LINGUIST List 15.768

Thu Mar 4 2004

Sum: Cross-Cultural Pragmatics; LFG Parser

Editor for this issue: Steve Moran <stevelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Fay Wouk, Summary: Cross-cultural pragmatics
2. Petra Gieselmann, LFG Parser

A few weeks ago I posted the following query (Linguist 15.329) about
cross-cultural variation in vagueness vs specificity of accounts.

I am interested in studies of the specificity or vagueness of accounts
given in support of other speech acts, such as apologies, requests, or
refusals. Bresnehan & Liao 1996 discuss this with respect to American
vs Taiwanese refusal strategies, and reference work by Takahashi &
Beebe. Is anyone aware of any other works that look at relative
frequency of specific vs vague accounts/explanations?

I received two responses.

Dr Simon Gieve suggested that one of the following papers might be
relevant

Le Pair, R. (1996) Spanish request strategies: a cross-cultural
analysis from an intercultural perspective. In: Jaszczolt, K. and
Turner, K., (Eds.) Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics: Vol 2 -
Discourse Strategies, pp. 651-670. Oxford: Elsevier]

Mir, M. (1992) Do we all apologise the same? An empirical study on the
act of apologising by Spanish speakers learning English. In: Bouton,
L.F. and Kachru, Y., (Eds.) Pragmatics and language learning, pp. ??
Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois]

Reiter, R.M. (1997) Sensitising Spanish learners of English to
cultural differences: the case of politeness. In: Putz, M., (Ed.)
pp. 143-156. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang ]

Walters, J. (1979) Strategies for requesting in Spanish and English -
structural similarities and pragmatic differences. Language Learning
9, 277-294.

C�sar F�lix-Brasdefer referred me to his 2002 dissertation from the
University of Minnesota, Refusals in Spanish and English: A
Cross-Cultural Study of Politeness Strategies among Speakers of
Mexican Spanish, American English, and American Learners of Spanish as
a Foreign Language.

I am grateful for these two responses, but would still like to hear
from anyone else who knows of additional references. If I receive more
responses, I will post another summary.

Dear all,

I posted a question on freely available LFG parsers (Linguist 15.639)
and got the following responses from the list members - thanks to all
the people who answered my question!

A general overview of LFG:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/

A list of LFG systems:
http://montague.stanford.edu/lfg/www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/LFG/systems/

An LFG grammar development toolkit:
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~aac/lkb.html

and a review on it:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2409.html


Thanks,
Petra Gieselmann