CAS LX 400 Second Language Acquisition Week 6b Functional and pragmatic perspectives What is a functionalist approach Functionalist researchers functionalists are generally concerned with the role language structures play in actual communication The knowledge about language that they study is primarily knowledge about how language is used Giv n Grammar as a set of strategies that one employs in order to produce coherent communication Functionalism It is worth noting that functionalists and generativists are often quite ideologically divided The functionalist view is generally considered by functionalists to be an alternative to the generativist roughly speaking UG view For many functionalists the knowledge of language is exclusively cast in terms of knowledge of language use I as essentially a generativist at heart don t buy that but nothing really precludes us from thinking of this instead as looking at two different aspects of our linguistic knowledge This is how I will treat it here that is as complementary rather than contradictory Discourse To investigate language function we need to consider language in context as in the context of a discourse Consider Here are two grammatical sentences He bought a book John bought it Discourse To investigate language function we need to consider language in context as in the context of a discourse Consider Here are two grammatical sentences He bought a book John bought it Yet only one can be used in response to the question without additional gestures What did John buy at the store Discourse A well formed discourse has a coherent flow of information In any given sentence some information is new and generally some information is old Certain aspects of language are sensitive to the distinction between new and old information for example pronouns can only refer to old information John walked in He sat down It was a dark and stormy night He sat down Grammaticality and felicity Whether a sentence is grammatical is a semiindependent question as to when it can be used A sentence is grammatical if it can be used in some context but it is felicitous only if it is used in the proper context Pragmatics is concerned with the system underlying what makes an utterance felicitous is certainly a part of overall language knowledge Topic comment Sentences in a discourse can generally be divided into a topic and a comment on the topic The topic is what the sentence is about generally the old information something already established in the discourse and the comment is what the sentence says about the topic generally new information Topic comment In English the subject generally serves as the topic of a sentence Let s talk about John John bought a book He also bought some coffee There are also other means of indicating the topic As for that book John bought it two weeks ago That book John bought but this other one he didn t Topic comment Many languages explicitly mark topics with a particle among them Japanese Ano hon wa John ga katta That book top John nom bought As for that book John bought it Or Korean Ku chayk un John i sassta That book top John nom bought As for that book John bought it Topic comment Li and Thompson 1976 made a very influential proposal that differentiates languages into two types topic prominent languages and subject prominent languages The underlying organization of these two types of languages are claimed to be different subject prominent languages like English differentiate subject and predicate primarily while topic prominent languages like Mandarin or Japanese differentiate topic and comment primarily Topic comment In a topic prominent language the sentence is usually structured with the topic first discourse old or given information followed by the comment discourse new information The concept of subject takes a back seat there are no meaningless subjects like in it rains or there was a fire double subjects are very common As for fish halibut is delicious Topic comment The article you use in English also is determined by context The indefinite article a n is used on new information while the definite article the is used only for given old information The fireman arrived A fireman arrived John bought a book A book was about firemen L2 research into function Many L2A researchers have concentrated on this pragmatic knowledge the use of language in context to see how this knowledge develops in L2A It is clear even from English that there is a great deal of pragmatic knowledge involved in language use over and above the things which render sentences grammatical or ungrammatical principles and parameters and such Modes of expression Giv n is credited with distinguishing two different modes of expression as ends of a continuum the pragmatic mode or presyntactic mode where a speaker relies heavily on contributions of context and relatively little on structure and syntax and the syntactic mode where a speaker structures sentences in a more target like and systematic way Giv n s pragmatic vs syntactic modes Pragmatic mode Topic comment structure Syntactic mode Subject predicate structure Loose conjunction Tight subordination Slow rate of delivery several intonation contours Word order governed by pragmatic principles old information followed by new information Noun Verb ratio low about 1 1 Fast rate of delivery single intonation contour Word order governed by semantic principles i e agent first Grammatical morphology absent Noun Verb ratio higher semantically complex verbs Elaborate use of grammatical morphology Modes Idea L2 learners start in the pragmatic mode and move toward the syntactic mode Among other things this would suggest that initially topic comment type structures would be very common in the speech of elementary L2 ers Grammatical vs pragmatic knowledge There is reason to believe that these are two semi independent forms of language knowledge L2 ers are sometimes observed to have acquired the grammatical structure without necessarily using it in the right places from the perspective of the TL Huebner 1983 Single subject Ge an adult Hmong speaker learning English in Hawaii as an L2 Hmong and Ge s second language Lao are both topic prominent languages which as fully developed languages share many of the characteristics as Giv n s pragmatic mode Recordings made every 3 weeks for a year Ge and is a Ge s use of is a Presumably has its origins in English it s a or is a but careful study reveals that this was not how Ge initially