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- Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022
Pragmatics and Society - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022
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A study of linguistic manipulations of activating, seeking and creating common ground in intercultural business communication
Author(s): Chengtuan Lipp.: 169–192 (24)More LessAbstractPrevious studies on common ground (CG, for short) have mainly focused on its definition and functions in various daily interactions. Few studies explore the linguistic manipulations of CG in cross-cultural business interactions. This paper aims to fill in this gap by examining how sellers and buyers manipulate linguistic actions of activating, seeking and creating CG to make a deal. This study instantiates and develops Kecskes’ (2013) CG model. Based on qualitative analysis of data collected from email interactions between Chinese sellers and Australian buyers, I find that (1) Interlocutors often activate their core CG through manipulating frequency markers such as “again”, and epistemic markers such as “I knew”, “you know”, “might”; (2) Interlocutors seek core CG and emergent CG by manipulating epistemic markers such as “I’m sure”; (3) Interlocutors often bring the third party or element into the communication to create emergent CG by using question markers such as “you see?”, imperative markers such as “Do you understand!”, and narrative markers like “I tell you” and “once” or “before”; (4) The interpersonal manipulations of CG construction contribute to business integrity and reliability because the more efforts interlocutors make to activate, seek, and create CG, the more clarified and acceptable their business relations become in business communication. For the purpose of validating what I have found, I conduct a quantitative study of linguistic means of constructing CG in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), and summarize the typical linguistic means of activating, seeking, and creating CG in various settings.
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Clean room, uncomfortable bed
Author(s): Elizaveta Smirnovapp.: 193–223 (31)More LessAbstractOnline customer reviews, being an essential factor that determines success or failure in business, in particular in the tourism industry, demand close attention since the investigation of this type of discourse might bear some implications both for language specialists and for hotel managers. This paper is a quantitative and qualitative study of evaluation devices occurring in the corpus of hotel reviews from Booking.com. The analysis is based on methods associated with corpus linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1994; Eggins 2004), specifically, the Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005), which is applied here to a new type of discourse, that of hotel ratings. The study focuses on the categories of Attitude, Graduation and Engagement suggested by Martin and White and investigates inscribed and invoked evaluation. In order to adapt the Attitude dimensions to the corpus under study, new subcategories were created as a contribution to evaluation theory. The practical result of the study is a list of evaluation devices employed in hotel reviews; the list may be useful for further corpus analyses and for designing systems for automated analysis of customer evaluation. Since online customer reviews are commonly used by hotels as a benchmark of their guests’ satisfaction and a valuable information source of features and services that need to be improved, the present study is also likely to make an important contribution to the industry.
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Politeness in hotel service encounter interactions in Spain
Author(s): Lucía Fernández-Amayapp.: 224–249 (26)More LessAbstractCustomer satisfaction in hotels has been measured by considering different aspects of the client’s experience, one of these being interaction with hotel staff. The receptionist is probably the most important member of staff in this context, since this person is the first that the customer meets upon arrival and the one consulted when having a problem or doubt. In this paper, receptionists’ views regarding what they consider to be appropriate verbal and non-verbal behaviour in reception desk service encounters in Spain are analysed. The results show that (a) the participants have very specific expectations regarding what constitutes appropriate receptionist behaviour and (b) there appears to be a general preference for deference politeness strategies and a focus on the transactional part of the interaction.
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Repetition and paraphrase in contexts of concordant and discordant orientations
Author(s): Sayamol Panseeta and Richard Watson Toddpp.: 250–271 (22)More LessAbstractLanguage processing theory posits that a person chooses words based on how he/she conceptualizes the referent. Where there are two or more interlocutors, depending on the way they conceptualize the referent, their word choices may be the same or different. In an unpublished paper, Sinclair claims that when interlocutors are in concordance, they are likely to repeat the word choices of their partners; when they are in discordance, they are likely to use paraphrases. This article investigates this claim by examining whether there is a relationship between two types of reiteration of concepts (repetition and paraphrase) and interlocutors’ orientations (concordant and discordant). 100 hotel reviews and responses posted on TripAdvisor were collected to form two corpora representing the two contexts. The data was analyzed quantitatively to obtain comparative frequencies of repetition and paraphrase in each context, and connotations of paraphrases were identified to see whether there is any association between the types of connotations and interlocutors’ orientations. The results stand in contrast to Sinclair’s claim. More specifically, paraphrase outnumbers repetition in both contexts, and repetition is more preferred in discordant contexts. Affective connotations are more common in the reviews where the hotels are rated “terrible” and the reviewers and the respondents show opposing views on the concepts.
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The role of object distance and gender in Persian compliment responses
Author(s): Mehdi Sarkhoshpp.: 272–294 (23)More LessAbstractThis study investigated the effect of the distance of the object of the compliment from the complimentee on compliment responses in Persian. A further aim of the study was to understand whether gender of the complimentee made a difference to the response pattern. To this end, 2652 Persian compliment responses were elicited through Discourse Completion Tasks from 563 BA students majoring in twenty disciplines at a university in Iran. The findings revealed that the distance of the object of the compliment did not influence the degree of acceptance or rejection of the compliment. It was also found that Iranian university students’ compliment response behavior, mostly characterized by the rejection or evasion of compliments was shifting toward accepting compliments. This observation is attributed to increasing chances of exposure to and interaction with foreign media such as satellite TV, the Internet, foreign films, series, etc. among Persian university students.
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More than writing on the wall
Author(s): Timo Savelapp.: 295–321 (27)More LessAbstractThis article is dedicated to the analysis of visual multimodality and agency in a school unit situated in Southwestern Finland. The school unit is approached as a node of intersecting discourses and its visible features are investigated as materialized discourses. The results indicate that writing is the preferred mode of visual expression in this learning environment and that there is a shift in modes from image to writing as students progress in the school system, which reflects the existing de jure educational discourses. Moreover, while teachers and school staff are the most active agents in the school unit, the assessment of multimodality indicates that students appear more passive than they are if research focuses only on writing. Moreover, not taking images into account risks reinforcing the traditional notion of writing as the only proper form of expression.
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Language change among Kalhuri Kurdish speakers in Iran
Author(s): Javad Yarahmadipp.: 322–340 (19)More LessAbstractIn the multicultural and multiethnic context of Iran, Farsi (Persian) is the only official and the most prestigious language employed by the people. This article investigates sociolinguistic factors fostering a radical language shift from Kurdish to Farsi among Kalhuri Kurdish speakers in Kermanshah, the biggest Kurdish city in Iran – a trend which has raised many social and cultural controversies within the Kurdish community. Data were gathered through a questionnaire focusing on the attitudinal, economic, and social factors affecting the shift. The participants of the study were 1,000 native Kurdish speakers in Kermanshah; the data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and item percentage. The analysis revealed that social, personal, and economic factors contributed to the shift, even though the economic concerns outweighed the others. The article discusses the implication of the findings in detail.
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Review of Schneider & Ifantidou (2020): Developmental and Clinical Pragmatics
Author(s): Kunkun Zhangpp.: 341–345 (5)More LessThis article reviews Developmental and Clinical Pragmatics
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Review of Haugh, Kádár & Terkourafi (2021): The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
Author(s): Ruili Su and Yanfei Zhangpp.: 346–351 (6)More LessThis article reviews The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
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