LINGUIST List 4.465

Tue 15 Jun 1993

Qs: Turkish, Crosscultural Pragmatics, Finnish

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Turkish
2. , Request for Crosscultural pragmatics - Japanese
3. Steven Schaufele, Query: Finnish dictionary

This request is on behalf of a colleague of mine who does not have acess
to the linguistlist. We would be grateful for any information concerning :

a) the existence of extensive classes in the Turkish language or Turkish
 linguistics during the summer or the acdemic year, in the US, Canada or
abroad
b) Those scholars, professors or students, who conduct or have conducted
 major research on the linguistics (in any framework) of the Turkish or
 related languages.
c) Bibliographic references for linguistic research on Turkish or related
languages in any theoretical framework.

If there is sufficient interest, I will summarize the results for the list.

Pierre Pica (UQAM & MIT)
e-mail : r31264uqam.bitnet or (if there is nay difficulties with this
adress after august 1st) ppicaathena.mit.edu

I am a doctoral candidate about to begin my dissertation
proposal. I am looking to have people respond to anew methodology
that I will propose for studying the role of context
in the way Japanese Americans construct refusals. I am interested
in finding out how these refusals in Japanese vary according to
their social relationships with their interlocutors. I will be
interested in observing only those Japanese Americans who are
fluent in Japanese.

In the past, Beebee and Takahashi used hypothetical situations in
for which participants could not use contextual clues in
structuring their responses. The lack of a natural setting for
eliciting these data provides little evidence of the participants
ability to select relevant information to include in their
responses. For this reason, I want to select two participants who
share the same relationships with a common set of acquaintances
in order to see how the participants spontaneously use their
knowledge of relevant details. Sperber and Wilson (1986) define
context as a list of premises about the information of the
immediate environment. knowledge about the world, culture,
values, beliefs, and memories. In their theory called, "Principle
of Relevance", they consider that speakers and hearers
cognitively process to select the most relevant information in
the specific situation and relationship. I believe that this
ability to figure out the relevant information is important to
refuse appropriately in specific contexts.

I am interested in finding out whether the study of two
participants is sufficient number of participants to document the
relevance of context. My more quantitatively-oriented professors
would probably insist on more participants. However, I had in
mind a case study approach using only two people who had a number
of common acquaintances. I would involve their common
acquaintances in making requests to which my participants would
respond. Of course, the request would vary in degree of how much
politeness is needed to refuse (eg.inconvenience and magnitude of
effort, social relationship: familiarity, solidarity, power,
etc.)

Please send references to me or if you have comments on helping
improve my design, I would appreciate them as soon as possible. I
plan on defending my proposal in September.

Nobuko Kodama
Kodamanacf.nyu.edu
or write to me at: New York University, 239 Greene Street, 635
East Bldg., New York, NY. 10003

Does anybody out there know of a good Finnish-English dictionary and how i
can get one? The best i've been able to find is a little Berlitz pocket
dictionary with 12500 'concepts', and what i'd like is something of the
quality of Cassell's.
------
Dr. Steven Schaufele c/o Department of Linguistics
712 West Washington Ave. University of Illinois
Urbana, IL 61801 4088 Foreign Languages Building
 707 South Mathews Street
217-344-8240 Urbana, IL 61801
fcoswsux1.cso.uiuc.edu