This dissertation explores, by means of an empirical investigation based on a bi-directional approach to learner's interlanguage, whether second language learner groups of typologically different languages acquire the respective target language sociopragmatic rules in realizing a speech act of compliment responses, at both levels of compliment response type and semantic formula. As the means to deepen this investigation, several contextual and psychological variables, such as social distance and relative power between the interlocutors, cognitive consistency, and attribution of compliments, as well as leamer's learning backgrounds and gender, were integrally studied in relation to pragmatic transfer. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of data collected by an oral discourse completion test and verbal reports from two second language learner groups (i.e., Japanese learners of English and American learners of Japanese) and two native speaker groups (i.e., native speakers of Japanese and native speakers of American English) revealed that Japanese learners of English have less difficulty in learning target language cultural patterns in compliment responses than American learners of Japanese, and that 'normal' transfer and reverse transfer occur in inverse directions. The study proposes a consistent explanation for these bi-directional effects of pragmatic transfer under the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman, 1977): the former occurs from unmarked to marked, while the latter from marked to unmarked. The dissertation also identifies (a) specific situational and psychological conditions inducing negative pragmatic transfer, (b) the roles of transfer of training and overgeneralization, as well as negative transfer, in formulating the pragmatic aspect of interlanguage, and (c) common gender differences in two groups of native speakers, which second language learners neither bring over from first language to interlanguage nor master in second language acquisition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:406789 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Shimuzu, Takafumi |
| Publisher | Birkbeck (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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