Island Puerto Rican and Continental American Responses to Critical Incidents: An Intercultural Study of Language, Norms, and Values

Ebsworth, Timothy; Ebsworth, Miriam

doi:10.1207/s15327973rlsi3003_1

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In our earlier work (Ebsworth 1992;Ebsworth and Ebsworth 1997) we found that IPR evaluation of language and behavior reflected the degree to which an individual considered and balanced affiliations with family, friends and Community. However, for the CAs studied, language and behavior could sometimes be judged favorably in their Community, even when an individual's needs and interests were placed above those of others.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 83%

The pragmatics and perceptions of multicultural Puerto Ricans

Ebsworth

2000

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Integrating natural observation, Interviews, and quantitative analysis, Ms study used a recursive research approach to compare the sociolinguistic judgments of four groups: 38 Puerto Ricans who were encultured on the US mainland, 38 return migrants to Puerto Rico, 161 Americans encultured in the Greater New York metropolitan area (Continental Americans), and 86 bilingual Puerto Ricans encultured on the island of Puerto Rico (Island Puerto Ricans). These participants evaluated alternative sociolinguistic strategies to critical incidents presented in English. Four alternative responses to five critical incidents were surveyed (20 responses in all). Discriminant analysis of group judgments on three subscales (evaluation, social cooperation, and dynamism) showed that while the participants had much in common, there were significant differences and surprising similarities on one or more subscales for 17 of the 20 alternate responses to the critical incidents. Bilingual-bicultural experts and group members interpreted the data in open-ended Interviews; analysis of the interview transcripts revealed both subtle and striking differences in the norms and values underlying sociolinguistic behavior in one or another Community. Mainland and migrantPuerto Ricans were surprisingly alike in their judgments, which in the majority of cases were more like those of Island Puerto Ricans than of continental Americans. Nevertheless, differences revealed possibilities for misunderstandings with mainland and migrant Puerto Ricans in their interactions with both continental Americans and island Puerto Ricans. Areas identified with the potential for sociopragmatic failure included obligations to strangers, the categorization of truth and lies, the use of time in caringfor others, approaches to conflict resolution, and balancing social responsibilities.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 83%

The pragmatics and perceptions of multicultural Puerto Ricans

Ebsworth

2000

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Latin American culture has been described as one in which the person is construed as intrinsically linked to others, with personal identity being determined on the basis of one's relationships (Díaz Guerrero and Szalay 1991;Ebsworth and Eisenstein Ebsworth 1997). Accordingly, the individual is perceived to be incomplete on their own (Díaz Guerrero and Szalay 1991;Fitch 1989;Placencia 1996).…”

Section: Colombian Culture: An Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish

Travis¹

2004

Intercultural Pragmatics

127

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper considers the cultural values manifested in the use of the diminutive su‰x -ito/-ita in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish. It will be demonstrated that this su‰x is highly frequent (occurring approximately 600 times in the 70,000-word corpus), and that from its core uses in relation to children and expressing small size it has taken on the pragmatic functions of expressing a¤ection, hedging speech acts and expressing contempt. Wierzbicka (1992) has shown that the frequent use of the diminutive in languages such as Russian and Polish plays a valuable role in realizing the cultural goal of the expression of good feelings towards others. The same can be said of its use in Colombian Spanish, but analysis of the diminutive in conversation reveals that it goes beyond this to realize a range of essential cultural ideals in interaction. Based on a semantic analysis of some of the central uses of the diminutive, I propose a set of cultural scripts to capture the role played by the diminutive in a variety of speech events, scripts which form an important part of the basis for interaction in Colombian society.

show abstract

“…A small number of studies, however, have used more traditional social science methods such as questionnaires. Ebsworth and Ebsworth (1997), for instance, used a questionnaire to compare responses to five critical situations by Island Puerto Ricans and Continental Americans from the New York area (a complaint from a customer, divulging personal information to a stranger, insults to a person's mother, the experience of gender bias, and how to handle obligations to friends). Hinkel (1994) and van Betteraij and Kellerman (1996) also used questionnaires to compare and contrast which topics of informal conversation are preferred by different cultural groups.…”

Section: Cross-cultural Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sociolinguistic Approaches to Sla

Young

1999

Ann Rev Appl Linguist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO SLA Richard Young INTRODUCTIONThe study of second language acquisition involves understanding what bilinguals know about their second language and how they acquire and use it. 1 Because acquisition and use occur in a social context, it is important for secondlanguage acquisition researchers to understand the ways in which social context and the acquisition and use of a second language are related. In recent years, our understanding of language as a social phenomenon has increased greatly. In a recent survey of sociolinguistics and language teaching, McKay and Hornberger (1996) divide the field into four related areas: 1) studies of language and society-how large-scale social and political issues affect language use in a particular society, 2) studies of language variation-how the "same" language varies from speaker to speaker, from place to place, and from situation to situation, 3) studies of language and interaction-how language is used in face-toface communication, and 4) studies of language and culture-how particular cultures privilege some kinds of language over others.Sociolinguistic approaches to SLA have been very popular in recent years and to survey all the work published in the past five years would be to risk losing focus in such a short article as this. Fortunately, there are other articles in this and recent volumes of ARAL that have surveyed other parts of this broad field, and so I have chosen to omit all but passing reference to four important areas of sociolinguistic research in SLA: pragmatics, classroom second and foreign language learning, literacy, and multilingualism. Pragmatics is arguably one of the liveliest areas of current sociolinguistic research in SLA, but it is reviewed in a separate article in this volume. A second area of intense interest for researchers and educators is the socialization of second and foreign language learners in schools, but instructed SLA is also the topic of another article in this volume. Third, research into the social contexts of literacy in a second language was reviewed in ARAL volume 12 (1992) and so I will limit the present review to 105 106 RICHARD YOUNG spoken language. And finally, multilingualism was also the subject of a recent ARAL volume-volume 17 in 1997-and will not be covered here.What remains to be reviewed in this article falls within the second and third areas of McKay and Hornberger's (1996) survey: language variation and face-to-face communication. Some of the questions that interest SLA researchers studying these areas include the following: Why do bilinguals speak differently in different situations and with different people? What are the causes of miscommunication in conversations between people from different cultures? How do patterns of conversation differ in different languages and do bilinguals transfer conversational patterns from their first language into a second language? And how does speaking a second language influence an individual's sense of social identity? In this survey, I will review...

show abstract

Island Puerto Rican and Continental American Responses to Critical Incidents: An Intercultural Study of Language, Norms, and Values

Cited by 6 publications

References 18 publications

The pragmatics and perceptions of multicultural Puerto Ricans

The pragmatics and perceptions of multicultural Puerto Ricans

The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish

Sociolinguistic Approaches to Sla

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About