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Speech Acts Bibliography:
Correction of Factual Error
Takahashi, T. & Beebe, L. M. (1993). Cross-linguistic
influence in the speech act of correction. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka
(Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 138-152). NY: Oxford University
Press.
Looks at American and Japanese performance on
the speech act of correction in status unequal (professor-student: low
to high, high to low) situations where one knows the other has made
a factual error. The study had 55 subjects -- 15 Americans, 15 Japanese
responding in English, and 25 Japanese responding in Japanese (in Tokyo)
-- fill out a 12-situation discourse completion task. The average age
of respondents was 32-33. It found that positive remarks are an important
adjunct to face threatening acts in English -- "I agree with you, but..."
64% of Americans did this while only 13% of the Japanese in Japanese
did so (AE>JE>JJ). All groups used softeners, "I believe," "I
think," questions, "Did you say...?" and expressions to lighten the
gravity of the mistake or defend the interlocutor, "You made one small
error in the date." Japanese also used softeners but not as frequently
in ESL (50% of time vs. 71% of time for E1 group). Both groups used
verbal indications of correction in English more than in Japanese (only
26%) (professor to student: AE>JE>JJ, student to professor: JJ>JE>AE).
The reason was that in Japanese paralinguistic means such as facial
expressions, tone of voice, sighs, hesitating serve that function. Japanese
are more overt in their consciousness of status and in not covering
it up in their use of language. Americans harbor a polite fiction that
you and I are equals.
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