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- Volume 9, Issue, 2009
Languages in Contrast - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2009
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Modality and ENGAGEMENT in British and German political interviews
Author(s): Annette Beckerpp.: 5–22 (18)More LessSpeakers regulary use modality and other resources from the appraisal system of engagement to position themselves intersubjectively. In doing so, they modify the discursive space for the voices of others. This is particularly relevant in political media interviews, especially in questions with topics that are potentially face-threatening to the interviewees’ public face. This paper compares the use of modality and other engagement resources in British and German political interviews and discusses the differences in frequency and function. Data is taken from videotaped and transcribed political interviews conducted during British and German election night broadcasts. Their analysis is based on recent studies in contrastive pragmatics, appraisal theory and pragmatically oriented studies on media discourse, bearing in mind that cross-cultural comparison of data taken from a particular genre has to take into account a broad range of contextual factors including genre-specific constraints.
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The intersubjective function of modal adverbs: A contrastive English-French study of adverbs in journalistic discourse
Author(s): Agnès Cellepp.: 23–36 (14)More LessThis paper presents a contrastive study of modal adverbs in English and French, with a focus on a few pairs such as évidemment vs. ‘obviously’, apparemment vs. ‘apparently’. The relation between inference and epistemic modality is discussed both semantically and syntactically. Modal adverbs license double modality in French, in contrast to their English counterparts. This different syntactic behaviour confirms that the distinction that is generally made between two modal functions — the identificative one and the restrictive one — is relevant to French modal adverbs, but not to English modal adverbs. However, this semantic difference needs to be revisited and backed up pragmatically. It is argued that the identificative function of modal adverbs should be redefined in terms of intersubjectivity. While ‘apparently’ and ‘obviously’ mark the speaker’s identification with the addressee’s point of view, apparemment and évidemment are shown to be able to express the speaker’s evaluation whatever the speaker and addressee’s common knowledge might be. This pragmatic difference in turn provides an explanation for the different constraints on the use of modal adverbs in English and French.
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Intersubjective positioning in French and English: A contrastive analysis of ‘ça dépend’ and ‘it depends’
Author(s): Bart Defrancq and Bernard De Clerckpp.: 37–72 (36)More LessSimilar to the uses of default discourse markers such as ‘well’, ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’, instances of ‘it depends’ and ‘ça dépend’ can be attested in which the speaker’s intersubjective positioning seems to be the main motivation behind their use (Moissinac and Bamberg 2004). In this paper we explore the systematicity and frequency of such examples in both French and English based on extensive contextualised corpus-based analysis. In particular, we will focus on their functional and formal features and attest to what extent they can be diagnosed as representative of ongoing intersubjectification processes. In doing so, we will trace differences and similarities between the two languages. The study shows that there is indeed fertile ground for such expressions to develop in the direction of discourse markers and that they evolve at slightly different paces in both languages.
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Challenges in contrast: A function-to-form approach
Author(s): Anita Fetzerpp.: 73–97 (25)More LessChallenges express the speaker’s intention not to comply with a proposition, force or presupposition communicated in and through a prior conversational contribution. This may be a directly adjacent contribution, some less directly adjacent contribution, or a conversational contribution uttered in some prior discourse. As for its sequential status, a challenge is a responsive contribution, and from an interpersonal perspective, it tends to carry a high degree of face-threatening potential. A felicitous analysis of a challenge thus needs to go beyond a single conversational contribution, not only accommodating context but also the nature of a challenge’s embeddedness in context. The contribution is organized as follows: The first section systematizes the necessary and sufficient contextual constraints and requirements for a conversational contribution to be assigned the status of a challenge. The second part argues for a challenge to be conceptualized as a particularized contextual configuration, which may serve as a tertium comparationis in contrastive pragmatics. The third section exemplifies the frame of reference with a contrastive analysis of British and German challenges adopted from a corpus of political interviews. In both sets of data, challenges tend to be realized implicitly, and in both sets, challenging the content of a contribution is more frequent than challenging its force or presuppositions. While the British data display a wider variety of challenges, the German data prefer the content-based, implicitly realized challenge.
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Interruption in advanced learner French: Issues of pragmatic discrimination
Author(s): Marie-Noëlle Guillotpp.: 98–123 (26)More LessThis exploratory study focuses on interruption as a feature of conversational management in multi-participant talk in advanced L2 French, based on a comparison with L1 French and English. It has two overall objectives: to consider pragmatic adaptations in L2 French from the point of view of interactional pressures, and to assess cross-cultural differences in the management of talk from the standpoint of learners. It is thus at the interface between interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics research. The analysis highlights tensions between pragmatic and processing demands in the learner data, resulting in limited pragmatic discrimination, differential adaptations to native French practices and possible stereotyping.
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Closeness and distance: The changing relationship to the audience in the American TV news show “CBS Evening News” and the Swiss “Tagesschau”
Author(s): Martin Luginbühlpp.: 124–143 (20)More LessThis article compares the form of TV news reporting in the American “CBS Evening News” and the Swiss “Tagesschau” from their beginning until today. It draws particular attention to the ‘culturality’ of text types — a term that will be introduced in the first part. The analysis focuses on local, temporal and emotional closeness in news packages and illustrates how the two shows stage closeness in different and changing ways. Although a partial homogenization can be observed, the notion of a continuous americanization is rejected. The results will be analysed in the perspective of the TV news shows considering factors such as the text repertoire and overall format of the show. Discussing the results I will argue that the concept of ‘journalistic culture’ is helpful to conceptualize and understand the form of news. While the analysis cannot decide to what degree single influencing factors are at work, it further develops some common assumptions (like national characteristics of text types or the influence of commercialization).
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The nominative and infinitive in English and Dutch: An exercise in contrastive diachronic construction grammar
Author(s): Dirk Noël and Timothy Collemanpp.: 144–181 (38)More LessThe nominative and infinitive (or NCI) is a syntactic pattern that has so far not been given its due in the linguistics of languages that possess structures that could go by that name. In English and Dutch these were probably introduced (or at the very least revived) into the grammar as loans from Latin. To the extent that they have received attention, the linguistics of these three languages traditionally treats them as mere passive alternates of accusative and infinitives, but in English and Dutch, and probably also in Latin, most NCI patterns can instantiate three distinct constructions: a passive NCI, a descriptive NCI and an evidential NCI. Though the latter one especially can be seen to be ‘more grammatical’ than the passive NCI, it is not the result of a grammaticalization change that has taken place inside English or Dutch. In English the evidential NCI did become a productive schematic construction that grew to be very useful in journalistic and academic discourses. In Dutch, on the other hand, the productivity of the NCI constructions has much decreased after a brief 18th-century peak. English and Dutch do have in common, however, that a couple of substantive evidential NCI patterns grammaticalized into deontic NCI constructions, which at present is the most frequent NCI construction in Dutch.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 25 (2025)
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Volume 24 (2024)
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Volume 23 (2023)
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Volume 22 (2022)
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Volume 21 (2021)
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Volume 20 (2020)
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Volume 19 (2019)
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Volume 18 (2018)
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Volume 17 (2017)
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Volume 16 (2016)
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Volume 15 (2015)
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Volume 14 (2014)
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Volume 13 (2013)
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Volume 12 (2012)
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Volume 11 (2011)
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Volume 10 (2010)
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Volume 9 (2009)
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Volume 8 (2008)
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Volume 7 (2007)
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Volume 6 (2006)
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Volume 5 (2004)
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Volume 4 (2002)
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Volume 3 (2000)
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Volume 2 (1999)
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Volume 1 (1998)
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