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- Volume 9, Issue 4, 2018
Pragmatics and Society - Volume 9, Issue 4, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 4, 2018
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Asian slurs and stereotypes in the USA
Author(s): Adam M. Croompp.: 495–517 (23)More LessAbstractSlurs such as chink and gook are linguistic expressions that are primarily used to derogate certain group members for their descriptive attributes (such as their ethnicity) and are often considered the most offensive of expressions. Recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has illuminated several important facts regarding their meaning and use – including that slurs are commonly understood to felicitously apply towards some targets yet not others, that slurs are among the most potentially offensive expressions afforded by natural language, and that slurs are often flexibly employed and of potential use, not only derogatorily to convey offense towards out-group members, but also non-derogatorily to convey affiliation with in-group members or to diminish the derogatory force that the slur is typically understood to carry. Nonetheless, prior scholarship has unfortunately restricted itself primarily to considerations of slurs that typically target members of other groups. Since no account of slurs for Asian-Americans has so far been proposed, the aim of this article is therefore to provide the first systematic and empirically informed analysis of slurs for Asian-Americans that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative (non-derogatory) use.
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Multimodal acquisition of interactive aptitudes
Author(s): Jarret Geenenpp.: 518–544 (27)More LessAbstractIn this article, I detail incremental microgenetic alterations in the development of one particular socio-interactive aptitude: making a relevant interactive contribution. Taking heed of Clark’s (2014) call for the need to reorient our attention to investigate the pragmatics of interaction by accounting for the multiple communicative modes through which this is acccomplished I detail the ways in which parental facilitation and a flexible participatory configuration, made possible by video-conferencing technology, create conditions enabling the agentive re-introduction of a psycho-socially relevant topic. Paramount are the ways in which residual interactive specificities in introduction, co-production and multimodal configurations re-manifest suggesting a more symbiotic relationship between traditional notions of ‘message’ and ‘production’. During the microgenesis of interactive aptitudes, children are not just learning what constitutes psycho-socially relevant topoi, they also acquire an understanding of exactly how to make the contribution through multimodal ensembles.
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Investigating audience orientation in courtroom communication
Author(s): Krisda Chaemsaithongpp.: 545–570 (26)More LessAbstractThis study presents an empirical study of audience orientation, investigating lawyers’ overt interpersonal negotiation with jurors. Drawing upon a corpus of the closing arguments of five high-profile American trials, the quantitative and qualitative analysis identifies the traces and degree of the jury’s presence through pronominal choices, questions, directives, references to shared knowledge and asides. Such relational practice does not merely “oil the wheels” of courtroom communication but also constitutes a key way to the meaning-making process in this phase of the trial. The findings attest to the centrality of relational work in accomplishing transactional goals in institutional discourses.
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Debating or displaying political positions?
Author(s): Helmut Gruberpp.: 571–597 (27)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates the reference statements and rhetorical functions of politicians’ reactive (“uptaking”) statements in parliamentary debates as well as their self-positioning effects. Uptaking moves may be used by speakers for pursuing strategic, global discourse aims. The specific properties of such ‘uptaking’ utterances and their sequential embedding in the unfolding discourse provide analysts with cues of speakers’ global interactional goals. Results indeed show how global and local pragmatic factors impact content, form, and rhetorical function of MPs’ uptaking statements. The data comprises four Austrian parliamentary sessions, which follow the inaugural speech each newly appointed Austrian chancellor has to deliver in the Austrian national assembly at the beginning of a legislative term. Overall, four fifths of the uptaking discourse units (consisting of ‘reference to previous statement plus comment’) refer to the government program, the inaugural speech or a previous MPs’ statement. Whereas a closer investigation of the reference statements seems to indicate a left wing vs. right wing rhetorical pattern (with left wing and center parties referring to ‘official’ sources, while right wing parties set their own topical agenda), investigating the rhetorical functions of the uptaking discourse units reveals a clear government vs. opposition (but no party-specific) rhetoric: Government party MPs praise the government program (or the inaugural speech), opposition party speakers criticize it. Both groups thus focus on the interpersonal plain of interaction. In contrast, argumentative (or counter-argumentative) uptaking discourse units which would indicate speakers’ willingness to enter into a rational discourse (in a Habermasian sense) with their political opponents are extremely rare. Through their rhetorical activities, the vast majority of government and opposition speakers thus reinforce and perpetuate already known political stances and affiliations in front of a third party (i.e. the general public watching the debates via TV or Internet livestream) rather than presenting themselves as rational, problem-focused politicians.
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Investigating the apology strategies of Saudi learners of English
Author(s): Dina Abdel Salam El-Dakhspp.: 598–625 (28)More LessAbstractThe present study examines the apologetic behavior of Saudi learners of English in a foreign language learning context. The study also investigates the influence of language exposure, gender, distance and dominance on the learners’ apologies. To this end, a Discourse Completion Test was completed by (1) 411 Saudi learners of English, (2) 42 native speakers of Saudi Arabic and (3) 47 native speakers of English. The groups of native speakers provided the norms of apologetic behavior in the learners’ first (L1) and second (L2) languages. The results showed the Saudi participants’ preference for face-saving strategies to both the speaker and hearer, and a positive influence for increased L2 exposure on the learners’ pragmatic competence. The variables of gender, distance and dominance also proved influential but to varying degrees. The results are interpreted in light of the existing literature and theoretical models. Pedagogical implications and research directions are proposed.
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A diachronic analysis of metaphor clusters in political discourse
pp.: 626–653 (28)More LessAbstractThe complex and abstract character of political discourse makes it difficult to be understood directly by ordinary people. Assuming that use of metaphor could make political language easier to comprehend, more and more scholars began to focus on the study of metaphor in political discourse. However, most of these studies paid only attention to the contrastive study of single metaphor phenomena, while diachronic studies of metaphors still remained few.
The present paper attempts to make a diachronic analysis of metaphor clusters in American and Chinese political discourse. The data employed are American and Chinese leaders’ political speeches, addressed to university students; the Chinese corpus contains 119021 characters, while the American corpus includes 118805 words. The research was implemented over three periods, namely before 1900, from 1900 to 2010, and from 2010 up to now (when the new term “metaphor cluster” was introduced to study the clustering phenomena of metaphor in different periods). In addition, both qualitative analysis and qualitative analysis were employed; the linguistic analysis tool Wmatrix and MIPVU procedures were adopted to identify metaphor clusters, thereby remedying the shortcomings of traditional methods which identify metaphor through researchers’ intuition and perception. Qualitative analysis was used to conduct a contrastive analysis of dominant metaphor clusters and how they tend to be used by the lecturers, both in the American and the Chinese corpuses.
The data analysis shows that metaphor clusters abound in American and Chinese leaders’ political speeches in universities. Generally speaking, Chinese leaders adopt more metaphor clusters than do their American counterparts. Similar metaphor clusters in both data are: journey, family, and building. Circle and art metaphor clusters are unique to the Chinese data, while religion and drama metaphor clusters only occur in the American data. Before 1990, leaders adopted few metaphor clusters both in America and in China; the two decades from 1990 to 2010 witnessed a peak season of employing metaphor clusters in both Chinese and American leaders’ speeches, whereas after 2010, the usage of metaphor clusters in Chinese data ushered in a new stage of development, with a multitude of new metaphorical expressions having cultural connotations. The results reveal that the differences in the usage of metaphor clusters are mainly due to the various ideologies and cultural backgrounds of the two countries. In addition, our analysis also shows that the employment of metaphor clusters in political discourse could lead the audiences’ direction of thinking, reduce the audiences’ comprehensive burden, and arouse the audiences’ emotions.
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Osamu Sawada, 2018. Pragmatic aspects of scalar modifiers: The semantics-pragmatics interface
Author(s): Jacob L. Meypp.: 654–656 (3)More LessThis article reviews Pragmatic Aspects of Scalar Modifiers: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
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