Pragmatics - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2009

The present article describes a study in which conversation analysis was used to investigate the verbal interactions between carers and profoundly multiply disabled young people. We examine the cognitive processes that come into play in conversations, and describe and analyze the interactional effects of pathologies on the cognitive processes involved in comprehension. We identify the rationality and reasoning processes to which the disabled person is susceptible, that is to say, that person’s cognitive efficiency, and the communication strategies employed by the “normal” interlocutor. The corpus, which was gathered at a specialist institute in France, consists of video recordings of interactions between a multiply disabled young person and one or more carers. In total, thirteen conversations involving six different young people were recorded. Analysis of the characteristics of the conversational exchanges revealed that conversational exchanges are based on two very precise modes of interaction that foster the mutual understanding process. Learning outcomes: These two modes of interaction represent exchange structures that favor the emergence of mutual understanding and that reveal the multiply disabled person’s cognitive efficiency in the conversation. We highlight the role of repetition as a conversation repair and we discuss the relationship between the carer and the disabled person.

The English system of address constitutes an exception among the European languages, in that it does not have a grammatical distinction between a formal pronoun of address and an informal one. Rather, English speakers exploit lexical strategies (i.e. nominal vocatives). This study aims to shed light on the address strategies used by students and members of the teaching staff in academic interactions, with reference to the University of Reading (UK). Data from semi-structured interviews and video-recordings outline an unmarked pattern of asymmetry between the parties, in which students mainly employ formal vocatives towards lecturers (title+surname, honorifics), while lecturers frequently use first names and other informal expressions. Reciprocal informal vocatives, by contrast, emerges as a marked practice, which is resisted or delayed in time. This asymmetrical distribution of forms questions classical models and previous research on address and calls for the necessity of new components for the understanding of the phenomenon.

Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2005) rapport management theoretical framework, this article examines Peruvian Spanish-speakers’ behavioral expectations, types of face respected/threatened and interactional wants when congratulating. Analysis shows that participants’ interactional wants were mainly relational; they exhibited a rapport-maintenance orientation using strategies that, although apparently violating the equity principle, relfected their interdependent self-construals (Markus and Kitayama 1991). Along the same lines, participants enhanced their own identity and respectability face, and in doing so, also enhanced the interlocutor’s respectability face by making her the beneficiary of their concern for her. Although gender differences were found, these were not statistically significant.

Qiye wenhua/’enterprise culture’ has emerged as a new paradigm in China’s economic reforms. Hailed as China’s new ‘culture’ it featured in an interview with certain executives of non-state owned enterprises. In the examination of this discourse, the concept of ‘communicative action’ (Habermas, 1998) is adopted as an analytical tool. The main contention in this exploratory examination is that there is speaker intent to justify China’s model of socialist market economy. This justification is mainly reflected in the semantic content of the discourse, which stresses what is ‘unique’ and ‘characteristic’ in China’s economic reforms. The rationale for this contention rests primarily on the argument that given the context of skepticism and criticisms leveled at the Chinese model, and the fact that the speakers themselves are key players in the new market economy, it would be likely that in a public discourse of this nature there would be grounds for attempts at legitimizing the Chinese economic model.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse formal and functional aspects of constructions based on a Justification (or Claim-Argument) coherence relation, explicitly marked by a connective. The prototype of this construction is an utterance like Está gente em casa, porquer as luzes estão acesas [“ There is somebody at home, because the lights are on”]. The empirical data are collected from an on-line corpus of contemporary written Portuguese (CETEMPúblico). Following Sanders et al.(2001), I assume the distinction between semantic and pragmatic coherence relations in text representation: Semantic relations connect the situations of the sociophysical world described by the propositional content of the related textual segments; pragmatic relations involve the illocutionary domain, i.e., the relation concerns the speech act status of the segments. Justification relation is a pragmatic relation and I argue that it requires simultaneously a sequence of speech acts and an inference process. In fact, Justification relations occur typically in argumentative contexts, and argumentation, according to van Eemeren & Grotendorst (1984), is a compound illocution, consisting of at least two functionally distinct statements: A main assertion corresponding to the claim being made and a subordinate assertion, which counts as an attempt by the speaker to justify his claim, convincing the listner of its acceptability. The claim being made in prototypical Justification constructions (p, because q) is an assumption, not a fact; it corresponds to a conclusion drawn by the speaker, supported by the premise expressed in the second clause and warranted by a generic implicit premise. The account presented in this paper contests Sweetser’s (1990) distinction between epistemic causal conjunctions and speech act causal conjunctions: The act of concluding may be speaker-internal, but since it is asserted and then justified, it is not possible to dissociate the epistemic and the illocutionary domains within the field of argumentative texts.

First- and second-person pronouns have been one of the centerpieces of the literature on language and gender differences in Japanese (Shibamoto Smith 2003). Most of our understandings of real (empirical) pronominal use comes from investigations of female speakers of standard Japanese. Our understandings of how dialect speakers and/or men use pronominal forms in daily linguistic practice are not well informed. This article undertakes an investigation of Japanese men’s uses of pronominal forms; each participant was born and reared in the Kansai (western) area of Japan and uses a dialect variety of Japanese (Hanshinkan Dialect). Literature which addresses pronominal usage in Japanese indicates that these forms are risky since they always serve to position speaker and hearer in specific ways relative to one another; as such, pronouns are something to be avoided. The findings of this paper indicate that pronouns are used by Japanese men; however the uses are contextually governed and have little to do with delineating speaker from hearer and have more to do with specific conversational goals.

This paper compares the tendency to express autonomy in 20 Estonian, 20 Swedish, and 20 Swedish Estonian middle-class families with preadolescent children during videotaped family mealtimes. The results indicate that compared to the Swedish participants, participants from both Estonian samples expressed autonomy less frequently. Being talkative does not always mean expressing more autonomy. The Swedish preadolescents who were the most talkative and whose mothers were talking less, were more likely to express their personal needs, opinions and preferences. Possible reasons of cultural variability in autonomy orientation are discussed.