Pragmatics - Volume 16, Issue 4, 2006

This paper investigates how some participants of a reality show, which featured on Brazilian television from January to April, 2004, produce and interpret discourse relationships. It will focus on the discursive relations among textual segments as well as on the pragmatic bonds between these segments and implicit information, all of which often signaled by linguistic elements, such as discourse markers. These linguistic elements contribute to the co-construction of text meaning since they point to a specific meaning relation among whatever potential meanings conveyed by the discourse content. This paper will also consider different discourse dimensions (syntactic, semantic and discursive) in order to investigate the properties of such linguistic elements and their function in the production of advisive speech acts.

So-called traditional theories in second langauge acquisition (SLA) have been criticized for their neglect to examine interactional, social, and political aspects in language practices. The present study will illustrate exoticization, one of the political phenomena observed in interactions between native-speaker and non-native speaker (NS/NNS). Exoticization is known as a covert power exercise where ‘self’ creates inferior ‘other’ in order to establish and maintain its superiority (Said 1978), which involves identity construction and categorization. Adopting a conversation analysis (CA) approach and utilizing NS-NNS conversations in Japanese, this study will first demonstrate how exoticization is discursively constructed through the development of interactions. Then the study will explore how the NNS participant tries to resist such practices. By so doing, this study will shed light on interactional and ideological aspects of language practices and society as a learning environment. The study will also suggest the necessity for exploring what NNSs face in real L2 societies in order to develop emic perspectives in SLA studies.

The aim of this study is to examine the nature and extent of translational shifts in interpreter-mediated texts. 10 professional interpreters with 11-30 years experience participated in the study. A corpus of 10 source texts (full-length speeches) and 10 target texts (interpreter-mediated versions) recorded during international conferences is analyzed. Shifts in the following linguistic phenomena are assessed: Personal reference, agency, mood and modality, threats to face. Our findings reveal a significant trend of distancing, de-personalization and the mitigation of illocutionary force.

Although a large number of studies are conducted on Japanese demonstratives, most of them explain referential functions of the three demonstrative types (the so-called proximal ko-, medial so-, and distal a-) based on sentence-level analysis, and little previous work has been directed toward the analysis of the demonstrative use in spontaneous interaction. This study employs Japanese conversational data and examines the demonstrative usages whose main function is NOT to refer to some entity in the speech situation or the discourse. From the analysis, the paper shows that the use of Japanese demonstratives can exhibit and emphasize an interactional meaning, such as the speaker’s antipathy, insult, suspicion, surprise, and affection toward the referent, and that it can be selected from among other choices, such as a noun phrase or ellipsis, when the speaker is willing to express these emotions or attitudes. In order to understand the process of expressing these emotions or attitudes, the paper applies Hanks’ (1990, 1992) ‘indexical framework’ and the interactionally defined notion of the speaker’s and addressee’s sphere proposed by Laury (1997) and Enfield (2003). Using these frameworks, this study illustrates that the relationship among the speaker’s and addressee’s spheres and the referent, as well as the context in which the three are projected, are not static or predefined but instead are flexible and do change during ongoing interaction.

Fifty-nine Japanese college students of English at two different proficiency levels were evaluated for their ability to produce a speech act of request in a spoken role play task. Learners’ production was analyzed quantitatively by rating performance on a six-point scale for overall appropriateness, as well as qualitatively by identifying the directness levels of the linguistic expressions used to produce requests. Results revealed a significant L2 proficiency influence on overall appropriateness, but only a marginal difference in the types of linguistic expressions used between the two proficiency groups. Moreover, grammatical and discourse control encoded in the rating scale seemed to have affected the quality of speech acts.

This paper examines the use of co-switching in Navajo written poetry. I look specifically at the use of code-switching from English dominant poems to Navajo. I outline three general semantic domains that are most commonly code-switched from English to Navajo: 1) emotions; 2) mythic characters; and 3) traditional place-names. I suggest that this has to do with a general linguistic ideology that understands these domains as incommensurate with English. I argue that such code-switches are “emblematic identity displays.” I conclude by discussing the relationship between “folk” orthographies and “standard” orthographies. I argue that an over-reliance on “the standard” and a diminishing of “folk” orthographies limits the potential for creativity and subtly undermines notions of incommensurability when Navajo poets are limited to “the standard”, a standard that many Navajos do not know.