English linguistic - prof.ssa Zanfei PDF

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ENGLISH LINGUISTICS FOR TOURISM AND COMMERCE AND ESPIn the years following World War II, the central focus of ESP research was English for science and technology (EST) in academic contexts. During the 1980s, research was devoted to teacher training, Vocational ESP, interlanguage, and training of int...

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ENGLISH LINGUISTICS FOR TOURISM AND COMMERCE AND ESP In the years following World War II, the central focus of ESP research was English for science and technology (EST) in academic contexts. During the 1980s, research was devoted to teacher training, Vocational ESP, interlanguage, and training of international teaching assistants. In the modern period, genre and corpus linguistics studies took the center stage. The present of ESP may be summarized as follows: variety, in topics, methodologies, rhetoric, and writer's stance and attitude; context, the specific contexts of businesses and online media, multimodality. English for commerce and tourism is a branch of study pertaining to ESP. English for specific purposes is the study of English related to or designed for specific disciplines and professional communication. ESP is centered on language (tense and aspect, lexis, register), discourse and genre appropriate to these activities. ESP looks at the language in real situations and therefore its functional and pragmatic aspects. English for specific purposes is a specialized language and therefore it is different from General English because it is linked to specific contexts. Some terms from GE acquire a specific meaning in the context of commerce or tourism. Examples: Operator and tour operator, agent and travel agent. Payoff meaning in finance and in marketing: Your payoff amount is how much you will actually have to pay to satisfy the terms of your mortgage loan and completely pay off your debt. A payoff is a variant of a branding slogan typically used in marketing materials and advertising. The idea behind the concept is to create a memorable phrase that will sum up the tone and premise of a brand or product (like a film), or to reinforce the audience's memory of a product. Linguistic features of Business English: Acronyms. Example: B/E (bill of exchange) Forecasting: assessing likelihood about future trends and future planning and probabilities Polite informal language (workplace emails, customer service) Formal language (register) B-T-B , B-T-C with the purpose of being precise. Promotion is part of the annual marketing plan (Marketing MIX) Features: -Getting the Attention of the potential customer -Creating Interest -Inspire the desire to buy a product or service -Inspire Action: the potential customer buys the product or service Promotional language features: figurative language, expository questions, speech acts, sense relations and coinages, and MULTIMODALITY which is part of webpages, ads, TV commercials. “The information structure” of a video text or a billboard explains multimodal figurative language, and their references to discourses. Politic verbal behavior is important not only for customer service but in every kind of communication in the professional world. Examples in Phone calls: “Is this a good time to talk?” “Do you have a half hour, or should we schedule a phone appointment?” The presence of a company or an organization in old and new media creates visibility. Social media can be analyzed in terms of tools and strategies that are typically described by ‘politic verbal behavior’, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and multimodality. Pragmatics is important to understand how language may be a tool for «better business communication». Examples: Gricean maxims explain conversational language but are useful for “better business writing” in the context of business letters and emails. Speech Acts analysis looks into the sender’s intentions in conversations and in advertising and gives a better comprehension of the cultural way of communicating. 1

WHAT IS PRAGMATICS? Pragmatics is the systematic study of meaning dependent on the use of language. There is a huge gap between the meaning of a sentence and the message conveyed by saying it. This means that → the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence underdetermines the content the speaker wants to express. This phenomenon is known as the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis. Pragmatics fills the gap created by linguistic underdeterminacy; context, real-world knowledge and inference are pragmatic factors that influence meaning and understanding. Examples of undeterminacy: Textual cohesion ambiguity examples: 1. The authorities barred the anti-globalization demonstration because they advocated violence. 2. The authorities barred the anti-globalization demonstration because they feared violence. *Is the pronoun they referring to the authorities or to the demonstrators? The authorities barred the anti-globalization demonstration because they advocated/feared violence. Answer about Anaphoric reference ambiguity: the pronoun THEY clearly have anaphoric reference, but it is not clear who the referent is. This ambiguity is solved by the reader background assumption about who is likely to fear or advocate violence. Question for the students: Is the pronoun they referring back to the authorities or to the demonstrators? Lexical ambiguity: Jane is looking for her glasses. The word glasses means spectacles but also drinking vessels. Only the context can help the listener to clarify this lexical ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity: They are cooking apples = specific type of apples that are suitable for cooking or cooking as a verb? Example 1: What are they doing in the kitchen? They are Cooking apples Example 2: What kind of apples are they? They are Cooking apples. Cooking can be a verb or an attributive ADJ or a noun Cooking oil, my dad’s cooking, Italian cooking. A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO PRAGMATICS Pragmatics as a modern branch of linguistics has its origins in the philosophy of language and semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs and the philosopher Charles Pierce has divided signs in three types: icons, symbols and indexes. Charles Morris in 1938 divides the study of semiotics into syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax is the study of formal relations between signs, semantics is the relation of signs with what they denote, and pragmatics is the study of relation between signs and their users and interpreters. In the 1950s and 1960s the school of natural language philosophy flourished under the leadership of J. L. Austin. It was within this tradition that Austin and later Searle developed the theory of speech acts, and Grice developed the theory of conversational implicature. These theories are nowadays landmarks on the path of the development of a pragmatic theory of language use. In the early 1970s the linguist George Lakoff advocated for a study of language in terms of its functions. Later on, Functional linguistics based on social semiotics focused on multimodality and on cognitive linguistics. In 1983 Stephen Levinson published the text ‘Pragmatics’ which is considered the starting point of a systematic study of pragmatics as a linguistic discipline. In the last two decades the ‘relevance theory’ (a development of pragmatic theories based on Gricean maxims) is founded by Sperber and Wilson. *Nowadays research in pragmatics has extended to other domains ranging from historical linguistics to the lexicon, and from computational linguistics to cognitive science. Examples of pragmatic analysis: the central topics of pragmatics include Gricean Maxims, implicature, explicature, speech acts and deixis. Nowadays (deixis), thanks to the evolution of the privacy of web users is constantly invaded 2

THE INVASION OF PRIVACY ON FACEBOOK iPhone users will find the Marketplace icon inside the Facebook app, at the bottom of their screen between the Groups and Notifications icons, where the Messenger shortcut used to be. Those on Android phones will find the icon near the top of the app, with Messenger on the right-hand side of the search bar. FB Marketplace → what is it? Marketplace is a FB service which lets users buy and sell items to others in its network. It’s not an original idea: eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon have been offering similar services for years. (SCREEN MULTIMODAL FACEBOOK MARKETING)

INSTAGRAM, privacy invasion in Instagram marketing, superga)

GRICEAN MAXIMS AND MULTIMODALITY RELEVANCE AND IMPLICATURE EXAMPLE A: How is the weather today? B: It is rainy and cloudy. COUNTEREXAMPLE A: Where is my Halloween *candy? B: Mine is missing too.

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SENTENCE AND UTTERANCE A sentence is a well-formed string of words which follows grammatical rules. A sentence is a linguistic unit and it is an abstract construct defined by grammar. Example of a sentence: he won the Tour of France. Examples of a string of words that is NOT a sentence: won the he France of Tour Another example: won the Tour of France he The study of sentence meaning belongs to the linguistic study called semantics. Sentence-meaning refers to the meaning of a sentence which is independent of its realization in a concrete form or any instance. Contexts, pronunciation (stress on specific words), selecting gestures, pauses, the social role of the speaker, the audience ARE NOT taken into consideration. An Utterance is the use of a piece of language: it could be a word, a sentence or a sequence of sentences. It refers to their use by a specific speaker on a particular occasion. Contexts, pronunciation (stress on specific words), selecting gestures, pauses, the social role of the speaker, the audience ARE taken into consideration. Examples of utterances are: 1. On the phone: Hello? 2. In a restaurant to a waitress: A coffee, please. 3. Conversational exchange: He won the tour of France. 4. Written sequence of sentences: Some books are to be tasted, and some others to be digested. That is, some books are to be read only in parts; others wholly, with diligence and attention. Utterance meaning or speaker meaning is what a speaker intends to convey by making an utterance in a specific situational context. Quote from Brown and Yule “Discourse”: “The study of utterance meaning belongs to pragmatics. Pragmatics investigates the use of language in context by a sender and it is more concerned with the relationship between the speaker and the utterance, on the specific occasion of use, rather than with the potential relationship of one sentence to another, regardless of their use. CONTEXT AND ITS SOURCES Context refers to a dynamic setting in which a linguistic unit is systematically used. Context is composed of three sources: 1. A physical context. 2. The linguistic context 3. The general knowledge context The first source is that the interpretation of the utterance “he’s not the chief executive. He is. He’s the managing director.” depends on the physical context and the selective gesture accompanying the utterance.

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The second source of context is the linguistic context, which refers to the surrounding utterances in the same discourse. Example: John: Who gave a large tip to the waitress? Mary: Helen did. In this case the surrounding discourse plays a crucial role in understanding what Mary intended. The third source of context is the general knowledge context. Sometimes it can be referred to as background knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge, real-world knowledge context. -Example of a pragmatically well-formed sentence is: ”I went to London last month ’’, ‘’The Westminster Cathedral was magnificent’’. -An anomalous utterance would be ‘’I went to Paris last month’’, ‘’The Westminster Cathedral was magnificent’’. -According to our real-world knowledge Westminster Cathedral is in London and not in Paris. This is the context that we take into consideration in understanding and evaluating both the sentence and the utterance. A set of background assumptions shared by sender and addressee as members of a community is involved in the evaluation of the previous an utterance. This is also called common ground. However, claiming common ground with the addressee is also a strategy that emphasizes the sender solidarity with the addressee. In this case the sender and the addressee are co-operators.

DEIXIS The term deixis is derived from the Greek and it means to show or to point out. Deixis are some of the linguistic elements which require contextual information for their interpretation. In order to interpret deictic forms such as ‘here, there, you, this’ it is necessary to know who the speaker is, and who the hearers are, and the time and place of the discourse. How do we interpret the following statement? 1. I don’t want to go with her, I want to go with her. The deictic references are resolved if accompanied by selecting gesture indicating the right person and the wrong person in the situational context. 2. John told Bill that he couldn’t date his sister. For this utterance we need to Resolve the discourse reference. - he=Bill (personal pronoun), his=John’s (possessive ADJ). We can summarize that deictics are words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information. For example, English pronouns are words that require contextual information to convey any meaning (in this case the physical context): I don’t want to go with her, I want to go with her. We can summarize that deixis is the relationship between the structure of the language and the context in which the language is used . For example, English pronouns and possessives ADJ and PRO are words that require contextual information to convey any meaning (in this case the linguistic context): ‘John told Bill that he couldn’t date his sister.’ ‘A message in a bottle found in the sea: Meet me here, a month from now, with a magic wand about this size.’ Without the deictic information the reader would not know who to meet, where or when to meet the writer, or the correct size of the required magic wand. Linguistic expressions employed as deictics include: • Demonstratives • Adverbs of time and space • Motion verbs • First and second person pronouns • And others A CASE OF NON-DEICTIC USE: When the pronoun you is used as impersonal, its use is nondeictic. Example: When you travel on a train without a valid ticket you will be liable to pay a fine . ‘You’ in this sentence refers to anyone, not to a specific person. Third person pronouns are usually 5

linked to the discourse; therefore, they refer to the linguistic context, and they are considered anaphoric or cataphoric. Example: Mary wishes she could visit the Louvre. BUT they can also be used deictically with reference to the physical context. Example: She’s not the secretary, she is. Accompanied by a deictic gesture which selects the referred people who are in the situational context. Example: This town is famous for its small antique shops. The deictic THIS can be interpreted by knowing the location of the speaker. The possessive ‘its’ is anaphoric (refers back to the word ‘town’) and cataphoric (refers forward to the word ‘shops’). Discussion about the concept of deictic pronouns: deictic pronouns refer to entities that must be identified according to the physical context or the linguistic context. For instance, in the sentence I will give you an answer about deictic pronouns, the deictic pronouns I and you refer to the speaker and the addressee, respectively, therefore they refer to the physical context. Verbs of motion are deictics. Tense is deictic. Examples: a) Can I go to your office tomorrow at 12 PM? b) Can I come to your office tomorrow at 12 PM? Come and go are motion verbs. Go marks a movement away from the deictic centre and come marks a movement toward the deictic centre. Tense has to be explicated (explicature) in relation to the time of the utterance, which makes it a deictic feature of language. For example, the past tense TOLD, in contrast to TELL, is deictic: the past tense locates events in relation to the time of utterance. Present tense, generally, indicates that the sender portrays a situation as it is in a time interval that includes the time of utterance. Past tense means before the time of utterance. Future tense means after the time of utterance. Markers are: • Auxiliary verbs such as will, have, be • Irregular forms of verbs, for example, thought or seen… • Inflectional suffixes (-ed, -s, ing, -n) Time adverbials have the function to help reveal the relation between time and tense: for example the time adverb ALREADY in: when he phoned I had already sent the email. Other adverbials are then, yesterday, at present, in 2 minutes. BASIC CATEGORIES OF DEICTICS 1. Time Time, or temporal deixis concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance. This includes time adverbs, e.g. ‘Recently’, ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘soon’, etc. and also different tenses. Example: tomorrow denotes the consecutive next day after every day. The "tomorrow" of a day last year is a different day from the "tomorrow" of a day next week. 2. Place The most common English examples are the adverbs “here” and “there” and the demonstratives “this” and “that”. For example: I enjoy living in this city. Here is where we will place the computer. She was looking over there. Other cases: *the briefcase is to the left of the desk *I’m headed north. 3. Person deixis Person deixis is concerned with the identification of the role of the participants in a speech event. Personal pronouns express number, gender, person. Examples: I am here. It’s me. What about you? She told me that, yesterday. The pronoun we is usually denoting inclusiveness. Sometimes it is used in contrast with they as a denotation of exclusion. ‘We are a large corporation and they are a startup company.’ Vocatives Noun Phrases can function as person deictics: in the following sentence the name John is a vocative NP: ‘John, if we do not leave now, we will be late for our next appointment.’ In the following sentence the polite address SIR is a vocative NP: ‘Am I afraid, Sir, we are closing.’ 4. Others: social deixis, discourse, anaphora, cataphora. 6

Social deixis: Social deixis concerns the social information that is encoded within various expressions, such as relative social status and familiarity. Kinship terms and titles refer to different real people. Mother-in-law, uncle… (kinship terms). His uncle and my uncle are two different people… General, Doctor, manager… (social rank, professional) Mister, Madam, sir … (Titles) • Discourse: Discourse deixis refers to the use of expressions within an utterance to refer to parts of the entire discourse that contains that utterance, including the utterance itself: e.g. “This is a great story”. • Anaphora: An anaphoric reference refers to something within a text that has been previously identified, e.g. "Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly". The word "it" refers to the noun phrase "the plate". The following deictics refer back to a part of a book or an article: *In the last section *In the previous chapter *As already mentioned. Difference between anaphora and antecedent: Anaphora= When a word or phrase picks up its meaning from some other piece of language nearby, the relationship between the two. Antecedent= A word which gets its meaning in this way, an anaphoric device, and the piece of language which gives the anaphoric device its meaning. • Cataphora: A cataphoric reference refers to something within a text that has not yet been identified, e.g. in "He was very cold”. David promptly put on his coat" the identity of the pronoun "he" is unknown until the individual is also referred to as "David". ‘Here goes the main argument...’ This is how it works. ESO → outside CATA→ → inside, forward ANA → inside, backword •

EXPLICATURE -Pragmatics is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with knowledge of the world, taking into account the context of use. -Pragmatics is concerned with the context of use, with choices among semantic possibilities, and investigates the way language users build interpretations. -In pragmatics, utterances are interpreted in context. Example: if the context of the utterance ‘people who buy these tickets often don’t have loads of money’. Is a recent newspaper report about a claim by the policy manager, then the word ‘often’ modifies what follows to mean ‘are often not rich’. *And it is not a modifier of what came before: ‘those who buy these tickets often’, all of them, are not rich. Reading the sentence ‘people who buy these tickets often don’t have loads of money’ and hearing it makes a difference. The speaker would have delivered it si...