Pragmatics - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2010

Even though the acknowledgement genre is a common practice in Arabic scholarly texts, this area is largely neglected in academic research. The present study examines the generic structure and the linguistic patterns of gratitude expressions used in acknowledegments accompanying the Arabic Ph.D. dissertation genre. To this end, I have analyzed the various rhetorical component options that writers use to convey gratitude and the role played by the socio-cultural factors in shaping this genre in a corpus of 100 Arabic acknowledgements accompanying Ph.D. dissertations in soft sciences written by doctoral Arabic native speakers. A discursive genre analysis reveals that Arab writers tend to use certain socio-cultural specific components that can be seen as contextualization cues bringing about the religious beliefs, and the academic and social conventions of the Arab writers. Further, they tend to utilize certain preferred address forms, and social honorifics together with various gratitude expression options having different degree of intensification to respond to different types of audience and reflect their complex relationships with the academic and social community members.

Noun phrase conjunction in Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa) is performed by placing a connective between two noun phrases, but there is some variation in the forms used in the major dialects. In the Twi dialects the connective is ne, but Fante speakers may use nye or na depending on whether a comitative or a coordinative interpretation is intended. This paper focuses on the historical origins of the noun phrase connective n(y)e in Akan. It suggests that Akan patterns with other sub-saharan African languages such as Ewe, Ga, Yoruba and Hausa, which have noun phrase connectives originating from comitative verbs. This suggestion is based on the morpho-semantics of these connectives. In addition, the paper demonstrates that the origin of the connective n(y)e could be further traced to an equative copula in the language. This conclusion is based on syntactic and semantic evidence available in the language and strengthened by the cross-linguistic tendency for copula verbs to develop into noun phrase connectives in a number of unrelated languages.

This article presents an exploration of several linguistic and discursive variables as they relate to behavior change obtained from psychotherapeutic motivational interviews. These interviews were conducted with native Spanish speakers, a relatively under investigated language minority group in the US with regard to this type of discourse. Using a linguistic framework, the study examines the tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) of Spanish verbs, the semantic verb type, such as desire, ability, readiness, reasons, need and commitment (DARN-C), and the context in which the verbs were produced in [+/- conflict] in narratives. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, the study shows how shifts in verb tenses, the production of DARN-C semantic verb types, and speakers’ utterances implicitly involve an expression of change. Based on Grimshaw’s (1990) and Labov and Fanshel’s (1977) tenets regarding conflict talk in which they note that conflict involves speech acts such as defenses, retreats and challenges, and Brenneis (1996) who maintains that the contents of conflict narratives are intertwined with the “narrator, audience, purposes and expectations” (p. 42), the study shows how the presence of conflict-related narratives decreases between interviews. Namely, participants decrease the use of utterances that recount past events and events containing conflict and move in the direction of speaking about future events and less conflict as their sessions progressed.

This paper investigates the Japanese sentence-final particles ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy. Because of their pivotal roles in spoken Japanese, these particles have been investigated extensively for decades. However, most previous works have analyzed them solely in terms of communication, invariably assuming the presence of an addressee. In fact, it is not yet widely known that these particles can also occur in soliloquy in which communication with another person is not intended. The present article is the first study to address the significance of ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy and discuss problems associated with hitherto proposed analyses. In order to investigate how communicative and non-communicative intentions influence utterances, an experiment was conducted in which soliloquies of native speakers of Japanese were examined. For ne, this study endorses Takubo and Kinsui’s Discourse Management Model. For yo, Inoue’s account is vindicated.

This article explores the process of grammaticalization that has lead to the innovation of a distinct form of negation in Arizona Tewa, a Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken in the U. S. southwest. After reviewing comparative linguistic evidence that clearly establishes the innovative form of the Arizona Tewa negative, the analysis proceeds to examine ethnographic data as a means of understanding an apparent reanalysis of a subordinate clause marker as an obligatory part of negative constructions. Such data provide strong evidence for viewing the powerful role of discourse and language ideological factors in accounting for how this grammatical reanalysis both emerged and ultimately came to be the “preferred” form. Comparative data from Australian languages provides additional evidence for viewing larger discourses as highly influential contexts for grammatical change.

The present study examines two commonly-used Japanese verbs of cognition, WAKARU and SHIRU, in naturally occurring conversation, and demonstrates that these verbs are expressions of position and attitude that are relevant both to individual speakers (i.e., subjective uses) and to relational activities among participants (i.e., intersubjective uses). My naturally occurring conversation data supports Lee (2006) that there seems to be a general principle that speakers’ lexical choices are governed by information type, but the link between speakers’ lexical choices and information type is not so absolute but fluid. In fact, while 24% of my data are those where only WAKARU is expected to be used or only SHIRU is expected to be used, 74% are those in which both WAKARU and SHIRU are possible regardless of information type. A closer analysis of such ‘fluid’ examples suggests that speakers choose one expression over another to express their personal attitudes and emotions toward the content of information and toward the other conversation participants. More specifically, their choice for WAKARU manifests such features as experiencer perspective and speaker empathy, and in contrast, their choice for SHIRU is characterized as observer perspective. The study is firmly in keeping with a usage-based perspective on language (e.g., Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Bybee 2006), which takes as its starting point the idea that language use shapes language form and meaning, and offers new insights into the interactional and performative nature of language by addressing the two commonly used verbs of cognition in Japanese conversation from a viewpoint of discourse pragmatics.