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Abstract Abstract: Pragmatic disfluency refers to speech disfluency such as repetitions, pauses, repairs, etc. which occur in speech production as interactional resources to achieve interpersonal purposes when communicators take face, politeness, emotions as well as their relationships into consideration. It is one of the indicators of pragmatic competence. The present study makes a comparative study of Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of pragmatic disfluency with the target data from 78 Chinese EFL learners’ natural conversations and the reference data from Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. The findings include: Learners use more pragmatic disfluency markers than English native speakers. However, most of them are non-lexical voice clips with less and simple pragmatic markers. Pragmatic disfluency is used more frequently to manipulate conversations and manage interpersonal relationship while less frequently to adjust information transfer. Learners have some pragmatic awareness and strong willingness to communicate and are trying to enhance interpersonal interactions to help carry out conversations. But lack of pragmatic knowledge and difficulty in retrieving them often lead to avoidance.
Key Words: pragmatic disfluency; disfluency markers; pragmatic competence; communicative function
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