Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Hamburg, 2001. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-288). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests according to situation, language, age, and hearer variables, and the level of consistency between the child interview results and the validation results. Semi-structured individual interviews with child participants were used as the major method for data collection. Naturalistic school and home observations, interviews with parents and teachers of the children, audio and video recordings, and field notes were also included to validate and triangulate the child interview data, which were coded and analyzed using a modified version of the CCSARP coding scheme and an excellent level of intercoder reliability was reached.Results indicate that overall: (1) requests made under rights-protecting situations seem to be more direct and reasonableness-based than those made under favor-asking situations, (2) Chinese requests appear to be more direct and elaborate than English requests, (3) older children are more likely than younger children to frame direct, brief, and tactful requests, (4) child hearers are more likely than adult hearers to receive direct requests, and (5) for an individual child, the child interview and validation findings appear to be compatible, except that consistency is low regarding requests given to classmates. The results lend strong support to the claim that language use can be highly context-specific as can the request performance of children. This study may bring new insights into understanding the complexity of Chinese children's requests, thus sensitizing educators and parents to the significance of pragmatic competence in Chinese children's earlier development of language, whether Chinese or English, and helping them provide instructions that better suit children's pragmatic development and ability.

Whereas some researchers claim that the holistic processing of the right hemisphere is essential for contextual integration in language pragmatics (Myers, 2001, Myers, 2005), results of other studies point to involvement of executive processes of the frontal lobes (McDonald & Pearce, 1998; Bernicot & Dardier, 2001). This study examined the role of frontal lobes in language pragmatics by testing performance of young adults and older adults on selected standardized pragmatic inferences called 'implicitures'. Implicitures were first presented free-standing and then embedded in contexts that either supported (enabling contexts) or cancelled (cancelling contexts) their preferred meaning. First, implicitures were examined using behavioral reaction time measures in young adults. The second part of the project addressed the question about involvement of frontal lobes in language pragmatics by testing older adults with varying degrees of frontal function on processing of implicitures. Finally, event-related potential responses to implicitures with and without context in young adults were explored. Results revealed a strong relationship between frontal lobes and performance on implicitures in canceling contexts in older adults. There was no significant effect for free-standing implicitures and implicitures presented in enabling contexts. In addition, an N400 was observed to free-standing implicitures, but implicitures in context elicited a negative component in the later 400 ms window at the anterior sites. These results indicate that frontal lobes are important for pragmatic processing requiring integration of linguistic context with an utterance for the correct interpretation. Consequences of our findings for models of impliciture processing and accounts of neural architecture underlying language pragmatics are considered.

No description available.

The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of ninety requestive emails written to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies on interlanguage pragmatics have been comparative. These studies focused on how nonnative speakers’ pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native speakers’ and compared learners with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to native speakers. In addition, the few existing literature on developmental pragmatics have used elicited. Naturally occurring data, in the form of emails, offer a more valid reflection of learners’ pragmatic competence. This study adopted speech event analysis approach, which seeks to account for all parts of requestive emails and recognize the “work” each part does in the production of the speech event. Results indicated that although quantitative analysis did not indicate much pragmatic development, content analysis revealed learners’ development of pragmatic competence such as showing ability, clearer requests and relevant supportive moves and improvement from a reason then request to request then reason structure. This study elucidated the merits of analyzing natural data in interlanguage pragmatics as well as offered the benefit of recognizing email requests as a situated event.

Hungarian 'focus position' is typically thought of as a central example of a 'discourse configurational' phenomenon, since it not only involves the expression of information-structural (or 'discourse semantic') meaning through the manipulation of word order but also interacts syntactically with other elements of the sentence. In this thesis, I argue that this kind of phenomenon highlights fundamental theoretical problems with conventional assumptions about the relationships between linguistic form and different kinds of meaning and demonstrate that these problems have led to empirical inadequacies in the syntactic analysis of Hungarian. I propose an alternative analysis that makes use of a dynamic, incremental parsing-based approach to grammar, which in turn allows for the influence of inferential pragmatic operations (investigated in terms of Relevance Theory) at all stages in the process of interpreting linguistic form. This opens up possibilities of structural and interpretive underspecification that allow for the interpretation of the 'focus position' to be unified with the information-structural interpretation of sentences that do not contain a syntactically focused expression. This analysis explains the interaction of syntactic foci with other pre-verbal items. The burden of explanation is thus shifted away from specialised, abstract syntactic representations and onto independently necessary aspects of cognitive organisation. The use of 'discourse semantic' primitives---whether in terms of focus or exhaustivity---to encode the effects of the 'focus position' is shown to be both theoretically problematic and empirically inadequate. The information-structural meanings associated with the position must be viewed not as the input to interpretive processes but instead as the result of inferential processes performed in context. Reanalysis of the syntactic evidence shows the relevant position to be not merely pre-verbal, but underlyingly pre-tense, showing that the unmarked position of the main verb is essentially the same as that of syntactically focused expressions. This leads to an analysis whereby both 'neutral', topic-comment readings and cases of narrow focus emerge from inferences over a common interpretive procedure. This procedure is identified as 'main predication': the point in the parsing of a sentence at which the application of a single predicate effects the conversion of a mere description of an event into a truth-conditional assertion. Main predication is represented using neo-Davidsonian, event-based semantics (the effect of the main predicate being equivalent to that of the application of an existential quantifier over an event variable in the neo-Davidsonian approach) and made dynamic by the use of the epsilon calculus. This analysis predicts the postposing of any (otherwise pre-tense) 'verbal modifier' (VM) in the presence of a syntactic focus and the apparent information-structural ambiguity of VMs when they are pre-tense. Certain constraints on the distribution of quantifiers are also predicted, one such constraint being adequately characterisable only within a semantically underspecified, procedural account. The behaviour of the negative particle "nem" is also given a maximally simple explanation. The apparently variable scope of the negative operator is explicable without ad hoc syntactic mechanisms: the apparent wide scope reading associated with 'sentential' negation follows inferentially from narrow scope negation of temporal information. The syntactic positions of negation are predictable on this basis. In addition, the assumption of consistent narrow scope negation correctly predicts that VMs must postpose or receive a narrow focus reading in the presence of "nem".

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-234). / Microfiche. / xvii, 234 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 362-383).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-250).