Pragmatics - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2018

This study aims to investigate the rhetorical genre components and the pragmatic evaluation options used to articulate the communicative function of ArBR genre, and find out how these generic and evaluation options contrast with those reported in other languages and cultures. To this end, a corpus of 50 book reviews written by 50 Arab reviewers was collected and analyzed within the rhetorical components developed and applied by Motta-Roth (1998) to English book reviews. The present study drew on Hyland (2000) , Gea Valor (2000–2001) , Moreno and Suárez (2008a) and Alcaraz-Ariza (2010) in order to examine how the qualities of ArBRs are evaluated and in which terms (i.e., criticism or praise). The results indicated that the Arab reviewers employed additional sub-moves that have not been used by other researchers. Unlike English book reviewers, Arab reviewers try to avoid criticism. Instead, they usually devote most of their book reviews to describe and summarize uncritically although critical appraisal is supposed to be the backbone of this genre. These purposive generic component preferences and evaluation tendencies can be explained with reference to the goal of the academic community and the writing culture that constrain Arab reviewers' academic behavior. I hope that the results of this study will provide graduate students and novice researchers with further awareness of the acceptable generic strategies, the linguistic choices and pragmatic evaluative options that can be used to write an evaluation of a piece of research.

Diglossia is, as far as the Arabic language is concerned, a concept that has been taken for granted, as much as it has been criticized. First, based on Ferguson’s article on diglossia and subsequent interpretations and ramifications of the concept and with a special focus on how language variability is discursively deployed and how it is perceived in the Arab speech community, I will argue that diglossia does not so much describe actual language use, but rather how language variability is ‘read’ in the Arab world. In the second part of the article, an analysis of labeling in a 19th century debate will show how the dichotomy between fuṣḥā and non-fuṣḥā varieties (ʿāmmīya), 1 which is the basis of diglossia, was already taken for granted long before the concept and the term existed, and even before fuṣḥā and ʿāmmīya were used as independent lexical items. The analysis in both parts of the article shows how much diglossia is taken for granted by most native speakers of Arabic, even if it defies linguistic descriptions of actual language use. It is exactly this ‘common-sense-ness’ that suggests that diglossia is a useful tool to describe language ideological attitudes.

This article reports an eight-month investigation into the long-term impact of explicit instruction on the learnability of different aspects of email requests by a group of Vietnamese university students. Two intact classes were randomly assigned to the treatment (N = 13) and control conditions (N = 19). Over a four-week period, the treatment group received six hours of instruction which comprised consciousness-raising, meta-pragmatic explanation, repeated output practice and teacher feedback. The control group, on the other hand, only followed the usual syllabus. Results of the study indicate that the treatment group obtained significantly greater pre-to-posttest gains than the control group, and that their improvement was retained by the time of the eight-month delayed post-test. Despite the learners’ overall progress, however, it was also found that different aspects of their performance appeared to respond differently to instruction. The article supports the need for instruction of email politeness and discusses implications for future pedagogy and research.

Due to their largely non-routinized forms and their not being retrievable in computerised corpus searches, refusals have hitherto not been examined from a diachronic perspective. The present paper presents an inventory of refusal strategies in Early Modern English drama texts. Five comedies from two periods (1560–1599 and 1720–1760), respectively, taken from the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 ( Kytö and Culpeper 2006 ) were examined manually and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis lead to an alternative classification of refusals which differs considerably from the frequently used taxonomy by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990) . The proposed classification takes into account three levels of analysis: the propositional content of the utterance, the functional super-strategy, and the speaker’s stance. The development of refusal within the period under investigation partially matches findings regarding related speech acts that show a development towards increased indirectness ( Culpeper and Demmen 2011 , Pakkala-Weckström 2008 , Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008 ).

This study demonstrates that two types of language ideologies (linguistic nationalism and feminine language normativity) influence how Japanese contemporary novels represent non-Japanese characters’ speech. It investigates the role of gender and observes that novelists only infrequently assign highly gendered utterance-final forms to non-Japanese characters when they speak in Japanese. This tendency is more salient among the representations of male non-Japanese characters. Masculine expressions seem to belong to a set of linguistic resources that are considered available only to the Japanese. This exclusivism, i.e., linguistic nationalism, might explain the lack of highly masculine forms among non-Japanese characters in novels. As for the relatively frequent assignment of gendered language for female characters, the normativity of feminine language makes it part of the basic language of all female speakers including non-Japanese individuals. In addition, feminine expressions are not as strongly associated with authenticity as masculine expressions.