Pragmatics and Society - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2018

This study presents an analysis of hedging strategies employed by the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, in political interviewing. Using a discourse-analytic procedure, the study investigates a corpus of 22 press interviews and verifies the presence of hedging-related discursive strategies in the President’s responses. It also identifies four specific interrelated discourse moves: ‘Reformulating the interviewer’s question’, ‘Expanding the scope of the original question sequence’, ‘Switching the time frame of the question context’, ‘Recasting the question reference from specific to general terms’. It is suggested that President Obama manages to avoid explicit responses to questions about controversial issues through hedging strategies, which shift the focus of the interviewer’s question to different interrogative formats, time frames and reference perspectives.

In this paper, we analyse and discuss an utterance/pragmeme/pract proffered by US President Donald Trump and addressed to FBI Director Comey: ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’. 1 We consider the explicature of this utterance (‘I hope you will drop the Russian investigation concerning Flynn’) and its illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. We argue that while Republicans opt for an Austinian or Searlean analysis, in the attempt to deny that this utterance constituted an attempt to influence Comey, there are reasons for adopting a Strawsonian analysis, casting it in the framework of pragmemes, devised by Mey (2001) , that frame a socio-pragmatic analysis of utterance interpretation within context. This analysis shows, Trump illicitly tried to persuade Comey to drop the Russian investigation, and therefore attempted to interfere with the judiciary system. A reasoned case can be made for saying that Trump had the intention of interfering with America’s federal court system through this utterance.

This study investigates Barack Obama’s attitudes towards Republicans and Democrats by analyzing a corpus of 249 Presidential weekly addresses. Analysis shows that Obama’s attitudes towards the Republicans are characterized by a negative judgment of propriety, creating a negative image of the Republican Party, whereas when Republicans and Democrats are mentioned together, his attitudes are characterized by his hopes for and commendations on bipartisan collaboration. An analytical model based on the attitude schema is proposed to explicate the strategies for encoding attitudes. It is found that negative attitudes are always expressed implicitly by recounting events that elicit the attitudes (i.e. behaviors of the Republicans) and performing speech acts that are motivated by the attitudes (i.e. urging the Republicans to stop the wrong behaviors). The patterns of attitudes reflect bipartisan conflict and cooperation on the one hand, and constitute an important strategy to battle against the opposition party and build coalitions on the other.

This paper uses the corpus tools DOTA and WordSmith to see if they can provide any indication as to why some label Phillipson’s theory of Linguistic Imperialism as a conspiracy theory. The tools were applied to multiple corpora composed of texts drawn from: Phillipson’s works, conspiracy theory books, and a control corpus of general academic papers. The quantitative data generated was subjected to a corpus informed qualitative analysis with the tools being applied to facilitate a corpus-assisted discourse study of Linguistic Imperialism.

Whilst many studies focus on human-to-media interactions, this paper turns to how a multimodal medium contributes to human-to-human interaction. By bringing together both radical embodied cognitive science ( Chemero 2009 ) and dialogism ( Linell 2009 ), the paper develops an anti-representationalist approach to the concept of social presence. We use an exploratory study of close friendships that maintain their interaction through the use of the mobile instant messaging service WhatsApp. In so doing, we describe texting as language-activity where people engage with each other by using resources from body, environment, and brain. Our work represents a major departure from previous studies of mobile interaction in adopting an embodied view of language and cognition. By so doing, we show how parties create anticipatory routines that enable them to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ their interlocutor. The paper’s main contribution is to draw attention to this kind of heightened social presence that we choose to call “co-imagining”.

This paper explores how the cultural concept of the Irish Mammy is portrayed in the popular television comedy series ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’. Considering the historicity and cultural aspects surrounding essential views of Irishness that have shaped the archetype of the stereotype, we draw on a corpus of (semi)scripted fictional interaction taken from the series. Using a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach to explore linguistic patterning surrounding the use of key lexical markers (e.g. Mammy), we investigate what they reveal about how the concept is represented, (de)constructed, and negotiated. The paper discusses the construction and deconstruction of the stereotype and the extent to which it draws on shared knowledge to reflect and navigate particular cultural values and concerns ( Hall 1997 ; Hall et al. 2013 ). It views the deconstruction, in particular, as a way of challenging the traditional stereotype, in light of societal change, to provide a more layered, realistic and multi-faceted insight into the identities of the Irish Mammy figure within the fictional context of Mrs Brown’s Boys.