Pragmatics - Volume 24, Issue 4, 2014

This paper investigates apologies produced by Greek native speakers and English learners of Greek as a foreign language in two informal (-P, -D) and two formal situations (+P, +D). Drawing on data elicited by means of an assessment questionnaire, a DCT and the participants’ verbal reports, the study attempts to explore the extent to which the two groups differ in their contextual assessments of the apology situations under examination and in strategy use. The results indicated that the learners of the study differed significantly from the native speakers in regard to their assessments of the contextual parameters (power, distance, severity of offence) involved in each apology situation. Furthermore, significant quantitative and qualitative differences were attested in relation of the two groups’ preferences in strategy use when performing apologies in Greek. On the basis of these results it is argued, that these learners interlanguage apology behavior is influenced both by their native cultural values and (negative) politeness orientation, as well as from lack of adequate socio-pragmatic development resulting mainly from their foreign language learner status.

In this paper I will describe and interpret some data from Southern Quechua and Southern Aymara spoken texts recorded during traditional divinatory sessions. This analysis is aimed to show that divination can be considered as an example of how ritual speech, often described as a phenomenon based on fixed sequences, is characterized by variable elements too, being the relationship between a particular “context of situation” and the divinatory speech event very strong. In particular, the analysis focuses on a specific kind of speech acts, which seem to be built with the help of morphological devices that are normally used to indicate the source of information in the Quechua and Aymara language families. The same devices are used with a specific performative function in the context of divination: To “officialise” the message of the oracle and to oppose this to the speech acts of the diviner.

In this essay, I discuss one direction for developing a systematic, data-grounded analysis of categories in talk-in-interaction. This framework is developed around two main analytical foci. The first examines how the participants themselves work to publicly associate some set of normatively and morally accountable actions, rights, obligations, entitlements, attributes, etc. (i.e., category-bound predicates; see, e.g., Jayyusi 1984; Sacks 1972a, 1972b, 1979, 1992; Watson 1978) to the various turn- and sequence-generated categories built up by their actions-in-talk, and to explicit categorial formulations (i.e., labels, metonyms, descriptions, etc.) and their indexers. The second is concerned with how the participants recognizably and relevantly accomplish the sequential organization and turn by turn management of their categorization work. The notions of rhetorical (see Edwards 1991, 1997, 1998), conditional (Schegloff 1968, 1972), and retro-relevance (see Schegloff 2007a on ‘retro-sequences’), along with response priority (Bilmes 1993, 1995; see also Bilmes 1988) are introduced as sequential analytical tools for developing a systematic, data-based analysis of these practices.

This investigation examines different speaking roles that lawyers may shift into, and depart from, in the monologic genre of the opening statement in three American trials, incorporating Goffman’s concept of Footing (1981) into an analysis of three high-profile trials. The findings reveal that lawyers take on three distinct discursive roles: The storyteller, the interlocutor, and the animator. In addition, indexical resources commonly associated with each role are explored which serve to contextualize such role shifts. In effect, the lawyers can subtly make the discourse argumentative and suggestive of inferences. Such discursive practices appear to stand in direct contradiction to the purpose of the opening statement.

Among the rare treatments of discourse markers in South Slavic languages (Miškovi? 2001, 2003; Fielder 2008; Dedai? and Miškovi?-Lukovi? 2010; Premilovac 2010; Miškovi?-Lukovi? and Dedai? 2012), the Serbian discourse marker zna?i, evolved from the lexical verb zna?iti (‘to mean’), has so far gone unnoticed. Based on a corpus of approximately 6.5 hours of recorded semi-formal student-teacher conversations, the paper analyzes the pragmatic aspects of the discourse marker zna?i. The key questions that are addressed are: (a) what discursive environments zna?i occurs in; and more importantly, (b) what pragmatic effects the speakers intend to achieve by using this discourse marker. The pragmatics of zna?i is explored in order to establish whether in each individual case it is used (a) as a marker of various types of reformulation, such as expansion or compression, (b) as a means of concluding, or (c) whether it serves an interactional function.

This paper uses membership categorization analysis to illustrate how five women invoke multiple female gender and sexuality identity categories in personal narratives to construct the device of womanhood. The five racially diverse women include four self-identified lesbians and one heterosexual and range in age from mid-twenties to early forties. Analysis of their two hour audio recorded interaction illustrates that gender and sexuality cannot be understood as a binary difference between men and women. These women use revolutionary categories, defined on their own terms rather than by outsiders, to characterize women they encounter in their personal experience (lesbian and otherwise). The revolutionary categories exemplify a diversity of female gender and sexuality identities and ultimately challenge heteronormative conceptions of female identity while simultaneously constructing a lesbian counterpublic. Thus, the personal experiences of these women, as related through everyday narratives, turn out to be highly political.

During the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign, President Obama turned some heads by stating “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that”. His opponents argued that this was an attack on private enterprise (with “that” referring to business), while his supporters and fact-checking organizations maintained that “that” referred to what Obama was talking about previously (U.S. infrastructure) and represented his political-economic plan of an increased interlacing of private business with government investment. I argue, from a relevance-theoretic perspective, that both interpretations follow from differing contextual assumptions on the part of the audience. In this sense, the role of contextual assumptions in utterance interpretation is highlighted – different contextual assumptions lead to different cognitive effects if the utterance leaves room for more than one interpretation. Combined with a highly polarized U.S. political arena, where participants pounce on their opponent’s every possible miscue, all the ingredients for misunderstanding are present.