Pragmatics and Society - Online First

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.

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.

Virtual collaborations via video-conferencing applications may enable international groups to develop ideas and explore synergies in creative ways. This article presents a case study that unveils how students in a group involved in a virtual simulation game, in which English as a lingua franca was used, navigate a highly intercultural environment, orient to team building through cooperative practices, and gradually develop their own team culture. The game was inserted in two online university courses in tertiary institutions in Germany and Finland. In the game, students performed several tasks that require collaborative work in the development plan of a fictitious city. The data for the study comprise video-recorded game interactions and students’ learning journal entries. This article is centered on the multimodal analysis of the interactions taking place during the kick-off session of the game and showcases successful multimodal strategies that aided the development of an inclusive and positive atmosphere in the group.

The present study seeks to reconsider popular assumptions regarding the dynamics of power in interpersonal interactions in light of data from an historical North American speech community. Specifically, I examine directive and commissive speech act formulations in colonial Spanish Louisiana data, both in terms of the level of directness employed in their head acts as well as the degree of tentativeness which accompanies them. The corpus for the study consists of 200 institutional letters composed in two settlements of the Louisiana territory between 1778 and 1802. Study findings reveal that speakers in Spanish Louisiana showed a clear preference for directly formulated speech acts, but that the level of tentativeness used in this period was highly dependent on the relative power of the speaker in the interaction. The results thus call into question traditional notions of the ‘rights’ speakers possess to issue certain types of speech acts.

This paper considers the interplay of small-scale pragmatic actions and large-scale discursive formations; specifically, we examine frame-shifting and keying in the globally syndicated BBC television show Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby. Focusing on the fourth season of Amazing Hotels, which broadcast in 2021, we document how work and workers are staged for entertainment as quintessential examples of a non-serious frame that Goffman called regroundings. We argue that this particular keying of other people’s labour as play is further evidence for how mediatized representations of super-elite lifestyles normalize inequality by “democratizing” privilege and amplifying entitlement.

This study examines face attributes in political interviews involving interviewers working for western broadcasting companies and Iranian politicians. The data consists of 10 hours of talk. The topic raised in the interviews is concerned with Iran’s human rights which have aroused concern and been the focus of international attention. Iranian politicians interviewed on global media are often questioned about Iran’s non-conformity with Human Rights Council. The study revealed that the interviewers ascribed the Iranian politicians with the negative attributes of lack of universalism, non-benevolence, lack of power, non-conformity, and lack of self-direction and the interviewees claimed the positive attributes of security, conformity, benevolence, universalism, self-direction, achievement and tradition to save or enhance their face.

Also, the findings demonstrated that Iranian politicians tended to be more concerned with their collective face.

Drawing on Hansen and Terkourafi’s (2023) model of Hearer’s meaning, the paper discusses cognitive mechanisms through which hearers interpret political language gaffes (e.g. former U.S. President Trump’s “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”). The paper approaches political language gaffes as dependent on a high degree of blending between textual-and-discursive frames and social-world frames. The dataset analysis demonstrates how a Hearer’s difficulty in interpreting a gaffe-y utterance can shift Hearer’s focus (a) from one frame element (e.g. speaker, hearer, effect of utterance on hearer) to another, and (b) from a discursive frame to a social-world frame. The paper demonstrates how, while looking to pinpoint the contextual relevance of an utterance, a Hearer can simultaneously shift focus and vary the scope of cognitive structures from which Hearer can derive meaning. The paper also suggests how analyses of political language gaffes can contribute to research on sociopragmatic topics such as Speaker’s accountability, pragmatic competence, pragmatic failure, non-propositional effects, etc.

The present comparative study investigates the use of multi-word expressions known as ‘routine formulas’ in the humorous monologues of four comedians from four different late-night TV shows in Spain and the United States. The study is framed in the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) and linguistic phraseology. The study of routine formulas is intriguing due to their overlooked status in discussions, despite their simple semantics. Yet, they play various pragmatic roles, particularly in humor creation and comprehension, which is the primary focus here. The study aims to achieve two objectives: first, to identify the routine formulas present in both Spanish and English and assess their frequency in monologue delivery, and second, to examine how these formulas contribute to humor within the monologues.

This study explores how guided tour interaction is achieved through certain question formats, specifically known-answer questions (KAQs), as they are deployed by guides for subsequently designing their talk to fit perceived visitor knowledge and for inviting visitor involvement in question-initiated talk. The approximately 470 minutes of video-recorded data come from guided tours in Japan, Belgium, South Korea, and Cambodia. In these tours, English was used as a common language among local guides and their foreign visitors. Analysis revealed how mobile tours are accomplished through sequences initiated by guides’ KAQs, exposing the guides’ strategic deployment of these questions and demonstrating how they subsequently utilized visitor responses to construct their talk. Comparison of the findings from the current study with those from previous research on KAQs in other institutional talk, such as educational and political settings, implies that, depending on the interactional goals, KAQs may perform diverse actions.