Pragmatics - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2006

This study of the politics of representation illustrates the Bush Administration’s use of a religious mode of representation to make sense of the 9/11 events, to legitimize military actions against the Taliban, Afghanistan, and terrorism in general. The religious mode of representation is enabled by the construction and application of what we call the “War on Terrorism script,” which is grounded in the institution of “American civil religion.” We demonstrate the unique power of this mode of representation to create a coherent account at a time of national crisis, to establish connections between the 9/11 perpetrators, the Taliban, and the Afghanistan government. By comparing the Bush Administration’s discourse with those voiced by dissenters and critics using intellectual, rational, and legal representations and modes of argumentation in the post-9/11 contexts, we demonstrate how the institutionalization of a particular mode of speaking influence a particular mode of thinking and a particular mode of acting. We also argue that the convention governing political discourse have significant implications in determining the legitimacy of definitions and interpretations of political situations as well as of political actions.

The paper examines the pragmatic roles that locutionary acts play in understanding the communication between doctors and patients in Southwestern Nigeria. Working within John Austin’s locutionary acts, with restrictions to the lexical occurrences and lexical relationships observed in the discourse, it got data through tape recordings of doctor-patient conversations and interviews of both doctors and patients (and/or their relations).The findings revealed that two categories of locutions were engaged in hospital interactions, namely, locutions intended to be understood by non-professionals and locutions not intended to be understood by non-professionals. The paper observes that locutions in medical discourse in Southwestern Nigeria bring standard lexical choices and local linguistic initiatives of medical practitioners into a pragmatic union. It therefore concludes that the pragmatic engagement of these choices displays the tact the practitioners use in dealing with patients, and it recommends the need for the practitioners to master the locutions and their pragmatic adaptation for effective management of patients.

This paper analyses a corpus of compliment responses in Turkish according to the conversational maxim approach (Leech 1983, 2003) and the face-management approach (Brown and Levinson 1987) with a view to extending the conceptualisation of self-presentation in theorising on politeness. It observes that the two theories ground politeness on consideration for alter and give precedence to politeness in the sense of displaying deference and solidarity at the expense of self-politeness, described in the present study as speaker need for display of competence, self-confidence, and individuality in interaction, besides the need for non-imposition. Regarding the maxim approach, the paper argues that conversational implicatures triggered by a variety of responses ultimately tie to the Tact Maxim and more specifically to the Sympathy Maxim in the Turkish context. The analysis reveals that compliment responses may override the Politeness Principle, that self-presentational concerns are crucial motivating factors, and that face concerns need to be incorporated into the model. From the perspective of the face-management approach, the study supports the claim in O’Driscoll (1996) and Spencer-Oatey (2000) that the notions of positive and negative face as need for community and autonomy need to be disentangled from the theory’s conceptualisation of face as public self-image. With the incorporation of a number of self-politeness strategies, the face-theoretic analysis builds on this distinction and integrates it with the concept of interactional imbalance by extending an analytic framework adapted from Bayraktaroğlu (1991). The paper concludes with suggestions on how the two theories may complement each other.

This paper aims at an explanation of the discrepancies between natural intuitions and standard logic in terms of a distinction between NATURAL and CONSTRUCTED levels of cognition, applied to the way human cognition deals with sets. NATURAL SET THEORY (NST) restricts standard set theory cutting it down to naturalness. The restrictions are then translated into a theory of natural logic. The predicate logic resulting from these restrictions turns out to be that proposed in Hamilton (1860) and Jespersen (1917). Since, in this logic, NO is a quantifier in its own right, different from NOT-SOME, and given the assumption that natural lexicalization processes occur at the level of basic naturalness, single-morpheme lexicalizations for NOT-ALL should not occur, just as there is no single-morpheme lexicalization for NOT-SOME at that level. An analogous argument is developed for the systematic absence of lexicalizations for NOT-AND in propositional logic.