Pragmatics - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2017

Departing from a short overview on pragmatic gestures specialized for the expression of refusal and negation, the article presents first results of a study on those gestures in Savosavo, a Papuan language spoken in the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific. The paper focuses on two partly conventionalized gestures (sweeping and holding away) and shows that speakers of Savosavo use the gestures in a very similar way as speakers of German, English or French, for example. The article shows how a linguistic and semiotic analysis might serve to uncover proto-morpho-semantic structures in a manual mode of communication and contributes to a better understanding of the conventional nature and cross-linguistic distribution of gestures. Moreover, by examining partly conventionalized gestures in a small, little known and endangered language, it presents a particular approach to the analysis of multimodality in the field of language documentation.

The present study analyzes the discursive strategies of manipulation in the political genre of a discourse in Parliament with an aim to convince the audience that the Prime Minister and his party are innocent of receiving illegal cash donations from a slush fund run in the party. For that purpose, we have used Van Dijk’s (2006) scheme of strategies of manipulation at several levels of discourse (content, lexis, topics, syntax, rhetoric, and order of discourse). Findings of the study show that the Prime Minister’s speech presents characteristics of ideological discourse, since it follows a general strategy of positive in-group and negative out-group presentation, which has an overall legitimating function. At other levels of discourse, the denial of controversial actions is made manipulative by following strategies of emphasis of our positive and their negative actions with the final aim of self-legitimating himself and his discourse. The discourse is further made manipulative by using appropriate contextual constraints and defensible semantics of representation.

Using audio-recorded data from second language (L2) English conversations-for-learning between an L2 user of English and a first language (L1) user of English (the researcher), this study analyzes cases in which the L1 user avoids initiation of repair. In each case, the L2 user appears to have misunderstood something said by the L1 user. Instead of initiating repair in next turn on the L2 user’s talk, or in third position on his own talk, the L1 user goes along, at least briefly, with the direction set by the L2 user. Often, the L1 user, sooner or later, returns to the misunderstood talk. Avoidance of repair initiation is one way in which the L1 user contributes to the construction of the L2 user as interactionally competent to participate in conversations-for-learning.

This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a participant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, exploring how laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation where the potential accusation of opportunism arises in accounts of personal job satisfaction as against the legitimacy otherwise afforded with an appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice. Where speakers attend to the criticism of humanitarian activity for its significance in affecting outcomes of warfare, the management of these different demands is accomplished in reflexive work to ironize their own and others’ formulations of motivation for pursuing humanitarian work.