Pragmatics - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2017

Speech act studies are increasingly likely to use retrospective verbal protocols to record the thoughts of participants who produced targeted speech acts (e.g., Cohen & Olshtain, 1993 ). However, although communication is always a two-way street, little is known about the recipients’ perceptions of speech acts. In academic communication at universities, it is critical for students to gain awareness of the socio-cultural norms as well as knowledge of appropriate linguistic forms in interacting with instructors. Therefore, gathering perceptual information from instructors, the recipients of many speech acts such as apologies, serves an important role in realizing successful student-instructor communication. Targeting instructors’ perceptions, two forms of an online survey were created via surveygizmo.com, with one including 12 spoken apologies and the other including 12 emailed apologies. An equal number of native (NS) and nonnative English speaking (NNS) students produced these apologies. The 150 instructors who responded to the survey gave significantly higher ratings to apologies made by NS students than to those made by NNS students. An analysis of instructors’ explanations after the ratings showed that both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge ( Thomas, 1983 ) were valued in the successful realization of apologies, with the majority of instructor explanations addressing the sociopragmatic aspects of apology productions. In their comments on highly-rated student apologies, instructors appreciated the fact that students took responsibility in apologizing, offered worthy explanations, and delivered the messages with minimum grammatical mistakes. Poorly rated apology messages did not contain sufficient or valid evidence, inconvenienced the instructors through inappropriate requests, and usually had multiple grammatical mistakes. This study provides useful source of information to be used in university classrooms that can orientate novice learners towards socio-cultural expectations and appropriate lexical markers to be employed in making successful apologies in academic settings.

In this paper I examine Chinese perceptions of (in)appropriateness and offence from a cross-cultural pragmatic point of view, by exploring (in)appropriate evaluations in the context of a major social offence, and the influence of Confucian ideology on people’s evaluative tendencies. By doing so, I aim to contribute to pragmatic understandings of Confucianism as an ideology that underpins evaluative attitudes in Chinese culture. On the theoretical level, I argue that one needs to carefully examine dimensions of ideologies that underlie evaluative tendencies, and also the ways in which ideologies are invoked, rather than making sweeping claims. I believe that is possible to adopt ‘ideology’ as an analytic notion in interpersonal pragmatics and (im)politeness research, but only if the influence of ideology on interpersonal interaction and evaluative tendencies is captured with the aid of qualitative and quantitative evidence, that is, only as far as one avoids using a certain ideology as an umbrella term to analyse culturally-situated data.

The phenomenon of misunderstanding is a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats to intersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.

The cognitive properties of morphosyntactic choices are at the base of any usage, patterns and tendencies they could possibly reveal; thus, by means of the cognitive properties of salience and informativeness, variation in second-person tú and usted must be considered as inherently meaningful, implying that each form conveys a different meaning that is used to pursue concrete communicative goals in discursive interaction. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of tú and usted and their syntactic variants (preverbal, postverbal and omitted) reveals that these forms are unevenly distributed across different textual genres and socioprofessional affiliations of speakers. It may be concluded that tú and usted contribute toward shaping the different communicative styles on the basis of the cognitive dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity, respectively. Considering these pronouns as meaningful choices by themselves, this study attempts to go beyond the traditional approach that treats them as terms of address, delving into the discursive and cognitive traits which underlie such a variation.

This study explores metapragmatic comments in Nigerian quasi-judicial public hearings, involving interactions between complainants, defendants and a hearing panel, with a view to investigating their forms, features, distribution and functions. The data are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively from a discourse-pragmatic framework that incorporates Verschueren’s theory of metapragmatics, Mey’s pragmatic act theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversation analysis. Four types of metapragmatic comments are used: speech act descriptions, talk regulation comments, maxim adherence/violation related comments and metalinguistic comments. Their distribution and functioning are shown to be partly predictable from properties of the speech event, while they also co-determine the nature and development of the analysed hearings.

In this paper, we adopt Kádár and Haugh’s (2013) discursive-interactional approach to argue that extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching can be perceived as normal and qiàdàng (appropriate). Spontaneous mundane conversations and interviews in Mandarin were collected and transcribed by means of interactional sociolinguistic methods. A close analysis was conducted on participants’ responses to the extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching and their retrospective thoughts. Results show that the participants did not view the speech as inappropriate. They produced the speech to achieve relational goals, clarify things, collaborate on a topic, claim participatory rights or display high involvement. They enjoyed conversing around a trivial topic in informal settings. This challenges the argument of long overlapping, floor taking or topic switching as problematic in the literature. The findings indicate the importance of embracing different perspectives from varying sources to understand perceptions of turn-taking mechanisms in Mandarin conversation. This study can contribute to our understanding of interpersonal pragmatics and the conventional views/norms that might cause communication misunderstanding in cross-cultural contact.