Interlanguagepragmatics

Language Learning 49:4, December 1999, pp. 677–713

Exploring the Interlanguage of Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Research Agenda for Acquisitional Pragmatics Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig Indiana University

G. Kasper and R. Schmidt (1996) have argued that the field of investigation known as interlanguage pragmatics has been essentially modelled on cross-cultural pragmatics. Taking Kasper and Schmidt’s argument one step further, this article shows how interlanguage itself has been ignored in research on interlanguage pragmatics. Research has not established that pragmatic competence is independent of grammatical competence. Although grammatical competence may not be a sufficient condition for pragmatic development, it may be a necessary condition. I outline a research agenda in which the study of interlanguage becomes more central to the study of interlanguage pragmatics.

The goal of this article is to set out a research agenda that makes the interlanguage of interlanguage pragmatics a central area of investigation. It begins by assessing the state of acquisition research in interlanguage pragmatics; then it surveys work in

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, Program in TESOL and Applied Linguistics.

This paper was originally presented as a plenary at Second Language Research Forum 1998 at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. I thank my graduate students at Indiana University during the fall of 1998 for their comments on this paper. I am also indebted to Gabi Kasper and the reviewers of Language Learning for their guidance on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors or omissions are mine.

Correspondence concerning this article may be sent to Kathleen BardoviHarlig, Program in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, Indiana University, Memorial Hall 313, Bloomington, IN 47405. Internet: bardovi@indiana.edu

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interlanguage pragmatics that either directly examines or appeals to grammatical competence. I will also show how acquisition studies in interlanguage pragmatics will differ from the type of studies we have conducted so far, and I will outline potential areas of investigation.

As we know, interlanguage pragmatics deals with the pragmatics of language learners; but does that in itself make it an acquisitional endeavor? As early as 1992, Kasper observed that it did not. She observed, “the majority of [interlanguage pragmatics] studies focus on use, without much attempt to say or even imply anything about development” (1992, p. 204). In contrast to this practice, the definition of interlanguage pragmatics offered by Kasper and Dahl (1991) the year earlier included acquisition.

Interlanguage pragmatics was defined as “referring to nonnative speakers’ comprehension and production of speech acts, and how that L2-related knowledge is acquired” (p. 216).1 The definition of interlanguage pragmatics was more ambitious than the contemporary practice, and 8 years later, it still is: The study of how L2-related speech act knowledge is acquired is more of a desideratum than a reality.

If interlanguage pragmatics research cannot be characterized as acquisitional, what is an accurate characterization? It has been essentially comparative, comparing what learners or non-native speakers do to what native speakers do. As Kasper (1992) observed, The bulk of interlanguage pragmatics research derived its research questions and methods from empirical, and particularly cross-cultural, pragmatics. Typical issues addressed in data-based studies are whether NNS differ from NS in the 1) range and 2) contextual distribution of 3) strategies and 4) linguistic forms used to convey 5) illocutionary meaning and 6) politeness—precisely the kinds of issues raised in comparative studies of different communities. . . . Interlanguage pragmatics has predominantly been the sociolinguistic, and to a much lesser extent a psycholinguistic [or acquisitional] study of NNS’ linguistic action.

(Kasper, 1992, p. 205)

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At the time that Kasper’s (1992) article “Pragmatic Transfer” was written, only three longitudinal studies had been published: Schmidt’s (1983) well-known report on Wes, a learner of English, Schmidt and Frota’s (1986) study of a beginning learner of Brazilian Portuguese, and Billmyer’s (1990) study of instructed learners of English. Cross-sectional studies at that time included Scarcella (1979), Olshtain and Blum-Kulka (1985), Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986), Takahashi and Beebe (1987), Trosborg (1987), S. Takahashi and DuFon (1989), and Omar (1991). A significant number of longitudinal studies (regrettably rare in any area of SLA) were published about the same time as Kasper’s article, reflecting that other researchers also saw the need for acquisitional research. These studies included Ellis’s (1992) longitudinal study of two children’s untutored acquisition of English requests, and Sawyer’s (1992) study of the acquisition of the sentence-final particle ne by American learners of Japanese. Bouton (1992) investigated the development of comprehension as related to implicature and Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1993) studied the changes in the speech acts of advanced nonnative speakers during their advising sessions in their 1st year of graduate school. Even after the flurry of longitudinal studies around 1992, however, the field could not be characterized as “acquisitional.”

Nor did the balance of studies in the field change between 1992 and 1996. However, when Kasper and Schmidt’s (1996) paper “Developmental Issues in Interlanguage Pragmatics” repeated the observation that interlanguage pragmatics was more comparative than acquisitional, it was much more striking. Although additional cross-sectional (Kerekes, 1992; Robinson, 1992; Svanes, 1992; Trosborg, 1995) and longitudinal (Siegal, 1994) studies had been conducted, the relative handful of longitudinal, or even cross-sectional, studies had done very little to change the overall character of interlanguage pragmatics.2 Kasper and Schmidt’s paper helped me articulate my growing discontent with the comparative stance of most studies, and I had come to understand that not only was interlanguage pragmatics not fundamentally acquisitional, but it was, in fact, fundamentally not acquisitional.

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One striking detail that reveals the extent to which acquisition has been overlooked in interlanguage pragmatics is that many articles from 1979 to 1996—with the exception of the explicitly acquisitional studies with cross-sectional and longitudinal designs—identify non-native speakers as “non-native speakers” rather than learners, and they are described only by their first language, with no attempt to characterize variables such as proficiency levels or length of residency in the host environment. This detail of reporting subject profiles reveals not that they were badly done acquisitional studies, but that they were not acquisitional studies at all.

The consequence of the dominance of comparative studies over acquisition studies in interlanguage pragmatics has been that the areas of investigation in interlanguage pragmatics are quite distinct from studies in second language acquisition. This division seems to have real-world correlates as well. When papers are reviewed for the annual AAAL conference, for example, there are two separate strands: one for cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics together and another for SLA. Consider also that the relatively new Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (Ritchie & Bhatia, 1996) has no chapter on pragmatics.

Why has interlanguage pragmatics developed as it has?

Kasper (1992) provides the central reason: because cross-cultural pragmatics has served as the model for interlanguage pragmatics research. A second reason is that the research has concentrated on investigating the pragmatics of advanced NNSs rather than learners at all levels.3 Our elicitation tasks (predominately written discourse completion tasks that involve reading scenarios) favor advanced learners. Moreover, the availability of Englishspeaking undergraduate and graduate students at universities around the world has reinforced the tendency to use advanced learners. In addition, the fact that studies of this population reveal that even very advanced learners have not mastered basic pragmatics gives them a certain shock value: To show that advanced learners have not mastered certain areas of L2 pragmatics is a more stunning result than to show that low-level learners differ

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from the target norm. Finally, as a pedagogical needs assessment, the demonstration that advanced learners do not exhibit targetlike norms implies that instruction is warranted at all levels of development. As a result of SLA and interlanguage pragmatics having evolved as specialized research areas, we find a third and later development that will continue to separate the fields of inquiry: In many cases, the research has come to be conducted by different practitioners.

Assuming that an acquisitional focus is desirable in interlanguage pragmatics research, what would an acquisitional interlanguage pragmatics look like? Such a research agenda is found in Kasper and Schmidt’s (1996) lead article to the thematic issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition dedicated to the development of pragmatic competence. Following Kasper and Schmidt, an acquisitional research agenda in interlanguage pragmatics would investigate two essential areas: changes within the L2 pragmatic system and influences on that system. In Table 1, I summarize the areas of investigation identified by Kasper and Schmidt (1996).

It is important to note that some of the questions in Table 1 look as unfamiliar in an interlanguage pragmatics investigation as they look commonsensical in second language acquisition research. Presumably, these questions would be addressed by the measures that interlanguage pragmatics has used thus far, although new measurements could be developed (see Table 1, Point b). NS and NNS speech act production can differ in at least four ways, and any or all of these comparisons could be used to evaluate differences in an acquisitional study across time (in a longitudinal study), or across proficiency levels or lengths of stay (in a crosssectional study).4 The measures include (a) choice of speech acts—do learners and NSs perform the same act in a given situation? and (b) use of semantic formula—there are many ways to realize a response to a compliment; for example, do we express gratitude (by saying thank you), downgrade the compliment (oh, this old thing), accept responsibility (I made it myself), or reciprocate (you look pretty terrific, too). Differences also include (c) the content of the propositions we encode. When turning down an

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Table 1 Basic Questions About SLA With Respect to Interlanguage Pragmatics a. Are there universals of pragmatics and do they play a role in interlanguage pragmatics? b. How can approximation to target language norms be measured? c. Does L1 influence L2 pragmatics? (Transfer) d. Is the development of L2 pragmatics similar to learning a first language? e. Do children enjoy an advantage over adults in learning a second language? f. Is there a natural route of development as evidenced by difficulty, accuracy, or acquisition orders or discrete stages of development? g. Does type of input make a difference? (foreign language vs. second language) h. Does instruction make a difference? i. Do motivation and attitudes influence level of acquisition? j. Does personality play a role? k. Does a learner’s gender play a role? l. Does (must) perception or comprehension precede production in acquisition? m. Does chunk learning (formulaic speech) play a role in acquisition? n. What mechanisms drive development from stage to stage?

Note. The questions in Table 1 are derived from the section headings in Kasper and Schmidt (1996).

invitation, we could be vague (I have something to do) or specific (I have to go to my cousin’s wedding). And finally, (d) differences in linguistic form: Is the speech act realized with downgraders or aggravators? (Could you do me a favor versus Just do me a favor).

Measuring change in interlanguage pragmatics systems either cross-sectionally or longitudinally would result in more acquisitionally oriented interlanguage pragmatics studies, at once linking interlanguage pragmatics research more directly to SLA research and maintaining its connection to cross-cultural pragmatics. This is a necessary stage in the maturing of the field of interlanguage pragmatics research, and an increasing number of studies in this area will be undertaken in the coming years.

Although this stage of research has not yet been fully explored, I propose that we go still further in studying the acquisition of L2 pragmatic competence by investigating the relation of the

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development of the grammatical and pragmatic systems. The first step is to examine how grammatical competence had been acknowledged in interlanguage pragmatics research; I will begin with a brief review of how proficiency in general has been handled. (For more thorough coverage of the issue of proficiency, see BardoviHarlig, 1999a; Kasper & Schmidt, 1996).

Previous Studies on Acquisition in Pragmatics A consequence of the comparative focus of interlanguage pragmatics is that there have not been enough longitudinal studies to allow comparison across learners, contexts, or languages.

However, there have been sufficient cross-sectional studies to begin to compare effects of levels of proficiency and on length of stay of pragmatic development.

Low- and high-proficiency learners were found to differ in the order and frequency of semantic formulas they used. Lowerproficiency learners were also more direct in their refusals than higher-level ESL learners (T. Takahashi & Beebe, 1987). The use of external modifiers may also increase with linguistic proficiency, as does the number of words used (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986).

The use of lexical downgraders (downtoners, understaters, hedges, subjectivizers, intensifiers, commitment upgraders, and cajolers) also improves with proficiency (Trosborg, 1987).

In a rare study that included low-level learners, Scarcella (1979) found that when making requests, the low-level learners invariably relied on imperatives, whereas higher-level learners showed sensitivity to status, restricting the use of imperatives to equal familiars and subordinates. Koike (1996) also found a proficiency effect in the recognition of the intent of speech acts in a study of the perception of Spanish suggestions by English-speaking learners of Spanish.

Proficiency may also influence transfer. Advanced learners were found to be better than intermediate learners at identifying contexts in which L1 apology strategies could be used successfully (Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper, & Ross, 1996). Japanese learners

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of English as a second language showed a greater tendency to soften the directness of their refusals than did lower-level Japanese ESL learners, and they also showed a greater level of formality, both of which T. Takahashi and Beebe (1987) attributed to transfer from Japanese refusals.

Other areas are apparently less sensitive to level of proficiency. Kasper and Schmidt’s review of the literature found that proficiency may have little effect on the range of realization strategies that learners use (Kasper & Schmidt, 1996), and S. Takahashi (1996) found little proficiency effect on learners’ perception of the transferability of L1 request strategies as a whole.

Both low- and high-intermediate proficiency learners equally relied on their L1 request conventions in L2 request realization (S. Takahashi, 1996, p. 210). However, as Kasper (personal communication, March 1999) pointed out, the absence of a proficiency effect may be due to the fact that real beginners were not included in the studies. The child L2 learners observed by Ellis (1992) did not produce a full range of request strategies at the end of the 15–21month observation period. The reduced range may be in part attributable to the classroom context in which the requests were collected; nevertheless, there is a possibility that request strategies are constrained by proficiency.

Length of stay is also a factor in pragmatic development.

Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1985) reported an increase in acceptance of direct request strategies by NNS speakers of Hebrew as their length of stay increased. In fact, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986) showed that proficiency is not as good a determiner of pragmatic development as length of stay with respect to length of utterance. The longer requests of the NNSs of Hebrew were attributed to their greater use of external modification (i.e., elements added to the head act, such as reasons and justifications for the requests). Such external modification increased across proficiency levels—higher-proficiency learners used more external modification moving away from the native-speaker norm—whereas external modification decreased the longer an NNS had lived in Israel. This led Blum-Kulka and Olshtain to

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conclude that “in terms of pragmatic competence, length of stay is a much more interesting measure than level of linguistic proficiency” (1986, p. 174). Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s work points to the necessity of considering proficiency and length of stay independently in a context where foreign-language learners may arrive in the host environment with a high level of proficiency, but no experience in the target culture. In the same setting there may be learners with lower proficiency who have been in the target environment longer (see Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986, fn. 9).

In a longitudinal study of the advising session talk of NNSs with high grammatical proficiency who had just arrived at an American university, Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1993) found that NNSs showed an increase in the use of speech acts favored

by NSs in the academic context, and they showed a decrease in speech acts not used by NSs as length of stay increased. In the same period, however, NNSs did not conform to NS use of mitigators and nonuse of aggravators (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993).

Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) study of awareness of deviations from NS norms showed that tutored ESL learners in an intensive program were more sensitive than EFL learners to pragmatic infelicities. Within the ESL group, learners at a high level of proficiency showed greater pragmatic awareness than learners at lower proficiency. Bouton (1992, 1994) also found that ESL learners enrolled at an American university without specific training in pragmatics became increasingly targetlike in their interpretation of implicature as length of stay increased.

Even shorter lengths of stay might help learners become more targetlike, particularly with respect to highly salient conversational functions such as greetings. Omar (1991, 1992) found that American learners of Swahili who had been to Tanzania showed much more targetlike use of multiple turns in lengthy Swahili greetings (Omar, 1991, 1992). Similarly, Hoffman-Hicks (1999) observed that American university students of French also adjusted their greetings to be more targetlike during a semester in France, but theirs became shorter and less frequent.

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As we have seen, some acquisition studies compare learners using a broad concept of proficiency. Our next step is to ask whether interlanguage pragmatics studies have taken specific note of the grammatical development of their learner-participants.

In the next section I consider pragmalinguistic competence, the linguistic competence that allows speakers to carry out the speech acts that their sociopragmatic competence tells them are desirable. Because this discussion focusses on what grammatical knowledge is necessary for pragmalinguistic competence, the following section divides pragmalinguistic competence into its pragmatic and grammatical parts. The term grammatical as I am using it here encompasses anything having to do with a linguistic grammar, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or the lexicon of the developing language.

The Relation of Pragmatic and Grammatical Competence What do we know about the relation between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence? Working with highly grammatically proficient learners and non-native speakers has shown that high levels of grammatical competence do not guarantee concomitant high levels of pragmatic competence. As early as 1985 Olshtain and Blum-Kulka observed, “It has been shown repeatedly in the literature that second language learners fail to achieve native communicative competence even at a rather advanced stage of learning (or acquisition in the natural setting)� (p.

321). In 1990, Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford made a similar observation regarding graduate students at an American university.

From these and other studies that investigate advanced NNSs we learn that interlanguage grammatical competence is not a sufficient condition for interlanguage pragmatic competence—but is it a necessary condition? Asked another way, is pragmatic competence built on a platform of grammatical competence? Very few studies make the link between pragmatics and the interlanguage system. How have researchers talked about the relation of grammatical competence and pragmatics?

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When we review the literature from this perspective we find that, with very few exceptions, mention of grammatical competence is very brief and appears only in the discussion section as a possible interpretation of results. The real exception to this claim is a 1987 article by Blum-Kulka and Levenston entitled “LexicalGrammatical Pragmatic Indicators.” The article presents an overview of lexical simplification, morphological constraints, and syntactic development as they affect the realization of speech acts.

This study takes an error analysis perspective showing what can go wrong in the grammatical and lexical realization of speech acts in L2 English and L2 Hebrew, but it is nonetheless a step in the direction that I am advocating. Similarly, in their article “ ‘I Very Appreciate,’ ” whose very title suggests that a degree of grammatical knowledge is necessary for pragmatic realization, Eisenstein and Bodman (1986) observed “extensive syntactic and lexical problems” in the written responses of advanced learners. They listed problems such as intensifiers, tense, word order, “misused/mangled idioms,” and word choice (p. 175).

Effects of development in the lexicon were noted by BlumKulka and Levenston (1987) where learners of Hebrew use the equivalent of have in requests such as “Can I have your notes?” rather than the more specific terms such as borrow or lend which according to Blum-Kulka and Levenston are less scary to the addressee. Cohen and Olshtain (1993) also identified development in the lexicon as the culprit behind the awkward request “I want to drive with you” in a context where “Could you give me a lift?” would be appropriate. In a retrospective task the learner reported not knowing how to use the word lift, which appeared in the role-play scenario. T. Takahashi and Beebe (1987) also noted that when making refusals, higher-level learners used, and in fact overused, a greater range of intensifiers, really, awfully, terribly, truly, deeply, and extremely. Such use seems to be dependent on lexical acquistion.

In interpreting a similar observation made by Trosborg (1987) that higher-proficiency learners used more downgraders (downtoners, understaters, hedges, subjectivizers, intensifiers,

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commitment upgraders, and cajolers) than lower-proficiency learners, Maeshiba et al. (1996) observed that “it is difficult to say whether this pattern truly reflects a development of pragmalinguistic competence or merely an extension of the learners’ lexical repertoire” (p. 160).

More general linguistic competence is discussed as well. In her discussion of apology strategies, Trosborg (1987, p. 165) noted, “The low number of explanations used by learners is a likely outcome of insufficient linguistic knowledge. In order to provide a convincing explanation or give an adequate account, you need the relevant linguistic means. Likewise, a high degree of proficiency is demanded to query the preconditions on which an accusation is built” (emphasis added). Koike (1996) observed that lower-level learners of Spanish as a foreign language had difficulty identifying the illocutionary force of suggestions and particular difficulty with negative interrogative suggestions such as ?No has pensado en leer este libro? and ?No deberías leer este libro? (illocutionary-force equivalents of the non-negative suggestions in English “Have you thought about reading this book?” and “Shouldn’t you read this book?” respectively). She concluded, “this process implies a knowledge of the target language speech acts at both the grammatical/lexical level as well as the pragmatic level of use” (p. 275).

T. Takahashi and Beebe (1987) found that their lowerproficiency group used direct expressions such as “I can’t” when making refusals, and they attributed this to a developmental stage, stating, “the point is that the higher frequency of direct expressions among lower proficiency learners is not a function of NL transfer, but rather most probably a developmental stage where simpler, and also more direct, expressions are being used” (p. 150).

Olshtain and Cohen (1989) reported that “it often happens that nonnative speakers are aware of the sociolinguistic need to apologize, yet because their linguistic competence is limited, they use erroneous language forms and produce speech acts that sound deviant or even create communication failure” (p. 62, emphasis added).

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Just as transfer studies have taken the lead in investigations of acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics, they also have also paid the most attention to the role of proficiency. Probably the best known study to investigate the effect of the level of proficiency on transfer was T. Takahashi & Beebe’s (1987) study. They hypothesized that the peak of the [pragmatic transfer] curve would be expected to fall at higher proficiency levels than the peak of the curve for phonological or morphological transfer. Similarly for the developmental curve of any one individual, we would expect phonological and morpho-syntactic transfer to rise to their peaks earlier than pragmatic transfer since pragmatic transfer requires more fluency to surface. (p. 153)

This echoed earlier observations by Blum-Kulka (1982) that Canadian learners of Hebrew did not transfer request strategies to Hebrew as much as they might have been expected to because they lacked the complex L2 knowledge necessary to implement indirectness, and Cohen and Olshtain (1981) who found “that L2 learners sometimes avoided using a semantic formula which had high frequency in their L1 and which would have allowed for positive transfer into L2, because they were lacking linguistic competence in L2” (Olshtain & Cohen, 1989, pp. 62–63). WildnerBassett (1994) observed that a learner ”wants to carry [a] routine over into her use of German, to the extent that her proficiency allows” (p. 11). And Maeshiba and colleagues (1996) observed that in the case of positive transfer, advanced learners used the same strategies as native speakers in both the L1 and the L2, and they concluded that this “makes sense in light of the assumption that advanced learners are likely to be more acculturated, and have the linguistic facility to transfer pragmatic strategies from the native language” (p. 169, emphasis added).

House (1996) described the dilemma of interpretation when she attempted to tease out why some EFL learners were superior to others at the end of a semester-long instructional study. Learners who had had longer stays in an English-speaking environment were better than other learners both before and after instruction,

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and instruction did not close the gap between them. Were these same learners superior grammatically at the outset of their host experience, or was the communicative experience alone sufficient to increase their pragmatic competence? She observed that It was not possible to answer the question of whether those students who were more competent linguistically had been superior before they entered the English-speaking environment—such that they had a more solid basis for the development of their pragmatic competence in the first place—or whether their pragmatic competence strongly benefited from the inimitably rich variety of communicative experience real everyday life affords. (p. 245, emphasis added)

Investigating the Relation of Grammatical and Pragmatic Development House (1996) accurately summed up the state of the field when she wrote, “whether the level of linguistic competence is a necessary precondition for efficient learning of pragmatic phenomena such as the ones discussed here cannot be further elaborated here” (p. 245). However, as we consider the future of interlanguage pragmatics, I would say that we have sufficient resources to take up the challenge and address the issue now. But where should we begin? How do we move beyond very broad concepts of proficiency or competence to examine particular and well-defined interlanguage development as it relates to pragmatics?

One excellent place to start is House and Kasper’s (1981) list of mitigators and downgraders. Consider the presupposition of linguistic competence that lies behind the list in Example 1.

1. Downgraders (House & Kasper, 1981) a. Politeness markers (please) b. Play-downs (past tense, progressive, modals, negation, interrogative) c. Consultative devices (would you mind) d. Hedges (kind of, sort of, somehow)

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e. Understaters (a little bit, a second) f. Downtoners (perhaps, possibly) g. “Minus” committers (I think, I guess, I suppose) h. Forewarnings (anticipatory devices such as, you’re a nice guy, Jim, but or far be it from me to belittle your efforts, but) i. Hesitators (deliberate malformulations used to indicate reluctance to perform the ensuing speech act such as stuttering or repetition) j. Scopestaters (I’m afraid that, I’m not happy that) k. Agent avoiders (passive and impersonal constructions) l. Embedding (Blum-Kulka & Levenston, 1987) In play-downs a speaker draws on knowledge of modals, tense, and aspect, and on syntactic knowledge of negation and question formation. With hedges and understaters a speaker must have enough syntax to properly position them in the sentence. With consultative devices and scopestaters a learner needs knowledge of the complements that particular formulas take, and with agent avoiders, the learner needs to know formation and use of passive.

Even minus committers put a strain on a learner’s suprasegmentals, and embedding as a means of marking politeness has obvious syntactic requirements.

The Development of the Tense-Mood-Aspect System Related to Pragmatics

Modals have been demonstrated to play an important role in mitigation. In House and Kasper’s (1981) inventory of downgraders alone, modals were listed as a group under play-downs and individually under consultative devices (see Example 1). Other studies that highlight the pragmatic role played by modals include House and Kasper (1987), Blum-Kulka (1989), Faerch and Kasper (1989), and House (1989). Understanding the acquisition of modals and modal expressions in interlanguage thus becomes relevant to understanding how learners use modals as downgraders.

A paper by Dittmar and Terborg (1991), entitled “Modality and

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Second Language Learning,” offers a model for research that integrates interlanguage research with interlanguage pragmatics. Although modality is recognized as both a semantic and pragmatic category (p. 348), Dittmar and Terborg’s study did not set out to examine the use of modals related to the development of pragmatic competence per se. Nevertheless, their research yields important lessons for students of interlanguage pragmatics.

The paper uses a concept-oriented inquiry to investigate the expression of modality in German, and thus, in keeping with the European studies of this type, investigates a range of linguistic devices used to express modality in interlanguage. These include modal verbs, modal adverbs, intonation, and, in interlanguage, the request marker bitte “please.” The concept-oriented approach has been used very successfully in the study of the acquisition of temporal expression (e.g., Dietrich, Klein, & Noyau, 1995) and often results in an interesting mix of linguistic devices being studied together, whereas the form-oriented approach in SLA would focus on a specific form such as modal verbs.

In this study Dittmar and Terborg (1991) focussed on one learner drawn from a longitudinal study of 16 native Polish-speaking informants learning German. Their informant was observed from a very early stage of interlanguage development and participated for the full 2.5 years of the study, during which time 18 transcripts were collected. Throughout the study, learners performed narrative tasks, instruction-giving tasks, and problemsolving tasks. The instruction-giving tasks are particularly important to request formation. In one of the instruction-giving tasks, for example, the ashtray task (adopted from the ESF project; see Becker & Carroll, 1997), a researcher silently acted out a scene for the learner in which a guest in a cafe steals an ashtray.

Following the initial demonstration, the learner gave instructions to a second researcher so that he could act out the same scene (p. 353).

In interlanguage, modal expressions include bitte “please,” which is the first linguistic device used to mark modality. Dittmar

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and Terborg (1991) identified the order of acquisition of linguistic devices used to express modality as shown in Example 2.

2. Order of acquisition of means of modal expression (Dittmar & Terborg, 1991, p. 358) i. bitte “please” ii. müssen “must” können “can” iii. denken “think” iv. möchten “would like” wahrscheinlich “probably” v. sicher “sure/certain” vi. wollen “want” vii. vielleicht “maybe” As the first expression of modality, bitte “please” marks requests and necessity in early stages of interlanguage because other means of request or necessity are unavailable. According to Dittmar and Terborg, the function of bitte as a politeness marker comes into the interlanguage later: “Not until so-called ‘true’ deontic means are available is bitte ‘please’ used primarily to mark politeness” (p. 359). An inventory of expressions shows that learners use “bitte ‘please’ in the sense of a request for action . . . especially frequently when müssen ‘must’ is not to be found or is only found to a small degree” (p. 359).

Table 2 shows the interaction of emergent modal expressions in the interlanguage of an individual learner (Dittmar & Terborg, 1991). Bitte emerges earlier than muss and weiss. Note that when bitte is the only means of modal expression (in Interview 3), it is used robustly with 36 tokens. Muss and weiss emerge tentatively (with 4 and 5 tokens, respectively) at Interview 5. The use of muss peaks at Interview 9 (37 tokens) with a corresponding decline in the use of bitte (only 2 tokens). A second increase in the use of bitte (22 tokens) is seen before it stabilizes at a low rate of use in Interviews 12–15, as muss (with 29 to 48 tokens) assumes the modal functions that bitte carried in earlier stages. Thus, the longitudinal evidence shows that even a very simple lexical item

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Table 2 Order of Emergence of Modal Expressions for an Individual Learner Interview no. bitte 3 5 7 9 11 12 13 15

36 4 9 2 22 1 4 0

Modal expressions muss 0 4 4 37 5 29 30 48

weiss 0 5 0 5 3 11 4 5

Note. The frequency counts in Table 2 are based on the instruction-giving task reported in Dittmar and Terborg (1991).

like please takes its place in the acquisitional sequence. According to data from the more advanced learners, bitte surfaces again later as a politeness marker.

Continuing with modals, consider the case of will as used by NNS graduate students in advising talk (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993) as in Example 3b. Whereas NS graduate students always mitigated their suggestions as in 3a, “I was thinking of taking syntax,” in addressing an advisor about courses they wanted to take, NNSs often did not, resulting in turns such as 3b, “I will take syntax.” The use of will seems to have the opposite effect of a mitigator, operating instead as an aggravator indicating a strong commitment by the student to his suggestion for a course.

3. Graduate students addressing a faculty advisor Advisor: OK, let’s talk about next semester. a. NS: I was thinking of taking syntax. b. NNS: I will take syntax.

After a presentation of the 1993 paper, a conference participant suggested that the NNS in Example 3 simply did not know his modals. He asserted that given better grammar training, the learner’s use of will would take care of itself. Anxious to get our

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pragmatic message across I replied that this was not simply a case of grammar learning. I wanted to head off the claim that if learners knew or were taught grammar better, they would get pragmatics for free.

After thinking about this exchange for several years, I’d like to go back to this example and make the opposite claim from the EFL teacher. I’d like to suggest that the NNS in Example 3 shows an excellent understanding of the use of will, specifically an understanding of the core, referential meaning of will as a marker of the future. “I will” has a transparent form-meaning association with the future, whereas “I was going to” does not. Although the reader is likely to find the native-speaker’s suggestion more appropriate, the learner is likely to find was going to to be an odd equivalent to will in the pair of sentences “I will take syntax next semester” and “I was going to take syntax next semester” when the propositional content is held constant. Acquisitionally, we cannot expect pragmatic extension of tense-mood-aspect forms until the core deictic meanings have been acquired.

In fact, Andersen and Shirai (1996) captured this claim in their treatment of the acquisition of past morphology in a prototype semantics model. Employing a prototype model, Andersen and Shirai hypothesized the acquisitional sequence in Example 4 for simple past beginning with the core meaning of deictic past, expanding to a marker of habitual or iterative past, and finally, extending to a pragmatic function as a softener (or play-down following House & Kasper, 1981).

4. The spread of the simple past Deictic past > habitual or iterative past > counterfactual or pragmatic softener (play-down) (Andersen & Shirai, 1996, p. 557) Andersen and Shirai also hypothesized an acquisitional sequence for the progressive. In the progressive sequence a pragmatic device was not included, but because it is used as one, I have provisionally inserted it in the last position in Example 5, analogous to the sequence for the spread of the simple past.

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5. The spread of the progressive (modified) Process > iterative > habitual or future > stative progressive > pragmatic softener (play-down) (Andersen & Shirai, 1996, p. 557) Both of these sequences remain to be tested in their later stages, and both point to good places to start an investigation.

Grammatical competence may also limit the value of the pragmatic input to the learner. A learner who has not achieved control over prototypical uses of tense-mood-aspect morphology may not be ready to extend the use of those forms to politeness markers in incoming data. Consider the case of an intermediate ESL student who was engaged in a pedagogical task. The students had been asked to rate videotaped scenarios for appropriateness in pragmatics and grammar (see BardoviHarlig & Dörnyei, 1998). After students compared their responses, a student questioned the use of could in one of the “good” scenarios (i.e., a scenario with no grammatical or pragmatic problems). In the scenario, a student responds to his teacher’s invitation “Peter, we need to talk about the class party soon” with “Yeah, if tomorrow is good for you, I could come any time you say.”

My ESL student identified the use of could as problematic, explaining that could was used for past, but that the utterance was oriented to the future as reported in Example 6.

6. ESL learner, IEP Level 4, summer 1997 “Dr. Bardovi, there is something strange about this sentence: If tomorrow is good for you, I could come any time you say. He is talking about tomorrow, but he uses could, which is past.”

It appears that the learner has made a primary association of could with past which at this stage disallows its use in nonpast contexts. Her form-meaning association will eventually expand beyond one-form one-meaning (the one-to-one principle; see Andersen, 1984), possibly by encountering more positive evidence of this type. There is clearly quite a bit of work that can be done in the area of modals, grammatical competence, and interlanguage

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pragmatics. However, the acquisition of modals is not the only area to be investigated.

The Development of Prosody Related to Pragmatics

The most obvious and most often-identified facet of pronunciation that is singled out in discussions of pragmatics is the suprasegmental level, namely sentence stress and intonation.

How does a learner’s interlanguage phonology affect his or her delivery or perceived illocutionary force?

A minus committer such as I thínk quickly becomes an aggravator with the opposite effect if the stress pattern changes to Í think, in which a speaker contrasts her opinion with that of her interlocutor rather than softening her utterance, as in Example 7.

7. NNS, Chinese (Taiwan) A: What is it you were thinking about taking next fall?

S: Um, there are two required courses. So Í think I need to take for this semester . . . (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1996) Kasper (1984) and Wildner-Bassett (1984) provide two examples of the very few studies in interlanguage pragmatics to include intonation. Other work outside of interlanguage pragmatics such as the collection of conversational analyses in Atkinson and Heritage (1984) could provide a useful model for interlanguage pragmatics studies.

As part of their investigation of modality, Dittmar and Terborg (1991) also analyzed intonation in German interlanguage, in addition to modal development. Dittmar and Terborg found that the earliest requests had very little linguistic structure, as shown in Example 8.

8. Time 1 (Dittmar & Terborg, 1991) a. komm komm komm komm ja come come come come yes b. platz kleine platz seat little seat c. zeitung zeitung tasche newspaper newspaper bag In addition, these syntactically simple requests exhibited an intonation pattern that Dittmar and Terborg described as “dramatic”

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and “strange� (p. 365). In the requests in Example 8, each word is its own intonational phrase. They observed that at Time 1 the informant is very uncertain of his production and the illocutionary force of a request can hardly be inferred from the way that it is delivered with respect to intonation. The context in which the examples in 8 were produced makes it possible for the utterances to be understood as requests; otherwise without context they would be more likely to be understood as questions.

A striking difference is found between the utterances in Example 8 from Time 1 and those in Example 9, 10 months later.

By Time 2, the requests in 9 show terminal intonation. Overlooking certain issues of syntax and semantics, Dittmar and Terborg (1991) observed that, with respect to intonation, the requests in 9 are reasonably good realizations of requests.

9. Time 2 (Dittmar & Terborg, 1991) a. sie bitte setzen you please set b. bitte diese tasche please this bag place small chair platz kleine stuhl c. bitte zietung raus please newspaper out The study of the relation of interlanguage intonation and speech acts is in its infancy, but Dittmar and Terborg (1991, p. 367) identified three hypotheses for future study: 1. The illocutionary force of an utterance is primarily expressed by intonation in the initial stages of SLA. 2. The basic function of the progradient, nonterminal, pattern [Time 1] is the interactive signalling of the learner that s/he is uncertain about the meaning and performative aspects of the utterance and prefers that the conversational partner qualify the utterance with the right illocutionary modality and take over the conversational work.

3. It may be that speech acts in elementary learner varieties are not very distinct from each other on the basis of formal criteria (syntax, intonation, morphology, etc.).

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The Development of Morphology Related to Pragmatics

In addition to the examples of the English tense-aspect forms discussed earlier that are instances of morphological acquisition, it is important to consider examples from languages with richer inflectional systems than English. Consider the range of forms used in two judgment studies of requests in Spanish (Rodríguez, 1997; Walters, 1979). Request forms may include, but are not limited to (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1989), items in Example 10. The sample of Spanish request forms represents a range of grammatical knowledge including verbal morphology representing the present (10a, b, and c), conditional (10d and e), future (10f), formal imperative (10g), and formal past subjunctive (10h). The secondperson forms used in the judgment tasks were all formal (usted) forms (10a, b, d, g).5 10. Spanish request forms Expression Grammatical description a. Me puede dar 2p, pres, formal b. Tiene 2p, pres, formal c. Quiero 1p, pres d. Podría 2p, conditional, formal e. Querría 1p, conditional f. Tomaré 1p, future g Déme 2p, formal imperative h. Quisiera 2p, formal past subjunctive

English equivalent “Can you give me” “Do you have” “I want” “Could you, Would you” “I would like” “I will have” “Give me” “I would like”

Judgment tasks that ask learners to draw on such a broad base of grammatical knowledge assume that learners can distinguish among the forms. Moreover, by including only formal verbal morphology in second person, they may further assume that learners can make the distinction between informal and formal verbal morphology corresponding to the use of tu and usted.

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This assumption must be examined for classroom foreign language learners who are engaged in a status-unequal encounter (Kasper, 1997b), an environment in which the learners are addressed by their teachers informally (Rodríguez, personal communication, 1997) and thus only the second-person tu forms are modelled. To use judgment tasks successfully, it seems that learner familiarity with morphology must somehow be determined independently of the judgment task before the learner politeness rankings can be assessed.

Finally, consider how grammatically sophisticated the request alternatives in Example 10 compare to the German production data for interlanguage requests (Dittmar & Terborg, 1991).

By analogy to the German production data, we might expect production by beginning learners of Spanish to include por favor “please” (by analogy to the use of bitte “please” in early German interlanguage) and isolated NPs (as in b, platz kleine platz “seat little seat”), followed by use of informal morphological forms by more advanced learners (such as the classroom use of digame “tell me” used by students to surprised teachers, Rodríguez, personal communication, 1997), and finally emergent use of the morphology in Example 10.

The Development of Grammatical Complexity Related to Pragmatics

The grammatical competence required for syntactic devices is perhaps more straightforward than in the other areas. In a study of requests, S. Takahashi (1996) found that learners favor monoclausal request formulas, whereas NSs prefer biclausal request formulas, as summarized in Example 11.

11. Use of embedding (S. Takahashi, 1996, 1998) Monoclausal requests (preferred by NNSs) a. Would you (please) VP b. Could you (please) VP Biclausal requests (preferred by NSs) c. Would it be possible for you to VP? d. I was wondering if you could VP.

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A typical interlanguage pragmatics study would compare nativespeaker production in 11c and d to learner production in 11a and b.

Adding a focus on grammatical competence would also ask why learners do not use the biclausal requests in 11c and d: Are the learners simply unfamiliar with the pragmatic value of the embedded realizations or do they additionally show only emergent use of such constructions throughout the grammar that precludes their pragmatic use? I will take this case up again later.

Lexical Acquisition and Formulaic Learning in Pragmatics

Finally, in the realm of the lexicon, Cohen and Olshtain (1993) provide a retrospective method for uncovering the influence of lexical development on the production of semantic formulas as previously discussed. Related to lexical development is formulaic learning. Some of the syntactic arguments are simplified if empirical work reveals that some of these issues are better described by an appeal to formulaic speech. Note that Kasper and Schmidt (1996) identified the role of formulaic learning as one of the areas in need of investigation (see Table 1, Point m).

Scarcella (1979) interpreted expressions such as I would like as formulaic devices, not representative of a speaker’s L2 competence, especially in the case of low-level learners (p. 283). Scarcella concluded that L2 learners seem to use politeness features before they acquire rules that govern their distribution. Schmidt (1983) also provided examples of formula learning by Wes, who appropriately used the formula “Shall we go?” as a suggestion, but did not extend it to any other contexts at an early stage of development.

At the same stage, he used expressions such as “Sitting?” to mean “Shall we sit down?” or “Let’s sit down.” By the end of the observation period of Wes’s interlanguage development, gross errors in the performance of directives had largely been eliminated and the use of progressives like “sitting” had disappeared. Schmidt summarized Wes’s progress as follows:

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[Because] Wes is highly motivated to engage in interaction and communication and in general has developed considerable control of the formulaic language that acts as social grease in interaction, we might expect that he would show more development over time in the area of sociolinguistic competence compared with his very limited development in grammatical competence. This is, in general, the case. (p. 154)

In this case, and perhaps in the case of other learners like Wes, pragmatic development is not dependent on grammatical development. Although other studies that I have cited suggest that there is a relation between grammatical and pragmatic development, both outcomes are consistent with the line of investigation I have argued we should pursue. It is important to bear in mind that identifying the relationship—whatever that turns out to be—is necessary to advance our understanding of interlanguage pragmatics. It is likely that, as in other areas of SLA research, there will be some individual variation, and there will also be varying degrees of involvement of grammatical competence depending on the linguistic complexity of the speech act realization.

Grammar in Interlanguage Pragmatics Instructional Studies

One of the ramifications of factoring in the role of grammatical competence that immediately comes to mind is for instructional studies in interlanguage pragmatics (see Table 1, Point h).

Next to transfer studies, I think that influence-of-instruction studies are going to form the most significant body of acquisitional interlanguage pragmatics studies. Examples of such work are House (1996), LoCastro (1997), and S. Takahashi (1998). Other pedagogical evidence is summarized in Kasper (1997a), and a new collection edited by Rose and Kasper (1999) on instructional experiments that focus on the teaching of L2 pragmatics will appear shortly.

Adding a relevant grammar-oriented probe at the outset of a pragmatics instructional study is not unlike the syntax screening

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tests used in SLA syntax studies. For example, White (1989) described a test to determine whether learners have mastered WH-movement that was administered to determine which learners could provide valid judgments of subjacency violations. In the case of pragmatics, we would not necessarily be screening participants, just collecting additional data to aid our interpretation.

What kind of information would tests of grammatical development provide when added to the obligatory pretest-posttestretention test design of instructional-effect studies? I will construct a hypothetical study modelled on S. Takahashi’s (1998) study of instructional effects on the production of monoclausal and biclausal requests to illustrate some potential benefits of such an approach. In this line of investigation, an appropriate grammatical pretest would probe the learners’ ability and willingness to produce multiclausal sentences.

If learners who show no embedding in any context do not respond to pragmatic instruction on the pragmatic use of embedding, we might interpret this as evidence that a certain level of syntactic competence must precede this particular aspect of pragmatic competence (Table 3). If learners who show no embedding in any context before instruction show embedding in requests and other contexts after instruction, we might interpret this as evidence that syntax and pragmatics can be learned at the same time.

On the other hand, if learners who show no embedding in any context before instruction show embedding in requests only, in response to instruction (but in no other contexts), we might interpret this as evidence of formulaic learning. Finally, if learners who show use of biclausal constructions in nonpragmatic uses before instruction show use of biclausal constructions as a mitigator after instruction, we might interpret this as a case where syntactic development is a prerequisite to pragmatic development. We might further interpret this as a case of the teachability hypothesis (Pienemann, 1989, 1998) in one of two ways: that a learner’s having completed a prior acquisitional stage has increased the potential influence of instruction on interlanguage development, or that the instruction has focussed on the next stage of acquisition.

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Table 3 A Grammatical Interpretation for an Instructional Experiment in L2 Pragmatics Before instruction

After instruction

Possible interpretation

No embedding in any context

No embedding

Syntactic competence precedes pragmatic competence

No embedding in any context

Embedding in requests and other contexts

Syntax and pragmatics simultaneously

No embedding in any context

Embedding in requests only

Formulaic learning

Use of embedding, but not generalized to pragmatic use

Embedding in requests also

Syntactic development necessary to pragmatic use

Expanding Elicitation Tasks to Accommodate Acquisition Studies

Finally, whether we broaden our focus to include interlanguage studies as I have argued for here, or broaden our interlanguage pragmatics studies to include acquisition as part of the research agenda following Kasper and Schmidt (1996), it means including learners at all levels, especially at the lower levels.

Including lower-level learners will require some modifications to standard elicitation practices in order to make them more accessible. Visually oriented tasks such as presenting scenarios on video (Leary, 1994) or the use of printed cartoons (Rose, in press) will become more important because lower-level learners can interpret them more easily than the common written presentation (BardoviHarlig, 1999b). The more obvious and easier solution of delivering scenarios in the first language is much less desirable because that could increase both first language and culture influence.

Oral data will also become increasingly important as we seek to understand the role of chunk learning. What may appear to be a smooth delivery of a formula in a written response may show

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difficulty of retrieval in authentic oral production as shown in the conversations between students enrolled in an intensive English program and the program advisor in Examples 12 and 13 (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1997).

12. Level 3 (low-intermediate), male, L1 Brazilian Portuguese S1: Maybe, maybe I, uh, maybe I can (..) I can (.) jump one level, do you understand?

13. Level 7 (advanced), male, L1 Korean S2: So, I just, I’m just asking you, um, do you, could you, please let me, could you please um, give me some information, if, if possible?

In Examples 12 and 13 the learners struggle with modal expression. The learner in Example 12 seems to build his request one word at a time, whereas the learner in 13 tries out a variety of request formulas, “I’m just asking,” “do you,” “could you,” and “please let me,” before settling on “could you please give me some information.” Such important production information is obscured in written tasks.

Lastly, we note that in Dittmar and Terborg’s (1991) study, the instruction-giving task had a single addressee, simplifying the sociolinguistic variable of the addressee. This may or may not prove to be a useful design simplification for working with the lowest-level learners. It is worth considering such a simplification when working with beginning learners. We must also keep in mind that oversimplification with respect to addressees may run the risk of missing the stages at which learners are able to linguistically differentiate between addressees. The ultimate goal will be to increase our acquisitional savvy without sacrificing our pragmatic orientation. Arriving at that balance will undoubtedly take some experimentation.

As we incorporate different levels of learners into our studies, we should be prepared for additional challenges in analysis as well. Lower-level-learner speech acts will be harder to identify, especially in conversation (as opposed to more controlled elicitation tasks), as shown in Example 14, collected as part of the corpus

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for Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1997). Potential ambiguity of speech acts was also noted by Dittmar and Terborg (1991).

14. Level 3 (low-intermediate), male, L1 Brazilian Portuguese A: If you start in March, then you can stay in the IEP until (.)

December.

S1: December?

A: Or S1: I don’t think so, December, because if I have (.) um A: Level 3 S1: Level 3?

A: Next session Level 4 In this example we see what might be categorized as a negative response by S1 (in italics); it is probably a disagreement, but it is also possibly a rejection of a suggestion. It is unlikely that we would be able to make fine-grained distinctions between similar speech acts in the speech acts of lower-level learners as Murphy and Neu (1996) did when they distinguished between complaints and criticisms in a role-play by advanced non-native graduate students. This anticipated difficulty in speech act identification is consistent with Dittmar and Terborg’s (1991) observation that speech acts in elementary learner-language are not very distinct on the basis of formal criteria.

Concluding Remarks The expansion of interlanguage pragmatics to include acquisition is not in conflict with continuing the practice of interlanguage pragmatics research as we know it. What I am advocating is a broadening of the field of inquiry. The goals of the research agenda that I have outlined here can be summarized as follows: expanding learner populations to include beginning-level learners and modifying elicitation procedures appropriately; implementing cross-sectional studies in which acquisition can be studied across levels of proficiency; instituting longitudinal studies when possible; and integrating the investigation of the development of inter-

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language grammar with investigations of emergent pragmatic competence.

In closing, I believe that in order for interlanguage pragmatics to mature as an area of investigation in second language acquisition, we must begin to ask acquisitional questions of the type outlined by Kasper and Schmidt (1996), addressing the question “How does L2 pragmatic competence develop?” To also understand how L2 pragmatic competence is related to linguistic competence, we must begin to explore the interlanguage of interlanguage pragmatics.

Revision version accepted 13 March 1999

Notes 1

Kasper and Dahl (1991) employed a narrow definition of interlanguage pragmatics as speech act research for the specific purposes of the review article. Kasper’s definition of pragmatics is much broader (e.g., Kasper, 1997b).

2 To give a perspective on the field at the time the article by Kasper and Schmidt (1996) was written, I have included only work circulated before 1996.

Cross-sectional studies from 1996 include Houck and Gass (1996), Koike (1996), Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper, and Ross (1996), and S. Takahashi (1996), and more recently Hassall (1997), Hill (1997), Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei (1998), and Rose (in press). Longitudinal studies include Cohen (1997) and Kanagy and Igarashi (1997).

3 Six of the longitudinal studies cited earlier investigated beginning-level learners and constitute an exception to this claim (Cohen, 1997; Ellis, 1992; Kanagy & Igarashi, 1997; Sawyer, 1992; Schmidt, 1983; Schmidt & Frota, 1986). These studies are a small fraction of the acquisitional studies (crosssectional and longitudinal together) and an even smaller portion of interlanguage pragmatics research as a whole.

4 In this article I focus on speech act research in interlanguage pragmatics where the investigation of the interface of grammar and pragmatics is likely to be the most revealing. For a broader definition of pragmatics see Kasper (1997b).

5 This is not the case with native-speaker production, as Blum-Kulka’s (1989) crosslinguistic investigation of requests shows. Native speakers of Argentinian Spanish used both formal and informal morphology in their requests in response to the variety of scenarios presented by the discourse completion task. Using formal morphology exclusively in the judgment tasks is both a simplification of the number of choices presented to the learners

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and a reflection of the shopping scenario used by Walters and Rodríguez for the judgment tasks.

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