On Pragmatic Creativity In Nonnative Speakers’ Communication

Taking the socio-cognitive approach as the theoretical foundation, this dissertation aims at raising the hypothesis that pragmatic creativity plays an important role in nonnative speakers’ successful communication. This study intends to explore how nonnative speakers achieve successful communication through novel uses of language.Previous studies are mainly concerned about the creativity of language in use at the sentence level and the creative aspect of language use at the utterance level. As for creativity of language use at the discourse level, little attention has been paid to it. The notion "linguistic creativity" cares about both generative creativity and lexical creativity, while the creative aspect of language use primarily refers to rhetorical features of both literary language and nonliterary language. Some scholars are also interested in native speakers’ efforts in seeking for a convincing, humorous or sarcastic effect in communication, but few of them discuss functions of nonnative speakers’ creativity of language use. Besides, little attention has been paid to how nonnative speakers could manage to achieve successful communication barely relying on their limited linguistic and cultural resources in communication.Pragmatic creativity refers to as a contextualized fact that integrates situated speakers’ novel use of language forms and other interlocutors’ mutual cooperation to achieve certain communicative aims at the discourse level. Pragmatic creativity that occurred in nonnative speakers’ communication is defined as a contextualized fact that integrates situated nonnative speakers’ novel inputs and other interlocutors’ cooperative understanding, which aims to achieve successful communication. The socio-cognitive approach, adopted by Kecskes (2013a) as a valid theoretical foundation for intercultural pragmatic studies, also works well in understanding pragmatic creativity in nonnative speakers’communication. Nonnative speakers’ pragmatic creativity shares the following features:(1) situated relevance; (2) flexibility, subjectivity and individuality; and (3) effect-orientation.The corpus used in this study is from the naturally occurring data. The data in this study consists of two parts. Some data are from the recorded naturally occurring conversations in a language-learning class as well as daily communication, which need transcribing. The other source is the online corpus VOICE, which is ready-made naturally occurring data. With the guidance of socio-cognitive approach, this study aims to analyze how nonnative speakers achieve successful communication through pragmatic creativity with the support of the data analysis.Three forms of pragmatic creativity in nonnative speakers’communication are discussed in great details with examples. They are pragmatic creativity in grammatical forms (including changing utterance structures and omitting lexico-grammatical features), pragmatic creativity in lexical forms (including shifting lexical function, using an alternative word, describing an intended word and creating a new word) and pragmatic creativity by deviating collocation (including deviating prepositional phrases in collocation, deviating verbal phrases in collocation and deviating formulaic expressions in collocation). Reasons for nonnative speakers’creative uses in conversations are as follows:(1) Communicative needs. The main aim in nonnative speakers’input is to cooperate in achieving successful communication, and pragmatic creativity is aroused with such an aim. (2) Positive cooperative attitude. Different from native speakers automatic cooperation, nonnative speakers’cooperation is both driven and active. Such an active cooperative attitude promotes nonnative speakers show their pragmatic creativity in communication. (3) Novel but imperfect lingual-situational matching efforts. Nonnative speakers’limited linguistic and cultural resources restrict them to speak as native speakers do. Therefore, they will make imperfect lingual-situational matching efforts so as to convey what is required in the context for the interaction to proceed until the communication task is accomplished.To sum up, with the guidance of the socio-cognitive approach, this dissertation intends to enrich the understanding of creativity in language use as a matter of intercultural pragmatics. It not only expands the research scope of nonnative speakers’ communication, but also encourages speakers with relatively poor linguistic competence to take part in the actual communication, and help them to grow pragmatically creative. This dissertation is a preliminary research, which is about how nonnative speakers achieve successful communication relying on different forms of pragmatic creativity during the process of intercultural communication. It is not that mature and still far from perfect. On the one hand, the differences and similarities between pragmatic creativity and linguistic creativity is a topic worthy of further exploring. On the other hand, further refinement and a well-grounded research frame are needed to promote socio-cognitive approach to the analysis of pragmatic creativity in both native and nonnative speakers’ communication.