This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed, or the sociopragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many didactic materials do not address holistically.Integrating relevant findings about complaint behaviour from pragmatics and various neighbouring disciplines, these pedagogical steps combine distinct teaching approaches, include production tasks and guidelines for assessment. Moreover, these steps also comprise an account of some communicative effects of complaints from the cognitive framework of relevance theory with a view to fostering learners' meta-psychological awareness.

Learners of English may have problems or make mistakes when engaging in phatic communion, as its use requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of a wide range of complex and subtle issues, such as when and with whom to engage in it, the underlying reasons to do so, the types of phatic tokens that may be exchanged, the topics that such tokens may address, or potential effects achievable. Although many didactic materials implicitly deal with some elements related to phatic communion, they do not include it as an independent topic, nor do they neatly define it, distinguish its different manifestations or address its socio-cultural peculiarities. For this reason, this paper suggests a methodological proposal to teach the pragmatics of phatic communion and raise learners' meta-pragmatic awareness. Based on an approach to teach the pragmatics of specific L2 aspects (Martínez Flor and Usó Juan 2006), this proposal integrates relevant findings about phatic communion from pragmatics and other neighbouring disciplines, combines different approaches to teach intercultural pragmatic issues in class and includes tasks. IntroductionLearners of English of diverse proficiency levels may experience performance-and language-related problems, as a consequence of which they deviate from native speakers' standards and expectations when accomplishing speech acts, producing certain types of discourse or participating in conversations (Thomas 1983;Kaur 2011).1 Such deviations may result in pragmatic errors, which, though unnoticed in some cases, give rise to funny or anecdotal misunderstandings or even have more serious consequences in others. To be communicatively competent, learners of English must acquire some knowledge and develop the necessary skills that enable them to reach their social and communicative goals, as well as to project their desired identity, by performing adequately in a variety of social or situationalcontexts.An area that poses difficulties and challenges to many learners of English is phatic discourse, small talk or phatic communion, i.e. that "[…] language used in free, aimless, Unaware of the role of status and distance in the target community, on some occasions they made overly personal comments to their teachers, as if talking to very close subjects. On other occasions, they greeted as expected when entering classrooms, but proffered much selfdisclosure or transferred unsuitable L1 idiomatic phatic expressions -e.g. 'fresh as a salad' instead of 'fresh as a daisy' as a reply to a how-are-you question. 2 This proves that this area of interaction, often regarded as unproblematic, may at times turn out to be risky, treacherous and troublesome, so it deserves pedagogic attention. Indeed, an effective management of small talk in any language requires knowledge of subtle issues, such as when and with whom to engage in it, the underlying reasons and purposes to do so, the topics that can be addressed or the effects achievable. Phatic communion in ESL materials

No abstract

No abstract

This paper reflects on the conceptual nature of interjections. Although there are convincing reasons to claim that interjections do not encode concepts, arguments can be adduced to question such claim. In fact, some pragmatists have contended that they may be conceptual elements. After reviewing both the non-conceptualist and conceptualist approaches to interjections, this paper discusses some reasons that can be given to reconsider the conceptuality of interjections. Nevertheless, it adopts an intermediate standpoint by arguing that the heterogeneity of interjections, with items incorporated from other lexical categories, and the openness of the word class they constitute, which results in the coinage of certain interjections or the innovative usage of some elements, could indicate the existence of a continuum of more and less conceptual items. In any case, this paper suggests that those items with conceptual content would not encode full concepts, but some schematic material requiring subsequent pragmatic adjustments.