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Article published In:
Applied Pragmatics
Vol. 4:1 (2022) ► pp.63–91

The multilingual turn in pragmatics

Is the use of hedges and attitude markers shared across languages in trilingual writing?

ORCID logo | Universitat Jaume I

In the Valencian Community in Spain, the coexistence of Spanish and Catalan as co-official languages and English as a foreign language, which is learned as a third language (L3), shapes a unique multilingual setting. This study examined the extent to which multilingual learners’ use of two interpersonal pragmatic markers (PMs), i.e., hedges (e.g., I believe) and attitude markers (e.g., fortunately), is related across languages and whether the relationship changes over time. Participants were 313 Spanish-Catalan bilingual high school learners of L3 English. They wrote three opinion essays over one academic year in the three languages of instruction: Spanish, Catalan, and English. Quantitative results revealed a trend towards stronger correlations over time in both PMs. At Time 3, correlations were statistically significant for all language pairs in hedges and for two language pairs in attitude markers (Spanish and Catalan, Spanish and English). Qualitative analyses of the learners’ essays lend support to these results and show transfer at the phrase and discourse-level.

Keywords: multilingual turn, pragmatic markers, metadiscourse, L3 pragmatics, pragmatic transfer, multilingual pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The multilingual turn in SLA research
    • 2.2Pragmatics and the multilingual turn
    • 2.3Interpersonal pragmatic markers in multilingual writing
  • 3.Research question
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants and learning context
    • 4.2Instruments
    • 4.3Data collection procedure
    • 4.4Data analysis procedures
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Quantitative analysis: Frequency of interpersonal PMs across languages
    • 5.2Qualitative analysis: Shared interpersonal PM resources between languages
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Limitations of the study and future directions
  • 8.Pedagogical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.20024.mar
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