Pragmatics and Society - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025

Abstract

Through an observation of naturally-occurring medical openings in China, we show that problem solicitation is not necessarily a routine practice in medical consultations. There are four common conversational slots in a Chinese medical opening allowing an unsolicited problem presentation, featuring a common deep structure – a generic pre-sequence followed by the specific base sequence of problem presentation. Three logically connected factors distinguishing Chinese medical openings from their Western counterparts are identified to provide the rationale for the normality of unsolicited problem presentation in China. The study enriches the understanding of culture-specificity in certain local structural organization of medical consultations, calls for activity-specific reconsideration of medical authority and reveals further resemblance between medical consultations and service encounters.

Abstract

Experimental research recommends that climate change debaters actively contradict misinformation. This study examines discursively how participants do so during prominent televised Danish debates, that is, how they orient towards elements in other participants’ preceding talk about climate change causes and implications as factually wrong. Three types are considered: (i) contradictions produced by the interviewer in the next turn; (ii) contradictions produced by a co-participant after being allocated the turn by the interviewer; and (iii) contradictions produced by a co-participant in a self-selected turn. Analysis reveals that the contradictions are attuned to and limited by these sequential circumstances. The study overall finds that sequential context significantly impacts climate change debaters’ possibilities for contradicting misinformation; in particular, potential misinformation may be ‘smuggled’ into multi-unit turns, which can prove difficult for co-panelists to confront because of the format’s turn-taking provision.

Abstract

Scalar implicature is a very interesting topic in linguistic pragmatics. This study is intended to argue that, based on the Cognitive Grammar paradigm, scalar implicature is contextually activated by schematic networks. From a hierarchical perspective, those linguistic units sharing the same schema can be compared; from a horizontal perspective, these units are distributed from the stronger to the weaker in terms of semantic inclusion. The encyclopedic nature of context determines that using a weaker lexical item to implicate the denial of a stronger statement has become a cognitive routine which is presumed to be shared by the speaker and hearer. The study concludes that scalar implicature lies in between semantics and pragmatics.

Abstract

This article examines how the value of rule of law is negotiated through public prosecutors’ attitudinal positioning of themselves and defendants in courtroom discourse. A corpus-based analysis of 120 recent Chinese digital indictments revealed that the evaluative stances of public prosecutors toward themselves invariably imply positive judgment of capacity and legal propriety in their legal investigation, thus constructing a stable and authoritative image of law enforcers. Their attitudes toward defendants are mainly negative judgments of both moral and legal propriety through various criminal actions, creating a predominantly evil image of law violators with different personae. It is through these sharply different patterns of discourse representation that public prosecutors tactically construct and negotiate attitudes toward crime and justice, thus establishing mainstream judicial values during legal proceedings. This study may shed new light on the research of legal argumentation for negotiating judicial values under the civil law system in this digital era.

Abstract

This paper examined news reports published by a Swedish alternative newspaper in connection with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in June 2020. The primary objective was to assess the role of strategic employment of distinctive linguistic features in shaping a portrayal of the protests through implications of threat, fear, and xenophobia. As the results indicate, the characteristics that contribute the most to such a depiction consistently involve an ominous vision of the spatial and ideological proximity of external entities and values to the in-group (‘us’). These findings are related to the particulars of the corpus, as the purpose of news reports is to create a sense of immediacy and reduce distance. However, since the goal of alternative news is to appeal to readers’ sensibilities in critical areas of their lives, despite masquerading as traditional media, these outlets tend to communicate threat and concern rather than a reliable picture of reality.

Abstract

Within social scientific research searching for products is overwhelmingly reduced and represented as an activity that is embedded in decision-making processes. This study shows that searching is extremely multimodally rich and complex and that structured stages of searching are the product of customers’ efforts to order this complexity in and through concrete actions. Importantly, it also shows that customers carry out these actions un-hesitantly in both physical Brick-and Mortar (B&M) shops and in web-shops. The paper concludes that descriptions of searching need to take the nature of the multimodal environment as well as customers’ approach and engagement with it into consideration: searching for products is multimodally rich and complex and yet it is simple.

The study is situated within the broad fields of EMCA and Social Semiotics in multimodality. It is based on video-recordings and eye‑tracking recordings of customers’ buying practices in different kinds of (web)shops.

This article reviews Pragmatics and Emotion978-1-108-83596-1