studiesofnegativepragmatictransferininterlanguage.docVIP

Studies on Negative Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics Shaozhong Liu Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, 541004, China Abstract: Transfer is a pervasive term and this has led to diverse interpretations and research practices of it. This paper reviewed the related literature on transfer studies in second language acquisition, linguistic studies and non-linguistic. It also made a survey about approaches in transfer studies, native speakers’ attitudes toward transfer, and transfers made by Chinese learners of English. It was argued that transfer research evolved from a linguistic-to- non-linguistic path, and there is a necessity in the current trend to shift from the former to the latter. Keywords: transfer, linguistic transfer, pragmatic transfer, second language acquisition What is negative pragmatic transfer? As was mentioned in Section 1.1, transfer to pragmaticians means difference of use due to NL influence. And to understand what is different, a preliminary step was to sort out similarities and differences between languages and the use of these languages. The effort to study how non-native speakers understand and realize a speech act in the TL has spiraled into a tradition identified as the study of pragmatic universals. As many as 11 speech acts have been covered to date: requests, suggestions, invitations, refusals, expressions of disagreement, corrections, complaints, apologies, expression of gratitude, compliments and indirect answers (Kasper, 1992). Kasper (1995) focused on pragmatic transfer and defined it as “the influence exerted by learners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than L2 on their comprehension, production, and acquisition of L2 pragmatic information” (Kasper, 1992; 1995). 2.1 Role of negative pragmatic transfer in interlanguage pragmatic studies The study of the learner language has been a growing source of concern also in pragmatics in recent years. The pragmatic perspective toward the le