云山讲座教授Istvan Kecskes讲座通知

讲座题目：Bilingual Pragmatic Competence

主 讲 人： Istvan Kecskes（云山讲座教授）

讲座时间：2013年6月8日（星期六）下午2:30

讲座地点：广东外语外贸大学第七教学楼213室

内容简介

　　Pragmatic competence is usually defined as the ability to produce and comprehend utterances (discourse) that is adequate to the socio-cultural context in which interaction takes place (e.g. Rose & Kasper 2001; Thomas 1983). This presentation is going to discuss bilingual pragmatic competence that has been a somewhat neglected area in the field of both bilingualism and pragmatics. Because of the monolingual focus pragmatic competence has never been a primary issue in the agenda of linguistic/philosophical pragmatics or other subfields of pragmatics with the exception of interlanguage pragmatics. This lack of attention may also be explained by the fact that linguistics proper has never really focused on pragmatics competence. Chomsky (1978: 224) introduced a distinction between "grammatical competence," which is related to form and meaning, and "pragmatic competence," which involves "knowledge of conditions and manner of appropriate use, in conformity with various purposes". Chomsky, however, did not take any interest in this pragmatic competence and considered the separation of linguistic competence from pragmatic competence to be indispensable, for practical reasons, for the ability to explore and discover the pure, formal properties of the genetically preprogrammed linguistic system.

　　Willingness, motivation and ability of individual learners to assume L2 socio-cultural beliefs, norms and pragmatic expectations seem to play a decisive role in bilingual pragmatic development and language use. Consequently, an advanced non-native speaker cannot be expected “simply to abandon his/her own cultural world” (Barro et al. 1993: 56). Adamson (1988) pointed out that non-native speakers are often reluctant to accept and share the values, beliefs and presuppositions of an L2 community even if they have been living there for a long period of time and can speak the language quite well. The influence of L1 cultural expectations on communication patterns is so strong that even if the conceptual socialization process in L2 is very advanced, and the individual has high proficiency and excellent skills in the L2 her/his interaction with Westerners can be severely blocked by the limits imposed by cultural factors.

　　This presentation has a relatively limited scope. It focuses mainly on discussing how the emerging new language with its own developing socio-cultural foundation affects the existing L1-governed knowledge and pragmatic competence of adult sequential bilinguals. It is assumed that bilinguals already have an L1-governed pragmatic competence at place, which will be adjusted to accommodate the socio-cultural requirements of the new language.

 主讲人简介

　　Istvan Kecskes is Professor of Linguistics and Education at the State University of New York, Albany, USA where he teaches graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism. His latest publications include five books Foreign Language and Mother Tongue (2000); Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2 (2002); Cognitive Aspects of Bilingualism (2007); Explorations in Pragmatics (2007); Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer (2009). His next book "Intercultural Pragmatics" will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

　　Professor Kecskes is the founding editor of "Intercultural Pragmatics", the Mouton Series in Pragmatics  and the bilingual journal "Chinese as a Second Language Research". Together with Pilar Garces Blitvich he founded the "Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (John Benjamins)