Pragmatics and Society - Volume 6, Issue 4, 2015

Speaker intention is conceptualized as a property of utterances in context, not speakers; it is based on communally shared knowledge of discursive means to ends. The article’s main theoretical claim is that utterances, in addition to being produced with an intention about their pragmatic meaning, are also produced with an intention to bring about some post-interactional end result. Both types of intention bear on the utterance’s pragmatic meaning. Empirical aspects of the theoretical difference between these two types of speaker intention are shown through analysis of naturally occurring interactions; here, the analytical focus is on the scope, interdependence, recognizability, and fulfillment of each type of intention, with special attention to the functionality of an utterance’s content, composition, and sequential placement as a means of getting a response from the interlocutor(s) that goes along with what the speaker intends as regards the end result of the interaction.

This work studies manipulative use of language that can be called “deliberate failure of communication”; I characterize this kind of manipulation and show that it can be found in the discourse of marketing experts and legal professionals. Relying on relevance theory, I show that manipulation of this kind takes advantage of what van Dijk calls the “context model” of the addressees. I exemplify two ways in which the context models of some of the discourse’s participants might be misused in order to manipulate them. One way is exemplified by a text from an advertisement, the other by a text from a criminal court file. I propose, finally, that the analysis supports van Dijk’s view that social, discursive, and epistemic inequalities reproduce one another in a kind of vicious circle. It suggests, in van Dijk’s terms, that manipulation by deliberate failure of communication is a discriminatory use of language employed by elite groups in order to reproduce their social power.

This study is a socio-pragmatic analysis of persuasive strategies used by the participants in “al-ittijāh al-muʿākis”, “The Opposite Direction”, on the Al-­Jazeera TV channel. An ethnographic approach was adopted in the research; the analysis focused on the use of politeness strategies and face-saving and face-­threatening interactions in order to find out their persuasive factors. I observe that religious citations, prophetic sayings, proverbs, and metaphor are used predominantly by the participants in communicating various political issues. I argue that the persuasiveness of these rhetorical strategies stems from their aesthetic influence in establishing moral credibility and in evoking emotional responses. I also argue that these rhetorical strategies are speech acts that indirectly provoke responses and/or aim at saving the speakers’ and/or addressees’ face. The study concludes that persuasiveness is facilitated in part by transferring socio-pragmatic meanings through the use of some politeness and figurative devices such as honorific modes, metaphors and proverbs.

This paper investigates how talk and practical action are coordinated during one type of activity involving professional communication: the service-­assessment sequence in hair salons. During this activity, a practical inspection of the haircut must be coupled with sequentially produced verbal acts. Our analysis of four examples reveals that there is no fixed relationship between the organization of talk and practical action. Instead, people manipulate this relationship on a moment-by-moment basis, often coordinating the two into a single, integral package, or relying on one stream of action to achieve progress in the other. These findings imply that some multimodal activities that are brought into alignment may have their own, separate and independent procedural logic and sequencing patterns and that these can be brought into play to create or deal with constraints in each other.

Although the practice of (re)formulating has been examined in a variety of institutional settings, its realization in the framework of school interaction has received no attention from a conversation analytic perspective. The present article aspires to fill this gap, offering some preliminary remarks about how reformulations, namely versions of what was previously said or implied, are accomplished in the classroom. More specifically, two types of the teacher’s reformulations are distinguished, on the basis of his/her epistemic access to what is reformulated. The research aims at demonstrating how a general practice adapts to the central activities of the setting in which it is employed.

This study aims to explicate interviewer and candidate conversational practices in L2 job interviews as they relate to the assessment of a candidate’s qualification for a particular position. The data consisted of 27 audio-recorded job interviews for the position of student assistant in English classes at a Japanese university. The analysis of these interactional data, conducted using conversational analysis methodology, revealed that the inadequacy of a candidate’s response is constructed by means of the interviewer’s subsequent pursuit of a relevant answer from the candidate. In addition, a candidate’s ability to build rapport by providing sequentially linked joke-serious responses evoked a positive evaluation from the interviewer. The findings indicate that a candidate’s understanding of expected behaviors and ability to accommodate his or her behaviors in a manner relevant to the interaction result in a positive assessment.

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant cluster articulation and intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca interactions in Japan (Jenkins 2000; Matsumoto 2011). Some research has claimed that the full articulation of consonant clusters in lexeme-initial and lexeme-medial position is critical to the maintenance of intelligibility (Jenkins 2000, 2002, 2007; Walker 2010; Deterding 2013). Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of repair sequences in interactions among English as a Lingua Franca speakers at a Japanese university, this study claims that consonant elision in consonant clusters in lexeme-initial, lexeme-medial, and lexeme-final position can attenuate intelligibility, and that the insertion of an elided consonant into a word that was oriented to as unintelligible can help restore intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca.