Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication.
Pragmatic Resources Series—Call for papers (deadline: 1 Jun 2015): Back to Basics: Filling the Gaps in Pragmatics Teaching Materials. Editors: Donna Tatsuki & Donna Fujimoto
The teaching of pragmatics to language learners has been advocated because of empirically demonstrated needs and benefits (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996, 1999; Bardovi-Harlig, 2003; Kasper & Schmidt, 1996; Kasper & Rose, 1999). Furthermore, language textbooks rarely include pragmatic information and teacher manuals generally fail to offer any supplements (Vellenga, 2004). Over the past decade, efforts have been made to collect and publish pedagogical guides and materials for use by language teachers. A recent cataloguing and analysis (Tatsuki, forthcoming) of pragmatic topics addressed by several prominent pedagogical collections indicates that directive and expressive speech acts (especially requests, apologies, compliments, refusals, and suggestions/advice-giving) are the most common topics for teaching materials/lesson plans. Awareness-raising activities are the next most frequent. The areas underrepresented by teaching materials include deixis, commissive speech acts, and other topics such as implicature/explicature.
The proposed volume aims to rectify this situation and fill the pedagogical gaps. Papers dealing with the following topics will especially be sought:
deixis (personal, spatial, temporal, social, discourse)
commissive speech acts (promising, warning, threatening, guaranteeing, inviting, offering, swearing, volunteering)
implicature/explicature
taboo language
lying, deception
assessment
context
conversation (turn-taking, sequence organization, etc.)
structure (codes/styles, non-verbal, sound/prosody, morphology, clause/sentence, suprasentential utterance building, genres, rhetoric, signs/symbols, etc/)
relevance
intentionality
development
Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the editors with other suggestions for rare/underrepresented topics. For information on manuscript formats contact Donna Tatsuki dhtatsuki@gmail.com.