Bücher von Istvan Kecskes

The book aims to serve as a theoretical framework for the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) that is an alternative to the two main lines of pragmatics research: linguistic-philosophical pragmatics and sociocultural-interactional pragmatics. SCA broadens the scope of the field with an intent to incorporate not only L1 communication but also intercultural communication, and communication in a second language. The author integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and emphasizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents. SCA places equal importance on the social and cognitive individual factors in pragmatics. The author claims that while (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience.The book serves as a theoretical guide for researchers and students who would like to understand how we need to change first language-based theories to make sense of what happens not only in L1 but also in intercultural and multi-lingual interactions.

The book aims to address one of the main problems of Chinese language teaching: lack of research base. The rapidly growing interest in Chinese language teaching has not resulted in the development of a strong research background. This book attempts to change the current situation. The volume consists of three chapters. Chapter I: Research Base for Practice contains three papers, each of which uses research findings as a basis for solving issues connected with practical language teaching. Chapter II: Integrating Culture and Language is about one of the most intriguing topics of current language-oriented research: how to integrate culture into the process of language teaching. Chapter III: Acquisition of Language Structures consists of studies that investigate the acquisition of certain grammatical structures in Chinese. There are only a few papers in the literature on this issue, so the articles in this chapter are especially important for further research. One of the most important features of the volume is that each paper makes an attempt to bring together theory and practice by focusing on theory-building based on practice or theory application in practice. Thus the book can be recommended to both researchers and practitioners.

This book focuses on a particular type of formulaic expressions called Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs). Since the meaning of these pragmatic units is shaped by the interplay of linguistic and extralinguistic factors they can be best accounted for in a theoretical framework which represents a knowledge-for-use conception. A unique feature of the book is that it examines the development and use of a particular type of formulae from new perspectives. The comparison of a monolingual and multilingual approach, and the application of the graded salience hypothesis to SBUs within a cognitive-pragmatic theoretical framework reveal that issues such as the role of context in shaping situational meaning, and the existence of common or similar cognitive mechanisms and knowledge structures responsible for cognitive functions and speech behavior in different languages need revision. As a consequence, the book seeks answer to two main questions: 1) origin and extent of context-sensitiveness, and 2) the development of the particular situational functions of SBUs. On the basis of recent research it is argued that context affects comprehension only after highly salient information has been accessed. Search for the appropriate meaning stops if the information accessed initially is compatible with the context, and it continues, if it is not. This approach puts the issue of context-sensitiveness of SBUs into an entirely different perspective. It is also discussed that why exactly these utterances started to be used to express those pragmatic functions and not others. SBUs demonstrate better than any other linguistic unit that there is a strong cognitive-linguistic interdependency. The development of certain SBUs can be accounted for through cognitive mechanisms, and vice versa: learning an SBU for a culturally important category can linguistically reinforce the learning of the category itself. The book uses a cross-linguistic perspective and illustrative examples from several languages which makes its arguments and claims convincing.

In this book, the authors present research and theory to argue that metalinguistic awareness of one's native language is altered by either the acquisition or the learning of a second language.