Text 21

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 451.

jenny thomas: 'Cross-cultural pragmatic failure' in Applied Linguistics 4/z, 1983, page 105

'Free goods' are those which, in a given situation, anyone can use without seeking permission, for example, salt in a restaurant (providing, of course, that you are having a meal in that restaur­ant and have not simply wandered in from the street with a bag of fish and chips). Generally speaking, what an individual regards as 'free goods' varies according to relationships and situation. In one's own family or home, most things (food, drink, books, baths) are free goods. In a stranger's house they are not. Cross-culturally, too, perceptions of what constitutes 'free' or 'nearly free' goods differ. In Britain, matches are 'nearly free', so one would not use a particularly elaborate politeness strategy to request one, even of a total stranger. In the Soviet Union cigarettes are also virtually 'free' and a request for them demands an equally minimal degree of politeness, such as Daite sigaretu [give (me) a cigarette]. A Russian requesting a cigarette in this country and using a similar strategy would either have wrongly encoded the amount of politeness s/he intended (covert grammatical or pragma-linguistic failure) or seriously misjudged the size of imposition (sociopragmatic failure).

> The author is writing ('in this country') about Britain. Do you
think her observation on salt in a restaurant is based on a uni­
versal component of a 'restaurant script'? In a family context,
do you agree that 'most things ... are treated as free goods'?
What about other cultures you are familiar with?

> The examples in this text are physical objects. There are also
cultural differences in what kind of information is considered
'free goods'. What constraints are there, in cultures you are
familiar with, on asking people about certain topics (for
example, their political views, religion, marital status,
income, cost of their possessions, bathroom behavior, sexual
practices)?

> What do you think the distinction is between the two kinds of
'failure' (pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic) described
here?