Pragmatics - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2002

Two interviews by Christiane Amanpour televized September 8, 2000 on CNN, one with Ehud Barak and one with Yasser Arafat were analyzed for indicators of personal perspective. Generally, use of the same indicators as in Suleiman, O’Connell, & Kowal (2002) was confirmed: Number of syllables spoken; use of first-person singular and plural pronominals and second-person pronominals; hesitations; smooth and interruptive turn transitions; and questions posed by interviewees. The interview with Arafat was extraordinarily agonistic, as manifested in his excessive use of first-person singular and second-person pronominals, hesitations, questions, and interruptions. For her part, Amanpour incited the shift to agonism with her provocative questioning. She then moved toward a more personal perspective by speaking proportionally more and by using more first-person singular pronominals and hesitations, all the while still maintaining her professional style of smooth turn transition. The dialogical character of personal perspective is discussed.

In this paper we examine the semantics-pragmatics of the deictic motion verb erxome ‘come’ in central and extended uses. We argue that a detailed language-specific analysis of erxome and its systemic counterpart pijeno ‘go’ is necessary, since even at the level of basic appropriateness conditions, there are significant differences from other languages. Based on extensive corpus data, we further argue that in third-person discourse erxome is a conventional means of adopting perspective. In particular, we show that the factors which are relevant to the speaker’s/narrator’s choice to identify with a particular point of view are amenable to a principled description which relies both on discoursal parameters and text-sensitive generalizations. Motivating the adoption-of-perspective uses is a subjectification shift whereby the speaker’s presence at the goal of motion becomes increasingly more implicit. Our results, therefore, add to the study of deixis in natural languages, point to the existence of generalizations in the complex factors that underlie construal and highlight some of the cognitive mechanisms involved in meaning shifts.

This study examined the interpretation of English anaphora by native Spanish speakers and potential transfer of Spanish pragmatic and lexical requirements into English. It further evaluated whether appropriate contextual information might prime the preferred English interpretation of such constructions. Pragmatic and lexical rules governing co-indexation in Spanish and English anaphora constructions differ substantially and operate quite differently in the two languages. Spanish pragmatic rules require obligatory disjoint reference for subject pronominals in finite complement subjunctive clauses and pre-posed adjunct clauses. The lexical properties of verbs and anaphora in reflexive, reciprocal, and intransitive constructions in Spanish require obligatory retention of the anaphora element. English has no such pragmatic or lexical requirements. The study appraised the effects of the different pragmatic co-indexation requirements and different lexical requirements on the interpretation of English anaphora by native Spanish speakers. An act-out task, a corresponding written task, and a grammaticality judgement task in English were administered to adult native English speakers and adult native Spanish speakers categorized as intermediate and advanced learners of English. Subjects were instructed to match pronominals with appropriate referents in English subjunctives and pre-posed adjuncts. They were further required to judge the acceptability of sentences containing anaphora elements in English reflexives, reciprocals, and intransitives. Results indicated that subjects in general ignored pragmatic and lexical requirements of the first language in favour of the second language requirements governing anaphora. Less proficient subjects apparently encountered some processing difficulty when interpretation of sentences with anaphora was required within limited time constraints. The use of contextual information was also evident in the interpretation of some constructions.

The aim of the study is to compare the regulatory speech used by parents and children in three different groups: Swedes in Sweden, and Estonians in Estonia and Sweden. 54 families with children of 9-13 were videotaped during mealtime. All regulatory speech aimed at controlling behaviour was identified and coded according to sentence form used for regulation as well as outcome (response). Estonians in Estonia used behaviour directives most frequently, and favoured the direct imperative form of regulatory language over declaratives and questions used by Estonians and Swedes in Sweden. Although the outcomes of regulation were mainly compliance in all groups, Estonian children living in Sweden complied significantly less than Swedish children. The results also show that Estonian children in Sweden have been influenced by the Swedish preference for regulating by declaratives and questions, using more questions and fewer imperatives than their mothers.

This article examines the distribution of relationships of power and authority as an activity in gossip sessions among members of a community in Pohnpei, Micronesia. The position of Bourdieu, that the interactionist approach cannot elucidate important aspects of the sharing of power in society, is used as a starting place to examine ways in which interactants in everyday conversations manipulate and organize gendered identities and the entitlements of certain classes of individuals to particular types of power.