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Broadly speaking one can identify two approaches to the study of speech acts in cultural context: a mainstream approach known as 'contrastive pragmatics' and an alternative approach which I call 'ethnopragmatics'. Contrastive pragmatics (Blum-Kulka, Danet and Gherson 1985; Blum-Kulka et al 1989; Blum-Kulka and Kaspar 1993; among other works) assumes that certain speech-acts or speech-act types such as request, apology, and compliment - are found in all or most cultures, although they are "realised" differently from culture to culture. For example, requests may be realised with different degrees of directness or politeness, with an emphasis on positive or negative politeness, using different formal means of expression, e.g. imperatives, questions, modalised sentences, and so On. Many valuable studies have been produced in the contrastive pragmatics framework, but there are also some serious difficulties with its assumptions and methodology. |
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