Bringing together the latest studies on Japanese pragmatics, this edited volume showcases the breadth of research conducted in this ever-expanding, interdisciplinary field, with the introductory chapter providing a useful summary of developments in the field in the past decades. The twelve chapters address a variety of traditional and emerging topics by adopting diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks and presenting a range of perspectives on grammar, interaction and culture. They demonstrate a wide scope of pragmatics research informed by, as well as informing, usage-based grammar, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. Chapters also consider future directions as to how the study of Japanese language in use will continue to offer critical data and analyses to the field dominated by the study of English and other European languages. This volume is certain to be of interest to students and scholars engaged in pragmatics in general and the Japanese language in particular.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language. The book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by eight empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. They target selected features of Japanese pragmatics and investigate the learners' use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence. The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, sentence final particles, speech acts of various types, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics (linguistic forms available to perform language functions) and sociopragmatics (norms that determine appropriate use of the forms) in Japanese. By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. The last section presents a critical reflection on the eight empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research.

With a focus on intercultural communication between Japanese and Americans, this book describes how differing listening styles and conversational behaviours across cultures can negatively influence intercultural communication. Responding to the many calls for studies examining the teachability of listener responses in the language classroom, the author investigates whether listener responses would be a suitable target for instruction in the EFL/ESL classroom, and, if so, what instructional methods are best suited to teaching this elusive aspect of pragmatic competence. By addressing these issues, this book provides exciting and novel insights into various aspects of applied linguistics. By supplementing language data and questionnaires with retrospective and longitudinal research techniques, the author is able to present a much richer description and deeper understanding of how and why participants used listener responses in the manner they did. With the findings supporting an explicit approach to teaching listener responses, this book provides language practitioners with a direction in which to move forward. Beyond this practical application, this study sheds new light into such theoretical debates as the role of consciousness in language teaching (the Explicit vs. Implicit debate), the universality of Grice’s theory of conversation and the potentially differing conceptualisations of politeness across cultures.

Most of the innovative and exciting work done by East Asian pragmaticians on their languages, past and present alike, is written and published in local languages. As a result, research published in and about a particular East Asian language has been largely unavailable to those who do not speak the language. The contributors seek to present a comprehensive survey of existing outputs of pragmatics research on three major East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). The survey concentrates on a number of core pragmatic topics such as speech acts, deixis, discourse markers, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and face/(im)politeness. To complement and compare with the picture of research work published in the local languages, the volume also includes a survey of internationally published, English-mediated articles and books studying the regional languages or contrasting them with other languages. A rivetting discourse on pragmatics research, it will be a valuable read for students and scholars alike.

This book showcases new and innovative developments and approaches in pragmatics, spotlighting perspectives from an international range of emerging scholars undertaking cutting-edge research pushing the field in new directions. The volume begins by taking stock of the most up-to-date developments in pragmatics research, as embodied by the work of a newer generation of pragmaticists. Chapters are organized around key areas of development within pragmatics, including intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, and new perspectives on referencing, implicating, and inferring, shedding further light on the ways in which pragmatics increasingly interfaces with other linguistic disciplines and on innovative methodologies. The book also places the focus on pragmatics approaches in languages other than than English, further expanding the borders of research. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in pragmatics interested in staying on top of the latest developments and future directions for the field.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of a wide range of developmental and clinical issues in pragmatics. Principally, the contributions to this volume deal with pragmatic competence in a native language, in a second or foreign language, and in a selection of language disorders. The topics which are covered explore questions of production and comprehension on the utterance and discourse level. Topics addressed concern the acquisition and learning, teaching and testing, assessment and treatment of various aspects of pragmatic ability, knowledge and use. These include, for example, the acquisition and development of speech acts, implicatures, irony, story-telling and interactional competence. Phenomena such as pragmatic awareness and pragmatic transfer are also addressed. The disorders considered include clinical conditions pertaining to children and to adults. Specifically, these are, among others, autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.

An understanding of sociocultural context is crucial in second language learning – yet developing this awareness often poses a real challenge to the typical language learner. This book is a practical language teachers’ guide that focuses on how to teach socially and culturally appropriate language for effective communication. Moving beyond a purely theoretical approach to pragmatics, the volume offers practical advice to teachers, with hands-on classroom tasks included in every chapter. Readers will be able to: · Identify possible causes of learner errors and choices in cross-cultural communication · Understand second language acquisition theories that support their classroom practices · Develop a pragmatics-focused instructional component, classroom-based assessments, and curricula · Help learners to become more strategic about their learning and performance of speech acts · Incorporate technology into their approach to teaching pragmatics This book aims to close the gap between what research in pragmatics has found and how language is generally taught today. It will be of interest to all language teachers, graduate students in language teaching and linguistics, teacher educators, and developers of materials for teaching language.

The first book-length collection of studies on the assessment of pragmatic competencies in a second or foreign language. Grounded in theoretical perspectives on communicative and interactional competencies, it examines the reception and production of speech acts through a variety of assessment methods and quantitative and qualitative analyses.

This book explores second language pragmatic development with a specific focus on two areas: classroom-based pragmatic instruction in the study abroad context, and using technology for developing and assessing pragmatic competence. Teaching Pragmatics and Instructed Second Language Learning directly compares the effects of technology platforms and traditional paper-based tasks within the second language environment for developing pragmatic competence. These analyses are based on empirical research of how undergraduate Chinese learners of English receive explicit instruction in classrooms using different training materials. The book makes an original and innovative contribution to collecting oral speech act data in the form of computer-animated production tasks (CAPT) designed to enhance learner engagement and performance. Using this tool, it explores the beneficial role of technology in teaching and learning, offering practitioners and researchers practical ways to maximise second language pragmatic development in the classroom.