Pragmatics - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2003

In an influential paper, Fox & Thompson (1990) argue that the grammar of relative clauses in spoken American English is affected by interactive and cognitive factors pertaining to the communication situation. Existential sentences containing a relative clause as well as an overt locative expression figure prominently in their analysis. The present paper examines Fox & Thompson’s analysis of such sentences in the light of a wide range of data. It is shown that the generalizations they make on the basis of their limited corpus (25 tokens) rest on false premises. Their analysis fails to take account of some of the most salient properties inherent in existential sentences in all varieties of English; it also disregards relevant cross-linguistic data. An alternative analysis is offered.

This study looks into one context of Formulaic Speech (FS) usage: The partial L2 immersion class. It tries to define and classify FS according to Raupach’s contextual list (1984) and lexical criteria as well as differentiating it from creative speech. FS is presented mostly as a pragmatic concept challenging the usual conceptions of language acquisition as an analytical process. Also challenged is the idea that language production is based on analysis of the input followed by production out of parsed output. In a Second Language Acquisition perspective, FS is shown as being a temporary stage of acquisition which, among other aspects, enables the speaker to reach idiomaticity in his or her L2 and thereby efficient communication with native speakers.

Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have been far more likely to use ideology to understand the social relations of nation, racialized ethnicity and class than to understand the social relations of gender. This chapter investigates language ideologies and gender by examining narratives told by male and female, Black and White police officers in Pittsburgh about moments when they found it necessary to use physical force. Many of the workers in this traditionally working-class, masculine job describe themselves as “acting crazy” to instill fear and respect in those with whom they interact. “Acting crazy” is an ideology of interaction of personhood which describes and prescribes a way of acting like and unlike people “on the street” as well as a way of claiming and denying responsibility for action. A detailed analysis of reason adverbs and adverbials and agentive and non-agentive semantic roles shows that police officers construe themselves not as particularly powerful agents but instead as hapless victims, and as adopting a mask of anger, rather than being intrinsically angry people. The analysis of these narratives has implications for understanding whether and how the integration of women into a traditionally masculine occupation like policing leads to the reinscription or transformation of certain ideologies about how interaction should proceed. Such analysis also suggests that to understand how ideology works we need to consider not only how different genres make meaning but how they make meaning stick, and that more careful analysis of how narratives work and how structures of feeling are experienced and inscribed will be crucial for this project.

An echo answer is an answer that repeats elements of the question. This response form occurs after yes/noquestions and “statements about B-events”. The current study is based on data from native/non-native institutional interaction, and echo answers are shown to play an important role in certain types of repair that are characteristic of such interaction. Echo answers have two main usages. The first is to appropriate a candidate formulation and integrate it into one’s own turn in progress. This often happens when native speakers attempt to assist non-native interlocutors in expressing themselves. The other is to claim a strengthened commitment to the answer. This is especially salient in cases where a minimal agreement might project a potential dispreferred response. Echo answers may occur alone or with an initial or final response word, and these different response formats are shown to index the relative epistemic authority of the interlocutors.