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- Volume 24, Issue 1, 2017
Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 24, Issue 1, 2017
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Responding to direct complaints
Author(s): Ping Liu and Huiying Liupp.: 4–32 (29)More LessAbstractThis article examines the role of metapragmatic expressions (MPEs) in constructing common ground (CG) in the call taker’s responses to customer direct complaints in telephone interactions in the framework of the socio-cognitive approach proposed and developed by Kecskes (2008, 2010, 2013, 2017) and Kecskes and Zhang (2009, 2013). Based on five extracts drawn from the data of about two hours of 15 recordings of telephone interactions that include successful complaint settlements made between customers and the customer service department of one Chinese airline, it reveals that the call taker mainly employs five types of MPEs as CG construction devices to explicitly manifest intentions of giving accounts and explanations, confirming and checking information, negotiating adequate compensations, establishing close interpersonal relationships, and aligning with the organization. This article enhances our understanding of the functioning process of metapragmatic indicators in complaint settlement in institutional telephone interactions.
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Gestures of the abstract
Author(s): Fey Parrill and Kashmiri Stecpp.: 33–61 (29)More LessAbstractSpeakers perform manual gestures in the physical space nearest them, called gesture space. We used a controlled elicitation task to explore whether speakers use gesture space in a consistent way (assign spaces to ideas and use those spaces for those ideas) and whether they use space in a contrastive way (assign different spaces to different ideas when using contrastive speech) when talking about abstract referents. Participants answered two questions designed to elicit contrastive, abstract discourse. We investigated manual gesture behavior. Gesture hand, location on the horizontal axis, and referent in corresponding speech were coded. We also coded contrast in speech. Participants’ overall tendency to use the same hand (t(17) = 13.12, p = .001, 95% CI [.31, .43], d = 2.53) and same location (t(17) = 7.47, p = .001, 95% CI [.27, .47], d = 1.69) when referring to an entity was higher than expected frequency. When comparing pairs of gestures produced with contrastive speech to pairs of gestures produced with non-contrastive speech, we found a greater tendency to produce gestures with different hands for contrastive speech: (t(17) = 4.19, p = .001, 95% CI [.27, .82], d = 1.42). We did not find associations between dominant side and positive concepts or between left, center, and right space and past, present, and future, respectively, as predicted by previous studies. Taken together, our findings suggest that speakers do produce spatially consistent and contrastive gestures for abstract as well as concrete referents. They may be using spatial resources to assist with abstract thinking, and/or to help interlocutors with reference tracking. Our findings also highlight the complexity of predicting gesture hand and location, which appears to be the outcome of many competing variables.
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Insights and their emergence in everyday practices
Author(s): Sarah Bro Trasmundi and Per Linellpp.: 62–90 (29)More LessAbstractThe aim of this article is twofold. First, it is a theoretical and empirically based contribution to the branch of research that studies enabling conditions of human sense-making. It demonstrates the value of a coherent ecological framework, based on dialogism and interactivity for the study of sense-making, problem-solving and task performance in naturalistic contexts. Second, it presents a promising method for the analysis of cognitive activities, Cognitive Event Analysis (CEA), with which we investigate real-life medical interactions, especially the emergence of insights in procedural task performance in emergency medicine. We show how sense-making and insights are accomplished by medical teams when they integrate cultural expertise, professional skills, inter-bodily dynamics, material constraints and affordances within the environment, i.e. when local co-action is embedded in socio-cultural patterns of behaviour.
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Do the meanings of abstract nouns correlate with the meanings of their complementation patterns?
Author(s): Carla Vergaro and Hans-Jörg Schmidpp.: 91–118 (28)More LessAbstractThere is a widespread assumption in Construction Grammar (but also before and elsewhere) that the meanings of verbs correlate with or even determine their complementation forms and patterns. There is much less research on noun complementation, however, although this category is even more interesting for a number of reasons such as the potential for valency reduction, nominal topicalization constructions, and additional complementation options, e.g. of-PPs and existential constructions.
In this paper we focus on the class of nouns reporting commissive illocutionary acts (promise, offer, pledge, refusal, bet, threat, etc.), and address the question of whether there is a correlation (i) between the meaning of these nouns and their preferred complementation patterns, and (ii) between their semantic similarity and their similarity in the distribution of complementation patterns.
We report the results of a study of a set of 17 commissive nouns chosen from a wider collection of illocutionary nouns. Two types of analysis were carried out in order to compare the semantic and grammatical characteristics of these nouns. The semantic analysis was based on insights from speech act theory and the philosophy of language. We developed a framework for a systematic comparative description of the nouns in our word field. The results were tallied with a corpus-based grammatical analysis. Two hundred tokens of each noun type were randomly sampled from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Using these data, the 17 nouns were subjected to an analysis of the relative frequencies of their complementation patterns.
Results indicate a general match between noun meanings and complementation patterns. More specifically, however, they indicate that the closeness of this match depends on the prototypicality of nouns as members of the class of commissives.
The study, then, contributes to our understanding of the relation between lexis and syntax. At the same time, it confirms the need for a close semantic analysis to account for the great extent to which item-specific information, i.e. properties of individual nouns, have to be taken into consideration at the expense of large-scale generalizations.
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Recovering alcoholic
Author(s): Jonas B. Wittkepp.: 119–135 (17)More LessAbstractThis paper examines the competing construals of the phrase recovering alcoholic, which, as a Membership Categorization Device (Sacks 1992), serves to fulfill a commitment to an identity category and at the same time evokes other category-bound activities, often with unintended consequences. Former problem drinkers are routinely referred to by themselves and others as recovering alcoholics, yet they are not ‘recovering’ in the canonical sense of the word, and they participate in a behavior – not drinking – which is a negation of the behavior that originally qualified them as alcoholics. This use of the relatively new identity marker recovering alcoholic may discourage a problem drinker from attempting sobriety, as it implies an unbounded, never-ending period of recovery, unlike recovery from other diseases (and, oddly, unlike the full recovery proffered by Alcoholics Anonymous).
Volumes & issues
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Volume 31 (2024)
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Volume 30 (2023)
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Volume 29 (2022)
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Volume 28 (2021)
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Volume 27 (2020)
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Volume 26 (2019)
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Volume 25 (2018)
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Volume 24 (2017)
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Volume 23 (2016)
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Volume 22 (2014)
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Volume 21 (2013)
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Volume 20 (2012)
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Volume 19 (2011)
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Volume 18 (2010)
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Volume 17 (2009)
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Volume 16 (2008)
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Volume 15 (2007)
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Volume 14 (2006)
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Volume 13 (2005)
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Volume 12 (2004)
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Volume 11 (2003)
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Volume 10 (2002)
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Volume 9 (2001)
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Volume 8 (2000)
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Volume 7 (1999)
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Volume 6 (1998)
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Volume 5 (1997)
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Volume 4 (1996)
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Volume 3 (1995)
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Volume 2 (1994)
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Volume 1 (1993)
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