Pragmatics - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2007

The paper seeks to demonstrate that, first, over the course of interaction in the radio phone-in events, participants display orientation to various aspects of their co-participants´ identities, second, since membership categories emerge and are developed at various sequentially relevant times, membership categorisation processes are closely tied with the event´s sequential organisation, and, third, categorisation bears on politeness aspects of interaction as the participation in the public ´arena´ causes participants´ faces to be constantly at stake. The methodological underpinnings of the paper represent the approaches of Membership Categorisation Analysis and the model of politeness based on the conceptualisation of face. The data are drawn from the corpus of Nočné dialógy (´Night Dialogues´) radio phone-ins broadcast on the Slovak public radio over the period of 1995-2004. The paper further attempts to demonstrate that participants are engaged in category work which sequentially unfolds in the course of the production of phone-in calls. Participants´ progressive involvement in talk is closely linked with the construction of ´layers´ of their categorial identities. The membership category of ´location´ represents the minimum agreed-upon canon of callers´ call-relevant identities. As the category is universally applicable, it bears the least face-threatening potential, for which reason it is used explicitely. In contrast, strategies of non-explicit categorisation, i.e. invoking categories through category-relevant predicates, apply to those topic-relevant categories which carry a significant face-threating ´load´ (e.g. ´family status´, ´political affiliation´, etc.). In summary, sequential organisation and category work are seen as being closely intertwined, with the latter also being employed as a positive and negative politeness strategy.

Linguistic hybridity is the process of the authorial unmasking of another’s speech, through a language that is double-accented and double-styled. The present study investigates how linguistic resources, especially code-switching is used for meaning making in local comedy shows in Hawai‘i. Local comedy is inseparable from the use of carnivalistic act. This act deconstructs attempts at stabilizing social systems by being playfully and non-violently subversive. While there are many studies of language and humor, there are much fewer studies on the use of code-switching in comedy. The present study is particularly interested in the latter and specifically addresses Bakhtin’s work on carnival. It is often maintained that ethnic jokes marginalize those of Filipino origin as the Other. However, the present paper claims that both functions of comedy - marginalizing of the Other and disrupting of official views of reality - are inseparably intertwined. Andy Bumatai, a local comic, tactically achieves carnivalistic effects while negotiating and juggling his subjectivity. Given this, code-switching as well as language selection can be a powerful tool for doublevoicing. Little is known about the pragmatics of pidgin and creole languages. Hence, the present study provides a starting point for future projects on the discursive practice in Hawai‘i Creole.

This article is a contribution to a theory of lexical semantics and situated sense-making which aims at explaining how meaning is constituted in and across contexts, in a dialogical interplay between lexical resources and aspects of situations. We propose that the semantics of words or grammatical constructions are not just abstract schemas, to be filled in by pragmatic enrichment in situated uses. Nor are words associated with simple lists of different usages. Instead, we propose a theory of meaning potentials. The basic assumptions of such a theory are that linguistic resources provide language users with semantic resources to understand, say and mean specific things in particular usage events, and that this always involves an interplay with contextual factors. The study reported here is an exercise in empirical pragmatics, using authentic data from language use. We explore the meaning potential of the Swedish adjective ny ‘new’ by examining its interplay with a specific grammatical construction, x-och-x (‘x-and-x’: in English roughly ‘x, it depends on what you mean by x’). X-och-x is a conventionalised and (largely) conversational practice, by which language users activate and negotiate parts of the meaning potential of a word x, such as ny, in order to establish a local situated meaning of it. In doing so, they exploit their knowledge of what x can mean, performing what can be seen as users´ semantic analyses in authentic communicative interaction. Our study can also be read as a contribution to Construction Grammar, attempting to develop a more dynamic, interactional interpretation of this theory than has previously been put forward in the literature.

Numerosity and privileges of occurrence of various types of interjections (primary conventional, primary non-conventional, secondary, and onomatopoeic) were investigated in three different literary readings of Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne 1926), in one reading of Ulysses (Joyce 1960), and in an artistic performance by actors (the film The third man, Korda, Selznik, & Reed 1949). The spoken corpora, based on printed texts as source, consisted of 667 interjections. Ameka’s (1992 b, 1994) hypothesis that, parallel to their independence from ambient grammar, interjections would also be isolated temporally by preceding and following pauses, was not confirmed; for the entire corpus, only 39% of all interjections were thus isolated. However, an alternative hypothesis, that interjections serve an initializing function, was confirmed: Altogether, 77% of the interjections were found to be initializing, i.e., were preceded by a pause, introduced a speaking turn, introduced an utterance, and/or introduced a citation. Primary conventional interjections constituted the majority of interjections (overall 56%), but only two of these were common to all the corpora (oh and ah). By far the highest percentage (28 %) of primary non- conventional interjections occurred in the artistic performance of The third man. None of these occurred in either the novel or the screenplay of The third man, unlike the primary non-conventional interjections throughout the text of the literary readings. Functions of interjections are discussed in terms of Goffman’s (1981: 226) animators (literary readers, 26% of whose spoken interjections were added to those in the printed text) and principals (actors, 79% of whose spoken interjections were added to those in the printed text), in terms of literacy and orality, and in terms of the emotional stance and perspective of a speaker at the very moment of utterance.

Although the discursive construction of authority has been largely investigated for different kinds of interaction and settings, studies concerned with authority in ethnographic encounters are scarce. In the present article, I demonstrate that in this kind of encounters the mediational character of the interactants’ roles and the transcendence of the co-constructed text with respect to the current event play a crucial role in the construction of authority through discourse. My data consist of two events in 1990 recorded as part of a research project on beliefs and ritual practices among the Totonac population in Eastern Mexico, as well as the corresponding field notes. While my focus is on the linguistic and discursive resources used in the recorded sessions, I demonstrate that a well-founded account also involves a previous event, in which the methodological tools and interactional dynamics were negotiated, as well as a rehearsal previous to each recording session proposed by my consultant as a means to ensure the relevance of the information and the appropriateness of its delivery.

The goal of this paper is a reassessment of the contributions provided by John L. Austin’s book “How to Do Things with Words” to pragmatics. It discusses some assumptions belonging to the received reading of the volume, as regards its aim and structure, the conceptions of illocution and of perlocution, and the alleged exclusion of “non-seriousness”. Against the received reading, it is argued that “How to Do Things with Words” is structured as a proof by contradiction of the claim that all speech should be considered as action, that in illocution a major role is played by the conventionality of effects, that perlocution presupposes a conception of action as responsibility, and that Austin had reasons not to deal with “non-seriousness” in detail, albeit recognizing the issue as relevant to the study of the uses of language. In the conclusions, the tenets attributed to Austin are neither crtiticized nor defended, but an attempt is made to say what are their implications for research into language use and for philosophy.