Pragmatics - Volume 28, Issue 3, 2018

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to analyze and characterize forms of address in present-day Basque from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, and, second, to underscore some of the distinctive features that make Basque interesting with regard to address.

This work characterizes forms and systems of address in Basque based on two main factors: second-person pronouns and allocutivity. Five types are proposed depending on dialectal variety, and the existing differences in each of these systems are described. This article aims to fill a gap in Basque studies by analyzing modes of address in present-day Basque as a whole and going beyond mere grammatical analysis: previous studies are rather partial and confusing in terms of linguistic description, dialectal distribution and social usage (hierarchy among modes of address); in contrast, this article, based on extensive field work, gives an account of the different address systems according to the dialect and shows the sociopragmatic value (i.e., level of formality or politeness and personal distance) that each mode of address acquires in its system.

The article will also highlight some of the distinctive linguistic features that make Basque interesting with regard to address. Forms of address in Basque display strong similarities with those in other languages in terms of the pronominal system and its historical development, yet they also show some distinctive features, namely: verbal allocutivity, which presents the speaker-hearer axis; gender differences in verb forms for familiar address; and the grammaticalization of expressive palatalization in the case of the xu form of address (xu being an expressive variant of the polite pronoun zu). Current trends towards simplification of the systems of address are also discussed, as is the existence of groups of speakers who use a simplified system.

Authority is a much discussed topic in organizational literature, but its in situ enactment is little investigated. Using the notions of deontic and epistemic authority and using multimodal conversation analysis as a research methodology, the purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical study of authority-in-action. We particularly focus on both sequences of talk and the multimodal resources that are mobilised to ‘do’ authority. Furthermore, as research from non-Western contexts remains rare, we complement insights into authority enactment based on ‘Western’ data by using data that is drawn from a corpus of naturally-occurring video-recorded faculty meetings at an Indian University. Findings indicate that the doing of authority can be made visible by explicating participants’ orientation to their respective deontic and epistemic rights and their invocation of particular identities, which are accomplished by means of a complex intertwining of verbal and non-verbal resources.

This paper aims to describe different patterns of syntactic extensions of turns-at-talk in mundane conversations in Czech. Within interactional linguistics, same-speaker continuations of possibly complete syntactic structures have been described for typologically diverse languages, but have not yet been investigated for Slavic languages. Based on previously established descriptions of various types of extensions ( Vorreiter 2003 ; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007 ), our initial description shall therefore contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of this phenomenon. While all previously described forms for continuing a turn-constructional unit seem to exist in Czech, some grammatical features of this language (especially free word order and strong case morphology) may lead to problems in distinguishing specific types of syntactic extensions. Consequently, this type of language allows for critically evaluating the cross-linguistic validity of the different categories and underlines the necessity of analysing syntactic phenomena within their specific action contexts.

This paper investigates the linguistically marked motives that participants attribute to those they call trolls in 178 comment threads of three Hungarian left-wing political blogs. It is also concerned with how frequently these motives are mentioned and how they contribute to the discursive construction of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to examine whether the mainly emotional motives ascribed to trolls in the academic literature correspond with those that the participants attribute to the alleged trolls in the threads. The paper identifies five motives for trolling: emotional reasons, financial gain, political beliefs, being employed by Fidesz or the Hungarian government, and unspecified political affiliation. Depending on these motives, trolling and trolls are constructed in various ways. Furthermore, by suggesting that Fidesz or the Hungarian government employs trolls, the posters discursively construct Fidesz as an autocratic and corrupt state party that tries to manipulate the public.

In light of a belief that Hawaiʻi Creole (HC) is mostly inappropriate in public domains of society, this study examines how it was employed in two university commencement speeches by a local politician in Hawaiʻi. The analysis adopts the perspective of heteroglossia ( Bakhtin 1981 ) in order to describe how HC is used together in the speeches with English and also some Hawaiian words. By focusing on the contrastive indexical meanings attached to all three languages, the analysis describes how the speaker combined humor and serious advice in his speeches. In particular, a focus is given to a specific feature of the HC grammar, the negative imperative, that was used by the speaker to underscore his main points. Discussion of the analysis considers the potential of the perspective of heteroglossia to understand the usage of HC in the public domain in Hawaiʻi to construct formal speeches of a decidedly ʻlocal’ style.

This paper extends the concept of local grammar to speech act studies, focusing specifically on apologising in English. It aims primarily to demonstrate the usefulness of a local grammar approach to account for speech acts and ultimately to contribute to the on-going development of corpus pragmatics. Apology expressions in a corpus of scripted TV conversations are first automatically extracted and then manually examined in order to make sure that all remaining instances have the illocutionary force of apologising and thus qualify for further analysis. The subsequent local grammar analyses facilitate the establishment of a local grammar of apology, comprising 14 local grammar patterns. The analyses show that it is promising to develop a set of local grammars to account more adequately for speech acts in general. The relationship between local grammars, functional grammars, and general grammars is further discussed, which suggests that local grammars can be an alternative approach to functional-pragmatic studies of language and discourse. Directions for future research are outlined; and implications and applications are briefly discussed.