engleski

Politeness strategies in the written communication of Croatian lawyers: a contrastive approach

A recent study on the foreign language and content needs analysis of Croatian law students and practising lawyers shows that business correspondence is the most needed skill in English for Legal Purposes courses (Lukica and Kaldonek, 2011). Croatian law students and lawyers require a high degree of communicative competence (Dell hymes) in English in order to successfully apply for jobs, draft letters before action and reply to various other forms of letters received from clients or colleagues to name just a few examples. Communicative competence does not only involve linguistic knowledge of the foreign language, but also social and pragmatic knowledge which are harder to acquire and are not given enough attention in ELP courses. If the ELP student does not possess a sufficient degree of either type of knowledge, communication breakdown will occur. If one lacks linguistic knowledge, one will be perceived as a less proficient speaker of a language, but if one lacks social or pragmatic knowledge he will be perceived as impolite, bad tempered and inneffective which can and reflect negatively on one's reputation as a lawyer and their business prospects. Two types of pragmatic errors are distinguished: pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic. “Pragmalinguistic error occurs when the pragmatic force of a linguistic structure is different from that normally assigned to it by a native speaker“ (Harlow, 1990) which is attributed to negative transfer from the mother tongue either linguistic or pragmatic. Socipragmatic error refers to “the social conditions placed on language in use“ (Harlow, 1990) which Thomas maintains comes from culturally different perceptions of what is appropriate linguistic behaviour (1983). The purpose of this study is to investigate which types of errors occur in written production of Croatian ELP students with regard to politeness as defined by Brown and Levinson (1978). We also want to investigate which strategies they use when communicating with native English speakers in writing and what is the level of their awareness of both politeness strategies and pragmatic errors.

politeness strategies; pragmatic errors; English for Legal Purposes

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