LINGUIST List 15.768

Thu Mar 4 2004

Sum: Cross-Cultural Pragmatics; LFG Parser

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

Directory

  • Fay Wouk, Summary: Cross-cultural pragmatics
  • Petra Gieselmann, LFG Parser

    Message 1: Summary: Cross-cultural pragmatics

     Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 15:37:36 -0500 (EST)
    From: Fay Wouk <f.woukauckland.ac.nz>
    Subject: Summary: Cross-cultural pragmatics


    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.

    Message 2: LFG Parser

     Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 04:18:01 -0500 (EST)
    From: Petra Gieselmann <petraira.uka.de>
    Subject: LFG Parser


    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