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- Volume 8, Issue, 2017
Pragmatics and Society - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
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Sociolinguistic representations of the military in Greek comedy films
Author(s): Anastasia G. Stamou and Stavros Christoupp.: 1–25 (25)More LessThis paper aims to explore cinematic representations of the military in peacetime, and more importantly, from a socio-cultural setting in which mandatory military service is highly devalued. Focusing on three Greek popular comedy films, we examined humorous depictions of the military. By adopting the ‘identities in interaction’ model of Bucholtz and Hall, our analysis suggested that the use of the formal vs. the informal military sociolect indexed the contrasting identities of film officers vs. soldiers as well as their diverging views about the military. On the other hand, the use of the informal military sociolect by soldiers established an affinity among them, helping them to jointly construct the army in their talk as unjust, corrupted and ineffective for the Turkish ‘threat’.
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Karachi weds Lahore
Author(s): Gwendolyn Kirkpp.: 26–37 (12)More LessThis paper investigates the mixing of Urdu and Punjabi language elements in a comic television serial – Larka Karachi Ka Kuri Lahore Di – that aired during the month of Ramzan (Urdu for Ramadan) in 2012. The serial features exaggerated depictions of a Punjabi Lahori family and a muhajir (Urdu-speaking) Karachiite family. Of particular interest is the way marked phonological features and lexical items are deployed to highlight panjabiyat (‘Punjabi-ness’). This study explores relationships between the humorous performance of language mixing and language ideologies in Pakistan. Even in places where panjabiyat is strongly emphasized, the lexico-grammatical choices made by the characters still render the language maximally understandable to an Urdu-speaking (rather than Punjabi-speaking) audience. Using theories of ‘mixed language,’ this study seeks to address the importance and implications of these ways of performing ethnolinguistic identity.
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The very sensitive question
Author(s): Martha Sif Karrebæk and Narges Ghandchipp.: 38–60 (23)More LessThis paper engages with ideological difference, education, and expressions of insecurity on the basis of a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in two Farsi heritage language classrooms and the group of Iranian immigrants organized around these classrooms in Copenhagen, Denmark. We show how insecurity and surveillance gave meaning to different space-times, or chronotopes ( Bakhtin 1981 ), evoked by the participants, and to the understandings of community. The contemporary state of Iran and political and religious ideologies associated with this were subject to taboo in class but not necessarily elsewhere. We argue that this partly motivated the structure and content of the classroom, as the teacher tried to create a neutral space for children whose parents’ ideological backgrounds were potentially incompatible. This could liberate the children from their parents’ anxieties and it made the teacher’s job less vulnerable. Linguistic Ethnography (Rampton 2007) is the analytic framework of the paper.
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The impact of face systems on the pragmalinguistic features of academic e-mail requests
Author(s): Erhan Aslanpp.: 61–84 (24)More LessThis study investigates the impact of power/distance (PD) variables operationalized as face systems on the pragmalinguistic features of academic e-mail requests. A corpus of 90 academic e-mails was classified into four face system groups: hierarchical (sender +P), hierarchical (recipient +P), deference, and solidarity. Request perspectives, strategies, and mitigating supportive moves were analyzed. The analysis revealed that the speaker and hearer dominance were the most frequent request perspectives in the hierarchical (recipient+P) and deference groups. The impersonal perspective was more common in the hierarchical (sender+P) group. The preparatory was the dominant request strategy in all groups, relatively more frequent in the hierarchical (recipient+P) and deference groups. The most common supportive move was the grounder, which occurred more frequently than other supportive moves. The findings of the study indicate that face systems influence the request patterns in academic e-mail communication. The study has implications for future research on pragmatics of computer-mediated communication (CMC).
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A subtle kind of certainty
Author(s): Patrick F. Parnabypp.: 85–106 (22)More LessUsing data collected from 42 semi-structured interviews with professional financial planners and eight recorded meetings between planners and clients, this paper examines two interrelated social phenomena from a Bourdieusian (1977, 1991) perspective. First, it examines how professional financial planners legitimize their expertise by constructing and maintaining a distinction between short-term economic uncertainty on one hand, and the inevitability of long-term economic growth on the other. Second, it conceptualizes those legitimation practices in terms of their symbiotic relationship to broader structural conditions. The analysis concludes by reflecting on the significance of misrecognition as it relates to industry claims about the future.
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Scope and partitivity of plural indefinite noun phrases in Spanish
Author(s): Juan J. Colomina-Almiñanapp.: 107–128 (22)More LessIt has been argued that European Spanish plural indefinite noun phrases including algunos convey a partitive effect because the restrictor alg- provides additional properties. The reason that algunos implicates a “non-all-things” effect is because it refers only to an indeterminate part of the whole. The scope of bare plurals and unos, in contrast, does not exhibit this characteristic. This article argues that, contrarily to this claim, the scope of bare plurals and unos also induces partitivity because occurrences of these words include unarticulated constituents. Therefore, European Spanish indefinite noun phrases pragmatically presuppose the relevant part of what the speaker intends to refer, which is also shared by the audience since it is part of the common ground both occupy. Hence, bare plurals and unos are always contextually restricted, since a covert (optional) variable present in the logical form cannot capture this contextual restriction.
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Aligning caller and call-taker
Author(s): Tom Koole and Nina Verbergpp.: 129–153 (25)More LessThis paper reports on conversation analytic research for the Dutch national emergency call-centre. In a corpus study of 120 emergency calls we show that callers’ orientations to their communicative tasks are not aligned to the institutional communicative tasks of the call-takers. In a subsequent workplace experiment involving over 2000 calls, it appeared that the use of an alternative question rather than a wh-question, significantly altered callers’ emergency deliveries and adapted them to call-takers’ communicative needs. The analysis shows two aspects of callers’ responses to the different question formats: (i) The alternative questions produced significantly more type-conforming answers than the wh-questions, and also (ii) callers treated their non-conforming answer to alternative question more often as dispreferred than their non-conforming answers to wh-questions. Callers thus treated the preference for type-conformity to be stronger for alternative questions than for wh-questions.
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The future in reports
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