Pragmatics - Volume 14, Issue 4, 2004

A review of the current literature shows that by the age of two and a half (and probably earlier), children have already acquired a rich working knowledge of human intentionality and goal-directed action (Stein & Albro 1997: 7; Mandler 1998). The paper focuses on the ways in which children use this knowledge to tell stories from pictures. The story is the description of the actions performed by animate actors. We distinguish the main actors (protagonists in the narrative line) and the background actors (participants in the narrative field) who can observe and interpret what is going on in the main action. So the narrative text contains not only the action presented by the story-teller (landscape of action) but also how this action is interpreted by the story characters (landscape of consciousness). They are all thinking minds who can think similarly or differently about the plot. And the narrator uses characters’ minds to produce different representations of the story (Bokus 1998, 2000). The narrator can confront one interpretation with another, and a) makes choices of the “true” representation of the main action (in doing this the child plays the role of the omniscient and omnipresent story-teller who is directly in touch with the ontology of the story), or b) presents a possible but not a certain story reality (the listener is not told how things are but rather how they seem to be). Therefore we can speak about the interplay of the narrator’s mind and the minds of story characters in a kind of internal narrator’s dialogue. The storyteller creates different minds and alternative ways of interpreting the main action. Also shown are examples of such inter-mind phenomena in the stories told by preschool children.

There is extensive literature describing the characteristics of a good leader in the area of organisational communication and business management. However, the research tends to be based on secondary, survey or reported data, typically interviews and questionnaires. Moreover, the predominant image of a “good” leader tends to be a charismatic, inspirational, decisive, authoritative, ‘hero’. The Language in the Workplace database provides a large corpus of authentic spoken interaction which allows examination of how effective leaders behave in a wide range of face-to-face interactions at work, and identifies a diverse range of leadership styles. The analysis reveals that effective leaders select from a range of strategies available to challenge, contest or disagree with others, paying careful attention to complex contextual factors, including the type of interaction, the kind of community of practice or workplace culture in which they are operating, and the relative seriousness of the issue involved. The analysis identifies four distinct strategies which leaders use to deal with potential conflict. These strategies lie along a continuum from least to most confrontational: Conflict avoidance; diversion; resolution through negotiation; and resolution by authority. The findings suggest that good leaders “manage” conflict: i.e. they choose strategies which address both their transactional and relational goals in order to achieve a desirable outcome.

Laughter in dialogue has been researched under the aegis of many different disciplines. The present approach is psycholinguistic, but with some reliance on recent research in phonetics and conversation analysis (CA). A corpus of laughter from four TV and two radio interviews of Hillary Clinton was analyzed by means of the PRAAT software (www.praat.org) for acoustic measurements. All the interviews had taken place in the several weeks immediately following the publication of her memoirs Living history (2003). The results showed that her laughter was concentrated mostly during the speech of the interviewers rather than during her own speech, and in the TV rather than in the radio interviews. The most frequent topic of her laughter concerned her own presidential candidacy rather than the historical contents of her book. The strong punctuation effect (Provine 1993, 2000), i.e., the claim that laughter occurs only during the pauses after phrases and sentences, was not confirmed; instead laughter occurred most frequently as a sort of back channeling on the part of the auditor. Contrary to the claim of Clayman and Heritage (2002) that media interviewers maintain a professional neutralism, interviewers in this corpus manifested their personal perspectives by laughing. These findings are discussed in light of current empirical research and in terms of a theory of perspectivity that conceptualizes laughter both in general and more specifically in media interviews as a nonverbal expression of personal perspective.

Um and uh are generally considered to be indicative of dysfluency and uncertainty in speech production. However, analysis of the academic seminar indicates that the distribution of um and uh is not random. In specific well-defined environments um is used to indicate the underlying structure of the talk. Although Swerts (1998) has already suggested that fillers such as um and uh could be treated as discourse markers in Dutch, the notion that such tokens are functioning as discourse markers has not been developed in detail. This paper analyses the role played by um in a series of computer science seminars. Using traditional conversation analysis techniques, the paper focuses on the way in which um indicates structure in the academic seminar by maintaining coherence across bits of talk. It thus argues that in specific well-defined environments um functions as a discourse marker. This paper therefore addresses such issues as the role and function of um in seminar talk, the environments in which it occurs, and its use in indicating the structure of the talk to the listening audience.

The polemics of political rhetoric encourage the implementation of presupposed referents as though they were assumed and shared. This paper examines the presupposed referents employed by the White House, concerning the urgency of invading Iraq, and countered by the political left. Details indicate that the White House was endeavoring to build an undeniable argument for invasion. Consequently, they had to employ definite noun phrases as first mentions of previously unshared referents in order to achieve the hidden didactic goal of pre-empting counter arguments. The Democrats, the liberals, and the media had to endeavor to overcome such presuppositions and explain that addressees neither shared nor identified the assumed referents. Appeals to fear and epistemological assessment are also examined. Insights from the analysis suggest that, given the conducive political temperament of the country prior to the November 2002 mid-term elections, forestalling argumentation by implementing definite noun phrases as if they were previously shared referents is highly efficacious.