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Edited by Konstanze Jungbluth, Cornelia Müller, Nicole Richter, Hartmut Schröder
Pragmatic approaches to languages in contrast: Expansion or recycling? Karin Ajmer (ed.). 2011. Contrastive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
1. General overview
2. Individual contributions
2.1. Modality and ENGAGEMENT in British and German political interviews
2.2. The intersubjective function of modal adverbs |
ways in each language. French identificatives imply an (unspecified) viewpoint other than the speaker’s and at the same time signal that the speaker distances themselves somewhat from that viewpoint. This latter characteristic is not shared by English identificatives; apart from that, in contrast to French identificatives, they suggest the addressee’s viewpoint as a basis. Modal adverbs also function within a language specific macro-organisation of discourse, with tense cooperating in the pragmatic function of modal adverbs in very different ways in both languages.
2.3. Intersubjective positioning in French and English
2.4. Challenges in contrast
2.5. Interruption in advanced learner French |
advanced L2 speakers of both languages. Guillot bases her qualitative categories of interruptions on Julia Goldberg’s (1990) type of schemes for interruptions. Of course, Goldberg, as well as most of the theoretical literature the author builds her study on, developed her model with Anglo-Saxon culture and English language as the default. Guillot’s references to English-French contrastive studies are restricted to two authors, neither of whom is Bert Peeters, whose seminal study of 2000 would have been an important point of reference for theory, and one of whom is only referred to with a 1993 article instead of her recent book (Béal 2010) which would have been very close to the topic. Consequently, the study lacks a convincing theoretical foundation and while the conclusions are interesting, the data, particularly in conjunction with the somewhat Anglocentric scheme used to categorise interruptions do not, in my opinion, fully support the interpretation given in the conclusions, that there is a tendency for L2 French subjects to orient to non-affiliative interruptive acts as acts of competition and conflict, as is stereotypically associated with native French, whereas L1 French subjects tend to orient to them as acts of cooperation in the build-up of argument (117).
2.6. Closeness and distance |
2.7. The nominative and infinitive in English and Dutch
3. Conclusion and points of criticism |
entirely sure that the benefit of this particular form of recycling for the reading public is immediately apparent. After all, the special issue mentioned continues to be available both in print and electronic forms. References Béal, Christine. 2010. Les interactions quotidiennes en français et en anglais: de l'approche comparative à l'analyse des situations interculturelles. Bern/New York: Peter Lang (Linguistic insights 99). Defrancq, Bart and Gert De Sutter. 2010. Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and English. A corpus-based contrastive analysis of the language internal and -external properties of English depend, French dépendre and Dutch afhangen, liggen and zien. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15(2): 183–213. House, Juliane. 1996. Contrastive discourse analysis and misunderstanding: The case of German and English. In Marlis Hellinger and Ulrich Ammon (eds.), Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 345–361. Martin, James R. and Peter R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Peeters, Bert. 2000. "S'engager" vs. "to show restraint": Linguistic and cultural relativity in discourse management. In: Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven (eds.), Evidence for Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science; 4), 193–222. Schneider, Klaus P. and Anne Barron (eds.). 2008. Variational Pragmatics. A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam /Philadelphia: Benjamins (Pragmatics & Beyond , n.s.; 178). Download: Heinz Leonhard Kretzenbacher: Review on Contrastive Pragmatics. 2011. In PRAGMATICS.REVIEWS 2013.1.1 |