10 - Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions in Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Research 1: An Applied Linguistic Case Study of Learners of English and Chinese

Summary

In Chapter 10, we examine how cross-cultural pragmatics – in particular, cross-cultural research on expressions – can be applied to applied linguistics. More specifically, we explore how the study of expressions can provide insight into in-depth problems in language learning and language use, by examining cross-cultural pragmatic differences between the ways in which British learners of Chinese and Chinese learners of English evaluate a set of pragmatically important expressions in their target language. Chapter 10 reveals that the use of seemingly ‘simple’ pragmatically salient expressions such as sorry in English can cause significant difficulties for foreign language learners. In methodological terms, the present chapter first conducts an ancillary research, i.e. questionnaires, followed by a contrastive pragmatic exploration, i.e. interviews conducted with language learners.