Departing from Schneider and Barron (2008), representing the emerging field of Variational Pragmatics, this volume examines pragmatic variation focusing on methods utilized to collect and analyze data in a variety of first (L1) and second (L2) language contexts. The objectives are to: (1) examine variation in such areas of pragmatics as speech acts, conventional expressions, metapragmatics, stance, frames, mitigation, communicative action, (im)politeness, and implicature; and (2) critically review central methodological concerns relevant for research in pragmatic variation, such as coding, ethical issues, qualitative and quantitative methods, and individual variation. Theoretical frameworks vary from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, to variational pragmatics. This collection contains eleven chapters by leading scholars, including two state-of-the art chapters on key methodological issues of pragmatic variation study. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to those who study pragmatics, discourse analysis, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and language variation.

Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

This collection showcases cutting-edge developments in co-construction in discourse. Drawing on the pioneering work of Dale A. Koike, the volume contributes new understandings of how speakers jointly negotiate meanings, contexts, identities, and social positions in interaction. The volume is organized around three key themes in co-construction—co-constructed discourse, pragmatics in discourse, and teaching and assessment of discourse—and builds on the introductory chapter that situates the discussion on context and co-construction as fundamental to understanding meaning-making in interaction. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives across strands of linguistics and education, chapters explore both the contextual elements that frame co-construction processes and the distinct dynamics between action and language use across a wide range of interactional contexts, including sports commentary, interviews, everyday conversation, classroom discourse, and digitally mediated settings. Taken together, the book highlights the impact of Koike’s contributions on existing research in pragmatics and discourse and exhibits the potential for her work to frame scholarship on emerging interactional contexts. This volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in discourse studies, pragmatics, applied linguistics, second language studies, and language education, as well as those interested in interaction across diverse contexts.

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is a comprehensive critical survey of the field of L2 pragmatics, collecting a number of chapters that highlight the key theories, methods, pedagogies, and research findings throughout its development over the last four decades. Demonstrating the ways in which pragmatics has long served as a lens through which to examine patterns of L2 development, the volume is divided into six parts which reflect the field’s structure and evolution: • Constructs and units of analysis • Theoretical approaches • Methodological approaches • Pedagogical approaches • Contexts and individual considerations • L2 pragmatics in the global era The handbook has a particular focus on covering not only traditional topics in the field, such as constructs of pragmatic competence (e.g., speech acts, implicature), teaching and assessment, and pragmatics learning in a study abroad program, but also emerging areas of study, including interactional pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, usage-based approaches, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistic experimentation. Each chapter introduces the topic and follows with a description of its theoretical underpinnings, an overview of existing literature, appraisal of current practice, concluding with a discussion of future directions for research and key readings. The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is an essential resource for those with an interest in second language acquisition, pragmatics, and language teaching.

This book contributes to the literature of interlanguage pragmatics by building an interface between researching and teaching speech acts in the Chinese context. It is written for researchers, language educators, classroom teachers and readers who are interested in interlanguage pragmatics research, acquisition and teaching, with particular reference to speech acts performed by Chinese learners of English, and their relationships with the learners’ first language and cultural concepts. It provides a more advanced understanding of the production and development of speech acts of Chinese learners of English from the cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, L1 and L2 developmental perspectives, drawing on relevant second language acquisition theoretical frameworks. It also recommends research-informed pedagogies that are applicable to other learners of English.

This volume offers a comprehensive snapshot of the breadth of empirical research currently being conducted on the second language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in Spanish during study abroad. Research on this topic spans diverse methodological approaches, types of programs, linguistic structures, and learner characteristics, which is reflected in the contributions in this volume. This diversity of approaches illustrates how the second language development of sociolinguistic variation during study abroad depends crucially on a number of linguistic and extralinguistic factors and can be measured in distinct ways. Thus, this collection will be an indispensable resource to researchers and students of second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, education, and other fields interested in language development during study abroad.

Pragmatic instruction has received momentous attention in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) over the last decades. In order to scrutinize the effectiveness of L2 instruction, meta-analyses are warranted; nonetheless, meta-analyses have been largely neglected, despite the fact that they provide a systematic explanation of the findings from the previous studies. Since meta-analysis is flourishing by leaps and bounds in each and every field, pragmatic studies are not the exception, and among miscellaneous constructs and units of analysis in pragmatics, the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal are investigated in this book. To bridge this gap, this book mainly presents the variables which can moderate the effectiveness of L2 instruction such as age, gender, proficiency, outcome measures, psycholinguistic features, research design, and treatment types. The first chapter of the book outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the study, accentuating the importance of conducting meta-analysis in this field of study. The second chapter elaborates on the empirical studies and a thorough review of the relevant research. The third chapter deals with the design of the study in which the inclusion and exclusion criteria, effect size calculation, coding of the variables, and reliability have been outlined while chapter four presents the obtained outcomes and results of the study. The last chapter describes the final remarks of the study, the limitations, implications, and the directions for future research in the field of pragmatics instruction.

On a regular basis people encounter unfamiliar uses of pragmatic features, such as offers or requests with differing levels of directness or terms of address showing differing amounts of solidarity or deference. Variational pragmatics is the study of such uses, according to region, gender, age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, among national and sub-national varieties of pluricentric languages. Despite the wide focus just outlined, this volume provides the first study of pragmatic variation across different social classes, using naturally occurring, interactional data. The discourse analyzed here was collected in over twenty restaurant service encounters spanning three price points. The aim of this study is two-fold: to provide a potential framework for how pragmatic variables and their context can be defined, using the concept of a communicative activity, and to investigate socioeconomic variation in pragmatics by taking offers, thanks responses and address forms as examples. This study contributes, both on a methodological and empirical level, to the growing body of research in variational pragmatics, as well as speech acts, terms of address, relational work and sociolinguistics.

Intercultural Pragmatics is a large and diverse field encompassing a wide range of approaches, methods, and theories. This volume draws scholars together from a broad range of cognitive, philosophical, and sociopragmatic perspectives on language use in order to lay the path for a mutually informing and enriching dialogue across subfields and perceived barriers to doing pragmatics interculturally.

Researching Sociopragmatic Variability showcases a range of research approaches to the study of speech acts and pragmatic markers across different languages and varieties of a language, investigating native and non-native usages and variation across gender, situation and addressee.