Speech Acts Bibliography:
Letters of Application

Ebsworth, M. E., Bodman, J. W., & Carpenter, M. (1996). Cross-cultural realization of greetings in American English. In S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language (pp. 89-107). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reports on a study conducted by Ebsworth, Bodman, and Carpenter to explore the way non-native speakers handle greeting situations in U.S. American English. They began by collecting data from naturally occurring greeting exchanges between native and non-native speakers of U.S. American English. From this data they created an open-ended questionnaire that described 7 greeting acts between people of varying degrees of familiarity/formality and asked respondents to create a dialogue in English that would be appropriate for the situation. They were then asked to create a dialogue in their native language for the same situation and to provide a literal translation into English. A total of 283 dialogues were collected. The baseline data for the study was provided by 50 native speakers of English and the second language data came from 2 groups: one composed of 20 bilingual graduate students, and the other was composed of 80 adult, advanced-level ESL students from the American Language Institute at New York University. The median age of the informants was 23 (range of 19-65) and they were predominantly middle-class. The researchers found that native speakers made a wide variety of linguistic and non-verbal decisions about what greeting was appropriate to use in a given situation based on sensitivity to many situational and psychosocial variables. As a result of this complexity, many non-native speakers had significant difficulty producing greetings in a way that native speakers of U.S. American English found acceptable. Much of this pragmatic gap can be accounted for by looking at differences in cultural assumptions about what constitutes a polite greeting. For example, many of the native speakers considered it polite to give a quick, but friendly "greeting on the run" or a "speedy greeting" to a friend or acquaintance passing by when one or both greeters are in a hurry. However, in many cases this was considered extremely rude and impersonal by non-native speakers who came from cultures in which it is considered important to extend more effort to greet a person or in cultures in which concerns of time are secondary to the importance of social interaction. Ebsworth, Bodman, and Carpenter found that greeting competence is very much language-specific, and that pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic failure often occurred when non-native speakers did not understand the assumptions made by native speakers for particular greeting situations.

James, C., Scholfield, P. & Ypsiladis, G. (1994). Cross-cultural correspondence: Letters of application. Occasional Paper. Dublin: Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College.

Discusses ten sequences in application letters taken verbatim from 8 letters written by Greek applicants. Eight were identified by natives as clear and distinct kinds of failure and two as acceptable. The study had French (10), German (6), Greek (6), Polish (9), Portuguese (5), and Syrian Arab (9) speakers (N=45) doing the rating of each statement. They were all advanced learners of English and had to rate each statement on a 5-point scale from very suitable to very unsuitable. Then they were asked to rate the sequences also if they were written in the native language. The study didn't find that this rating was any different from the EFL rating. Greeks were least likely to catch failures. All were guided by their first-language pragmatics. Note that UK raters used different criteria from those of Americans. Self-praise was rated down but Americans wouldn't necessarily react this way.