Читать книгу Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA - Salvatore Attardo - Страница 37

Every speech act has a set of realization patterns, that is, all the ways a given speech act may be produced. For requests, that set may include the following, among others:

(11) Could you open the window?

I wonder if you could open the window?

Open the window, please.

The actual realizations of speech acts differ across cultures. People request and apologize differently, depending on the culture in which they operate. Needless to say, variation on a cultural basis is not the only type of variability displayed by speech acts. There is also individual variation, that is, a given person may apologize more or less or differently than someone else, while still sharing broad cultural patterns. Another kind of variation is situational: one is more or less likely to apologize to a person depending on the relationship with that person.

Cross-cultural variation in speech act realization patterns can create serious cross-cultural problems, even though speakers may be producing grammatically correct sentences. For example, bald imperatives (e.g., pass the salt) are acceptable between intimates in Polish (Wierzbicka, 1985) and Italian, but not in American English, where they may be perceived as rude. We look in detail at the SLA and TESOL applications of cross-cultural speech act differences later in this chapter.