Linguistic Perspective of Pakistani Street Vendors’ Communication: An Ethnopragmatic Approach

Abstract

Since the last century, there has been an increasing interest in understanding the twists and turns of meaning-making in different languages and cultures. The purpose of this study is to determine how Pakistani street vendors use language and communication strategies to negotiate meaning and to understand the adaptation of ways of communication by street vendors toward different customers. Based on the Ethnopragmatic approach by Goddard (2006), the researcher investigates the communication of Pakistani street vendors as a sample, using the observation method of research. The findings show that street vendors communicate by using the strategies of cultural script, semantic primes, pragmatic particles, and linguistic evidence like turn-taking, overlapping, and more. The analysis provides a deeper understanding of cross-cultural communication and sheds light on how vendors negotiate meaning and achieve their goals by conveying meaning effectively to different audiences. The research contributes to the field of anthropological linguistics and also offers valuable insights for future researchers, in the context of less-explored areas such as the linguistic perspective of street vendors' communication.