Discourse and culture in pragmatics study

DISCOURSE AND CULTURE

Discourse Analysis

It covers an extremely wide range of activities, from the narrowly focused investigation of how words such as ‘oh’ or ‘well’ are used in casual talk, to the study of dominant ideology in a culture as represented, for example in its educational or political practices.

However, within the study of discourse, the pragmatic discourse is more specialized. It tends to focus specifically on aspects of what is unsaid or unwritten (yet communicated) within the discourse being analyzed. It also pays much more attention to psychological concepts such as background knowledge, beliefs, and expectations.

Coherence

What language users have most in mind in an assumption of coherence, that what is said or written will make sense in terms of their normal experience things.

For example:

a.       Plant sale (means that someone is selling plants)

b.      Garage sale (does not mean that someone is selling garages)

Although these notice have an identical structure, they are interpreted differently. Indeed, the interpretation of (1b), that someone is selling household items from their garage, is one that requires some familiarity with suburban life.

The emphasis on familiarity and knowledge as the basis of coherence is necessary because of evidence that we tend to make instant interpretations of familiar material and tend not to see possible alternatives.

For example: how many animals of each type did Moses take on the Ark?

If you immediately thought of ‘two’, then you accessed some common cultural knowledge, perhaps even without noticing that the name used (Moses) was inappropriate. We actually create a coherent interpretation for a text that potentially does t have it.

We are also unlikely to stop and puzzle over ‘a male and a female (what?)’ as we read about the accidedient reported in the example below;

A motor vehicle accident was reported in front of Kennedy Theatre involving a male and a female.

We automatically ‘fill in’ details (for example, a male person driving one of the motor vehicles) to create coherence. We also construct familiar scenarios in order to make sense of what might first appear to be odd events, as in the newspaper headline in the example below;

Man robs Hotel with Sandwich

The sandwich  (perhaps in a bag) being used as if it was a gun, than you activated the kind of background knowledge expected by the writer (as confirmed by the rest of the newspaper article) or it can be interpreted (the man was eating the sandwich while robbing the Hotel). Whatever it was, it was inevitability based on what you had in mind and not only on what was in the ‘text’ in that example.

Background Knowledge

Our ability to arrive automatically at interpretations of the unwritten or unsaid must be based on pre-existing knowledge structures. These structures function like familiar patterns from previous experience that we use to interpret new experiences. The most general term for a pattern of this type is a schema (plural, schemata). A schema is a pre-existing knowledge structure in memory.

If there is a fixed, static pattern to the schema, it is sometimes called a frame. A frame shared by everyone within a social group would be something like a prototypical version.

For example:

Apartment for rent. $ 500. 763-6683

A normal (local) interpretation of the small fragment of discourse example will be based on not only an ‘apartment’ frame of the basis of inference (if X is an apartment, then X has a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom), but also an ‘apartment from rent advertisement frame. Only on the basis of such a frame can the advertiser expect the reader to fill in ‘per month’ and not ‘per year’ after ‘$500’ here. If the reader expects that it would be ‘per week’, for example, then the reader clearly has a different frame (i.e. based on a different experience of the cost of apartment rental!). the pragmatic point will nevertheless be the same: the reader uses a pre-existing knowledge structure to create an interpretation of what is not stated in the text.

A script is a pre-existing knowledge structure involving event sequences. We use scripts to build interpretations of accounts of what happened.

For example:

I stopped to get groceries but there weren’t any baskets left so by the time I arrived at the check-out counter I must have looked like a juggler having a bad day.

Part of this speaker’s normal script for ‘getting groceries’ obviously involves having a basket and going to the check-out counter. Everything else that happened in this event sequence is assumed to be shared background knowledge (for example; she went through a door to get inside the store and she walked around picking up items from shelves).

The concept of a script is simply a way of recognizing some expected sequence of actions in an event. Because most of the details of a script are assumed to be known, they are unlikely to be started. For members of the same cultures, the assumption of shared scripts allows much to be communicated that is not said. However, for members of different cultures, such an assumption can lead to a great deal of miscommunication.

Cultural Schemata

We develop our cultural schemata in the contexts of our basic experiences.

For some obvious differences (for example; cushions instead of chairs), we can readily modify the details of a cultural schema. For many other subtle differences, however, we often don’t recognize that there may be a misinterpretation based on different schemata. In one reported example, an Australian factory supervisor clearly assumed that other factory workers would know that Easter was close and hence they would all have a holiday. He asked another worker, originally from Vietnam, about her plans

For example;

You have five days off. What are you going to do?

The Vietnamese worker immediately interpreted the utterance in terms of being laid off (rather than having a holiday). Something good in one person’s schema can sound like something bad in another’s.

Cross Cultural Pragmatics

The study of differences in expectations based on cultural schemata is part of a broad area of investigation generally known as cross-cultural pragmatics. To look at the ways in which meaning is constructed by speakers from different cultures will actually require a complete reassessment of virtually everything we have considered so far in this survey. The concepts and terminology may provide a basic analytic framework, but the realization of those concepts may differ substantially from the English language examples presented here.

What we reviewed the cooperatives principles and the maxims, we assumed some kind of general middle-class Anglo-American cultural background. What if we assumed a cultural preference for not saying what you know to be case in many situations? Such a preference is reported in many cultures and would clearly require a different approach to the relationship between the maxims of quality and quantity in a more comprehensive pragmatics.

When we considered turn-taking mechanism, we didn’t explore the powerful role of silence within the normal conversational practices of many cultures. Nor did we include the discussion of a socially prescribed ‘right to talk’ which, in many cultures, is recognized as the structural basis of how interaction proceeds.

When we explored types of speech acts, we didn’t include any observations on the substantial differences that can exist cross-culturally in interpreting concepts like ‘complimenting’, ‘thanking’, or ‘apologizing’. The typical American English style of complementing creates great embracement for some Native American Indian Receivers (it’s perceived as excessive). Indeed, it’s unlikely that the division one cultural group makes between any two social actions such as ‘thanking’ or ‘apologizing’ will be matched precisely within another culture.

The study of these different cultural ways of speaking is sometime is called contrastive pragmatics. When the investigation focuses more specifically on the communicative behavior of non-native speakers, attempting to communicate in their second language, it is described as interlanguage pragmatics. Such studies increasingly reveal that we all speak with what might be called a pragmatic accent, that is, aspects of our talk that indicate what we assumed is communicated without being said.

If we have any hope at all of developing the capacity for cross-cultural communication, we will have to devote a lot more attention to an understanding of what characterizes pragmatic accent, not only in others, but in our selves.