Offers and refusals: A postcolonial pragmatics perspective

提议与拒绝：后殖民语用学视角

• 批准号: 182656299
• 负责人: Privatdozent Dr. Eric Anchimbe
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2009-12-31 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/182656299?language=en
• 关键词: Offers; refusals; postcolonial; pragmatics; perspective

In linguistic studies of postcolonial communities, pragmatics has been significantly ignored. This project adopts a pragmatic approach to offering in two postcolonial countries: Cameroon and Ghana. From a contrastive-comparative perspective, it explores pattems of offering and refusing in the English varieties (and Pidgins) in these two communities with a bid to establish how the group or collective cultures and mix of languages of these communities influence speakers' response to offers. Offers are commissives which beside committing the offerer to some future action, are accepted or refused by the offeree depending on the amount of trust in the offerer, rules of (ethnic, social) group interaction, opening of (ethnic, social) group boundaries, choice of language used in the offer utterance, and levels of politeness of the language in which the offer is made. On this basis, this study, with a direct focus on patterns of refusing offers, seeks to achieve the following: 1) investigate and analyse the linguistic strategies through which offers (for services, assistance, and help) are made and how these are refused (e.g. mitigation, use of kinship terms, evasiveness, etc.), 2) explore and account for the impact of postcolonial collective or group cultural systems on the refusal of offers, 3) verify if the switch between languages in multilingual postcolonial communities (indigenous language, official language and pidgin) affects interactants' reaction to offers, 4) establish the place of age, gender and sociocultural hierarchy in speakers' refusal of offers, and 4) redress the existing paucity, however slightly, of works on pragmatic behaviour in postcolonial communities.

在后殖民社会的语言学研究中，语用学一直被忽视。该项目采用务实的方法，在两个后殖民国家提供：喀麦隆和加纳。本文从对比的角度，探讨了这两个社区的英语变体（和皮钦语）中的主动和拒绝模式，试图确定这两个社区的群体或集体文化以及语言的混合如何影响说话者对主动的回应。要约是委托，除了承诺要约人未来采取某种行动外，受要约人接受或拒绝要约取决于对要约人的信任程度，（种族，社会）群体互动规则，（种族，社会）群体边界的开放，要约话语中使用的语言选择，以及要约语言的礼貌程度。在此基础上，本研究以拒绝为主要研究对象，旨在实现以下目标：1）调查和分析提供（服务、帮助和帮助）的语言策略以及拒绝的方式（如缓和、使用亲属称谓、回避等）; 2)探讨和解释后殖民集体或群体文化体系对拒绝要约的影响，3）验证多语言后殖民社区中语言之间的转换是否（土著语言、官方语言和皮钦语）影响互动者对提议的反应，4）在发言者拒绝提议时确立年龄、性别和社会文化等级的地位，以及4）纠正现有的匮乏，然而，对后殖民社区的实用主义行为的研究却很少。