Pragmatics - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2003

The detailed semantic encoding of demonstrative systems of the world’s languages has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. One important finding is that spatial (notably distance) encoding, normally considered to lie at the heart of exophoric demonstrative semantics, may be rivalled as to its ‘basicness’ by more discourse-related forms of encoding, such as the status of the addressee’s attention in relation to the referent. This paper investigates the attentional characteristics of ton, a nominal demonstrative in Jahai (Mon-Khmer, Malay Peninsula) previously considered to encode spatial proximity to addressee. It does so in light of naturalistic interaction data from a specific object-identification task originally aimed at eliciting shape-encoding distinctions (Seifart 2003).

The ability to do indirectness, inexplicitness and vagueness is a key component in the repertoire of all competent discoursers and these are commonplace phenomena in written and spoken discourses, particularly in conversations. The study reported in the paper seeks to delineate and exemplify these three terms which are used frequently in the literature, but which are potentially confusing as they are not always unambiguously defined and consistently applied. The purpose of the study is to describe the differences between the three terms in terms of their pragmatic usage and functions, drawing upon a corpus of naturally-occurring conversational data between Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English. In so doing, this study underlines the widespread occurrence of these forms of language use and the ways in which participants in spoken discourse employ them to jointly construct both context and meaning.

The following article applies both quantitative and qualitative methods of research to markers of perspective in a TV interview of Colin Powell on the CNN LARRY KING LIVE program from November 26, 2001. Perspective is well established in phenomenology and social psychology; its starting point is the conviction that every utterance expresses a point of view. From previous research, we accept the dialogical nature of perspective (see O’Connell & Kowal 1998) and further argue that perspective can be observed through measures of orality and literacy and through referencing (name and pronoun reference). The following measures of orality and literacy are examined: Back channeling hesitations, interruptions, contractions and elisions, first person singular pronominals, interjections and tag questions, and turn transitions from interviewer to interviewee and vice versa. We argue further that Colin Powell’s perspective stresses the division between “we” and “they” with regard to the then imminent involvement in Iraq. Theoretical implications are discussed.

This paper examines the behavior of contrastive –wa in Japanese written discourse. While supporting its local nature (Clancy and Downing 1987), the paper argues, based on a survey of newspapers, that localness alone is not sufficient to understand the nature of contrast. It proposes that the use of contrastive –wa is motivated by how the writer perceives the world, or what Chafe (1994) calls ‘conscious experience’. We propose literal opposition, evaluation, association, and conflict as its main components. In the final part, the paper relates the results to the recent study on Contrastive Topic (Lee 1999, 2000, 2003), stating that the CT-approach is still unable to account for the entire range of phenomena discovered. The paper suggests that the discrepancies arise because of the fact that natural data integrates the writer’s context-specific intentions, to which priority is not given in formalistic approaches.