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Preface

This book started out as a series of guest lectures that Attardo delivered in Pickering’s Pragmatics and SLA class on Grice, speech-act theory, and presuppositions. We had both taught separately courses on pragmatics, Pickering on the SLA and TESOL connections, Attardo on “Theoretical Pragmatics.” Since we were both unhappy with the options for textbooks at the graduate level, besides the venerable Levinson (1983), now almost 40 years old, we started talking about turning the lectures into a book that would be both an introduction to pragmatics and a book about its applications to SLA and TESOL.

For obvious pedagogical reasons, the discussion of theoretical pragmatics precedes its applications to SLA/TESOL. However, we want to be very clear that the book was built exactly the other way around: we started from the applications to SLA/TESOL and then proceeded to determine exactly what the students needed to know about the theory in order to understand the discussion of the SLA/TESOL applications of pragmatics.

This decision comes from years of experience teaching these materials in courses structured like this book. Many of the students who need to understand the applications of pragmatics to SLA/TESOL struggle to read the original contributions. Hence the choice of keeping theory to a minimum and keeping the level of the exposition as simple and straightforward as possible.

Related to this was the choice of coverage: we chose to focus on topics which have direct relevance to SLA/TESOL teachers, and of course the materials they need to understand those topics. Another issue was selection: any book of this size, roughly the 15 week US academic semester reading size, requires serious, painful decisions on what to leave in and what to take out. Here our diametrically opposed attitudes served us well: Pickering’s restraint provided an effective counterbalance to Attardo’s “shiny moving object” expansive approach.

Our treatment of pragmatic theory is both more comprehensive and more in depth than similar books about pragmatics and SLA/TESOL. This is a principled choice. We strongly believe that repeating decontextualized formulations of various parts of pragmatic theories, such as Grice’s principle of cooperation (often reduced to its maxims), for example, or of the assumption of rationality in Brown and Levinson’s politeness, leads to oversimplification and to missing, if not quite the actual meaning of the theories, at least significant nuances. It is necessary to understand the milieu in which ideas are proposed, what were the scholars who proposed the theories reacting to, why certain ideas prosper and others do not.

In order to enable students to do effective and informed research on the applications of pragmatics to SLA/TESOL they need to understand where pragmatics is coming from and in what direction it is moving, that is, what the future trends are.

This is mirrored in the organization of the text. We begin with an initial chapter on semantics which introduces the basic concepts underlying the idea of meaning as a necessary first step to understanding the history and field of pragmatics, specifically the influence of context on the determination of meaning. These concepts may be more or less familiar to students in a pragmatics class depending on their prior background in linguistics.

Chapter 2 grounds the text very specifically in SLA/TESOL concerns and the audience who inspired this text. It is organized around a series of questions that we have been consistently asked regarding pragmatics and SLA/TESOL over our 20+ year history of teaching this class, and it sets the stage for the remaining chapters that address each issue in more depth. Chapters 3–8 focus on traditional areas of pragmatics. Chapters 3–5 survey speech act theory from its origins in ordinary language philosophy to its development into neo-Gricean pragmatics and rationality-based politeness theories. In Chapters 6–8, we turn to the ways in which contextual information is reflected in discourse ranging from information structure, to social and interactional information. Each of these chapters follows the same organizational structure and begins with a presentation of the theoretical concepts followed by applications to SLA/TESOL and finishes with sample teaching materials to exemplify how these concepts might be introduced in a TESOL classroom. In Chapter 9, we recognize that graduate pragmatics seminars often highlight a student research component as a proposal for a study or a discussion of a replication study. The chapter outlines the typical data collection techniques and research designs that are used in studies that comprise the intercultural, TESOL/SLA-based literature. The final two chapters discuss more recent developments in pragmatics including metapragmatics and some of the cutting edge work such as neuropragmatics and the role of pragmatics in human–computer interactions.

A note on the sources of our examples. We have used a variety of sources: (1) the Godfrey et al. 1992 “Switchboard” corpus. These are quoted by providing the file from the corpus in which the utterance can be found. If we are quoting a single turn, we provide the speaker identification and the turn number in the reference. If we are quoting two or more turns, we provide the speaker identification and turn number before each turn. (2) Invented examples, when useful and when the claim made is not particularly controversial or does not involve features that are below the threshold of consciousness of the speakers.¹ (3) Examples quoted in various sources (generally in a simplified notation, when it was not pertinent to the point being exemplified).

We are aware of the strong preference in some circles for using only naturally occurring data, but the problem with naturally occurring data is that they often need extensive contextualization to be understood and thus appear confusing to the reader. Moreover, they are “messy” as can be seen from looking at any transcription of naturally occurring data. The transcriptions are not always standardized and they impose an extra step to the reader. The pedagogical goal of this text being paramount, we decided to simplify the transcription of the sources, if necessary.

We would like to thank the following people for helping and/or providing us with offprints of their work: Nabiha El Khatib, Nancy Bell, Lachlan Mackenzie, Shigehito Menjo, Salvador Pons Bordería, Francisco Yus, the interlibrary loan staff, and the students who have taken various versions of the Pragmatics and SLA course we taught jointly at TAMUC in the past 10 years, and especially the students in the Spring 2020 version of the course who provided us with invaluable feedback on a draft of the manuscript.

Salvatore Attardo and Lucy Pickering

The Middle of Nowhere Ranch, near Lone Oak, TX

Notes

1 1. Constructed examples have the advantage of being more context-independent and hence more easily grasped, precisely because they are planned to be so. Furthermore, for the same reason, they are more focused on the feature being demonstrated. Finally, they must be realistic: that is, pass an acceptability test in the audience, much like literary texts.