Pragmatics - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2010

While the interactional conditions and timing of applause in audience response to public speeches has received attention in conversation analysis research, little research has been done on applause in educational contexts. The nature of applause, however, can vary depending on the context. This paper examines classroom-specific applause and focuses on where in classroom interaction the applause can occur, who initiates the applause, and what the applause accomplishes in the interaction. The data come from 14 audio and video-recorded Japanese primary school EFL class sessions. The analysis reveals that the applause in the data was a typically teacher-initiated action and it regularly occurred in sequence closing position as a positive assessment to the students’ success in carrying out the teachers’ oriented-to expectations.

The aim of this paper is to ascertain the attitudes English native speakers have towards the Spanish language and culture, specifically, in relation to the speech act of thanking and in connection with Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness ([1978] 1987). Two sources of data were used: First, a corpus of 64 course books which included 250 situations representing the speech act of thanking and, second, a questionnaire for the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language. The situations including the speech act of thanking were analysed and then categorized according to various criteria. The criteria were created by taking into consideration Coulmas’ (1981) proposal for the classification of thanking as well as the components of this specific speech act. The most frequent situations found in the course books were then used to devise the second source of data. The aim of this was to determine the attitudes of 300 participants, divided equally between the nationalities used in the investigation, Spanish, British and American. The questionnaire included 12 scenarios in which the thanking formula was omitted. Participants were prompted to answer questions based on their perceptions and to include other responses whenever they considered them to be appropriate. The main findings provided evidence of different facework values across the three groups of informants for some of the specific scenarios. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of data showed that some of the responses were connected to the thanking formulae, but others to speech acts such as request formulae.

Across Alaska, the popularity of indigenous forms of dance has risen, particularly in indigenous communities in which English dominates the heritage languages and Native youth have become monolingual English speakers. Some indigenous people say that Native dance accompanied by indigenous song is a way of preserving their endangered languages. With two case studies from Alaskan Eskimo communities, Yupiget on St. Lawrence Island and Iñupiat in Barrow, this article explores how use of endangered languages among Alaskan Eskimos is related to the activity of performing Eskimo dance. I suggest that practice of Eskimo dancing and singing that local people value as an important linguistic resource can be considered as a de-globalised sociolinguistic phenomenon, a process of performance and localisation in which people construct a particular linguistic repertoire withdrawn from globalisable circulation in multilingualism.

The use of particular lexical, semantic and pragmatic elements to determine the degree of formality is well recognised. In Japanese, formality in a communicative interaction is achieved not only by the use of the appropriate speech style but also of backchannels and short responses. Three such short affirmative responses that also have different pragmatic functions in Japanese are hai, ee (also variants e and eh) and un. Hai is considered to be the most polite while ee and un decrease in degree of formality. However, when looking at real data their use is not that clearly defined. While hai is found only in formal settings, ee and un are used just as frequently in those interactions. Hence, formality or politeness alone cannot account for their use. This paper looks at the use of hai, ee and un in formal interviews, and shows that all three tokens are used frequently as answers, backchannels and discourse markers. However, their distribution is determined by the speakers’ roles suggesting that they project a particular stance and have a distinct emotive value. It appears that hai puts the content in the foreground and is therefore mostly used by interviewees while un is hearer-centered and is more frequently used by interviewers as a backchannel. On the other hand, the ee token is used by both interviewers and interviewees but has other very different functions to hai and un. The fact that these tokens originally used as affirmative tokens are now multifunctional suggests that they are going through a process of intersubjectification.

I suggest that promises and threats are similar speech acts and pose analogous problems for Speech Act Theory. After showing that they share the same formal types, I argue against there being purportedly fundamental differences between them in regard to explicitability, deontics, and illocution/perlocution. I conclude that the joint analysis of promises and threats suggests the propriety of a holistic theory of illocutionary acts.

This paper reports on some recent work on affectivity, or emotive involvement, in conversational storytelling. After presenting the approach, some case studies of the display and management of affectivity in storytelling in telephone and face-to-face conversations are presented. The analysis reconstructs the display and handling of affectivity by both storyteller and story recipient. In particular, I describe the following kinds of resources: - the verbal and segmental display: Rhetorical, lexico-semantic, syntactic, phonetic-phonological resources; - the prosodic and suprasegmental vocal display: Resources from the realms of prosody and voice quality; - visual or "multimodal" resources from the realms of body posture and its changes, head movements, gaze, and hand movements and gestures. It is shown that the display of affectivity is organized in orderly ways in sequences of storytelling in conversation. I reconstruct (a) how verbal, vocal and visual cues are deployed in co-occurrence in order to make affectivity in general and specific affects in particular interpretable for the recipient and (b) how in turn the recipient responds and takes up the displayed affect. As a result, affectivity is shown to be managed by teller and recipient in storytelling sequences in conversation, involving both the reporting of affects from the story world as well as the negotiation of in-situ affects in the here-and-now of the storytelling situation.