Pragmatics - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2014

The close link between politeness and culture has often been highlighted, with some scholars having proposed taxonomies of cultures based on the diverse uses and conceptions of politeness. Generally, research (Hickey 2005; Ardila 2005) places Spanish-speaking cultures in the group of rapprochement cultures, which relate politeness to positively assessing the addressee and creating bonds of friendship and cooperation; and English-speaking cultures in the group of distancing cultures, which primarily use politeness to generate respect and social differentiation. This means that English politeness is not only supposed to be different from Spanish politeness, but diametrically opposed to it. The main goal of this study is to check these predictions against the understandings and use of politeness by native speakers of Spanish from Spain and nonnative speakers of Spanish from the U.S. Thus, this research is grounded in first-order politeness norms, which are then correlated with the informants’ behavior as reported in written questionnaires. The results confirmed these predictions and further showed that the more advanced learners were able to align themselves better with Spanish norms. Nevertheless, even they found some aspects of Spanish politeness –– such as the turn-taking system –– harder to adapt to, suggesting that certain aspects of native norms may be more difficult to abandon. We propose that firstorder notions of politeness may be prototypically structured, with some aspects being more central to its definition and therefore less easily foregone than others.

This study explores categorization processes of people (identities) and language (linguistic varieties) in interactions between L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) speakers of Japanese and the language ideologies behind them. Utilizing Conversation Analysis (CA) in combination with Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA), the present study focuses on how participants apply these categories to self and other where identities and language ideologies emerge in the sequences of ordinary conversations. The study also illuminates how the participants react to such ideologies, which is rarely documented in previous studies of L2 Japanese interactions. It is controversial to use CA and MCA as methodologies for inquiries into ideology due to different epistemological and theoretical frameworks. Yet, joining the emerging trend of CA studies that address ideological issues, this study will also demonstrate the compatibility between them. Methodological integration of CA and MCA has been proposed since the 1970s, but has started to be adopted only recently. Because few studies employ this combination in the area of language ideologies, it serves as a novel analytic tool in this body of research. Thus, this study makes a methodological contribution to the study of language ideologies, illustrating the production of language ideologies and reactions to it as participants’ accomplishments.

This paper argues for a pragmatically based reconsideration of cohesion-based approaches to information retrieval during comprehension, suggesting that a Relevance-based approach is preferable on both descriptive and explanatory grounds. It outlines a number of descriptive and explanatory problems dating back to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976, 1985; Hasan 1984) early view of cohesion, which seem to call for pragmatic solutions, and argues that interpretively used and echoic utterances raise serious questions as to the text-constitutive potential of cohesion. It goes on to discuss a number of cases that seem to pose problems for purely cohesion-based approaches but are straightforwardly explained by the Relevance-Theoretic account.

This article explores the alternation of honorific language (desu/-masu) and plain form language within English language lessons in Japanese high schools. It argues that, within such educational contexts, alternation of these different ways of speaking are perspective-shifting routines, to which their indexical meanings are related. I suggest that in a liberal arts high school, the alternation of forms amounts to an analytical practice within which desu/-masu highlights abstract knowledge and plain form frames participants’ involvement in imaginary event situations within which the contingent use of English can be theorized. In contrast, in a technical high school, the alternation of forms amounts to an identity problematizing practice, in which desu/-masu indexes a speaker’s intrapersonal distance from typical “school-like” roles and activities, and plain form indexes an authentic, Japanese insider identity in the face of learning English. These different perspective-taking routines socialize very different relationships between self and school, and, in particular, between self and resources such as second language proficiency, and are thus an arena for the reproduction of social class distinctions.

In a number of recent studies, developments in the structure of English general extenders (e.g. and stuff (like that), or something (like that)) have been investigated from the perspective of grammaticalization. These developments have mostly been described in terms of formal changes as a result of processes identified as morphosyntactic reanalysis, phonological attrition and decategorialization. In this study, I first describe the impact of these changes on the structure of general extenders, confirming the usefulness of the basic grammaticalization framework as a way of accounting for developments in linguistic expressions (such as discourse markers or pragmatic markers) that are not considered to be grammatical markers in the traditional sense. I then use a more recent version of the grammaticalization framework to investigate the extent to which general extenders have developed meanings that can be described as subjective (speaker-oriented) and intersubjective (addressee-oriented). In this development, general extenders have come to be used as hedges on expectations of informativeness and accuracy, primarily involving subjective meanings, and as indicators of positive and negative politeness strategies, which carry intersubjective meanings. In this analysis, pragmatic functions are shown to have a significant role in the linguistic changes associated with grammaticalization.

Whilst interviews are often regarded as an essential tool for social science, it has long been recognized that the interviewer has a formative role in the locally situated socio-communicative events that interviews are. Using transcripts of interviews elicited from female former colonials in the Belgian Congo, this article examines the way in which the interviewer, himself a former colonial, manages the construction of meaning and identity in relation to two intricately interwoven issues, namely the position of women and colonial society more generally. Findings demonstrate that the interviewer places the interviewees in a position of interactional subordination which also allows him, despite the threat to the interviewees’ face, to construct women as being superfluous both in 1950s-society in general and more specifically in the storyworld of the Belgian Congo, whilst at the same time he avoids any face threat to the colonial society more generally.

Laughter is primarily a social phenomenon and used as a resource for managing social relationships and identities. While it is often unplanned and uncensored, laughter is also strategically produced at particular moments to accomplish particular goals in interaction. In this article, I examine the ways in which laughter – specifically, what I call coping laughter – is utilized to manage the face-threatening relational aspects of disagreements rather than to deal with the actual content of disputes. The four specific functions of coping laughter that I analyze are (1) face-threat mitigation, (2) face-loss concealment, (3) serious-to-nonserious frame switch, and (4) topic transition facilitation. Which of these functions are accomplished varies depending on several contextual factors, including who initiates the laughter, how other participants respond to the laughter, and the overarching context and participant roles at play in the interaction. I discuss each of these influencing factors and the associated interactional functions of coping laughter in relation to the data I analyze. I argue that coping laughter is an efficient and effective strategy for dealing with the interactional trouble caused by a disagreement without dealing with its content.