Pragmatics - Volume 22, Issue 3, 2012

Disclaimers are generally defined as devices employed to ward off and defeat doubts and negative typifications which may result from intended conduct (Hewitt & Stokes 1975). In academic prose, writers also take advantage of disclaimers to remove any probable infelicities that could occur as a result of their research or language choices in an attempt to promote the precision and persuasive power of their text. In order to develop a clearer understanding of disclaiming in research articles (RAs), a sample of 120 RAs was selected to identify and discuss different types of disclaimers. The qualitative analysis of the corpus led to introduce six disjunctive types of disclaimers employed by writers of RAs: overt vs. covert, excluder vs. includer, internal vs. external, antecedent vs. subsequent, warning vs. clarification, and local vs. global. Each has been discussed with reference to authentic examples from various journals. Furthermore, a list of formal varieties is developed along with an opinion of what they typically target and where they tend to occur. The paper concludes with a definition of disclaimers in RAs.

This paper examines identity-related interaction in a group of teenagers at an international school in Japan, focusing particularly on the discursive accomplishment of multiethnic identity among so-called half-Japanese (or “haafu”) people. The study employs Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) to document three instances of mundane talk in which such multiethnic Japanese teenagers are ethnified through the use of various identity categories and their associated activities and attributes. The analysis demonstrates that multiethnic people use a variety of discursive practices to refute unwanted ethnification, including reworking the category, casting themselves in a different category and refusing to react to category-based provocations. Common to all three cases is the fundamental issue of how ethnicity becomes a resource for speakers in everyday conversation.

This study aims firstly to compare the complaints of local native-Malay speakers and expatriate native-English speakers in Brunei in terms of move structure and levels of directness combined with the frequency of modality markers; and secondly, it attempts to address the relationship between polite behaviour and its effectiveness in eliciting the appropriate response from the hearer. Data from an oral discourse completion task show interesting similarities and differences in the complaint move structure between the two groups of speakers. Superficially, there appears to be no significant difference between the two sets of complaints in terms of levels of directness, but a detailed analysis shows each group employing different mitigating strategies to minimise the force of a complaint. Furthermore, responses from an acceptability judgement questionnaire indicate that being indirect, and therefore polite, may not be effective in eliciting the appropriate response to a request for action in a complaint speech act.

What does it mean to represent events from the Holocaust in a graphic novel? And what if this is done not in the stark design of Art Spiegelman’s Maus but in the light ligne claire (known from Tintin)? This paper explores the discursive practices surrounding The Search, a graphic novel produced specifically to teach children and young adults about the Holocaust. It asks how (novel) forms of subjectivation are articulated in the everyday, mundane practices of educational media workers. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of the subject and close micro-analysis of language (and semiotic) practices, the paper presents extracts from ethnographic observations of a team of authors designing teaching and learning materials to accompany The Search. These materials – and their practices of production – are participating in transforming memories of the Holocaust and thus (co)producing forms of globalisation. Findings suggest that while the Holocaust has traditionally been seen as a matter of ‘national’ responsibility, The Search and its teaching materials invite readers to see it as (global/universal) ‘individualised’ responsibility. Students are subjectivated as global subjects: Firstly, as universal-ethical subjects and, secondly, as contingency-tolerant subjects. These materials thus constitute a mundane, everyday element shaping new ways of being.

The present study examines differences and similarities in the realization of compliments (on skills) in Cameroon and Canadian French. The data were collected by means of discourse completion tasks (DCT) administered to 55 participants in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and 39 respondents in Montréal (Canada). The 277 compliments obtained were analyzed according to the following three aspects: a) head act strategies (direct and indirect compliments), b) lexico-semantic and syntactic features of complimentary utterances, and c) external modification. With regard to head act strategies, the results show a preference for double head acts by the Cameroonian participants, while the Canadians more frequently employed single head acts. It was also found that indirect realizations of head acts occurred only in the Cameroonian data. Positive evaluation markers (e.g. adjectives, adverbs, verbs) and syntactic devices appearing in the compliments varied in type and frequency in the two varieties of French under investigation. The analysis of external modifications reveals that participants of both groups used many speech acts to externally modify their compliments. Overall, interjections, address forms, greetings, self-introductions and apologies were used as pre-compliments, with some speech acts, namely greetings and self-introductions, occurring only in the Cameroonian data.

This article aims to compare three distinct grammatical and conversational patterns of code-switching, which it tentatively links to three different South African ethnoracial labels: White, Coloured and Black. It forms a continuation of a previous article in which correlations were established between Afrikaans-English code-switching patterns and White and Coloured ethnicities. The typological framework used is derived from Muysken, and the hypotheses are based on his predictions as to which type of grammatical CS (i.e. insertional, alternational, congruent lexicalisation) will dominate in which linguistic and sociolinguistic settings. Apart from strengthening the idea of a correlation between patterns of language variation and ethnicity in general, the article explores the theoretical possibility of specific social factors overriding linguistic constraints in determining the grammatical form of CS patterns. In this regard, it will be shown that – on account of specific social factors underlying ethnicity – CS between two typologically unrelated languages, namely Sesotho and English, can exhibit more marks of congruent lexicalization than CS between two typologically related languages, namely Afrikaans and English, while – from the point of view of linguistic constraints – insertional/alternational CS would be expected in the former language pair and congruent lexicalization in the latter. That finding will be placed against the background of different pragmatic norms regulating the conversational use of CS within the Black Sesotho-speaking community (which we will describe as ‘language mixing’ in Auer’s sense) and within the Afrikaans speech community (which in the case of Whites we will describe as tending more towards ‘language alternation’ in Auer’s sense, and in the case of Coloureds as occupying an intermediate position between language alternation and language mixing). The summary of findings on grammatical and conversational CS patterns across ethnic samples will finally be placed against the background of ethnicity and its specific definition in the South African context.

This paper argues for an integration of post-structuralist and linguistic pragmatic perspectives on discourse as a response to the post-structuralist methodological deficit. In order to make his argument, the author presents and illustrates the logics approach to discourse, subjectivity and hegemony as presented by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. This post-structuralist approach constitutes a response to the methodological deficit that haunts much of post-structuralist discourse theory. Nevertheless, it does not provide a linguistic toolbox for analysis. Zienkowski argues that the logics approach can be brought to bear on empirical analysis through the notion of metapragmatic markers. These are linguistic tools that allow us to investigate the self-interpretations of individuals. The practical relevance of using metapragmatic markers in the identification of interpretive logics will be illustrated by means of an analysis of a critical response to the implementation of the Bologna process in Germany. Zienkowski studies Dietrich Lemke’s critical article called Mourning Bologna published in a special issue of E-flux journal n° 14 devoted to the Bologna process. More specifically, he investigates how Lemke constructs his critical stance. Throughout this process, Zienkowski proposes an interpretive and functionalist heuristic for identifying the interpretive logics operative in his text by means of a functional analysis of metapragmatic markers. He concludes with an argument for integrating both perspectives while emphasising that any articulation of post-structuralist and linguistic pragmatic theories of discourse involves some significant reconsiderations with respect to the indexical and differential theories of meaning that characterise each perspective respectively.