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An important area of the field of second/foreign language teaching and learning is pragmatics -- the appropriate use of language in conducting speech acts such as apologizing, requesting, complimenting, refusing, thanking. Meaning is not just encoded in word semantics alone, but is affected by the situation, the speaker and the listener.A speech act is, according to linguist Kent Bach, "the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". Speech acts can be broken down into 3 levels: 1. locutionary: saying something 2. illocutionary: the speaker's intent in performing the act. For example, if the locutionary act in an interaction is the question "Is there any salt?" the implied illocutionary request is "Can someone pass the salt to me?"; 3. In some instances, there's a third perlocutionary level: the act's effect on the feelings, thoughts or actions of either the speaker or the listener, e.g., inspiring, persuading or deterring. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at University of Minnesota provides a collection of descriptions of speech acts, as revealed through empirical research. The material is designed to help language teachers and advanced learners to be more aware of the sociocultural use of the language they are teaching or learning. These speech acts include: Apologies Complaints Compliments/Responses Greetings Invitations Refusals Requests Thanks

Suppose you are preparing for a potentially contentious meeting with someone with whom you've worked closely for years. She could be a fellow manager you want to convince to support an initiative but whose position in the matter differs from yours: how do you convince that person? While coercion and logic are not effective, "relationship-raising" is. According to a 2002 psychology study by Oriña, Wood, and Simpson, before making a request for change, mention your existing relationship with the other person and any mutually-shared goals/objectives, before delivering your appeal. " Or, in the most streamlined version of the relationship-raising approach, incorporate the pronouns "we," "our," and "us" into the request. The outcome? The relationship partners exposed to this technique shifted significantly in the requested direction. Similarly, in a British longitudinal study of effective professional negotiators, researchers found that the most successful bargainers spent 400% more time looking for areas of mutuality (e.g., shared interests) than did their mediocre counterparts.

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It's an ethos so culturally ingrained in us that it's hard to see beyond: Self-reliance is paramount, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to solve your own problems is a matter of character. Of course, that's not quite how the world works. All of us need help from time to time, and the ability to ask is a learnable skill we seldom think about but one that can have a monumental impact on our goals and lives. So, how to ask? 4 tips: 1. Make sure the person you want to ask realizes you need help. Thanks to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, we're programmed to have the ability to take in and process only so much information, ignoring the rest. 2. Make a clear request. Otherwise your potential helper might fall victim to audience inhibition, or the fear of "looking foolish in front of other people," which can prevent people from offering help because they doubt their own intuition that you need help. 3. Ge specific with your request and make sure your helper knows why you're specifically asking him or her. This will make them feel invested in your success and actually want to help. 4. Make sure the person you're asking has the time and resources to help.

Author Sheila Heen, along with Douglas Stone, recently wrote a book called Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. One of their chapters focuses on a phenomenon called "switchtracking": when "someone gives you feedback, and your reaction to that feedback changes the subject." Heen notes switchtracking is a pattern in feedback conversations "so common that it's instantly recognizable." "The first person stays on their own track. The second person actually smoothly switches to a different topic, which is their own reaction to the feedback, and often the feedback that they have themselves for the first person," Heen says. "They just get further and further apart ... And they don't even realize that they're going in different directions." Four pieces of take-away advice for effective feedback: 1. Try A Post-it We're always trying to get people to pay attention, but there's some research showing that we have a powerful (and affordable) weapon at our disposal: the Post-it note. 2. Assume Positive Intent Assume positive intent when receiving feedback: concentrate on the substance of the feedback, rather than questioning the giver's intentions! 3. To Get Someone's Attention ... Try Whispering In Their Right Ear. People are more likely to comply with a request when it was whispered in their right ear. 4. When Giving Feedback, Flatter First If you can boost a person's self-esteem before giving them constructive criticism, they might be more receptive to it.

Swear words are just like "please" and "try" in this respect; only, instead of softening the edges of a request or statement, these make it sound rougher and more aggressive. If I say, "Someone stole my red guitar," all I'm saying is that someone stole my guitar, and that the guitar was red. But if I say "Someone stole my damn guitar," I am not saying that my guitar was stolen and that it was damned (even if I'm in a death-metal band). Instead, I'm saying that someone stole my guitar and that I'm pissed off about it.

Just in case you were under the misimpression that artificial intelligence will be taking over the world shortly, this article suggests that digital assistants really can't even handle the sort of everyday linguistic interaction that humans take for granted. Still, it is interesting to find out how product engineers are designing the assistants to become "smarter" at comprehending your words and requests. Machine learning algorithms can help devices deal with turn-by-turn exchanges. But each verbal exchange is limited to a simple, three- or four-turn conversation.

This seminal longitudinal study, conducted by Goodwyn, Acredolo and Brown (2000), evaluated the benefits of purposefully encouraging hearing infants to use simple gestures as symbols for objects, requests, and conditions. Researchers measured the receptive and expressive language abilities of 103 babies via standardized language tests at the age of 11, 15, 19, 24, 30, and 36 months. Their findings suggest that symbolic gesturing does not hamper children's early verbal development, and may even facilitate it. The possible reasons underlying the results: increases in infant-directed speech, infant-selected topic selection, and scaffolding that encourages communication.

This article explains why and when we say things such as "please" and "thank you" to others. A recent study has shown that people in informal settings, received expressions of gratitude only a small amount of times in comparison to the amount of requests they complied with or number of times they offered their service or help. Although this may seem like a bad thing, researchers believe this is good news. This article further explains the researchers reasoning.

In West Bengal, the education minister just made it mandatory for students to study three languages. He is making this compulsory in private, government, and ICSE and CBSE-affiliated schools. This request follows feedback that was received about Bengali not being offered in many schools. Now the three languages learned will consist of the mother tongue, regional language, and an international language.

"Change has occurred so rapidly for our species that now we are equipped with brains that are super sensitive to threat but also super capable of planning, thinking, forecasting and looking ahead," said Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. "So we essentially drive ourselves nuts worrying about things because we have too much time and don't have many real threats on our survival, so fear gets expressed in these really strange, maladaptive ways." Dr. Hariri studies the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that has been called the seat of fear (there's one in each hemisphere of the brain). But it's really the seat of anticipation. The amygdala primes you to react - your pulse quickens, your muscles tense and your pupils dilate - even before other parts of your brain can figure out if you need to be scared or not. Nowadays, our amydalas can be overactive, thanks to 24/7 awareness of disasters around the world and/or stress/instability in one's personal and professional life. Remaining in this state of wary hypervigilance can contribute to issues like social anxiety, hypochondria, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia and all manner of phobias. It also plays a role in racial and religious intolerance because fearful people are more inclined to cling to the familiar and denigrate the unfamiliar. If you can sense and appreciate your fear - be it of flying, illness or social rejection - as merely your amygdala's request for more information rather than a signal of impending doom, then you are on your way to calming down and engaging more conscious, logic-dominated parts of your brain. At that point, you can assess the rationality of your fear and take steps to deal with it.

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

I thought was a really interesting and helpful website. The entries are short but you can request access to full articles as well. It has articles on LANGUAGE EFFECTS ON PERSONAL IDENTITY, PROFANITY AND MEDIA, PRAGMATISM OF CURSE WORDS, YOUTH SLANG EXPRESSION AROUND THE WORLD, IMPACTS OF "BAD" ENGLISH, UNCONVENTIONAL PHRASES AND AFRICAN RACE.