Pragmatics and Society - Volume 16, Issue 5, 2025

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed medical discourse to the forefront of everyday communication, but limited scholarly attention has been given to its intersection with social-mediated language use in the Chinese context. From a corpus-pragmatic view, we examined textual data collected from Zhihu, the most popular Chinese community question-answering site. Our analysis focused on the linguistic mechanism of evidential expression in social-mediated debates on Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Within the realm of medical scientific discussion, we identified a prevailing epistemic stance of doubt and uncertainty towards the efficacy of TCM, emphasising its socio-political significance. We also demonstrated how the ‘source of knowledge’ value and the ‘speaker commitment’ value of evidentiality interact at the semantic-pragmatic interface. Our findings shed light on a promising research trajectory for sociolinguistic intervention in the formal, descriptive line of evidentiality research, thus, advancing existing corpus pragmatics literature on evidentiality and epistemics in social-mediated communication.

Abstract

Situated within studies on discourses about populism (De Cleen et al., 2018), this paper zooms in on the use, meanings, and role of the word populist in contemporary socio-political debates and, more specifically, on social media. This paper examines populist as stigma term (Kranert, 2020) and seeks to determine how people negotiate their categorisation as (non-)populist — and hence the meaning of this category — on Twitter. Based on the analysis of 139 tweets including the phrase “I am not populist” in four different languages (Dutch, French, English, Spanish), we propose that two patterns can be identified for the renegotiation of users’ identities as populist: denial and self-categorisation. This analysis confirms that populist as a category can refer to a variety of (political) attitudes and orientations and shows the consequences of the polysemous nature of populist while proving that, in certain contexts, populist refers to some specific and stable categories.

Abstract

Online videos have gained popularity as a means for academics to communicate complex scientific ideas both to specialist and non-specialist audiences (Erviti & Stengler 2016; León & Bourk 2018; Luzón & Pérez-Llantada 2019). Nonetheless, concerns are raised about the potential journalistic or oversimplified nature of such science communication efforts. Consequently, this paper aims to shed light on how researchers can enhance transparency without reducing the significance of the content. The study is accomplished through an analysis of a corpus consisting of 10 videos compiled from the ‘Chemistry’ section of the website Latest Thinking (lt.org). This study adopts a discourse analysis approach, focusing on the discursive strategies employed in these videos to recontextualize knowledge for a wide audience. The findings reveal three types of recontextualization strategies performed through the orchestration of various semiotic modes: simplification strategies, strategies to construct an authorial persona and bonding strategies.

Abstract

A well-established body of research in organizational studies shows how business-oriented strategy discourse has spread to different organizations and to society at large. Drawing insights from this research, we in this paper study how strategy discourse intertwines with the spiritual and religious discourse in a specific case of a Finnish Church organization. The interdiscursive analysis focuses on the Church’s formal strategy text, employees’ written reflections regarding the implementation of the strategy, and one-on-one leadership conversations where the manager-employee dyads discussed these texts. Thus, the data set makes a rare case of an intertextual chain of text and talk through which strategy discourse was recontextualized from the field of strategic management to a religious realm. Our analysis specifically highlights how both the organization of textual practices and the conversational practices — and their orchestration — contribute to the transfer and transformation, i.e., recontextualization of strategy discourse.

Abstract

The inevitability of death is reinforced in the different cultures and religions of the world. Among Christians in general and Nigerian Christians in particular, it is seen as a transformator of human beings from mortality to immortality, as evident in their linguistic behaviour. This study investigates pain-relieving strategies in Christian condolence messages in Nigeria, within the purview of Capone’s pragmeme of accommodation. Data for the study comprised tributes and condolence messages in selected Christian burial souvenirs, programmes and books of tributes. Findings revealed reference to the deceased’s good qualities, reference to heaven as rest home and a better place, reference to future re-union, and reference to death as an inevitable messenger that calls human beings home are strategic pain-relieving strategies carefully employed by authors of Christian condolence messages and tributes to ‘heal the pain of death’ among Nigerian Christians. The choice of these strategies is predicated on the shared Christian belief about death.

Abstract

This study investigates the challenges of translating English demonstratives into Persian, with a focus on deictic shifts and their discourse-pragmatic implications. It aims to outline the recontextualization that deictic terms undergo during translation and the role of discourse-pragmatic factors in this process. Utilizing a parallel database of literary and academic texts in English and Persian, all instances of English demonstratives and their Persian counterparts have been identified and compared based on type, form, and quantity. An analysis of 1,849 instances of demonstrative discrepancies reveals two primary types of deictic shifts: (1) genuine shifts, which involve a change in the deictic center due to the translator’s (inter)subjectivity, leading to the re-contextualization of discourse, and (2) non-genuine shifts, where there is no change in the origo. The findings indicate a tendency for genuine shifts to alternate between distal-to-proximal and proximal-to-distal, with a marked preference for distal-to-proximal shifts, attributed to the unmarked nature of proximal deixis in Persian. Furthermore, translators frequently replace pure deictics with impure forms or add deictic terms for clarity, reflecting broader translation strategies aimed at ensuring the definiteness and explicitness of referents.

This article reviews The Politics of Climate Change Metaphors in the U.S. Discourse: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Analysis from an Ecolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective978-3-031-19015-5