Issue 2 Online:
Learning and Communication Strategies in Verbal Perlocutionary Aptitude
Adam Świątek, Giuseppe Leonardi
Adam Świątek, University of Economics and Human, Sciences in Warsaw, Okopowa 59, 01-130, Warsaw, Poland.. Email: adamswiatek1986@gmail.com
Perlocutionary acts and effects have long been treated as marginal (Searle, 1969) or too wide and unclear (Leech, 1983) aspects of language competence and performance. However, Post (2013) maintained that perlocution ought to be widely investigated, regarded as being among the vital aspects of communication, and even treated as complementary to the speech act theory (SAT) and linguistic pragmatics. In 2016, Świątek introduced the concept of verbal perlocutionary giftedness, presenting an extended framework for the study of perlocutionary acts from the pragmatic and glottodidactic perspectives on a concomitant basis. Recent research has revealed that perlocution may even have deeper, genetic roots which, supposedly, may have a serious impact on one’s increased verbal perlocutionary efficiency. However, there is yet another phenomenon, that is, learning and communication strategies which might affect the target phenomenon Therefore, the aim of the study, based on both qualitative and quantitative research, was to determine the principal types of learning and communication strategies implemented by perlocutionarily gifted language users, that is, whether they prefer any particular types of strategies when learning and communicating verbally or simply apply a mixture of all strategies, thus possessing a certain kind of global awareness. In other words, this study allowed us to determine whether the above-mentioned learners apply a plethora of strategies when interacting with other language users or simply adopt a finite set of strategies in order to be only understood and thus ensure communicative effectiveness. Therefore, the individual case analysis method together with the contrastive approach allowed to establish the dominant types of strategies in the phenomenon discussed.
Keywords: perlocution, aptitude, strategies, communication, learning