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Browsing MS or MPhil by Author "Aisha Zafar Khan"

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    Pragmatics of the speech act of greetings
    (UMT Lahore, 2019) Aisha Zafar Khan
    The current study investigates cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. It examines semantic formulas underlying the speech act of greetings produced by Pakistani ESL learners of English. It particularly compares and contrasts the speech act of greeting produced in English and Urdu by non-native speakers (NNS) of English and native speakers (NS) of Urdu in selective contexts. The study also investigates the NSs’ production of speech act of greeting in English for their pragmatic appropriateness and analyzes different elements that influence respective ratings. A Free Discourse Completion Test (abbreviated as FDCT) has been operated to elicit greeting responses by the ESL learners of English language. This test consists of 10 situational prompts along with some basic demographic questions presented both in English and Urdu versions. In order to authenticate the data, it was triangulated by additionally administrating retrospective interviews and role-plays. The pragmatic appropriateness of NNSs is checked by four-point scale rating. The results show that there is a significant deviation of NNSs from NSs in terms of greeting strategies, like, greetings proper, phatic questions, phatic phrases, address terms and situational greetings. The differences between the production of speech acts result from not fully developed pragmatic competence and lack of appropriate linguistic means. Socio-cultural differences in the communication style are quite evident in the speech act production. These dissimilarities in the sociopragmatic behavior may become the cause of pragmatic failure leading to miscommunication. Finally, the important pedagogical implications are also discussed which are very significant for pragmatic instruction. The result of this research leads to a better understanding about Pakistani ESL learners’ way of greeting and responding to certain greetings in English. It not only elaborates ESL learners’ pragmatic competence but also their perception about pragmatic appropriateness.