| Pragmatics is the study of how speakers use language that is appropriate for the context of the interaction, and that accomplishes speakers' communicative goals. In applied linguistics, language use has been investigated from a pragmatics perspective in two major ways: by examining how people use a selected set of speech acts (e.g., Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989), and by examining how speakers use a particular linguistic feature or set of features hypothesized to contribute to pragmatic meaning (e.g., Aijmer, 1996; He, 1998). These studies have involved the analysis of predetermined variables that, so far, have yielded interesting yet limited findings.; The current study investigated a range of pragmatic functions used in naturally-occurring conversations while simultaneously analyzing the use of linguistic features hypothesized to contribute to pragmatic meaning. Native English speakers realizations of pragmatic acts in academic conversations was analyzed from a corpus of academic spoken language (45,000 words). Four subproblems were investigated. The first subproblem dealt with the development of a taxonomy that would be useable for pragmatic analysis in academic contexts. The taxonomy was supported by inter-rater agreement with Kappa correlations between the researcher and the raters ranging from .75 to .92.; The second subproblem explored differences in the use of pragmatic utterances within the contextual variables of situation type (i.e., office hours, service encounters, study groups), speaker role (i.e., student, professor, service provider), and speaker sex. The third subproblem investigated the variability in lexical and grammatical features and utterance length in the realization of pragmatic utterances. Lexical features included stance markers such as modals, hedges, and amplifiers. Grammatical features included syntactic structure and agency. The final subproblem looked at the intersection of linguistic realizations and speaker/register differences.; Results of this study include a fuller range of pragmatic acts classified into a taxonomy of pragmatic functions. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus samples revealed that native speakers demonstrated great variability in the types of pragmatic functions they used in different situations, and variability in lexical and grammatical patterns in the realizations of different pragmatic functions. Examples of how native speakers communicate pragmatically are included with the results. |
