This paper deals with verbal interactions between/among intermarried family members and relatives.  According to the Pew Research Center, 17% of newlyweds were married to a person of a different race/ethnicity in 2015, a more than fivefold increase from 3% in 1967. Another data that triggered this study was a 2011 US Census report; over 20% of population speak a language other than English at home, and only 58.2 % of them speak English very well. This implies that there is a significant number of intermarried families whose interactions involve native and non-native English speakers.

It has been well-known that native speakers have tendency to be upset when their non-native interlocutors’ utterances exhibit idiosyncratic features that have nothing to do with their accent and grammatical errors. Jenny Thomas (1983, 22) would view this uncomfortable occurrence as pragmatic failure, “the inability to understand what is meant by what is said.” In fact, over the past decades, pragmatic failure has attracted attention from a large number of researchers (e.g. Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984, Beebe et al. 1990, Kasanga 1998, Cohen & Shively 2007, Jingwei, 2013, Su 2018).

This paper aims to capture main factors that create uneasiness during verbal interactions between European American family/relatives and Korean American family/relatives who are the investigator’s friends and relatives. All the European Americans are US-born native speakers of English. However the parents and relatives of the Korean Americans are native speakers of Korean, who have lived in US for over 25 years.   

The point of departure for this study is the notion of ‘face’ and ‘face threatening acts’ that Brown and Levinson (1987) describe. The notion raises a series of questions as to how to deal with Conversational Implicature (Grice 1981) and Direct and Indirect Speech Acts (Searle 1969, 1975) in situations that involves mixed families of different cultures.  The questions are addressed by analyzing idiosyncratic utterances occurred in three speech domains: dinner tables, social gatherings, and grandchildren-sittings.  A special attention is paid to pragma-linguistic/socio-pragmatic interference. A further discussion is centered around ‘cultural variation in basic human needs’ that needs to be taken into consideration for an in-depth analysis of interactions.  Finally, the paper presents a preliminary framework for further studies on Englishes in Intermarriage.

 

 

Reference

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Brown Penelope and”fa Stephen C. Levinson (1987) Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.  Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney

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Jingwei, Tang (2013). Analysis of Pragmatic Failure from the Perspective of Adaptation. Cross-Cultural Communication 9 (3), 75-79. 

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Su, Yanfei (2018). The Pragmatic Strategies Adopted by an Advanced Chinese EFL Learner in Realization of Request Speech Act—A Case Study, Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 9 (3), 548-554.