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This paper aims to investigate Asian English learners’ preferred uses of the modal auxiliaries must and should by using both syntactic, topical and semantic annotation as well as various corpus linguistic tools. Our primary goal is to identify culture-specific motivations in the use of the two modal verbs and to demonstrate how those relate to the use of the two items in language produced by L1 speakers of English. We adhere to Hinkel’s study (TESOL Q 29(2):325–343. 1995, doi: 10.2307/3587627) and her findings as a springboard into our analysis. She suggested that differences in the use of modals between Asian English learners (AELs) and English L1 speakers may be culturally founded. We see the essential need to question and deepen the understanding of such implications, arguing that a count of tokens and their correlation with essay topics alone cannot be sufficiently informative. This is why we pursue a more in-depth approach which combines both corpus and pragmatic tools. First of all, we will conduct a contrastive analysis of quantitative data from two different learners’ corpora on the one hand, and three available corpora of contemporary English on the other hand. The goal of this analysis is to carve out certain AEL and/or English native speakers’ patterns in using must and should in their deontic and epistemic senses. Secondly, we will evaluate the AEL data in regard to whether and how they reflect cultural values different from the ones expressed in native English speech. Our findings show that, whereas ENSs and AELs alike do demonstrate a preference in the less face-threatening modal should over the more direct must in deontic uses, both must and should tend to be used more deliberately and more purposefully by AELs than by ENSs, who seem to apply them much more vaguely and polysemously. With regard to Hinkel’s major claim that AELs’ use of must and should reflects cultural values different from the ones expressed in native English speech, we were able to affirm this hypothesis. AELs in our datasets use must and should significantly differently than ENSs due to their alleged culturally intrinsic sense of togetherness and joint responsibility for their society.

This article argues that, when analysing formulaic language use in Chinese, besides the three main groups, proverbs (yànyu), idioms (chéngyu), and guànyòngyu compounds, we need to distinguish and pay special attention to a fourth category: situation-bound utterances (qíngjìng zhuanyòngyu). Situation-bound utterances (SBUs) constitute a unique group within idiomatic expressions because their use is tied to particular situations. SBUs fulfil social needs in conversation. People know that if they use these prefabricated expressions they are safe: nobody will misunderstand them because these phrases usually mean the same to most speakers in a speech community. The article aims to introduce SBUs as a separate category among Chinese formulaic expressions, discuss its relationship to yànyu, chéngyu, and guànyòngyu compounds, explain why it is important to handle it as a separate lexical category, and highlight the unique nature and use of SBUs. However, it is not the goal of the article to give a full and detailed description of the new category, which will need further research.

The paper discusses the differences between intracultural communication and intercultural communication from a socio-cognitive perspective that treats this relationship as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Movement on the continuum, and differences between the two phenomena are affected by different factors that will be discussed in the paper. The hypothetical left end of the continuum is intracultural communication and the right end is intercultural communication. Neither exists in pure form. The question is to which end a given communicative situation is closer to and what characteristics it is dominated by. While moving on toward the right end communication becomes less dependent on standards, norms, frames, core common ground and formulaic language and is characterized more by emergent common ground, ad hoc generated rather than formulaic expressions, norm creating attempts and individual creativity in solving communication problems.

This paper discusses two important issues of current pragmatics research as related to dialogue and discourse: interest in the hearer rather than the speaker, and focus on utterance rather than dialogue and discourse segment. These two issues are intertwined, and they are each other’s consequences. It will be argued that current pragmatic theories appear to be hearer-centered and utterance-centered and they consider communication recipient design and intention recognition. This explains why the main interest in these theories is in interpretation: recovery of speaker’s meaning by the hearer. The paper claims that hearer-centeredness is a direct consequence of the fact that pragmatics is an utterance-based inquiry. In order for us to get closer to what exactly the speaker has wanted to say we need to go beyond utterance to dialogue and discourse segment. This would require rethinking and reevaluating, to some extent, what current pragmatics is all about. In fact this process has already started. Several studies have been talking about “narrow pragmatics” and “wide pragmatics” discussing the relationship of pragmatics, dialogue (e.g. Weigand 2001, 2004, 2006, 2010, Cooren 2010) and discourse analysis (e.g. Puig 2003, Taboada and Mann 2006, De Saussure 2007).

Communication is not as smooth a process as current pragmatic theories depict it. In Rapaport's words "We almost always fail [...]. Yet we almost always nearly succeed: This is the paradox of communication" (Rapaport 2003: 402). This pa- per claims that there is a need for an approach that is able to explain this "bumpy road" by analyzing both the positive and negative features of the communicative process. The paper presents a socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics that takes into account both the societal and individual factors including cooperation and egocentrism that, as claimed here, are not antagonistic phenomena in interaction. This approach is considered an alternative to current theories of pragmat- ics that do not give an adequate account of what really happens in the commu- nicative process. They consider communication an idealistic, cooperation-based, context-dependent process in which speakers are supposed to carefully construct their utterances for the hearer taking into account all contextual factors and hearers do their best to figure out the intentions of the speakers. This approach relies mainly on the positive features of communication including cooperation, rapport and politeness while almost completely ignores the untidy, trial-and- error nature of communication and the importance of prior contexts captured in the individual use of linguistic units. The overemphasis on cooperative, societal, contextual factors has led to disregard individual factors such as egocentrism and salience that are as important contributors to the communicative process as cooperation, context and rapport. The socio-cognitive approach is presented as a theoretical framework to incorporate and reconcile two seemingly antagonistic sides of the communicative process and explain the dynamic interplay of prior and actual situational contexts.

The goal of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it explains the relevance of the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 1997; 2003; Kecskés 2001) to pragmatics research, arguing that although this hypothesis is a psycholinguistic theory it may contribute significantly to our understanding of pragmatic processing. Secondly, it will be claimed and demonstrated through examples that the salient meaning of lexical units constituting utterances in conversation plays a more important role in comprehension than has been believed by the supporters of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic theories that consider context to be the main source of actual contextual meaning.

AbstractThis paper argues that people with more than one language have different knowledge of their Lis than do monolingual people, and this difference can mainly be due to the effect of subsequent languages on the development and use of the LI skills. In order to investigate the state of the L1 in foreign language learners a longitudinal experiment was conducted with native speakers of Hungarian studying English, French or Russian as a foreign language in different classroom settings. The L2 effect on the LI was analyzed from three aspects: (1) structural well-formedness; (2) use of linguistic and visual memory; and (3) metaphorical density. This study will focus only on issues concerning structural well- formedness.1The participants of the experiment were tested three times during a two year period. Findings demonstrated that intensive and successful foreign language learning can have a beneficial effect on the development and use of mother tongue skills.