LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 15:12 December 2015
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Role of Transfer in Discourse:
From the Perspectives of Politeness and Coherence

Rehnuma Khan

Abstract

There has been a lot of controversy in deciding whether language transfer takes place at the level of discourse. Most of the authors refute the concept of ‘discourse transfer’ but there are few undeniably important researchers whose observations and beliefs are contradictory. This paper intends to give a brief idea of the concept of discourse, its analysis and finally support the notion in light of some significant researches that discourse transfer does takes place in second language acquisition, be it positive or negative. This paper also intends to emphasize on two areas of discourse, politeness and coherence, which affect what has been called ‘presentation of self’. Any misinterpretation during the comprehension and production due to cross-linguistic differences in discourse in these two particular areas may mistakenly convince the learner that the native speaker is being rude in situations where they are actually behaving appropriately according to their speech community norms. Also, since much of the research on contrastive discourse in the past deals with politeness or coherence, this paper aims to concentrate on these two areas.

Keywords: Discourse, transfer, discourse transfer, politeness, coherence, cross-linguistic differences.

Introduction

During second language acquisition, learners bring with them the native speakers knowledge of their first language and culture. The impact of the first language (L1) and its cultural background on second language (L2) use has been referred to, technically, as discourse and pragmatic transfer. Before going to discourse transfer we will understand discourse and its analysis first.

Discourse Analysis

Seinfeld (1993) quotes, ‘There’s two types of favours, the big favour and the small favour. You can measure the size of the favour by the pause that a person takes after they ask you to “Do me a favour”. Small favour- small pause. “Can you do me a favour, hand me that pencil”. No pause at all. Big favours are, “Could you do me a favour....” Eight seconds go by. “Yeah? What?” “...well”. The longer it takes them to get to it, the bigger the pain it’s going to be.’(Yule, 2006:124)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Rehnuma Khan, Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of English
Faculty of Arts
Aligarh Muslim University
Aligarh
Uttar Pradesh
India
aamirmushtaque@gmail.com
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