Andreas Trotzke, Attila Balla, Hannah Grobauer, Eva Wittenberg
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引用次数: 0
摘要
本文通过关注句子类型与对话者之间的社会距离之间的关系——礼貌的社会意义组成部分的一个核心方面——来探讨语言形式与社会意义之间的接口。我们对四组不同的说话者进行了强制选择实验(第一母语为英国英语的人,第一母语为美国英语的人,第二母语为英语/德语的人,第一母语为德语的人)。在这个实验中,我们沿着句子类型的句法维度(陈述句、疑问句或祈令句)操纵了请求帮助的语言形式,并记录了我们的参与者为每种形式(兄弟、同事或陌生人)选择的收件人。我们超越了高度约定俗成的形式(例如,Can you VP?),因此也改变了情态助动词(例如,Will you VP?)基于这幅求助方式的综合图,我们根据语言形式在不同社会场景中的幸福程度来识别语言形式的集群。我们的描述性聚类分析以及句子类型之间的统计比较表明,在不同的说话者群体和语言中,语言形式和社会意义之间存在系统的对应关系,我们提出,我们的经验数据为从“社会语法”的角度重新思考言语行为语法提供了一个潜在的起点。
Asking for help: An empirical exploration into social grammar.
This paper explores the interface between linguistic form and social meaning by focusing on correlations between sentence type and the social distance between interlocutors-a central aspect of the social meaning component of politeness. We present a forced-choice experiment with four different groups of speakers (L1 British English speakers, L1 American English speakers, L2 English/German speakers, and L1 German speakers). In this experiment, we manipulated the linguistic form of asking for help along the syntactic dimension of sentence type (declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives) and recorded the addressee our participants picked for each form (brother, coworker, or stranger). We broaden the empirical picture by going beyond highly conventionalized forms (e.g., Can you VP?) and therefore also varying the modal auxiliary verbs (e.g., Will you VP?). Based on this comprehensive picture of ways of asking for help, we identify clusters of linguistic forms depending on their felicity in different social scenarios. Our descriptive cluster analysis as well as the statistical comparisons between sentence types indicate that there are systematic correspondences between linguistic form and social meaning across different groups of speakers and languages, and we propose that our empirical data provide a potential starting point for rethinking speech act grammar in terms of 'social grammar'.
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