\nCalifornia State Polytechnic University, Pomona, USA
\n<adkermad
![\"atmark\"](\"http:\/\/www.tesl-ej.org\/atmark.png\")
cpp.edu><\/p>\n\nAbstract<\/h3>\n
Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners\u2019 pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took a pragmatic listening test (adapted from Cohen, 2010) and made decisions about speaker intent across sixteen speech acts. Learners\u2019 responses were compared with 11-12 English native speakers\u2019 (NSs) responses. The learners provided open-ended rationales for how they made their decisions. Results demonstrated that for almost half the speech acts, all of which did not have a transparent pragmatic force, the learners relied primarily on the linguistic message and did not arrive at the same judgments as NSs did. In over half the cases when the learners did agree with NSs, the pragmatic force was transparent with the linguistic form. Overall, results demonstrate that pragma-prosodic meaning is challenging for learners. There is a need for teachers to provide pedagogical interventions to assist learners in interpreting a range of spoken cues, with a focus on prosodic properties, to decipher pragmatic meaning across a variety of speech acts.<\/p>\n
Keywords<\/strong>: Prosody; Pragmatic Intent; Pragmatic Comprehension; Pragmatic Strategies; Pragma-Prosodic Instruction<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In any given interaction involving second language (L2) learners, the \u201cnorms\u201d of the target language must be considered when producing and comprehending communicative acts in that language (Eslami-Rasekh, 2005; F\u00e9lix-Brasdefer, 2019; Sonnenburg-Winkler et al., 2020). Competence in this area of L2 pragmatics involves not only how learners use<\/em> language (Bardovi-Harlig, 2013) but also how they understand<\/em> and comprehend<\/em> language (Cohen, 2010; Culpeper et al., 2018). In other words, pragmatic productive skills involve what learners say and how, and pragmatic receptive skills involve the interpretation of what others say and how (Eslami & Mirzaei, 2012). Pragmatic comprehension is essential to co-constructed meaning between a speaker and a hearer. Successful comprehension is the result of interpreting the linguistic message along with the pragmatic force. However, how<\/em> a speaker conveys a message is often much more telling than the actual message itself (Culpeper, 2011; Wharton, 2012). Therefore, L2 pragmatic comprehension involves the decoding of the linguistic form along with the physical speech properties themselves.<\/p>\n
Prosody deals with just that\u2014the properties of speech which are superimposed over the linguistic message and which carry their own unique pragmatic meaning suggestive of the speaker\u2019s intent. In fact, more often than not, a speaker\u2019s prosody conveys much more meaning than the actual words they say; therefore, pragmatic comprehension inherently involves prosodic comprehension (Kang & Kermad, 2019). While prosody is pragmatic in nature (Brazil, 1997; Knowles, 2016; Ladd, 1996; Levis, 2016; Pickering, 2018), the intersection of L2 pragma-prosodic research is much more limited when compared with other areas of syntax, semantics, and morphology. Furthermore, a bulk of the current L2 prosody research has focused on prosodic production, yet research lacks on exactly how learners comprehend and make decisions about pragmatic meaning when conveyed through prosody, especially across speech acts. It has been suggested that prosody is difficult to hear for language learners (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010), but questions still remain as to what aspects of speech (prosodic or other) learners do indeed attend to. The current study, nested in L2 pragma-prosodic comprehension research, seeks to respond to these gaps and, in doing so, provide pedagogical insight on how to integrate a focus on pragma-prosodic speech act instruction in the English language learning classroom.<\/p>\n
Literature Review<\/h3>\n
Prosody<\/h4>\n
If language is considered to be a hierarchical structure that begins with individual sounds, the sounds are first placed into an allowable order according to the phonotactics of said language. These sounds then work together to create meaningful words, which are subsequently organized structurally according to the syntax of a given language. At the time of a spoken utterance, prosody gives life to these words as it is superimposed onto these embedded linguistic layers. Prosody, often interchangeable with the term \u201csuprasegmentals,\u201d refers to the properties of speech that are spread over the building blocks of language. Prosody collectively refers to the use of a speaker\u2019s vocal resources, including pitch, loudness, tempo, and voice quality, to characterize an entire utterance all the way down to a single syllable (Culpeper, 2011; Wichmann & Blakemore, 2006). In the absence of prosody, or the \u201chuman element\u201d (Ward, 2019, p. 1) of language, speech would simply be strings of computational or mechanical turn-taking. The most studied prosodic property is intonation, often the most crucial in indicating the force of an utterance (Knowles, 2016; Wichmann & Blakemore, 2006).<\/p>\n
Multi-Functioning Prosody<\/h4>\n
A speaker can exploit the prosody of English to convey several functions (Chun, 2002; Levis & Wichmann, 2015; Pickering, 2018). Attitudes and emotions have often invariably been linked to prosody, namely intonation, under the \u201cattitudinal\u201d umbrella. Prosody has been associated with irony, sarcasm, politeness, impoliteness, sincerity, nervousness, enthusiasm, excitement, and so on. However, this association is problematic and unreliable for several reasons (Levis, 1999; Levis & Wichmann 2015; Wichmann, 2000): attitude and emotion are actually not synonymous; emotion is not easily identifiable and consistently matched to effects of the voice; there is a lack of agreement on attitudinal effects even within a group of native speakers (NSs), and perceptions of attitude and emotion are language-specific.<\/p>\n
Grammatical functions of prosody are quite common in English as a Second Language (ESL) textbooks and have associated tone unit boundaries and intonation with structural syntax and punctuation, i.e., tone units with phrasal boundaries (commas, periods, etc.) or intonation patterns with punctuation (rising pitch for yes\/no questions or falling pitch for statements) (Chun, 2002; Levis & Wichmann, 2015; Pickering, 2018). However, any particular utterance, regardless of its grammatical structure, can be spoken with any intonational pattern (Levis, 2016). Set grammatical patterns do not hold across varying speaker intentions and real-time interactive contexts. Therefore, matching intonation with both grammatical and attitudinal functions is flawed due to the lack of consistency and predictability of these associations (Pickering, 2018). Rather than beginning with associating a particular tone with grammatical form or speaker affect, the tone instead can serve as the starting point to encode the speaker\u2019s intention within a speaker-hearer context. Said differently in Romero-Trillo\u2019s (2012) words, a pragma-prosodic analysis of language \u201cintends to identify the intentions with which utterances are pronounced and how they may help clarify the meaning behind some grammatical structures that do not render their transparent pragmatic force on the basis of their construction\u201d (p. 2).<\/p>\n
David Brazil\u2019s (1997) framework of intonation moves away from attitudinal or grammatical descriptions of prosody and focuses instead on its pragmatic nature within a communicative context. Brazil\u2019s (1997) systems of tone units, prominence, intonation, and pitch height are used to describe the meaning of prosody within a given speaker-hearer interaction (Pickering, 2018). Prominence, marked by increased pitch, length, and volume, is used meaningfully by a speaker to emphasize information within a tone unit (Brazil, 1997; Kang & Kermad, 2019; Pickering, 2018). Intonation functions within the context of the speaker-hearer interaction; this context considers what the hearer knows at a particular moment in the interaction. A proclaiming tone (fall or rise-fall) indicates that a speaker is asserting new information which expands the shared world between the speaker and the hearer, whereas a referring tone (rise of fall-rise) indicates that the speaker is discussing something already in play in the conversation, building on the hearer\u2019s knowledge, or making connections to prior established information (Pickering, 2018). A level tone has other pragmatic functions, such as singalling routine-like discourse, a lack of opinion, a word search, a desire to hold the floor, or a moment of temporary linguistic coding (Brazil, 1997; Pickering, 2018).<\/p>\n
Brazil\u2019s (1997) framework illustrates that at the time of a given utterance, a speaker makes choices\u2014choices to make a word prominent or not, choices to use one intonation pattern over another, choices to use a particular pitch height. Each prosodic choice has a function, and each function carries pragmatic meaning. When a speaker chooses one option over another, they are communicating something differently (Brazil, 1997; Kang & Kermad, 2019; Levis, 2016; Pickering, 2018; Wharton, 2012). Therefore, within the context of interaction between a speaker and a hearer, a hearer has to be attuned to all of these choices and the communicative consequences that they bring to the interaction. For L2 learners, this means that they should be aware that prosodic choices signal different speaker intentions. However, little research has documented how learners detect these choices and interpret their underlying pragmatic functions.<\/p>\n
Prosody and Speech Acts<\/h4>\n
Speech acts, or the use of language to carry out social functions, are the most common focus of L2 pragmatics instruction and assessment (Eslami & Mirzaei, 2012). General pragma-prosodic patterns have been documented across different studies of speech acts. Aijmer (1996) found the intonation of apologies to vary based on the gravity of the offense; that is, more routine-like apologies (e.g., \u201csorry\u201d) are spoken with rising or fall-rising tones. On the other hand, research has shown that more remourseful apologies or condolensces tend to have falling tones (Knowles, 2016). Similar patterns have emerged with respect to gratitude: \u201cthank you\u201d spoken with a falling tone is perceived to express sincere gratitude than when spoken with a rising tone which is perceived to be more routine-like or casual (Aijmer, 1996; Knowles, 2016; Wells, 2006; Wichmann, 2015).<\/p>\n
When expressing empathy in nurse-patient interactions, Staples (2015) found that native English speakers used more falling tones, but nonnative speaking nurses used more level tones which can sound more insincere. General patterns of level tones have often been used for routine phrases or asides (Cheng et al., 2008; Pickering, 1999; Wennerstrom, 1997; Wennerstrom & Siegel, 2003). For example, teacher directives or rote classroom explanations (e.g., repeating formulas or definitions) are usually accompanied by level tones because the teacher is focusing on the routine functioning of the class (Brazil, 1997).<\/p>\n
The prosodic patterns of directives, such as yes\/no and wh- questions, are much more salient than other speech acts, mostly because of their frequent occurrence in ESL textbooks (Pickering, 2018). Pedagogical strategies for teaching yes\/no and wh-questions have been to ask the former with a rising tone and the latter with a falling tone. While there are no exclusive paired matchings between these speech acts and intonation patterns, Brazil (1997) notes that the frequent co-occurrence of rising tones with yes\/no questions is due to their nature which often projects an assumption into the shared world between the speaker and the hearer. And, while wh-questions can be uttered with any tone choice, their nature of seeking information that is not yet at play in the conversation is often accompanied by falling tones.<\/p>\n
Learners\u2019 Comprehension of Pragma-Prosodic Meaning<\/h4>\n
Comprehension of pragmatic meaning goes far behind understanding the literal linguistic message, and in order for learners to engage appropriately in interaction, they need to be aware of the ways in which prosody contributes to the illocutionary force of an utterance. Some studies have included a focus on prosody when looking at learner comprehension of pragmatic meaning. For example, while not taking an instrumental investigation of prosody, Taguchi et al. (2016) explored the way in which L2 Spanish learners used auditory cues (vocal qualities such as intonation, stress, pausing, and speech rate) to infer ironic meaning on a multimedia listening test. They found that both high- and low- scoring groups made use of auditory cues, although to a lesser extent than logical (i.e., deductive) reasoning. Similarly, Shively et al. (2008) considered tone in how L2 Spanish learners made decisions about irony. The learners were asked to assess tone by checking all that applied (e.g., sincere, sarcastic\/ironic, friendly, etc.). While the learners did pick up on different tones, Shively et al. (2008) found that this question was not methodologically consistent, as participants understood irony, but chose different tones to accompany the response. This inconsistency illustrates Bryant and Fox Tree\u2019s (2005) finding that irony is a dynamic involvement of many interactional features, and while particular vocal characteristics may accompany irony, there is not a set \u201cironic tone of voice\u201d (p. 272) that maintains prosodic consistency across ironic utterances.<\/p>\n
For a number of reasons, interpreting the pragmatic function of prosody is challenging for learners: 1) even NSs of English are unable to verbalize or agree on the conventions of how prosody is used (Levis, 1999; Pickering, 2018); 2) English learners do not have native-like intuitions when it comes to prosody (Levis, 1999); 3) learners often cannot hear prosodic cues associated with speaker intent (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010); and 4) pronunciation has received much less of a focus pedagogically speaking when compared to other skills (i.e., grammar, word-building, writing, etc.), although it is becoming increasingly more recognized. The combination of non-target-like pragmatic behavior can result in communication breakdown (Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) and \u201cperformance insecurity\u201d (Romero-Trillo, 2012, p. 5). There is, therefore, a great need for teachers to bring focus to the properties of speech that are involved in altering pragmatic meaning. Benefits of meta-pragmatic instruction have already been noted in the research with respect to speech act comprehension (Derakhshan & Arabmofrad, 2018; Derakhshan & Eslami, 2015). Combining meta-pragmatic instruction with prosodic training can provide classroom opportunities to engage in authentic speech act situations which carry high demands for successful pragmatic competence.<\/p>\n
The Current Study<\/h3>\n
While research has documented the many functions of prosody in conveying a speaker\u2019s intent across speech acts, what is much less understood is whether English learners are able to interpret these salient uses of prosody, i.e., whether they comprehend the pragma-prosodic meaning conveyed when the pragmatic force of the utterance is not transparent with the linguistic form. Much L2 prosody research has focused on the actual speech production of L2 learners which has advanced quite a bit. However, what is less understood is what is involved in learners\u2019 prosodic comprehension\u2014a skill which is essential for L2 English pragmatic success. This study adds to the literature by not only focusing on pragma-prosodic comprehension, but also on providing insight into the actual strategies learners use when it comes time to make a decision about a speaker\u2019s intent. Simply asking whether or not learners arrive at the same conclusions as native speakers is not enough; it is important to understand the means to the end. While research documents the difficulties in hearing prosodic meaning (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010), knowing what lies below the surface of these difficulties can inform pragma-prosodic pedagogy in the English language learning classroom. Therefore, the current study responds to the following research questions:<\/p>\n
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- To what extent do English learners agree with native English speakers on pragma-prosodic meaning across speech acts?<\/li>\n
- What strategies do English learners use to make decisions about pragmatic meaning when conveyed through prosody?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n