Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects (Mouton Series in Pragmatics)

by István Kecskés

This volume explores how linguistic research can support the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language. It responds to a rapidly growing interest in the Chinese language all over the world, and answers the need for a strong research background for the discipline. Without that, Chinese language learning remains only a unique experience and/or a useful education challenge. The first section explores crucial issues about the structure and use of Chinese as a Second Language such as word-order, noun-noun compounds, meaning-making in writing, pronunciation and stress and tone. The second section explores the learning of Chinese by seeking answer to questions about difficulties, expectations, beliefs, use of corpus and learning how to express necessity. The authors coming from eight different countries demonstrate how existing knowledge has been generated, bring together different lines of research, point out tendencies in the field, demonstrate and explain what tools and methods researchers can use to address major issues in the field, and give direction to what future research should focus on.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

István Kecskés was a Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, USA. He taught graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism at SUNY, Albany. He was the President of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) and the CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) Association. He was the founder and co-director of the Barcelona Summer School on Bi- and Multilingualism (until 2016), and the founder and co-director of Sorbonne, Paris – SUNY, Albany Graduate Student Symposium.