Culturally specific forms and rules for pragmatic language
use may require some specific analysis by adult learners both in the sense of
organizing implicit knowledge into new explicit categories and in the sense of
increasing the repertoire of language structure by learning new forms. New categories
may be necessary because the second language may make social distinctions not
followed in the speakers' first language, distinctions relating, for example, to social
status, age, or sex of the listener. More forms may be necessary because the second
language may include a richer variety of alternatives for expressing the same intentions.
Conversational features such as rules for turn-taking, interrupting, and opening
and closing conversations may also require explicit learning and analysis by
adult second language learners. At the same time, some languages may be more
indirect, and speech acts (such as requests) may be more buried. Second language
learners would have to learn all these pragmatic conventions and the forms for
conveying them.
The control issue for pragmatic competence is the problem of attention. In
addition to the usual problem of a formal (surface structure) and semantic (meaning)
representation of an utterance competing for attention, the difficulty of deciding
between literal and metaphorical (or indirect) semantic interpretations must also be
resolved. How do children learn to ignore the literal meaning and respond by
attending to the intention of utterances
In Clark's (1979) model for the interpretation of indirect meanings, indirect
utterances give rise to two representations in listeners corresponding to the literal
and intended meanings of the utterance. Adults have both interpretations simultaneously
available and solve the problem of meaning by attending to one of them as
a function of contextual factors. This selective attention may be especially difficult
to execute in a second language where the conventions are less familiar. Cultural
differences such as the use of indirect requests for action, the use of sarcasm and
irony, and the forms for signaling politeness and deference may make the decision
regarding the intended meaning difficult. Thus for adults the problem of correct
interpretation is the responsibility of control of processing.
Children, according to Shatz and McCloskey (1984), do not have two represen-

54 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
tations available for the interpretation of indirect speech. They rely exclusively on
contextual conditions and do not, in general, form a representation for the literal
meaning. This direct mapping between the utterance and a unique meaning in
context is a consequence of the language being represented at the conceptual level.
De Villiers (1984) puts the case somewhat more tentatively but makes essentially
the same point. She argues that children do not have multiple mappings between
forms and meanings and that their interpretation of meanings is based on their
knowledge of familiar contexts and familiar utterances. Thus the control problem is
reduced, as there are not two interpretations competing for attention. Intended
meaning is resolved more on the basis of social-contextual circumstances than on
the basis of linguistic forms.
In summation, the problem presented to children learning their first language
and adults learning their second language regarding pragmatic competence is different.
For children, the primary task is the process of analysis. Children need to
explicate and expand their linguistic resources to cope with the demands of using
language for different purposes, in different contexts, and to different effects. Adults
need to learn some social conventions for the new language and to solve some
mapping problems between forms and social conditions, but the task of organizing a
linguistic system along the lines of speech functions so that the system is operable in
contexts has been solved for a first language. Adjustments in the organizing structures
in which the first language is already represented as a formal or symbolic
system carrying pragmatic functions are a relatively small problem.
For adults, the problem to be solved for pragmatic competence is essentially to
develop the control strategies to attend to the intended interpretations in contexts
and to select the forms from the range of possibilities that satisfy the social and
contextual needs of the communicative situation. Adults make pragmatic errors, not
only because they do not understand forms and structures, or because they do not
have sufficient vocabulary to express their intentions, but because they choose
incorrectly. They attend to the wrong possibility for meaning, they fail to attend to a
social distinction that needs to be marked linguistically, or they select the incorrect
politeness marker for the situation or the listener. Many examples of the kinds of
new selection strategies adults must learn when speaking a second language and the
kinds of social and contextual errors they make while learning them are described in
the research reported in the collection by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989a).
Pragmatic competence is achieved when control of processing is mastered for a
richly analyzed representation of the language.
Adults do, of course, still need to worry about the analysis problem. They need
to continue to build up their repertoire of formal linguistic resources and to verify
that their organization of the system has followed the correct categories. In my view,
this problem is relatively minor; other views, however, lead to different conclusions.
Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989b) describe two opposing views on
this issue. Eraser (1985) argues that speech act markers are universal but have
different distributions across languages and cultures, while Wierzbicka (1985) argues
speech act markers are unique realizations created by languages and cultures.
The prevailing opinion in the literature appears to be that of Fraser, and it is from
that assumption that my argument, which attributes little analysis difficulty to adult

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 55
second language learners, follows. If Wierzbicka is correct, the analysis problem
for adults learning a second language is considerably exacerbated.
Similarly, while children's greatest obstacle for mastering pragmatic competence
is in developing analyzed representations of language, they still need to pay
attention to control. Errors such as the one in (3) do occur, and children have to
learn the processes for attending to the appropriate meaning possibility. Children
use and understand indirect speech from an early age, and so the role of control in
early language processing for pragmatic proficiency is tangible. The argument
presented here, however, is that the greatest challenge for each group, children
learning their first language and adults learning a second language, lies in a different
component.
This division, in which children face a more serious barrier from analysis and
adults from control, is not accidental. The two processing components are intricately
connected to each other, but are nonetheless ordered in their priority. They are
connected because each entails the other. Analyzed representations carry with them
the prospect of selective attention to aspects of a representation or deciding between
competing representations. Yet attention is a vacuous concept in the absence of
content, so control of processing presupposes representations. This is not a hopeless
tangle; in my empirical work I have been able to measure learners' levels of mastery
of these two processing components independently and show their separate involvement
in language tasks. Thus, although proficient reading, for example, depends on
both analysis and control, analysis is prior (Bialystok, 1988). Further research with
the processing abilities of children and adults as they master the pragmatic functions
of language will address these claims directly.
References
Ackerman, B. P. (1981). The understanding of young children and adults of the deictic
adequacy of communication. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 256-70.
Becker, J. A. (1982). Children's strategic use of requests to mark and manipulate social
status. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language development (Vol. 2): Language, thought
and culture (1-35). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Berman, R. A. (1986). A step-by-step model of language learning. In I. Levin (Ed.), Stage
and structure: Reopening the debate (191-219). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Bialystok, E. (1986). Factors in the growth of linguistic awareness. Child Development, 57,
498-510.
Bialystok, E. (1988). Aspects of linguistic awareness in reading comprehension. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 9, 123-139.
Bialystok, E. (1991). Letters, sounds, and symbols: Changes in children's understanding of
written language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 75—89.
Bialystok, E., & Mitterer, J. (1987). Metalinguistic differences among three kinds of readers.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 147-53.
Bloom, L. (1973). One word at a time: The use of single word utterances before syntax. The
Hague: Mouton.
Bloom, L., Rocissano, L., & Hood, L. (1976). Adult-child discourse: Developmental interaction
between information processing and linguistic knowledge. Cognitive Psychology,
8, 521-52.

56 Cognitive Approaches to Interlanguage Pragmatic Development
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989a). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests
and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989b). Investigating cross-cultural pragmatics:
An introductory overview. In S. Blum-Kulka, J. House, & G. Kasper (Eds.), Crosscultural
pragmatics: Requests and apologies (1-34). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Bowerman, M. (1973). Early syntactic development: A cross-linguistic study with special
reference to Finnish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M. (1982). Reorganizational processes in lexical and syntactic development. In
E. Wanner & L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (319-
346). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1983). Child's talk: Learning to use language. New York: Norton.
Case, R. (1985). Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood. New York: Academic Press.
Clark, H. H. (1979). Responding to indirect speech acts. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 430-77.
Clark, H. H., & Clark, E. V. (1977). Psychology and language. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
de Villiers, J. (1984). Form and force interactions: The development of negatives and questions.
In R. L. Schiefelbusch & J. Pickar (Eds.), The acquisition of communicative
competence (193-236). Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.
Donaldson, M. (1978). Children's minds. Glasgow: Fontana.
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1977). Wait for me, roller skate! In S. Ervin-Tripp & C. Mitchell-Kernan
(Eds.), Child discourse (165-188). New York: Academic Press.
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1989). Children's social concepts in language development. Invited address
to the Society for Research in Child Development, Kansas City, MO.
Fraser, B. (1985). On the universality of speech act strategies. In S. George (Ed.), From the
linguistic to the social context (43-69). Bologna, Italy: CLUEB.
Gelman, R., & Baillargeon, R. (1983). A review of some Piagetian concepts. In J. H. Flavell
& E. M. Markman (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology, (Vol. 3): Cognitive development
(167-230). New York: Wiley.
Gordon, D., & Ervin-Tripp, S. (1984). The structure of children's requests. In R. L. Schiefelbusch
& J. Pickar (Eds.), The acquisition of communicative competence (83-106).
Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1975). Learning how to mean. London: Arnold.
Jackendoff, R. (1987). Consciousness and the computational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986). From metaprocess to conscious access: Evidence from children's
metalinguistic and repair data. Cognition, 28, 95-147.
Macnamara, J. (1972). The cognitive basis of language learning in infants. Psychological
Review, 79, 1-13.
McTear, M. F. (1984). Structure and process in children's conversational development. In
S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Discourse development: Progress in cognitive development research
(37-76). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Schlesinger, I. M. (1971). Production of utterances and language acquisition. In D. I. Slobin
(Ed.), The ontogenesis of grammar: A theoretical symposium (63-101). New York:
Academic Press.
Searle, J. R. (1979). A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In J. R. Searle (Ed.), Expression and
meaning (1-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shatz, M. (1978). On the development of communicative understandings: An early strategy
for interpreting and responding to messages. Cognitive Psychology, JO, 271-301.
Shatz, M. (1983). Communication. In J. H. Flavell & E. M. Markman (Eds.), Handbook of
Child Psychology, (Vol. 3): Cognitive Development. New York: Wiley, pp. 84-89.

Symbolic Representation and Attentional Control 57
Shatz, M., & McCloskey, L. (1984). Answering appropriately: A developmental perspective
on conversational knowledge. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Discourse development: Progress
in cognitive development research. New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 19-36.
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts. Journal
of Pragmatics, 9, 145-78.

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II
SPEECH ACT REALIZATION
This section includes five studies of interlanguage speech act performance:
thanking, apologizing, complaining, requesting, and correcting. While there is a
large literature on requests and only somewhat less on apologies, the other three
speech acts have not yet been studied much. Consequently, for the investigation of
requests and apologies, there is a much richer empirical and theoretical foundation
for interlanguage pragmaticists to work from.
According to various semantic criteria, the five speech acts form intersecting
groups. In Searle's (1976) typology, thanking, apologizing, and complaining represent
expressive speech acts; requesting is a directive act; and correcting, a representative
act. Following Leech's (1983) functional classification, thanking and apologizing
are convivial, while complaining, requesting, and correcting are competitive
acts. While these groupings may not seem to be of much interest beyond speech act
theory, they have behavioral correlates in speech act realization patterns, suggesting
that there is indeed a relationship between speech act theorists' analyses and language
users' communicative practice. Because illocutionary and social goals are
compatible in the case of convivial acts, thanking and apologizing tend to be
aggravated in force. Complaining, requesting, and correcting tend to be mitigated,
reflecting the tension between illocutionary and social purpose. However, these are
rough generalizations: as has frequently been pointed out in the literature, not only
would it depend on the context of a request whether and how much it needs to be
mitigated, it might even be perceived as quite consistent with the hearer's facewants;
for instance, if the very fact of being asked to do something, even if involving
some effort on the part of the speaker, conveys appreciation of the hearer's
competence or attributes.
Indirectness and conventionalized means of implementation are common features
of most linguistic action, yet speech acts differ in the extent to which fixed
conventionalized expressions are routinely used. Since thanking and apologizing are
regularly implemented by means of standardized routines (though, obviously, not
only by them), learners not only have to find out when those acts are appropriate or
even required in the target community but also what formulas need to be used, and
in conjunction with what other means of expressing gratitude or regret. In case of
acts that are contextually perceived by the speaker as posing a threat to the hearer's
face, such as the competitive acts under study in the following chapters, the main
decisions for learners (as well as native speakers) to make are the ones formulated
59

60 Speech Act Realization
by Brown and Levinson (1987): whether to carry out the face-threatening act at all,
and if so, whether to do it in an on-record or some kind of off-record fashion. The
literature documents considerable cross-cultural variability and learner-specific performance
patterns on these issues (see the Introduction).
Eisenstein and Bodman (Chapter 3) examine the expression of gratitude by
native and nonnative speakers of English, representing a variety of linguistic and
cultural backgrounds. Their study combines data from a number of sources: observation
of naturalistically occurring events, role-plays, oral and written production
questionnaires, and retrospective interviews. LI data were obtained using written
questionnaires. Learners' responses were rated for appropriateness, using native
speakers' thanking performance as baseline data. Differences between learners' and
native speakers' expressions of gratitude were noticeable at the sociopragmatic and
pragmalinguistic level. Sociopragmatic differences involved the kinds of events and
interlocutor relationships that require thanking, as well as the learners' familiarity
with the situational context. Thanking behavior was further influenced by the
culture-specific prominence of values such as modesty, gratefulness, and indebtedness.
While the learners' performance was pragmalinguistically successful in contexts
that required simple, ritualized responses, they did much less well when more
complex, creative expressions were called for. Even the advanced learners often did
not fluently command the range of conventions of means and forms by which the
native speakers expressed gratitude.
Because Eisenstein and Bodman used a variety of data types, the impact of these
instruments on the subjects' responses could be assessed. Questionnaires, roleplays,
and naturalistic data exhibited the same types and wording of semantic
formulas. However, not only did the interactive conditions produce more linguistic
activity in terms of restatements and reformulations, they also emphasized the role
of the giver in the speech event: it was through her conversational contributions that
the receiver's choice of specific semantic formulas was prompted. Thanking thus
appeared as a jointly developed event, involving mutually adjusted contributions by
both participants.
One of the issues demonstrated by Eisenstein and Bodman's chapter is the crosscultural
variability of contextual factors in the event of thanking. Bergman and
Kasper (Chapter 4) focus on the assessment of contextual factors in situations where
the speaker has committed some offense, and the way in which contextual assessment
influences informants' selection of apology strategies. Informants were Thai
learners of English and native speakers of American English and Thai. Data were
collected by means of assessment and production questionnaires. Informants largely
agreed in their perception of the relationship between context-external factors (social
distance and dominance) and context-internal factors (severity of the offense,
offender's obligation to apologize, the likelihood for the offended party to accept the
apology, and offender's loss of face). However, when it came to assessing individual
offense contexts, cross-cultural differences prevailed, Thai and American respondents
differing most in their perception of the offender's obligation to apologize. Of
the apology strategies, aggravating the apology was most sensitive to contextinternal
factors. Respondents assumed more explicit responsibility for the offense
the closer they perceived the relationship between the interlocutors. Social distance

Speech Act Realization 61
thus was important in apology performance. Status, on the other hand, was unrelated
to learners' and native speakers' strategy choice. While learners and English
native speakers displayed the same frequency patterns in expressing explicit apology
and responsibility as well as in their upgrading of apologetic force, the learners
made more use of context-dependent strategies such as downgrading responsibility
and severity, offering repair, and different forms of verbal redress. In more than half
of the cases, the difference between learners' and American English native speakers'
strategy suppliance could be traced to sociopragmatic transfer from Thai.
Bergman and Kasper discuss the learners' oversupplying, relative to the target
norm, of context-dependent strategies as yet another instance of the verbosity phenomenon
noted in some of the interlanguage pragmatics literature. Evidence is
accumulating that verbosity is very likely to be instrument-induced. While learners'
responses to (written) production questionnaires, such as in Bergman and Kasper's
study, are typically characterized by verbosity, their contributions to interactive
tasks such as role-plays are not. In fact, Eisenstein and Bodman's (Chapter 3) study
shows that learners' expressions of gratitude in role-plays are 50% shorter than those
of native speakers of English. These output differences reflect differential cognitive
demands placed on learners in the two conditions, and highlight the research purposes
to which the two types of data collection instruments might best be put.
Production questionnaires serve to elicit knowledge displays without making demands
on learners' fluency or interactional skills. Role-plays, on the other hand,
require the ability to compute contextual factors and assemble relevant linguistic
material in a highly automatized fashion. Because they make simultaneous demands
on learners' comprehension and production systems, they are useful tools for probing
learners' ability to instantiate sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge
in interaction.
Apologies and complaints may occur in response to the same event: apologies as
remedial activity produced by the offender, and complaints as expression of disapproval
voiced by the offended party. Olshtain and Weinbach (Chapter 5) examine
cross-cultural and situational variability in the choice of complaining strategies, and
the interaction of contextual assessment with strategy choice. Data were collected
by means of the same types of instrument as in Bergman and Kasper's apology
study: production questionnaires to elicit responses to offensive events, and assessment
questionnaires to probe for informants' perceptions of contextual factors.
Olshtain and Weinbach's chapter reports on three studies: a study of complaint
performance by native speakers of Hebrew, a cross-cultural comparison of complaining
by native speakers of Hebrew and of British and American English, and an
interlanguage study, comparing complaint realization by nonnative speakers of
Hebrew at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels with that of native speakers.
The responses by the native speakers of Hebrew were found to cluster around
three strategies: expressing disapproval, voicing an explicit complaint (such as "you
should have done x"), and giving a warning. Strategy choice was determined by
interlocutors' status relationship, low-high constellations prompting less severe
complaints; equal and high-low relationships, more severe ones. The cross-cultural
comparison yielded highly consistent response patterns across the three native
speaker groups. An important feature to note is that although informants were given

62 Speech Act Realization
the choice to opt out, two-thirds of the respondents did choose to complain. It will
be a matter for future studies to examine whether members of more
interdependence-oriented cultures choose to abstain from complaining more frequently.
Learners' complaints differed from those of the target group on all selected
measures. The nonnative speakers produced longer complaint utterances, chose
more severe complaining strategies, and used both more softeners and intensifiers.
Strategy choice was influenced by interlocutors' relative status, social distance, and
the hearer's obligation to have avoided the offensive act. Both groups produced the
most talk when no explicit hearer obligation existed, and the least when there was a
clear contractual violation. Increasing obligation resulted in more severe strategies
in both groups. However, the learners produced longer utterances when the hearer's
obligation was implicit, and they opted for more severe strategies than the native
speakers when an explicit obligation had been violated. Just as in Eisenstein and
Bodman's findings, the learner responses in this study, too, displayed more variability,
suggesting that these nonnative speakers were not quite accustomed to target
conventions of means and forms.
Conventionality of means and forms has predominantly been studied in the
context of requests. In a variety of request contexts, native and nonnative speakers
of different languages were shown to prefer conventionalized indirect request strategies.
In interlanguage pragmatics in particular, little attention has been given to
indirectness in requests that is not conventionalized in terms of particular illocutionary
force indicating frames (though conventionality of means is extant in indirect
requests, too). Weizman (Chapter 6), therefore, in her study on requestive hints,
makes an important contribution to understanding interlanguage requesting. Since
previous research has shown hints to be less polite than conventionally indirect
requests, their prime function is not one of politeness. Rather, their inherent opacity
(opacity of illocution, proposition, or both) enables speaker and hearer to exploit
their deniability potential. Based on this functional analysis, Weizman hypothesized
that learners make more use of hints than native speakers, employing them as a
communication strategy in compensation for the lack of conventionalized forms.
Comparison of the hinting patterns in native and nonnative speakers' responses to
eight request contexts in a discourse completion questionnaire did not reveal greater
reliance on hinting by learners than by native speakers, hence no support for the
communication strategy hypothesis. Length of residence in the target community
had no effect on the amount of hints used, suggesting that learners possess the
ability to employ nonconventional indirectness from early on. The nonnative speakers
matched native speaker options in the contextual distribution of hints and preference
for substrategies. Both groups preferred hints with the greatest illocutionary
opacity, confirming the deniability potential hypothesis. The nonnative speakers,
however, employed more redundant combinations, suggesting that learners invest
more linguistic activity in reaching their communicative goals even when hinting.
This part concludes with a study by Takahashi and Beebe (Chapter 7) on corrections
performed by Japanese learners of English in comparison with native speakers
of Japanese and American English. In their previous studies of face-threatening acts
carried out by the same groups of native and nonnative speakers, the authors had
found distinctive patterns of style shifting according to interlocutor status. Focusing

Speech Act Realization 63
on the modification of corrections by means of positive remarks and softeners, the
Japanese learners' style-shifting patterns were clearly influenced by transfer from
Japanese. While Japanese learners, reflecting native sociopragmatic norms, styleshifted
more than American respondents when refusing, contradicting and disagreeing,
this study indicated dramatic style-shifting in the American speakers' use of
positive remarks. Their prevalent use of positive remarks in the high-low condition,
which was not matched by the Japanese learners or native speakers, provides more
evidence of a positive politeness orientation in American interaction, and greater
emphasis on status congruence in Japanese conversational behavior. The study also
confirms Beebe and Takahashi's earlier claim that pragmatic transfer prevails in
higher proficiency learners.
The five chapters on interlanguage speech act realization highlight a number of
important issues: (1) even quite proficient learners tend to have less control over the
conventions of forms and means used by native speakers in the performance of
linguistic action; (2) differences between learners' and native speakers' sociopragmatic
perceptions of comparable speech events are systematically related to differences
in their speech act performance; (3) transfer at the pragmalinguistic and
sociopragmatic level persists at higher levels of proficiency; (4) learners produce
more speech than native speakers when the task is less demanding on their control
skills; and (5) researchers must pay close attention to the constraints of different data
collection instruments on learners' performance.
References
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.
Searle, J. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, 1-23.

3
Expressing Gratitude
in American English
MIRIAM EISENSTEIN and JEAN BODMAN
Expressing gratitude has important social value in American English. One indication
of its importance is that it is one of the few functions that most speakers can
remember being explicitly taught as children. Used frequently in a wide range of
interpersonal relationships, this function, when appropriately expressed, can engender
feelings of warmth and solidarity among interlocutors. Conversely, the
failure to express gratitude adequately can have negative consequences for the
relationship of speaker and listener.
Expressions of gratitude can range from simple, phatic utterances to lengthy
communicative events mutually developed by both the giver and the recipient of a
gift, favor, reward, or service. Most native speakers of English on a conscious level
associate the expression of gratitude with the words "thank you"; however, they are
unaware of the underlying complex rules and the mutuality needed for expressing
gratitude in a manner satisfying to both the giver and recipient. Similarly, second
and foreign language learners are unaware of the underlying rules for expressing
gratitude in English; in fact, they usually assume that the expression of gratitude is
universal and remain unaware of significant differences in its cross-cultural realization
(Eisenstein & Bodman, 1986). Because of this, the function of expressing
gratitude is particularly difficult for learners to perform successfully.
Background
The importance of social interaction rituals, such as expressing gratitude, was
addressed by Goffman (1967). He explained that every individual has a potential
emotional response to others which is related to his or her "face," defined as "an
image of self, delineated in terms of approved social attributes" (5). Violation of
social norms may result in loss of face with accompanying negative feelings on the
part of one or both participants. Brown and Levinson (1987) identify the desire for
approval as "positive face" and define "negative face" as "the desire to be unim-
64

Expressing Gratitude in American English 65
peded in one's actions" (13). Some acts, verbal and nonverbal, may be counter to
the "face wants" of speaker or hearer and, therefore, are "face-threatening acts"
(65). Brown and Levinson categorize expressing thanks as a face-threatening act in
which the speaker acknowledges a debt to the hearer—thus threatening the speaker's
negative face. Searle (1969) stresses the positive aspects of thanking, which he
defines as an illocutionary act performed by a speaker based on a past act performed
by the hearer that was beneficial. Leech (1983) describes thanking as a convivial
function whose goal of stating appreciation helps maintain a polite and friendly
social atmosphere. Thus, it is apparent that expressing gratitude is a complex act
potentially involving both positive as well as negative feelings on the part of giver
and receiver.
Thomas (1983) identifies the difficulty encountered by nonnative speakers in the
cross-cultural realization of speech acts. She notes that misunderstandings can arise
not only from language limitations (pragmalinguistic failure) but also from inadequate
utilization of social conventions and values in the target culture (sociopragmatic
failure). Coulmas (1981) views thanking in cross-cultural perspective and underscores
the challenge for speakers of European and Asian languages to express
thanking adequately to each other. He posits a useful distinction between thanks that
entail indebtedness to the addressee and thanks that imply no indebtedness.
It is useful to keep in mind that not all expressions using the words "thank you"
refer to gratitude. Rubin (1983) collected natural data on uses of the words "thank
you" that referred not only to gratitude but also to other language functions, such as
compliments and closings. In fact, Hymes (1971) states that "thank you" as it is
used in British English is often more of a formal marker than an expression of
gratitude, which is its more common function in American English.
Experiment 1
We began investigating how gratitude is expressed by observing its use in natural
contexts by native speakers of American English. Data were either audiotaped and
transcribed at a later time or written down as field notes. We focused on only those
utterances whose illocutionary force was that of gratitude in response to receiving a
gift, favor, reward or service. 1 Fifty situations were identified in which expressions
of gratitude occurred. These ranged from short, formulaic expressions that appeared
to be highly ritualized to intricate and lengthy interchanges conveying deeply felt
emotions. As a result of a series of pilot studies, we constructed a questionnaire
containing fourteen of these situations designed to elicit expressions of gratitude.
The pilot studies revealed the importance of describing the roles and relationships of
the interlocutors in the questionnaire in detail as well as carefully describing specific
contexts for the situations; we found that small changes in these variables significantly
affected the nature of the responses. Fifty-six native speakers of American
English, representing both males and females, a range of ages, diverse social
backgrounds, and natives of a variety of regions with the United States, were asked
to write responses to each of the fourteen situations.
The written data elicited by the questionnaire were analyzed by coding each

66 Speech Act Realization
utterance in terms of its underlying speech act. For example, on leaving a dinner
party, a guest said:
Thank you for inviting me. I had a great time.
We coded this utterance as "Thanking + Expressing Pleasure." Wherever possible,
we used functional categories described in the literature (van Ek, 1976, Searle,
1969); however, in some instances we had to create our own tentative terminology
where appropriate descriptors had not been previously identified. For example, after
opening a gift, a subject responded:
Oh, how beautiful. How did you know It's just what I wanted!
The italicized utterances were clearly not intended to express the functions of
Asking for Information or Expressing Need. We tentatively coded them as "Expressing
Intimacy: Mind Reading," an indirect compliment acknowledging the accuracy
of the giver's understanding of the receiver's unexpressed desires.
The fourteen questionnaire items are briefly summarized in Appendix 1. Some
of these items produced phatic, ritualized responses, such as brief comments to a
bus driver (Item 2), a cashier (Item 5), a garage attendant (Item 13), and a friend
handing over a newspaper (Item 12). In post hoc interviews, native American
English speakers characterized utterances, such as
Thanks.
Thank you. Have a nice day.
as virtually automatic. The expression of gratitude in situations such as these appears
to be a social amenity rather than a genuine expression of gratitude and has
been identified by Rubin (1983) as the "bald thank-you."
Some other items on the questionnaire produced relatively short, but more
creative responses than those described above. Swift thanking followed by a single
brief comment was typical for Item 6 (a friend bringing attention to a bit of food on
a diner's face) and Item 8 (thanking a spouse for spontaneously helping around the
house). Typically, our respondants felt (although a great more could have been said)
that comments like
Thanks. You're a sweetheart.
(coded as Thanking + Expressing Affection) and
Thanks. That was really nice of you.
(coded as Thanking + Complimenting the Giver) were sufficient in recognizing a
spouse's thoughtfulness.
The remaining items elicited and seemed to require much more complex and
lengthy expressions of gratitude. These were most successfully analyzed as speech
act sets (Cohen & Olshtain, 1981), groups of semantic formulae that together
achieve the appropriate language for a particular situation. In appreciation for a
generously offered $500 loan, a characteristic response was:
You're a lifesaver. Thanks. I'll never forget it. You really can't imagine what this
means to me.

Expressing Gratitude in American English 67
(Coded as Complimenting the Person/Action + Thanking + Expressing Indebtedness
+ Expressing an Inability to Articulate Deep Feelings). Our respondents, when
interviewed later, indicated that in these situations gratitude was much more challenging
to express. It was not uncommon for the respondents to state with humility
that their linguistic skills were inadequate for the task. American native speakers,
rating the appropriateness of the utterances, found humbling admissions such as this
not only expressed the depth of the feelings in a satisfactory manner, but also
adequately expressed gratitude.
It is useful to consider two characteristics that Goffman (1967) describes that are
operant in social interactions—"demeanor" and "deference"—in order to understand
the complex linguistic task speakers face. "Demeanor" refers to the social
desirability of an individual reflected through his or her appearance and behavior.
"Deference" is the appreciation an individual exhibits to another through his or her
words and actions. Expressing gratitude requires that the recipient of a gift, favor, or
service exhibit both proper demeanor and proper deference in situations in which he
or she is feeling especially vulnerable. The recipient must show humility and
gratitude without losing dignity and control. The giver must remain sensitive to the
needs of the receiver and also behave with adequate deference and demeanor. The
struggle to find the words and exhibit acceptable demeanor and deference that are
mutually satisfactory is highly challenging. In addition, the difficulty of the task is
further compounded by the fact that both demeanor and deference in expressing
gratitude are culturally bound and, hence, difficult to translate from one sociolinguistic
context to another.
The lengthiest speech act sets were produced by situations that caused the
recipient to feel unusually grateful or indebted to the giver. None of the individual
semantic formulas constituting a set could be identified as more salient or of a
higher order than the others. Instead, the members of each set interacted synergistically
to express gratitude appropriately. Furthermore, the functions within the
speech act set did not appear in a fixed order. The direct expression of thanking, for
example, could be stated at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the set.
While greater emotion sometimes provoked longer speech act sets, this did not
occur when there was considerable social distance between interlocutors. Item 4 (a
vice president of personnel offers a relatively new employee a raise) elicited surprisingly
brief expressions of gratitude. This confirms one aspect of Wolfson's
Bulge Theory (1989), identifying brevity in communications between socially distant
interlocutors. However, we did not find in all cases the terseness that Wolfson
(1989) identified in communications among intimates. While the situation in which
a spouse is helpful around the house did produce a brief response, the situations
involving gift giving and loaning a large amount of money evinced quite lengthy
responses despite the intimacy of the interlocutor relationship.
Our data revealed that, although speakers are free to say anything they wish in
expressing gratitude (and there were occasional examples of highly creative speech
act sets), most speakers seemed to draw from a finite pool of conventionalized
expressions and ideas. Within the speech act set of expressing gratitude for a gift,
many native respondants referred to the lack of necessity for such generosity by
using expressions such as "Oh, you shouldn't have" and "You didn't have to."

68 Speech Act Realization
In accepting the loan, native speakers stated their inability to express their
appreciation sufficiently:
God, I don't know how to thank you.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate this.
1 can't thank you enough.
I can't tell you what this means to me.
Experiment 2
The same questionnaire that was administered to the native speakers of American
English was given to 67 nonnative college students in advanced-level ESL classes.
They were middle-class and represented fifteen language backgrounds—the largest
groups were Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The majority of
these learners had been in the United States for approximately two years, although
the range was as low as three months and as high as five years. The nonnative
speakers were asked first to respond to the items in the questionnaire in English.
Subsequently, they were given the opportunity to respond to the same situations in
their native languages if they wished. Twenty-five of the subjects provided us with
LI responses to the situations. (Bilingual speakers were asked to provide literal and
figurative translations of the LI responses.) This allowed us to consider instances of
cross-linguistic influence.
Using native speaker data as a baseline, we rated nonnative written responses.
Rating descriptors can be found in Table 3.1. The nonnatives were successful on the
whole in responding in a nativelike manner to situations requiring simple, phatic,
ritualized expressions of gratitude. However, items requiring complex speech act
sets (Items 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 14) were problematic for many of our nonnative
subjects. They were not able to approximate acceptable native speech acts in a
significant number of cases. In fact, their difficulties in adequately expressing
gratitude in a nativelike manner were extensive and severe. (See Table 3.2 for a
summary of ratings on nonnative responses.)
Table 3.1. Acceptability Scale for Nonnative Responses
Not acceptable
Problematic
Acceptable
Nativelike perfect
Not comprehensible
Resistant
A violation of a social norm, a faux pas, a likely instance of sociopragmatic
failure.
An error that might cause misunderstanding, but of a less serious nature.
Language so strange, unexpected, or garbled that interpretation is difficult.
Instances of pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic failure.
Clear and appropriate language, but containing small errors that do not interfere
seriously with native speakers' understanding.
Close to native responses in content, syntax, and lexicon.
An utterance that is extremely hard, if not impossible, to comprehend.
Often an instance of pragmalinguistic failure.
Nonnative participants, although finding it possible to answer some items,
refused to answer others, or gave reasons why they could not or would
not answer particular items.

Expressing Gratitude in American English
69
Table 3.2. Summary of Results of All Students on Individual Questions
Question
Question
topic
No
response
Not
acceptable
Problematical
Acceptable
Perfect
NC*
Resistant
1
3
$5.00
Sweater
5
7.5%
2
3.0%
3
4.5%
3
4.5%
9
13.4%
19
28.4%
9
13.4%
14
20.9%
39
58.2%
29
43.3%
1
1.5%
0
0%
1
1.5%
0
0%
4
7
Raise
$500.00
5
7.5%
9
13.4%
10
14.9%
3
4.5%
16
23.9%
14
20.9%
14
20.9%
15
22.4%
18
26.9%
21
31.3%
1
1.5%
1
1.5%
3
4.5%
4
6.0%
9
Lunch
5
3.0%
11
16.4%
22
32.8%
9
13.4%
14
20.9%
1
1.5%
5
7.5%
10
Farewell
14
20.9%
7
10.4%
21
31.3%
11
16.4%
13
19.4%
0
0%
0
0%
14
Dinner
7
10.4%
2
3.0%
24
35.8%
23
34.3%.
11
16.4%
0
0%
0
0%
*Not comprehensible.
In post hoc interviews, some nonnative speakers expressed a belief that they did
not do well in responding to some situations. They attributed their shortcomings to a
lack of real-life experience with some of the situations either because of their limited
social roles (e.g., homemakers who had no experience in the business world) or
because our situations lacked social reality in their native cultures (e.g., individuals
who felt very uncomfortable with the situation involving the large loan). Although,
in post hoc interviews, some native speakers expressed the same reservations, all
were, nevertheless, willing and able to find the appropriate language to respond to
the situations.
Analysis showed that ease or difficulty in responding appropriately to particular
items stemmed from linguistic factors as well as cultural ones. An analysis of poor
responses indicated that nonnatives lacked the words and the syntax to work their
way through culturally familiar and unfamiliar situations. Our data contained many
examples of syntactic errors (e.g., "I consider change a job") and lexical problems
including difficulties with intensifiers (e.g., "I very appreciate"), word order (e.g.,
"I'll pay back you"), idioms (e.g., "Thank you. Sound is good."), prepositions
(e.g., "I hope to see you by us"), and choice of words (e.g., "It is so glad to me that
I have such kind of good friend").
Table 3.3 shows the percentages of students whose responses were scored "Acceptable"
and "Nativelike/Perfect." While Japanese speakers of English are generally
thought to be very polite, they performed poorly on paper compared to the other
groups in our study. Possible explanations for this include the lack of cultural
congruity between Japanese and American cultures and the fact that written data do
not reflect nonverbal cues and prosodic features which might serve to soften responses
in real-life situations. The difficulty in cross-cultural communication between
Japanese and English speakers is well documented in the research of Beebe
and Takahashi (1989a,b). A revealing study by Coulmas (1981) shows that Japanese
speakers have particular difficulty in English with those expressions of gratitude that

70 Speech Act Realization
Table 3.3. "Acceptable" and "Native-like/Perfect"
Ratings by Language Group
Language
background
Japanese
Spanish
Korean
Chinese
Russian
Acceptable and
nativelike/perfect (%)
30.2
34.0
36.0
48.5
66.6
Nativelike/perfect (%)
14.8
20.0
23.0
28.1
58.3
imply indebtedness. In Japanese, Coulmas explains, an appropriate expression of
gratitude acknowledges this debt by using the same expressions as would be required
for an apology (e.g., Sore-wa kyoshuku desu, which literally means "I feel
ashamed," can function as "thank you" or "I'm sorry" [89]). Brown and Levinson
(1987) explain that, unlike England and the United States, Japan is a "debt-sensitive
culture" in which thanks can be expressed, in effect, by saying, "I am humiliated, so
awful is my debt" (247).
By contrast, the relative success of the Russian participants in the study does not
reflect the general American perception that Russians often express themselves
inappropriately. Perhaps expressing gratitude is not one of the problem areas for
them, or it is possible that judgments in this study reflect the limitations in the
written channel, as might be the case with the Japanese participants. Interestingly,
the Russian participants were most resistant in expressing themselves when they felt
insecure or when they felt that the situations were not to be taken seriously. It may
be that maintaining adequate demeanor played an important part in the behavior of
these respondants. (See Eisenstein & Bodman, 1986, for more information on these
data.)
Experiment 3
In our earlier work, discussed above, we noted that naturally occurring expressions
of gratitude were different in some respects from our written data. 2 In an attempt to
include the influence of intonation and prosodic features in our data, we administered
the questionnaire orally by reading each situation to ten native speakers and
taping their responses. Transcripts were almost identical to the language of the
written questionnaires. Some prosodic features seemed to add to the perceived
sincerity and effectiveness of the gratitude expressed. Emotion was conveyed by
tone as well as words. The range of emotion was more evident in the audiotapes.
Gratitude expressed to socially distant individuals was clearly reserved in tone in
comparison with effusive warmth and enthusiasm evidenced between friends and
intimates.
In post hoc interviews, the native speakers stated that they had found the process
awkward and had ambivalent feelings about the naturalness of their responses. They
felt that they would say much more in a natural situation. In fact, this was corroborated
by the frequent uneasy pauses in their responses. It was as though the subjects

Expressing Gratitude in American English 71
were waiting for someone to reply to their initial expression of gratitude before they
could continue. Dubin (personal communication) has noted similar difficulties with
people leaving messages on telephone answering machines. This led us to postulate
that expressing gratitude might not be merely a language function that existed as a
response to a beneficial event, but might, instead, be a negotiated and interactive
event that had greater social significance.
Experiment 4
In light of the importance to our subjects of interacting with the giver in order to
express themselves fully and naturally in expressing gratitude, we used the same
situations to set up role-plays that we hoped would reveal the interactive nature of
how gratitude is expressed. In addition, during this period, we continued to collect
naturally occurring examples. Some samples of role-plays and natural dialogues
appear in Appendix 2. Our corpus consisted of 98 role-plays. Thirty-four were
performed by native pairs, 40 by nonnative pairs and 24 by natives paired with
nonnatives. The participants were literate, middle-class adults from a variety of
social and ethnic backgrounds. Role-plays were recorded and transcribed for subsequent
analysis. The procedures described in the earlier experiments were then
followed.
We found that the role-plays and natural situations incorporated the same words
and semantic formulas that appeared in the written data. In this sense, our written
data were representative of certain aspects of natural language use. For example, the
following expressions occurred under all conditions in response to receiving a gift:
It's beautiful.
It's just what I needed.
How did you know
You shouldn't have.
Yet the role-plays went beyond the written data by providing us with additional
insights into the functions of thanking and responding to thanks as they exist in a
conversational interaction. Similar findings comparing oral and written data have
been reported by Beebe and Cummings (1985) and DeCapua and Dunham (1989).
Just as role-play data gave us additional information through the inclusion of conversational
turns, natural data was even richer and more revealing because it evidenced
restatements of the same information using slightly different language and
showed that the same function recurred over time.
In analyzing the role-plays, we found that the language expressed by the giver
(of the gift, favor, reward, or service) is crucial to enabling the receiver to convey
gratitude successfully. The giver prompts and comments throughout the development
of the speech act set. Prompts appear to function as linguistic enabling devices,
allowing the receiver to reassure the giver of his or her gratitude. Examples of
prompts are:
1 hope it fits.
1 hope you like it.
How was your lunch . . . did you like it
Are you sure it's enough

72 Speech Act Realization
Comments seem to keep the conversation moving by filling a turn-taking opportunity
and giving the thanker additional cues on how to thank the giver.
That'll keep you warm.
It should be washable. Machine washable.
We're going to miss you.
It was nice having your.
There is evidence in our data that the act of giving may be perceived as disrupting
the social equilibrium. Giving places the receivers in a position of obligation. The
givers can mitigate the disequilibrium by downplaying the importance of the gift,
favor, reward, or service (e.g., "Here's a little something I picked up for you").
Some givers also attempt to downplay the seriousness of the event by introducing
humor. They can also reassure receivers by stating that the act of giving brings
them pleasure and by claiming that the gesture has caused them no inconvenience.
The giver can have an important role in reassuring the receiver that it is all right to
take. Note the following interchange from natural data regarding the $5.00 loan:
1: Oh, no, I don't want to bother you.
2: Really, I have plenty. Believe me, you can have it.
Likewise, to restore the balance of the social relationship, the receiver needs to
express the appropriate amount of appreciation to the giver. In our natural data, we
noted that the receiver continued to thank the giver using a variety of strategies until
the giver indicated that enough had been said. The giver often indicated his or her
intent to end the thanking episode by abruptly nominating a change of topic.
The nonnative speakers had difficulty replicating several aspects of the native
model. Nonnative role-plays were often as much as fifty percent shorter than those
of natives. In some instances, even the advanced nonnatives in our study lacked the
language to express themselves more fully. (See Appendix 2, Dialogues 6 and 7.)
This is in contrast to results reported by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986). In
attempting to find the right words, the advanced learners they studied said too much
and were perceived as verbose. While our data showed that some individual turns of
nonnatives were longer because of hesitations, cirumlocutions, and searches for the
right words, the conversations taken as a whole were not long enough for natives to
feel that gratitude had been adequately conveyed.
Another aspect that nonnatives failed to replicate was the warm and sincere tone
that natives conveyed when they expressed gratitude. In our first study, we questioned
whether the nonnatives would be able to compensate for their lexical and
syntactic difficulties by sounding and acting very appreciative. We found, unfortunately,
that those students who lacked fluency and had to search continuously for
words also spoke with an unconvincing tone. When native speakers were asked to
judge these nonnative samples, they stated that the nonnatives sounded insincere.
Those students who were more fluent, by contrast, had a more nativelike tone and
sounded truly grateful.
In our native data, there was a definite rhythm in the interactions of the interlocutors.
In order for the gifts, services, rewards, or favors to be accepted successfully,
a mutually agreed-upon "script" needed to be followed. As a result, there

Expressing Gratitude in American English 73
was more frequent communication breakdown when two nonnatives conversed than
when one member of the pair was a native. The nonnatives' language flowed better
when they had the support of a native speaker. When a favor or a gift needed to be
repaid, native speakers often explicitly stated their intention to do so as a part of
their thanks. For example, in expressing gratitude for the small loan, a considerable
number of natives were very specific about repayment: "Thanks a million. I'll pay
you back next Monday." In some instances the intention to repay was stated in more
general terms: "We hope you'll come over to our place sometime soon."
Nonnatives sometimes did not express reciprocity or did so in an inappropriate
manner; e.g., "Thank you very much for dinner. You will come to our house next
week" In terms of the time mentioned, natives characterized this offer of reciprocity
as being offered too specifically. They felt that the nonnatives were in too much of
a hurry to pay them back. The overall offer, they felt, sounded too abrupt and
demanding. Natives felt that they were being "put on the spot" to obligate themselves.
In studying the groups and subgroups in our sample, it became apparent that
cross-cultural differences in language values and customs all contributed to potential
misunderstanding. These issues are addressed by Thomas (1983) in her discussion
of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure. Furthermore, Blum-Kulka and
Olshtain (1986) note that pragmatic principles are subject to both intercultural and
intracultural variation. Some Anglo-American subjects said that they could not
conceive of revealing to their friends that they were in need of money. Russian,
Ukranian, Chinese, and German subjects stated that they, too, would find lack of
money a source of shame and would have serious difficulty borrowing it from a
friend. In receiving a gift, several groups indicated that they would probably put the
gift aside and open it at a later time to avoid social embarrassment. Chinese participants
explained that their cultural values demanded that an emphasis be placed on
the presence of the guest rather than on a material object presented by the guest.
Other Asian, Greek, and Anglo-American subjects indicated that they would probably
say little about the gift and open it later when others were not present. However,
some Americans and Hispanics informed us that it was customary for them to open
a gift in front of the giver to share the enjoyment.
Expressions of gratitude occur at the time of giving and, in our natural data, are
found to reoccur later. For Anglo-American subjects, this reentry of thanks is as
important as the original thanks, which would have to be performed out of politeness.
A written note or phone call at a later date is not only highly valued but often
expected. However, in traditional Jewish-American culture, important interactions
tend to occur face to face; writing or calling are considered less meaningful. Our
Polish and Puerto Rican subjects also preferred thanks to be conveyed in person.
The cross-cultural complexity of this language function was also revealed by
subjects who stated that expressions of gratitude offered in a context they considered
inappropriate could be perceived as distancing, insulting, or rude. In many cultures,
the words "thank you" are not commonly used to express appreciation to family
members for acts of kindness considered part of their social roles. A Puerto Rican
informant who had lived for many years in the United States described how hurt and
angry her father became when she thanked him for helping her take care of her son,
his grandchild. Her mother called berating her:

74 Speech Act Realization
How could you have been so thoughtless You thanked your father. He was happy
to take care of Johnnie. Have you forgotten how to behave He's your father and
he loves you. How could you be so cold—to thank him
Compliments relating to the father's kindness would have been better received.
The opposite occurred in the case of an American family who welcomed a distant
relative from Argentina into their home. After a month had passed during which the
family had extended themselves personally and financially for their guest, they
became increasingly annoyed that the relative rarely expressed appreciation for their
efforts with the exception of an occasional terse "thank you." In Argentina, favors
for family members are expected as part of the warmth and bonding of the family
unit. While this is also true in American culture, the explicit statement of gratitude
is required after each event. In many cultures it is felt that gratitude and the intent to
reciprocate need not be expressed overtly. In fact, it might be considered insulting to
do so. Among friends and relatives, reciprocity is taken for granted. In the Republic
of Croatia in Yugoslavia, for example, thanking behavior must be judicious. If
people are thanked excessively (more times than necessary or with inappropriate
length or enthusiasm), this behavior is interpreted not as expressing gratitude but as
an indirect solicitation for more gifts or favors.
Another area of cross-cultural difference arose from the high value placed on
modesty and humility by several cultures in our sample. A Chinese informant
indicated that modesty is required in responding to the offer of a raise:
Thank you very much. But I think I have not done so well to get a raise. Anyway,
I'd try to do better.
Also, as mentioned above, apologizing appears to be associated with expressions of
gratitude in some cultures. A Japanese participant responded to the offer of the raise:
I'm sorry. 1 will try harder in the future.
Another Japanese, in response to the $500 loan, said:
I'm sorry. I'll always remember the debt of gratitude.
Americans find these kinds of utterances difficult to interpret and find them uncomfortable
and confusing.
Conclusion
Our data show that thanking is a speech act that is mutually developed. It can
involve a complex series of interactions and encodes cultural values and customs.
Both the giver and the thanker collaborate in the development of a successful
thanking episode. Because expressing gratitude involves "face wants" in the sense
that the speaker expresses both approval of and indebtedness to the receiver of
thanks, the feelings of the interlocutors are closely tied to this interaction. Our study
and those of others reveal that, while thanking appears to be a universal function, it
is accomplished differently in contrasting cultures, whose values may focus differentially
on the various components that constitute expressions of gratitude.

Expressing Gratitude in American English 75
In methodological terms, our studies reveal that, while written and oral questionnaire
data miiTor the words and expressions used in conveying gratitude, roleplays
reveal the interactive aspects of the function more fully. Although natural data
are most indicative of the whole process, role-plays have the advantage of providing
enough control to allow meaningful comparisons to be made. An integration of all
four kinds of data was effective in helping us understand how native and nonnatives
express gratitude in English.
Finally, it was evident that even advanced learners of English have considerable
difficulty adequately expressing gratitude. They need information on the nature of
what to say, the language used to express it, and the context in which it is needed,
"rom a pedagogical perspective, role-plays can serve not only as a diagnostic tool
for teachers, but can also provide much needed practice for learners. Ideally, with
their heightened awareness, learners can also observe outside the classroom the use
of pragmatic functions in social interaction and vehicles that depict such interaction
(e.g., dramas, soap operas). It may also be helpful for students to compare English
models to their own speech in order to enhance their awareness of the pragmalinguistic
and sociopragmatic rules of English.
Appendix 1: The Questionnaire
Please read the following short descriptions of situations in which you might find yourself.
Think of what you might say in response to this situation. Write your response (if any) in the
space provided. Say as much or as little as you wish—you may choose to say nothing in
several circumstances.
1. It's Friday. You look in your wallet and notice that you only have $2.00. Your good
friend at work notices this and hears you say, 'Darn, I'll have to go to the bank.' Your
friend asks if you need money, and you say that you forgot to go to the bank. Your
friend says, 'I have plenty. How much do you need' You say, 'Could you lend me
$5.00 I'll pay you back on Monday.' Your friend says, 'Sure. Are you sure you
don't need more than that' You say you don't. Your friend gives you the $5.00.
2. You board the bus, pay your money and take a seat near the front of the bus. Just
before your stop, you signal the driver to stop. You move to the front, the bus comes
to a stop, and the doors open.
3. It's your birthday, and you're having a few people over for dinner. A friend brings
you a present. You unwrap it and find a blue sweater.
4. You work for a large company. The Vice-President of Personnel calls you into his
office. He tells you to sit down. You feel a little nervous, because you have only been
working there for six months. The Vice-President says, 'You're doing a good job. In
fact, we are so pleased with you that I'm going to give you a $20.00 a week raise.'
5. In the supermarket, the cashier puts your groceries in bags and turns to begin
checking out the next customer. You pick up your bags to leave.
6. At the table in a restaurant a friend says, 'You have something on your face.' You ask
where. Your friend tells you. You rub your face and ask, 'Is it off" Your friend says
that it is.
7. You find yourself in sudden need of money—$500.00. You mention this to a friend.

76 Speech Act Realization
Your friend immediately offers to lend it to you. You are surprised and very grateful.
Your friend writes out a check for $500.00 and gives it to you. At first you say, 'Oh
no, I didn't mean for you to lend it to me. I couldn't take it.' Your friend says,
'Really, it's all right. What are friends for' After your friend insists again, you take
the check.
8. You are married. Both you and your spouse work. You come home late from work
and find that your spouse has done some work around the house that you had
promised to do, but had not had a chance to do.
9. Your friend suggests going out to lunch. You say that you'd like to go, but you only
have $2.00. Your friend says, 'Ah, don't worry. I'll take you today.' Your friend
takes you to a very nice restaurant—a much more expensive one than the ones you
usually go to. You have a wonderful meal. Your friend pays, and you get up to leave.
10. You have just gotten a new and better job. A friend at the office tells you she has
organized a farewell party for you.
11. You have just gotten your hair cut in a new style, and you like it better than the old
way. Your friend sees you and says, 'Hey, you've got a new haircut. It looks nice.'
12. You are sharing an apartment with a friend. You're both sitting and relaxing in the
living room. You ask your friend to hand you the newspaper which is nearby. Your
friend gives you the newspaper.
13. You pick up your car in a parking garage. As the attendant who drove up your car
walks past you to get the next person's car, you hand him a tip.
14. You have been invited to the home of a rather new friend. You have dinner with him
and his wife and a few other friends of theirs. The food was great, and you really
enjoyed the evening. As you leave, your hosts accompany you to the door.
Appendix 2
Dialogue 1
(A role-play between two native speakers)
WOMAN 1: I've got something for you.
WOMAN 2: You do (takes package and unwraps) Oh, my goodness. Why did you do
this ... a blue sweater, (giggles) How did you know this is just what I
needed It's wonderful. Thank you. I'm so surprised!
WOMAN 1: (laughing) Price tag in it
WOMAN 2: I can really use this . . .
WOMAN 1: Good. I hope it fits.
WOMAN 2: Oh, I'm sure it will. Thank you. (goes to try it on) It's medium, I'm sure it
will. TA-DA!
WOMAN 1: (laughing) Yes, it does fit nicely.
WOMAN 2: Yes, it's just what I needed. That's really nice.
WOMAN 1: Wear it in good health.
WOMAN 2: Thank you.
WOMAN 1: So, how's everything (topic changes.)
Dialogue 2
(A role-play between two native speakers)
WOMAN 1: I've only got $2.00. What am I going to do now I guess I'll have to go to the
bank.

Expressing Gratitude in American English 77
WOMAN 2: Oh, you don't have to go to the bank. I have money. I can lend you some.
WOMAN 1: Oh no, I don't want to bother you. Thanks.
WOMAN 2: Really I have plenty. Believe me, you can have it.
WOMAN 1: Can you lend me $5.00, do you think
WOMAN 2: Yeah. Sure. Here.
WOMAN 1: Oh, I really appreciate this. Thanks.
WOMAN 2: You're welcome.
Dialogue 3
(Natural data—a conversation between two native speakers)
MOTHER: Another box, huh Oooo . . . what did you buy Oh, I shouldn't . . .
I thought when she went out I should tell her not to buy one thing.
DAUGHTER: Us. This is for you.
MOTHER: What
DAUGHTER: And this one is for me.
MOTHER: This is for me Ohhhhh.
DAUGHTER: That's for you.
MOTHER: Ohhh, Jeanie, what'd you do that for now
DAUGHTER: (giggles)
MOTHER: That's too much, (opening the gift box) Oooo! Oh, my, that's lovely. Lovely.
Oh my, Jeanie, that's pretty.
DAUGHTER: Open it up.
MOTHER: Ooo. Beautiful. Oh, yes.
DAUGHTER: See . . . That'll keep you warm.
MOTHER: Yes, I should say so. That's beautiful.
DAUGHTER: Good. I'm glad you like it. It should be washable. Machine washable.
MOTHER: Is it
DAUGHTER: I think so. Just toss it in the machine.
MOTHER: Ohh. Oh, my, that's lovely. Thank you.
DAUGHTER: Oh. you're welcome, (they kiss and laugh.) What are we having for dinner
Dialogue 4
(Natural data—a conversation between two native speakers)
MOTHER: (looking in a gift box of assorted pastries) Oooo. Oo. Oo. Oo.
DAUGHTER: You've got a choice.
MOTHER: Ohhh. You spend too much money.
DAUGHTER: No.
MOTHER: Oh, dear.
DAUGHTER: No.
MOTHER: Yes.
DAUGHTER: No, it was fine.
MOTHER: You shouldn't. I'll have to pay you.
DAUGHTER: No, no, no. (switches topic.)
Dialogue 5
(Natural data—A conversation among native speakers, a 12-year-old boy,
two men, and two women)
AUNT: Why don't you give Erik his
UNCLE: Erik Here's . . .
ERIK: Oh, thank you.
UNCLE: Your Christmas present.
ERIK: Thank you. (opening present) Oh! Excellent!

78 Speech Act Realization
AUNT: Do you like that
ERIK: I ... I've always wanted a good sweater. We were going to get one. Now I
don't need one. Excellent, thanks.
AUNT: Good.
UNCLE: Good.
AUNT: I don't know. It may be a little big.
DAD: Ooo. That looks great.
MOM: Oo-la-la!
DAD: Hey, Joe College.
MOM: Ooo. And that's a real wool one. Aww. That looks like an Eddie Bauer.
ERIK: Thank you.
MOM: Is it wool
AUNT: Yeah. It may be a little big. But I figure that . . . Erik . . . any minute now, it'll
fit.
MOM: Yeah. Oh ... handsome!
AUNT: It's a little big.
MOM: He was just talking about how he wanted some good-looking sweaters to wear to
school. That's what the kids are wearing. Oh, boy.
AUNT: (looking at the television) Hey, look, the Superbowl's coming on.
Dialogue 6
(A role-play between a Turkish man and a Brazilian woman)
MAN: This is very kind of you inviting ... eh ... to you birthday ... eh ...
party ... eh ... may I introduce you ... eh ... angora sweater if you
mind ... eh ... if you like a sweater.
WOMAN: Ay! Are you give me a sweater ... a blue sweater
MAN: A blue sweater . . . yes.
WOMAN: Ah ... Oh, that's wonderful. I really do like it.
MAN: I'm happy you like it.
WOMAN: I will. And ... eh ...
MAN: That's fine. And ... eh ... hoping to celebrate you next birthday all together
again.
WOMAN: And so you can give me another sweater! (laughing) This time red, okay
MAN: Yes, okay.
Dialogue 7
(A role-play between a French man and a Malaysian Chinese woman)
WOMAN: I know today's a special day. I brought something for you.
MAN: Why is this a special day Is a surprise
WOMAN: It's your birthday.
MAN: Oh, is birthday. Are you sure How did you know that
WOMAN: (long pause)
MAN: I'm really surprised, but ... uh ... I'm really at ease, but thank you very
much because that's very nice and I didn't know you learned it was my
birthday. I appreciate it.
WOMAN: Don't mention it. (gives him the present)
MAN: Wow! My God! But I like! Ah ... that's ... oh ... I like that. Thank you
very much.
WOMAN: Don't mention it.

Expressing Gratitude in American English 79
Dialogue 8
(A role-play between a Chinese woman and a Russian woman)
WOMAN 1: Since you have been work here ... uh ... very good and very diligent. I
like you very much. From next week I will raise your salary $15.00 every
week. Would you like this
WOMAN 2: Yes. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.
WOMAN 1: Don't mention it. . . . And ... uh ... that's all. Would you please go back
to your work
Dialogue 9
(A role-play between native English speakers)
1: How about going out to lunch this afternoon Are you free
2: I'm free, but I ... I don't know. 1 just didn't take enough with me. . .
1: Well, don't worry about it, I'll treat you.
2: No, I don't want you to do that.
1: It's okay. It's my pleasure.
2: (silence)
1: Next time you can treat me. Okay
2: Well, all right.
Dialogue 10
(A role-play between a Spanish man and a Hispanic woman)
WOMAN: Joe, 1 have a little problem. 1 just realize that I don't have any money with me
and the banks are closed now. Do you think is possible for you to lend me at
least ten dollars for the weekend
MAN: Ten dollars Do you need that money for what To eat or . . .
WOMAN: No . . . just to have some money with me for the weekend in case any emergency
comes up ...
MAN: Yes, I can. I can borrow . . .
WOMAN: I can lend you . . .
MAN: I can lend you, I can lend you ten dollars, but don't forget next Thursday . . .
when you . . . Yes, when you get paid, give me back ten dollars and if you
want to give me some interests . . . well . . .
WOMAN: (laughing) Oh ... thank you very much. I really appreciate that.
Appendix 3
The Role of the Giver
Offer
Here.
I'll take you.
How much do you need
Downplay the offer
Here's a little something.
Really, I have plenty.
I hate to eat alone.
Comment
It's washable.
Role of the Thanker
Hesitate
Oh, I couldn't.
Are you sure it's all right
Oh, come on. No!
Express surprise
For me
You're kidding!
Compliment
It's lovely.
This is nice.

80 Speech Act Realization
Prompt
I hope it fits.
Do you like it
Did you have a good time
Reassure
Really, it's all right.
What are friends for
React
Oh, good.
I'm glad you like it.
It was nice to see you.
Close
Well, good.
Don't worry about it.
It is/was my pleasure.
Don't mention it.
(Change topic)
You're so nice.
You're the best husband/wife in
the whole world.
Offer or suggestion of repayment
I'll pay you back on ...
Next time, I'll take you.
I hope we can do this again
sometime (soon).
If there is anything I can ever
do for you . . .
Re-thank
I love the sweater you gave me.
That was such a nice evening.
Thanks again for helping me
out. I don't know what I
would have done without you.
Notes
1. We noted that utterances containing words such as "thank you" or "thanks a lot" did
not always express gratitude. For example, in the exchange:
1: That haircut doesn't do a thing for you.
2: Thanks a lot! You really know how to make me feel good!
the illocutionary force of "thanks" is irritation rather than gratitude.
2. Further information on our findings regarding cross-linguistic and cross-cultural elements
in the written data will be integrated with our discussion on role-plays below since
many of the same elements appeared in the written data as well as the oral data.
References
Beebe, L. M., & Cummings, M. C. (1985). Speech act performance: A function of the data
collection procedure Paper presented at the Sixth Annual Sociolinguistics Colloquium,
TESOL Convention, New York.
Beebe, L. M., & Takahashi, T. (1989a). Do you have a bag Social status and patterned
variation in second language acquisition. In S. Gass, C. Madden, D. Preston &
L. Selinker (Eds.), Variation in second language acquisition: Discourse and pragmatics
(103-125). Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Beebe, L. M., & Takahashi, T. (1989b). Sociolinguistic variation in face-threatening speech
acts: Chastisement and disagreement. In M. Eisenstein (Ed.), The dynamic interlanguage:
Empirical studies in SL variation (199-218). New York: Plenum.
Blum-Kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. (1986). Too many words: Length of utterance and pragmatic
failure. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 8, 165-79.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, A., & Olshtain, E. (1981). Developing a measure of sociocultural competence: The
case of apology. Language Learning, 31, 113-34.

Expressing Gratitude in American English 81
Coulmas, F. (1981). Poison to your soul: Thanks and apologies contrastively viewed. In
F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational routine (66-91). The Hague: Mouton.
DeCapua, A., & Dunham, J. F. (1989). Interaction strategies in the requesting and giving of
advice. Paper presented at the Second Language Acquisition Circle, October 13,
1989, New York University, New York.
Eisenstein, M., & Bodman, J. W. (1986). "I very appreciate": Expressions of gratitude by
native and non-native speakers of American English. Applied Linguistics, 7, 167-85.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction rituals. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hymes, D. H. (1971). Sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking. In E. Ardener (Ed.),
Social anthropology and language (47-93). London: Tavistock.
Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.
Rubin, J. (1983). The use of "Thank you." Paper presented at the Sociolinguistics Colloquium,
TESOL Convention, Toronto, Canada.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4, 91-112.
van Ek, J. A. (1976). The threshold level for modern language learning in schools. London:
Longman.
Wolfson, N. (1989). The social dynamics of native and nonnative variation in complimenting
behavior. In M. Eisenstein (Ed.), The dynamic interlanguage: Empirical studies in SL
variation (219-36). New York: Plenum.

4
Perception and Performance
in Native and Nonnative Apology
MARC L. BERGMAN and GABRIELE KASPER
"I'm sorry, so sorry,
Please accept my apology ..."
BRENDA LEE, "I'm Sorry" (1958)
In terms of their actional characteristics, apologies relate in important ways to other
frequently studied expressive speech acts. Like the speech acts of thanking, complimenting,
and complaining, apologies occur post-event. Complimenting and thanking
involve events deemed praiseworthy by prevailing social norms; complaints and
apologies refer back to events that constitute norm infringements. By complimenting
and thanking, an event is made into a praiseworthy occasion; by complaining
about or apologizing for its occurrence, an event is made into a transgression. In
terms of value attribution, the relationship between event and speech act is reflexive
rather than unilateral. Complaints, thanks, and compliments commonly hold the
addressee to be causally involved in the preceding event; the agent assuming responsibility
for the event necessitating the apology is the speaker. Compliments differ
from thanks in that thanks require that the addressee's preceding action be beneficial
to the speaker; compliments refer to addressee-related events, which do not need to
be beneficial to anybody in particular. The actional descriptors referred to above
allow us to distinguish compliments, thanks, complaints, and apologies schematically
(Table 4.1).
Apologies can be defined as compensatory action to an offense in the doing of
which S was causally involved and which is costly to H. This conceptualization is
supported by Goffman's (1971) view of apologies as remedial interchanges, remedial
work serving to reestablish social harmony after a real or virtual offense. Following
Goffman's distinction of ritual and substantive compensation, apologies can be
classified into (1) those redressing virtual offenses, which are remedied by the sole
offering of an apologetic formula, and (2) those redressing actual damage inflicted
on the addressee, sometimes including an offer of material compensation. Both
kinds of apology have been demonstrated to vary cross-culturally.
82

Apology, Perception, and Performance 83
Table 4.1. Actional Features of Four Expressives
Event
e-Evaluation*
e-Actor
e-Recipient
Compliment
Thanking
Complaint
Apology
post
post
post
post
good
good
bad
bad
H
H
H
S
H
S
S
H
*e = event.
Ritualistic apologies are sometimes distinguished from substantive ones by different
formulae. Thus in (American) English, ritualistic apologies with the formula
"excuse me" are offered as territory invasion signals when addressing strangers
(e.g., prior to asking direction), as announcements of temporary absence from
ongoing interaction (e.g., in order to answer the phone), or upon virtual or real
intrusion of another person's physical space (e.g., passing somebody in a narrow
hallway). Borkin and Reinhart (1978) define the function of "excuse me" as "a
formula to remedy a past or immediately forthcoming breach of etiquette or other
light infraction of a social rule" (61). "I'm sorry," in their analysis, is used in a
wider range of contexts, especially "in remedial interchanges when a speaker's main
concern is about a violation of another person's right or damage to another person's
feelings" (61). Borkin and Reinhart's analysis is given strong empirical support by
House (1988). She found that in seven apology contexts involving substantive
offenses, native speakers of British English (n = 100) used "I'm sorry" up to 80%
of the time. In six of these contexts, "excuse me" did not figure at all, in one of them
it was used with negligible frequency (3%).
The ritualistic function of much apologetic behavior, and its cross-cultural variability,
has also been noted by Coulmas (1981) in his analysis of expressions of
gratitude and indebtedness in a number of Western languages as opposed to Japanese.
Coulmas notes that in many contexts requiring expressions of gratitude in
Western cultures, such as upon receiving a gift, Japanese requires an apologetic
formula such as "sumimasen." The function he ascribes to ritualistic apologies in
Japanese concurs with the functional properties of "excuse me" described by Borkin
and Reinhart (1978); namely, indicating "the speaker's willingness to conform to
conventional rules and social expectations. . . . Verbal apology occurs even if there
was no serious or real offence as a precaution against inadvert misconduct or
unanticipated negative interpretation of one's performance" (Coulmas, 1981,84).
While Borkin and Reinhart's (1978) analysis suggests that acquiring appropriate
formulas for ritualistic apology is problematic for nonnative speakers (NNS), substantive
apologies confront the learner with a more complex learning task. First (as
with ritualistic apologies), she has to identify the occurrence of an event that requires
apology. This may require restructuring her cultural knowledge as such
events have been shown to vary cross-culturally (Olshtain, 1983). Second, the
severity of the offense and the weights of contextual variables such as power and
distance need to be assessed—another potential trap as perceptions of these social
variables are also subject to cross-cultural variation (House, 1988; Vollmer &
Olshtain, 1989). Finally, appropriate output strategies have to be selected. While all

84 Speech Act Realization
available evidence points to a universally valid apology speech act set (Olshtain,
1989), preferences for strategy choice are contextually and cross-culturally at variance
(Olshtain, 1989). As Garcia (1989) has demonstrated, cultural differences do
not only obtain in preferences for local strategic choices but for global approaches to
the speech event, such as opting for a deference versus a solidarity style.
While we do not believe that language users actually go through the motions of
planning linguistic action in the serial fashion outlined above (Schmidt, Chapter 1),
appropriate apologizing requires the specified knowledge components, and the language
user's ability to access this knowledge fast and flexibly. In interlanguage (IL)
pragmatics, only a few studies have addressed the issue of how NNS apologize in
ongoing interaction with a native (NS) or NNS interlocutor, and the available
studies (Rasper, 1981; Trosborg, 1987; Garcia, 1989) have analyzed NNS's performance
in terms of their pragmatic knowledge (what semantic formulas do they use)
rather than examining how pragmatic knowledge is accessed under immediate processing
constraints.
Studies of IL apologizing have essentially addressed the same research
question—the accessibility of apology strategies to NNS—yet they have examined
this issue by means of different data-gathering procedures. Rintell and Mitchell
(1989) compared NS and NNS use of apology strategies in their responses to written
and oral Discourse Completion questionnaires and found only slight differences
between the two conditions. In order to review previous substantive findings and
assess further instrument effects, the results of five studies are summarized in
Table 4.2.
Holmes (1989) investigated the realization of apologies in an ethnographically
collected corpus of 183 remedial interchanges produced by adult NS of New Zealand
English (NS NZE). Hers is not an interlanguage study but has been included
because it allows us to compare elicited data with naturally occurring speech.
Olshtain (1983) examined apology performance in role-plays, enacted by NS of
American English (NS AE), Russian (NS Rus), and Hebrew (NS Heb), and by
American and Russian learners of Hebrew (IL E-Heb, IL Rus-Heb). Role-play was
also employed by Trosborg (1987) in a study involving NS of British English (NS
BE), NS of Danish (NS Dan), and three groups of Danish learners of English at
different levels of proficiency. Table 4.2 includes the figures for the lower advanced
level (IL Dan-En). House (1988) used a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to study
apology realization by NS of British English (BE NS), NS of German (NS Ger), and
German learners of English (IL Ger-En). By means of the same DCT questionnaire,
Kasper (1989) looked at the apology responses provided by NS of Danish (NS Dan)
in comparison with Danish learners of English (IL Dan-En) and Danish learners of
German (IL Dan-Ger). Throughout the five studies, apology realizations were
coded according to the semantic formulae identified as constituting the apology
speech act set (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989).
Figures reported in the studies have been summarized according to these categories.
Most subjects apologized explicitly by means of an Elocutionary Force Indicating
Device (IFID) such as "I'm sorry" and stated whether they assumed responsibility
for the offense (responsibility): e.g., by blaming a third party ("the kitchen
must have mixed up the orders"), admitting the offensive act ("I forgot to bring your

Apology, Perception, and Performance 85
Table 4.2. Selection of Apology Strategies (%) by Fifteen Groups of Informants
Verbal
IFID Intensifier Responsibility Account Minimization Repair redress
ethno. (Holmes)
NS NZE
RP (Olshtain)
NS AE
NS Rus
NS Heb
IL E-Heb
IL Rus-Heb
RP (Trosborg)
NS BE
NS Dan
IL Dan-E
DCT (House)
NS BE
NS Ger
IL Ger-E
DCT (Kasper)
NS Dan
IL Dan-E
IL Dan-Ger
61
92
66
66
69
64
7
6
8
80
69
73
72
75
68
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
40
31
48
22
27
15
9
100
75
58
92
71
24
33
41
70
66
80
49
82
75
23
42
33
33
23
21
22
18
13
3
5
6
18
5
10
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
21
25
14
13
11
16
9
16
12
5
0
0
8
0
0
22
12
21
15
13
14
13
16
23
2
0
0
0
0
7
5
6
2
9
4
8
8
5
1
book"), or by self-blame ("it's my fault"). The extremely low frequencies of IFID
provided by the British-English and Danish speakers in Trosborg's role-plays do not
seem to be the result of a language or instrument effect since high frequencies of
IFID were supplied by speakers of the same languages in Kasper's (1989) DCT
study and by Olshtain's (1983) role-players. This suggests differential contextual
effects in Trosborg's data as opposed to the other studies. Intensification of apology
("Im very/terribly sorry") was only reported in the DCT studies, where the English
NS and German-English IL users upgraded their apologies more than the Danes and
the German NS. Except for the Danish NS, who provided the same amount of
explanations or accounts for the offense in the role-play and DCT, the interactive
conditions elicited considerably more accounts than the noninteractive DCT. This
instrument effect may be indicative of different psychological and discoursestructural
conditions. Subjects may feel more psychologically pressed to account for
purported misdeeds in a direct encounter with the offended party, and in ongoing
discourse where they can distribute various apologetic acts over several turns.
Accounts may even be requested by the interlocutor, a possibility precluded by the
one-turn response in a DCT. The British-English and Danish NS tended to minimize
the severity of the offense (e.g., "it's only a tiny scratch (on your car)") more in the
role-plays than in the DCTs, which suggests a similar effect as in the case of
accounts. The greater effort of these speakers to minimize the offense is consistent
with their reluctance to explicitly apologize and take on responsibility. Repair, or
compensation for the incurred damage ("I'll bring it in tomorrow"), was offered
with about the same frequencies as minimization. Olshtain's (1983) role-plays and

86 Speech Act Realization
Holmes' (1989) ethnographic data provided very few instances of repair. Expressions
of concern for the hearer ("I hope you didn't wait long") or promises of
forebearance ("it won't happen again"), conflated as "verbal redress," were used
extremely rarely by all groups across conditions.
For the majority of NS and IL users, expressing an explicit apology and making
a responsibility statement were the essential components of apology, whereas providing
explanations, minimizing the offense, and offering repair and verbal redress
were optional and, as demonstrated by Olshtain (1989), context-dependent strategies.
This summary thus extends Olshtain's findings (1983, 1989) to a wider range
of languages.
The variation in supplied apology strategies raises a number of questions. For
instance, why do Holmes's (1989) informants make considerably fewer responsibility
statements than any other group Our supposition is that this is due to the
type of apology included in Holmes's corpus. Even though Holmes does not comment
on this, her offense categories "space" and "talk" offense in particular suggest
that she included ritualistic apologies in her corpus. The apologetic formulas by
which ritualistic apology is performed very often do not co-occur with other redressive
activity. As the role-plays and DCT questionnaires exclusively provide contexts
for substantive apologies, the naturalistic data set does not provide an adequate
baseline for the two types of elicited data. Furthermore, the conspicuous difference
between Trosborg's (1987) role-plays and the remaining elicited data suggests that
close attention be given to instrument effects in the study of apology.
Research to date has examined apology behavior in a variety of Western cultures
and languages. While these studies have been important in providing preliminary
evidence for a universally valid apology speech act set, and the differential
selections from this set according to contextual factors, it is requisite to
extend the scope of study to non-Western languages and cultures to advance the
fundamental issue in cross-cultural pragmatics; namely, the universality and specificity
of linguistic action. One of the methodological problems in cross-cultural and
cross-linguistic comparison is to determine whether the contextual conditions in
which the speech act behavior under study occurs are perceived as the same or
different by the groups to be compared (Arndt & Janney, in press; Blum-Kulka &
House, 1989). With specific reference to apologies, Wolfson, Marmor, and Jones
(1989) comment that "a cross-linguistic study of apologies may well reveal that the
notions of offense and obligation are culture-specific and must, therefore, become
an object of study in themselves" (180). Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness
theory predicts that the weightiness of face-threatening acts (FTAs), computed by
adding the values of social distance, dominance, and degree of imposition as perceived
by actors in a given context, determines the kind and amount of redress
afforded in the performance of FTAs (76). According to theory and empirical
evidence (Kasper, 1990 for overview), both the weights and values of the contextual
factors vary cross-culturally. In the cross-cultural study of apology, it is therefore
essential to establish what constitutes an offense, how members of different cultures
perceive offense contexts, and how these perceptions are reflected in output strategies.

Apology, Perception, and Performance 87
The Present Study
The central research questions we wish to examine in this study are: (1) How are
contextual factors in a variety of offense contexts perceived by Thai and American
informants (2) How is the selection of apology strategies determined by contextual
factors and (3) What patterns of intracultural and intercultural variability are observable
in the selection of apology strategies by Thai NNS of English as compared to
NS of Thai and American English
Informants in this study were 423 Thai graduate students at Chulalongkorn
University, Bangkok, at an intermediate level of proficiency in English, and 30 NS
of American English who were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Data
were collected by means of two questionnaires. The Assessment questionnaire
included 20 items, each of which specified a different offense context (see Appendix
1 for sample item). Informants were asked to rate these contexts on a 5-point rating
scale for 4 context-internal factors (Severity of offense, offender's Obligation to
apologize, Likelihood for the apology to be accepted, offender's Face-loss) and 2
context-external factors (social Distance and Dominance) (for the distinction between
context-internal and context-external factors, see Brown & Fraser, 1979;
Blum-Kulka & House, 1989). The selection of the context-external factors Distance
and Dominance (power) follows Brown and Levinson's (1987) weightiness formula
(76) and their argument that Distance and Dominance constitute "very general
pancultural dimensions which nevertheless probably have 'emic' correlates" (76).
The context-internal factors are assumed to function as components of Brown and
Levinson's dimension "degree of imposition," specified for the speech event of
apologizing. Severity of offense and Obligation to apologize were found to distinguish
different types of offense by Olshtain (1989). Likelihood for the apology to be
accepted was added in view of an analysis of apology responses; however, it is
included in the present study to examine possible interdependence between it and
other contextual factors, and effects on the selection of apology strategies. Offender's
Face-loss was included since, as Vollmer and Olshtain (1989) note, "the
expression of responsibility seems to be linked directly to the S's cost and loss of
face which results from performing the speech act of apologizing" (198), and which
consequently can be expected to have an impact on the redress afforded in carrying
out an apology.
The Dialog Construction (DC) questionnaire included the same offense contexts
as the Assessment questionnaire. Informants were asked to supply the offender's
and the offended person's turn (see Appendix 2 for sample item). Since the apology
response was elicited from the informants rather than being provided as part of the
questionnaire items, the instrument differed from the standard Discourse Completion
questionnaire (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989). For this study, only the
first pair parts were analyzed.
The two questionnaires included the following contexts:
1. A and B are friends. A has had an accident with a car borrowed from B.
(Damaged Car)

88 Speech Act Realization
2. A and B are friends. A borrowed a magazine from B and poured coffee over
it. (Ruined Magazine)
3. At a staff meeting, teacher A contradicts teacher B. (Contradiction)
4. At a staff meeting, teacher A accuses teacher B of being a poor teacher.
(Poor Teacher)
5. At an office, a junior colleague forgets to pass on a private message to a
senior colleague. (Private Message Low-High)
6. At an office, a senior colleague forgets to pass on a private message to a
junior colleague. (Private Message High-Low)
7. At an office, a junior colleague forgets to pass on an important business
message to a senior colleague. (Business Message Low-High)
8. At a office, a senior colleague forgets to pass on an important business
message to a junior colleague. (Business Message High-Low)
9. At a restaurant, a customer changes her mind after the order has already
been taken. (Order Change)
10. At a restaurant, a waiter spills food on a customer's clothes. (Food on
Customer)
11. At a restaurant, a waiter brings the wrong order. (Wrong Order)
12. At a restaurant, a customer spills food on a waiter. (Food on Waiter)
13. At Bangkok Airport, a customs official messes up a traveler's suitcase.
(Messed-up Bag)
14. At Bangkok Airport, a traveler is caught trying to smuggle a Buddha out of
the country. (Smuggled Buddha)
15. At Bangkok Airport, a customs official breaks a legally purchased statue
when searching a traveler's suitcase. (Broken Status)
16. At Bangkok Airport, a traveler is unable to produce a customs form. (Customs
Form)
17. A professor has not yet graded a term paper that a student was supposed to
pick up. (Ungraded Paper)
18. A student forgets a book she was supposed to return to her professor.
(Borrowed Book)
19. A professor misplaces a student's term paper and fails the student. (Failed
Student)
20. A student plagiarizes from a published book and is found out by a professor.
(Cheating Student)
Items in both questionnaires were randomized. The Assessment questionnaire
was filled out by 30 American NS of English and by 30 Thai NNS of English. Both
versions were in English; however, for the Thai study, conceivably difficult vocabulary
items were glossed in Thai. The DC questionnaire was prepared in an English
and in a Thai version. The English version was filled out by 30 NS of English and
by 288 Thai NNS of English. The Thai version was filled out by 136 Thai NS.
The Assessment Study
The mean ratings and standard deviations of contextual factors in each offense
situation are included in Appendix 3. Calculation of Pearson Product Moment

Apology, Perception, and Performance 89
Coefficients revealed no statistically significant correlation between the contextexternal
factors Distance and Dominance, nor between any of the context-external
and the context-internal factors. This finding lends support to Brown and Levinson's
(1987) thesis of the mutual independence of contextual factors (80f.). However, we
hesitate to conclude that such independence would continue to obtain in ongoing
interaction. While a static, snapshotlike view of an interactional configuration, as
represented by the questionnaire items, suggests the integrity of Distance and Dominance
relative to each other and to the interactional content, conversational interchanges
where apologies are jointly negotiated may well evidence a dynamic and
interdependent fluctuation of participants' ascriptions of Distance and Dominance
(e.g., Aronsson & Satterlund-Larsson, 1987), and of these context-external with
context-internal factors.
The ratings of context-internal factors by both Thai and American informants
yielded high correlations between Severity and Obligation (American r = .7210,
p < .000, Thai r = .6815, p < .001), Severity and Likelihood (American r =
- .6382, p < .002, Thai r = - .7505, p < .000), Severity and Face-loss (American
r = .7564, p < .000, Thai r = .5848, p < .007), and Obligation and Face-loss
(American r = .8528, p < .000, Thai r = .7401, p < .000). Overall, then, it can be
concluded that Severity of offense is systematically related to the offender's Obligation
to apologize (corroborating Olshtain's (1989) finding about the covariance of
Severity and Obligation [160]), the Likelihood for the apology to be accepted—the
more serious the infringement, the less the likelihood for the apology to be
successful—and the extent to which the offender's (positive) Face is adversely
affected. Furthermore, Face-loss and Obligation can be viewed as codeterminant:
more Face-loss requires more Obligation to apologize, and more Obligation entails
more Face-loss.
The demonstrated interrelatedness of context-internal factors can be understood
as an explication of Brown and Levinson's (1987) contextual dimension "degree of
imposition" (76) for the speech act of apology. What is noteworthy is the strong
congruence by which Thai and American informants perceived the relationships
between the context-internal factors, and the lack of interrelation expressed in the
ratings of the context-external factors. However, rather than drawing hasty conclusions
about congruent social perceptions by members of widely different cultures,
we feel that two caveats are in order. First, the Thai questionnaire was administered
in an English version. The assessments given by the Thai informants may therefore
represent their perceptions of offense contexts in English-speaking cultures rather
than in their native culture. Their approximation of the American ratings might be
taken as an expression of intercultural competence, a construct parallel to interlanguage
competence. To what extent the Thais' intercultural perceptions are reflective
of, or different from, their social perceptions in their native culture can only be
examined by comparative Thai material, which we unfortunately were unable to
collect.
Second, the noted correlations obtained across the 20 contexts represented in the
questionnaire. They do not allow predictions of the values assigned to contextual
factors in individual contexts. In the remainder of this section, we shall take a closer
look at the contextual assessments of different offense situations. Statistically signif-

90 Speech Act Realization
icant differences between the Thai and American ratings were determined by multivariate
analysis (MANOVA). In order to facilitate the following presentation, we
shall divide the continuous ratings into three categories: low (1-2.3), medium (2.4-
3.7), and high (3.8-5).
SEVERITY OF OFFENSE
Only Order Change and (according to the American raters) Borrowed Book were
perceived as light offenses. Medium Severity was assigned to offenses involving
low material costs (Ruined Magazine), inconveniences rather than infringements
of legal rights or entitlements (Ungraded Paper, Contradiction, Messed-up
Bag, Private Messages), or mishaps occurring as part of a job (Food on Waiter,
Wrong Order). These offenses represent minor impositions on somebody's time,
money, physical space, energy, or face-wants; they warrant no legal claims to
redress.
High Severity offenses have major real-life consequences rather than involving
easily repairable inconveniences. They may constitute illegal action (Cheating Student),
high material costs (Broken Statue), potential or real obstruction of regular
procedures and negligence of professional obligations (Business Messages, Failed
Student), or violation of a person's physical integrity without this being an accepted
job or task risk (Food on Customer).
Offenses that were rated as less severe by American than by Thai informants
were Borrowed Book, a routine fact of American academic life, and Smuggled
Buddha. For cultural outsiders, taking a Buddha statue out of Thailand constitutes
no more than a petty offense, in legal terms. For Thais, the act is not just illegal but
sacrilegious, expressing contempt of religious beliefs and of the most significant
symbol of Thai culture. Americans gave higher Severity ratings than the Thais to
Wrong Order, Private Message High-Low, Poor Teacher, and Cheating Student.
Whereas the Thais assigned contradicting a colleague and questioning his or her
professional competence the same medium Severity rating, the Americans perceived
the "Poor Teacher" allegation as much more serious.
OBLIGATION TO APOLOGIZE
Except for Order Change, which was rated low on Obligation by the Thais, both
groups of informants perceived the offender's Obligation to apologize as medium or
high in all contexts. However, the American raters gave as many as 12 offenses
higher scores on Obligation than the Thais. A consistent relationship was discernable
between Obligation and Severity in the ratings by both groups. First, Offense
contexts received the same ratings on Obligation as on Severity. Thais and Americans
perceived 13 contexts as similar on these dimensions. This finding is consistent
with the assessment of seven offense contexts by Israeli raters, reported by Olshtain
(1989). Second, Offenses received a categorically higher rating on Obligation than
on Severity. In the American ratings, the low Severity offenses Order Change and
Borrowed Book scored medium on Obligation, and five medium Severity offenses
(Ruined Magazine, Wrong Order, Food on Waiter, and the Private Messages) registered
high on Obligation. The Thai raters assessed six medium Severity items as
high on Obligation (Private Message Low-High, Wrong Order, Food on Waiter,
Borrowed Book, Damaged Car, Messed-up Bag). This relationship between Severi-

Apology, Perception, and Performance 91
ty and Obligation has not been reported in previous apology assessment studies
(House, 1988; Olshtain, 1989; Vollmer & Olshtain, 1989).
The ratings of individual offense items on Obligation thus permit us to elaborate
upon the correlational finding, "the more severe an offense, the more it warrants
apology": Either the obligation to apologize is directly proportionate to the severity
of the offense, or the perceived need to apologize categorically exceeds the degree
of the norm infringement. This latter finding strongly suggests the precedence of
relational over transactional concerns in much human interaction: in the interest of
restoring social harmony, remedial action in the form of apology is seen as required
even if the offense is a minor matter. Building on Goffman's (1971) discussion of
ritual and substantive apology (also Owen, 1983), the following analogy comes to
mind: ritual apology is offered as redress to virtual offenses, that is, to events that
might, but did not, cause offense. By the same token, factual minor offenses can be
magnified into virtual major infringements through disproportionate offer of redress.
The benefit accruing from a disproportionate (and acted-upon) need to apologize
is to reestablish the implied parties—offender and offended person—as fully
competent and responsible participants in the business of social interaction.
There was, however, one exception to the patterned relationship between Severity
and Obligation. In the Thai ratings, Smuggled Buddha was assessed as the
highest offense of all (4.7) yet assigned to medium Obligation (3.5). There were no
indications from the ratings of the other context-internal factors to explain this
irregularity; although Smuggled Buddha registered low on Likelihood and high on
Face-loss, so did other items that were assessed as strongly requiring apology. We
think that perhaps the informants reasoned strategically on this item: since an
apology is concomitant with admitting to an offense that is a major cultural and legal
infringement, an escape route for the offender might be to pretend ignorance by not
apologizing. We shall see whether this speculation bears out in the Thais' choice of
apology strategies.
LIKELIHOOD OF APOLOGY ACCEPTANCE
The Thai raters did not perceive Likelihood for the apology to be accepted as low in
any context, whereas the American raters felt that acceptance was unlikely in
Broken Statue, Cheating Student, and Smuggled Buddha. These three contexts,
which (except for Smuggled Buddha in the American ratings) registered highest on
Severity in Thai and American assessments, were also given the lowest ratings in
the medium category by the Thais. Likewise, Thai and American raters perceived
the same seven offenses as having a high Likelihood for apology acceptance. All of
these offenses had been given low ratings on Severity.
OFFENDER'S FACE-LOSS
All offense contexts were perceived as involving medium or high damage to the
offender's face by both Thai and American raters. However, the Thais considered
only four contexts—Contradiction, Poor Teacher, Order Change, and Private Message
High-Low—as less than highly face-threatening. The Americans, on the other
hand, felt in as many as nine contexts that the offender's face was not severely
threatened. In addition to the four contexts also rated as medium for Face-loss by the
Thais, the Americans attached only minor Face-loss to low and medium Severity

92 Speech Act Realization
offenses that were due to an oversight rather than to an intentional norm infringement,
and that did not involve high costs to the offended party (Ruined Magazine,
Messed-up Bag, Customs Form, Ungraded Paper, Borrowed Book). For the Thais,
minor Severity of an offense did not entail minor Face-loss. Out of twelve medium
Severity offenses, the Thais rated nine high on Face-loss. The highest Severity
offenses were also given the highest ratings on Face-loss by Thais and Americans.
The emerging pattern is thus that for the Americans, offender's Face-loss and
Severity of offense were codeterminant. In the Thai informants' perception, by
contrast, high Severity and high Face-loss were interrelated, but lower Severity
might be outweighed by other factors that could make an event highly threatening to
the offender's face even in the absence of much damage in objective terms. Such
factors seem to include demonstration of undesirable personal attributes such as
clumsiness, carelessness, or forgetfulness. We are reluctant, however, to draw
further inferences from these differential ratings, since they may well be indicative
of conceptual differences between the notion of "face" in Thai and American culture.
Comparative ethnosemantic study of the concept efface" in both cultures and
languages is needed, exploring its meaning and function within each cultural context
(cf. Hu 1944 for an examination of the concept of face in Chinese culture).
Of the context-external factors Distance and Dominance, we shall only examine
Distance, as no effects were found for Dominance on any of the other contextual
factors, nor on the selection of apology strategies.
DISTANCE
With few exceptions, the Thai and American ratings of Distance reflected the social
role relationship between offender and offended party. Thai and American informants
agreed in perceiving the closest relationships between friends, and the most distant
relationships between strangers in service and administrative encounters. Differences
are noticeable in the two groups' perceptions of student-professor and work relationships.
Both groups assessed the relationships between student and professor as
medium Distance, corresponding to "acquaintance" as opposed to familiars or strangers.
Yet for the Thais, student-professor tended more towards the low end of the
medium Distant category (> 3), whereas for the Americans, it approximated closer to
the high end of medium Distance (< 3). Possibly, Thais perceive the prototypical
relationship of students and professors more similar to that of distant family members,
while Americans regard it more as a work relationship involving participants on
different levels of positional hierarchies. The latter view is supported by the ratings of
relationships between colleagues, which the Thais perceived as more distant than the
Americans in four out of six cases. Previous studies with different populations are
consistent with either the Thai or the American assessments of social Distance in the
two types of role relationships. German and British raters assessed relationships
between colleagues as less distant than student-professor relationships (House, 1988,
305), whereas Israeli informants perceived more Distance between colleagues than
between student and professor (Olshtain, 1989,160). Neither the Thai nor the American
ratings indicated any evidence of differential perceptions of Distance between the
relationships of teachers and office colleagues on the one hand, and between coworkers
at different ranks on the other hand.

Apology, Perception, and Performance 93
Our findings on the Assessment study can be summed up as follows:
1. Thai and American raters perceive context-external and context-internal factors
as unrelated.
2. Context-internal factors in offense contexts are highly interrelated. Severity
covaries with Obligation to apologize, Likelihood for the apology to be
accepted, and offender's Face-loss, lending support to Olshtain's (1989)
hypothesis that "severity of offense is the representative contextual factor in
the sociopragmatic set of the apology" (160).
3. Thai and American raters consistently perceive Obligation, Likelihood, and
Face-loss as higher than Severity of offense, suggesting the primacy of
interpersonal concerns over transactional goals in much remedial exchange.
4. Despite the overall consistent relationship of contextual factors in the American
and Thai assessments, individual offense contexts may be characterized
by constellations of contextual factors that are not predictable from the
general pattern, and that vary cross-culturally. In each of the 20 situations,
Thais and Americans differed in their perception of at least one contextual
variable, most on Obligation, least on Likelihood.
By way of summary, Table 4.3 presents the two language groups' differential
assessments.
Table 4.3. Differences in American and Thai Assessments of Contextual Factors
Obligation Face-loss Distance Dominance Severity Likelihood
Borrowed Book
Messed-up Bag
Poor Teacher
Private Mess. H-L
Wrong Order
Smuggled Buddha
Ruined Magazine
Cheating Student
Private Mess. L-H
Business Mess. L-H
Business Mess. H-L
Food on Customer
Food on Waiter
Customs Form
Contradiction
Damaged Car
Order Change
Failed Student
Ungraded Paper
Broken Statue

94 Speech Act Realization
The Dialog Construction Study
The DC data were coded into the following major categories:
IFID—Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, specifying the force of apology
(I'm sorry, I'm afraid)
Upgrader—Element increasing apologetic force (I'm terribly sorry, I really
didn't mean to hurt you) Taking on Responsibility—speaker admitting the
offense, including self-blame (How stupid of me), lack of intent (I didn't
mean to do this), and admission of fact (I haven't graded it yet)
Downgrading Responsibility or Severity of offense—(a) utterance reducing
speaker's accountability for the offense, including excuse (My watch had
stopped), justification (I was suddenly called to a meeting), claiming ignorance
(1 didn't know you were expecting me), problematizing a precondition
(we weren't supposed to meet before 12:00), or denial (I didn't do it); (b)
utterance reducing severity of offense (I'm only 10 minutes late)
Offer of Repair—speaker offering to remedy damage inflicted on offended party
by an action to restitute H's entitlements (I'll pay for the damage, I'll have it
marked tomorrow)
Verbal Redress—speaker showing concern for offended party (I hope you
weren't offended), efforts to appease (let me buy you a drink) or promise of
forebearance (it won't happen again)
Interrater reliability was established through consensus coding by three raters
(Thai and English NS data) and two raters (Thai-English interlanguage data).
The distribution of apology strategies across offense contexts and language
groups is included in Appendix 4. The overall strategy distribution by language
groups is displayed in Figure 4.1. Consistent with previous studies, IFID and Taking
on Responsibility were used in more than half of the possible cases. Upgrading
Fig. 4.1. Overall use of apology strategies (%) by NS of English (English, N = 30), NS of
Thai (Thai, N = 136), and Thai NNS of English (IL, N = 288). IFID = Illocutionary Force
Indicating Device, UG = Upgrader, TR = Taking on Responsibility, DG = Downgrading,
RE = Offer of Repair, VR = Verbal Redress.

Apology, Perception, and Performance 95
apologetic force, Downgrading Responsibility, and offer of Repair were supplied in
one third of all contexts, and Verbal Redress was expressed on about every tenth
occasion or less. The contextual distribution of strategies was examined by comparing
strategy use in each context between pairs of language groups (NS English-NS
Thai, NS English-IL users, NS Thai-IL users).
IFID
Overall, correlational analysis revealed no effects from the contextual factors on the
selection of IFIDs, the exception being Obligation, which was found to covary with
the use of IFIDs by the IL group (r = .6588, p < .002).
In 16 out of the 20 situations, the three language groups agreed in their frequency
of IFID suppliance. All groups used few IFIDs (between 14% and 50%) in low
Severity contexts such as Order Change and Customs Form, as well as in high
Severity situations such as Cheating Student and Smuggled Buddha. Thus the Thais
matched their medium rating of Smuggled Buddha on Obligation by providing few
apologetic formulas. Conversely, IFIDs were supplied with high frequency (80%-
96%) in response to high Severity offenses such as Broken Statue and Food on
Customer, which received identical IFID frequencies as the medium Severity offense
Food on Waiter. The inverse relationship, for some offenses, between Severity
and IFID was especially pronounced in the English data: in the lowest Severity
context, Borrowed Book, 83% IFIDs were supplied, as in the medium Severity
contexts Ungraded Paper and Wrong Order (86%), while the high Severity item
Damaged Car only elicited 47% IFIDs. Contradiction and Poor Teacher were assigned
to different severity categories (medium and high) in the American Assessments,
yet no significant difference obtained in the frequencies of IFIDs in these
contexts. These two items were both assessed as medium offenses by the Thai
raters, which is reflected in the frequencies of IFIDs provided by Thai NS and IL
users. All three language groups used the same frequencies of IFIDs in response to
the Messages offenses (60%-81%). The difference in Severity between Private and
Business messages was not matched by IFID suppliance.
The theoretically interesting point emerging from the highly variable use of IFIDs
is its intricate relationship with Severity of offense. By responding to low Severity
offenses with an explicit apologetic formula, the offender symbolically emphasizes
her eagerness to repair whatever minor norm infringement has occurred. Not using
IFIDs to remedy high Severity offenses may have either of two functions. First, an
offender may avoid admitting responsibility for the offense committed, which would
be concomitant with an explicit apology. Second, and conversely, where the offender
is prepared to assume responsibility, an all-purpose apologetic formula, which is also
used for ritualistic apology, might not be felt to convey adequately a substantive
apology for a major offense. An expression of apology propositionally related to the
specific offense might be more apt to convey the sincerity of the speaker's regret.
UPGRADING THE APOLOGY
Upgrading of apology correlated highly with Obligation (r = .7628, p < .000) and
Face-loss (r = .7248, p < .000) in the English data, and with Obligation in the
Thai-English IL data (r = .6887, p < .001). Except for Obligation and IFID, which

96 Speech Act Realization
covaried in the IL data, Upgrading, remarkably, was the only strategy that correlated
with context-internal factors; it reveals that for the English NS, Obligation to
apologize and Face-loss have their behavioral correlates not in the use of apologetic
formulas, nor in expressing responsibility, but in the intensification of either or both
of these strategies. This intensification makes good sense, considering the routinized
nature of apologetic formulas: in order for them to count as sincere apology,
they warrant Upgrading, which serves to emphasize their substantive nature. The IL
users, while sharing with the English NS the preference to express Obligation
through Upgrading, also increased their use of IFIDs with greater Obligation. If this
increase can be taken to indicate that the NNS regard IFIDs just as apt a means to
express Obligation as Upgraders, it might reveal a tendency for the NNS to underdifferentiate
the apologetic function of IFIDs, compared to English NS use.
In all three groups, Upgrading correlated highly with IFID (English: r = .6906,
p < .001, Thai: r = .7636, p < .000, IL: r = .8014, p < .000). To the extent
Upgrading was used to intensify an IFID, it could be claimed that the covariance
expresses the relationship between an independent (IFID) and a dependent variable
(Upgrader). Yet it must be remembered that Upgrading was coded when it operated
on other apology strategies as well, for instance, on Lack of Intent as a subcategory
of Responsibility (e.g., I really didn't mean to hurt you). However, no covariance
could be established between Upgrading and any other apology strategy.
Least Upgrading (0%-20%) was afforded across language groups to the low
Obligation and low Face-loss context Order Change, the medium Obligation offenses
Customs Form, Contradiction, and Smuggled Buddha, and to Poor Teacher,
which had been rated high on Obligation by the American and medium by the Thai
informants. Consistent Upgrading was furthermore provided in Business Message
Low-High. In half of the offense contexts, Upgrading was supplied differentially by
the three groups. In four situations, the Thai NS provided fewer Upgrading than the
English NS, which is reflective of their lower ratings of these offenses for Obligation
(Failed Student and the restaurant situations Wrong Order, Food on Waiter, and
Food on Customer). The reverse—the Thais providing more Upgrading than the
English NS—was true in Messed-up Bag, where the English informants did not
upgrade at all, and Ungraded Paper. The IL users closely approximated target norms
in all but one context (Messed-up Bag).
TAKING ON RESPONSIBILITY
Taking on Responsibility was the only apology strategy that covaried with a contextexternal
factor (Distance) in all three groups (English: r = — .6514,p < .001, Thai
r = -.6418, p < .001, IL: r = -.7165, p < .000). English and Thai NS
and Thai-English NNS thus agreed in expressing more responsibility for the offensive
act, the closer they were to the offended person; conversely, the more distant
the relationship to the offended party, the less they were likely to admit accountability.
Consistent with the ratings for Distance, in Damaged Car and Ruined Magazine,
involving two friends, all groups of informants expressed Responsibility in 89%-
98% of the possible cases. In the four Message offenses, taking place between coworkers,
offenders assumed Responsibility with a frequency of 66%-93%. The

Apology, Perception, and Performance 97
Thai NS and IL users afforded the same amount of Responsibility in the four
Message contexts, regardless of status relationship (senior to junior or vice versa) or
Severity of offense (private versus business message). The Thai NS consistently
provided very high Responsibility frequencies (91%-93%), the IL users offering
less (76%-84%). Curiously, the English NS expressed more Responsibility for
failing to pass on a private message than for a business message. Two of the studentprofessor
contexts also registered high for Responsibility: Borrowed Book and
Failed Student. These items clearly illustrate that Severity of offense is not operative
in determining whether or not an offender explicitly assumed Responsibility: Borrowed
Book, which ranged lowest on Severity in the American ratings, elicited the
highest amount of Responsibility (I forgot to take it along); Failed Student, one of
the highest Severity offenses, was afforded almost as much Responsibility. High
Distance relationships such as all waiter-customer interactions registered low on
Responsibility (3%—47%). The failure of Severity to predict whether or not offenders
take on Responsibility was also manifest at the lower end of the Responsibility
scale: the lowest frequencies of Responsibility were observed in the lowest
Severity contexts Order Change as well as in the high Severity context Smuggled
Buddha. However, the Thais' reluctance to assume Responsibility for the Smuggled
Buddha reflected its medium rating on Obligation. In seven contexts, more Thai NS
than English NS assumed Responsibility, but only in two of these situations (Food
on Customer and Broken Status) did the IL users follow their native pattern.
DOWNGRADING RESPONSIBILITY OR SEVERITY
All three groups used considerably fewer strategies to downgrade responsibility for
the offense than to explicitly assume responsibility. The high Severity offense
Smuggled Buddha was downgraded by far the most frequently by all groups. This
supports further our earlier speculation about the low rating of Smuggled Buddha on
Obligation to apologize by the Thai informants. Cheating Student, another high
Severity offense, was heavily downgraded by the Thai informants, whereas the
English NS downgraded this offense in less than half of the possible cases. Contexts
in which high Responsibility corresponded to low Downgrading were Damaged
Car, Ruined Magazine, Borrowed Book, Failed Student, and Customs Form. Moreover,
informants downgraded responsibility less in some contexts with high occurrence
of IFIDs (Food on Customer, Wrong Order, Food on Waiter, Broken Statue).
Yet some offenses, notably the undelivered Messages, were redressed both by
highly frequent use of Responsibility and fairly frequent Downgrading strategies
(all groups between 25% and 52%).
With only 6 out of 20 situations in which the three language groups did not differ
in downgrading responsibility, this category displayed the most intergroup variability.
In most of these contexts, the Thai NS downgraded more than either or both
English NS and IL users. The IL users downgraded responsibility more than did the
English NS in three of the restaurant situations and in the two teachers' meetings.
OFFER OF REPAIR
In the American data, Repair correlated negatively with Downgrading (r =
— .6824, p < .001): offenders will be less prone to offer Repair the more they
downgrade the offense. The same logic did not obtain for the Thai data. Neverthe-

98 Speech Act Realization
less, for more than half of the offense contexts, English NS, Thai NS, and IL users
agreed on whether or not they offered Repair.
Least Repair (0%-10%) was offered in compensation for verbal or verbally
conveyed offenses (Contradiction and Poor Teacher, the Private Message contexts,
Order Change). Offenses that elicited Repair offers in more than half of the possible
cases were those in which material compensation could be provided (Broken Statue,
Ruined Magazine, Damaged Car, Food on Customer) or a neglected obligation
honored (Ungraded Paper, Borrowed Book, Wrong Order, Failed Student). The
language groups offered Repair differentially in three of the Message situations.
Very few Repair offers were made by the Thai NS in all of the Message contexts,
whereas the English NS and IL users offered Repair more frequently to compensate
for the undelivered Business Messages. The IL users provided more Repair than the
English NS in one type of high Distance context: customs official-traveler (Messedup
Bag, Customs Form, Smuggled Buddha).
VERBAL REDRESS
This strategy ranged lowest in frequency across language groups and offense contexts.
By far the most frequently chosen subcategory of Verbal Redress was Concern
for Hearer. Groups agreed in affording very little Verbal Redress in the four
custom official-traveler contexts, three of the waiter-customer contexts and of the
student-professor interactions, and in all Message contexts (0%-19%). Only one
offense, Contradiction, elicited more than 20% Verbal Redress from all groups,
which is consistent with previous findings for a comparable offense in English and
German (House, 1988,310) and Hebrew (Olshtain, 1989,161). In three contexts,
only one of the groups supplied over 20% Verbal Redress: the Thai NS in Failed
Student, and the IL users in Poor Teacher and Food on Waiter. In 11 contexts, either
or both Thai NS and IL users provided more Verbal Redress than the English NS.
Expressing concern for the offended party was thus a more common strategy for the
Thais, regardless of the language they used.
Table 4.4 summarizes the contexts in which the IL users differed from the
English NS in their use of apology strategies. No differences were obtained for
Ruined Magazine, Private Message High-Low, and Failed Student. Of the six
apology strategies, learners and English NS differed least in Upgrading apologetic
force and in the canonical strategies IFID and taking on Responsibility, whereas
they differed most in the context-dependent strategies Repair, Verbal Redress, and
Downgrading responsibility or severity of offense. If we apply Selinker's (1969)
operational definition for determining effects of language transfer to these data, the
white dots indicate effects of pragmatic transfer in the Thai-English IL users' apology
performance. Fifty-five percent of the differences in the use of apology
strategies can thus be attributed to pragmatic transfer. We are not at all convinced
that this is an appropriate way to determine pragmatic transfer; however, since we
are not aware of a comparably rigorous method that might be more in accordance
with current thinking on cross-linguistic influence, we shall accept this procedure,
and the obtained results, until further notice.
To summarize our findings on the contextual distribution of apology strategies
across the three languages:

Apology, Perception, and Performance 99
Table 4.4. Differences in Apology Strategies Used between NS of English
and Thai-English IL Users
Messed-up Bag (13)
Business Mess. L-H (7)
Cheating Student (20)
Ungraded Paper (17)
Broken Statue (15)
Borrowed Book (18)
Food on Customer (10)
Food on Waiter (12)
Order Change (9)
Poor Teacher (4)
Customs Form (16)
Smuggled Buddha (14)
Wrong Order (11)
Private Mess. H-L (6)
Business Mess. H-L (8)
Damaged Car (1)
Contradiction
UG TR IFID RE VR DG
IFID = Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, UG = Upgrader, TR = Taking on Responsibility, DG — Downgrading,
RE = Offer of Repair, VR = Verbal Redress.
= IL users differ from English NS atp < 0.05.
= IL users differ from English NS at/ < 0.05; English NS differ from Thai NS at/) < 0.05; no difference between
Thai NS and IL users at p < 0.05.
1. Contextual factors operated differentially in the strategy selection. While
Obligation had been found to determine the choice of IFID by NS of German
and British English (House, 1988), in the present study it was only the IL
users who made their choice of IFID contingent on perceived Obligation to
apologize.
2. The strategy most sensitive to contextual factors was Upgrading: the more
Obligation and Face-loss involved in an offense, the more Upgrading of
apology would be provided. Previous studies had shown NS of Hebrew to
increase apologetic force in direct proportion to Severity of offense and in
indirect proportion to the offender's status vis-a-vis the offended party (Olshtain,
1989); the latter finding was also obtained for NS of British English and
German (House, 1988). These concurring results provide consistent evidence
for the underspecification of IFID as an apology strategy: since routine
formulas are used both in ritual and substantive function, sincere expression
of regret warrants specific marking through intensification (House, 1988;
Vollmer & Olshtain, 1989).
3. Informants were more prone to explicitly express Responsibility for the
offense the closer the relationship between the offender and the offended

100 Speech Act Realization
person. This finding appears to contradict Wolfson's (1989) bulge hypothesis,
according to which less redress is offered in interaction between very low
and very high distance participants, whereas the most redress is provided in
medium distance relationships. The contradiction is resolved if we reconsider
the relationships comprised by our questionnaire contexts. Whereas they
do include total strangers and acquaintances such as colleagues and friends,
they do not extend to intimate relationships. Because the relationships spectrum
covered in this study does not include the lowest end of the social
distance continuum, our finding does not present counter-evidence to the
bulge hypothesis.
4. No effect of contextual factors was found on Downgrading Responsibility,
Repair, and Verbal Redress. All three of these context-dependent strategies
tended to be used more frequently by the IL users than by the English NS.
5. The Thai-English IL users differed least from the English NS in their suppliance
of Upgrading and the canonical strategies IFID and taking on Responsibility.
Most differences occurred in the context-dependent strategies.
6. More than half of the differences in apology suppliance can tentatively be
attributed to pragmatic transfer from Thai apology patterns.
By examining Thai learners' contextual perceptions and choices of apology
strategies, we have shed light on their sociopragmatic knowledge of apology. We
have not analyzed their actual wordings of apology strategies, that is, their pragmalinguistic
knowledge of apologizing in English, which would require another
study.
How can we account for the relative oversuppliance of context-dependent strategies
by the Thai learners Our finding is consistent with House's (1988) observation
that NNS tend to do "too much of a good thing," a phenomenon she labelled
"gushing," or, less benevolently, "waffling" (Edmondson & House, 1991). Waffling
had been reported to characterize request realization by learners of different native
and target languages (e.g., Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986; Kasper, 1989). House
(1988) was the first to draw our attention to a similar phenomenon in NNS apologizing,
demonstrating that German learners of English provided more apology upgrading
and expressions of responsibility than NS of British English. Edmondson and
House (1991) point out that all the studies in which waffling is evident are written
DCTs, and remind us that waffling was not present in the interactional, negotiated
discourse elicited by open-ended role-plays (Kasper, 1981; see also Eisenstein &
Bodman, Chapter 3). Therefore, waffling may well be an instrument effect of
DCT—both of the Discourse Completion and Dialog Construction variety. But
Edmondson and House (1991) go further in their account of waffling. In both roleplay
data (Kasper, 1981; Edmondson, House, Kasper, & Stemmer, 1984) and DCT
data (House, 1988, 1989), German learners of English were consistently shown to
use fewer conventionalized requestive and apologetic forms than British NS. At the
same time, waffling was extant in the DCT though not in the role-play data. In order
to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, Edmondson and House refer to
the differential cognitive demands of discourse production in face-to-face interaction
(role-play) and written questionnaires. They argue that paucity of adequate

Apology, Perception, and Performance 101
requestive and apologetic routines characterizes learners' speech act realization in
both production tasks because such routines, though available in IL, are not "integrated
into learners' discourse production systems" (285). Yet when learners' planning
and execution of linguistic action does not operate under the pressures of
conversational turn-taking, they will compensate for the lack of pragmatic routines
by oversupplying nonconventionalized speech act realization strategies.
Our study provides partial support for Edmondson and House's (1991) hypothesis.
The Thai learners did indeed waffle, but they did not do so in compensation for
lacking apology routines. Rather, our findings suggest that DCT, in whatever version,
provides learners with an opportunity for knowledge display that is precluded
for many NNS by the cognitive demands of face-to-face interaction. Comparison of
learners' pragmatic performance in interactive discourse and DCT may thus throw
light on the state of learners' discourse production systems, or the extent to which
available pragmatic knowledge is readily accessible in conversation.
Acknowledgments
The research reported in this paper was supported in part by the University of
Hawaii Project Development Fund, grant R-90-866-F-034-B-101. We gratefully
acknowledge the assistance we received from colleagues and students in carrying
out the study. Staff and students at the Language Institute, Chulalongkorn University,
Bangkok, helped us collect the Thai data. Naoko Maeshiba and Naoko
Yoshinaga made their English NS data available to us. Peggy DuFon and Satomi
Takahashi have a major share in the data analysis. Special thanks are more than due
J. D. Brown, Thorn Hudson, and Steven Ross for their assistance with the statistical
processing of the data during different phases of the project.
Sample item from Assessment questionnaire
At a friend's home
Appendix 1
John and Paul are good friends. John borrowed Paul's car for the weekend. Unfortunately,
when he was backing up to park, he didn't see a lamppost. He hit it and damaged the rear of
the car. He is now returning the car to Paul.
1. How close are John and Paul in this situation
1 2 3 4 5
very close
very distant
2. What is the status relationship between John and Paul
1 2 3 4 5
John higher John = John lower
than Paul Paul than Paul

102 Speech Act Realization
3. How serious is John's offense
1 2 3 4 5
not serious at all
very serious
4. Does John need to apologize
1 2 3 4 5
not at all
absolutely
5. How likely is Paul to accept John's apology
1 2 3 4 5
very likely
very unlikely
6. Does John gain or lose face in this situation
1 2 3 4 5
gains face
loses face
Appendix 2
Sample item from Discourse Completion questionnaire
At a friend's home
John and Paul are good friends. John borrowed Paul's car for the weekend. Unfortunately,
when he was backing up to park, he didn't see a lamppost. He hit it and damaged the rear of
the car badly. He is now returning the car to Paul.
PAUL: Is everything okay
JOHN:
PAUL:

Appendix 3: Mean Ratings (X) and Standard Deviations of Contextual
Factors by American (n = 30) and Thai Informants (n = 30)
Severity
Obligation
Likelihood
Face-loss
Distance
Dominance
Item
Am
Th
Am
Th
Am
Th
Am
Th
Am
Th
Am
Th
1 X
SD
2 X
SD
3 X
SD
4X
SD
5 X
SD
6 X
SD
IX
SD
8 X
SD
9 X
SD
10 X
SD
11 X
SD
12 X
SD
13 X
SD
14 X
SD
15 X
SD
16 X
SD
17 X
SD
18 X
SD
19 X
SD
20 X
SD
4.10
0.99
2.60
1.05
2.90
1.12
4.50*
0.56
3.60
0.96
3.50*
1.02
4.60
0.48
4.40
0.80
2.10
1.14
4.60
0.56
3.30*
0.89
3.50
1.28
3.20
1.19
3.60*
1.30
4.60
0.55
2.90
1.33
2.80
1.10
1.00*
0.91
4.70
0.53
4.80*
0.37
3.70
0.97
2.50
0.89
3.40
0.89
3.60*
1.05
3.20
1.02
2.90*
1.03
4.50
0.72
4.10
0.76
1.80
1.05
4.30
0.59
2.60*
1.05
3.00
1.05
3.40
1.09
4.70*
0.65
4.50
0.85
2.80
1.24
3.20
1.07
3.10*
1.20
4.50
0.96
4.50*
0.67
4.90*
0.30
4.70*
0.47
3.10
1.31
4.20*
0.87
4.50*
0.56
4.30*
0.97
4.90*
0.30
4.90*
0.40
3.40*
1.26
5.00*
0.18
4.80*
0.42
4.80*
0.50
3.50*
1.09
3.40
1.43
4.90
0.25
3.30
1.24
3.70
1.21
3.80
0.86
4.90*
0.25
4.60
0.80
4.30*
0.95
3.50*
0.97
3.00
1.25
3.10*
1.15
3.90*
1.00
3.50*
0.92
4.50*
0.62
4.10*
0.76
2.30*
0.96
4.60*
0.71
4.00*
1.03
4.10*
0.75
4.10*
0.73
3.50
1.63
4.70
0.59
3.10
1.16
3.20
1.26
4.10
0.93
4.40*
0.72
4.60
0.61
3.60
1.08
4.50
0.88
3.30
0.82
2.70
0.99
3.80
0.76
3.90
0.96
3.00
1.06
3.60
0.99
4.10
1.09
2.90
1.06
2.90*
1.45
4.00
1.13
3.10*
1.11
2.30
1.23
2.20
1.08
3.10
1.14
4.10
0.81
4.50*
0.56
3.60
0.98
2.20
0.99
3.60
1.02
4.40
0.67
3.00
0.96
2.90
1.19
4.00
0.87
4.20
0.82
3.40
1.05
3.70
0.85
4.10
1.15
3.10
1.12
4.00*
0.94
4.00
0.98
3.70*
0.91
2.50
1.26
2.70
1.30
3.50
1.12
4.40
1.03
4.00*
0.91
3.50
1.20
2.40
1.02
4.30
0.83
3.50
1.15
2.60
0.96
3.70*
1.06
4.00
1.02
3.60
0.87
4.50
0.76
3.90
0.94
2.90
1.20
4.80*
0.40
4.20
0.84
4.50*
0.88
2.50*
1.23
3.80*
1.39
4.30
0.86
3.60*
0.95
3.30*
0.97
3.20*
1.12
4.60
0.84
4.70
0.53
4.30
0.80
3.90
0.80
2.60
1.07
2.60*
1.14
3.80
0.86
3.70
0.83
4.10
0.88
4.10
0.91
3.00
0.41
4.40*
0.80
3.80
0.79
3.80*
0.82
3.80*
0.82
4.60*
0.66
4.70
0.59
4.10*
0.81
3.90*
0.77
4.10*
0.60
4.50
0.67
4.70
0.57
1.50
0.62
1.80*
0.90
2.80*
0.95
3.10
1.24
3.10*
0.69
3.20*
0.73
3.10
0.75
3.00*
0.91
4.50
0.76
4.70
0.87
4.40
0.84
4.50
0.96
4.80*
0.54
3.90
1.36
4.80
0.56
4.60
0.72
3.20
0.78
3.10*
0.75
3.10
0.79
3.50*
0.85
1.40
0.66
2.80*
0.30
3.90*
0.86
3.50
1.33
3.60*
0.76
3.70*
0.86
2.90
0.87
3.70*
0.94
4.60
0.72
4.60
0.60
4.60
0.66
4.60
0.72
4.30*
0.83
4.40
0.80
4.60
0.80
4.20
0.83
2.90
1.00
2.50*
1.12
2.80
1.01
2.90*
1.09
2.80
0.56
3.00*
0.55
2.90*
0.36
3.10
0.63
1.70
0.94
4.40
0.91
1.30*
0.54
4.40
0.88
4.20
1.01
1.60
1.14
1.70
0.88
4.00
1.28
3.50
1.41
2.30*
1.42
3.40*
1.52
2.00*
1.10
4.60
0.76
1.90
1.11
4.30
1.04
1.40
0.92
2.70
0.85
4.00*
1.17
2.20*
1.31
3.10
0.50
1.40
1.05
4.60
0.84
1.90*
0.98
4.50
0.96
3.90
1.37
1.50
0.81
2.00
0.87
3.60
1.17
2.90
0.50
3.30*
0.94
2.30*
0.94
2.90*
0.44
4.40
0.99
1.60
0.87
4.40
0.84
1.60
0.80
Item numbers in the leftmost column refer to the following offense contexts: 1 — Damaged car, 2 = Ruined magazine, 3 —
Contradiction, 4 = Poor teacher, 5 = Private message low-high, 6 = Private message high-low, 7 = Business message low-high, 8
= Business message high-low, 9 = Order change, 30 = Food on customer, 11 = Wrong order, 12 = Food on waiter, 13 = Messedup
bag, 14 = Smuggled Buddha, 15 = Broken statue, 16 = Customs form, 17 = Ungraded paper, 18 - Borrowed book, 19 =
Failed student, 20 ~ Cheating student.
* = p < 0.05.

Appendix 4: Use of Apology Strategies (%) by NS of English (EN, n = 30),
NS of Thai (TN, n = 136), and Thai NNS of English (IL, n = 228)
IFID
UG
TR
DG
RE
VR
Item
EN
TN
IL
EN
TN
IL
EN
TN
IL
EN
TN
IL
EN
TN
IL
EN
TN
IL
1 n
%
2 n
%
3 n
%
4 n
%
5 n
%
6 n
%
7 n
%
8 n
%
9 n
%
10 n
14
47
20
67
18
60
20
67
23
77
19
63
22
76
18
60
8
27
28
82
60
85
66
79
59
79
63
104
78
98
73
107
81
92
70
31
23
115
185
64
211
75
185
65
180
64
219
77
217
76
219
77
225
78
41
14
273
11
37
8
27
4
14
5
17
14
47
10
33
16
55
16
53
2
7
23
35
27
21
16
17
13
22
18
73
55 C
63
47
73
55
58
44
4
3
64
83
29
66
23
41
14
49
18
99
35 C
102
36
153
54
117
41
4
1
206
27
90
27
90
11
37"
19
63
27
90
24
80
19
66»
22
73
1
3»
2
117
89
117
91
94
71"
81
65
121
91
125
93
122
92"
121
92
21
16 a
62
262
91
276
98
139
49
136
49
217
76
236
81
238
84
238
81
25
9
108
1
3.b
1
3 a
13
43 b
15
50 b
12
40
13
43
12
41"
8
27
12
40ab
3
29
22 a
28
22"=
72
54=
62
50 C
63
47
70
52=
42
32
44
34
9
7ac
22
44
15"
7
2'
49
[7bc
66
24 bc
86
30
85
30»
68
24b
68
26
0
Qbc
7
20
67
18
60
0
0
1
3
1
3
0
0
10
35*
8
21'
1
3
25
94
72
88
68
10
8
9
7
7
5
11
8
3
2ac
9
7»c
14
10'
84
217
75
196
70
16
6
11
4
14
5
13
5
37
I3bc
51
18''
3
l c
188
2
7
1
3
7
23
2
8"
4
13
2
7"
1
5 ab
1
3ab
3
[Jab
1
18
14
12
9
41
31
20
16
15
11
14
10
18
[4a
22
17"
2
2 a
10
31
11
13
5
74
26
58
21 b
50
18
53
19 b
38
13"
34
12"
3
l b
10

%
11 n
%
12 n
%
13 n
%
14 n
%
15 n
%
16 n
%
17 n
%
18 n
%
19 n
%
20 n
%
93 87
24 85
80 64
28 115
93 87
10 76
33» b 60=
11 39
39 30
23 108
79 82
7 49
24 37
25 75
83 ab
57=
25 93
83 b 70
19 98
63 73
7 39
24 b 31 =
96
236
84
263
92
186
65 b
105
37
236
83
108
38
152
53"
166
59 b
221
78
135
48 be
77=
13
43*
22
73=
0
Qab
7
25
11
38
5
17
4
13=
10
33
13
43=
4
14
48 »=
26
20»
57
43=
41
32'
21
16
61
46
24
18
60
46 ac
50
38
29
22"
17
13
73=
84
30
177
63
75
26"
44
15
177
62
60
21
71
25=
64
23
83
29
52
18
7ab
9
30
6
20=
14
47
3
11 =
7
24 = b
26
87
28
93
29
97
27
90
10
35
47 a
41
30
57
43=
66
52
32
25==
91
69=
106
80
94
71
124
93
120
89
59
46
38 b
78
28
99
35
133
47
28
10=
140
49 b
231
81
212
74
212
81
246
86
122
43
10 b
4
13
9
30"
4
13= b
22
79
2
7
7
24
14
47=
2
7ab
2
7 a
14
48 ab
16 C
24
18
28
21
42
33=
105
80
15
11
28
21
106
80==
40
30=
36
27ac
92
72*
2bc
31
11
36
13 b
79
28 b
260
91
13
5
48
17
114
40=
114
ll b
7
2=
201
71"
83
19
63
10
33
1
3 b
4
14 b
13
45
2
7ab
12
40ab
17
57
21
70
3
10
63
79
60
50
38
12
9
21
16=
75
57
23
17»c
84
64=
78
59
85
63
22
17
66
230
82
124
44
54
19 b
146
5]bc
181
64
123
44 be
216
76 h
216
65
197
69
45
16
2
0
l b
1
4»b
0
0
0
0
0
l=
b
0
0
0
1 =
1
3"
2
7=
0
]ab
8
11
23
17=
5
4
4
3
8
6"
0
0
7
5=
18
14==
32
24 a
6
5=
4
16
6"
82
29 b
10
4
3
1
12
4"
5
1
7
2
7
6=
36
13
21
7 b
The leftmost column specifies offense contexts, cf. Appendix 3.
IFID = Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, UG = Upgrader, TR ~ Taking on Responsibility, DC = Downgrading, RE = Offer of Repair, VR = Verbal Redress.
a = EN and TN different at p < 0.05.
>> = EN and 1L different at p < 0.05.
= = TN and IL different at p < 0.05.

106 Speech Act Realization
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5
Interlanguage Features
of the Speech Act of Complaining
ELITE OLSHTAIN and LIORA WEINBACH
In the speech act of complaining, the speaker (S) expresses displeasure or
annoyance—censure—as a reaction to a past or ongoing action, the consequences
of which are perceived by S as affecting her unfavorably. This complaint is usually
addressed to the hearer (H) whom the S holds, at least partially, responsible for the
offensive action. For the purpose of this study, censure will be assumed to have been
expressed whenever S chooses to verbalize her disapproval of the violation.
From the speaker's point of view, the following preconditions need to be fulfilled
in order for the speech act of complaining to take place:
1. H performs a socially unacceptable act (SUA) that is contrary to a social
code of behavioral norms shared by S and H.
2. S perceives the SUA as having unfavorable consequences of herself, and/or
for the general public.
3. The verbal expression of S relates post facto directly or indirectly to the
SUA, thus having the illocutionary force of censure.
4. S perceives the SUA as: (a) freeing S (at least partially) from the implicit
understanding of a social cooperative relationship with H; S therefore
chooses to express her frustration or annoyance, although the result will be a
"conflictive" type of illocution in Leech's terms (Leech, 1983, 104); and
(b) giving S the legitimate right to ask for repair in order to undo the SUA,
either for her benefit or for the public benefit. It is the latter perception that
leads to instrumental complaints aimed at "changing things" that do not meet
with our standards or expectations. The main goal of such instrumental
complaints is to ensure that H performs some action of repair as a result of
the complaint.
Since complaining or expressing censure is a face-threatening act directed toward
H, and since its conflictive nature might result in a breach of the social goal of
maintaining comity and harmony between S and H (Leech, 1983), S is faced with a
series of "payoff" considerations before the actual realization of censure can take
108

The Speech Act of Complaining 109
place. Obviously, the annoyed and frustrated S needs to air her feelings in order to
regain emotional balance or in order to get "things done properly." But how does
this compare to the risk of losing a friend or causing another person considerable
embarrassment and possibly even anger which might affect his willingness to carry
out repair In other words, to what extent might S be willing to risk certain social
advantages in order to rid herself of the frustration caused by the SUA or in order to
improve matters and correct the situation (in case of bad service, bureaucracy, etc.)
In cases where the damage done could be repaired by H, S needs to consider the
most effective route for such a remedy to occur; a straightforward reproach may not
ensure the repair process, while the avoidance of complaining might.
Payoff Considerations
According to Brown and Levinson (1987, 60) the realization of a face-threatening
act (FTA), such as the speech act of censure, follows a certain path of decision
making. We contend that with respect to the speech act of complaining this series of
decision-making steps is really a sequence of payoff considerations. There are at
least three main junctures of decision making:
1. At the first juncture of decision making, the speaker has the possibility of
completely opting out from performing the act; in other words, refraining from
expressing censure altogether. Such opting out may have certain payoffs from S's
point of view: she can get credit for being tactful and polite; she can avoid the
consequences of potentially damaging H's face; and she can give H the feeling that
S is considerate and cares for H (who is responsible for the violation). On the other
hand, S might remain frustrated since she has not expressed her feelings of annoyance
and disappointment and has not reprimanded H for the SUA. Furthermore, in
cases of instrumental complaints (leading to expected repair) mentioned earlier,
performing the act may risk the potential for repair and at times might endanger S's
position with respect to H. Such considerations of risk will affect S's decision to
carry out the act or opt out.
2. At the second node, S has the possibility of choosing to carry out the act "on"
or "off" record. Off record in the case of censure would be some hint related to the
inconvenience that resulted from the SUA, without explicitly mentioning either the
SUA or H. Such an evasion of the clear and obvious expression of censure would
present similar payoffs for S as in step 1 above, but if H chooses to pick up the hint,
then some reaction from H, either an apology or an offer of repair, might set things
straight and S would no longer feel annoyed. For example, if in the situation where
there is a line of people waiting to get to a counter a person suddenly tries to push in
front of S, the latter might say something like, "I'm the last in line." No real facedamage
has been committed since there was no direct mention of the offender or the
offense, yet the offender will, most probably, go and stand behind S and thus resolve
the problem. On the other hand, if S decides to express censure "on" record, she
moves on to the next juncture of decision making and payoff considerations.
3. At the third step of Brown and Levinson's path, S has a choice to realize the
speech act with or without redress. If she chooses not to use redress, then censure is

110 Speech Act Realization
expressed unmitigatedly as a statement or request that explicitly mentions the SUA
and/or H as violator. In this case, payoffs have been considered irrelevant or less
important and S chooses to express her frustration without any mitigation. In fact,
there is a possibility that S will not even refrain from a full realization of the
complaint and will indeed use a personal threat or insult. The risk that S is willing to
take is open conflict with H. In turn, H might react to such a complaint with an open
attack on S, serving as retaliation for the face-damage suffered by H.
On the other hand, if S chooses to use redress as part of the realization of the
speech act of complaining, then two options are open: the positive politeness orientation
or the negative politeness orientation. In the case of censure, a speaker opting
for a positive politeness orientation would probably still prefer the explicit mention
of both the SUA and H but with some expression of mutual concern and understanding,
which creates mitigation. The payoff for such a choice would be the fact that S
would fully air her frustration but at the same time would express personal interest
or understanding concerning H. In an in-group context, this orientation will not
necessarily lead to real conflict and the risk will be relatively small. Thus, if a
mother tells her son, "You have left some dirty dishes in the sink again," and there is
an understanding between them that he should place the dishes in the dishwasher,
such a complaint will not greatly damage the relations between the two.
If the decision is negative politeness oriented, the strategy to perform the act of
censure might take the form of a mitigated expression. In the case of censure, such
mitigated strategies might be realized as a conventional request for repair, where
applicable, or as a statement relating to the SUA but not directly to H. Thus in the
case of pushing into the line, S might say "Excuse me, sir. There's a line here," or in
the case of a latecomer to a meeting, "I was really hoping to start our meeting on
time." It seems that in the negative politeness orientation, even when the complaint
is explicitly expressed, mitigation might lower the risk and thus lessen the effect on
payoff.
A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Native Speakers' Norms
In order to investigate features of interlanguage with respect to the speech act of
complaining, it was necessary to first establish baseline intra-cultural and crosscultural
norms. We started with a study of the realization of complaints in Hebrew
(Olshtain & Weinbach, 1987; Weinbach, 1988). Data were collected via responses
to a discourse completion questionnaire, consisting of 20 situations. Each situation
presented respondents with a detailed description of the context, the social status
and the social distance between the interlocutors, and details on whether there exists
mutual commitment or an explicit/implicit contract (social obligation) that requires
H to be responsible for the SUA (see Appendix). The data collected from 35 Israeli
university students led to the development of a scale for the perception of the
severity of the complaint. This scale enabled us to categorize complaint realizations
on five points along a continuum. The categories were defined in terms of the
degree of face-threat that S was willing to undertake when expressing censure or, in
other words, in terms of payoff considerations as described above. The following
five realization patterns were established.

The Speech Act of Complaining 111
1. Below the level of reproach are various realizations that enable S to avoid
explicit mention of the offensive event or direct focus on S. In fact, this category
deliberately leaves room for H's interpretation as to whether or not a complaint was
actually voiced. A typical reaction in this category would be a general remark: for
example, if H spilled something and damaged the tablecloth or some papers, S
might say: "Such things happen," or "Don't worry about it, there's no real damage."
In terms of payoff considerations, S makes sure (in this realization) that there is no
real breach in social harmony as a result of the SUA and that H does not feel
reprimanded too strongly.
2. Expression of annoyance or disapproval encompasses various realizations
that are vague and indirect and do not explicitly mention either the SUA or H, but do
express general annoyance at the violation. S still tries to avoid open confrontation
with H, but makes it clear that there was a violation of some sort. Thus, a realization
of a complaint in a statement such as: "Such lack of consideration!" or "This is
really unacceptable behavior" does not specify exactly what was wrong and who
was responsible. H can choose to interpret it as a complaint but he can also ignore
the illocutionary intent.
3. Explicit complaint refers to realizations where S has made the decision to use
an open face-threatening act toward H, but to instigate no sanctions. In this category
S explicitly refers to either the SUA, or H, or both. Thus, any of the following
realizations of complaints in a case where a doctor postponed an operation without
informing the patient would be considered an "explicit complaint": "You're inconsiderate!"
"One should not postpone this type of operation," or "You should not
have postponed such an operation."
4. Accusation and warning is expressed as a complaint when S chooses to
perform an open face-threatening act and further implies potential sanctions against
H. An example of this type of complaint addressed toward someone who was very
late for a meeting is, "Next time I'll let you wait for hours."
5. Immediate threat is expressed when S chooses to openly attack H. A realization
of this strategy is, "You'd better pay the money right now"; "I'm not moving
one inch before you change my appointment." This strategy can also consist of
curses and direct insults, such as "You're an idiot."
Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) suggested that these five categories of realization
patterns of complaining make up the speech act set for this speech act (Olshtain &
Cohen, 1983). Table 5.1 indicates that speakers of Hebrew tend to cluster around the
three central strategies: disapproval, complaint, and warning. When the speaker is
of lower status than the hearer, the tendency is to opt for less severe complaints
(disapproval and complaint); when the interlocutors are equals or the speaker has
higher social status, the tendency is stronger for the two more severe realizations
(complaint and warning). Few respondents choose the softest strategy, "below level
of reproach"—mostly in cases where the speaker is of lower status than the hearer;
even fewer make use of "immediate threat," which seerns to increase with social
power.
The second study to be reported here was designed to compare different cultural
groups with respect to a set of situations in terms of their preference for the optingout
strategy, the direct strategy, the unmitigated, and the mitigated strategies (Katz,
1987). In this study the realizations of complaining clustered for all three groups in

112 Speech Act Realization
Table 5.1. Distribution of Strategies by Social Status
among Native Speakers of Hebrew (% of actual responses
of each strategy in the particular social status context)
Strategy
Below level of reproach
Disapproval
Complaint
Warning
Threat
S(-P)
H( + P)
(%)
18
28
38
14
2
100
S — speaker, H = hearer, P = (social) power.
Equals
(%)
8
15
48
25
4
100
S(+P)
H(-P)
(%)
6
13
43
32
6
100
three major categories: the unmitigated form, comparable to what we called earlier
the "warning"; the mitigated strategy, in fact, the conventional complaint; and the
indirect strategy, which resembles implicit disapproval. Unique to this study is that
it also allowed for the strategy of opting out in cases where the respondents chose to
indicate that they would prefer not to offer a verbal reaction to the situation given.
Subjects in this study consisted of two English-language groups—one British
(n = 27) and one American (n = 23)—and a Hebrew-speaking group (n = 25). The
English-speaking informants were students and staff from Lancaster and Birmingham
Universities in England, and from Columbia and New York Universities in
New York City; the Hebrew speakers were from Tel Aviv University and Beit Berl
Teachers' Training College. Their age ranged from 19 to 55.
The instrument used to collect the data was a Reaction Elicitation Questionnaire,
which is in fact a modified version of Blum-Kulka's (1982) Discourse Completion
Questionnaire. The Modified Elicitation Questionnaire was designed to
elicit expressions of censure from the three groups of respondents in their country of
domicile. The purpose of modification was to obviate, as much as possible, constraints
made on responses with respect to tone or content, and furthermore, to
allow the option of zero response leading to the opting-out strategy.
The questionnaire consisted of two main parts (beyond the section dealing with
personal information): (1) 25 situations to which respondents were asked to react in
writing; and (2) an evaluation sheet on which respondents were to indicate the
degree of perceived severity of the SUA provided in the questionnaire. The 25
situations provided in the questionnaire consisted of 20 descriptions related to acts
expected to elicit expressions of censure and 5 distractor situations placed at randem
among the 20 other situations.
The acts described in the 20 censure situations refer to manifestations of socially
unacceptable behavior in a Western culture. These situations were divided into 5
main content categories:
1. littering
2. noise making
3. unpunctuality

The Speech Act of Complaining 113
Table 5.2. The Option to Express or Refrain from
from Expressing Censure by Cultural Group
British
533 tokens
(%)
American
431 tokens
(%)
Israeli
491 tokens
(%)
Censure
Avoidance
65
35
100
61
39
100
64
36
100
4. queue jumping
5. petty stealing
The first important finding of this study is that respondents from all three cultures
opted out less than they chose to express censure, for the given situations. Table 5.2
presents these data. About two-thirds of the respondents in each group chose to
realize the speech act of censure, while about one-third opted out by indicating on
the questionnaire that they would prefer "to say nothing" in the given situation.
Table 5.3 presents strategy preferences among those who decided to carry out
the act of censure. From considering the data in both tables 5.2 and 5.3, it becomes
apparent that the differences among the three groups were negligible. This was
contrary to our expectations: from other studies we had come to perceive Israeli
society as much more direct and positive politeness oriented and the British culture
as much more indirect and negative politeness oriented, with the American culture
falling somewhere in between. It seems, therefore, that the chosen situations had a
much stronger impact on strategy choice, and this impact was similar in all three
cultures. It is conceivable that the seemingly "universal" situations selected for the
instrument contributed to similar strategy choice in the three cultural groups.
Figure 5.1 shows the variation of responses by the three groups of respondents
according to the five situations used in this study. The distribution of responses
further reinforces that the three culture groups differ in their speech act behavior of
complaining only slightly with respect to three situations (noise, unpunctuality,
line), while showing almost identical realization patterns for the other two. The
overall picture emphasizes the similarity of performance among the three culture
groups.
Table 5.3. Strategies to Express Censure by Cultural Group
British
347 tokens
(%)
American
264 tokens
(%)
Israeli
313 tokens
(%)
Indirect
Mitigated
Unmitigated
20
15
65
100
14
17
69
100
13
16
71
100

114 Speech Act Realization
Fig. 5.1. Variation of responses by three groups of respondents.
The Intel-language of Complaints
In this section we are concerned with the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic
features of the interlanguage of complaining as exhibited by intermediate and advanced
learners of Hebrew as a second language. We have tried to focus specifically
on deviations from native norms that might lead to sociopragmatic failure (Thomas,
1983; Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986).
In previous studies (Kasper, 1981; Olshtain, 1983; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983;
Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1985; Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986) it has been established
that nonnative speech act behavior can deviate from native behavior: in
strategy selection, in utterance length, in the consideration of social and pragmatic
features, in carrying out or opting out from performing a speech act, and in varying
the degree of external and internal modification. It is our objective to describe some
of the potential deviations that might arise particularly during the acquisition of the
speech act of complaining.
The research presented in this section will focus on one large-scale study comparing
native and nonnative realizations of complaints with respect to five measures:
utterance length as expressed in number of words, utterance length as expressed
in number of moves, position on the severity scale, use of softeners, and use
of intensifiers. Additionally, two shorter studies dealing with cultural and ethnic
preferences for strategy selection, within the nonnative group, will be discussed as
an expansion of our understanding of the various factors that might affect interlanguage
behavior.
Native and Nonnative Realizations of Complaints in Hebrew
The main goal of this investigation was to identify factors that distinguish native
from nonnative realizations of complaints. Two main hypotheses were formulated to
underlie the various studies reported here.

The Speech Act of Complaining 115
1. According to previous work on interlanguage pragmatics (Blum-Kulka &
Olshtain, 1986), we would expect nonnative speakers to produce longer utterances
(as measured by number of words or by number of moves) than native speakers,
given the same descriptions of situations on the discourse completion test (see
Appendix).
2. Although the cross-cultural comparison above demonstrated striking similarities
in the performance of the three "central" strategies on the severity scale
(Tables 5.2 and 5.3), learners will tend to move more toward the less severe
strategies than do native speakers; new immigrants or newcomers to any culture
might try to avoid straightforward face-threatening interactions at all costs. Strategy
selection for complaining can be ranked on a 5-point scale, where 5 is the strongest,
most severe complaint, and 1 is slightly below the level of reproach. Native speakers
can be expected to have a higher average along this scale (tendency toward
stronger complaint) than nonnative speakers. Furthermore, in their attempt to sound
less aggressive and more polite, learners might tend to use more softeners, which
lower the face-threatening nature of complaints. Accordingly, they will use fewer
intensifiers, since such intensifiers aggravate complaining force and create even
stronger conflict.
Two groups of subjects—35 native speakers of Hebrew and 35 learners
(nonnatives)—were compared on five separate measures in order to test the above
two hypotheses. Length of utterance was tested on two measures—number of
words and number of moves within the realization; severity of complaint was
measured by the average position along the severity scale (from 1 to 5), and
softeners and intensifiers were compared across all situations. A multivariate analysis
of variance (MANOVA) was conducted and the differences between the two
groups were found significant (F[5,64j = 25,7; p < .001). The results of a univariate
analysis for the differences between the two groups on the five measures are
presented on Table 5.4. The results indicate strong group differences for the first
three measures: total length of utterance, number of moves, and the severity scale
(strategy selection). The learners, as expected in hypothesis 1, use considerably
more words in order to express the speech act of complaining. The number of moves
may be related to the overall length of utterance since more moves would have to be
realized in more words, but it is obvious that independent of the number of moves,
the overall length of utterance indicates a strong difference between the groups. This
result further reinforces the findings presented in Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986)
and strengthens our belief that advanced learners tend to make use of more words in
order to negotiate their intentions expressed via speech act realizations.
The results presented in Table 5.4 also confirm hypothesis 2, at least partially.
According to hypothesis 2 we expected native speakers to prefer more severe
strategies in comparison to the learners. The average on the severity scale is 2.79 for
the Hebrew speakers and only 2.61 for learners, which fully confirms this part of
hypothesis 2. Furthermore, Table 5.4 also indicates that, as expected, learners tend
to use more softeners (.68)' in comparison to natives (.54). However, the last part of
hypothesis 2 was not confirmed, as it seems that learners use more intensifiers (.77)
than natives (.68). It may well be that in their attempt to negotiate their intentions,
the use of more words overcomes any other considerations, intensifiers being used
mainly for message clarification rather than for intensification.

116 Speech Act Realization
Table 5.4. Univariate F-Tests for Differences between Native Speakers and Learners
on Five Measures (averaged over 20 situations)
Native Ss
Learners
Measure
X
SD
X
SD
F
Total no. of words
7.05
1.03
10.14
1.84
74.86***
No. of moves
1.67
.18
2.09
.30
50.03***
Severity scale
Total softeners
2.79
.54
.21
.16
2.61
.68
.18
.24
15.24***
8.05**
Total intensifiers
.68
.16
.77
.18
4.67*
*p < .05.
**p < .01.
***p < .001.
Some situations were particularly sensitive to the differences between the two
groups. Consider situation 11: "Your car needs some urgent repair work and you
take it to the garage close to closing time. There are two cars in line before yours.
You ask nicely to have your car fixed in spite of the late hour. The owner of the
garage apologizes for not being able to fix it and rejects any possibility of even
looking at it at this late hour." The native speakers made relatively short complaints
in this situation, such as: "I won't come here again"; "Okay, I'll do without it";
"You just lost a client." The learners, on the other hand, had much longer utterances:
"I was hoping for better treatment since I have been your client for quite
some time. What can I do now"; "Sir, I have to have my car. You know Mr. X, he
recommended that I come here and I don't want to complain to him about you—it
might give your garage a bad name. So, why don't you fix it for me" These
examples show how learners feel the need to "say more" in the hope that they might
get the car fixed, after all.
Situation 9 was particularly sensitive to the differences in strategy selection on
the severity scale: "It is not the first time that loud rock music is heard from your
neighbor's apartment quite late at night. You pick up the phone and you say . . ." In
this situation the native speakers tended to opt for the most severe strategies, many
using threats and ultimatums such as: "If you don't turn off your stereo soon I'll
break your door down," "If you don't stop this loud music immediately I'll call the
police." The learners were much more hesitant in their selection of strategies,
opting for complaints rather than threats, such as: "I'm trying very hard to sleep but
it is impossible with all this noise," "Some people would like a little peace and quiet
but you are completely inconsiderate."
Following the analysis above, we raised a number of additional questions.
Given the high significance of length of utterance and selection of strategy on the
severity scale as measures distinguishing the two groups, might particular aspects of
the situation interact with these differences We were concerned, primarily, with
features of social status, social distance, and the existence of some kind of a contract
or social obligation on H's part to have avoided the reason for complaining. These
three independent variables: social status, social distance, and social obligation

The Speech Act of Complaining 111
were embedded in the description of the situations on the discourse completion
questionnaire. Table 5.5 presents the means and standard deviations of utterance
length and severity scale produced by the two groups, by social distance, social
status and social obligation, while Table 5.6 gives the F values for the multivariate
analysis of variance for these data.
From the F values presented in Table 5.6 we see that social distance is a
significant factor for both groups in terms of both length of utterance and severity of
complaint (p < .001). It does not, however, interact with group and is nonsignificant
as far as group distinctions are concerned. It is interesting to look at the means
presented in Table 5.5 for the two groups: although length of utterance is always
higher for learners, as was to be expected based on the main effect established
earlier, it is surprisingly similar in its distribution according to different types of
social distance. Thus, both groups use more words with acquaintances, as if there
seems to be a need to negotiate more with interlocutors of this type. This finding
goes along with Wolfson's (1989) description of "the bulge" phenomenon, which
Table 5.5. Means and Standard Deviations (in parentheses) for Two Dependent Variables
According to Groups by Social Distance, Social Status, and Social Obligation
Number of words
Severity scale
Social factor
Natives
Learners
Natives
Learners
Social Distance
Strangers
6.74
(1.61)
9.57
(2.90)
2.64
(.34)
2.43
(.31)
Acquaintances
8.48
(2.78)
11.79
(3.46)
3.02
(.34)
2.72
(.26)
Friends
5.54
(2.32)
8.59
(4.07)
2.67
(.62)
2.44
(.51)
Relatives
6.43
(1.68)
9.58
(2.65)
2.76
(.40)
2.73
(.38)
Social Status*
S(-P) H(+P)
S( + P) H(-P)
Equals
7.77
(2.16)
7.69
(1.60)
4.88
(.78)
10.71
(2.91)
11.30
(3.58)
5.79
(1.04)
2.46
(.35)
2.98
(.31)
4.13
(.79)
2.33
(.36)
2.78
(.34)
4.41
(.77)
Social Obligation
Nonexistent
8.06
(2.47)
li.OO
(3.48)
2.66
(.37)
2.37
(.37)
Explicit
5.26
(.89)
6.27
(1.22)
4.46
(.79)
4.82
(.78)
Implicit
6.24
(1.52)
9.06
(2.63)
2.61
(.32)
2.61
(.34)
*S — speaker. H = hearer, P = (soeial) power.

118 Speech Act Realization
Table 5.6. F(df) Values for the Multivariate Analysis of Variance
Source of variance
Social distance
Distance & group
Social status
Status & group
Social obligation
Obligation & group
*p < .01.
**p < .001.
Length of utterance
14.82**
(3,66)
.14
(3,66)
177.50**
(2,67)
15.52**
(2,67)
84.85**
(2,67)
9.92**
(2,67)
Severity scale
16.16**
(3,66)
1.89
(3,66)
184.83**
(2,67)
2.99
(2,67)
224.33**
(2,67)
5.43*
(2,67)
indicates that when speakers are less certain about roles and relationships with their
interlocutors they negotiate more and accordingly use more words. It seems that
both groups in our study feel the need for such negotiation in the case of mere
acquaintances. On the other hand, with respect to strangers and relatives, they
behave very similarly since here the roles are more fixed—strangers, we may never
see again; relatives are here to stay. In either case there is less need for negotiation,
as was also found by Wolfson (1989). The difference lies in the way Israelis, both
native speakers of Hebrew and learners, react to friends. It seems that friendship is
more binding in Israeli society and therefore, when a friend performs a breach of
confidence, the disappointment is great. A sense of solidarity is well founded
among friends (verbal reports of subjects) and there is no need to negotiate via
lengthy exchanges. An example is situation 13: "A friend who takes the same course
as you do was not willing to share some important material which he was able to get
and which can help you prepare for the exam in that course." The complaints
produced by the respondents in this case were rather brief, expressing deep personal
disappointment.
With respect to social status, Table 5.6 shows that this factor is significant for
both length of utterance and strategy selection on the severity scale for both groups
(p < .001), but more important, there is interaction between status and group with
respect to length of utterance (p < .001). From Table 5.5 it is clear that again
learners always use longer utterances than native speakers, but this is particularly
strong in the case of S(+P) - H(-P), where the speaker is of higher status than the
interlocutor. It is under these conditions that learners use the longest utterance,
negotiating most fervently. Furthermore, the standard deviation (SD) in this case is
extremely high (3.58), indicating great variability among the subjects in the group
of learners.
The strongest interaction effect in our analysis is found between social obligation
and group, as can be seen from Table 5.6. Here the interaction is both for length

The Speech Act of Complaining 119
of utterance (p < .001) and for strategy selection (p < .01). In terms of length of
utterance, both groups use the most intensive negotiation when there is no explicit
social obligation; here again, expectations can be less well predicted and the obligation
is not fixed. In cases like these, negotiation might bring about repair of the
violation, hence if pays for the speaker to negotiate. On the other hand, when there
is explicit obligation, one can simply appeal to it without too much negotiation,
such as in situation 3: "You are driving your new car on a main street. Suddenly a
car crosses in front of you not having stopped at a stop sign." In this case, the
obligation is part of the law, and therefore the only thing subjects need to say is that
one must abide by traffic laws. On the other hand, for situation 10, "You have
returned from your vacation one day later than expected and are unable to hand in a
seminar paper on time. Your professor is not prepared to extend the time," it seems
worthwhile to negotiate and hope that the professor will change his mind. The
greatest difference between natives and learners is found in cases where the obligation
is implicit. Here the learners feel a greater need to negotiate. They also exhibit
greater variability than natives do: on situations with no social obligation, there is a
difference of 1.19 standard deviation between natives and learners on length of
utterance, while the difference is 1.85 when the obligation is implicit (indicating
greater variability for the implicit obligation).
The interaction between social obligation and group (p < .01) on the severity
scale is realized in a rather unexpected manner: for situations with explicit social
obligation, the learners choose more severe strategies than the natives (4.82 as
compared to 4.46; see Table 5.5); for the situations with implicit obligation, they
show exactly the same means; and when there is no obligation whatsoever, the
difference is very small, with the natives scoring only slightly higher than the
learners. Both groups use the more severe strategies when there is social obligation,
but this is the only case when the learners do so even more than the natives,
probably feeling much more confident that in such obvious situations, they have the
right to complain explicitly and boldly.
Cultural and Ethnic Considerations
The last question to be discussed in this chapter relates to culturally specific parameters
derived from context knowledge (Faerch & Kasper, 1984), which might be
perceived differently by learners than by native speakers, thus leading to additional
deviations in speech act performance. This question was investigated with two
groups of immigrants in Israel: Russians and Moroccans (Hauser & Swindler,
1988). There were 20 respondents in each group; all were immigrants who had been
in Israel for at least two years when the questionnaire was administered. The two
groups reacted quite similarly in most situations and indicated a very similar spread
of strategy selection. The differences occurred in two specific situations.
Situation 3 was as follows: "You are nearing an empty spot in a parking place
when another car drives in and takes the place, disregarding you completely." In this
situation, Russians and Moroccans reacted very differently. Russians tended to use
warnings, threats, and even curses, while Moroccans opted out or chose one of the
two softer realizations of complaints, below the level of reproach or disapproval.

120 Speech Act Realization
When questioned in verbal reports, the Russians claimed that people should be
considerate and play a "fair game" in a parking lot, while the Moroccans said that
the offense was not serious; in fact, they might also do something like that.
Situation 8 read: "You are in great need of a money loan. You approach a friend
whom you had helped in the past, but s/he rejects your request." In this situation,
the two groups of speakers reacted quite differently. Russians tended to accept the
rejection and not to complain. If they did voice a complaint, it was "below the level
of reproach." Moroccans, on the other hand, made use of the full scale of strategies.
In verbal reports, the Russians claimed that when it comes to money business, it is
actually better not to borrow from friends, while the Moroccans said that friends
should be there to help you in time of need.
In another study, which compared new immigrants from Romania with longestablished
immigrants from the same country (Hoch-Pasko, 1988), it was found
that some interesting differences occurred in the subjects' consideration of the
contextual features. Thus, newcomers tended to opt out from expressing complaints
in situations that related to a breach of social norms affecting the public in general,
such as throwing litter in the public domain and being late for a movie, resulting in
disturbing the audience. Yet, when the violation affected the individual (e.g., a
neighbor in the building playing very loud music late at night), the newcomers
tended to use more severe complaints than the long-established immigrants.
Conclusion
A number of interlanguage features of speech act behavior have been established in
the series of studies reported in this chapter, two of which seem to be general and
might therefore apply to all speech act behavior of learners and three which might be
specific to the speech act of complaining.
The two general interlanguage features of speech act performance are length of
utterance and variability. Learners at the intermediate to advanced level of second
language acquisition tend to be verbose and use more words than native speakers,
more than they themselves would use in their own language, in order to negotiate
the intentions of their speech acts in the new language. When compared to native
speakers of the target language, this difference is strong.
More pronounced variability in strategy selection, use of intensifiers, softeners,
number of moves, etc. can be seen from the consistently larger standard derivations
exhibited by learners. Learners are less certain about such decisions and therefore
tend to vary more in their choices than native speakers.
The speech act of complaining, being an inherently face-threatening act, exhibits
interesting deviations in learners' interlanguage from native speakers' norms,
which are specific to this speech act. Such deviations seem to focus on the fact that
newcomers to the target community attempt to sound less offensive and less facethreatening.
As a result, their overall choice of realization patterns is consistently
closer to the less severe end of the scale when compared to native speakers. As part
of their variability in choice, they also seem to be more sensitive to differences in
social factors related to their interlocutors. In our study, the unexpected finding

The Speech Act of Complaining 121
related to the notion of social obligation: when the situation was one in which social
obligation was explicit either by law or convention, the learners felt more secure in
their choices and were less concerned with being polite and cautious.
The studies of the interlanguage of speech act behavior presented in this chapter
indicate that contextual parameters such as social factors and situational factors
might affect realization patterns of speech acts produced by learners. Some of these
interlanguage features have the potential to represent any speech act behavior while
others are speech act specific.
Appendix
Sample items from discourse completion questionnaire (translated from Hebrew):
Situation 9
It is not the first time that loud rock music is heard from your neighbor's apartment quite late
at night. You pick up the phone and say:
Situation 13
A friend who takes the same course as you at the university refuses to share some important
material for the next test, which s/he managed to get hold of. In the past, you helped him/her
many times. You see him/her on campus and say:
References
Blum-Kulka, S. (1982). Learning how to say what you mean in a second language: A study
of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied
Linguistics, 3, 29-59.
Blum-Kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. (1986). Too many words: Length of utterance and pragmatic
failure. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 8, 47-61.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universah in language usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Faerch, C., & Kasper, G. (1984). Pragmatic knowledge: Rules and procedures. Applied
Linguistics, 5, 214-25.
Hauser, Z., & Swindler, I. (1988). A comparison of realization patterns of complaints among
Israelis from Morroco and from the Soviet Union. Unpublished seminar paper, School
of Education, Tel Aviv University.
Hoch-Pasko, R. (1988). Complaints as expressed by Israelis from Roumanian background.
Unpublished seminar paper, School of Education, Tel Aviv University.

122 Speech Act Realization
Kasper, G. (1981). Pragmatische Aspekte in der Interimsprache. Eine Untersuchung des
Englischen fortgeschrittener deutscher Lerner. Tubingen, Germany: Narr.
Katz, L. (1987). Face risk in the expression of censure: A cross-cultural study. Unpublished
master's thesis, School of Education, Tel Aviv University.
Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.
Olshtain, E. (1983). Sociocultural competence and language transfer: The case of apology. In
S. Gass & L. Selinkcr (Eds.), Language transfer and language learning (232-49).
Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Olshtain, E., & Blum-Kulka, S. (1985). Degree of approximation: Nonnative reactions to
native speech act behavior. In S. Gass & C. Madden (Eds.), Input in second language
acquisition (303-25). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Olshtain, E., & Cohen, A. (1983). Apology: A speech act set. In N. Wolfson & E. Judd
(Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language acquisition (18-36). Rowley, MA: Newbury
House.
Olshtain, E., & Weinbach, L. (1987). Complaints—A study of speech act behavior among
native and non-native speakers of Hebrew. In M. B. Papi & J. Verschueren (Eds.),
The Pragmatic perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics
Conference (195-208). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Thomas, J. A. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4, 91-112.
Weinbach, L. (1988). The realization pattern of complaints in Hebrew: Native speakers and
learners. Unpublished master's thesis, School of Education, Tel Aviv University.
Wolfson, N. (1989). Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL. Cambridge, MA: Newbury
House.

6
Interlanguage Requestive Hints
ELDA WEIZMAN
This chapter explores the use of Hints as a request strategy by learners. It addresses
the question of regularities to be observed in the use of requestive Hints by language
learners with various mother tongues at different proficiency levels, and the similarities
or differences between them and native speakers. This analysis contributes
both to our knowledge of learners' pragmalinguistic behavior, as well as to our
understanding of indirectness. The study was conducted within the framework of
the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (cf. Blum-Kulka,
House, & Kasper, 1989), and focuses on a comparison of Hebrew learners (henceforth
HL) with Hebrew native speakers (henceforth HN), examined in the context of
a larger body of CCSARP data. Drawing on findings concerning the situational
variation and the use of Hint substrategies by native speakers (Blum-Kulka, 1989;
Weizman, 1989), I propose to examine whether the opacity inherent in Hints is
exploited by learners as a strategy of communication, whether the impact of situational
variations marks Hint selection by learners as it does with native speakers,
and whether the use of Hint substrategies is comparable in the two groups.
Defining Requestive Hints
The category of requestive Hints consists of the most nonconventional and indirect
of all request strategies. Typical instances include:
/ have so much work to do (when used as a request to be left alone).
Don't you have anything to do (when used as a request to be left alone).
It's cold in here (when used as a request to close the window).
/' ve just missed my bus (when used as a request for a ride).
Are you going home now (when used as a request for a ride).
Do you have your notebook with you (when used as a request that the hearer
lend the speaker her notebook).
The kitchen is in a bit of a mess (when used as a request that the hearer clean up
the kitchen).
123

124 Speech Act Realization
In Hints, the interpretation of the speaker's intentions is highly contextembedded,
and is not secured either by the sentence meaning of the utterance (i.e.,
by its context-independent, literal meaning), as in direct requests (e.g., "Leave me
alone, please"); or by some grammatical or semantic device, conventionally used to
convey the requestive force, as in indirect, conventional requests (e.g., "Could you/
Would you leave me alone, please")
Initially, the CCSARP coding scheme made a distinction between two types of
Hints—mild Hints and strong Hints—in terms of the amount of contextual knowledge
required for their interpretation. For the purpose of the present analysis, these
two strategies are collapsed, and each Hint is re-analyzed. The proposed analysis
assumes, following Weizman (1985; 1989), that although all Hints are inherently
opaque, they are not all opaque in the same way, or to the same extent. Hence, Hints
vary on two dimensions: degree and type of opacity. In terms of type, it is either
Hints' illocutionary force, or their propositional content, or both, that is obscure,
and that should, therefore, be "explored" and "deciphered" by the interpreter. On
the illocutionary dimension, a Hint is considered opaque when its utterance meaning
does not provide sufficient indication of its intended illocutionary force; consequently,
it carries the potential to perform a number of illocutionary acts. On the
propositional dimension, a Hint is considered opaque when its sentence meaning
does not provide sufficient evidence of the content of the act. Type and degree of
opacity interact, however, since on each of these dimensions Hints may be distinguished
in terms of degree of opacity, that is, the amount of "missing clues"
required for full interpretation. (For further details, refer to "Distribution of Hint
Substrategies in Learners' Data," below.) Obviously, since in real-life situations
disambiguation is highly context-dependent (see Dascal & Weizman, 1987; Weizman
& Dascal, 1991), the distinction by types is not always clear-cut. Generally
speaking, however, it seems safe enough to suggest that while illocutionary opacity
entails propositional opacity, the opposite does not hold, since opacity on the
propositional dimension does not necessarily imply opacity on the illocutionary
scale. For example, the utterance "I have so much work to do" could be interpreted
either as a request (to be left alone) or as an apology (for having forgotten to do the
shopping). Hence, it is considered opaque on both the illocutionary and the propositional
dimensions. The utterance "If only someone helped me," on the other hand,
would most plausibly be interpreted as a request, but the content of the request is
completely obscure, since the speaker does not specify the kind of help needed.
Hence, this Hint is considered relatively transparent on the illocutionary dimension,
and extremely opaque on the propositional one. Note that the two dimensions
interact: since certain propositional components are entailed by the illocutionary
force (Vanderveken, 1984, 190), a certain degree of propositional transparency may
help to disambiguate the illocutionary force. For instance, the illocutionary force of
promises imposes on the propositional content the requirement that a reference be
made to a (semantically) future action (Searle, 1975). Since, however, reference to a
future action is also apt to be made in requests, propositional content in Hints can
only be considered as contributing to the elucidation of illocutionary force. Hence,
it is the balance between the opacity types that changes from one Hint to another,
and creates the enormous variety of requestive Hints. 1
The very essence of Hints cannot be fully grasped unless one attempts to answer

Interlanguage Requestive Hints 125
the question: Why use Hints at all Assuming the speaker to be a rational agent
(Grice, 1975), he or she is supposed to achieve any given end by choosing "that
action which, most effectively, and at least cost, attains that end, ceteris paribus"
(Kasher, 1982, 32). What end could possibly be attained by the use of such a high
degree of opacity Surely, if the end to be achieved is the requestive one—that is, if
the speaker intends to get a requested act carried out by the hearer as a result of the
hearer's recognition of this intent (Searle, 1975)—then the most effective way of
achieving this purpose is not by using an "off-record" strategy (Brown & Levinson,
1978, 210), but by using direct ones. One would tend, then, to associate indirectness
with politeness and tact, following Leech, for instance: "in general, the more
tactful a directive is, the more indirect and circumlocutionary it is" (Leech, 1980,
109); or: "Indirect illocutions tend to be more polite (a) because they increase the
degree of optionality, and (b) because the more indirect an illocution is, the more
diminished and tentative its force tends to be" (Leech, 1983, 108). Along these lines,
it is tempting to suggest that the end to be achieved by the use of Hints is to get a
requested act carried out without threatening the hearer's face. Experiments have
shown, however, that although perceptions of politeness vary across cultures, Hints
are not conceived as the most polite strategy. Within the framework of CCSARP,
House (1986) and Blum-Kulka (1987) have shown that speakers of Hebrew, American
English, British English, and German conceive of Hints as less polite than
conventional indirectness. The same point was made earlier by Walters (1979, 286,
287) about speakers of American English and Puerto Rican Spanish, within the
framework of studies on learners' performance of requests in role-playing situations
(Eraser, Rintell,& Walters, 1980; Walters, 1981; Walters, 1979;Rintell, 1981). 2 Evidence
then seems to indicate that the most effective way to make requests while saving
the hearer's face is not the use of Hints, but the use of conventional indirectness.
If Hints are not the most efficient way to achieve the requestive purpose, or to
save face, what then is the end that can be attained most effectively by using them
In Weizman (1989) I have suggested the following: the large repertoire of plausible
interpretations of a given Hint seems to imply that Hints are the most efficient way
for the requester to make a request while at the same time securing the possibility of
legitimately denying some of its illocutionary and prepositional components. I have
therefore suggested (Weizman, 1989) that Hints be thought of as the only request
strategy that bears a high deniability potential for both parties: the requester may
plausibly deny having made a request (e.g., "I never meant to ask anything of you")
or deny its prepositional content (e.g., "I never asked you to fetch me my coat"; "I
just wanted you to close the window"); the requestee may legitimately ignore the
request or pretend to have misunderstood its content. Since this deniability potential
might be exploited by learners, the recognition of its importance underlies the
questions raised in the following section.
Research Questions
This study raises three main questions, underlined by previously observed data and
some working assumptions. First, in the CCSARP data, native speakers' use of
Hints is usually remarkably low relative to either direct strategies or conventional

126 Speech Act Realization
indirect ones. The analysis of request strategies in five languages combined (Australian
English, Canadian French, German, Argentinian Spanish, and Hebrew) reveals
that native speakers' selection of Hints varies from 1.14% to 7.76%, depending on
situational constraints (Blum-Kulka & House, 1989, 130). Low frequency is also
manifested in Hint selection by native speakers of British English, Danish, and
German in most of the situations (Kasper, 1989; House & Kasper, 1987). A similar
trend is depicted in studies of other data types, e.g., studies of request realization by
native speakers of English and German in role-plays (Kasper, 1981), and by native
speakers of Hebrew in authentic face-to-face interaction, phone calls, and letters to
the editor (Blum-Kulka, Danet, & Gerson, 1985). In terms of the deniabilitypotential
hypothesis, this low frequency seems to indicate either that native speakers
only rarely feel the need to secure a way to opt out of their request; or else, that only
seldom do they consider it worth doing at the expense of efficiency.
As for learners, the deniability potential might appeal to them for other reasons.
More specifically, it might be exploited as a strategy of communication. By virtue of
their nonconventional form, Hints might be employed to avoid the need to cope with
the target-language conventional realizations; and, by virtue of their opacity, they
might be exploited to avoid specific reference to the interlocuter's preceding turns.
Put differently, their high deniability potential might be exploited by way of "risk
avoidance," whereby a learner can "tailor his message to the resources he has
available" (Corder, 1983, 17) in order to cope with "what to an individual presents
itself as a problem in reaching a particular communicative goal" (Faerch & Kasper,
1983, 212).
If Hints are indeed employed as a communication strategy, a higher frequency of
use is likely to be observed in learners, mainly those least exposed to the target
culture and therefore most liable to feel insecure. This raises the questions whether
learners use Hints more frequently than native speakers, and whether the incidence
of Hints decreases with the increase in length of stay in the target culture. Answers
will be suggested in "Proportion of Hints and Situational Variation in Learners"
(below).
Second, observed situational variation in native speakers' use of all request
strategies, including Hints (Blum-Kulka, 1989) and Hint substrategies (Weizman,
1989) suggests powerful situational constraints on their requestive behaviour.
CCSARP questionnaires include eight situations, differentiated in terms of six social
parameters: the degree of (1) dominance and (2) familiarity between the speakers;
the requester's (3) right to make the request and the (4) degree of difficulty
involving in making it; the (5) likelihood of compliance and (6) degree of obligation
on the part of the requestee (Blum-Kulka & House, 1989). The second issue discussed
in "Proportion of Hints and Situational Variation in Learners" (below) concerns
the impact of situational variance on the selection of Hints by learners.
Third, Hints in the CCSARP data were found to consist of several main substrategies,
ranging from extreme opacity to relative transparency. The low incidence
of other substrategies in native speakers' data was interpreted as indicating that
although Hints are nonconventional in form; that is, nonconventional in terms of the
lexical and grammatical items used for their realizations, their use is not entirely
convention-free. The following point has been made (Weizman, 1989): one usually
thinks of Hints, and justly so, as an open-ended category, because utterances of any

Interlanguage Requestive Hints 127
form could be interpreted as carrying a given illocutionary force, depending on the
situation. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that even the use of Hints obeys a
certain order, since in a given situation a given set of semantic contents is more
likely to be preferred, although an open-ended repertoire of potential candidates is
available. For example, when requesting that the hearer give the speaker a lift, a
Hint would preferably be realized by questioning some constituent of the feasibility
of that action; for example, by asking, "Do you have a car" or "Are you going home"
whereby a positive answer is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the
feasibility of the requested action. On the other hand, when requesting a roommate
to clean up the kitchen, a Hint is more likely to be realized by stating some reason
for the request; for example, "the kitchen is in a terrible mess." (For further details,
see "Distribution of Hint Substrategies in Learners' Data," below.) 3 It is therefore
important to emphasize that requestive Hints are viewed here as being accountable
in terms of "conventions of means," specifying "a semantic device by which an
indirect speech act can be performed," as opposed to "conventions of form," that is,
"conventions about the wording of indirect speech acts" (Clark, 1979, 433).
Furthermore, marked preference for the most opaque substrategy has been observed
in native speakers and was interpreted as a confirmation of the hypothesis
that opacity in Hints is intentionally and purposefully exploited (Weizman, 1989).
The questions that arise at this point are whether learners prefer the same substrategies,
and whether they, too, opt for the most opaque one. Answers to the last
two questions will be suggested in "Distribution of Hint Substrategies" (below).
Methodology
CCSARP data, elicited by means of a discourse-completion test, offers the possibility
of exploring the use of requests and apologies by native speakers of Australian,
American and British English, Canadian French, Danish, German, and
Hebrew, as well as by learners of English in Denmark, Germany, and the United
States, of German in Denmark, and of Hebrew in Israel (Blum-Kulka, House, &
Kasper, 1989, chapter 1).
The present study compares learners with native speakers, all students. Table
6.1 indicates the distribution.
A two-step analysis was undertaken. First, 305 Hebrew learners, (henceforth
Table 6.1. Comparison of Learners and Native Speakers
Learners
Native Speakers
Target
language
Country
Mother
tongue
No. of
subjects
Language
No. of
subjects
Hebrew
English
English
English
English
Israel
Germany
Denmark
USA
Israel
Various
German
Danish
Various
Various
305
200
200
35
47
Hebrew
Australian English
American English
German
Canadian French
Argentinian Spanish
173
226
27
200
128
40

128 Speech Act Realization
referred to as HL), were compared with 173 Hebrew native speakers (henceforth
HN). Then, all other learners (n = 482) were compared with the rest of the native
speakers (« = 621). The reason for the distinction is that only Hebrew learner's data
allow for quantitative analysis in terms of length of stay in the target culture, and for
qualitative analysis of Hint substrategies. The rest of the data lends itself mainly to
the study of frequency of use and situational variation.
Data Analysis
Proportion of Hints and Situational Variation in Learners
Of the eight request situations featuring in the CCSARP questionnaire, the following
five are analyzed here:
SI (referred to as "Kitchen"): A student asks his roommate to clean up the
kitchen the latter had left in a mess the night before.
S5 (referred to as "Notes"): A student asks another to lend her some lecture
notes.
S7 (referred to as "Ride"): A student asks people living on the same street for
a ride home.
SI 1 (referred to as "Policeman"): A policeman asks a driver to move her car.
S15 (referred to as "Lecturer"): A university lecturer asks a student to present
his paper a week earlier than scheduled.
Table 6.2 shows the impact of the situational variation on the selection of Hints
by HL as compared to HN. The analysis reveals that in both populations the
frequency of Hints is situationally dependent. In each of them, Hints rarely occur in
the Notes situation (1.7% in learners, 1.2% in native speakers). The Lecturer
situation is also marked by a relatively low incidence of Hints (4.2% and 2.7%,
respectively), while in both groups, Hints most frequently occur in the Policeman
situation (14.6% and 12.8%, respectively). In this respect, no significant differences
are found between HL and HN. 4
Table 6.2. Distribution of Hints by Situation in Hebrew Native Speakers (HN)
and Hebrew Learners (HL)
Learners (HL)
Native speakers (HN)
Situation
N
n
%
N
n
%
p* value
chi-square
1 Kitchen
5 Notes
7 Ride
1 1 Policeman
15 Lecturer
Total
293
297
272
240
191
1293
33
5
28
35
8
109
11.3
1.7
10.3
14.6
4.2
8.4
163
170
165
164
150
812
15
2
23
21
4
65
9.2
1.2
13.9
12.8
2.7
8.0
0.492
# *
0.249
0.611
0.449
0.472
* *
1.324
0.258
0.573
Note: Of A' utterances, n are rcquestivc Hints.
*For learners (HL) versus native speakers (HN), by chi-square analysis.
;!: *The number of Hints is too small to allow for statistical analysis.

Inierlanguage Requestive Hints 129
As concerns native speakers, these findings confirm earlier ones. Blum-Kulka
and House (1989) show the significance of situationally specific features on the
determination of request strategies in general, and Weizman (1989) reports on
situational constraints affecting the selection of Hint substrategies. Blum-Kulka and
House (1989, 128) further indicate that for native speakers of the 5 languages
examined—Australian English, Canadian French, German, Hebrew, and Argentinian
Spanish—the Notes and Lecturer situations attract not only the lowest proportion
of Hints, but also the highest degree of cross-cultural agreement. From the
comparison presented here, the same picture emerges for Hebrew learners: their
sensitivity to situationally specific features is as crucial to Hint selection as it is with
Hebrew native speakers, and they, too, share the agreement concerning the two
situations in question. These findings also seem to agree with Blum-Kulka and
Levenston's (1987) observation, that in four of the five situations examined, the
distribution of strategy types by situation revealed no statistically significant differences
between Hebrew learners and Hebrew native speakers (157).
The question arising at this point is whether this high situational sensitivity in
Hebrew learners reflects a general tendency to be observed in learners of other
languages. To answer this question, different sets of CCSARP data were collapsed
(as explained in "Research Questions," above), so as to allow comparison of Hint
selection by native speakers of various mother tongues with Hint selection by
learners of various target languages, regardless of their mother tongues. We know
by now that situational features affect internal and external modifications of requests
(mitigating devices such as interrogatives, conditionals, hedgers, politeness markers)
(Faerch & Kasper, 1989; House, 1989). Table 6.3 indicates that they also affect
the selection of Hints.
In Table 6.3, two populations are compared: on the one hand, 621 native
speakers (of Australian and American English, German, Canadian French, and
Argentinian Spanish) and on the other, 482 learners (of English). The results show a
marked situational variation in Hint selection by learners, and suggest similarities in
that respect with native speakers. Again we see that in both groups, the Notes
Table 6.3. Distribution of Hints by Situation in Native Speakers
(of Australian and American English, German, Canadian French and Argentinian Spanish)
versus Learners (of English, with Various Mother Tongues)
Learners (HL)
Native speakers (HN)
Situation
N
n
%
N
n
%
p* value
chi-square
1 Kitchen
5 Notes
7 Ride
471
479
474
24
2
25
5.1
0.4
5.3
614
618
614
49
2
38
8.0
0.3
6.2
0.060
*#
0.522
3.535
*#
0.410
1 1 Policeman
473
31
6.6
610
51
8.4
0.265
1.243
15 Lecturer
Total
465
2362
24
106
5.2
4.5
604
3060
31
171
5.1
5.6
0.983
0.00045
Note: Of TV utterances, n are rcquestive Hints.
*For learners (HL) versus native speakers (HN), by chi-square analysis.
* :t The number of Hints is too small to allow for statistical analysis.

130 Speech Act Realization
situation attracts the smallest percentage of Hints (0.5% in learners, 0.19 in native
speakers); the Lecture situation attracts a relatively small proportion of Hints
(4.59% in learners, 5.57% in native speakers); and Hints are most likely to occur in
the Policeman situation (6.9% and 8.87%, respectively). On the whole, observed
situational variation by learners indicates that Hint selection by learners is as situationally
determined as their selection by native speakers.
Looking at the totals in Table 6.3 we can see that, taken together, the proportions
of Hints employed by learners and native speakers (4.5% and 5.6%) are fairly
similar. The similarity between HL and HN, as shown in Table 6.2, is more
pronounced: 8% and 8.4%, respectively. 5 These findings, then, suggest no reason to
believe that Hints are used as a strategy of communication.
This interpretation is further supported if Hint selection is examined in terms of
learners' length of stay in the target community. Table 6.4 compares the use of Hints
by Hebrew learners with different periods of residence in Israel. Table 6.4 reveals
striking similarities between the compared groups of immigrants. These similarities
seem to be particularly interesting since language exposure was shown to affect the
acquisition of target norms, at least as far as verbosity is concerned (Blum-Kulka &
Olshtain, 1986, 158). The lack of effect of length of stay on Hint selection, I
suggest, has to do with two factors: (1) Hint selection by HL matches NH norms
from the very start, and there is therefore no reason to expect any mismatch with
time; (2) The use of Hint differs from that of any other strategy, mainly because
conventions of use, that is, lexical and grammatical conventions, are not at stake
here. This aspect with be further discussed in "Conclusion" (below). 6
Distribution of Hint Substrategies in Learners' Data
As noted above, although Hints are essentially nonconventional in form and hence
highly context-embedded, a qualitative analysis of CCSARP Hints reveals a consistent
semantic pattern of Hint substrategies, differing in terms of opacity types and
ranging in degree of opacity. Type classification is based upon the distinction
between illocution and proposition, and is mainly a matter of focus rather than a
clear-cut distinction. The degree of opacity is a theoretical construct, determined in
terms of the (assumed) disambiguation procedures required for full interpretation of
the speaker's meaning. Weizman (1989) classified and ranked native speakers'
substrategy preferences on both the prepositional scale and the illocutionary scale.
Beginning with the propositional scale, we can rank the native speakers' preferences
from least to most opaque. Least opaque of the substrategies is reference to
the requested act, where S explicitly refers to the act, but there is no reference to the
effect that H is responsible for its performance, as in
I haven't got time to clean up the kitchen.
Slightly more opaque is reference to H's involvement, where S refers indirectly to
H's responsibility, but does not name the requested act, as in
You've left the kitchen in a mess.
The next substrategy is reference to related components, where S refers to some
object semantically related to the requested act, as in
The kitchen is in a terrible mess.

Intel-language Requestive Hints 131
Table 6.4. Distribution of Hints in Hebrew
Learners' Data by Length of Stay in Israel
Length of stay
(years)
N
n
%
10
24
8
33.3
Note: n Hints were used by A' subjects.
Of greatest opaqueness is the substrategy of zero propositional content, where no
reference is made to any of the propositional components related to the requested
act. Examples include:
Are you going to give us a hand
Are you going to do something for me
Attention!
Substrategies on the illocutionary scale can also be ranked from least to most
opaque. Least opaque is questioning H's commitment, where S checks whether H
feels committed to carrying out some act, the beneficiary of which is to be S. The
nature of the requested act, however is not specified, nor is it hinted at. Examples
include:
Are you going to give us a hand
Are you going to do something for me
Somewhat more opaque is questioning feasibility, where a reference is made, indirectly
or partially, to some precondition for the feasibility of the act. Examples
include:
Do you have a car
Are you going directly home
Have you got your note with you
Yet more opaque is stating potential grounders, where a statement made by S is a
potential argument for the performance of the requested act, and may therefore be
interpreted as the reason for that request. Examples include:
I've just missed my bus.
I live near your place.
The kitchen is in a bit of a mess.
Madam, we have an injured person; this car is in the way.
Of greatest opaqueness is the substrategy of zero illocutionary components, where
no reference is made to the nature of the illocutionary act, and hence the interpretation
of both the illocution and the propositional content is entirely contextembedded,
as in
Attention!

132 Speech Act Realization
In this section, learners' use of Hints is compared with native speakers' use in
terms of substrategy selection. Specifically, it raises the questions whether HL and
HN use the same substrategies, and whether they use them with similar frequency.
Table 6.5 presents the selection of Hint substrategies by Hebrew learners. The
learners predominantly opt for the substrategy of Stating potential grounders
(54.2%, « = 52). Their second choice is the combination of Stating potential
grounders and Questioning feasibility (18.8%, n = 18), as in:
Hi there. Are you going home now I've just missed my bus,
Hi. How are you doing I missed yesterday's class. Do you have your notebook
with you
Only in the third place do we find the intermediate Questioning feasibility (12.5%,
n = 12).
The similarities and differences between learners and native speakers are evident
from Table 6.6, which presents the distribution of the three predominant options in
three populations: Hebrew learners (HL), native speakers of Hebrew (HN), and
native speakers of Australian English and Canadian French (NS).
First of all, the most opaque illocutionary substrategy is obviously preferred by
all three groups (63.4% HL, 53.2% HN, 75.7% NS). This preference provides
further support for the high-deniability hypothesis: Hints are exploited precisely by
virtue of their opacity. Thus, if Hints are deemed situationally acceptable, the
requester tends to opt for their most opaque variant, rather than trying to compensate
for their inherent opacity by choosing a relatively transparent substrategy.
However, Table 6.6 also reveals an important difference between learners and
native speakers. While Hebrew learners turn to redundant combinations as their
second choice (22%, n = 18), both HN and NS select them as their third choice
Table 6.5. Distribution of Hint Substrategies in Hebrew Learners' Data 7
Illocutionary
scale
Prepositional
scale (%)
Reference to
requested act
Reference
to H's
involvement
Reference
to related
components
Zero
Various
combinations
Total
Questioning feasibility
Stating potential
grounders
0
2.1
11.5
8.3
0
21.9
0
0
1.0
21.9
12.5
(12)
54.2
(52)
Zero
Other
Potential grounders &
questioning feasibility
Total
0
1.0
0
3.1
(3)
0
7.3
1.0
28.1
(27)
0
2.1
1.0
25
(24)
1.0
0
0
1.0
(1)
0
3.1
16.7
42.7
(41)
1.0
(1)
13.5
(13)
18.8
(18)
100
(96)

Interlanguage Requestive Hints 133
Table 6.6. Distribution of the Three Predominant Hint Substrategies
in Hebrew Learners (HL), Native Speakers of Hebrew (HN) and Native
Speakers of Australian English and Canadian French (NS)
Substrategies
Subjects
HL
(N = 82)
HN
(N = 62)
NS
(N = 111)
Stating potential grounders
Stating potential grounders
and questioning feasibility
Questioning feasibility
63.4%
(n = 52)
22%
(n = 18)
14.6%
(n = 12)
53.2%
(n = 33)
14.5%
(n = 9)
32.3%
(n = 20)
75.7%
(n = 84)
6.3%
(n = 1)
18%
(« = 20)
Note: Of N hints, (n) are of the substrategy under consideration.
(14.5%, n = 9 and 5.2%, n = 7 respectively). These differences, statistically
significant (HL differ from HN at p < 0.05 [P value = 0.0369, chi-square =
6.5965], and from NS at/ < 0.01 [P value = 0.006, chi-square = 10.243], seem to
be related to a most striking interlanguage specific feature: learners' preference for
"verbosity" (Levenston 1971).
In the realization of requests, learners' tendency toward verbosity was mainly
observed in the use of supportive moves (explanations and justifications for the
request) by learners of Hebrew and American English (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain,
1986; Blum-Kulka & Levenston, 1987) and by Danish and German learners of
English (House & Kasper, 1987; Edmondson & House, 1991; Faerch & Kasper,
1989; House, 1989). A typical example for Hebrew speakers in English L2 would
be
I went over the material we will study in the next weeks and I would rather like to
have your lecture notes next week, if it's possible and if you can be ready. (Blum-
Kulka & Olshtain, 1986, 175)
A typical example for German learners of English would be
Good evening. Perhaps you've already seen me once. We're living on the same
street. You know, my bus has just left, and as I- noticed that you have come by car I
was going to ask you whether you could give me a lift. (House & Kasper, 1987,
1283)
Verbosity implies a redundant use of words. Similarly, combinations of Hint
substrategies imply a redundant use of substrategies, since each of the substrategies
may be used in an independent position as a self-sufficient requestive Hint (Weizman,
1989, 88). It is suggested, therefore, that HL preference for redundancy is
comparable with learners' preference for verbosity: if indeed verbosity is exploited
by learners as part of their attempt to cope with communication problems—mainly
insecurity resulting from the learning situation—then so is redundancy: both may be
considered as typically "strategic," that is, related to the context of language
learning.

134 Speech Act Realization
Conclusion
From a theoretical point of view, I suggested that the most striking feature of requestive
Hints is that lack of conventions of form and hence context-embeddedness,
reach a degree so high that deniability potential is always secured. The peculiarity
of this feature, I pointed out, resides in its apparent mismatch with the concept of
communication as a goal-oriented activity carried out by a rational agent. It is
therefore the task of research into nonconventional indirectness to explain what goal
could be efficiently pursued by the use of Hints.
Researchers of interlanguage, I further hypothesized, might find the task more
rewarding, were it to be found that this very deniability potential is liable to be
exploited by learners to achieve a goal specific to the learning situation: the goal
of overcoming unease and insecurity by avoiding unambiguous commitments to
culture-specific meanings of conventions of form.
In light of these assumptions, the findings support the following conclusions:
1. Basically, learners seem well able to use Hints for the realization of requests:
they do not use them in any markedly deviating manner as regards frequency,
dependence upon situationally specific features, and preference for opaque Hint
substrategies. The use of nonconventional indirectness, therefore, seems to be one
of the pragmalinguistic essentials with which learners come to L2 and which,
therefore, they need not acquire anew (Blum-Kulka, 1982).
2. The hypothesis that the very lack of linguistic constraints inherent in Hints is
exploited by learners to avoid risks is, at first sight, not supported by the findings,
since learners do not reveal any marked preference for Hints, not even when they
are first exposed to the target language. The issue, however, is more complicated. In
various areas, learners were observed to exhibit general preference for putting
information "on record." Thus, for instance, intermediate learners of English were
shown to prefer propositional explicitness to ellipsis (Kasper 1981, 1982. For further
discussion, cf. Kasper 1989, 245). If the tendency toward explicitness is indeed
an interlanguage specific feature, one would expect to find learners more reluctant
to use Hints than native speakers. In other words, along this line of argument, Hints
would be less frequent in learners' data than in native speakers'. It could therefore
be the case that similar use of Hints by native speakers and by learners reflects an
interplay between two conflicting tendencies: on the one hand, preference for explicitness,
encouraging a decrease in the frequency of Hints; and on the other, risk
avoidance, entailing an increase in the frequency of Hints. The results, then, could
be interpreted as indicating that these two tendencies counterbalance each other.
This hypothesis should be empirically tested.
3. Learners' tendency toward redundancy is no doubt a strategy of communication.
This peculiarity is related to earlier findings concerning learners' preference
for verbosity; I interpret it, therefore, as a typical feature of the learning situation.
4. The findings have an important implication for the nature of indirectness in
general. The fact that the same Hint substrategies are selected by learners and by
native speakers, and that situational variation is similar in both populations, supports
the assumption put forward in Weizman (1989): namely, that although apparently
"open-ended," even nonconventional indirectness is governed by semantic
norms. Moreover, learners' preference for the most opaque Hint substrategy further

Interlanguage Requestive Hints 135
supports the hypothesis (Weizman, 1989) that opacity in Hints is not used as the last
possible choice. Rather, it is purposely exploited as the most efficient means when
deniability is deemed necessary.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Gabi Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka for comments on an earlier
version; to Hadassa Kantor for helping me obtain additional Hebrew learners' data,
incorporated for my purposes into CCSARP learners' data; to Joel Walters for
discussions of aspects of interlanguage; to Tsipi Parnassa for the statistical analysis;
and to Miriam Schlesinger for stylistic comments on the last version of the paper.
Notes
1. This bi-dimensional analysis implies that the category of Hints encompasses several
substrategies. The category includes Ervin-Tripp's (1976) "hints" and "non-explicit question
directives," also labeled "nonconventional instrumental moves" or NCI's (Gordon & Ervin-
Tripp, 1984). It further includes Walters's (1979, 286, 287) SVOs and Donde (where) questions.
2. Cross-cultural variation is highly marked in all the quoted studies. For example,
Walters (1979, 286, 287) notes a cultural difference in the scale value of politeness of
SVOs (e.g., "you have any ball and rope"), which parallel roughly my "Questioning feasibility:
Reference to hearer's involvement and to requested object." In Spanish, SVOs are
located near the politeness end of the scale, that is, near conventional indirectness, while in
American English they are not far from the impoliteness end. Blum-Kulka (1987) indicates
that in American English Hints follow the typically conventional Query preparatories (Can
you . . . Could you . . . ) as the next most polite strategy, while for Hebrew speakers,
Hints are not only less polite than query preparatories but also less polite than performatives
("I want you to . . .").
3. These semantic preferences, I suggested, have to do, indirectly and partially, with
some requirements presupposed by the felicity conditions, or with some constituents thereof
(Weizman, 1985, 1590; whereas in conventional indirectness (e.g., in "can you" questions),
the requester refers to the preparatory conditions explicitly and fully.
4. Situational variation was analyzed for HL and HN separately, by means of the Chocran
test, which takes into account only fully completed questionnaires. On this analysis, S5
was found to be significantly different (alp < 0.05) from SI, S7, and Sll, while S15 was
significantly different (at p < 0.05) from Sll. Differences between both populations were
analyzed for each situation separately, by means of chi-square analysis.
5. The total number of Hints («) is a dependent observation, since a considerable number
of respondents were found to use Hints in at least two situations. In Table 6.2, for example,
15.4% of the 65 HN Hints and 10.1% of the 109 HL Hints are dependent. Consequently, chisquare
analysis is not appropriate for the total.
6. Note, however, that while 17% (n = 8) of the members of the first group (length of
stay up to one year) used hints in two situations, members of the other groups systematically
chose no more than a single Hint each. This might suggest a decrease in Hint selection over
time, but given the relatively small number of group members, further investigation is
required.

136 Speech Act Realization
1. The total number of Hints in HL data as presented in Tables 6.5 and 6.6 (n = 96)
differs slightly from the total number of HL Hints in Table 6.2 (n = 109), due to a difference
of nuance between the initial CCSARP definition of Hints and the one suggested in Weizman
(1985, 1989). Note, however, that this difference has no bearing on the claims made about the
similarities between learners and native speakers in terms of the selection of Hint substrategics.
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7
Cross-Linguistic Influence
in the Speech Act of Correction
TOMOKO TAKAHASHI
and LESLIE M. BEEBE
In this chapter, we examine American and Japanese performance of the speech act
of correction by looking at how this speech act is performed with status unequals—
a person of lower status addressing someone of higher status and a person of higher
status addressing someone of lower status. By focusing on correction, we are not
looking at opinions, but rather at situations where one person knows the other has
made a factual error. By looking at situations between a professor and a student, we
are choosing situations where the roles are clearly defined and the status relationships
are relatively clear-cut. The difference in status here is not necessarily socioeconomic,
but rather a matter of the power structure within the classroom.
In previous research, we have investigated American versus Japanese performance
on several face-threatening speech acts such as disagreement (Beebe &
Takahashi, 1989a,b), refusals (Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990; Takahashi
& Beebe, 1986, 1987), announcing embarrassing information (Beebe & Takahashi,
1989a), and chastisement (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989b). The present study continues
our research project on sociolinguistic variation in face-threatening speech acts.
Face-threatening speech acts have received much attention (e.g., Brown &
Levinson, 1978) and have been found important because they are the source of
cross-cultural miscommunications, or what Thomas (1983) calls "pragmatic failure."
In this domain, we have focused on American and Japanese speakers because
their cultures are vastly divergent; thus they were expected to show a large difference
in the use of politeness strategies (e.g., Ide, 1989; also see Kasper 1990, for a
review of literature on politeness; Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989, for research
on requests and apologies).
In our research, we have analyzed each speech act as consisting of a sequence of
"semantic formulas" (Cohen & Olshtain, 1981) such as the positive remark (e.g., "I
wish I could, but . . ."), the expression of regret (e.g., "I'm sorry"), the refusal
itself (e.g., "I can't come"), and so on. In examining the number, order, and/or
138

The Speech Act of Correction 139
content of semantic formulas used in several face-threatening speech acts, we have
found differences in the realization of speech acts by Americans and Japanese.
We shall focus here on the use of positive remarks, softeners, and other similar
formulas. These formulas have been found particularly interesting because they are
frequently used by Americans and/or Japanese in order to make each speech act less
face-threatening. The definition of politeness varies from study to study (e.g.,
Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987; Ide, 1989; Lakoff, 1973; Leech, 1983). It is,
however, generally agreed that politeness aims at smooth communication (Ide,
1989), seeks to reduce friction (Lakoff, 1973), and to disarm the potential for
aggression (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Along the same line, politeness is viewed
here as the language usage developed in order to make a situation less facethreatening
and to make communication smoother. In this sense, we consider positive
remarks and softeners to be important politeness strategies.
One of the major focuses of our research has been to examine the cross-cultural
influence of Japanese upon English as a second language (ESL) at the discourse
level. In this domain, we have found much evidence of native language (NL)
transfer in Japanese ESL speakers as well as other examples of their efforts (successful
or unsuccessful) to try to sound like English native speakers.
Another focus of our research has-been on how Americans and Japanese perform
such speech acts with status unequals. This question was asked because it is generally
claimed that Japanese are very conscious of social status while Americans
are relatively less status-conscious. Ide (1989), for example, argues that in many
honorific languages such as Japanese "the choice of expression is made according to
the variable of power and distance of the addressees" (Ide, 1989, 238). Similarly,
Matsumoto (1989) argues that in Japanese, social context plays a much larger role
than is generally assumed.
Barnlund and Araki (1985, 23) also support the view that "status relations are
critical in determining the character of communicative behavior in Japan (Nakane,
1970; Nomura & Barnlund, 1983) and are less critical in the United States (de
Tocqueville, 1965; Nomura & Barnlund, 1983)." In their study of compliments by
Japanese and Americans, Barnlund and Araki (1985, 23) have found that "Japanese
exchanged compliments less frequently in close relations and more often in relations
that were more distant," while "with Americans it appeared that compliments might
be exchanged more often in close relationships and less in more distant ones."
It is thus suggested that both Japanese and Americans style-shift according to the
psychological distance of the interlocutors. Based on the view that the Japanese are
more conscious of social status than Americans, it can be further hypothesized that
Japanese style-shift more than Americans according to the social as well as psychological
distance of the addressees.
In the investigation of sociolinguistic rule transfer at the phonological level,
Beebe (1980) and Schmidt (1977) have found that sociolinguistic style-shifting
patterns are transferred from the NL to the second language (L2). By focusing on
the discourse level here, we discuss the differences among native English, Japanese
ESL, and native Japanese responses, and ask whether and to what extent Americans
and Japanese native speakers style-shift and whether to what extent Japanese ESL
learners transfer patterns of sociolinguistic style-shifting from Japanese to English.

140 Speech Act Realization
In sum, we discuss in this paper: (1) the use of politeness strategies that the
speaker uses in order to make each correction less face-threatening (i.e., more
polite)—e.g., positive remarks, softeners, expressions of regret; (2) NL transfer in
the Japanese ESL responses; and (3) style-shifting by the three groups according to
the status of the interlocutor. The data will be presented, for the most part, descriptively
in terms of semantic content in order to give the flavor of responses by the
three groups in an encounter of interlocutors of different status.
Method
The discourse completion questionnaire used for this study consisted of 12 items—
two situations for each of the following: correction, disagreement, chastisement,
announcing embarrassing information, and two other speech acts as controls (see
Appendix for descriptions of the 12 situations). For each pair eliciting one type of
speech act, one situation involved a person of lower status talking to someone in a
higher position and one involved someone in a higher-status position talking to a
person of lower status. The situations were presented in randomized order. In this
paper, we shall discuss only correction.
There were 55 subjects who filled out the questionnaire—15 Americans who
responded in English (AE), 15 Japanese who responded in English (JE), and 25
Japanese who responded in Japanese (JJ). The Japanese subjects tested in English
had high-intermediate to advanced levels of ESL proficiency. All subjects were
college graduates. For the Americans, there were 11 females and 4 males, with an
average age of 33. For the Japanese ESL subjects, there were 8 females and 7 males,
also with an average age of 33. For the Japanese tested in Japanese, there were 11
females and 14 males, with an average age of 32. The American and Japanese ESL
subjects were tested in New York, and the Japanese subjects using Japanese were
tested in Tokyo, Japan.
All the responses were analyzed as consisting of a sequence of "semantic formulas"
(Cohen & Olshtain, 1981) or bits of meaning such as the expression of regret
and the correction statement itself. For each of the subject groups, the total number
of semantic formulas of any kind used for each situation was obtained.
Results and Discussion
Correction Situation 1 (Higher to Lower)
Correction situation 1 read as follows:
You are a professor in a history course. During class discussion, one of your
students gives an account of a famous historical event with the wrong date.
In this situation, we are dealing with an utterance that will be made by a person in a
higher-status position (the professor) to a person in a lower-status position (the
student). What is common to all three groups is that the majority of subjects decided

The Speech Act of Correction 141
to correct the student. One American opted out, saying "thank you." One Japanese
using English said to the class, "Does everyone agree with that date" but this was
clearly an attempt to elicit peer correction. One Japanese using Japanese opted out,
and another wrote "I will wait until other students notice the mistake."
The most noticeable difference is that 9 out of 14 Americans (64%) prefaced
their correction with at least one positive remark: most typically, "That was very
good but I believe that took place in 1945." (Other responses were quite similar,
with a variety of adjectives being used: "excellent," "great," "marvelous," etc.) Two
American respondents used more than one positive remark: "That was a great
account of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Everything was in line except the date. It was
1942, not 1943," and "Excellent description, Henry! I like the way you outlined the
events. Now when did all that take place" We have thus found 11 positive remarks
(79%) used by the American group.
Japanese ESL speakers, on the other hand, never once prefaced their responses
with a wholehearted positive remark. Most typical of their responses was: "I think
that date is not correct," or "The date is wrong," or simply, "In 1972." Only 3 out of
13 Japanese ESL speakers (23%) used something resembling the American positive
remark. But upon reading these remarks to a group of American native speakers, we
were backed up in our intuition that the remarks were so lukewarm that a native
speaker would hardly call them "positive" or feel comfortable with them. The
remarks were: "Well, I'm almost satisfied with your account of that event except the
date of it," "Your ideas is fine, but I think the age you mentioned is something
wrong," "Thank you for bringing up interesting account, although the date you just
mentioned was actually 1919."
Japanese using Japanese used even fewer positive remarks: only 3 out of 23
(13%) had the professor make a positive comment to correct his student's mistake.
A typical Japanese response in Japanese (87% of the data) had no prefacing positive
remark at all (e.g., "It's 1603," or "Wait a second. The date is incorrect," or "The
date you just mentioned is incorrect. Please check it by the next class.") The three
who used positive remarks used ones very similar to American English patterns.
The remarks were: "Very nicely done, but why don't you check the date you just
mentioned," "Your presentation was very good, but it was supposed to have taken
place in 1549." "It was a very good presentation, but just one mistake—the date."
The percentage of positive remarks used by the three groups is presented in
Figure 7.1 The finding is that Americans use by far the highest percentage of
positive remarks and Japanese using Japanese use the lowest with the Japanese
speakers of English in between: AE > JE > JJ. This suggests that the percentage of
positive remarks used by Japanese ESL learners is influenced by Japanese, where
positive remarks are evidently not critical in this particular situation.
Positive remarks (including praise, complimenting, and positive evaluations)
are extremely important prefixes to face-threatening acts in English. In our research
on refusals (Beebe et al., 1990), one of the striking differences between Japanese
and English native speakers was that Americans felt the need to preface their refusals
with what we called "positive adjuncts": for example, "I'd love to, [but] ..." "That
sound wonderful, fbutj . . ."In our studies of disagreement (Beebe & Takahashi,
1989a,b), we also found that Americans often used expressions of "token agree-

142 Speech Act Realization
Fig. 7.1. Percentage of positive remarks in correction situation I, where the professor corrects
the student's mistake (higher to lower). Note: These figures exclude the subjects who
opted out and those who described what they would do instead of writing what they would
say.
Key:
AE—Americans using English
JE—Japanese using English
JJ—Japanese using Japanese
merit" (Brown & Levinson, 1978): for example, "I agree with you, [but] . . ."
"Yes, [but] ..." (also see LoCastro, 1986).
Similarly, as we have found in this study, Americans use a positive remark to
preface a correction to a lower-status person. This is an "adjunct" to the correcting
act because although it is very common (used by 64% of our American respondents
in this situation), it cannot stand alone and accomplish the speech act of correction.
Just as "I'd love to . . ." is a vital to polite refusal in many situations but unable to
stand alone as a refusal, a positive remark such as "It was a very good account"
softens the upcoming correction but cannot substitute for it in any way. We thus
maintain that it, too, is an "adjunct" to a correction.
In addition to the use of positive remarks, American respondents seem to have
made more efforts to soften their corrections than their Japanese counterparts. They
tried, for instance, to soften the correction and make it the least face-threatening
possible by using the following types of softening devices 71% of the time:
(1) "softeners"—that is, expressions (or hedges) such as "I believe," "1 think,"
"You may have (the wrong date)", (2) questions such as "Did you say . . . "
"When did that happen", and (3) other expressions intended to lighten the gravity
of the interlocutor's mistake or to defend the interlocutor, such as "You made one
small error in the date."
Japanese ESL respondents also used similar formulas: for example, (1) "I
think," "I'm afraid" as softeners; (2) "Isn't it 1945" "That was in 1492, wasn't it"
as questions; and (3) "I guess it's not very important" to lighten the gravity of the

The Speech Act of Correction 143
mistake. However, Japanese respondents using English used softeners only 50% of
the time, as compared with 71% use by Americans. Japanese responding in Japanese
also used the equivalents, yet much less frequently (26% of the time): for
example, (1) "I think"; (2) "Was it 1968"; and (3) "It might be a slip of the tongue."
The differences among the groups in the use of all types of softening devices are
presented in Figure 7.2.
Essentially, the pattern for softeners is the same as that for positive remarks:
AE > JE > JJ. That is, the largest percentage (71%) of softeners was used by the
Americans, who used more than the Japanese using English (50%). And the Japanese
using English used more than the Japanese using Japanese (26%). The Japanese
using English result, being midway between the native speakers of Japanese and
English, suggests cross-linguistic influence from the native language, Japanese, on
the English of Japanese.
As we compare Figure 7.2 with Figure 7.1, we notice that there is a smaller gap
among the three groups in the use of softeners (Figure 7.2) than in the use of
positive remarks (Figure 7.1). It has been pointed out that the Japanese tend to place
value on silence and to be skeptical about the efficacy of communicating delicate
thoughts or feelings through strictly verbal strategies. Clancy (1986), for example,
has noted that "[the] Japanese have little faith in verbal expression or in those who
rely upon it" (214). It is generally observed that the Japanese try to express regret,
for instance, through nonverbal and/or paralinguistic means such as facial expres-
Fig. 7.2. Percentage of softeners in correction situation I,* where the professor corrects tne
student's mistake (higher to lower). Note: *Includes softeners of three types, including
questions and other softening expressions. **These figures exclude the subjects who opted
out and those who described what they would do instead of writing what they would say.
Key: AE—Americans using English
JE—Japanese using English
JJ—Japanese using Japanese

144 Speech Act Realization
sions, tone of voice, sighs, hesitance, and so forth. Although our discourse completion
questionnaires are not designed to collect such expressions, we have often
found that Japanese native and ESL speakers used pauses to show hesitance or
silence (see, e.g., Beebe et al., 1990). This could be seen as evidence that Japanese
prefer less verbally explicit expressions, especially in face-threatening situations.
Americans, on the other hand, seem to rely on verbal expression and use a
clearly verbal strategy for dealing with a threat to face. American culture promotes
explicit verbal means of correcting, refusing, or disagreeing and thus encourages
explicit verbal means of undoing the threat to face that the explicit correction,
refusal, or disagreement poses. This results in a strong tendency toward a ritualized
use of the positive remark. In other words, the positive remark is a very important
politeness strategy for Americans.
The Japanese rely much less on the positive remark than Americans. Instead,
they use softeners, which Americans also use. The softener is different from the
positive remark in that the former is a down-toning device integrated in the main
body of a speech act (e.g., / think [softener] it's 1942, not 1943 [main body of the
speech act of correction]), while the positive remark is a preceding adjunct that is
phrasal and separate from the main body (e.g., It was a good presentation,
but . . .). It seems, therefore, possible that the Japanese use the positive remark
much less often because of its explicitly verbal nature. It is also possible that the
positive remark is avoided because it may sometimes sound too untruthful for
people who have little faith in verbal expression. For Japanese ESL learners, it is
much easier to transfer the NL knowledge in the use of the softener than that of the
positive remark.
Apart from the use of these formulas, the overall tone of the Japanese responses
in Japanese is quite different from that of American responses. For instance, 6 out of
23 Japanese speakers using Japanese (26%) chose to point out directly that there was
a mistake in the presentation (e.g., "The date you just mentioned is incorrect") and
then to say, for example, "Please check the date" or "Why don't you check the
date" All in all, Japanese responses sounded much more authoritarian than American
responses. They had a ring of superiority that came from the use of a directive to
check the date and from its position following a direct statement that a mistake had
been made.
Correction Situation 2 (Lower to Higher)
Let us now look at situation 2, which reads as follows:
You are a student in a sociology class. During the lecture, the professor quotes a
famous statement attributing it to the wrong scholar.
In this situation, the status of the participants was reversed; it was the professor who
made the mistake. Therefore, any correction attempted would have to be from the
lower-status interlocutor (the student) to the higher-status interlocutor (the professor).
The most striking difference between the two status situations was that no native
Americans or Japanese ESL speakers used a positive remark to a higher-status
person before a correction ("It was a very interesting lecture"), and only one Japa-

The Speech Act of Correction 145
nese using Japanese did so. It was evidently judged totally inappropriate to praise
the professor and then correct. Thus, only one out of 37 subjects (who opted to say
something) used a positive remark (or positive remarks) from student to professor,
whereas in the opposite situation from professor to student, 15 subjects out of 50
(who opted to say something) used a positive remark. This shows that all groups
were highly sensitive to status differences in this regard.
Avoidance or "opting out" (Bonikowska, 1988) was indeed possible since the
overall directions to the questionnaire made it clear that saying nothing was an
option for any of the situations. Two Americans opted out completely. Another
wrote, "Probably nothing, or I would say, 'Are you sure you have the correct name
Isn't it ...'" And another wrote, "Probably nothing, but in a small seminar I
might say something like 'You mean Ellis, don't you' especially if anyone else
looked confused." Still another American commented, "If I did not know the
professor well, I wouldn't say anything. If I did know the professor, I would
approach him after class and say, 'Wasn't it X who said Y'"
Three Japanese ESL speakers opted to say nothing. Another said, "I would not
take prompt action. I would observe others' reactions, and if nobody seemed to have
noticed, I would say something." What was interesting about those who opted out
was that two out of three Japanese ESL subjects who said they would say nothing
specified that they expected the professor to recognize his mistake. Americans did
not seem to have this reason for keeping quiet.
Japanese responding in Japanese were the ones who avoided the difficulty of
correcting the professor most: 10 out of 25 (40%) decided to opt out, whereas 3
Japanese ESL learners (20%) said they would say nothing and 2 Americans (13%)
opted out.
The dominant pattern used by all three groups in this situation (from the student
to the professor) was, again, to use a softener (or softeners) such as "I think that
was . . ." before a correction. The percentage of softeners used by the three different
groups is presented in Figure 7.3.
What is most interesting in the differences between Japanese ESL and native
American responses is not the frequency of softeners used or the sequence of
formulas that the respondents chose to use. It is rather the wording of the softener or
the correction formula that is of particular interest. Books comparing Japanese and
American culture stress that Americans value variety and originality in verbal
expression as a way of demonstrating sincere feeling as opposed to perfunctory
politeness (see Condon, 1984; Goldstein & Tamura, 1975). They warn Americans
not to try to transfer this into their Japanese. Japanese culture prescribes certain
formulaic expressions that can be used over and over again in appropriate situations
without needing to be varied or elaborated upon to convey politeness (see Coulmas,
1981; Loveday, 1982). The American value placed on variety is not shared by the
Japanese. On the contrary, knowing and using the correct formula is what counts in
Japanese politeness (see Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a,b, for similar findings).
Clancy (1986, 216) explains why the Japanese depend on formulaic expressions
as follows:
In Japan, there seems to be an extensive codification of contexts in which particular
feelings are expected; speakers need only indicate, by means of the right

146 Speech Act Realization
Fig. 7.3. Percentage of softeners in correction situation II, where the student corrects the
professor's mistake (lower to higher). Note: *These figures exclude the subjects who opted
out and those who described what they would do instead of writing what they would say.
**Some subjects used softeners more than once.
Key: AE-Americans using English
JE—Japanese using English
JJ—Japanese using Japanese
formula, that they are experiencing the appropriate reaction, without expressing
any more personal, individualized response. An important goal of socialization in
Japan is to promote the unanimity in feeling that will support the norms of verbal
agreement and empathy.
She further notes that Japanese mothers provide instruction in verbal formulas and
expect from their children much earlier mastery of social courtesy than American
mothers (Clancy, 1986, 236).
Ide (1989) would argue that Japanese has a much higher degree of "discernment"
(obligatory choice) in expressing politeness; that is, the choice of formal
linguistic forms such as honorifics or morphological marking on the verb according
to social conventions. American English, on the other hand, is high in "volition"
(strategic choice); that is, the choice of interactional strategies such as jokes or
questions according to the speaker's intention. The Japanese usually search for the
appropriate linguistic formulas or politeness marking according to the variable of
power and distance of the addressees, while American English speakers are allowed
to make a considerably more active choice from a relatively wider range of possibilities.
In other words, Japanese and American English are different in that the
speaker's focus is placed on the socially prescribed norm in Japanese and on the
speaker's own intention in American English. Japanese ESL learners' use of formulaic
expressions, therefore, can be explained as transfer of a belief in the efficacy of
choosing the appropriate expression according to relative status. This would be
another reason why Japanese prefer formulaic expressions to more personal and
individualized responses.

The, Speech Act of Correction 147
In this research, the difference in softeners used by Japanese and American
respondents may reflect these purported cultural differences. Americans seemed to
be elaborating their softeners, by using more self-deprecating softeners with a
greater variety to wording and a preference for the "[clause] + but ..." structure
such as "I may be wrong/mistaken, but . . ." and "I'm not sure, but . . ." Then,
they said, "I think that . . ." One American used a combination of softeners: "I'm
curious about the quote you read. I was under the impression White said that. Am I
wrong"
Japanese ESL respondents tended to stick to short, formulaic softeners, such as
"I'm afraid," "I think," or "I understand." Their responses might have been shorter
and less varied simply because they were using a second language. Empirical
investigation of non-Japanese learners at the same proficiency levels would be
needed to verify this. However, the apparently formulaic brevity is worth examining
because natural data have also shown that Japanese ESL speakers overuse "I'm
afraid" as a softener. Although it was surely meant to have a polite softening effect
when used by Japanese ESL subjects, it was not used at all by English native
speakers.
Americans might avoid the use of "I'm afraid," especially from student to
professor, because it has a slight ring of superiority. ("I'm afraid I made a mistake"
sounds appropriate but "I'm afraid you made a mistake" sounds patronizing.) It is
highly unlikely that the Japanese ESL speakers meant to convey this tone since they
used softeners much more frequently from student to professor than from professor
to student. As we look at the responses by Japanese using Japanese, the ESL use of
"I'm afraid" becomes a curious case because Japanese native speakers did not use
the equivalent of "I'm afraid" in their Japanese. Instead they used the question form
predominantly (80%) in order to soften corrections: for example, "Isn't it X who
said Y" or "Isn't that quoted by X"
With respect to formulaic expressions used by native speakers, some studies
(Cohen & Olshtain, 1981; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Olshtain, 1983; Owen, 1980)
report that English native speakers' choices of apology forms are highly patterned.
In other words, there are major strategies frequently used to express an apology: for
example, "I'm sorry" and "It was my fault" (see Olshtain & Cohen, 1983). Eraser
(1981) has found that the more formal the situation, the longer and more elaborate
the apology. Thus, it can be said that the degree to which major strategies are
actually ritualized may vary in different cultures as well as according to different
speech acts and situations. In Japanese culture, however, it seems that formulaic
expressions are especially favored.
Another interesting finding was that one Japanese ESL respondent used a question
form quite different from the dominant questioning pattern used by all three
groups; namely, "Isn't it X who said Y" The Japanese ESL subject said, "Would
you please tell me who made this statement again" This type of seemingly factual
question, although it has never been the predominant pattern in native Japanese
or Japanese ESL, has cropped up repeatedly in our research on Japanese use of
face-threatening speech acts such as warning, disagreement, and chastisement (see
Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a,b; Beebe & Takahashi, 1988).
On the face of it, this question form could be interpreted as a very polite way of

148 Speech Act Realization
correcting someone, but it is not so polite as it is intended to be. Indirectness is not
always highly valued in American speech. This finding is corroborated by Blum-
Kulka's (1987) finding that indirectness and politeness do not necessarily co-vary.
In her study of English and Hebrew requests, Blum-Kulka (1987) examined different
request categories including hints (e.g., "We don't want any crowding" [as a
request to move the car]) and conventional request forms (e.g., "Would you mind
moving your car"). She has found that American native speakers consider hints
less polite than conventional indirectness although hints are rated more indirect than
conventional indirectness. Similarly, in our research, when told that some Japanese
respondents would say nothing to correct the professor, expecting that the professor
would see his or her own mistake, Americans were surprised and a little amused.
When told that one Japanese said, "Would you please tell me who made this
statement again" a native English speaker immediately piped up, "It sounds as if
you're trying to trap him."
The use of a question to elicit a self-correction is fairly frequent from a teacher
to a student in class, but the request from a student to a professor to repeat something
is likely to be interpreted as a simple request. When the professor discovers
that it is an indirect way of making a correction, he or she is likely to feel embarrassed
or annoyed, particularly if he or she has fallen for it and answered the
question on a literal level (see Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a,b, for a discussion of a
distinctively Japanese questioning strategy found in natural data).
It is generally recognized that the communicative style of the Japanese is indirect
and intuitive, especially compared with that of Americans. In her study of
Japanese mother-child interaction, Clancy (1986) reports that Japanese mothers
frequently use rhetorical questions and hints to express a variety of negative attitudes
and opinions such as skepticism, frustration, and disapproval to their children.
She also reports that Japanese mothers strongly emphasize sensitivity to the needs,
wishes, and feelings of others. Such training serves a purpose in Japanese interaction.
This point is well elucidated by Kasper (1990) as follows: "Rather than
emphasizing distance, indirectness in Japanese culture appears to express empathy
between the participants, symbolizing a high degree of shared presuppositions and
expectancies" (200). Upon receiving an indirect request, for example, the Japanese
feel that the speaker is trying to make the speech act less face-threatening; they also
understand (or at least try to understand) the feelings and needs of the speaker in
making such a request. It is, therefore, possible that in Japanese culture, indirectness
serves to symbolize empathy. It is also likely that a closer relationship exists in
Japanese culture between indirectness and politeness than in American culture.
Two Correction Situations Compared
Now let us turn to the data on style shifting and investigate whether the styleshifting
pattern of the Japanese using English might be transferred from their native
Japanese pattern. As we compare the two status situations, we find a dramatic style
shift in the use of softeners among Japanese subjects. Figure 7.4 presents the
comparison between the two status situations in the use of softeners by the three

The Speech Act of Correction 149
Fig. 7.4 Percentage of softeners in the two correction situations.
Key: AE—American using English
JE—Japanese using English
JJ—Japanese using Japanese
subject groups. As seen here, the Americans style-shifted the least, while the
Japanese both in Japanese and English displayed great style shifting by the use of
softeners. This pattern found in the use of softeners within each situation again
suggests that there is native language transfer; this time, however, it is not just the
use of softeners that shows cross-linguistic influence, it is actually the style shifting
itself that Japanese ESL speakers are transferring.
This is reminiscent of a finding from our refusal data (Beebe et al., 1990), where
Japanese in both English and Japanese style-shifted more than Americans using
English in the use of expressions of regret (e.g., "I'm sorry"). Figure 7.5 is based on
our refusal data.
Similarly, the use of positive remarks prefacing disagreements suggests similar
style-shifting tendencies, as seen in Figure 7.6. The data on Japanese using Japanese
are not available on disagreements so it is not possible to show in this instance that
JJ > JE > AE; however, the finding that JE > AE is consistent with the other
findings.
Figures 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6 suggest that the lower- to higher-status situation is
more face-threatening than the other status situation, higher to lower, especially for

150 Speech Act Realization
Fig. 7.5. Percentage of expressions of regret in the two refusal situations. (Data from Beebe,
Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990.)
Key: AE—Americans using English
JE—Japanese using English
JJ—Japanese using Japanese
the Japanese in both English and Japanese. More softening devices (softeners,
positive remarks, and expressions of regret) are used with the lower-status person
addressing the higher-status person than vice versa. The degree of shift is greater for
Japanese subjects than for Americans in each case and greater for Japanese using
Japanese than Japanese using English in the corrections and refusals where both sets
of data are available.
In correction, as opposed to disagreement and refusal, there are many situations
where elaboration and multiple prefacing positive remarks are not appropriate. It
would sound very odd for a student to say, for example, to a professor, "You are a
very intelligent person, you know a lot about this subject, and you have certainly
earned your reputation as an expert in this area, but that novel was published in
1972, not 1970." The number and character of prefacing remarks depends upon the
situation, the status of the participants, and the speech act. An ESL teacher, on the
other hand, might compliment a student's book report before correcting a small
error, but would not feel compelled in a drill session to give a positive remark about

The Speech Act of Correction 151
Fig. 7.6. Percentage of positive remarks and token agreement in the two disagreement
situations. (Data from Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a, b; no JJ data are available in this study.)
Key: AE—Americans using English
JE—Japanese using English
every sentence the student utters. Thus, the situation is a key variable in the use of
positive remarks.
Similarly, the social status of the two interlocutors is very important in determining
whether a positive remark should be used. A professor might say something
positive before correcting a factual error by a student ("That was a good report, but
it was in 1942, not 1943") but a student would sound arrogant using a positive
remark with a professor ("That was a fascinating lecture, but it was President
Carter, not President Ford"). The positive remark often used in corrections is praise
of the interlocutor, and such praise usually come from the "superior," not from the
lower-status to the higher-status person. The positive remarks often used in refusals
and disagreement are an expression of the speaker's positive feeling about the offer
or invitation (e.g., "Oh, I wish I could, but . . .") or token agreement with the
interlocutor's opinion (e.g., "I agree with you, but . . ." "Yes, but . . ."). This type
of positive remark is not direct praise of the interlocutor. It seems, therefore,
necessary to distinguish positive remarks in different speech acts.
In this study, we have found that none of the subjects (except for one JJ) used a

152 Speech Act Realization
positive remark in the situation where a student corrects a professor, as seen in
Figure 7.7. Here we see that all three groups converged in the status situation Lower
to Higher. At the same time, Americans style-shifted most in this particular situation.
As previously discussed, the positive remark is one of the most important
politeness strategies Americans employ in face-threatening situations. This formula
was used as often as 79% of the time by Americans in the situation where a higherstatus
person is talking to a lower-status person, while it was used by none in the
other situation. The shift from 79% to zero is much greater than those found in the
performance of the Japanese subjects, who simply do not use the positive remark
very often in any situation.
As mentioned above, in the speech act of correction, the situation, the relative
social status, expertise status, role status or other kinds of status have been found
important factors influencing the way the speaker performs. When we engage in a
speech act like giving embarrassing information, however, it does not seem to
matter so much who has what status. Rather, the prefacing positive remark seems
uniformly out of place. We say, "I think you have something in your teeth," not
"You are really well groomed today and I know you are an avid tooth-brusher, but
you have spinach in your teeth." Some face-threatening acts seem to require more
elaboration and some require simplicity.
The pattern of style shifting may vary according to many factors. In our research,
we have found that, generally, native speakers of Japanese are influenced in
the way they perform the speech act of correction in English by the way they
perform corrections in Japanese; for example, they style-shift in English according
to the status of the interlocutor in a manner similar to the style-shifting typical of
native Japanese.
Lastly, it should be pointed out that our Japanese ESL subjects had highintermediate
to advanced levels of ESL proficiency. In our study of refusals by
Americans, Japanese native speakers, and two Japanese ESL proficiency groups
(Takahashi & Beebe, 1987), we argued that transfer was greater among highproficiency
ESL learners than their low-proficiency counterparts at the discourse
level. The lower-proficiency students do not have the fluency in the target language
to give free rein to pragmatic transfer phenomena. The high-proficiency students,
on the other hand, have the control over English to express Japanese sentiments at
the pragmatic level. In her recent study of politeness in Japanese, Matsumoto (1989)
has argued that in Japanese, "politeness expressions are not simply additions to a
neutral utterance which conveys the prepositional content: rather, the structure of
the language requires some choice of expression that conveys additional information
on the social context" (208). In other words, Japanese utterances are always marked
linguistically for social context (also see Ide, 1989). That is, some utterances may
have exactly the same content but vary in linguistic forms according to the social
contexts in which the utterances were made. Japanese ESL learners may try to
transfer such linguistic markings into English, but are unable to find places to
transfer these features. Instead, their utterances in different social contexts may
sound uniform in English regardless of differences in the social contexts because the
utterances are the same in content and only the content is expressed in English.
Advanced learners, on the other hand, find substitutes for the places to transfer these

The Speech Act of Correction 153
Fig. 7.7. Percentage of positive remarks in the two correction situations.
Key: AE—Americans using English
JE—Japanese using English
JJ—Japanese using Japanese
social differences or at least to express such sentiments. In the present study, we
have found that ESL learners transfer Japanese style-shifting patterns into English.
If we had tested low-proficiency learners, however, we might not have found the
same phenomenon.
Conclusion
In sum, we have uncovered a number of patterns in the speech act of correction.
First, we have demonstrated that it is a typically American pattern to use a positive
remark such as "That was a great account" before saying "but" and making a
correction when speaking to a person of lower status. Only 13% of the Japanese
using Japanese did this whereas 64% of the Americans did. Japanese using English
were in between. This pattern can be schematically represented as AE > JE > JJ. It
provides evidence that there was cross-linguistic influence from Japanese. This
same pattern could be claimed to show incomplete acquisition, however.
Second, we have shown that softeners give evidence of cross-linguistic influ-

154 Speech Act Realization
ence in both the situation with the higher- to lower-status interlocutor and the
situation with the lower- to higher-status interlocutor. With the professor to the
student, we see that softeners were used with correction 71% of the time, and
the pattern is: AE > JE > JJ. The exact opposite pattern exists with the student
speaking to the professor: AE < JE < JJ.
Third, and most important, particularly striking in our data is that style-shifting
patterns are transferred from the native language, Japanese. Whereas transfer has
been well documented on the phonological and syntactic levels, there was traditionally
less interest at the discourse level. Recent studies, however, have shown
that transfer at the discourse level is also widespread (e.g., Beebe et al., 1990;
Blum-Kulka, 1982, 1983; Cohen & Olshtain, 1981; Olshtain, 1983; Olshtain &
Cohen, 1983; Takahashi & Beebe, 1987). What is striking in this study is that it is
not only discourse patterns that transfer, but also the style shift between two different
discourse patterns with interlocutors of different status.
It is the Japanese using Japanese whose style shifting shows the greatest frequency
in certain situations. Americans, in the same situations, show much more use of
softeners, whether they are speaking to someone of higher or lower status. The
style-shifting patterns are important because they are sociolinguistic evidence of a
significant aspect of Japanese and American cultures. Sakamoto and Naotsuka
(1982) have claimed that Japanese and American cultures have different "polite
fictions" upon which they operate. Americans go by the polite fiction that "you and
I are equals," whereas Japanese go by the polite fiction that "you are my superior."
In our research, we have found these stereotypical attitudes to be of some value, but
also limited. Americans are not unconscious of status; rather, they often show how
conscious of status they are by making moves to downplay or cover up status
differences—to deny that status differences do exist (see Figures 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6).
Americans are indeed aware of such differences, and as in the use of positive
remarks in the two correction situations (see Figure 7.7), they sometimes show a
very marked style-shifting pattern. Japanese, on the other hand, are conscious of
status, and do not try to cover it up (see Figures 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6).
Since style shifting according to interlocutor status has been shown to be greater
among Japanese using English than among Americans using English in refusals and
disagreements as well as in corrections, we naturally believe that there is a common
explanation. Where data on Japanese using Japanese are available, that is, on
refusals and corrections, the data are consistent with an explanation of transfer. It is
not only the semantic content that is transferred but, more interesting, the patterns
of style shifting.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our appreciation to the editors of this volume for their
helpful comments. We also wish to thank the students in the TESOL and Applied
Linguistics programs at Teachers College, Columbia University, for their many
suggestions. We also thank those who took the time to answer the discourse completion
questionnaire for the present research.

The Speech Act of Correction 155
Appendix
The following are the 12 situations used in the questionnaire. After the description of each
situation there was a three-line blank for the respondents to write what they thought they
would say. "Higher to Lower" indicates that the particular speech act was performed by a
higher-status person speaking to a lower-status person, and "Lower to Higher," vice versa.
The situations were presented in randomized order.
[Correction—Higher to Lower] (This categorization did not appear in the questionnaire.)
You are a professor in a history course. During class discussion, one of your students gives an
account of a famous historical event with the wrong date.
[Correction—Lower to Higher]
You are a student in a sociology class. During the lecture, the professor quotes a famous
statement, attributing it to the wrong scholar.
[Disagreement—Higher to Lower]
You are a corporate executive. Your assistant submits a proposal for reassignment of secretarial
duties in your division. Your assistant describes the benefits of this new plan, but you
believe it will not work.
[Disagreement—Lower to Higher]
You work in a corporation. Your boss presents you with a plan for reorganization of the
department that you are convinced will not work. Your boss says: "Isn't this a great plan"
[Chastisement—Higher to Lower]
You are a corporation president and you have asked your assistant to prepare xerox copies of
essential documents for an important press conference. Your assistant arrives at the last
moment with 100 copies of the wrong materials.
[Chastisement—Lower to Higher]
You are a middle manager in a large corporation and your boss hands you a 50-page
document, asking you to make 30 copies of each page. Ten minutes later he comes back to get
the copies because it turns out he only wanted 30 copies of the front page. You have just made
10 copies of the whole packet. Obviously he is angry with you.
[Announcing Embarrassing Information—Higher to Lower]
You are a corporate executive talking to your assistant. Your assistant, who will be greeting
some important guests arriving soon, has some spinach in his/her teeth.
[Announcing Embarrassing Information—Lower to Higher]
You are a student, speaking with your professor to prepare for a three-way meeting you have
with the dean of the college. Your professor has some mustard on his cheek from lunch and
you are aware of it.
[Praise (Control)—Higher to Lower]
You are a teacher trainer and one of your students submits an original paper that gives you
fresh insights into teacher behavior. You run into the student in the hallway.

156 Speech Act Realization
[Praise (Control)—Lower to Higher]
You are a beginning graduate student and you attend a lecture given by a famous scholar in
your field. During the lecture you become aware of some ideas that you have never thought
about before. You are excited about the lecture and approach the professor afterward.
[Persuasion (Control)—Higher to Lower]
You are a corporate executive. You have a plan for an advertising campaign for a new
product. You are enthusiastic about the plan and need the cooperation of your assistants in
implementing it.
[Persuasion (Control)—Lower to Higher)
You are a middle manager in a large corporation. Your company exports its products
to a foreign country where you have lived. You know of a major problem in the
product design in terms of its practicality for that foreign market. You want the
corporation president to order a revision.
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Ill
DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVES
The chapters in this section expand the perspective of ILP into different directions.
Their common denominator is their focus on interlanguage discourse, rather than on
individual speech acts. As Aston comments in Chapter 11, speech-act-oriented ILP
is characterized by an intra-organism view and a focus on interactional (as opposed
to transactional) goals. The authors of the following chapters have adopted an interorganism
view, with varying emphasis on transactional and interactional discourse
functions.
House (Chapter 8) examines inappropriate responses in learners' conversations
with native speakers. In the second language literature so far, miscommunication in
native-nonnative (and nonnative-nonnative) discourse has primarily been addressed
in research on repair and interactional modification. In this research tradition,
emphasis is given to the interactional treatment of communication problems by the
interlocutors, rather than to locating their contributing sources. House offers a new
perspective on the topic by attempting to account for the complexity of responding
behavior in both native and nonnative talk. Her processes-oriented analysis yields a
threefold classification of problem sources: language-based difficulties, conceptual
and strategic deficiencies related to gaps in pragmatic knowledge, and operational
difficulties, which may lead to inputs being virtually ignored. Whereas the first two
problem sources are likely to typify learners more than native speakers, type 3
problems may well surface in native speaker talk as well. Future research in this
area will have to take into account, as House does, the processing constraints
operating in learners' decoding and encoding of messages in conversational interaction.
Zuengler (Chapter 9) provides a comprehensive review of interlanguage studies
concerned with the effect of conversational topic on learners' variable performance.
The main findings emerging from work in this area are that both expertise in the
topic and affective involvement influence interlocutors' role dynamics and conversational
behavior. Most studies indicate that superior topic expertise, whether real or
subjectively perceived, results in more control of the discourse by the expert participant,
regardless of native or nonnative speaker status. However, expertise may be
neutralized by affective factors such as emotional involvement and test anxiety. One
of the important implications of interlanguage studies on topic is the emphasis on
factors internal to the speech event (rather than adopting the traditional focus on
event-external factors such as learners' age, LI, etc.). This work could thus be the
159

160 Discourse Perspectives
first step toward full ethnographies of communication in the study of interlanguage
variation, with the speech event as the unit of analysis. This development would
imply the inclusion of other event-based parameters of variability, such as the nature
of the setting, relationship between the participants, and message content. Presumably
the quality of learners' speech and conversational control, at least in the case of
advanced nonnative speakers, is subject to complex interactions between eventinternal
and -external factors which are still not well understood.
Blum-Kulka and Sheffer (Chapter 10) expand the ILP research agenda by considering
the potential for ILP phenomena in a first language. The population examined
are American-born longtime immigrants to Israel, who maintain English as the
language of the home. The metapragmatic discourse of these families in their first
language is shown to manifest an intercultural pattern that differs in its style from
both Israeli and American discourse. Traditionally, shifts in LI use among immigrants
would be considered a case of attrition. This study suggests that we can gain
new insights into ILP by placing such phenomena in the classical interlanguage
study paradigm, comparing the first language version spoken by the immigrants to
native speech in both relevant contact cultures. Consequently, in the approach
offered here, ILP phenomena are by no means restricted to second language varieties.
We have chosen Aston's contribution to be the final chapter to this volume
because it presents a more optimistic picture of interlanguage discourse than is
usually painted in ILP. Rather than focusing on pragmatic failure and other sorts of
miscommunication, Aston's concern is with the negotiation of comity, the establishment
and maintenance of friendly relationships in native and native-nonnative talk
exchanges. In order to achieve such interactional goals, participants minimally need
to find common ground for sharing attitudes toward features of the world ("solidarity")
or for showing affiliation with the other ("support"). Applying conversation
analytic methods, Aston carefully demonstrates how the conversational resources
drawn on to establish rapport in native-native discourse are transformed into a
different set of resources in native-nonnative interaction. The important implication
of Aston's work, both for theory construction in ILP and second language pedagogy,
is to extend to ILP the fundamental tenet of interlanguage studies, namely, the
autonomy of learner language. Instead of viewing interlanguage pragmatic knowledge
and behavior as deficient in terms of native norms, we need to consider its
functionality and inner justification.

8
Toward a Model for the Analysis
of Inappropriate Responses in
Native/Nonnative Interactions
JULIANE HOUSE
Why do learners of a second or foreign language often fail to respond in a way
acceptable to their native interlocutors Is it because they "misheard" or simply
didn't hear what was said to them, because they did not understand what was said to
them, or because they did not understand what the interlocutor had meant by what
he or she said to them
In trying to find possible answers to the question of what may go wrong in a
learner response, one notices immediately that response failures stem from many
different and possibly interacting sources: they can be a result of inadequate perception,
of inappropriate comprehension at the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and
discourse levels of language or of gaps in the learner's knowledge of the world; they
can result from uncooperativeness on the part of the responder, who in this case may
have understood perfectly well what the interlocutor had tried to communicate but
just wanted to be difficult; or the responder may have perceived, and comprehended
correctly, and intended to cooperate, but cannot manage a response which is, at this
stage of the discourse, expected from his interlocutor.
Given the difficulty of coming to grips with interlanguage responses, it is
understandable that attempts at investigating them are relatively rare (notable exceptions
are Keller-Cohen, 1979; Kasper, 1981, 1984; Thomas, 1983). What is needed
in dealing with deviant learner responses and misunderstandings in interactions
between learners and native speakers is a model comprehensive and powerful
enough to take account of the complexity and ambiguity of the causes of response
failure.
In this chapter I shall (1) set the framework for the eventual development of such
a model by reviewing various theoretical and empirical approaches and their relevance
for explaining the difficulties learners face when responding; (2) attempt to
integrate some of the assumptions and concepts found useful in these approaches
into a discourse-processing model; and (3) illustrate the explanatory power of this
161

162 Discourse Perspectives
model by demonstrating how it can account for a set of exemplary misreponses
taken from role-play-elicited discourse data.
Approaches to Analyzing Responding Behavior
The following research strands are relevant in addressing the issue of interlanguage
responses: (1) social views of language, (2) intercultural miscommunication,
(3) studies of misunderstanding based on pragmatic theories, (4) the psychopathology
of everyday discourse, (5) cognitive-discourse-processing models.
Social Views of Language
Language can be viewed from two perspectives: (a) an intra-organism one, where
the focus is on what goes on in language users' minds; and (b) an inter-organism
(social) one, where what goes on between two or more language users matters most
(Halliday, 1978, 56). Looking upon language as an essentially social phenomenon
has had a long tradition in Europe and North America that may be traced back to
linguists of the Prague school and their work on language functions, functional
styles, and functional sentence perspectives; and to British contextualists such as
Firth and later Halliday, who, influenced by the anthropologist Malinowski, emphasized
the importance of "the context of situation" in establishing meanings in talk.
Firth (1964) suggests, for example, that "the give and take of talk resembles a preordained
ritual . . . the moment a conversation is started whatever is said is a
determining condition for what in any reasonable condition may follow" (94).
In North America, a similar tradition of stressing the embeddedness of language
in context or culture exists in the work of anthropologists and linguists such as Boas,
Sapir, and Whorf, and later sociologists of language and sociolinguists such as
Cicourel, Labov, and Goffman as well as that group of sociologists around Harold
Garfinkel who came to be known as the "ethnomethodologists." On the ethnomethodological
view, it is less useful to judge a response according to whether it
matches the previous speaker's unobservable intentional state; rather, the main
concern is to look at how observed and contextualized stretches of discourse form
coherent wholes. The notion of sequentially organized implications as manifest in
tied pairs or adjacency pairs is relevant here (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973); that is,
when the first part of such a couplet is produced, it sequentially implicates the
production of the second part of the pair.
The close-order organization of talk as evident in the tying of utterances in
adjacency pairs thus enables discourse participants to monitor their conversation
jointly such that the achievement of "understanding" (or "misunderstanding") can
be seen as displayed through the positioning of elements of talk and actions (Benson
& Hughes, 1983, 179); any response is to be seen as "a kind of claim as to what was
meant by the previous utterance" (Bilmes, 1990).
As Goffman (1981, 12) pointed out, one major problem with this view is that the
burden of defining a response is simply thrown back onto the previous speaker's
initiating statement, and from there reference is made back to another initiating

Native I Normative Interactions 163
statement preceding it, and so on; it is thus difficult to know where to start or how to
find proof of the appropriateness of a given response in itself. Another difficulty
with this view is that it lends itself best to a fairly formalistic, micro-level analysis,
which does not take the larger co-text into account.
In his own attempt to define a response, Goffman (1981, 35) states that a
response, which emanates from an individual and is inspired by a prior speaker, tells
us something about that individual's position or alignment in what is occurring. In
the context of an ongoing discourse, "alignment" implies, first, that two interactional
moves are brought into something resembling agreement or partnership with one
another; second, that the response is of local significance, that is, relevant and
comprehensible at the moment of speaking.
Goffman (1981) singles out one type of response which he calls a "reply", that
is, "a response in which the alignment implied and the object to which reference is
made are both conveyed through words or their substitutes" (35). Replies, then,
reach more directly and verbally backwards to the immediately preceding move,
ostensibly achieving cohesion through overt surface connections on the utteranceexpression
level (examples are the ritualized reciprocal pairs in phatic phases of
talk), while responses are often less "tidy" in their back-referencing; they do not
necessarily bear on the immediately preceding surface expression but rather are
coherent on account of a variety of different interpretation schemata available to
speakers. 1 In simplistic terms, if we accept Goffman's distinction, but wish to
consider both "replies" and "responses" in his technical sense, then we are obliged
to investigate under the notion of "responding" (in the nontechnical sense) both the
linguistic links between segments of talk and the interpretation schemata by means
of which talk is achieved.
Intercultural Miscommunication
There is a rich literature on misunderstandings occurring in interactions between
members of different cultures. Gumperz (1982a, b) found that misunderstandings
often result from participants misusing "contextualization cues," that is, aspects of
the surface forms of utterances (prosodic, phonological, lexical choices, routine
formulas that may signal relevant interpretive frames). In Gumperz's view, it is such
(often culture-specific) linguistic cues that are crucial for processes of conversational
inferencing, that is, "the 'situated' or context-bound process of interpretation, by
means of which participants in a conversation assess others' intentions and on which
they base their responses" (1982a, 153).
Tannen (1984a,b, 1986), who has studied both native-native and nativenonnative
talk, explains deviant responses and misunderstandings as a "matter of
framing," of exploring frames, breaking frames, or reframing in Batesort's (1972)
sense. Frames are dynamically linked as an "interpretation and responding chain
where negotiated footings are continually changed." Tannen (1984b) lists eight
levels of differences in the ways speakers signal what they mean: when to talk, what
to say, pacing and pairing, intonation, formularity, indirectness, cohesion, and
coherence—and these eight may lead to differential ways in which conversational
partners tend to assess others' intentions as a basis for making their responses.

164 Discourse Perspectives
Along these eight levels, cross-cultural as well as intra-cultural misunderstandings
can arise.
Research has been done on some of these eight areas. Erickson (1975) and
Erickson and Shultz (1982) analyzed misunderstandings in multiracial consulting
interviews, where they described how subtle differences in interactional style across
racial and ethnic groups can lead to misinterpreted responses. Kochman (1981)
examined black and white interaction styles. Scollon and Scollon (1981), in their
work on Athabaskan Indians, revealed several culturally conditioned differences,
especially in face-presentation and the distribution of talk and silence, where differences
in the lengths of silences tended to be interpreted as challenges or disagreements
by members of the other culture.
Work on communicative style (Lakoff, 1976), politeness phenomena (Brown &
Levinson, 1987), Gricean Implicature (Grice, 1975; Smith, 1982; Sperber & Wilson,
1986) as well as the interpretation of indirect speech acts (e.g., Clark, 1979;
Clark & Schunk, 1980; Clark & Lucy, 1975) have resulted in hypotheses suggesting
that "normal talk" is "indirect"; that is, if they want to respond appropriately,
speakers need to infer their partners' intentions in order to find out how the words
used were "really meant." Indirectness lies at the heart of many if not most misresponses
and misunderstandings in talk, and such alignment failures are of course
much more likely to occur in talk between people from different cultural backgrounds,
where indirectness and politeness conventions often diverge (Blum-Kulka,
1987; House, 1986).
Pragmatic-Theory-Based Studies of Misunderstandings
The third research strand is pragmatic-theory-based and is represented by the work
of Dascal (1977, 1985); Dascal and Katriel (1979), Dascal and Idan (1988), Blum-
Kulka and Weizman (1988) and Weizman and Blum-Kulka (1988). In this line of
inquiry, misunderstandings in "normal talk" between native speakers are analyzed at
different levels of pragmatic meaning. Dascal (1985) introduced the notion of a
"conversational demand" set up by an utterance, the perception of which may differ
for interlocutors. What exactly can go wrong in the perception of a conversational
demand can be described by reference to four questions that need to be answered in
interpreting what speaker S has said (Fillmore, 1976, 78):
1. What did S say (proposition)
2. What was S talking about (what was said plus what was implicated, that is,
the extended semantic meaning)
3. Why did S bother to say it (illocution)
4. Why did 5" say it in the way he said it (key, tone).
On any one of these layers of significance and any combinations thereof, misunderstandings
can arise. 2 Weizman and Blum-Kulka (1988) made a similar distinction of
the potential causes of misunderstandings in terms of the levels of prepositional
content, illocutionary point and mode, and, following Searle (1983, 1992), they
also differentiate between an "individual-I" (a speaker's) meaning and a "collectivewe"
direction pertaining to the three levels along which communication can break
down.

Native I Normative Interactions 165
Psychopathological Studies of Misunderstandings
The fourth approach relevant to construing a theory for the analysis of misunderstandings
is the psychopathological approach, which can be traced back to Freud's
intuitions about the "psychopathology of everyday life," and in particular, slips of
the tongue. This approach is linked to the work of Langer and her associates (e.g.,
Langer, 1978; Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978; Langer & Imber, 1980), Reason
and Mycielska (1982) as well as Heikkinen and Valo (1985), who related the
findings in this paradigm to interlanguage responses, and most recently Heckhausen
and Beckmann's (1990) work on action slips. The central points made in connection
with this approach are that much of what is traditionally conceived of as "ostensibly
thoughtful action" is in fact characterized by "mindlessness" (Langer, Blank, &
Chanowitz, 1978), and that it is especially in overlearned behaviour, that is, routinized
and automatized actions, that "slips" occur (cf. also Goffman's [1959]
distinction between "knows-better" slips and "does-not-know-better" errors).
Langer's "Non-Thinking Hypothesis" has been given indirect support through
the work by Langer and Abelson (1972) and Abelson (1976) and the many ensuing
studies on the packaging of knowledge in the mind, suggesting that in many types of
behaviour actants rely on scripts to reduce cognitive work, effort, and time. Because
of the imprintedness of larger plans, schemata, scripts, or social episodes in human
memory, we are able to predict upcoming moves and consequently stop paying
attention to the reality of the interlocutor's input. The "illusion of control" is often
only disrupted by the occurrence of "slips," the recognition of which is then equivalent
to a sudden intrusion of reality.
In the case of language learners, slips tend to occur for a different reason:
learners have not yet fully developed and automatized scripts at their disposal.
Because learners often "rehearse" internally what will be their next move, they also
often neglect any real input (Heikkinen & Valo, 1985).
Information-Processing Approaches to Language Understanding
The information-processing approach is closely linked to the psychopathological
one in that here, too, an assumption of scripted behavior is made, in which cognitive
schemata, frames, or scripts are representations of repeated behavioral patterns
designed to reduce cognitive work. The basic idea of organizing knowledge in
packets that function as ready-made subsets goes back to Bartlett's (1932) conception
of human memory as consisting of high-level structures, or schemata, encapsulating
knowledge about particular objects, events, and situations. Such knowledge
structures have also been referred to as frames, that is, networks with slots
which can be filled with certain values (Minsky, 1975), and scripts, which represent
sequences of routine actions, such as the restaurant script (Schank & Abelson,
1977).
Cognitive models that explain the processes operative in discourse comprehension
(Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Kintsch, 1988) are
especially relevant to analyzing interlanguage responses. In the original Kintsch and
van Dijk model (1978), the construction of a prepositional text base was considered
to be the major component in comprehension. In their later (van Dijk & Kintsch,

166 Discourse Perspectives
1983) version, a "situational component" was added. Strategical behavior was
considered to be the driving force in the construction of a propositional text base,
discourse comprehension being regarded as basically a strategic process. In a later
attempt to combine production systems with a connectionist approach, Kintsch
(1988) developed a "construction-integration model" of discourse understanding,
claiming that initially comprehension is bottom-up-guided and it is only in a later
integration process that appropriate meaning is selected. A cluster of propositions is
derived from the discourse via activation of the closest neighbors of the original
text-derived propositions in the general knowledge net. Kintsch assumes a minimally
organized and structured knowledge system, with specific structures being
generated in the context of the task for which they are needed and resulting in dense
associative knowledge nets.
The strongest arguments for a cognitive-processing-model approach to the explication
of inappropriate responses is that such an approach is (potentially) explicit,
and may integrate the different insightful perspectives sketched above. Social perspectives
may be encapsulated as such rules, norms, and conventions must have
psychocognitive correlates inside the individual if they affect conversational behavior.
Further, the very notion of inappropriateness presupposes at least two cognitive
systems in interaction: in principle, an information-processing model should enable
the identification of contextualized misunderstandings by explicating processing
"states" of the interacting systems.
Toward a Model for Analyzing Responses
In building on discourse-processing approaches as sketched above, Edmondson
(1989) set up a discourse comprehension and production model, which I have
adapted and outlined in Figure 8.1. I shall briefly describe this model and then
illustrate its explanatory power by applying it to the analysis of discourse data. As
can be seen, discourse comprehension can hardly be considered independently of
discourse production, especially in the case of dyadic spoken face-to-face discourse.
The model operates on two "levels": a prelinguistic or conceptual level
(made up of the upper boxes A, B, C, F, G, and H) and a lower linguistic level
(consisting of the lower boxes D, E, and I) on which the linguistic decoding of the
input and the encoding of the output occurs. These levels are networked in rather
more complex ways than Figure 8.1 suggests. In briefly elaborating upon the
subcomponents inside this model, I shall restrict myself to characterizations relevant
to my purposes.
Box A: The Operant Discourse Frame
The assumption here is that a copy of some relevant stored situational constellation
or schema is made and "filled in" by knowledge derived from the current discourse
situation. The result is a complex of conceptual and linguistic representations: the
operant discourse frame. The term frame (cf. Bateson, 1972; Goffman, 1974;
Tannen, 1979 and above) is being used here as distinct from schema, which pro-

Native I Normative Interactions 167
Fig. 8.1. Schematic discourse processing model.
vides the skeleton that is fleshed out in the ongoing discourse. In my terminology,
then, a schema is built up into a discourse frame. In ongoing discourse, however,
further or alternative schemata can be called up, leading to revision, switching,
reactivation or indeed coexistence of operant discourse frames (see the notion of
coexistent discourse worlds in Edmondson, 1981). The following elements are
contained in a currently activated discourse frame:
1. Knowledge of the currently relevant discourse topic
2. Knowledge of the currently relevant interactional move
3. Representation of the discourse outcomes resulting from the preceding interaction
4. A primarily linguistic representation of the prepositional content of the last
turn held in short-term memory, which can be accessed from the currently
active frame.
In terms of the distinctions made by Dascal (1977, 1985) and Blum-Kulka and
Weizman (1988) it is the level of aboutness (topic, proposition) which is captured in
"operant discourse frames".
Box B: Interactional Goals
It is assumed that the speaker has or develops a goal for the ongoing encounter,
together with relevant subgoals, which develop as the discourse unfolds. There is

168 Discourse Perspectives
clearly interaction between boxes A and B, in that what has happened so far may
influence what the speaker seeks to get out of the encounter. Similarly the goals of
the speaker system will affect what form the "nonlinguistic reaction" represented in
box F may take, just as long-term goals will impinge on strategic manipulation (box
G). For instance, in the case of the elicited role-play data to be analyzed below, the
role specifications in part predetermine what are here called interactional goals, just
as these role specifications (in part) preselect a particular schema, that is, a set of
expectations concerning what type of discourse will take place. In terms of the
distinctions made by Weizman and Blum-Kulka (1988), we may here include two
types of goals in an interaction: the individual-I point and the collective-we direction/purpose
of the encounter (although it is often difficult to disentangle the two).
Box C: Current Prediction/Expectation
This simply marks a result of ongoing processing: the system expects a more or less
specific type of input.
Box D: Decode
The process of extracting a "discourse meaning" may involve linguistic decoding
(itself a complex of subsystems), discourse interpretation strategies, and various
inferencing procedures as suggested by Gumperz, Tannen, and others. The strategic
knowledge that may be activated in box G may also be called up in this decoding
process.
Box E: Discourse Meaning
As an outcome of the decoding processes in D, a discourse meaning for the current
input is arrived at.
Box F: Nonlinguistic Reaction
An interpreted input leads initially to a nonlinguistic response, a sort of "gut reaction":
the determinants of this response are in large measure personality-based, and
not, strictly speaking, part of a discourse system. In Edmondson (1987), some
"reactive formatives" are posited, and a distinction is made between an interactional
option (which basically concerns whether the hearer/speaker will take a positive or
a negative attitude towards the current discourse move made by the interlocutor),
and an illocutionary option concerning the category of speaker-meaning appropriate
to this purpose.
Box G: Choice of Discourse Strategies
In this phase of the system, the hearer/speaker calls upon strategic or procedural
knowledge, which may lead to the employment of interactional strategies designed
to disguise the reaction in F above. The hearer/speaker may, for instance, decide to

Native I Normative Interactions 169
delay but at the same time anticipate the raw reaction stored in F, or may cloak it via
various politeness strategies. In this phase, which may be likened to a filtering
instance that serves to modulate speech acts under the constraints of politeness
maxims, potential responses of the interlocutor are taken into account, in the anticipation
of which speakers adjust their initial reactions.
Box H: Immediate Communicative Plan
At this junction in the system a prelinguistic communicative plan has resulted,
the scope of which may range from small turn-internal units to longer discourse
stretches, in which case elements of such a plan will be transferred to box B for later
recall.
Box I: Linguistic Encoding
It is at this level that the communicative plan arrived at in H is transformed into
linguistic representation. Box ] then contains at the very least a complex of linguistic
resources, search strategies, prepacked chunks such as routine formulas, and
gambits, acting as discourse lubricants. If linguistic searching is unsuccessful (i.e.,
the communicative plan established in H cannot be realized linguistically), backlooping
may occur, leading, for example, to "reduction strategies" (Kasper 1982;
Faerch & Kasper, 1980, 1983) with which speakers attempt to adjust a communicative
plan in light of the insurmountable complexity of the linguistic realization
necessary to carry it out.
This model does not aspire to completeness, focusing instead on what appear to
be critical points of processing from the learner's perspective. While the pathway
mapped in Figure 8.1, and the numbering adopted for expository purposes, suggest
a straightforward linear-processing procedure, the "boxes" are interrelated and the
whole system operates in parallel, that is, various nodes, items, and paths are
activated at the same time. Further, various shortcuts exist in a fully developed
system (see Edmondson, 1987 on the nature and function of routines). The following
analyses suggest several refinements to the model, in terms of further paths
through the subsystems.
Testing the Model
First of all, we have to clarify what exactly is to be understood by an inappropriate
response. Following Goffman's (1981, 35) characterization of a response as a move
inspired by a prior speaker that is (a) aligned to what is "occurring now" and (b) to
be understood as "relevant now," we can say that an inappropriate response is a
response interpreted not to be in alignment with the preceding discourse and is thus
taken not to be relevant at the moment of speaking. However insightful, such a
definition is not easily operationalized. It will, however, suffice here.
The model's operation will be demonstrated in an analysis of conversational
responses. The data were elicited via role-plays from advanced German learners of

170 Discourse Perspectives
English interacting with English native speakers in a variety of simulated everyday
situations. The dialogues included both immediate contact and telephone conversations,
each requiring centrally a specific speech act such as a request, a complaint,
or a suggestion. Interactants were given brief, oral, and "open" situational instructions,
with roles being varied along the dimensions of dominance and social distance.
3
In cases of inappropriate responding, a retrospective interview was conducted.
In these interviews, subjects listened to a playback of their recorded conversation
and, at the same time, studied the transcription. With respect to the critical (mis)response,
they were then asked to reflect upon how they had "understood" their
interlocutor's ("response-inspiring") utterance and what they (thought they) had
intended with their own ensuing utterance. These retrospective interviews were not
consistently taped as it often transpired that subjects felt much freer to do serious indepth
probing of their own behavior when they were not recorded. Respondents
frequently pointed out that in the retrospective sessions they were (actually often
painfully) confronted with their own "failure," an experience absent in the original
role-play session (the recording of which was never felt as intrusive).
In analyzing the data, I have used the discourse analytical categories provided in
Edmondson's (1981) discourse model and in Edmondson and House's (1981) Interactional
Grammar of English. Instances of inappropriate learner responses will be
related to the Discourse Processing Model outlined above, and to concepts, methods,
and findings adopted from the five research strands described above. At the
same time, detailed analysis, even if at times rather speculative, suggests quite
strongly that things are much more complex than indicated by the model.
The analysis of the interlanguage data examined revealed that there are three
sources for the pragmatic-responding errors found:
1. language-based difficulties, focusing on problems that are apparently located
in linguistic decoding and encoding
2. conceptual and strategic deficiencies, which may result in learners choosing
inappropriate or inadequately mitigated speech acts
3. operational difficulties, which may lead to an input apparently being ignored.
It is conceded immediately that these three distinctions are decidedly fuzzy-edged.
Indeed, it will transpire that taking a discourse-processing perspective on learner
responding behaviors makes neat categorization of responses a difficult if not rather
artificial undertaking.
Language-Based Responding Deficiencies
ENCODING DIFFICULTIES
The most predictable and most common learner response difficulties relate to the
apparent inability to find and employ routine formulas and gambits appropriately
(box I). The following are examples of this type of responding deficit:

Situation 1: Invitation to a Party/Opening Phase
Native I Normative Interactions 171
NS: Hi, how are you
NNS: Oh, just fine, what about yourself
NS: Pretty good, what have you been up to lately
NNS: Well, I worked at home for University, I was really busy.
NS: And what have you been doing nights
NNS: As I told you, I didn't go out much, usually I stay at home and work.
In commenting on the last move in this discourse stretch, the learner reported that
she had intended to express the translation equivalent of the German phrase wie
gesagt, which in German is a rather meaningless formula used to provide coherence
with preceding discourse stretches. In the context above, the English phrase as I told
you carries, however, a rather petulant and needlessly aggressive overtone, which
the learner certainly did not intend to imply. An expression such as "As I say, I've
been working so ..." would have been more appropriate in this context.
Learners admit that they infrequently model their utterances on supposed German
translation equivalents. In situation 2 below, the learner had intended to produce
a final Thanks, but through the inappropriate inclusion of the downtoner
anyway, she produced a distinct "misfire": anyway collocates exclusively with
Thanks in a context in which a Request has not been satisfactorily met, its semantic
meaning being "in spite of everything."
Situation 2: Request for Money/Closing Phase
NS: Just leave me your name and address; I'll write it down and then give you the
money.
NNS: Okay, that's kind of you. Thank you anyway.
In the retrospective interview, the learner indicated that she had considered the token
anyway to be a convenient filler corresponding to the German all-purpose gambit
also, which would be perfectly acceptable in an equivalent German interchange.
In situation 3 below, the learner fails to reply appropriately to a typically vague
and essentially ritual suggestion made by a native speaker in the (phatic) opening
phase of an interaction, thus violating the politeness principle of "leaving options"
(Lakoff 1973).
Situation 3: Phatic Talk/Neighbors
NNS: Hello. I'm your new neighbor. I'd like to visit you because I've just moved in and
don't know you.
NS: Oh, how nice! Well, we'll have to get to know each other.
NNS: Yes, 1 think so as well. Perhaps you should drink a cup of tea.
In this context an appropriate response would have been a vague reciprocating
phrase such as "maybe you'd like to come over for a cup of tea sometime." The
learner explained that she had meant to say something equivalent to the German "ja
naturlich, wir sollten mal auf ein TaBchen Kaffee zusammen kommen," which does
have the casual, nonimposing overtone the supposed English equivalent totally

172 Discourse Perspectives
lacks because of the modal should. The learner initiation is, of course, also lacking
in appropriateness.
In situation 4 below the learner again fails to respond appropriately inside a
phatic phase of an interaction because she lacks the appropriate tokens. In this case,
unsuccessful transfer from the mother tongue was not the culprit; in fact, the token
"Okay," which would have been correct in the following exchange, is very common
in German as well and fulfils the same functions:
Situation 4: Request to Hand Over Lost Property/Closing Phase
NS: What number is your house number
NNS: Eleven Eleven.
NS: Number 11, okay, about two o'clock then.
NNS: Yeah, that's right.
The phrase "that's right" used by the learner in her final move implies a personal
evaluation of the truth of the interlocutor's preceding utterance. What the learner
had meant to realize in this final discourse slot was a ritual move sealing the
agreement reached before, that is, the realization of the ritual speech act Okay
(Edmondson & House, 1981, 60), for which conventional tokens such as okay or
fine would suit. The learner had realized that such an act was called for at that
final stage in the interaction but did not have the appropriate tokens at her disposal.
The next example reveals learners' inability to produce discourse lubricating
devices (gambits) such as Uptakers or Starters in a conventionally accepted way.
Indeed, inappropriate responses that result from the learner's inability to employ an
acceptable gambit token (e.g., the token well) are very frequent in the data. They
originate, as I have written elsewhere (House 1982b; 1984), from the transfer into
English of the German gambit token ja, which fulfils many different discourse
lubricating functions. Here is an example:
Situation 5: Request for a Lift
NS: Why don't you use your own car
NNS: Yes, you know, it's too dirty.
DECODING DIFFICULTIES
I turn now to inappropriate learner responses which seem to relate to difficulties of
decoding (box D). The inappropriate learner responses resulting from decoding
problems are less easily ascertained than were the ones related to the unavailability
and unencodability of routines and gambits; in some cases both decoding and
encoding problems seem to have been operative.
In situation 6 below the learner takes the indirect request "do you mind if 1 do P"
apart and responds separately (and idiosyncratically) to the two chunks "do you
mind" ("no") and "if I do P" ("do it"), suggesting that she did not interpret the
indirect request as an intended entity (see, however, the studies conducted by Clark
and his associates, e.g., Clark and Schunk 1980, which revealed that it is indeed
sometimes the literal meaning of an indirect request that native speakers respond
to.)

Situation 6: Small Talk/Waiting Room
Nativei'Normative Interactions 173
NS: Excuse me, do you mind if I open the window It's so stuffy in here.
NNS: No, do it.
Besides admitting the decoding problems mentioned above, the learner reported that
she had actually wanted to realize an uptaking routine formula equivalent to the
German bitte schon, but was unable to do so and thus resorted to the linguistically
simple imperative form. It had not struck her that the result might violate the
politeness principle.
In situation 7 below, the learner was unable to interpret the discourse stretch
"what was your name, again" correctly; that is, as a polite request for information.
The use of the past tense in particular led to interpretive uncertainty, so the learner
fell back on a simplistic echoic strategy, providing an amusing type of "reply"
(Goffman, 1981). When the native speaker made a joke of the learner's inappropriate
response, the learner might have sought to do likewise, but lacked or at least was
unable to access the set token "I think so," producing the contextually puzzling
response "I think," a not-uncommon mistake for Germans learning English:
Situation 7: Gas Company/ Complaint
NS: Well, let me look at my list. What was your name, again
NNS: It was Brown.
NS: It was Brown. Is it still Brown
NNS: I think.
NS: Well, I do have a Brown on my list.
In situation 8, the learner was unable to use an appropriate discourse interpretation
strategy for the formula "May I help you" (routinely employed in service
encounters), and went on to produce a reply in Goffman's (1981) sense, which in
part reproduced the native speaker's preceding utterance—a defensive habit acquired
in the foreign language classroom. In following this echoic strategy, these
learners produce impolite responses. It is, however, surely part of (common) strategic
knowledge that the deference manifested in the first pair part of a request is
totally inappropriate for use in a positive response to that request: the error, therefore,
appears to be mainly one of decoding. However, a system failure in terms of
strategic knowledge (see box G), or more precisely, its use in discourse interpretation,
may also have been present.
Situation 8: Gas Company/Complaint/Opening Phase
NS: May I help you
NNS: Yes, of course, you may. I want to complain.
In situation 9, the learner revealed in the retrospective interview that she was not
in a position to correctly interpret the routine formula "What have you been doing
lately": the response is plausibly an initiation of her own interactional goals; that
is, box B determines what results in box H. Note that a nonlinguistic reformulation
of the interlocutor's query, roughly of the form "What are you doing when it is late"
is appropriately responded to—in other words, the input is not interpreted, but it is
not ignored:

174 Discourse Perspectives
Situation 9: Invitation to a Party/Opening Phase
NS: Hi, how are you What have you been doing lately
NNS: Well, I want to go to a party tonight.
An interesting example of learners' failure to use appropriate inferencing strategies
(box D) necessary for arriving at a plausible discourse meaning of the interlocutor's
preceding move (box E) is provided in situation 10:
Situation 10: Small Talk/Elevator Got Stuck
NS: I'm not trusting this elevator any more. What about you Are you Are you going
to walk up or are you going to ride the rest of the way
NNS: I, I, the next time I will take the stairs.
My hypothesis here (and it was in fact substantiated in the interview) was that the
learner was unable to derive from the NS utterance the implication that NS had
stopped, or was about to stop the lift. The problem is one of inferencing. Such
inferencing is in this case role-play-specific, in that whereas in real-life situations
speakers make inferences from the enveloping situation to the words uttered by the
interlocutor, it is the other way round in a role-play situation, in which the words
used can redefine the situational context (something similar can, of course, happen
in telephone talk). In situation 10 the learner was unable to infer what situational
redefinition the interlocutor had meant to create through his initiating move; he
couldn't make sense of the utterance, hesitated, and then made a good attempt at
replying, revealing that the propositional content of the input was adequately interpreted.
While this instance of an inferencing problem may be role-play-specific,
interpretive problems based on wrong inferences are not.
Conceptual and Strategic Deficiencies
In many cases, it will be a matter of speculation as to whether perceived impoliteness
is a result of the responding learner's lacking the conventionalized tokens for
performing a strategically modulated plan (box I), or whether the deficiency lies in
the pragmatic knowledge base itself (box G). The following examples of inappropriate
learner responses evidence a lack of relevant culture-specific pragmatic knowledge,
resulting in violations of the politeness principle or one of its maxims (e.g.,
the maxim of tact) to be observed in realizing polite utterances (e.g., Lakoff, 1980;
Leach, 1983; Holmes, 1985).
Situation 11: Landlady
NNS: I intend to go out with a friend tonight, so I won't be home tomorrow morning for
breakfast, Mrs Bennett.
NS: Well, you know, Anita, I bought extra biscuits for your breakfast.
NNS: Well, that doesn't matter, 'cause they will surely be fresh on Tuesday anyway.
In commenting on the pretty rude response "that doesn't matter," the learner in
question said that she had tried to produce a translation equivalent of the German
minimizers das ist dock nicht so schlimm or das macht dock nichts, both of which
carry a much more pacifying and consolatory overtone than the abrupt pseudo-

Native I Normative Interactions 175
equivalent chosen. In fact, the phrase "that doesn't matter" is overrepresented in my
data, and all its users proclaimed ignorance of the inherent impolite connotation.
The point here is that English has no "translation equivalent": an entirely different
speech act is in fact conventionally called for in English; that is, some form of
apology seems to be needed rather than a minimizer as is conventionally employed
in German. In other words, a cross-cultural comparison would need to go "further
back" than the issue of linguistic form. Situation 12 may help establish the point:
Situation 12: Complaint/Messy Kitchen
NS: Look here, Anne, are you responsible for that mess in the kitchen
NNS: Oh, yes, I think, but that doesn't matter.
In situation 13 the learner apparently lacks the pragmatic knowledge that a polite
and inoffensive countersuggestion is called for in this discourse slot, rather than a
grossly impolite rejection, abruptly bringing the talk to a close:
Situation 13: Party/Small Talk
NS: I have never been to Greece before but I always thought it must be beautiful.
NNS: Oh, yes, but there arc too many German tourists there in the summer.
NS: Mmh. Yes, well, what do you think Should we go and have some cheese now
NNS: Oh, no, no, no, I stay here.
NS: Oh, I see (rather nonplussed)
The learner in situation 13 stated that she had not intended to cut off the conversation.
On the contrary, she had just wanted to express her desire to stay exactly where
she was and continue chatting. The response produced is offensively ego-oriented
(for discussion of a pervasive preference for self-reference and a preoccupation with
self rather than the interlocutor in German native speaker talk, see House, 1979,
1982a, b, c, 1984, 1989). Even "Oh, no, no, no, we stay here" would produce a
totally different effect. Hence, I suggest, a deficiency in (culture-specific) pragmatic
knowledge, or a case of "schematic transfer," or at least, a bypassing of such
considerations in discourse production is the problem: the problem is not linguistic.
A similar lack of awareness of the effect of her response is attested to in situation
14. Here both gaps in pragmatic knowledge (box G), namely, that a response in the
form of a (repeated) polite request is called for, and the nonavailability of appropriate
linguistic tokens for making a polite request (box I) were suggested by the
learner as contributing to what she later felt was an insulting response to the nurse's
preceding utterance:
Situation 14: Making a Last-Minute Doctor's Appointment
NNS: Couldn't you make an exception for once
NS: Well, I don't see any way of squeezing you in at the moment.
NNS: Well, you can. Anybody can.
Operational
Difficulties
While the types of inappropriate responses previously characterized could be related
to some malfunctioning inside one or two phases ("boxes") of the proposed

176 Discourse Perspectives
discourse-processing model, the following instances of deviant learner responses
seem rather to be system malfunctions and can, informally, be accounted for as
shortcuts, in which the learner seems to ignore the input (see the above discussion of
the "psychopathological" research paradigms). Something similar, in this case
based on interpretative problems, was suggested in the discussion of situation
10 above, in which, it was hypothesised, interactional goals "took over" the
communicative-planning task. Similar "system leaps" will be suggested in the following.
General cognitive overload, insecurity, chunking problems and so on may
be causes. The role-play situation itself may be an additional causative factor. The
phenomenon to be explicated is familiar to nonexpert speakers of a foreign language,
as when, for example, one requires so much time to rehearse one's own
contribution to a group discussion that the topic has moved on before one is ready to
bid for a turn. In two-party interactions, such operational difficulties may, apparently,
lead to the performance of a rehearsed move, independent of its current
discourse relevance.
The following are examples of such nonpartner-oriented responses:
Situation 15: Invitation to a Party/Opening Phase
NS: Hi, Susanne, how are you doing
NNS: I'd like to invite you to a party I'm doing this night.
Here one might informally say "Susanne didn't listen": all she did was jump from
her goal of inviting the interlocutor to an immediate communicative plan and its
linguistic encoding, bypassing not only the partner's input but also any strategic
considerations (box B feeds directly into H). However, it is again of interest (see the
remarks offered for situation 12) that she picks up her interlocutor's token "doing."
The suggestion here is that this advanced learner is perfectly familiar with the
collocation "give a party": the grammatical "error" is a form of lip-service to the
input received, linguistically decoded, but otherwise ignored. The following three
situations are further examples of this type of self-centered shortcut:
Situation 16: Lost Property/Opening Phase
NS: Goood morning.
NNS: Morning. This is Frank speaking. Thanks a lot for your great party.
NS: Oh, I'm glad you had a good time, but to tell the truth I feel pretty icky today.
NNS: So I just want to. The reason I'm calling you is I'm looking desperately for my bag.
There are two obvious interpretations of the inappropriate learner move in situation
16 above. One is that after the performance of a thank you, the learner feels that he
has engaged himself long enough in small talk, and shifts directly from his interactional
goal (B) to an immediate communicative plan (H). Alternatively, the word
"icky" may have caused interpretive problems, again leading to the same fallback
strategy (see situation 13 above). In the retrospective interview, the learner in
question reported that both interpretations were simultaneously true in his case.
Situation 17: Can't Pay Rent
NS: Well, my dear, if you can't pay for this week and for next week I'm afraid I'll have
to let you go.
NNS: No, you know I have always paid in time before.

Native I Normative Interactions 177
The learner appears to have been working on the additional argument in his favor
that is brought forward, and under stress simply reacts negatively to the proposition
"I shall have to let you go," before producing it.
Situation 18: Can't Pay Rent
NS: Can't you get a loan
NNS: Well, maybe, you can wait till next week because I have an interview then.
This data segment is similar (note that the same stressful situation holds). In both
situations 17 and 18 the actual input is not taken into account by the learner, who
seems to be altogether too busy planning and producing reasons why she shouldn't
be thrown out. Such a phase-shift interpretation is in line with the subjects' own
diagnosis of what went wrong: both learners admitted that they were too busy
mapping out their argumentative plan to be able to listen, let alone respond to the
more "local" utterances produced by their interlocutors.
The response errors to be characterized in what follows are similar to the
"interactional slips" described above: learners anticipate and predict a next move on
the part of the interlocutor, and respond to it, even though it does not occur. The
actually occurring input is then ignored. In terms of our model, the discourse
meaning (box E) of an input is derived directly from the hearer/speaker's current
predictions/expectations (box C). The system "hears" what it wants to hear (the
same phenomenon occurs in native-speaker discourse, and is familiar in written
discourse when one proofreads one's own manuscripts).
Situation 19: Lost Property/Opening Phase
NS: Oh, hello, Mike.
NNS: Oh, fine. You
NS: I'm fine (puzzled pause).
Quite clearly, the student responds to a "How-are-you" move on the part of her
interlocutor, even though it is not there. In fact, "how are you" was a topic of
discussion in several of the communication courses the learner-subjects had attended;
in other words, this learner may have been primed by foreign language
instruction to expect this input. This does not to my mind invalidate the point being
made—that expectation can determine interpretation—but rather reinforces it.
Situation 20: Lost Property/Opening Phase
NS: Hi, Susie, how are you
NNS: Good morning, Kim, I'm fine. How are you
NS: Oh, my head's terribly fuzzy.
NNS: Oh, I'm glad to hear that.
In this situation the student's schema predicted a conventional fine, that is, a
positive response to the conventionalized query, and this was responded to. Expectation
again determined interpretation. There is, additionally, the possibility that
fuzzy was not understood, such that decoding uncertainty may have influenced the
predictive inteipretation.
Situation 21: Gas Company/Closing Talk
NS: I'll phone you right back and we'll arrange this whole thing again.
NNS: Yes, thank you very much.

178 Discourse Perspectives
NS: And once again, we're terribly sorry that we didn't get round to your place today.
NNS: Oh, thank you.
This discourse stretch takes place inside the closing phase of a situation in which the
learner had complained about an appointment not having been kept by an employee
of a gas company. A final ritual apology is offered by the offender, which is,
however, not responded to by a minimizer or some other appropriate move but by a
repetition of a Thanks previously realized by the learner. This learner seems to have
been operating inside a "closing talk" schema, knew that a Thank-you was her
operative response, predicted a repetition of the compensatory offer made before,
and responded to such a move as though it had occurred in reality. In the interview
the learner reported that she had in fact engaged in some "advance planning," and
apparently this advance planning barred her from flexibly reacting to the apology,
which was unexpected as it referred back to an early phase in the encounter.
As a last type of inappropriate response because of "psychopathological" slips, I
would like to cite some instances that cannot be related to any one phase in the
proposed discourse-processing model or even one of the suggested shortcutting
paths: we deal here, rather, with cases in which it appears learners were unable to
handle the cognitive load under the time constraints imposed by fast-moving oral
interaction, and the necessity of chunking and weighting the incoming discourse
stretches. The following example attests to such difficulties experienced by the
learners in my corpus:
Situation 22: Invite/Opening Phase
NS: You've been working! Oh, I didn't know you had a job! What kind of job
NNS: Well, at least I'm trying.
The learner only responds to the first part of the interlocutor's utterance. The case is
complicated by the connotations of the term "work." For some students, "work" is
something one forces oneself to do. It has nothing to do with paid employment.
Thus the response to the first part of the input may be adequate from the learner's
perspective, but ignores the apparent misunderstanding evidenced in NS's further
query. It is possible that this misunderstanding itself influences the content of the
learner's answer (some people feel apologetic about admitting to the fact that one
"works" occasionally), and this complex of factors leads to overload. It is also
possible that the learner was not able to infer the interlocutor's different understanding
of the term "work," and simply bypassed the problem by responding to his own
interpretation of the input.
Conclusion
The focus of this chapter has been on postulating a cognitive model inside which
different kinds of "inappropriate responses" may be located. The major problem
remains the validity of explanatory analyses offered inside this, or indeed any other
framework. How does one "know" of a concrete piece of data which processing or
knowledge constraints or difficulties led to its occurrence Given our current state of
knowledge, it seems to me that one can only plead for rich, context-based interpre-

Native I Normative Interactions 179
live hypotheses, established inside an explicit cognitive framework. I have attempted
such here. Furthermore, this study supports the belief that introspective and
retrospective data may be useful for interpreting observed pragmatic failure.
I have suggested here some of the complexity of responding in a foreign
language, and attempted to specify what problems may underlie instances of
pragmatic-responding failure. Three types of problems were suggested, and an
attempt was made to understand them.
1. Language-based difficulties leading to linguistic decoding and encoding
problems
2. Conceptual and strategic deficiencies related to gaps in culture-specific pragmatic
knowledge
3. Operational difficulties that may lead to interactional slips and inputs apparently
being ignored.
Furthermore, the notion of cognitive overload has been given some illustrative
substance. One pedagogically relevant conclusion (that has been made often enough
in the past (e.g., Edmondson, 1989; Edmondson & House, 1991) is the desirability
of learners' having a thoroughly established battery of routine formulas for more
successful discourse participation in L2. At the same time, the data above suggest
that routines may be too fixed, as it were, in that nonexpected responses to routinized
queries may shortcut a learner-discourse-processing system. The desirability
of adequate strategic repair and elucidation strategies is a further pedagogic
desideratum supported by the data.
I have suggested several research strands might be relevantly searched and
adapted for an eventual integrative-interdisciplinary approach to understanding and
explaining "deviant" interlanguage responses and misunderstandings. I have integrated
some of the insights of the five research strands into the frame provided by a
discourse-processing model, and have supported this model with a number of illustrative
conversations. Broadening our descriptive and explanatory framework is
essential to understanding why learners' responses seem somewhat enigmatic at
times. I conclude with a quote from Wallace Chafe:
Understanding is increased by expanding the descriptive framework to include a
large number of causal relations. Two things are necessary here. One is attention
to a maximally wide range of data. How easy would it be to understand the
workings of the solar system if we restricted ourselves to observing only the sun
and moon, because they are bigger and brighter and thus easier to observe than the
planets The other necessity is having the ability to imagine a maximally wide
range of explanatory models. Someone had to think of planets moving in elliptical
orbits around the sun. . . . These two necessities can be encapsulated in the statement
that understanding increases with an expanded field of vision. (1990, 19)
Notes
1. A similar distinction between responses in which linguistic cohesion is at stake (replies)
and those in which underlying shared knowledge provides for coherence is made by
Pomerantz (1984, 153ff.), who also discusses different types of problems speakers may find
themselves faced with when pursuing a response.

180 Discourse Perspectives
2. Schegloff (1987) lists comparable causes for misunderstandings in talk-in-interaction,
when he makes a distinction between two sources of "trouble": problematic reference ("propositions")
and problematic sequential implicativeness, the latter comprising four distinct
sources of trouble: favoured action interpretation (illocutions), serious/non-serious trouble
sources (key/tone), as well as a so-called constructive/composite distinction and the practice
of "joke first."
3. The following is an example of the type of brief situational and role outline informants
were given at the outset of each recording session:
You, student X, have just discovered that your car doesn't start, which annoys you greatly as
you have a course at the university in twenty minutes. It is already fairly late, and as you're
sure that you won't be able to make it by bike or bus, you decide to phone up a friend of
yours, Y, to ask him for a lift.
An instruction matching K's role would stress the fact that Y had just decided that he would
skip classes this morning or some other complicating factor.
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9
Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior:
The Effect of Conversational Topic
JANE ZUENGLER
As Kasper (1989) points out, interlanguage (IL) performance is now understood as a
variable phenomenon. Much of the variability is both normal and systematic. IL
variation, in fact, represents a major focus of current second language acquisition
(SLA) research and theory, and is the theme of conferences and books in the field
(e.g., the 1987 Applied Linguistics Conference at Ann Arbor, Michigan; the 1990
Second Language Research Forum [SLRF] at Eugene, Oregon; books by Eisenstein
[ed.], 1989; Gass, Madden, Preston, & Selinker [eds.], 1989; Tarone, 1988). Increasingly,
research has investigated IL performance in native speaker-nonnative
speaker (NS-NNS) interactions. The findings point to a number of factors that cause
IL performance to vary. One such factor emerging now is that of conversational
topic. Though topic has been called "one of the most under-researched areas in the
study of IL variation" (Tarone, 1988, 119), there is a small but growing body of
empirical studies on conversational topic necessary to consider if we are to understand
learner acquisition and performance of conversational skills.
In addressing conversational topic, we are not simply looking at what it is that
interlocutors talk about. Topic must not be viewed as a superficial, categorical
construct independent of the conversation. The fundamental importance of topic is
that it situates a speaker. First of all, speakers have cognitive and/or affective
relationships to particular topics. For example, we may talk about computer software,
and know a lot, a little, or nothing about it. Independent of how much we
know, computer software may be something we are greatly, or not at all, interested
in. Second, topic situates the speaker within the interaction, that is, vis-a-vis
the interlocutor. In other words, it can shape one's conversational role. Taking
computer software as an example, conversational roles are not simply a function of
how much each interlocutor knows, or cares about, computer software in an absolute
sense. How the interlocutors talk about software, and how active or not their
roles, are significantly influenced by what their conversational partner knows and
feels about the topic. Therefore, studying the influence of topic on NS-NNS interactions
will enable us to learn more about conversational dynamics and role-taking in
184

Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior 185
general, and increase our understanding, in particular, of IL conversational performance
and development.
This chapter will first synthesize the research on conversational topic and IL
performance. Following that will be a discussion of the research outcomes, as they
relate to two current theoretical models of IL variation. The two models are Selinker
and Douglas's Discourse Domain Model and Giles's Speech Accommodation Theory
(SAT).
Research on IL and Conversational Topic 1
The research germane to topic and IL has generally taken one of two focuses; it
either compares the same learners' IL performance across various topics, or it
compares performance by different IL learners when a particular topic is held
constant. Measures of IL performance vary considerably among the studies. While
a researcher may analyze the same set of IL features from one investigation to the
next, there is no such uniformity from researcher to researcher. However, the lack of
uniformity does not in itself represent a problem; it simply reflects the fact that in an
emerging research area, there is a wide range of potential measures to consider.
It will be apparent, in the research review, that some studies select traditional
"linguistic" measures (e.g., pronunciation, verb accuracy) while others analyze features
more recognizably pragmatic (e.g., directives, interruption behavior). Still
others analyze both types of features. Whether the units of analysis are "linguistic"
or "pragmatic," the overwhelming majority of the studies to be reviewed are,
nevertheless, germane to the pragmatics of IL performance. The researchers are
investigating whether, and how, topic influences the ways in which IL speakers
perform a conversation, and, specifically, the type of conversational role they assume.
Such research, therefore, has pragmatically relevant outcomes, even though,
in some studies, the measures themselves may be more traditionally "linguistic"
than pragmatic.
Only two of the studies to be reviewed are not clearly pragmatically based
(though they contain pragmatic measures). Cornu and Delahaye (1987) and Smith
(1989) ask acquisitional questions, rather than questions of performance per se.
They look at performance as a means, rather than an end in itself, because they are
primarily interested in determining whether IL acquisition varies across discourse
domains.
Studies of IL Performance Across Topics
Since many IL speakers are university students studying their major field through
the second language (i.e., have a "language for specific purposes" [LSP] orientation),
several studies have compared subjects' IL performance when conversing on a
topic within their major field with their performance on a topic lying outside their
major field. Two of the studies in particular illustrate the impact of topic on the roles
that interlocutors take in the conversations.
Selinker and Douglas (1985) report on an IL speaker (Luis) participating in two

186 Discourse Perspectives
conversations, one concerning civil engineering, his major field, and the other
concerning a life-story topic (how to prepare his native food). Luis's performance
varied from one conversation to the next. Each topic, the authors suggest, led to
different role dynamics between Luis and his interlocutor, resulting in variable IL
performance. Selinker and Douglas point out that when Luis conversed about his
major field, he was the relative "knower" in the interaction, since it was his specialty,
and his interlocutor was a NS who was not in the same field. Therefore,
Louis's role was to make evident his expertise. In conversing about food, on the
other hand, Luis was outside his area of expertise and interest, and the same was
true for his interlocutor, who in this case was a friend of his. In this type of
interaction, there was more role negotiation, partly because the interlocutors were
friends, and partly because neither "knew" the topic.
The topic-influenced role differences led to variation in some of Luis's communication
strategies. In particular, there was variation in the strategy Luis used when
he searched for a word he did not know. When conversing about engineering, Luis
(as "knower") continued talking until he found a synonym his interlocutor could
respond to. However, when he needed vocabulary to discuss food, Luis was more
likely to let the episode break down, saying "forget it" at one point. There was no
impetus for Luis to show that he was the "knower" of food (because he was not),
and he very likely held less interest in that topic than in the major field topic.
Luis also varied the way he corrected his interlocutor. This occurred when the
NS interlocutor misinterpreted the content of what Luis was saying. When discussing
engineering, Luis corrected his interlocutor very directly without mitigating
what he said. When discussing the life-story topic, however, Luis mitigated his
corrections by using politeness strategies. Here again, Selinker and Douglas suggest,
the cross-topic variation in response to interlocutor mistakes may reflect the
relative importance of the topic to the IL speaker. Misinterpretations by the interlocutor
when talking about food preparation may not be as urgent to correct because
that topic is probably much less important to the IL speaker than is his major field.
Results from a larger study by Zuengler and Bent (1991) concur with Selinker
and Douglas (1985) in pointing to the influence of topic on the conversational roles
taken by IL speakers. The Zuengler and Bent research involved, in part, an analysis
of 45 IL speakers conversing on two separate topics in dyads with NS interlocutors.
(See Zuengler 1989b for a subset of the results). All 45 NS-NNS dyads were first
asked to have a conversation about favorite and holiday foods. Then, each dyad
discussed a topic within their shared major field. The researchers looked for patterns
of conversational participation and dominance, employing measures such as amount
of talk, use of pause fillers to retain one's turn, topic moves, and back-channels.
Outcomes revealed variation in IL conversational participation from topic to topic.
When discussing food, the NNSs (relative to their NS partners) produced significantly
more talk and more pause fillers, while their NS partners back-channeled
significantly more, role patterns that Zuengler and Bent labeled NNS "speaker" and
NS "listener." These particular role patterns did not necessarily appear, however,
when the subjects had a conversation concerning their major field. In dyads in
which the NSs and NNSs shared the same major field and were at an equivalent
level in it, the NSs talked significantly more than their NNS partners, while the

Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior 187
NNSs back-channeled significantly more. That is, the role patterns were opposite to
those in the conversations about food. When discussing the major field topic, it was
the NSs who performed as active "speakers" and the NNSs who were the active
"listeners." (In both conversations, the NNSs produced more pause fillers. Topic
moves were nonsignificant with both topics.) The NS as "speaker" in the major field
conversations supports claims by Beebe and Giles (1984), among others, who assert
that NSs tend to dominate interactions with NNSs, perhaps due to feelings of
ethnolinguistic superiority (but see discussion below). However, the food conversations
showed no such NS dominance, and in fact, as pointed out, the NNSs spoke
significantly more than the NSs. Zuengler and Bent (1991) suggest that while
discussing food, the NSs may have conceded more of the talk to the NNSs because
the topic held little importance to the NSs. Or, the NSs may have judged the NNSs
as knowing more than they about the food topic. Since the NNSs resided in the NSs'
setting (namely, the United States), while the NSs had not, correspondingly, resided
in the NNSs' settings, the NNSs tended to be familiar with NS foods, whereas the
NSs did not typically show conversance with NNS foods. Relative knowledge of the
topic was, in fact, an important influence on conversational roles in other comparisons
tested by Zuengler and Bent (1991). (These outcomes will be brought up
below.)
Several additional studies looked at IL performance on major field versus nonmajor
field topics, but focused primarily on specific characteristics of the IL per se,
rather than on interactional dynamics such as role relationships. Cornu and Delahaye
(1987) tested two subjects and report IL variation between major field and
nonmajor field topics. Providing detailed results for one of the two subjects, they
report that when the IL speaker talked about economics, her major field, she
produced more embedded sentences, used fewer nonverbal strategies, performed
more self-correction of grammatical errors, and was less hesitant about and more
appropriate in her lexical choices. Cornu and Delahaye conclude that the subject
was more in control of the major field topic than the nonmajor field topic; she had
more control of the economics topic, they suggest, because her IL contained more
"integration of the target lexical systems" (1987, 150). Greater integration (and,
consequently, more control) can result from a learner's having greater exposure to
and practice in the TL in topic areas such as the major field.
A recent study by Smith (1989) compared IL performance on general topics in
the SPEAK test (a test of spoken language proficiency developed by ETS) versus
performance on major field topics in a specially developed version of the same test.
Thirty-eight graduate students were tested, and global measures were obtained of
their comprehensibility, pronunciation, grammar, and fluency. In contrast to the
preceding studies' outcomes, these subjects showed no significant differences in
their IL performance on major field versus nonmajor field topics. One possible
explanation for the lack of difference in performance is test anxiety as a variable.
Smith (1989) reports that a native-speaker control group that took the test indicated
that they found each test "quite stressful" (160). If native speakers found the task
stressful, it is quite likely that the IL speakers did as well. Further research in this
area is important for determining whether test anxiety was indeed important in
eliciting data such as in Smith (1989).

188 Discourse Perspectives
In addition to looking at IL performance on major field versus nonmajor field
topics, research has investigated performance on topics that differ according to
speaker interest or affect. Eisenstein and Starbuck (1989) asked eight IL speakers
what topics they were interested in as well as topics they considered uninteresting.
(The researchers referred to these as "invested" and "uninvested" topics, respectively.)
Each subject had two conversations with the researchers, one on an invested
topic, and the other on an uninvested topic. What Eisenstein and Starbuck analyzed
was the subjects' targetlike accuracy of their verb system across topics. Overall, the
subjects' IL was significantly less accurate when discussing the invested topic than
when discussing the uninvested topic. Specifically, subjects were less accurate in
lexical choice, tense choice, tense form, and use of repetitions. The researchers
suggest that the differences across topics might be due to monitoring or cognitive
load. When discussing the invested topic, subjects talked more, and this may have
caused them to monitor less. Or, it is possible that the cognitive load was greater in
the invested condition (though the subjects were at an advanced IL level, and the
invested topics did not appear to be cognitively demanding). Additional research
should help clarify whether monitoring or cognitive load may be confounding
variables in invested-uninvested topic comparisons.
Certain topics can trigger positive or negative emotions in IL speakers, and their
performance may vary as a result. A pilot study reported by Zuengler (1982)
consisted of asking 13 IL speakers questions on two different topics, a "neutral" one
(asking them their views on children watching television), and one that was potentially
ethnically-threatening (telling subjects that they should speak English in the
United States, and if they wanted to speak their native language, they should "go
back to [their] own country"; subjects were asked their views on that). Subjects'
responses to the two different topics were compared with respect to their production
of three phonological variables. Zuengler provides descriptive data illustrating that
some of the subjects were indeed emotionally aroused by the ethnically threatening
topic. Those subjects had lower accuracy when responding to the ethnically threatening
question than in responding to the neutral question. On the other hand,
subjects who did not respond negatively to the ethnically threatening question
(perhaps because their ethnic identity was weak) performed more accurately when
answering the ethnically threatening question.
Emotionality of topic was also a major focus in research by Dowd (1984).
However, in contrast to Zuengler (1982), Dowd's research did not concern emotion
attached to ethnic identity. Instead, Dowd asked her subjects to talk about an
unpleasant personal experience they had had. Prior to the "emotional" topic, they
were asked to discuss a "neutral" topic, for example, to describe their favorite food,
their home, family, etc. Subjects were 100 Mexican female IL speakers. Dependent
measures of IL performance were six phonological variables. Results were mixed.
Only two of the six variables, final consonant clusters and /r/, significantly differed
in accuracy from one topic to the next. The pattern of shift in accuracy also differed.
In going from "neutral" to "emotional" topics, subjects significantly decreased in
TL accuracy on final consonant clusters, but they significantly increased in accuracy
on /r/. Though Dowd's (1984) outcomes reveal an (albeit limited) effect of
topic shift, it is not known why the variables shifted in different directions. Such

Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior 189
bidirectional shifts are important for SLA researchers to understand (Dowd,
Zuengler, & Berkowitz, 1990; see also Tarone, 1985). It will be noted that though
the Zuengler (1982) and Dowd (1984) research may have had a general pragmatic
orientation, their measures for analysis were limited to linguistic items. Obviously,
it will be important to analyze pragmatic measures as well as to view IL performance
in such research.
IL Variation Within a Given Topic
Three research studies investigate IL performance when the topic is held constant,
the important variable being IL speakers' knowledge of the topic relative to that of
their (NS) interlocutors. All three studies consider relative topic knowledge as a
definer of one's conversational role (and thus are closely related in conception to
several studies discussed earlier). The present studies asks, implicitly or explicitly:
Can an interlocutor's knowledge of the conversational topic, relative to the partner's
knowledge, explain whether one interlocutor dominates, controls, or directs the
other, or whether both interlocutors play an equal role in building the conversation
As mentioned earlier, there are claims by Beebe and Giles (1984) and others that in
many NS-NNS interactions, the NS tends to dominate, due, perhaps, to feelings of
ethnolinguistic superiority. Investigations of relative topic knowledge provide an
important means of testing such claims.
Woken and Swales (1989), while limiting their study to three female NS-NNS
dyads, provide clear evidence for control in the NNS's performance when she had
greater topic knowledge. Each of the NS-NNS dyads was composed of an NNS
graduate student in computer science who was asked to show her NS partner (who
was not a computer science major) how to use some software. The researchers
report that in all three dyads, the NNSs, due to their topic expertise, clearly controlled
the conversation in talking more (and producing longer t-units), correcting
the NS more than the NS corrected them, and in giving more directions. The NNS
corrections to the NSs were largely unmitigated (as were those of the NNS in
Selinker and Douglas [1985], when discussing his major field knowledge). The
NSs, on the other hand, produced more inquiries, which served as requests for
clarification and for lexical help from the NNSs. Woken and Swales (1989) conclude
that their three dyads illustrate the influence of relative topic expertise on
control and participation in a conversation, regardless of the nativeness or nonnativeness
of the interlocutors. As such, the evidence of NNS control contradicts the
claims of Beebe and Giles (1984) and others regarding NS tendency to dominate (or
at the least, it qualifies any such claims regarding the NS). However, it remains to
be determined whether less fluent NNSs than these would also control such conversations.
Like Woken and Swales (1989), the Zuengler and Bent (1991) study introduced
earlier also addressed relative topic knowledge in NS-NNS interactions, but in a
larger number of dyads. Forty-five male NS-NNS dyads were formed to constitute
three distinct groups. In all dyads, NSs and NNSs shared their major field and were
asked to have a conversation on a specific topic within the field. In 15 of the dyads,
the NNS was the relative "topic expert," in 15 other dyads, the NS was the relative

190 Discourse Perspectives
"topic expert," and in the remaining 15, NS and NNS were relatively equal with
respect to topic knowledge. (Topic expertise was determined by what level the
subject was at in the major field.) Measures of conversational participation and
dominance included amount of talk, pause fillers, back-channels, topic moves, and
interruptions. While results were nonsignificant for interruptions, each of the other
measures revealed some significant patterns. When the NNSs had relative topic
expertise, they produced significantly more talk, more fillers, and more backchannels
than their NS partners. When, on the other hand, the NSs were the "topic
experts," the NSs produced more talk and more fillers. As discussed earlier, when
both NS and NNS were at the same stage in the major field, the NSs talked
significantly more, while the NNSs produced more pause fillers. Interestingly,
regardless of topic expertise, the NNSs produced significantly more back-channels.
Zuengler and Bent (1991) view the results as a clear indication of the influence
of relative topic knowledge on one's role in a conversation; topic expertise led to
greater amounts of talk and more pause-filling. At the same time, the NNSs,
regardless of topic expertise, tended to signal an active listening role as well, by
greater use of back-channels. It was only when the NNSs were the "topic experts"
that they displayed speaker dominance by talking more. As mentioned above in the
discussion about cross-topic variation, the fact that the NSs talked more than the
NNSs in the "equal" dyads perhaps indicates a tendency for NSs to dominate due to
feelings of ethnolinguistic superiority, even though they may be "equal" with respect
to topic knowledge.
A third study illustrates that relative topic expertise can influence 1L performance
even if it is only perceived, rather than actual, expertise. Zuengler (1989a)
administered an art judgment test to 45 dyads of NS-NNS women. She then asked
them to have two conversations about their individual judgments. In the first conversation,
subjects did not know how well they had performed on the test. However,
prior to the second conversation, Zuengler manipulated the scores so that in 15 of
the dyads, the NNS was led to believe that she had performed much better in making
art judgments than her NS partner had (i.e., that the NNS was the relative "topic
expert"), while in another 15 dyads, it was the NS who was led to believe that she
was the relative "topic expert." (The manipulated scores had no relation to subjects'
actual scores.) To establish a control group, in 15 of the dyads neither interlocutor
was told how she had performed. All 45 dyads then had a second conversation about
their judgments. Zuengler (1989a) reports an analysis of amount of talk, interruptions,
and task moves in an effort to determine whether perceived expertise had an
effect on conversational performance.
Outcomes revealed that the NSs consistently dominated in terms of amount of
talk; NSs produced significantly more talk than their NNS partners, across all
conversations. Moreover, topic expertise (in the second conversation) led the NS
perceived experts to increase their already greater amount of talk in the first conversation.
The other measures revealed two patterns: (1) perceived expertise led both
NSs and NNSs to interrupt more successfully and to move the task along more often
than their perceived nonexpert partners; and (2) the NSs tended to dominate in the
control group conversations. They not only produced more talk, but they interrupted
more successfully and moved the task along more frequently than their NNS part-

Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior 191
ners did. According to Zuengler (1989a), the findings show that when topic expertise
differences are not apparent to either interlocutor, it is the NS who will tend to
dominate a conversation with an NNS. The outcomes of Zuengler and Bent (1991),
discussed above, corroborate this. However, when interlocutors are aware of differences
in topic expertise (even though the differences may be apparent, not real), the
relative topic expert, NS or NNS, will tend to dominate the conversation. The only
exception is in amount of talk, which the NSs produced more of overall. Zuengler
(1989a) suggests that the NNSs may have talked less because of limitations in their
language proficiency. While none were IL beginners, it was apparent, in listening to
the conversations, that many of the NNSs showed difficulty in producing fluent
talk. Analysis of speech rate revealed that NNSs consistently spoke significantly
more slowly than NSs. NNSs often signaled difficulty by uttering "I don't know
how to say this" and "this is difficult for me."
To summarize, the research conducted on conversational topic addresses two
questions: Does IL performance vary from one topic to the next And, does IL
performance vary within a given topic The review of research on conversational
topic reveals that both types of variation are evident in IL performance. (Of course,
caveats should be attached, as not all of the studies have statistically tested results,
and one of the studies [Smith, 1989] had nonsignificant outcomes). While it is
obvious that more research must be undertaken in this area, the research conducted
to date already provides evidence that topic does indeed affect IL performance.
Explaining the Outcomes: Looking to SLA Theory
It is important to recognize that it is not topic per se that is of importance to SLA
research; rather, it is what topic reveals about IL development and use. That is, how
can research on topic contribute to theories of second language acquisition, and, at
the same time, how can language acquisition theories help us interpret the outcomes
of the research While some of the research studies discussed in this paper address
theory, either in their conception or in interpreting their outcomes, others do not.
Whether the researchers directly address theory or not in their studies, the majority
of the research outcomes can be shown to relate to either of two current SLA
theories in particular: the Discourse Domain Model and Giles' Speech Accommodation
Theory (SAT). Considering the outcomes that relate to these two theories will
help us understand topic as part of the larger picture of language acquisition and
use, and, at the same time, help us assess the viability of the theories in accounting
for the data. 2
The Discourse Domain Model: IL Development
and Use Varies According to Domain
The Discourse Domain Model (Douglas & Selinker, 1985; Selinker & Douglas,
1985) is a cognitively oriented theory which states that learners develop ILs through
various content areas, or discourse domains, that are important to or needed by
them. 3 Selinker and Douglas claim that because IL development is domain-situated,

192 Discourse Perspectives
a learner's IL may be well-developed, structurally and functionally, in one domain,
but not in the next. Fossilization, backsliding, and disfluencies in IL can occur when
learners are asked to converse within a domain that they have little or no knowledge
of (and/or do not know the forms and functions for conversing about it in the L2).
While Selinker and Douglas conceptualize discourse domain without using the
word "topic," it can be argued that the latter is a performance element of the
former. 4 That is, people do not talk about discourse domains; instead, they talk
about "things" (topics) that engage a domain of discourse. As such, a discourse
domain theory has direct relevance to studies of IL and topic, particularly to some of
the research discussed earlier which illustrates IL variation across topics.
Discourse domain theory can explain the effect of knowing, or being interested
in, a topic. Subjects in Selinker and Douglas (1985) and Cornu and Delahaye (1987)
appeared to speak more fluently and assertively when discussing their major field
than when talking outside their major field. The major field topic engaged a discourse
domain of which the subjects had more cognitive control than the other
topic's domain. (However, test anxiety may undermine the control, and thus explain
Smith's [1989] lack of significant differences.)
Asking subjects to talk about topics of varying interest to them (Eisenstein &
Starbuck, 1989) may also illustrate discourse domain theory (though further research
is needed to establish this). Often, what we have differing interests in we also
have differing amounts of knowledge about. That Eisenstein and Starbuck's (1989)
subjects were less formally accurate in discussing their topic of interest may indicate
that they had engaged a discourse domain in which they were quite comfortable, and
in talking more (which they did), they neglected to monitor their speech. Or, as the
authors also suggest, the cognitive load of the invested (interesting) topic may have
been greater, causing the subjects to be less formally accurate. In either case, it is
discourse domain theory, in suggesting that IL can vary in development and use
from domain to domain, that can provide an explanation for the cross-topic IL
variation observed in the studies just cited.
Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT): IL Use Varies
According to Interactional Dynamics
Topic and discourse domains, nonetheless, are not solely cognitive. When IL speakers
are interacting with someone, the research has shown, how much they know
about the topic will influence their IL use. However, it is not strictly the speaker's
absolute knowledge of the topic that will determine how active a conversational role
she will take; it is the speaker's knowledge compared to the interlocutor's knowledge.
In other words, topic knowledge within an interaction is interactionally defined.
It is in this sense that SAT is relevant for explaining some of the outcomes.
By combining several social psychological theories, Giles's Speech Accommodation
Theory (SAT) explains why speakers adjust (i.e., accommodate) their
speech while interacting with others. Conversations are perceived by participants as
being either inter-individual or inter-group encounters; if the latter, it is often ethnic
differences that become salient. Speakers can show solidarity, create distance, or
maintain their position, by converging toward their partner's speech patterns, by

Explaining NNS Interactional Behavior 193
diverging, or by not making any adjustments. Detailed explanation of SAT, as well
as its application to SLA, is outside the scope of this discussion; the reader is
referred instead to Beebe (1988), Beebe and Giles (1984), and Beebe and Zuengler
(1983).
As a theory of conversational dynamics, SAT can explain some of the IL
variation that is beyond the conceptual scope of the discourse domain model. At the
same time, the research outcomes can offer a needed elaboration of SAT.
First of all, SAT, in emphasizing interactional dynamics, can provide an explanation
for the outcomes in Zuengler (1989a), where perceived, and not actual,
expertise differences led to IL variation. Interlocutors were led to have certain
perceptions of their own and their partners' topic knowledge, and it was interlocutor
perceptions (and not actual knowledge) that influenced IL performance. Even when
actual knowledge levels are involved (see Zuengler & Bent, 1991; also, Woken &
Swales, 1989), topic knowledge is interactionally determined according to comparisons
the interlocutors make of each other. That is, the outcomes show that IL
performance can be a function of the speaker's knowing more, or less, about the
topic than the interlocutor knows, rather than how much absolute knowledge of the
topic the speaker has, divorced from the interaction.
As mentioned above, SAT posits that interactions can be viewed by interlocutors
as being inter-group or inter-individual encounters. Primarily, SAT points to salient
ethnic group differences between interlocutors as illustrating what would be perceived
as an inter-group encounter. When ethnicity (or other group differences) is
not made salient, it is likely, according to SAT, that the encounter will be perceived
as an inter-individual one, with interlocutors viewing each other on an individual,
rather than group, basis.
Research suggests that it is topic that may be an important determinant of
whether the NS-NNS encounter will be an inter-group or inter-individual encounter.
In Zuengler (1982), IL speakers were given a question to respond to that threatened
their ethnic identity. This approach, certainly, made ethnicity salient and a number
of the subjects responded by defending their ethnicity. For these subjects, the topic
focused the interaction on ethnic differences and made the interaction, for them, an
inter-group encounter. Where conversational topics draw on NSs' and NNSs' individual
experiences and training, instead of emphasizing their ethnic, or NS-NNS
differences, we would expect the interlocutors to experience the interaction as an
inter-individual encounter. We can point to the outcomes showing that conversational
performance is a function of relative topic knowledge (where the topic is not
ethnically salient). IL performance varied according to relative topic knowledge
differences in Woken and Swales (1989), Zuengler (1989a), and Zuengler and Bent
(1991). In these conversations, the IL speakers knew (or thought they knew) more
or less than their NS interlocutors; their performance varied according to these
knowledge differences. Clearly, then, what was salient to these interactions was an
inter-individual dynamic (the interlocutor differences in topic knowledge).
However, it is necessary to consider the outcomes of two studies (Zuengler,
1989a; Zuengler & Bent, 1991) that showed that the NSs dominated when the
interlocutors were supposedly equal in topic knowledge. That is, the conversational
performance split along NS-NNS lines, with the NS as dominator and the NNS as

194 Discourse Perspectives
subordinate. This indicates, I would argue, that if there are no apparent topic
knowledge differences between the NSs and the NNSs, the interaction may become
an inter-group encounter, with the NSs, unfortunately, exercising their beliefs of
ethnolinguistic superiority (see Beebe & Giles, 1984).
Conclusion
As we have seen, two current theories of SLA, the Discourse Domain Model and
SAT, can provide explanations for the IL performance variation apparent in the
majority of the studies on conversational topic reviewed here. They provide complementary
contributions, since the Discourse Domain Model is cognitively based and
SAT is a social psychological theory. After all, when looking at the influence of
topic on NS-NNS interactions, we must recognize that "topic" is both a cognitive
and a socially situated construct. Recognizing this will not only help us understand
the present research outcomes but will also enable us to plan the needed future work
in this area.
Notes
1. Because conversational topic is the focus of this paper, research studies involving
written IL and topic will not be included. For a discussion of some of the research on written
IL variation, see Selinker and Douglas (1987).
2. While it is essential, in theory evaluation, to determine the explanatory adequacy of
the theory per se, such an evaluation is beyond the scope of this paper. See McLaughlin
(1987).
3. Tarone (1988) states that the Discourse Domain Model stems from social psychology,
but does not provide support for this assertion. Selinker and Douglas, in their explanation of
the model, clearly present it as a cognitive theory.
4. Therefore, criticisms that a concept such as "discourse domain" is too vague for
methodological purposes (see Tarone, 1988) may be unfounded. One could argue that it is
topic that represents the operationalization of discourse domain.
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Beebe, L. M., & Zuengler, J. (1983). Accommodation theory: An explanation for style
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10
The Metapragmatic Discourse
of American-Israeli Families at Dinner
SHOSHANA BLUM-KULKA and HADASS SHEFFER
In the broadest sense, interlanguage pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which
nonnatives do things with words in a second language. The phenomena investigated
from this perspective may relate to both pragmatic and discoursal knowledge; in
practice, the emphasis has been on contrasting native and nonnative speech act
performance, on detecting learners' inappropriate speech act realization and accounting
for pragmatic errors or deficits in terms of both source and communicative
effects (see Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989 for an overview).
We deviate from this tradition here in several respects. Here we shall be concerned
with interlanguage pragmatics phenomena occurring in the speech of bilingual
speakers, for whom bilingualism is a day-to-day social reality. Ours is not a
learners' population; we shall be looking at families interacting around the dinner
table in three groups of families: native-born Israelis, native-born Americans, and
our target group, American immigrants to Israel. The immigrant group is composed
of middle- to upper-middle-class families living in Israel from 9 to 19 years. The
discoursal styles used by family members at the dinner table in this group have been
compared with the dinner-table talk of socioeconomically similar native Israeli and
native American families. All members of the immigrant families are bilingual
(English-Hebrew); both languages are being used at the dinner table, with English
being dominant.
The adults in these families are hence speaking mostly in their native language
(English) and to a lesser degree in their second language (Hebrew). The reverse is
true for the children: most children partake in family discourse in what for them is a
second language (English), reverting occasionally to Hebrew, their native language.
Is such a peculiar bilingual language situation the relevant context to look for
interlanguage pragmatics phenomena After all, we have been used to thinking
about interlanguage as an L2 (second language) specific notion; this assumption
underlies all studies to date, whether linguistically or pragmatically oriented. Yet
there is another context where systematicity in LI "errors" does come under consideration:
the domain of attrition studies (see Weltens, 1987 for a review). As in our
196

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 197
case, first language attrition studies focus on immigrant populations. But they differ
from ours in two important respects: since they are concerned with changes that
occur over time in a first language, it is this first language that serves as the criterion
norm. As reported by Wei tens, the focus in first language attrition studies is on
language loss as an intergenerational phenomenon over time, as established from
questionnaires, or on particular linguistic phenomenon at a given point in time
(e.g., Sharwood-Smith, 1983). In our case, language use in the immigrant families
is studied at a particular point in time and is compared to both native American and
native Israeli use. Furthermore, differing from that of attrition studies, our focus is
on pragmatic, rather than on linguistic, phenomena.
The bilingual families studied are, in effect, in contact with two incongruent
pragmatic systems, each realized by a culturally specific style of language use. The
possibility of a two-way interference under such conditions was already recognized
by Weinrich (1953, 1): "Those instances of deviation from the norms of either
language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with
more than one language, i.e. as a result of language contact, will be referred to as
interference phenomena." We propose to demonstrate that indeed, as implied by
Weinrich, language contact creates bi-directional effects, both from the first language
to the second and vice versa. The latter type of effect, namely, interference
from the second to the first language, has been noted in the very few studies to date
that addressed this issue. 1 We shall claim that rather than just showing traces of
"interference," the mutual influence between two sociolinguistic systems in the case
studied results in the emergence of a specific, pragmatic interlanguage.
We are interested in use rather than in usage (Widdowson, 1978), specifically in
the pragmatic norms that govern a particular speech community's interactional style
(Hymes, 1974) and its modes of pragmatic socialization. Studies in the ethnography
of speaking and cross-cultural pragmatics have clearly shown that ways of speaking
are culturally determined and that culture-specific interactional styles differ along
dimensions such as levels of directness in speech act realization (e.g., Tannen,
1981; Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989), interpretive strategies and signaling
devices (Gumperz, 1982), and conceptions and practices of "polite" behavior
(Basso, 1979; House & Kasper, 1981). Language in use is a powerful medium of
sociocultural socialization. Children acquire tacit knowledge of systems of belief
and cultural ways of speaking through exposure to and participation in languagemediated
interaction in the home (Gleason & Weintraub, 1976; Heath, 1983;
Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990). The cross-cultural comparison
of Israeli to American Jewish families in our sample reveals the two groups
differing on several dimensions of language use (Blum-Kulka & Katriel, 1991;
Blum-Kulka & Snow, 1992) and practices of pragmatic socialization (Blum-Kulka,
1990).
In previous work that focused on requestive behavior we found that the families
we observed manifest a bicultural, or intercultural style systematically different
from both the Israeli and American patterns. For example, immigrant families
realize requests less directly than native Israelis, but more directly than Americans
living in the United States. Furthermore, this intercultural style is realized regardless
of the language spoken. Speakers manifest characteristics of this style when

198 Discourse Perspectives
speaking both their first and second languages (Blum-Kulka, 1988; Blum-Kulka,
1991).
In this chapter we shall address these issues from a metapragmatic perspective.
Our underlying assumption is that a speech community's interactional style is indexed
both by the ways in which its members realize different speech acts as well as
by the ways in which they comment on language use: metapragmatic comments
(MCs) can reveal the pragmatic norms governing use and socialization. As in the
case of requests, our findings show the metapragmatic discourse of the immigrant
families to differ meaningfully from parallel discourse in both the American and
Israeli families, whether realized in a first or a second language.
The thrust of our argument is that under certain conditions, interlanguage pragmatics
can be realized in the first language. Furthermore, for bilinguals in conditions
of a twofold cultural contact, pragmatics may be the first area affected by
exposure to the sociocultural influence of the second language.
This argument is developed as follows: we shall (1) describe the background to
the study and our methods of data analysis; (2) present our findings with regard to
inter- and intra-group diversity in metapragmatic discourse; (3) discuss the unique
characteristics of the bilingual families' IL metapragmatic discourse, as manifested
by metacomments on language usage in the course of dinner-table conversations;
and (4) examine the degree of linguistic and pragmatic awareness of bilingual
speakers in general by considering data from interviews with the immigrant families
in our sample.
Background
The 24 families studied are all native-born, middle- and upper-middle-class Jewish
families, with two to three school-age children. Families were selected through the
snowball technique. The criteria for inclusion were: (a) college education for both
parents, (b) professional occupation for both parents, (c) European family origin for
both parents, (d) being religiously nonobservant, (e) being native-born Israeli or
American (for both immigrants to Israel and families taped in the United States). For
American immigrants to Israel, we required a minimum of nine years of residence
in Israel.
As can be seen in Table 10.1, most children (16 out of 29) in the immigrant
families were born in Israel and have not spent more than a month or two in an
English-speaking environment. Six children have spent two years abroad and two
have spent five. Out of the four children born in the United States, two came to
Israel at the age of one, one at the age of two, and one at the age of four and a half.
Yet though Hebrew has become unquestionably the dominant language 2 for all
of these children, English plays an important role. English is the main language
spoken at home, even though it is often mixed with Hebrew (Olshtain & Blum-
Kulka, 1989). Adults and children alike practice their bilingualism not only in
speaking (speaking English at home and Hebrew at work and at school) but also in
reading. The adults all report reading in English for pleasure, and 13 out of the 14
school-age children report reading in both languages.

American-Israeli Families at Dinner
199
Table 10. 1. Children in the Immigrant Families
Israeli born
17
6
2
N = 25
American born
2
1
1
N = 4
N = 29
Time spent abroad (years)
0
2
5
Age of immigration (years)
1
2
4.5
The families 3 were observed in their homes (Americans in the United States,
native Israelis, and immigrants in Israel). We have recorded three dinner-table
conversations (one by video and two by audio) for each family. An observer was
present at all dinners. 4 Three types of analysis have been carried out on these data to
date: first, transcripts were coded for the use of acts of social control (e.g., all
directives) by all participants in the first 20 minutes of all dinners, yielding a corpus
of 4120 control acts. A subset of the 903 control acts (cf. Ervin-Tripp & Gordon,
1986) issued by parents to children was examined for parental style of politeness in
issuing directives. Second, this analysis was complemented by a study of the metapragmatic
comments (cf. Becker, 1988) issued by parents to children during the
same dinners (Blum-Kulka, 1990). A third analysis focused on code-switching and
code-mixing in the immigrant families (Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1989). In the
following, we shall draw on results from all three.
The families were also interviewed at length in their homes; the interviews were
meant to probe mainly cultural preferences with regard to issues of children's
pragmatic socialization, extended in the case of the immigrant families to include
questions about language learning and bilingualism. The insights gained from the
interviews with the immigrants are incorporated in the present discussion, having
been found to be particularly helpful in dealing with issues of metapragmatic awareness.
The immigrant families studied present a case par excellence of a bilingual and
bicultural social reality. They maintain in practice and in attitude close contact with
two languages and two cultures, and hence are exposed to two systems of pragmatic
and discoursal rules. There is, of course, individual variation among the families,
some showing a higher degree of convergence (Giles, 1979) to the Israeli culture
than others. Yet as illustrated by the two following extreme cases on the "convergence"
continuum in our sample, even the least "American" family in the group
maintains an intimate link with the language and cultural heritage of their country of
origin. Consider the case of the Bells and the Darnos.
The Bells represent the Anglophone extreme of our bilingual continuum. They
have chosen to live in a Jerusalem neighborhood known for its density of Americans
and Canadians. They claim that at least on the street they live, English is the

200 Discourse Perspectives
dominant language even for the children. And indeed, during the interview we were
suprised to detect a trace of American accent in the Hebrew speech of their Israeliborn,
8-year-old daughter. At work, the husband uses Hebrew only (at a very
advanced level, given his occupation), at home, English only. Working as an instructor
of English, the wife speaks English for most of both her professional and
private life. The family spends most summers in the United States, and all the
children are balanced Hebrew-English bilinguals. While the Bells invest familial
effort in preserving English, the Darnos vacillate between a wish to raise their
children as bilingual speakers and the no-less-strong wish to acculturate to the
Hebrew-dominant Israeli culture. They mostly, but not entirely, speak English at
home and Hebrew at school and work. For the children, Hebrew is the preferred and
unquestionably the better known language; their English is more advanced than that
of other Israeli children their age, but it still definitely remains a second language.
For the parents, mastering Hebrew to the degree that would allow them to read
Hebrew literature in the original presented a challenge they faced within the family
context. Thus the father worked through all his son's literature assignments at high
school, a process he claimed to have proven extremely beneficial for his own
acculturation.
Notions of Interactional Style: Metapragmatic Comments
One way of capturing cross-cultural diversity with regard to interactional style is to
observe cultural differences in actual verbal and nonverbal behavior systematically.
The realization of requests in three groups of families, mentioned above (Blum-
Kulka, 1988; 1990), provides such an example. Cultural notions of style can be
further captured by what people say they do with words, namely, by their metapragmatic
discourse. Metapragmatic comments (cf. Becker, 1988) made in regard to
linguistic and conversational behavior can reveal the pragmatic norms underlying
such behavior. In Silverstein's terms, metapragmatic comments can be seen as
"non-referential indexes" (Silverstein, 1976). Just as language use can index nonreferentially
social dimensions such as degree of deference, comments made in
regard to the perceived violation of a conversational norm will index for the members
of the particular speech community the network of interactional norms that
govern language use in that community. Such comments relate to the smooth flow
of discourse by explicit bids for turn, by bringing to attention breaches of turntaking
rules, or by focusing on perceived violations of conversational maxims, as
laid out by Grice (1975). Metapragmatic comments are one of the explicit ways in
which members discuss criteria for verbal appropriateness. In family discourse,
metapragmatic comments further serve instrumentally in socializing children to the
pragmatic norms of the given culture (Blum-Kulka, 1990).
Research in the development of communicative competence in childhood reveals
that the process is very much dependent on culturally differential adult input.
Caretakers across cultures differ in their preferences in amount and type of talk
expected from children, and in the degree to which they deem it essential to explicitly
teach language to children (Heath, 1983; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Ochs, 1988;

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 201
Schieffelin, 1990). In Western societies it is rather the manner of speaking, namely
politeness, that tends to be attended to explicitly. Thus American middle-class
mothers systematically prompt the use of politeness formulas and sanction perceived
lack of polite behavior (Gleason & Weintraub, 1976; Grief & Gleason, 1980;
Gleason, Perlman, & Grief, 1984; Becker, 1988; Becker, 1990; see also Schmidt,
Chapter 1). Yet "politeness" is a culturally relative notion that serves in folk etymology
as a cover term for social criteria applied to the distinction between socially
appropriate and inappropriate verbal and nonverbal behavior. Considered as a measure
of pragmatic socialization, the analysis of metapragmatic comments can thus
show parents' culturally differentiated notions with regard to the style of linguistic
politeness required from children (Blum-Kulka, 1990). 5
In the following we shall compare the metapragmatic discourse of both adults
and children in the three groups of families studied. Several issues underlie the
discussion. First, what is the degree of inter-group diversity in pragmatic norms, as
revealed by the metapragmatic discourse of adults and children We hypothesize
that Americans and Israelis differ in pragmatic norms, and that immigrant families
differ from both, abiding by an IL system of pragmatics. Second, if our hypothesis
is confirmed, what is the degree of intra-group (child > adult) conformity within
each group Do children in the three groups follow in their parents' footsteps in
types of verbal behavior they sanction We further hypothesize that since children
can be expected to be socialized to culturally determined ways of speaking, the
metapragmatic discourse of the children in all groups will tend to replicate trends
detected in the parent's discourse. Children in the immigrant families will be no
exception, showing IL pragmatics being transmitted across generations. Furthermore,
if our hypotheses are supported, how far are the trends depicted for the
immigrants dependent on the language spoken We shall claim that the IL pragmatics
phenomena depicted for the immigrant families are realized independently of
language choice.
Method
Transcripts of dinner-table conversations were examined for the occurrence of metapragmatic
comments. 6 MCs related to verbal behavior were classified into three
distinct categories (see also Blum-Kulka 1990 for an additional "behavioral" category):
Talk-Regulation. This category includes comments made to regulate the smooth
flow of turn-taking. They include bidding for turn ("can I say something"), allocation
of turns ("Okay, David, your turn"), negating a turn ("wait, Talya is first"),
upholding a turn ("I'm talking now") and checking listener's attention ("are you
listening").
Maxim Violation. This category includes comments signaling perceived violation
of one of the four Gricean (Grice, 1975) maxims (see also Pellegrini, 1987).
Comments in regard to the maxim of relevance prompt the addressee to respond to a
conversational demand ("Beth, there is a question on the floor") or delegitimize
mention ("one should not say that"). Comments in regard to quality cast doubt on
the truth-value of a speaker's proposition (e.g., in response to a child's reporting

202 Discourse Perspectives
having seen a "GIANT turtle," the mother inquires, "How giant is giant Have you
really seen it"). Comments in regard to quantity set limits to degree of informativeness
of stated propositions ("we heard that"), but also elicit information or just talk
when felt lacking ("aren't you participating today"). Comments in regard to manner
prompt the use of politeness formulas ("say 'please'"), correct ungrammatical
language, note improper forms of address and reference (CHILD:" . . . that stupid
teacher" MOTHER: "Who" CHILD: "Varda, the Math teacher"), and sanction the use
of slang and vulgar language.
Metalinguistic Comments. This category captures talk about language; it includes
queries and responses about word meanings, as well as comments topicalizing
language, including cross-linguistic comparisons ("Did you know the Eskimos
have a hundred words for 'snow'").
Findings: The Degree of Inter- and Infra-Group Diversity
Americans show the highest degree of metapragmatic awareness: more than half of
the comments (54%, n = 1052) belong to American speakers, the other half being
divided between Israelis and immigrants. This pattern is repeated for both adults
and children. Through the course of two dinner-table conversations, the average
number of MCs per family member present (including non-MC speakers) is 20 for
American adults, 10 for immigrant adults and 8 for Israelis, and for the children 14
(American), 7 (immigrants) and 6 (Israeli) respectively.
GROUP AND AGE EFFECTS
To test the statistical significance of intra- and inter-group diversity in pragmatic
norms, two independent scores were computed per speaker: (1) a talk-regulation
(TRE) score, computed as the ratio of TR from maxim-violation (MV) and metalinguistic
(ML) MCs; and (2) metalinguistic score (MLI), computed as the ratio of
ML MCs from MV. We shall refer to these scores respectively as TRE and MLI. 7
The mean scores for both categories are presented in Table 10.2. The first point
to note in Table 10.2 is that MC discourse is not equally distributed among the
participants. While among the American and Israeli adults we did not find any
parent present who did not make at least one comment, among the immigrant adults
7 parents made no metapragmatic comments, and among the children 2 Americans,
4 Israeli and 7 children in the immigrant families did not partake in this type of
discourse. Since the TRE and MLI scores reflect preferences for actual use, the
following analyses are based on the subsample of participants found to engage in
metapragmatic discourse. The second point to note is that except for the immigrant
children's score for TRE, all other immigrant scores consistently fall between the
Israeli and American means.
The results show that Americans and Israelis differ significantly on both TRE
and MLI measures, this trend being repeated for adults and children (for adults,
7129] = 3.64, p < .001, for children 7[30] = 2.36, p < .05). For the immigrants,
TR scores for the adults differ significantly from both Israeli and American ones.
Immigrant adults have significantly higher TRE scores than Israelis (T[22] = 3.81,

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 203
Table 10.2. Group) Differences in Talk-Regulation (TR) and Metalinguistic (ML) Scores
for Adults and Children
Category
TRE
Adults
Standard deviation
Children
Standard deviation
MLI
Adults
Standard deviation
Children
Standard deviation
/; < 0.001*.
p < 0.005**.
p < 0.050***.
ISR
Mean [N]
0.06 [16]
0.06
0.42 [15]
0.56
2.70 [14]
3.90
2.60 [13]
3.30
Group
IVTM AM Significance
Mean \N] Mean (N] IS/AM IM/AM IM/IS
0.18 [9] 0.59 [16] * *** *
0.14
0.17 [14] 1.80 [17] *** ** —
0.35
1.50 [8] 0.49 [16] *** * —
0.99
2.40 [11] 0.38 [17] *** *** —
3.40
p < .001) while they score significantly lower than Americans (T[22] = 2.12, p <
.05). Immigrant adult MLI scores are higher for immigrants than for Americans
(7122] = 3.81, p < .001) but similar to those of Israeli adults. On the other hand,
the children in the immigrant families differ significantly from American children
on both measures (for TRE, T[29] = 2.70, p < .01, for MLI, 7"[26] = 2.42, p <
.05), but not from group 1 Israeli children.
The effects of group membership (Israeli/immigrant/American) and Age
(child/adult) on these scores were tested via a series of paired two-way analyses of
variance. Our expectation for cross-cultural diversity was fully confirmed. Israeli
versus American group membership has significant main effects on both MLI and
TRE. For MLI, only group membership is the significant distinguishing factor:
F(56,l) = 12,2, p < .005. Age had no effect, showing adults and children following
similar patterns, as predicted. For TRE, both group membership and age matter
(for group, F(56,l) = \5A,p< .005, for age, F(56,l) = 10.87, p< .05). There
was no interaction effect.
Against this background of cross-cultural diversity, the immigrants are shown to
occupy a peculiar interim position, as predicted. Though they speak mostly English,
Group membership sets them apart from Americans on both MLI and TRE. For
Metalinguistic discourse, the main effect for group is F(48,l) = 11.1, p < .005.
This pattern being similar for both adults and children, we found no effect for age.
On the measure of talk-regulation both group membership and age are important:
for group F(48,l) = 7.3,p< .005), for ageF(48,l) = 4.5,p< .010. There was no
interaction effect.
A different picture emerges in comparing the immigrants to the Israelis. For
both, we find a similarly high degree of metalinguistic awareness for both adults

204 Discourse Perspectives
and children. Hence it is not suprising that we found no effect for Group (nor Age)
on the MLI measure. On the measure of talk-regulation, we found no effect for
group but a nearly significant effect for age, (F[42,1 = 3,7, p = .06). In interpreting
this result it should be borne in mind that immigrant adults (but not children)
score significantly higher on TRE than Israeli adults (Table 10.2).
These findings confirm our earlier hypothesis that Israelis and Americans differ
significantly on both talk-regulation and metalinguistic measures. Against this
background of cross-cultural diversity in pragmatic norms, the immigrants seem to
waver between the two. We expected to find them to differ from both, thereby
indicating an IL system of pragmatics, and this expectation was confirmed for the
adults. Immigrant adults differ significantly from both Israeli and American adults
in their talk-regulation discourse (T-tests), but the difference is not big enough to
show a Group effect (analysis of variance). On the measure of metalinguistic MCs,
cross-cultural diversity is confirmed again, showing Israelis and Americans to have
different attitudes to the domain of language as topic. In this regard, the immigrants
differ from the Americans, resembling the Israelis in their degree of metalinguistic
awareness. As will be elaborated, there are different, group-specific motivations for
this phenomenon.
Our second hypothesis is partially confirmed: children in all three groups conform
to adult patterns in regard to metalinguistic discourse. But they differ from
adults in attitudes to talk-regulation; this could mean that for this aspect of discourse
children either have different notions, or different needs. These possibilities will be
explored below. The children in the immigrant families do not differ in a statistically
significant way from other Israeli children in regard to talk-regulation, as do their
parents. Yet qualitative analysis of these children's talk-regulation behavior, to be
discussed below, does suggest a unique pattern, in line with the "IL replication"
hypothesis.
Finally, in considering the metapragmatic discourse of the immigrants, it is
important to note that the overall majority of MCs (83%) are uttered in English, not
Hebrew. Only 10% of comments are made in Hebrew, with the remaining 7% made
in a mixture of English and Hebrew, manifesting the language choice patterns
typical of this group in general (Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1989). Hence the fact that
immigrant adults are found to differ from Americans in their metapragmatic discourse
means that they activate in their first language pragmatic norms adapted from
the second. But native language pragmatic norms seem at work too; in certain
respects, immigrant adults differ from Israelis as well. The metapragmatic discourse
of the bilingual families hence is seen to exhibit the first assumption underlying all
interlanguage studies: it is systematically different from both LI and L2.
ORDER OF PREFERENCES
The "in between" character of the immigrant families' IL pragmatics system is
further highlighted by considering the three groups' order of preference for domains
of discourse attended to. We have analyzed the distribution of the three categories of
MCs, uttered at the dinner table by all members of the family in the three
groups. For this analysis MCs have been seperated by speaker's role (adult or

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 205
Fig. 10.1. Adults' metapragmatic comments in three groups.
child) and divided by type of comment (discourse management/maxim-violation/
metalinguistic).
Adults. The marked difference between American and Israeli adults stems from
the culturally differing emphasis on conversational behavior as compared to language
as topic. In the American adults' discourse, the two conversational behavior
categories (maxim-violation and talk-regulation) take up 82% of all metapragmatic
discourse space; in the Israeli discourse, they constitute less than half of all comments
made (38%) (Fig. 10.1). The relative importance attached to conversational
norms (54%) versus language (45.5%) shows the Immigrants occupying an interim
position between the other two groups: this aspect of discourse is more important for
them than for Israelis, but less important than for Americans.

206 Discourse Perspectives
Fig. 10.2. Children's metapragmatic comments in three groups.
Children. American children share with their parents a very high degree of
metapragmatic awareness in regard to conversational behavior (talk-regulation plus
maxim-violation constitutes 78%), especially when it concerns discourse management
(48.4%), (Fig. 10.2). Israeli children, on the other hand, share with their
parents a relatively high degree of metalinguistic awareness (51%). The children in
the immigrant families reveal a pattern of their own. Similar to Israelis, they find
language important (43%); similar to Americans, they attend to maxim-violation
(31%). Consider the decreasing emphasis put on conversational management by
children in the three groups: Americans 80%, immigrants 52%, Israelis 49%.
Children Compared to Adults. Are children sensitive to the same aspects of
discourse as their parents Are their pragmatic norms similar to those of the adults
Tannen (1981) found that second-generation Greek-Americans who spoke no

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 207
Greek, nevertheless manifested in their conversations in English levels of indirectness
typifying Greek ways of speaking. In a similar vein, we explored the possibility
that the metapragmatic discourse of children born to immigrant parents will
show traces of unique parental input, setting these children apart from other nativeborn
Israelis. Comparing the children's preferences to those of the adults allows us
track the success of pragmatic socialization: children following in their parents'
footsteps in aspects of the discourse attended to may be said to have internalized
their parents' discoursal criteria. Such replication is manifest to some degree in all
groups: as shown by the analysis of variance across the groups, age had a significant
effect only on talk-regulation scores; the lack of such an effect on metalinguistic
scores at least partially supports the replication hypothesis. Comparing adult/child
patterns of distribution lends further support to partial replication:
For the Americans, the children follow in their parents' footsteps in deeming
conversational norms more important than language (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2). A
different trend is depicted for the Israeli children, who vacillate between the domains
more than their parents (but note small number of comments). Interestingly,
replication seems most salient for the Immigrants: in this group, the order of preferences
in matters of pragmatics attended to among the children is the exact mirror
image of the order exhibited by the parents. Metalinguistic comments constitute
almost half of all MCs for both (45.5% for adults, 42.6% for children), followed by
maxim-violation comments (adults 33.3.%, children 38.2%) and talk-regulation
MCs (adults 21.3%, children 19.2%). But in their relatively high metalinguistic
awareness these children also resemble Israeli group 1 children. Hence it may the
case that their metapragmatic discourse is affected by peer-group interaction rather
than by parental input.
The next sections discuss the unique characteristics of this IL metapragmatic
discourse.
Characteristics of Bilingual Metapragmatic Discourse
Talk-Regulation
The adults in the bilingual families pay attention to all three dimensions examined:
discourse management, language, and conversational norms. In regard to discourse
management, the model followed is the mainstream, middle-class American one:
"fair" turn-allocation, discouraging interruptions, and generally orderly systematic
turn-taking seem the discourse corollary of American ideals of individual rights and
equal opportunity for all. American individualism, with all that it entails for mutual
respect for individual space, has been long-remarked upon by outside observers,
such as de Tocqueville, and studied extensively, more recently, from both sociological
(Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985) and sociopsychological
points of view (Brown, 1991). Cross-cultural research has amply shown that the
discoursal manifestation of such ideals, namely, the systematics of turn-taking
(Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974) are by no means universal (Reisman, 1974;
Philips, 1983). Regular turn-taking is not necessarily adhered to even in all domains

208 Discourse Perspectives
of American conversations (Edelsky, 1981). But as the Jewish-American adults'
metapragmatic discourse shows, the rules seems to have an unquestionable normative
status in American society. In this respect, Jewish-Americans seem to approximate
mainstream American ways of speaking; by paying attention to this particular
aspect of discourse, the immigrant adults reveal a sensitivity going back to their own
language socialization. It is this positively evaluated feature of American interaction
that they are trying to preserve in their children's talk. It is important to note that by
its very nature, this feature is not bound to any specific language; potentially it is
equally applicable to conversations in Hebrew or English.
The ethnographic interviews with the families occasioned clear formulations of
the adults' prevalent attitude toward talk-regulation, specifically turn-taking. Asked
whether they discourage interruptions by children, we received from one of the
families the following reply:
FATHER: 8 It's very important that they don't interrupt others. It's a principle here. In
fact, sometimes we say to the other, "Wait, your brother is still talking," or
"Jessica is still talking."
MOTHER: And sometimes it ends up where they have to raise their hands, even (laughter).
FATHER: Oh, yeah.
The findings also show Israeli and American children to differ markedly in
degree of attention paid to talk-regulation, with the Israeli bilingual children in the
immigrant families paying the least attention to this aspect of discourse. This seems
to indicate a failure on the part of the immigrant parents to transmit their basically
American talk-regulation norms to their children. But the analysis of talk-regulation
comments by type, 9 suggests otherwise. Of specific interest are the ways in which
bids for turn are accomplished.
American children make explicit bids for turns: 47.4% (n = 116) of their talkregulation
comments are permission requests for a turn, often combined by a comment
indicating awareness of the rule, such as "Daddy, can I say something Is it
my turn" (Blum-Kulka, 1990). Israeli children bid less for turns (28% of talkregulation
MCs, n = 25) and when they do, instead of asking permission to talk,
they try to secure their interlocutors' attention by uttering a clearly addressed preexchange
move, preparing the ground for the ensuing talk (Edmondson, 1981):
"Daddy, do you know what happened today" The children in the immigrant families
seem to vacillate between the two techniques. Bids for turn constitute 78.9% of
their talk-regulation MCs (n = 19), showing them particularly concerned with
obtaining permission to talk. But they avoid the American style of explicit turntaking
metatalk. Instead, we find attempts to secure attention that look like indirectly
performed permission-requests:
NAVA (age 5): Ima (Mother), now can I tell you what they do
(Talk round continues.)
NAVA: Should 1 tell you what they do, what the GANANOT (nursery-school
teachers) do Should I tell you what they do
Subsequently Nava's attempts act as a pre-exchange move, similar to the Israeli
child's attempts. Yet semantically she is closer to the American child, using "tell" as

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 209
a "linguistic action-verbial" (cf. Verschueren, 1985). Hence the pattern exhibited is
an interim, interlanguage-type one, showing influence from both contact cultures.
Maxim-Violation Comments
Maxim-violation comments can relate to the perceived violation of any one of the
four Gricean maxims: relevance, quality, quantity, and manner. The distribution of
maxim-violation comments by type (Figures 10.3 and 10.4) shows American and
Israeli adults to differ markedly in preferences for the type of maxim violation most
likely to be noticed verbally. The immigrant adults seem to differ more in this case
from the Americans than from the Israelis.
Americans emphasize foremost adherence to the maxim of quality, namely,
factuality of the proposition asserted (60.2%). Both Israelis and immigrants distribute
their attention more equally between all four aspects of discourse. For Israelis,
manner (mainly politeness) is highly attended to (40%), followed by quality
(33.7%) and relevance. Degree of informativeness and volubility (quantity) are
rarely spoken about (6%). The immigrant adults fall between the two other groups
in their order of preference. Quality is very important (45.8%), followed by attention
to violations of manner (31.4%) and relevance (20.4%). Attention to quantity
of talk is negligable (2.1%).
The relative salience of comments in regard to quality in all three groups
deserves special attention. Prompting adherence to the factuality of stated propositions
is by no means a universal norm of pragmatic socialization. Heath (1983)
found an emphasis on this aspect both among the white working-class people of
Roadville and the middle-class "townspeople," but not in the black community of
Trackton. In Roadville, children are expected to "stick to the truth" in retelling
nonfictive stories of shared events that the adults are aware of; middle-class parents
also expect children to share information only the children know, but as in Roadville,
probe their children to recognize contradictions in such factual accounts.
Insistence on factuality is interpreted by Heath as manifesting literate traditions. On
the other hand, in the black working-class community of Trackton, oral traditions
dominate; hence adherence to factuality is suspended in favor of "storyness": the
purpose of narratives above all is to entertain and "to establish the story-teller's
intimate knowledge of truths about life larger than the factual details of real events"
(Heath, 1983, 188).
True to their middle-class literate background, all families in our group require
children to learn to distinguish fact from fiction. In the following example, the
child's report is challenged by both parents, and found counterfactual.
ILANA (age 13.5): Did you have a good time at Leora's
NAOMI (age 5): I wasn't at Leora's.
FATHER: Yes you were, this afternoon=
MOTHER: =You weren't Where did you go from CAN (nursery school)
NAOMI: To a home.
MOTHER: Not to this home.
NAOMI: Yes, to this home.
MOTHER: I wasn't here.

210 Discourse Perspectives
Fig. 10.3. Types of maxim-violation comments: adults.
The immigrant families seem to abide in the respect by the middle-class norm of
Heath's "townspeople." Children are invited to tell A-events (cf. Labov & Fanshel,
1977) that only they know, but must beware of contradictions. In American families
adherence to factuality supersedes all other maxims. The immigrant families, as
well as the Israelis, find other aspects of discourse also worthy of attention. Thus
parents also comment on the relevance of a child's contribution (MOTHER: "I don't
want to hear it, Naomi, I don't want to hear it now"), and on its manner of delivery
(FATHER: "... but don't shout").
A very similar picture of cross-cultural diversity emerges when we compare
American and Israeli children. American children, like their parents, are foremost
concerned with quality (65.6%); Israeli children, like their parents, when they do
comment (n equals only 19) stress manner (45%). But what about the children in the

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 211
Fig. 10.4. Types of maxim-violation comments: children.
immigrant families They share with other Israeli children the same types of input in
Hebrew from peer interaction, school, and the media. If they are found to differ
from other Israeli children, it would mean that the 11 pragmatic norms of the parents
are transmitted through bilingualism to the next generation, signaling the importance
of parents' input as a dominant source of pragmatic socialization. And indeed,
when it comes to Gricean maxims, the children in the immigrant group differ from
the group 1 Israeli children.
Differing from the Israelis, who attend primarily to manner, the bilingual children
stress in their comments the importance of factuality even more than their
parents (72.7% compared to 45.8% in parents' discourse), and resemble American
children in having this aspect of discourse at the top of their list of preferences for
maxim-violation MC comments.

212 Discourse Perspectives
Comments related to quality are made mostly among siblings, challenging the
truth-value of a statement by "lo yaxol lihyot" (can't be) or simply "that's not true":
DAVID (age 7.5): She plays XAMES AVANIM (marbles).
NAOMI (age 12): We don't play. We play after you go to sleep.
DAVID: No, you play before I go to (sleep).
NAOMI: (That's) not true. Last time we didn't.
Comments made to parents are phrased more indirectly:
DANA (age 14): You know you're exaggerating.
FATHER: I'am exaggerating What
Comments on relevance in both the Israeli and the immigrant families mostly
take the form of restricting undesirable topics, but are less frequent in the immigrant
than in the Israeli data. Thus for example, Naomi, age 12, interrupts her brother's
(age 7.5) dramatic account of a thriller with:
NAOMI: Don't say it because maybe they want to see it.
Similar to American children, this group pays little attention to manner. Israeli
children, on the other hand, find manner very important. Typical examples in the
Israeli data are comments to siblings sanctioning "bad" words, such as a 6-year-old
telling her twin sister not to say "mag'il" (disgusting) about food, or a 10-year-old
reacting to her 12-year-old sister's comment "she was a shitty teacher" by "Shlomit,
you don't say words like that here."
Metalinguistic Comments
In their type of metalinguistic awareness the bilingual families manifest a pattern of
their own. Given their active bilingualism and the adults' recent history of second
language learning, it seemed reasonable to expect from these speakers a relatively
high level of explicit attention to matters of language. And indeed, the bilingual
families exceed the Americans by far in their degree of language awareness though
they fall behind the Israeli norm. For both immigrant adults and their children,
metalinguistic comments constitute almost half of all metapragmatic talk, while for
Americans such comments do not exceed a fifth of metapragmatic discourse. For
Israelis, matters of language figure as the most prominent aspect of discourse
commented on, for both adults and children. (Figures 10.1 and 10.2).
The high level of attention to matters of language in the Israeli families confounds
the issue of linguistic awareness as a hallmark of bilingualism. This is due to
the peculiar history of the revival of Hebrew, which provides the sociolinguistic
context for the Israeli preoccupation with matters of "normative" versus "acceptable"
language use (Rabin, 1976). Within the Israeli families, speakers are very
concerned with matters of grammaticality (i.e., how to form the plural of kalba
(bitch): "Did you know one should say [klavot] and not [kalbot]"), but also with
word-meaning (in response to children's querying the meaning of loan-words (dilemma)
or just rare ones, word origins ("where does x comes from"), pronounciation
(how Ixl & Irl are pronounced in different registers), and the acceptibility of

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 213
slang. On the other hand, American speakers, when occasionally they do topicalize
language-related issues, make general comments in regard to the language of others,
not their own ("Did you know the Eskimos have a hundred words for 'snow'").
A close look at the metalinguistic comments made in the bilingual families
reveals several unique features. First, though clarifying word meanings to children
is a favorite pastime, in these families it is carried out in a multilingual fashion. Both
Hebrew and English words may be explained in the language the query was made in
("what's garlic It's a spice"), or explained and translated, with the degree of
translational equivalence between items in a given semantic field becoming the
topic of lengthy discussions. For example, a 13-year-old's test question (Heath,
1983) to her 5-year-old sister "What is OGER (hamster) Naomi, do you know" sets
in motion a discussion of the biological differences between a "hamster" and a
"guinea pig," combined with the linguistic quest for the Hebrew names of these
animals (Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1989).
Word-meaning queries in these families serve differential functions for adults
and children. Children's queries concern the meaning of English words, or ask for
equivalents between the two languages.
RIVKA (age 12): What are physicists [FISIKAIM]
MOTHER: Yes.
The mother confirms thatfisikaim, a phonological loan translation, is indeed the
equivalent of "physicists."
RIVKA (age 12): How do you say SOTER, ABA (Father)
FATHER: Contradictory.
The adults, on the other hand, rely on their children's Hebrew expertise for
clarifying the meaning of Hebrew words:
FATHER: What's KRAZA
DORON (age J5): Poster.
We also find an explicit analytical concern (in Bialystok's sense of "analysis";
Bialystok, Chapter 2) with issues of bilingualism, (including code-switching and
mixing), both on the sociopsychological and educational level. Though our presence
at the dinners no doubt affected the prominence given to language-related issues in
the talk agenda, we know from subsequent interviews with the families that the
concerns expressed are very real. A major issue is language choice. All the families
interviewed expressed a clear English-maintainance language policy; for all, speaking
English at home is a matter of deliberate choice. The parents report having
spoken only English with the children from the time of birth, with the children
hearing Hebrew for the first time sometimes only at the nursery school, as late as the
age of three. Yet through schooling, Hebrew became the children's dominant language,
while English remains that of the parents. At the time of the interviews,
English is estimated as being used in the home about 80% of the time, an estimate
confirmed by examination of the dinner-table conversations in these families (Olshtain
& Blum-Kulka, 1989).

214 Discourse Perspectives
Another issue is the degree of mixing and switching, and attitudes toward both.
Both practices are highly common during the dinner-table conversations but, differing
from Gumperz's findings that show bilingual speakers as unaware of the language
they are speaking (Gumperz, 1982), we found indications of our bilingual
speakers being aware of actually using a hybrid language variety, one that draws on
both languages. This variety is alternatively referred to as "Hibbish" or "Hebrish" as
exemplified in the following exchanges:
ILAN (age 8): (to brother) You're talking gibbish.
FATHER: Hibbish.
ILAN: Oh, yeah.
And a few minutes later, Idan is commenting on his mother's code-switching from
English to Hebrew:
ILAN: Those two words, IMA (Mother), were in Hebrish.
MOTHER: You're right. I changed in the middle.
The language game at work is one of naming; by trying to find an appropriate label
for their own mixed dialect, these families indicate their high degree of linguistic
self-awareness.
Metalinguistic awareness also allows for humor:
FATHER: Nisani, show Marit [the observer] how you speak Hebrew with an
American accent.
NISAN (age 6): LO (no).
OBSERVER: Yes, please.
NISAN: What
FATHER: Say something like when you imitate Mommy and me like ANI RAJITI
(I saw).
NISAN: ABA AMAR PAAM [HATARNEJOL] (Daddy once said [hatarnejol]-
[replacing /j/ for /g/ in pronouncing the Hebrew word for "rooster."])
But the children's high proficiency in Hebrew can also lend itself to a power
game. After being reassured by his parents that he speakes both English and Hebrew
well, a child criticizes his mother's Hebrew. Sister and father alike find the comment
face-threatening, to the extent that the father feels it necessary to come to the
mother's defense:
ILAN (age 8): ANI SAMTI LEV, IMA, ET HATAUYOT SHELAX SHE SHEAT
KORET LI MIXTAVIM VEHAKOL, AT KORET LI 1M TAUYOT,
BLI MI VTA IVRIT. (I noticed, Mom, your mistakes, when you read
me letters and everything, you read with mistakes, without a Hebrew
accent.)
MIRA (age 6.5): It's not nice to say that.
MOTHER: I really am pretty bad.
FATHER: But actually that's not true, Ilan, there are some words that you know,
but I think there are some things that IMA (Mother) can express more
clearly, even in Hebrew still.
ILAN: I know ABA (Father), except I am better in reading and talking in
Hebrew.

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 215
And finally, awareness of code-switching and mixing is combined with ambivalent
feelings toward the benefits of such practices:
INTERVIEWER: MA ATEM MEDABRIM BABAJIT BEDEREX KLAL ANGLIT
(What do you normally speak at home English)
FATHER: We try to speak English.
JESSICA (age 9): We talk part English and part Hebrew. AN1/ANI KMO MEDABERET
NAGID BEEMTSA HAMISHPAT AN1 OSA/OVERET MEANGLIT
LEIVRIT UMEIVRIT LEANGLIT. (I like, say in middle of the sentence,
I go from English to Hebrew and from Hebrew to English.)
FATHER: As a matter of fact, I have been puzzling over it for the last year. I used
to think it was cute when they mixed the sentences together.
MOTHER: I still think it's cute. I do it.
FATHER: I don't. I think it's bad for their Hebrew and their English, so I fuss at
them for the last year now, speak either English or Hebrew but not the
two of them together.
Degree of Language Dependency
It is especially noteworthy that MCs are indices of the immigrants' perception of
good discourse regardless of the language they are uttered in, or comment on. This
can be seen by the tacit agreement of participants to ignore the language they speak
completely if the issue at hand concerns pragmatically proper behavior. In the
following case a violation of the maxim of manner is at issue:
SHARON (age 6): Mommy, TAVI'I LI OD (bring me more) fish.
MOTHER: Excuse me.
SHARON: BEVAKASHA, TNI LI OD (please, give me more) fish.
That the child is mixing English and Hebrew singles out this example as typical
of the bilingual family. In sequence, the exchange is paralleled by several examples
in both the American and Israeli families, all parents being concerned with socializing
children to use politeness markers. But the mixing is irrelevant to the main issue
discussed: after first using a colloquial, slangy expression in Hebrew (literally,
"bring me" instead of "get me" or "give me") the child interprets her mother's
reaction as a reprimand for her lack of politeness, though it might have also been
interpreted as a negative reaction to mixing the two languages. Next, Sharon adds
the required "magic word" (bevakasha/please) and shifts register ("tni li" instead of
"tavi'i li"). But the "fish" remains "fish," and the exchange double-coded, the
mother never saying a word in Hebrew. Pragmatic socialization is hence taking
place independently of the language used for its implementation.
Degree of Metapragmatic Awareness
We have seen that the parents in the bilingual families try to socialize their children
according to a normative system of pragmatic rules shaped after the American
example. By attending explicitly to matters of discourse they highlight the salience

216 Discourse Perspectives
of this domain, helping develop their children's overall communicative competence,
regardless of the language used. The comments are made in English, but are equally
valid for talk in both languages. We also have evidence that in actual use, both
adults and children in these families abide by an IL pragmatics system, which
conforms to neither of the two languages involved (Blum-Kulka, 1988). In issuing
directives, bilingual parents' choice of strategies differs significantly from preferences
shown by both Israeli and American parents, the same being true for children
in these families. How far are the members of this group aware (in Schmidt's sense
of the word, Schmidt, Chapter 1) of any incongruence between the two pragmatic
systems represented by the languages they speak How far are they aware of their
own IL pragmatics These questions will be explored below in the wider context of
the issue of metapragmatic awareness in both first and second language (for a
different perspective see also Schmidt, Chapter 1; Bialystok, Chapter 2). We shall
draw here mainly on monolingual and bilingual speakers' explicit metacommunicative
responses to questions on language use during the ethnographic interviews.
The term metapragmatics seems to imply the capacity of speakers to formulate
explicit rules of speaking. But it is a matter of debate, whether the capacity to "do"
reliable metapragmatics is reserved to professional pragmaticists or, indeed, whether
it can be practiced by all. For example, Schmidt (Chapter 1) argues against
Wolfson's (1989) strong position with regard to the fallibility of native speakers'
intuitions about language use. Our data support his argument that both native and
nonnative speakers do have conscious access to such rules, though there are limitations
to this type, of reflexivity.
With regard to native speakers the argument is far from new. Cultural anthropologists
have long argued for the need to understand cultures emicly from the
"native's point of view" (Geertz, 1976), incorporating as valid data cultural members'
"experience near" (cf. Geertz, 1973) accounts of various dimensions of social
realities, including language use. Participants' understandings are a crucial source
of knowledge since "all social research, and indeed all social life, is founded on
participant-observation" (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983, 235). A case in point are
anthropological studies focused on terms that name a particular way of speaking,
are part of a speech community's metapragmatic vocabulary, indicating a heightened
cultural attention and articulation with respect to a specific sociocultural domain
(Katriel, 1986). The study of such cultural notions proceeds with the help of
cultural members explicating the meaning clusters associated with such terms
(Spradley, 1979), as exemplified by Katriel's study of dugri (straight) talk in Israeli
speech (Katriel, 1986).
Metapragmatics is also part of the discourse of language socialization, though it
is not clear at this stage how much of the acquisition of pragmatics is dependent on
explicit attention drawn by caregivers to this domain. But as demonstrated above,
parental discourse addressed to children is rich with metapragmatic comments with
respect to discourse management, conversational norms, and the use of politeness
formulae.
Even more than native speakers vary in the degree of their knowledge of pragmatic
rules, they also seem to vary in their capacity to formulate such rules explicitly.
Yet if asked, native speakers show high levels of agreement in judging the

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 217
appropriateness of a specific request variant in a given situation (Olshtain & Blum-
Kulka, 1985), or in agreeing on producing culturally determined request-variants
for the same situation (Blum-Kulka & House, 1989). Such results confirm empirically
the cross-culturally varied systematicity of pragmatic systems and the degree
to which the knowledge of such rules is implicitly there for native speakers to draw
on. Sociolinguists would be out of business if the whole intricate network of
relationships governing such choices were available consciously to every native
speaker; yet parts of this knowledge are retrievable through questioning.
In the case of interviews tapping metapragmatic knowledge, the questions asked
cast interviewees in the role of participant-observers, invited to reflect on their own
language experience. Hence the social situation created is what Glaser & Strauss
(1964) call an awareness context. Focus on the issues topicalized may thus transform
tacit knowledge into explicit formulations.
In the course of our ethnographic interviews with the families in the project, we
asked them both to rate the degree of importance attached to socializing children to
various aspects of "appropriate" language use, and to comment on perceived differences
between their own and native Israelis' ways of speaking. It is from responses
to the first type of question that we learned about the bilingual parents' conscious
efforts to socialize their children to systematic turn-taking norms, as discussed
above. The second type of question followed from discussions of the family's
discourse practices and attitudes in a certain domain. Thus, for example, we asked
the families to tell us about their naming practices and attitudes to nicknaming
(Blum-Kulka & Katriel, 1991), and encouraged their attempts to compare their own
practices and attitudes with those of both American and Israeli. The following
extract illustrates well such a comparative, reflexive effort:
MOTHER: 1 grew up in the South where they say "Yes, Ma'am" for a woman.
INTERVIEWER: Any woman
MOTHER: Any woman other than me, anybody other than me—my mother's
friends, to my mother "Yes, Ma'am," and "Yes, Sir" to a man.
FATHER: We had those things too.
MOTHER: And to this day. Now I don't expect anybody to say "Yes, Ma'am" to me.
I don't even want people to call me Mrs. Joss, I like to to be called
Lydia—by everybody. Even Jasson's friends, Jessica's friends, everybody
calls me Lydia. In the States, if I were to call my mother's friend by
her first name, why, there isn't anything like that! So here I (like being
called)
INTERVIEWER: (Still today)
MOTHER: You know that's funny. When I go back, I still call my mother's friends
Mrs. Such-and-such. I think.
FATHER: Here it is different.
MOTHER: =Anyway, here I don't mind being called by my first name by my
children's friends because it's that way here.
Lydia draws a clear distinction between past and present, "here" and "there."
While shunning the habits of her childhood, she accepts the difference in terms of
address between Israel and the United States as given, surprising herself (i.e.,
raising tacit knowledge to the level of consciousness) in realizing that she adapts to

218 Discourse Perspectives
this difference in norms ("you know that's funny . . ."). This metapragmatic awareness
to cross-cultural (and in this case also regional) variability in ways of speaking
is presented in an emotionally favorable light: she "likes" or at least "does not mind"
being addressed by her first name even by status inferiors (children) because "it's
that way here." In Schumann's terms, Lydia is describing her process of acculturation,
motivated by social and affective factors (Schumann, 1978). Other immigrant
speakers go as far as viewing this process of acculturation as a transformation of
personality:
FATHER: Ofl, ofi hishtana, lo rak ha-safa (it's your character that changes, not only the
language)
Yet there are limits to self-awareness and its accuracy on matters linguistic and
pragmatic. In actual use, we found no difference between Israeli and immigrant
adults in the relative salience of comments eliciting politeness formulas from children.
But through the interviews, adults in the immigrant families claimed they do
insist on such formulas, with such insistence occasionally cast in half-apologetic
terms, as a conscious cultural transfer strategy:
FATHER: A request is a request and it should have a "please" joined to it.
MOTHER: It's also still important to me, the "pleases" and "thank yous."
Another area where the bilinguals' awareness becomes inexact is matters involving
the pragmalinguistics of Israeli Hebrew. Talking about the lack of politeness in
public places (a complaint voiced often by Israelis; see Blum-Kulka, 1992) an
argument ensues between a couple stemming from a misunderstanding of a pragmalinguistic
phenomenon:
MOTHER: . . . and "thank you" and "excuse me," SLIXA, which people don't know in
this country.
FATHER: They do, they do.
MOTHER: When they step on your foot, or hit you with an elbow when getting on the bus.
FATHER: Well, I mean SLIXA in the sense of "move out of my way."
Rachel (Mother) is criticizing the Israeli way of speaking for its perceived lack
of IFIDS (Elocutionary Force Indicating Devices) for expressive speech acts: no
marking of gratitude, no expression of apology. But regardless of the degree of
accuracy of her observation, it is flawed by her mention of both slixa and "excuse
me": first, as translation equivalents, and second, as apology IFIDS. Literally slixa
means "pardon"; but its use in apologies is quite limited, competing with several
other lexical items serving this function, such as ani mictaer (I'm sorry) or ani
mitnacel (I apologize), which are much more frequent (unpublished CCSARP data).
Slixa is frequently used as an attention-getter, which in certain situations preempts
forthcoming violations that may need an apology and hence can be seen as a doublefunction
formula. "Excuse me" in English serves the same double function, while
"sorry" is the unmarked apology IFID (see also Bergman & Kasper, Chapter 4).
Rachel is misunderstood by her husband because of this double inaccurracy; he
insists on the use of slixa only as an attention-getter (or preemptive formula) and

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 219
reserves judgment as to the general politeness issue, while she is talking about
speech acts, namely the perceived Israeli absence of polite expressives ("when they
step on your foot"). This example shows the potential fallibility of metapragmatic
observations for a first as well as for a second language.
Finally, we come to the most problematic issue of awareness: Are the adults in
these families aware that their process of acculturation has affected the pragmatic
system of their native English In other words, that both in the way they realize
speech acts and in their metapragmatic discourse in the course of natural conversation
they are instantiating an interlanguage pragmatic system The answer is no. As
illustrated by the example of the use of politeness formulas above, the norms
claimed are not necessarily the norms enacted. On the contrary: metatalk about
pragmatic socialization seems motivated by the underlying assumption that by
maintaining English at the home you also maintain American ways of speaking. In
no part of the interview did we find any indication for a self-awareness related to the
pragmatic aspects of the style used. Self-awareness seems to stop short at the
borderline between linguistics and pragmatics: while both dinner-table conversations
and interviews are particularly rich with metareferences to linguistic issues of
language choice and code-switching, they are remarkably devoid of reference to the
pragmatic issues of how either of the languages used differs in style from native
American or native Israeli usage.
Conclusion
We have seen that immigrant, bilingual speakers manifest through their metapragmatic
discourse adherence to an underlying pragmatic system that differs in important
ways from the systems of both their contact cultures. This unique pragmatic
system is revealed in both first and second language use, regardless of language
choice. Furthermore, we have noted in the immigrant families' discourse a high
degree of awareness of both bilingual usage and cross-cultural differences between
the two relevant contact cultures. Yet there are limitations to this awareness: it is
fallible on contrastive pragmalinguistic matters and lacking in sensitivity with regard
to the interlanguage phenomena manifested in the first language.
There are two general implications to these findings. First, they suggest that in
the case of bilinguals maintaining their first language under conditions of intensive
sociocultural contact with a second language, the pragmatics of the first language
may be the primary domain to be affected by this contact. Ironically, while pragmatic
competence is the most difficult aspect of language to master in learning a second
language, it seems also to be, under certain conditions of bilingualism, to be the
easiest to lose in the first language. Second, the specific case of bilinguals studied
suggests that interlanguage is not necessarily a second-language-use phenomenon.
The discourse style realized by the bilingual families, mostly in their first language,
shows that pragmatic systems can be bi-directionally transferable, both from first to
second language as well as from second to first. The resulting hybrid style of the
bilinguals constitutes a prime example of interlanguage pragmatics.

220 Discourse Perspectives
Notes
This research was funded by Grant No. 87-00167/1 from the United States Israeli Binational
Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel to Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Catherine Snow.
1. Transfer of pragmatic rules from the second to the first language by immigrants is
reported by Clyne (1982, 105) who found for example that German immigrants to Australia
adopt the use of "Ja, danke" (thank you) as a positive reply to an offer, as called for by the
pragmatic rule in English, and in contrast to German, in which "Danke" is a negative reply.
More recently, Tao & Thompson (1991) found that Mandarin speakers, for whom American
English has become their dominant language, when conversing in Mandarin make extensive
use of American English backchannel strategies atypical of Mandarin speakers.
2. We use "dominant" here in the sense that it is the language the children use most, get
their schooling in, and know better. As can be seen in Table 10.1, it is not necessarily the first
language. Some of the children spoke only English at home, up to the age of 3 or 4, when
they began to attend nursery school.
3. The project had two stages: during stage 1 (1985-1988) we collected data from 34
families. The analysis of control acts was based on data derived from transcripts of three
meals from this sample (Blum-Kulka, 1988). For the second stage, (1989-1992), we selected
the 24 best-matched families across the three groups (8 per group). The study of metapragmatic
discourse, reported here, is derived from transcripts of these 24 families, two meals for
each.
4. In reporting findings from the project at conferences we are often challenged on this
point: but what about the presence of the observer Didn't it affect the proceedings The
answer is that of course it did. As it does in all forms and types of participant-observation,
whether sociolinguistic or ethnographic in outlook. Technically the inter-group comparisons
we are doing are still valid since this condition is shared by all families. But beyond that, we
can even say that the presence of the observer actually strengthens the validity of our
findings, since if the families are found to differ under these conditions it means that their
cultural styles transpire even under self-imposed constraints of self-presentation to an "outsider."
And indeed, in the final account, it is their nature as cultural texts of familial selfrepresentation
that makes these dinner conversations so fascinating to study from a crosscultural
perspective.
5. For an analysis of parental MCs in the context of pragmatic socialization see Blum-
Kulka (1990).
6. Since duration of meals varied by 10 to 20 minutes per meal, length was normalized to
1000 transcript lines for each.
7. We are grateful to Dan Davies for suggesting this analysis and to Kobi Yelenik for the
programing.
8. Transcription conventions follow CHILDES (McWhinney & Snow, 1985). Indices
used here are: [ . . . ] = trailing off, [-] unfinished word; [\] = interruption; [=] =
latching; [#] = pause; { ) = overlap. For convenience (differing from CHILDES) we have
reinserted capitals when needed, and used CAPS to denote code-switching from English to
Hebrew.
9. The category of types of talk-regulation (TR) includes the following comments related
to turns (T): bids for T, upholding T, arguing T, allocating T, negating T, prefacing T and
checking for attention. Half of American children's comments fall into the category of "bids
for T," with the rest distributed among the other categories. Israeli children's comments are
distributed among all categories, with no clear preference for any specific type. Children in

American-Israeli Families at Dinner 221
the immigrant families show a high preference (83.3%) for bidding for turns, almost totally
avoiding all other TRs.
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11
Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity
GUY ASTON
I take it that interlanguage pragmatics is concerned with the means by which goals
are (or are not) achieved in contexts of spoken or written discourse where one or
more of the participants is a nonnative speaker—what I shall term, for ease of reference,
NNS discourse. As well as having descriptive and explanatory objectives—
attempting to categorize and account for uses of discourse strategies that contrast
qualitatively or quantitatively with those employed in contexts with exclusively
native speaker participants (NS discourse)—it may also have pedagogic ones,
aiming to facilitate learners' achievement of their goals in interaction. Whichever
objective is primary, we must ask what kinds of goals need to be achieved, and what
constraints on their achievement distinguish NNS from NS discourse. In so doing it
seems important to consider not just the constraints relevant to the achievement of
goals of communicating information but also those relevant to achieving those
social goals of interpersonal rapport that dominate much of our everyday talk.
Two main perspectives on conversational goals and constraints have been
adopted in investigating the pragmatics of NNS discourse. On the one hand, we find
work that takes the point of view of the NNS speaker, focusing on the means by
which he or she attempts to express and convey particular meanings to interlocutors
in reference to the psycholinguistic constraints (those of restricted L2 [second
language] competence) under which such a speaker operates. On the other hand, we
find work that treats the achievement of goals in discourse as a collective concern,
focusing on the interactive procedures by which mutually satisfactory outcomes are
jointly arrived at, in reference to the peculiar constraints of the social context (those
of predictably unshared competence) in which participants in NNS discourse operate.
Both perspectives may be illustrated from the literature on communication
strategies (CS), which grew out of a concern with the means whereby learners can
express an intended meaning given their limited knowledge of the L2. Thus Corder
defined CS as "a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his meaning
when faced with some difficulty" (1983, 16); Faerch and Kasper, as "potentially
conscious plans for solving what to an individual presents itself as a problem in
reaching a particular communicative goal" (1983, 36; my emphasis). In contrast
with this speaker-oriented, intra-organism view of CS as procedures employed to
224

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 225
express a meaning, other researchers in the field instead proposed that they be seen
as "a mutual attempt to agree on a meaning where requisite meaning structures do
not seem to be shared" (Tarone 1983, 65), taking an inter-organism perspective in
which CS are considered to involve procedures of negotiation designed to obtain a
mutually ratified outcome—what Widdowson (1983) has termed the convergence
of participants' worlds.
This second perspective involves a somewhat different view of discourse goals
(perlocutionary ones of "agreeing on" rather than simply illocutionary ones of
"expressing" a given meaning) and of the constraints in terms of which CS are to be
accounted for. Rather than treating the latter as primarily a matter of nonnative
speakers' "lexical deficit" (Bongaerts & Poulisse, 1989), leading to a categorization
of CS in terms of speakers' personal "avoidance" (message abandonment, topic
avoidance) and "achievement" strategies (circumlocution, paraphrase, appeal for
assistance, transfer, mime: Faerch & Kasper, 1983), Tarone's definition stresses the
constraints that derive from the lack of intersubjective resources in NNS discourse.
It evaluates such "resource gaps" (not only lexicogrammatical but also
sociocultural—a lack of shared conventions concerning language use, and of shared
knowledge and experience of the world) not in terms of the "objective" status of
resources as available or otherwise, but in terms of their seeming status—of participants'
reciprocal perceptions and expectations as to the resources shared in the
current context. A presumed lack of intersubjective context for communication may
oblige participants to seek ways of making that context explicit and of establishing
what is in fact shared, rather than simply assuming the "reciprocity of perspectives"
of NS participants where meaning can reliably be expanded on the basis of an
"etcetera principle" (Cicourel, 1973).
This second viewpoint leads to an expansion of taxonomies of CS to include, for
example, (a) strategies of "recipient design," which aim to alleviate the hearer's
eventual problems of understanding rather than just the speaker's problems of
expression—through repetition, explanation, explication, and avoidance of reference
to predictably unshared culture-specific knowledge and experience (Tarone &
Yule, 1987; Aston, 1988c); (b) interactive procedures of comprehension checking
and confirmation, which repair failure and manifest that intersubjectivity has in fact
been achieved (Long, 1983; Varonis & Gass, 1985); (c) preparatory strategies
designed to influence assumptions and expectations preemptively—for instance,
overt disclaimers of competence ("I have a problem. I'm a foreigner, and . . .":
Anderson, 1988b), and covert ones, such as the adoption of a foreign accent and/or
incorrect lexicogrammar (Di Pietro, 1987; Warren-Leubacker & Bohannon, 1982)
—strategies that can be seen as canceling the presupposition that the resources
usually shared in NS discourse are available, activating what has been called a
"NNS set" of expectations (Anderson, 1988b): their utility in facilitating communication
is shown by Warren-Leubacker and Bohannon (1982), who demonstrate how
initial manifestations of incompetence by the NNS give rise to greater repetition and
explanation by the NS participant. The wider view of CS provided by an interorganism
perspective seems pedagogically useful, since in the final analysis language
users, including learners and their interlocutors, are typically concerned with
achieving perlocutionary outcomes of convergence, not merely illocutionary ones of

226 Discourse Perspectives
self-expression. It is clear from comparing the two approaches that the communication
strategies highlighted differ according to whether discourse constraints are
conceived of in intra- or inter-organism terms.
While differing in their perspectives on the goals and constraints involved, both
these approaches to communication strategies share a conception of discourse as
primarily a matter of conveying information, that is, as transactional (Brown &
Yule, 1983). In the intra-organism approach, such strategies as paraphrase, circumlocution,
and mime are designed to convey information successfully by clarifying
intended sense and reference. The inter-organism approach also treats discourse
goals as primarily transactional. Desired outcomes are formulated in terms of participants'
final information states, with convergence in respect of an "agreed meaning":
CS "are used to deal with problems which may arise in the transmission
of ... information" (Tarone & Yule, 1987, 50).
This tendency to conceive goals as transactional (and hence to consider discourse
constraints in relation to the achievement of such goals) glosses over the fact
that much everyday speech use instead has as its primary goals the negotiation of
interpersonal relationships. In such interactional speech, Brown and Yule note
(1983, Iff.), the correct conveyance of information may be very much less important.
Participants seem to be involved in "choric" behaviour, as Firth (1964, 112)
put it, where what is important is not so much the understanding of what is said as
the harmony of the dance of their saying, so that they "end up feeling comfortable
with each other" (Brown & Yule, 1983, 12): the emphasis is on ritual displays of
agreement and mutual appreciation. 1 Rather than a use of language for communication
(if by this term we mean, as is generally the case in applied linguistics, a
convergence of participants' information states), in interactional speech we have a
use of language for what Leech (1983) terms comity—the establishment and maintenance
of friendly relations. What seems primarily at issue is a convergence of
participants' worlds in affective terms—sharing feelings and attitudes rather than
knowledge and ideas (Aston 1988b). An extreme example is Malinowski's (1930)
"phatic communion," which he saw as totally devoid of information content; but
even where some information is conveyed, as in everyday chat between lovers,
friends, and gossips, the primary point of talk still seems to be that of establishing
and maintaining relationships of varying degrees of intimacy: even at academic
congresses, as Firth (1964) noted, much talk has a primary function of this type. As
Coupland et al. (1992) observe, interactional speech may also play a significant role
in what are prima facie purely transactional contexts, for instance, in celebrating
transactional success or making transactional failure acceptable. In service encounters
in shops, we often find assistants and customers engaging in pieces of interactional
chat when the requested goods are not available—or unexpectedly are so
(Aston 1988a; cf. examples, 2, 7, and 15 below). Given the frequency with which
interactional speech occurs in everyday talk, it is relevant for interlanguage pragmatics
to ask whether, and in what way, specific constraints condition the pursuit of
interactional goals in NNS discourse, and what "comity strategies " may be available
to participants in order to meet these.
Turning aside from the literature on communication strategies to other areas of
research into NNS discourse, we find a series of studies that focus on interactional

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 227
aspects of such talk. Work in contrast!ve pragmatics, while primarily concerned
with the comparison of speech act realizations in different cultures by native speakers,
has also examined realizations by nonnative speakers, comparing these with
typical realizations in those speakers' Lls and with those of native speakers. The
main speech acts selected for analysis are ones that are either face-threatening—
requests (the CCSARP project: cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989a), refusals (Beebe &
Cummings, 1985), disagreements (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989), complaints (Olshtain
& Weinbach, 1987)—or face-supportive—compliments (Wolfson, 1981), thanks
(Eisenstein & Bodman, 1986), apologies (Olshtain, 1983;Trosborg, 1987; CCSARP;
Garcia, 1989)—and their realizations have been compared in terms of the politeness
strategies employed to give and redress face (generally using taxonomies based on
the work of Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987). For example, in examining requests
and apologies, the CCSARP project has examined ways in which learners' assessment
of face-threat and the strategies they employ to redress that threat appear to
differ from those of native speakers of the L2. In this way, such work highlights
strategies employed by nonnative speakers to achieve interactional goals of satisfactory
rapport.
In terms of the distinction drawn above in discussing communication strategies,
it should however be noted that this line of research adopts an intra-organism
approach: it focuses on nonnative participants' expression of politeness. Limiting
attention to the realization of the single speech act, it does not consider eventual
interactive procedures by which mutually satisfactory interpersonal outcomes are
established, and it views constraints on the achievement of interactional goals in
terms of the NNS's limited competence; that is, strategies of politeness are usually
accounted for in terms of inadequate knowledge of the sociolinguistic conventions
of the L2 (giving rise to transfer from the LI) rather than in terms of a lack of
intersubjective resources (giving rise to negotiation). This limits the value of the
approach as an account of the strategies by which satisfactory rapport is achieved in
NNS discourse. For while the NNS participant's politeness strategies undoubtedly
contribute to the process whereby friendly relations are established and maintained
in such discourse, inasmuch as they indicate that speaker's friendly intent, an
account of such strategies does not explain how both participants 2 effectively come
to feel comfortable with each other as an outcome. (This because it is not necessarily
sufficient to convey an intent to redress face in order to effectively redress it,
and because the redress of the hearer's face by one speaker is clearly only one
element in the process of mutual facework—itself in turn arguably only one aspect
of the comity process.) Nor would it appear that the constraints on the achievement
of interactional goals in NNS discourse are simply those posed by the objective
limits to the NNS' competence; there may also be intersubjective, social constraints
under which NNS interactional speech operates, due to a perceived lack of shared
resources. The CCSARP project, which aims to "investigate the similarities and
differences in the realisation patterns of given speech acts between native and nonnative
speakers of a given language, relative to the same social constraints" (Blum-
Kulka et al., 1989b, 13), thereby assumes that the social constraints in NS and NNS
discourse can be treated as substantially identical rather than as in any way intrinsically
distinct. In discussion of the project data on request realizations, however,

228 Discourse Perspectives
Faerch and Kasper (1989; see also Kasper, 1989) are led to place this assumption in
doubt: noting that the tendency for nonnative speakers to provide warrants for
requests is independent of their LI, and thus cannot be accounted for in terms of
transfer, they suggest that this phenomenon reflects distinctive patterns of expectation
in NNS discourse, so that "for NNS contributions to be successful they may
have to follow different conversational principles" (Kasper, 1989, 54), "for instance,
by placing more emphasis on phatic, metalingual and metacommunicative
functions" (Faerch & Kasper, 1989, 245). Fiksdal (1988), in one of the few studies
in this area to examine the politeness strategies in both NS and NNS in NNS
discourse, similarly suggests that distinctive principles of interaction may be involved.
By arguing in favour of context-specific principles for the conducting of
interactional concerns in NNS discourse, these suggestions go in the direction of an
inter-organism perspective on the constraints to which such discourse may be subject.
It is the nature of such constraints that I wish to consider in this chapter.
Interactional Speech from an Inter-Organism Perspective
A Neglected Issue
It seems useful, as a premise to more detailed consideration, to note some reasons
for the lack of attention paid to interactional speech in NNS discourse from an interorganism
perspective. This may help clarify the theoretical and methodological
stance I want to adopt.
One reason for this apparent neglect is undoubtedly the widespread assumption
of a speech-act-based model of discourse. Placing the emphasis on the isolated
utterance rather than on the jointly-performed dance as a whole, such a model in a
sense presupposes that goals in discourse are the transactional ones of achieving
correct understanding, in the shape of "illocutionary uptake" (Searle, 1969). Even
where descriptions of NNS discourse have ventured beyond the single act, they have
largely considered interactivity as a matter of "negotiating meaning"—of jointly
clarifying and confirming understanding of the information that an individual speaker
intends to convey by a particular act (Long, 1983; Widdowson, 1983). A speechact-based
view entails that politeness, too, constitutes a kind of information, a
"social meaning" conveyed parallel to the main illocution and to be correctly understood
alongside it (Leech, 1983). Rather than conveying information, Brown and
Yule (1983) argue, interactional speech instead involves negotiating shared attitudes
and feelings: to describe this process we need to see talk as progressively bringing
about affective convergence through the joint realization of interactive procedures
(Aston, 1988b).
A second reason is the tendency in applied linguistics to formulate pedagogic
objectives in transactional terms—teaching language for communication (e.g.,
Widdowson, 1978; Johnson & Morrow, 1981; Brown & Yule, 1983). As a result of
this tendency (in part derived from speech act theory), "communicative approaches"
to language teaching have generally treated the achievement of interactional goals as
a matter of the NNS conveying information in a socially acceptable manner (by

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 229
employing appropriate politeness strategies: e.g. Littlewood, 1981; Widdowson,
1983). Such an approach to the interactional, as noted above, casts limited light
upon the processes by which mutually satisfactory interpersonal outcomes are collectively
achieved. The pedagogic importance of these processes and outcomes,
however, should not be underestimated. Many learners have goals of using the L2 to
establish interpersonal rapport (Geoghegan, 1983), and it should be borne in mind
that a context of positive rapport also facilitates transactional speech use; for instance,
by rendering operative a "benevolence principle" whereby eventual understanding
failures are more likely to be interpreted as errors rather than offenses
(Thomas, 1983; Slugowski & Turnbull, 1988; Anderson, 1988b). A context of
satisfactory rapport may also facilitate second language acquisition tout court
(Gumperz, 1982; Fillmore, 1979). 3
A third reason for the neglect of interactional speech is the difficulty of collecting
relevant data. For instance, studies that have examined NNS politeness strategies
have for the most part employed discourse completion tasks, where subjects are
required to state what utterance they feel would be appropriate to a specified context
(e.g., Blum-Kulka et al., 1989a). This method, however, discounts interactivity,
with the possibility of the utterance's joint production over time (on the basis of
back-channel feedback or its absence: cf. e.g., Anderson et al., 1988), and of the
realization of the appropriate action across a series of turns (as would appear to be
frequently the case for such face-threatening actions as complaints and apologies:
George, 1990; Owen, 1983). Data where realizations are interactively determined
can be obtained through the use of role-play, where subjects jointly simulate a
situation calling for a given action-type (Beebe & Cummings, 1985; House, 1989),
but it is difficult for this technique to reproduce the interpersonal context of naturally
occurring talk. Role-played interactions are without effective social consequences,
since the relationships between the characters are, in the final analysis, fictional and
temporary; as a corollary, the real-life relationships of the actors (rather than the
characters) may constitute an extraneous influence, revealed in the metadiscursive
nudges, winks, and laughter that accompany so many learner role-plays (Zanca,
1988; Wildner-Bassett, 1989). Experimentally contrived situations in the laboratory
pose similar difficulties. These too are isolated from the real-world context of actual
relationships: situations where goals are transactional, such as the picture description
tasks widely employed in work on communication strategies, are far easier to
set up experimentally than ones where goals are additionally or primarily interactional
(cf. Aston, 1986a, 1988b for further discussion of these issues). To examine
interactional speech from an inter-organism perspective, it seems essential to look
first and foremost at naturally occurring conversational data.
A final reason would appear to be of an ideological nature. While a range of
studies have used naturally occurring data to consider interactional aspects of NNS
discourse, these have typically examined situations in which interpersonal conflict
emerges rather than ones in which rapport is created successfully. Motivated by
social concern at the extent of conflictuality and the abuse of power in cross-cultural
settings, they have stressed how negative affect derives from misunderstanding of
intent (e.g., Gumperz, 1982; Thomas, 1983). Their emphasis has thus been on the
avoidance of interactional failure. If we are to understand how interactional success

230 Discourse Perspectives
can be achieved in NNS discourse, we need to focus on strategies for the establishment
of positive rapport—enhancing friendly relations—rather than just the avoidance
of negative outcomes of conflict and hostility. If interactional speech is seen
not simply as facilitating the achievement of transactional goals by making communication
acceptable, but as having objectives that may be the primary purpose of the
talk, then comity needs to be seen as not simply a matter of mitigating face-threat
and hence avoiding wnfriendly relations, but as a manner of enhancing relations in a
positive sense (Aston, 1989). 4
It is for the reasons outlined, I believe, that we find only passing observations in
the literature which consider comity strategies from an inter-organism perspective.
These limited observations are, however, suggestive, since they indicate that certain
characteristic features of NNS discourse can find explanations in terms of the use of
such strategies. For instance, McCurdy (1980) notes that participants in NNS discourse
may "fake" understanding as a means of avoiding putting transactional
failure, with its negative affective consequences, on record. Tarone (1980) notes the
occurrence of repairs to linguistic form in context where mutual understanding has
already been achieved. Excluding these from her transactionally defined taxonomy
of communication strategies, she suggests instead that they have primarily social
ends of "meta-communication . . . which says, 'I'm a member of your group'"
(1980, 426)—an interpretation that finds echoes in the following remark of Widdowson's:
Learners, like the ordinary people they are, adjust their language to an acceptable
norm for two reasons: either in order to be more effectively communicative or in
order to indicate a sense of identity with a particular group of language users. . . .
It is difficult to correct learner error which has little or no communicative consequence
because to do so is to ask learners to subscribe to an etiquette which may
seem alien to them, quaint, even ridiculous; to conform to standards of behaviour
that represent a code of conduct for particular social groups with which they have
no social connection and no real affinity. (1984, 248-49; my emphasis)
The use in NNS discourse of confirmations of understanding and of repairs to form
may in other words be accounted for in terms of participants' interactional rather
than transactional concerns (Aston, 1986b); that is, they may constitute comity
strategies aiming to maintain and enhance rapport.
Such isolated observations, however, tell us little of the range of comity strategies
that may be employed given the constraints peculiar to NNS discourse. Given
the difficulty of setting up controlled contexts in which negotiation of rapport is at
issue, any attempt to examine such strategies would seem to involve what Faerch
termed "straying around in the forest" (1984, 60), focusing on a range of examples
from various sources in the light of a general theory rather than attempting to deal
with systematically elicited data. As Faerch stressed, such a methodology means
that the investigator has to identify problems before proceeding to a description of
solutions; I shall thus be more concerned here with the nature of those problems—
the constraints on interactional speech in NNS discourse—than with the potential
solutions to them—the precise range of the comity strategies available. I want to
begin by examining the comity process in NS discourse and the intersubjective

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 231
resources it draws on, hoping thereby to identify areas that may be problematic in
NNS discourse owing to the absence of shared resources. By corollary, we may also
be able to highlight resources for comity that are, instead, likely to be shared in
contexts of NNS discourse, and hence be potentially available for use.
Comity in NS Discourse
Brown and Yule (1983, 4) argue that interactional speech involves the negotiation of
shared feelings and attitudes by participants, as opposed to the sharing of knowledge
and ideas that is at issue in transactional speech. The sharing of attitudes can
be seen from two perspectives, those of negotiating solidarity and of negotiating
support (Aston, 1988b). Brown and Oilman define solidarity as a matter of "likemindedness
or similar behaviour dispositions" (1972: 258), so that its negotiation
involves participants in finding they share attitudes to features of their world in
common—for example, that both feel the same way about the weather, or about an
Oxford University Press decision as to the print run on a book: 5
(1) A: T's - tsuh beautiful day out isn't it.
B: Yeh it's jus' gorgeous.
(Pomerantz, 1975, 4)
(2) A: Surprised that they: er didn't print eNOUGH, actually.
c: Yes:, T they obviously underestimated it"* didn't they, badly, because I've been to
th- THREE bookshops now, and none of them-
A:
A You'd have thought they'd've judged THAT a bit better, yes:."*
A: ==Sold out
c: Yeah.
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990: Lod A-04/a; A = assistance, C = customer)
Such routines of agreement (for a detailed description, cf. Pomerantz, 1984a) seem
characteristic of the negotiation of solidarity. The tendency to shift topics in casual
conversation reflects the search for things to agree on—to identify common concerns
toward which attitudes may be shared (Brown & Yule, 1983, 11).
As well as features of the situation in which the talk takes place (including ones
brought to that situation from past experience), common concerns may include
features of the talk itself. For instance, conversational closings often involve agreement
as to the conversation's satisfactory nature:
(3) A: Nice talking to you ''sir.'*
B:
A Nice •*- talking to you.
(Pomerantz 1975, 4)
Shared attitudes toward the talk may also be manifested without such explicit
agreements, but simply by production of analogous contributions. Joint laughter can
show shared pleasure at repartee (Jefferson et al., 1987; Davies, 1984). Recycling
of structural chunks (Tannen, 1989), for instance, by repeating a prior sequence
with an inversion of the discourse roles involved, can allow participants to show
their mutual acceptance and approval of that prior sequence. Consider the following
extract, again from an encounter in a bookshop:

232 Discourse Perspectives
(4) c: I hesitate to ask you this, but could you tell me why: + "The dancing Wu Li
masters" is under religion
A: + It is: believe it or not, according to Fontana, + an alternative theology book,
c: + Oh:! *(2syll)!+
A:
A So is •* Capra's "Turning point" and "The tao of physics."
c: + "The tao of physics" I could: - I could believe, I mean it doesn't 'actually
MENtion:'* re Ty ligions in there:,**
A: ^According -~*A: AA According -** according to Fontana it's the same kind of
book, so therefore: -
1—»c: =Mhm. I 'see.'* Yeah it is, it's (a group)! They're all about god and TT physics.'**
A: *(2syll)+
*: ^Mm.*« Yeah,
c: Yehhs. T Er- they're- [laughs]-*
2-^ A: A Yeah! Right! [laughs] Lot to do with religion that, yes"* [laughs]
(16)
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990: Lod B-07/a)
Here we find a reciprocation of ironic comments followed by self-laughter (arrows).
First the customer offers what he apparently intends as a little witticism ("They're
all about God and physics"). The assistant initially fails to appreciate this irony,
simply acknowledging it as informative ("Mm. Yeah"), whereupon the customer
initiates laughter himself. The assistant then joins in laughing, and goes on to
provide a contribution of her own that repeats the same structure: she produces a
similar ironic comment, and in her turn follows this with self-laughter. Thereby she
shows she has in fact appreciated the customer's previous contribution, and what
appears to have started off as a failure in interactional terms is turned into a successful
piece of repartee, where shared attitudes are displayed to the talk itself.
Solidarity implies that attitudes are shared in the sense that participants' feelings
vis-a-vis some state or event of which they have common experience are the same.
In general terms, it implies that with respect to such experience, A's wants for A
correspond to B's wants for B. However, it is also possible for attitudes to be shared
in another sense. Rather than sharing attitudes to features of common experience
(including their common talk), both may share attitudes to features of the experience
of one of the participants, to the sources of her or his individual joys and griefs,
where A's wants for A correspond to B's wants for A (or vice versa). One cannot
always share another's feelings about such personal matters a triumph and bereavement
in the sense of having the same feeling oneself, feeling as the other, but one
may be able to do so in the sense of sympathising, or feeling for the other. As
Goffman put it, "the needs, desires, conditions, experiences, in short the situation of
one individual, when seen from his own point of view, provides a second individual
with directions for formulating ritual gestures of concern" (1971, 92). Adopting
Goffman's term, I shall refer to this type of affective convergence as support.
If solidarity is largely characterized by routines of agreement, support seems
characterized by routines of affiliation. In the following examples, sympathy is
provided in response to personal disclosures:
(5) E: I hadda liddle operation on my TOE this week, I hadtuh have- TOEnail taken off.
B: (0.5) WHY::hh

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 233
E: Oh, I have a fungus'n I had'n infection, (0.3) T's a *HELL of a- 1 *
-^B: A OH::::::-«Emma. Innat awful, (0.7) Well what a SHAME. Didjeh haftuh go in
the hospit'l
E: No::, I dist hadda local deal, en I- id wadn'any fun, but I'm BEtter I wz, lying on
the couch out'n front.
^>B: Oh::: I'm sorry EmMA
(Sacks, 1992, 573)
(6) L: =But you know when you get OUT it's kind of co:ld.
E:
T (Oh: oh) YA:h«
L:
A Well it was,"* two o'clock in the morning and T then last night*
E:
A Huh Haw hawh ha:*w.
—> E: T Oo I(h) bet that was (fu:n)*
L:
A nhhhhh hn-hn-hn with no:"* c- hh T hh clothes on God it's good, hu-uh hUH huhh
hh*
—>E:
A hhh hh aaAAAAAA:::::::: Isn't that exerting,*
L: Uh:*: 1 *
—>E:
A Oh:* that's wonderful,*
L:
A Oh::* God we had, we, I never had so much fun in my li:fe.
(Jefferson, 1984, 200)
As with solidarity, support may also focus on features of the talk itself—where the
latter is viewed as an individual rather than a joint accomplishment. One participant
can show appreciation of another's contributions to the discourse by laughing at her
jokes and anecdotes—and that other can then in turn appreciate that appreciation:
(7) A: Can I help you.
c: Yeah, can you GIVE me a: - a- a prediction on when Jacques Lacan's "Ecrits" is
likely to come back in
A: + Frankly no. I can give you a + er + educated guess, of: i(4syll)."*
—»c:
A Well.* That's [laugh\ - better than T I can* do [laugh}, so: -
—* A: *[laugh }"*
(07)
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1900: Lod C-30/b)
Routines involving compliments and apologies, which also propose affiliation with
the other's interests, can similarly be seen as means of negotiating support, in
reference to the patterns of "supportive" and "remedial" interchanges described by
Goffman (1971: for examples and discussion, cf. Aston, 1988b).
Grounds for Solidarity and Support
Just as the transfer of information, through reference to maxims of sincerity and
truthfulness, relies on bases of speakers' knowledge and belief to warrant their
factual claims, so the negotiation of solidarity and support appears to rely on there
being affective grounds that warrant the feelings in question. For instance, if they
are to share attitudes in the solidary sense, it seems that both participants must have
personal experience of the features that are assessed (Pomerantz, 1984b). In examples
1-3 above, the weather, the unavailability of a book, and the quality of the

234 Discourse Perspectives
current conversation are matters to which each participant can be assumed to have
independent access. Where such experience is not self-evidently available, participants
may describe it in the talk, telling stories from their past that provide warrants
for their attitudes concerning, say, the poor safety standards of fairgrounds (Ryave,
1978). Where, on the other hand, a participant has no (or less direct) experience of
the features in question to be drawn on, the negotiation of solidarity may be
problematic—B cannot easily claim to know what it's like to travel by British Rail /
live under a Conservative government / write a dissertation if he has never done so.
In such cases, support may be more appropriate than solidarity. Grounds for sharing
attitudes in the supportive sense lie in the nature of the relationship between the
participants rather than in common experience: I can sympathise with you insofar as
I have a personal involvement with you. This point was well made by Sacks, who
noted how in disclosing one's personal experience to others,
it's pretty much teller's business to tell the story with respect to its import for him,
and it is his involvement in it that provides for the story's telling. . . . teller can
tell it to somebody who knows and cares about him, and maybe recipient can tell it
to someone who also knows and cares about initial teller, but it goes very little
further than that. (Sacks, 1978, 261)
This underlines two requirements for the negotiation of support: (a) that the teller be
involved in the story (i.e., he is entitled to have feelings toward the events described
by virtue of direct experience of them), and (b) that the recipient be involved with
("knows and cares about") the teller. It is this latter factor that entitles the recipient
to hold attitudes toward events of which he lacks independent experience.
As in negotiating solidarity, participants may also be called upon to make their
grounds for sharing attitudes in the supportive sense explicit, demonstrating that
they really do "know and care about" each other. Thus in the following example, L
demonstrates that she understands G's general situation (arrow): by citing her
knowledge that G is "tied down" she shows her entitlement to sympathize with G in
her dilemma of the previous night.
(8) o: And Danny didn't get in so I didn't go: typing last ni:ght,
L: =Didn't y T ou::"*
G: A No:^ I T ca- I thought well I c^an't leave him for VT two** hours if I'm if he's
crying when I've left him for one.
L: ±Oh:::::.«
L:
A *n:No.*"
L: + Oh: dear me.
G: So: I euh you know as I say 1 didn't get to t ¥ yping.~*
—* L: A Oh::::: You're"* well tie:d dow:n aren't T you."*
G:
A Well-* I am rea: T lly:« Yah.
L: AYe:h."
(Rahman, 1:4-6, cited in Jefferson, 1984, 204-5)
Clearly, degrees of "knowing and caring about: vary, and this is reflected in the
varying "tellability" of personal information. There are events we disclose and jokes
we tell to close friends but not to casual acquaintances. The loneliness that follows
loss of a loved one can be interpreted in terms of no longer having anyone close

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comitv 235
enough to confide in (Sacks, 1972). What seems at issue in such cases is the
restrictedness of the attitudes concerned, which not anyone may share supportively,
but only someone who is sufficiently close to us. This requirement has been stressed
by work in social psychology showing that growing intimacy correlates with an
increase in the "privateness" of disclosure (Morton, 1978): conversely, Goffman
noted how there is "a potential conflict between the provision of minor services to
unacquainted others and the obligation to keep one's distance" (1971, 120).
The restrictedness of attitudes also appears relevant in the negotiation of solidarity.
Sharing mild feelings about the weather is a rather different matter from
sharing homicidal feelings toward a common boss. While in the former case our
feelings are those that anybody might be expected to have—those of competent
consociates—in the latter they define a limited group, grounded in a highly specific
common experience and perspective. Social psychology has argued that interpersonal
attraction is related to perceived similarity—we like those who are like us—
with "uncommon similarity" being particularly attractive (Lea & Duck, 1982). As
with support, sharing restricted solidary attitudes thus implies a closer relationship,
one between individuals with a peculiar "likemindedness."
In both solidary and supportive senses, participants appear to negotiate progressively
more restricted attitudes as intimacy increases, thereby increasingly defining
themselves as somes rather than anys (Schenkein, 1978). From this perspective,
engaging in interactional speech is not only a matter of identifying potential
focuses of solidarity and/or support for which participants may have warrants, but
also of locating ones where appropriately restricted attitudes may be shared. Resources
for comity are constrained both by what is presumably common ground and
by the presumed intimacy of the relationship. While to a large extent these constraints
will be specific to the individual relationship concerned, we can, I think,
also see ways in which they may generally differ in contexts of NS and NNS
discourse, given the nature of the common ground and of the relationships which
such contexts imply.
Grounds for Solidarity and Support and NNS Discourse
Focusing on what I have termed solidarity, Fiksdal notes that "because rapport is
created when speakers share common interest or common ground . . . NSs may
rely on a different rapport system than NNSs" (1988, 3). It is clear that the common
ground of consociates—what everybody can be expected to have experience of
within a given culture—will not necessarily be available as a resource for solidarity
where cultural backgrounds differ. While members of different cultures may share
access to the weather (though there may well be differences in their feelings about
it), they are unlikely to share similar experience of Mrs. Thatcher or British Rail,
with respect to which the foreigner may lack warrants for protest on a par with those
of the paid-up British native. In consequence, participants may have difficulty
negotiating agreement vis-a-vis such topics. In extreme cases, we can imagine the
absence of common ground emerging in ways like the following:
(9) NNS: British Rail gets worse and worse, doesn't it
NS: I wouldn't have thought the trains were any better where you come from.

236 Discourse Perspectives
(10) NS: British Rail gets worse and worse, doesn't it
NNS: Well, I wouldn't know.
(fabricated)
It is not merely such single domains of experience that cannot be assumed shared,
however: comparing the behavior of interviewers in NS and NNS discourse, Fiksdal
(1988, 8ff.) notes how appeals to generic intersubjective experience (through the
use of expression such as "you know what I mean"), which invoke the interlocutor's
capacity to fill in detail from common knowledge (following an etcetera principle,
are not employed with NNS interviewees. In NS discourse such uses appear to help
create rapport: not only because they assume common ground but because they
propose allusiveness as a satisfactory discourse style. That is, participants can share
attitudes to the fact that they don't need to spell out detail in order to understand
each other. A well-known example of this involve irony, which, by alluding to what
is conventionally said in routine situations, can be an important strategy for achieving
solidarity (Sperber & Wilson, 1981, 1985, 1986). Discussing the utterance "He
almost won, didn't he" said by his wife to a companion when John has just come
off court announcing that he "only just" lost after an ignominious defeat at tennis,
Sperber and Wilson (1985) note that
If they are old friends in the habit of making mild fun of their husbands, then the
correct interpretation . . . would be easily accessible, and would merely confirm
a range of shared assumptions about their relationship to each other and their
outlook on the world. Suppose, however, that they are meeting for the first time.
Then a hearer who penetrated the irony would have learned an enormous amount
about the speaker's attitude to her husband, her outlook on life, all in a very short
time. As a result of this exchange, a degree of intimacy would be achieved
between them that would not have been created to anything like the same extent by
[alternative, explicit examples], (viii: 74)
John's wife's quip is a contribution to the discourse that not just anyone might have
made, and not just anyone understood: its production and grasp reveal the particular
individuals concerned as sharing a whole set of attitudes. Irony is reputed to be less
available as an interactional resource in NNS discourse, where it may be heard as
learner error rather than wit (Harder, 1980; Widdowson, 1984), and the absence of
the shared sociolinguistic competence necessary as a basis for an allusive style may
be one reason for the widely noted long-windedness and prosaicness of NNS discourse
(Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986; Kasper, 1989; Aston, 1988c).
Such absence of culture-specific common ground means that NNS discourse
may lack certain of the resources typically available to consociates in the negotiation
of solidarity. Similarly in negotiating support, with its basis in "knowing and caring
about," it may be difficult for outsiders to the NS culture, who may be stereotyped
victims and/or perpetrators of cultural prejudices, to draw on the neighborly respect
and understanding that is expected of consociates. This might suggest that the
resources for interactional speech in NNS discourse are drastically restricted with
respect to those available in NS discourse, entailing a "reduced personality" for the
learner, as Harder (1980) puts it. However, other areas of common ground, and
bases for mutual respect and understanding, may instead be available. We should

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 237
not exclude the possibility that some of these may be characteristic of NNS discourse.
As Borsch (1986) has documented, learners frequently perceive NNS discourse
as expanding rather than restricting their interactional capacity. To appreciate
how comity can be negotiated in such discourse, in other words, we must not only
recognize the limits imposed by participants' nonconsociacy, but also explore the
potential of nonconsociacy for providing interactional resources.
Resources for Comity in NNS Discourse
Negotiating Solidarity: Exploiting the Lack of Consociacy
I have suggested that negotiating solidarity is a matter of sharing attitudes toward
features of common experience. Thereby participants demonstrate their similarities
or likemindedness. While consociates may be able to draw on their "cultural value
similarity, cultural status similarity, cultural linguistic similarity, and perceived
cultural attitudinal similarity: (Ting-Toomey, 1986, 116), these are less likely to be
present in inter-ethnic encounters. To find areas of likemindedness in NNS discourse,
participants arguably need to turn from their identities as representative
members of their cultures of origin to focus on their identities as individuals, and to
their relationships as individuals to those cultures. If both participants manifest a
certain independence with respect to their native cultures, revealing what Ting-
Toomey terms "flexible cultural identities," similarities may be found at a "metacultural"
level. Recognition of the interactional potential of such flexibility may
underlie learners' claims of enjoying "the freedom to act like an outlaw" when using
the L2 (Borsch, 1986, 73).
To exemplify, one way in which participants in NNS discourse seem able to
establish solidarity is by both manifesting critical or ironic attitudes to their respective
cultures of origin. In the following extract, the British NS takes a critical stance
toward his country's role in the birth of America, from which he disaffiliates (first
arrow), and then, by going on to criticise the role of the Italian NNS' compatriots in
this process, seems to invite the latter to do the same in her turn (second arrow):
(11) NNS: Um: someone told me, er that the captain, of Mayflower was from Walton.
T ls it true 4
NS:
A He wasn't 4 FROM Walton he was CHRIStened in Walton.
NNS: Ah.
NS: Yeah. Don't know where he was born. + It was, a little bit before my time.
NNS: [laughs}
NS: =An- and: + but he was christened at All Saints Church. + Er: what was his
name + Something Matthews I think, but anyway.
NNS: Mm.
1—> NS: Yeah. + + He started it all going over in America, he started all the trouble,
you know. He took some of our trouble makers over there T and they started
more trouble, 4
NNS: ^{laughs} 1 *

238 Discourse Perspectives
2-^>
NS: and then your lot went over from the mafia and did the - made the rest, you
know, I mean-
NNS: [laughs}
NS: So. T l mean-"*
NNS: ^Yeah."*
NS: + Between them they really carved it up ().
(Recca, 1988, 217)
Further into the same conversation, the NNS does take up a similar opportunity to
disaffiliate from her culture, criticizing her compatriots as relatively humorless and
unduly vociferous:
(12) NS: [talking about his stay in a hotel in Italy] 1 was known to the staff as papa
grappa, ^[laughs \*
NNS: ^[laughs}'* Yeah.
NS: Yeah. Papa grappa.
—» NNS: Mhm. [laughs} + The Italians have a sense of humor sometimes.
NS: A very good sense of T humor. <
NNS: ^[laughs]*
NS: Yeah.
NSS: Mm:
NS: I like the Romans, I like: 'the"* the Italians in Rome.
NNS: ^Mm."*
NNS: Mhm. They are very friendly.
NS: Oh T yes.^
—> NNS: A Some'*times they are too noisy. As Americans.
. NS: =Too noisy
NNS: Yeah.
NS: Yeah. Oh Yeah. And when the family T ARGument started, A:H.*
NNS: *[laughs]*
NS: [laughs]
(Recca, 1988, 242)
Both participants here display critical attitudes toward their respective cultures,
from which they distance themselves. Taking the stance of fellow-outlaws, both
occupy a no-man's-land that becomes a common ground, and whose successful
creation is the focus of mutual appreciation and laughter.
A second, related area vis-a-vis which solidarity may be negotiated concerns the
task of being an NNS—of achieving and maintaining an identity outside the context
of one's own culture. This is clearly a resource for solidarity in NNS-NNS encounters,
but it can also be exploited in NS-NNS interaction if both participants can
claim experience of being nonnative speakers. In the last example, the NS refers to
his own experience as a foreigner, and in another extract from the same conversation,
offers a few words in the language of his NNS interlocutor:
(13) NS: And twice a week, I used to drive
NNS: Mh
NS: to the Vatican.
NNS: Mhm.
—> NS: "Vaticano," T isn't it'*

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 239
NNS:
A Mhm.'* You have got a BEAUtiful pronunciation. Congratulations.
NS: Especially when I say "Una birra per favore."
[mutual laughter]
(Recca, 1988, 243)
In this way discourse roles are momentarily inverted: the NS places himself in the
role of an incompetent NNS, and the NNS in that of the NS who can provide
support. This repetition with inversion enables the participants to share attitudes
toward the business of being/interacting with a nonnative, and in this respect again
to show a common flexibility with respect to their native cultures.
In the cases just discussed, participants can be seen as making up for their lack
of a common culture by using their experience as cultural outsiders as a basis for
negotiating solidarity. Nonconsociacy also appears to offer specific grounds for
sharing solidary attitudes with respect to the talk itself, seen as an appreciable joint
accomplishment. While in NS discourse, the satisfactoriness of talk typically lies in
its nonroutine nature, its particular wittiness and harmoniousness, which makes it
the achievement of somes rather than anys, in NNS discourse even the routine may
be problematic, with the result that its successful bringing-off can appear a noteworthy
accomplishment that provides grounds for mutual satisfaction. Jordan and Fuller
(1975) discuss a lingua franca example in which two Americans (n and g) are
talking to two Mayans (J and M):
(14) M: en Maya se dice pel.
G: UH HUH.
j: T iSabes*
G: *Pel.«
N: Pel.
M: Ah.
G: PEL.
j: T Pel.-<
M:
A Pel.«
G: PEL. PEL.
j: Por que pe, ele.
G: PE, ELE.
N: PEL.
j: Pe, e, ele.
o: PE, E, ELE. AHA.
j: iHah
G: PEL.
j: *Hah.-«
M:
A Hah.-*
G: PEL.
r. Pel.
Of it, they observe:
(Jordan & Fuller 1975, 26)
We find that an agreement is constructed over what "this" is called in Maya,
though the original difficulty with what "this" is has in no way been resolved. It is
evident here that speakers go to extraordinary lengths to assure each other that they

240 Discourse Perspectives
know, understand, have heard, and are even able to spell a word the meaning of
which is still problematic. So that what emerges as the achievement of the talk is
not the imparting of information but rather the celebration of agreement, collaboration,
consensus, a "look we can still talk together." (Jordan & Fuller, 1975,
27; my emphasis)
In NS discourse, to repeat and spell another's words successfully would hardly be a
cause for remark (except in cases where linguistic competence cannot be assumed
shared, e.g., with small children). In NNS discourse, on the other hand, insofar as
such ordinary success cannot be presumed on, its occurrence can be treated as
extraordinary. Even the production of formally correct speech can allow participants
to demonstrate their concern with achieving certain standards of talk, and offer
grounds for satisfaction. As well as such linguistic grounds, lack of shared sociocultural
competence may allow the relatively everyday to be treated as extraordinary:
in the next example, the fact that a large city bookshop accepts book tokens
becomes a cause for joint celebration in a way that would hardly seem possible in
the context of NS discourse. The outcome appears noteworthy precisely because the
NNS did not, and was not expected to, assume that it was routinely predictable:
(15) c": You DON'T accept book tokens here, do you
A: Yes, we do.
—> c": =Yes you do!
A: Oh, yes!
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990: Lod C-14; c" = non-native customer)
Such potential for "celebration of the ordinary" (Aston, 1988b) would seem to be a
specific resource of NNS discourse. Once again the absence of common ground is
paradoxically what provides participants with a common ground, in that they can
share attitudes toward the fact of its creation.
Negotiating Support: Exploiting Incompetence
NNS discourse also appears to offer particular resources for the negotiation of
support, which, I suggested earlier, is based upon participants' "knowing and caring
about" each other. Support, that is, implies that interlocutors are in some way
defined as specific individuals—as somes, not just anys. The fact that participants
in NNS discourse are not consociates may facilitate such a definition. The NNS'
observable lack of competence sets her apart from the category of consociates, who
can be presumed ordinarily competent other than in special circumstances (for
instance, following injury or temporary distraction). Known incompetence can thus
be a distinctive, individualizing feature that, by warranting support in the face of
inadequate performance (providing grounds for appeals for assistance to, and displays
of benevolent sympathy from, an interlocutor), can constitute an interactional
resource. Thus in the following bookshop example, the nonnative customer's admission
of sociocultural incompetence (first arrow) leads to the assistant's abandoning
his previous animosity and becoming much more helpful, proposing possible
locations for and then looking up the title in question in Books in print:

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 241
(16) c" Excuse me, um: a fr- friend of mine said she reserved a BOOK, in er Lovalts,
which is called "Story of the pendulum."
A =Well: - you've already been here haven't you. + T (Befo-)' 4
c" A Not at the-"* not at the THIS desk.
A =Well you asked the girl here. + 'Cos I was standing behind her when you
asked her.
1—» c" =Oh I'm T jusf* being getting lost probably.
A A Yeah."
A Yeah. + You've been to history
c" I have been everywhere.
A + Well- I haven't a clue, I mean you don't know what it's about
C" + Well- they are different stories- a T bout pendulums, yes."
A
A STOries. Well, it- 4 it should be in- in literature then, shouldn't it On: on the
ground floor
c" + I see-1 think she said it was FIRst floor. + Where I can-1 where- who can:
tell me-1 -1 mean I can BUY the book, but which- which depar- who can advise
me what T sort of-"* where can I look for it.
A: ±Er:.«
A: What's it called the: -
c": "Story of the pendulum."
A: ="Story of the pendulum." + Erm: well I MIGHT get some clue from the: er +
looking it up on the microfiche, on the other hand it might- if it just says "Story
of the pendulum," then: er: + you know, (you don't -) hh.
2—> c": =Okay, hh you are very kind.
(65)
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990: Lod B-12)
Incompetence may also give grounds for sharing attitudes supportively vis-a-vis the
discourse itself, by providing for the appreciable nature of one or other participant's
contributions. In the last example, the assistant's support for her incompetence is
made the focus of appreciation by the NNS customer (second arrow); incompetence
may similarly legitimate appreciation by the NS of the NNS' contributions to the
talk, along the lines of "You have got a beautiful pronunciation" in example 13
above.
In NS discourse, appreciable contributions tend to be nonroutine ones—that not
just anyone might have made. In NNS discourse, on the other hand, appreciable
contributions may also be routine, "ordinary" ones, that precisely because they
would be routine for consociates, can appear extraordinary where nonconsociates
are involved. What is little more than routine cooperation by a NS can justify a
NNS' effusive gratitude; NNS near-conformity to NS norms of speech can be
remarked upon and applauded. In this light we can perhaps understand the interactional
potential of self-repairs on linguistic form, for instance, noted by Tarone
(1980): competence in those who are expected to be incompetent is potentially a
praiseworthy accomplishment, a focus for the negotiation of support.
Personality Reduction and Expansion
I have suggested that the nonnative's status as an outsider with limited competence
may offer specific resources for the negotiation of solidarity and support in talk. If

242 Discourse Perspectives
this is the case, participants may have an interest in ensuring the activation of an
"NNS set" for the discourse, in order to make such resources available. However, to
take such a line is not without its problems: to assume the status of an incompetent
outsider can clearly appear equivalent to assuming a reduced personality, inviting at
worst dismissive scorn and at best unwelcome paternalism. In the talk that follows
example 16 above, for instance, the assistant at one point suggests that the book the
NNS customer needs might be a simplified reader for foreigners—a potentially
condescending suggestion that the NNS brusquely rejects:
(17) A (Hm.) + Well: - [laughs] Yeah. I don't know, you- you've been to the HIStory
department,
c" Mhm.
A And you've been to languages next door,
c" Well I- it was not a language book.
—> A Well okay, but 1 mean they have: um: simplified ENglish books there for
example. + They have: abridged: easy readers, + in that department,
c" But that was nothing to do with that.
A =It wasn't. Right. And have you tried the Literature department ON the ground
floor.
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990: Lod B-12)
There are, however, a series of potentially mitigating factors that seem relevant in
evaluating the NNS' role in such cases. First it seems worth nothing that the NNS
need not explicitly admit incompetence for an "NNS set" to be triggered. Goffman
(1983) notes that while customers in service encounters can pose their requests
immediately if these correspond to what the assistant can reasonably be expected to
have "in mind" (where the accessibility of the referent can be assumed), preparatory
work is called for where requests are predictably more problematic, with preliminary
greetings and apologies orienting the assistant to expect a nonroutine request.
To the nonnative speaker, for whom even a routine request may be intersubjectively
problematic, the use of such a preparatory strategy appears to offer a means of
avoiding the default assumptions of NS discourse, and NS acknowledgment of the
"marked" opening appears to signal the tacit instantiation of an "NNS set." Anderson
(1988a) found that in the PIXI corpus of English bookshop encounters, such
preparatory openings were acknowledged by assistants only when made by NNS
customers, as in the following example:
(18) c": Excuse me.
-» A: Yeah.
c": I'm looking for + this book "Residual and: infancy registration, + reGREssions."
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990: Lod B-05)
In this context the strategic use of such "marked" openings may thus be a way of
establishing the limited competence of the NNS tacitly, without explicit selfdenigration.
In any case, the explicit or implicit assumption of incompetent outsider status
needs to be assessed not just in terms of its immediate implications for the non-

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 243
native's face, but as a means to wider ends. It constitutes, on the one hand, an
avoidance strategy with respect to possible interactional trouble. By laying claim to
an initial face "lower" than that which is hoped for, learners reduce the risk of faceloss
with respect to too high a claim: they can fail acceptably, with less risk of
misunderstanding being heard as offense. On the other hand, by making available
the sort of interactional resources described above, it can constitute an achievement
strategy by opening up future opportunities for comity, for instance, by facilitating
the "celebration of the ordinary" and laying the basis of a "knowing and caring
about" that can be drawn on in negotiation of support later on in the encounter.
Shared History as an Interactional Resource
We must not forget that the construction of rapport takes place over time. It cannot
be treated as a one-off event, the result of a single instance of negotiation of
affective convergence, but is rather a progressive achievement. I suggested earlier
that comity involves sharing increasingly restricted attitudes, establishing increasingly
"uncommon" common ground and progressively greater intimacy. This process
involves participants in building up, and building off, a joint interactional
history. The importance of such history as a resource in talk was underlined by
Goffman:
In many of the conversations John has with others (whether with familiars or
unfamiliars), he will not merely fall back on what can generally be taken to be
shared, nor, indeed, will he merely tailor his references to the particular mind of
his particular hearer; rather he will be inclined to select from whatever he shares
with this other, just those topics that allow him to employ allusive phrases that
only the recipient would immediately understand. Thus, his talk will not so much
depend on common understanding as seek it out and then celebrate it. Indeed this
gives to ordinary verbal contacts a greater degree of exclusivity and mutual dovetailing
than one might otherwise expect—not only "recipient design," then, but
the celebration of what it implies. (Goffman 1983, 18)
Of the various ways in which prior talk and its outcomes can provide resources in
interactional speech, some seem particularly relevant to NNS discourse. For instance,
the use of irony, traditionally viewed as relatively inaccessible in NNS
discourse owing to the lack of intersubjective competence as a basis for allusion,
seems quite possible if allusion is instead made to features of the shared history of
the interactants. In the next example, again taken from the conversation analysed by
Recca (1988), the male NS makes a joking comment concerning the possible attitudes
of Anglo-Saxon women to rape (first arrow), which obtains appreciative
laughter from the NNS (she makes it clear that she appreciates the joke rather than
the sexism: second arrow):
(19) NS: So they chopped his head off, and they + took it away, and:
NNS: + Mh.
NS: and once more the: land was robbed, and: the houses were burnt, and: the
women were raped, and it was:
NNS: =Again.

244 Discourse Perspectives
1—» NS: Yeah. And the women said "when are you coming back," you know.
NNS: And ya T (/')' 4
NS: ^[laughs]"*
2-^> NNS: That is not very nice of you. [laughs] + Yeah.
NS: But there we are.
(Recca, 1988, 221)
When the topic of women's roles reappears later on in the conversation, the NNS is
able to ironically allude to her interlocutor's sexism as a known fact (arrows):
(10) NS: I used to be on the council in Walton. + And: we had a woman, a very intelligent
woman,
—* NNS: Oh:, how extraordinary.
NS: Oh:, terrible it is.
NNS: [laughs]
NNS: You know. + I like my women to be women, you know, T (), you know. ^
—> NNS: A Yeah, yeah, I know,"* you are very:
NS: Yeah.
1—» NNS: progressive, ^[laughs]*
NS:
A yeah."*
-» NNS: I understood this, [laughs]
(Recca, 1988, 253)
By alluding to an outcome established in prior talk, the NNS seems able to be ironic
here without assuming that a wider, more generic sociocultural background is
shared.
It may be noted that with her final "I understood this," the NNS makes it explicit
that her irony alludes to the prior talk. In the absence of the presumable common
ground and involvement implied by consociacy, there in fact appears to be a greater
need for participants in NNS discourse to make warrants for their attitudes
explicit—to cite grounds for solidarity and support. Such explicitness has the advantage
of also providing resources for further interactional speech. For instance,
participants' descriptions of their grounds for holding attitudes will often involve
disclosure of personal experiences, with the result that they become better known to
each other in a growing intimacy. And while the need to disclose relatively routine
experience may at times seem tedious for participants, who may feel obliged to
provide continuously what, in the terms of NS discourse, is trivial information
(Anderson, 1988b), we again need to bear in mind that this process contributes to
the accumulation of interactional resources on the basis of which rapport may
subsequently be developed further.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have attempted to outline some resources available for comity in
NNS discourse, arguing that these may not merely be a limited set of those available
in NS discourse. If this is the case, morals for both the descriptive and pedagogic
concerns of interlanguage pragmatics can be drawn. Descriptively, it supports the

Notes on the Interlanguage of Comity 245
argument that interlanguage pragmatics should operate with a difference hypothesis
rather than a deficit hypothesis (Faerch & Kasper, 1989, 246), and not simply
analyze NNS discourse in terms of failure to conform to NS conversational norms.
Pedagogically, it implies that the learner's task in developing an ability for interactional
speech using the L2 is not simply one of acquiring nativelike sociolinguistic
competence in the attempt to mimic the behavior of a native speaker, but requires
the development of an ability to use specific comity strategies appropriate to the
context of NNS discourse.
I have not attempted to provide a taxonomy of such strategies, merely to suggest
areas where resources may lie, given the constraints that seem relevant to interactional
goals from an inter-organism perspective. Certain possible maxims for the
pursuit of comity nonetheless appear to emerge: cite warrants for your attitudes;
admit incompetence; celebrate ordinary success; repair actual incompetence where
possible; appreciate benevolence; distance yourself from the stereotypes of your
culture. Just how such maxims can be effectively translated into specific comity
strategies in interactive discourse calls for considerably more detailed study. They
may, however, offer an initial framework for interpreting differences between NS
and NNS discourse from an inter-organism perspective in interactional terms (as
suggested by Aston, 1986b; Ehrlich et al., 1989), rather than in the purely transactional
ones generally employed.
The approach taken here, I would argue, also offers specific implications for
pedagogy. It suggests that we need to help learners (a) to appreciate that there are
differences in the bases for comity in NS and NNS discourse; (b) to view NNS
discourse not just in negative terms of limitation, but as providing characteristic
resources that can be exploited; (c) to investigate this potential by critically reflecting
on the strategies employed in samples of NS and NNS discourse and by experimenting
with the latter in "comity activities" where rapport is negotiated using the
L2 (Aston, 1986a, 1988a,b). It has often been stressed that attempts to get learners
to conform to NS practices only seem likely to succeed up to the point at which their
identity is not thereby put at risk (Thomas, 1983; Litlewood, 1983; Widdowson,
1984): hence the importance of also helping them develop comity strategies of their
own to establish satisfactory interpersonal relationships through the L2.
Notes
1. This is not, of course, to exclude the possibility that interactional speech can in some
cases take a conflictual form, as in the banter of reciprocal insult between close friends
(Slugowski & Turnbull, 1988). Such use is, however, typically keyed as nonserious (Goffman,
1974), and the importance of the harmony of the dance remains, as stressed for example
by Labov's work on ritual insults (1972).
2. For ease of discussion, I adopt a default view of conversation as dyadic in this paper.
3. This claim can be interpreted in terms of a lowering of what Krashen calls the
"affective filter," which, he argues, "is down when the acquirer [. . .] considers himself to be
a potential member of the group speaking the target language" (1985, 3-4).
4. An analogy can be drawn here with the emphasis in work on communication strategies
on achievement rather than avoidance strategies. A focus on achievement seems desirable

246 Discourse Perspectives
from a pedagogic perspective, since if comity is seen solely in terms of avoiding failure—of
limiting conflict—the task of learners becomes truly Herculean, as they are condemned to
wander a minefield of risk wherein they will inevitably always be less competent than a
native speaker. This is hardly a motivating prospect for the learner, or for the pedagogy,
whose role becomes that of trying to limit the extent of the social damage that the learner will
inevitably suffer. If on the other hand comity is approached in the positive terms of seeking
out opportunities for enhancing rapport—in particular those opportunities specifically offered
by NNS discourse—then the learner is offered chances of success, and also, I would argue,
the pedagogy.
5. Transcription conventions used in examples are those employed for the PIXI corpora
(Gavioli & Mansfield, 1990). Extracts from other sources have been retranscribed using the
same conventions.
+ short pause
(n)
longer pause (n seconds)
T texf* spoken in overlap with next speaker's A texf*
TT texf* < * spoken in overlap with next speaker's AA text**
= text latched to previous turn in transcript sequence
= =text latched to previous-but-one turn in transcript sequence
text - previous utterance broken off
text- previous syllable broken off
text:
previous syllable drawn out (number of colons indicates extent of lengthening)
. , ! give a rough guide to intonation
TEXT capitalization indicates marked emphasis
[comment] situational features or nonverbal behavior
(text) speech unclear: tentative transcription
(nsyll) speech unclear: n = approximate number of syllables
() speech unclear
Name speech altered to preserve anonymity is italicized
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
GUY ASTON is associate professor of English at the School for Interpreters and
Translators of the University of Bologna. In the 1980s he was coordinator of the
PIXI research project on the pragmatics of public service encounters in English and
Italian, and has since continued working on the acquisition of oral competence in a
second language, using conversational analytic methods of discourse description.
LESLIE M. BEEBE is professor of linguistics and education in the Applied
Linguistics and TESOL programs at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is
editor of Issues in Second Language Acquisition: Multiple Perspectives and coauthor
of English in the Cross-Cultural Era: The Social Rules of Speaking and
TESOL. She publishes widely in sociolinguistics and second language acquisition.
During 1990-1991, she served as president of the American Association for Applied
Linguistics.
MARC BERGMAN has taught English as a Foreign Language in such places as
Yemen, Holland, and Thailand since 1976. He is currently a lecturer in the ELT
Department of Thames Valley University (London), where he is assistant director of
the M.A. in English Language Teaching program. His research interests include
cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, ethnographic approaches to language
learning/teaching, and media discourse.
ELLEN BIALYSTOK is professor of psychology at York University in Toronto,
Canada. Her research is in cognitive development, language acquisition, and bilingualism.
Current research projects include investigating the development of children's
ability to use symbolic representation in the domains of language and number.
Recent books include Communication Strategies and Language and Processing
in Bilingual Children.
SHOSHANA BLUM-KULKA is associate professor in the departments of Communication
and Education at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where she teaches
courses in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language and education, and crosscultural
pragmatics. Her research is in cross-cultural pragmatics, interlanguage
pragmatics, and family discourse. She is co-author and co-editor of Cross-Cultural
Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies and of Interlingual and Intercultural Communication.
She is currently completing an extensive study of family discourse in
Israeli and American families.
JEAN BODMAN is president of the American Training Institute. She is a senior
consultant for the U.S.I.A. and has written numerous ESL And EEL textbooks.
251

252 About the Authors
MIRIAM EISENSTEIN is associate professor of English Education at New York
University. She is chair of the Second Language Acquisition Circle and author of
The Dynamic Interlanguage.
JULIANE HOUSE is professor of Applied Linguistics and head of the English
Language Program at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is author of A
Model for Translation Quality Assessment and co-editor of Interlingual and Intercultural
Communication and Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Her research interests include
translation theory, contrastive and interlanguage pragmatics, and misunderstandings
in everyday life.
GABRIELE KASPER is on the faculty of the M.A. in ESL and Ph.D. in Second
Language Acquisition programs at the University of Hawaii. Before she discovered
that she likes the tropics, she taught applied linguistics in Germany and Denmark.
Her research interests are cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, and psycholinguistic
aspects of second language learning and use.
ELITE OLSHTAIN is professor of Language Teaching at Tel Aviv University and
dean of the School of Education. In 1979 she established the M.A. in TEFL
program at Tel Aviv University. She teaches graduate courses in second language
acquisition, discourse analysis, course design and policy making, the structure of
English, and classroom-oriented research. Her research interests are in discourse
analysis, language attrition, factors affecting success in language acquisition, and
curriculum development. She had published articles in various professional journals
and anthologies and is co-author (with Fraida Dubin) of Facilitating Language
Learning, Reading by all Means, Reading on Purpose, and Course Design. She has
also been involved in various materials development projects.
RICHARD SCHMIDT teaches in the M.A. in ESL and Ph.D. in Second Language
Acquisition programs at the University of Hawaii. He has done research and teacher
training in Brazil, Egypt, Japan, Spain, and Thailand. His main research interests
are in the areas of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics and the intersection of the
two.
TOMOKO TAKAHASHI is associate professor of Languages and Cultures at Soka
University in Tokyo (currently at the Los Angeles campus). She has published in the
areas of second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. She
has also written a number of books and textbooks for Japanese learners of English.
LIORA WEINBACH is a teacher of Hebrew as a Second Language at Tel Aviv
University and coordinator of a government project for the development of materials
for the teaching of Hebrew in the (former) Soviet Union. She is co-author of The Art
of Discourse (in Hebrew) and a series of basic Hebrew-foreign language dictionaries
("2000+"). Her publications include textbooks for the teaching of Hebrew as a
Second Language, and a book on the methodology of academic writing. She is
currently researching inter-ethnic variation in the speech act of complaining within
Israeli society.

About the Authors 253
ELDA WEIZMAN is currently senior lecturer at the Bar-Han School for Translators
and Interpreters, and at the Hebrew Department of Ben Gurion University of the
Negev. Her publications include articles on the comparative analysis of journalistic
texts in English, French, and Hebrew, and its implications for translators and
learners; the nature of irony and hints, in a cross-cultural perspective; and the
interpretation (and misinterpretation) of indirect speakers' meanings in written and
oral discourse. She is currently engaged in a research project on discourse patterns
in news interviews, supported by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
JANE ZUENGLER is associate professor in the English Department, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses in second language acquisition and
conducts research on sociolinguistic aspects of second language use. She has conducted
research on accommodation theory and second language performance, and is
presently researching the influence of content domain on L2 conversational participation.
She has published articles in Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
Applied Linguistics, and anthologies on second language research.