Pragmatics and Society - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2024

Abstract

Awareness of cultural specificity in current classroom discourse is particularly important in an educational setting that has become largely multicultural due to globalization, migration and academic mobility. Drawing on the intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, and cultural studies, this paper explores the speech act of critical remark in Russian and Israeli classroom settings, focusing on students’ view of its degree of conventionality and admissibility. Data were obtained from a student survey questionnaire (undertaken between 2017-2019). Highlighting similarities and differences, we argue that both Russian and Israeli classroom settings exhibit critical remark as not uncommon, though varying in acceptability. Findings show that critical acts need not be limited to the merely conflictual, but may even be perceived positively, and may moreover exert varying levels of illocutionary force and be interpreted differently by different cultural groups.

Abstract

Speech acts in CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) have been receiving increasing attention in recent years. This study attempted to make a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and American online complaints of restaurants from the perspective of speech act structure in relation to face management. In spite of likeness in the general taxonomy of retrospective and prospective speech acts between the two corpora, addressivity appeared to be a strong factor affecting how face was managed in the specific construction of complaints as speech act sets in the Chinese data set, while such a discrepancy was absent from the American reviews where the face of restaurants and fellow consumers was not handled with much distinction and discretion. These findings in terms of the level of sensitivity and adaptation to the context seem to imply that the generally-recognized distinction of high-context vs. low-context between the two cultures is also manifested in online reviews.

Abstract

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) are characteristic of, and play a vital role in, the sharing economy, the new business model for (in particular younger) generations of consumers. Even so, discussions of the pragmatic strategies that sharing businesses employ in response to negative OCRs are still a scarcity in academic literature. The present article makes an original contribution to rapport management studies by examining both the negative and positive rapport management strategies (RMS; Spencer-Oatey 2008) in the responses of British and Chinese Airbnb hosts to 200 negative OCRs in English and 200 negative OCRs in Chinese; among the 400 responses by Airbnb hosts replying to their angry guests’ negative OCRs, there were just 10 negative and 10 positive RMSs. The study also examines similarities and differences between English and Chinese responses to negative OCRs.

Abstract

In this paper, we report on how authors of academic writing in Chinese (AWC) refer to themselves as single authors in the area of language studies. We find that AWC writers rely on the 1st-person plural 我们women “we,” 3rd-person NPs such as 作者/笔者 zuozhe/bizhe “this author,” and inanimate NPs such as 本文 benwen “this article/paper” for self-reference. Based on these findings and subsequent surveys of journal style guides and interviews of authors, we propose that (1) these self-referring expressions are a set of conventions; (2) the motivation for these conventions is modesty, a deep-routed value of Chinese society; and (3) these expressions serve as indexicals to the writers’ identity of a modest scholar in the particular discursive context: the genre of academic writing. By so doing, our work links language use to social values, to identity studies, as well as to genre analysis, thus contributing to the literature in all these fields of investigation.

Abstract

Collective attacks related to controversial issues are pervasive in online communication. However, public opinion is often reversed later when earlier reports are revealed to be misinformation, which may lead to remedies offered to the victim by netizens. We call such phenomena online public opinion reversal (POR) events, which reflect group polarization from attack to remedy. This paper explores the pragmatic strategies that netizens employ to launch attacks and offer remedies in such events, examining a dataset including 300 netizen-generated attacking comments and 300 remedial comments collected on Weibo. The study identified two main categories of online attack strategies and seven types of remedial strategies. Chinese netizens prefer to employ on-record strategies when launching attacks. When an earlier report is revealed to be fake, they employ apology as the most frequent remedial strategy. Preferences for different attacking and remedial strategies and potential influencing factors are also discussed.

Abstract

The burgeoning digital economy has also aroused wide public concerns over its improper use of personal data for economic and political profits. This study focuses on the milestone Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and examines how Mark Zuckerberg succeeded in avoiding public blame during two US Congressional hearings. An integrated analytic framework has been established by combining blame theory and critical discourse analysis to examine blame-avoiding strategies used by Mark Zuckerberg during the two Congressional hearings. The findings have revealed not only the topics but also the specific strategies and the linguistic means and realizations for these strategies. It is expected that this study can generate significant implications on blame-avoiding strategies by digital corporations for their inherently flawed business models.

This article reviews Statutory Interpretation. Pragmatics and Argumentation9781108429344