Jesús Romero-Trillo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Prosody and pragmatic markers in L2 English: the struggle against pragmatic fossilisation

The relationship between pragmatics and prosody is especially significant in intercultural communication, and the pragmatic-cum-prosodic interface plays an essential role in the cognitive transmission of meaning due to its multiplicity of patterns and functions. The present investigation delves into the relationship between pragmatics and prosody from a corpus pragmatics perspective (Romero-Trillo 2017) by comparing the performance of feedback elements in conversations between native and non-native speakers of English through the notion of Adaptive Management (Romero-Trillo 2007, in press). The paper will show, first, that the description of the acoustic features of pragmatic markers realising feedback in conversation is essential to understand how these elements function as cognitive ‘punting poles’ (Romero-Trillo 2014). Second, data will show that pragmatic markers have a fundamental role to avoid pragmatic fossilisation (Romero-Trillo 2002), to be communicatively efficient and to reduce digressive requests for clarification and repair.

• Romero-Trillo, J. (2002) The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-native speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 769-784
• Romero-Trillo, J. (2007) Adaptive management in discourse: The case of involvement discourse markers in English and Spanish. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 6: 81-94
• Romero-Trillo, J. (2014) ‘Pragmatic punting’ and prosody: Evidence from corpora. In Gómez González, M.A., Ruíz de Mendoza Ibáñez, FJ, Gonzálvez García, F. and A. Downing (eds) The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse: Applications and Implications.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 209-221.
• Romero-Trillo, J. (2017) Editorial. Corpus Pragmatics 1: 1-2.
• Romero-Trillo, J. (in press) Corpus pragmatics and second language pragmatics: a mutualistic entente in theory and practice. Corpus Pragmatics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-018-0031-5

Biodata

Jesús Romero-Trillo is a tenured Associate Professor (with accreditation as a Full Professor) at the Department of English Philology (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). After finishing his B.A. in English Philology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (with honours), he obtained an MSc in Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, as a Stevenson Scholar (1990) and finished his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1994). He specializes in Applied Linguistics with specific emphasis on the pragmatics-intonation interface in English and on the theory and application of corpus linguistics to cognition and the study of social conflict. Dr. Romero-Trillo has many publications in top rank journals, such as  Journal of Pragmatics , International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Journal of Linguistics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, etc.
Jesús Romero-Trillo is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Corpus Pragmatics (Springer) and of the series Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics (Springer)