Pragmatics - Volume 28, Issue 4, 2018

As Chinese legal system follows a statutory tradition, the writing of Chinese judicial opinions is normally considered as an invariant sequential process of stating the law, presenting the fact, and finally providing the conclusion. The official ideology is further reinforced by the fact that Chinese judges need to follow various authoritative writing guidelines and templates prescribed by the official bodies of legal profession. This paper examines to what extent this ideology is a trustworthy description, and to what extent it is only an imagined myth related to the rhetorical practices of Chinese legal profession. Theoretical constructs employed in the study are genre, text type, and rhetorical modes, and analytical data include exemplar judicial opinions, intertextual legislative documents, and insiders’ accounts. According to the research findings, while the official ideology remains a strong shaping force in the composing of Chinese judicial opinions, Chinese judges do take compelling moves to add dialogic elements to the traditionally monologue-dominated discursive sphere of legal writing.

The function of students’ email requests to faculty is both transactional and interactional. Students’ emails are not only sent with the aim of receiving some form of service but they also need to adhere to the interactional function of language in order to establish and maintain social relationships. Therefore, how to address their lecturers and how much directness is appropriate in the requests performed through this medium, are some of the most difficult choices that students have to make. This study investigates how L2 university students’ academic requests are formulated through the medium of email, and examines the correlation between the forms of address, the degree of (in)directness and the degree of imposition of their email as a way to express e-politeness.

This study examines a semi and a full English-medium instruction (EMI) undergraduate program offered at a Catalan university in order to measure its effect on the students’ oral output. Specifically, it tackles the acquisition of pragmatic markers (PMs) by measuring four variables, the overall frequency of use, the variety of types, the use of textual PMs, and the use of interpersonal PMs. Oral data were collected via a monologue and an interaction task. The study is cross-sectional with 39 full-EMI and 33 semi-EMI participants in 2nd and 3rd year of study plus 10 native speakers. PM use was chosen for analysis due to the important role they play in communicative competence. Results show a significant increase in the overall frequency and variety of types of PMs used from year 2 to year 3. The full-EMI group used PMs at a significantly higher frequency and wider variety when compared to the semi-EMI group, neither group reached baseline levels for use of interpersonal PMs, and both groups displayed a higher use of textual PMs compared to the NSs.

In recent work, Arundale proposed a Face Constituting Theory based on the Conjoint Co-Constituting Model of Communication. His main concern is directed towards a shift from the individualistic conception of face and (im)politeness to a non-summative view on communication based on fundamental insights from conversation analysis. Based on two film shootings between German and Brazilian exchange students, which are part of the larger corpus NUCOI, we will take a closer look at moments in which face comes to the fore in the light of (dis)alignment and (dis)affiliation. While in the German example facework is negotiated metacommunicatively, in the Brazilian example facework is calibrated in more subtle ways represented by prosodic and visual cues, which are either given or held back by the co-participants. We will show that these two different patterns may be related to culture-specific construals of face.

This study investigates creative product descriptions (CPDs) in an intercultural context, especially with respect to cultural references (CRs) and lexical cohesion. More specifically, it examines (i) how CRs are utilized in CPDs written in English for intercultural communication, (ii) how lexical cohesion can be described in a culturally meaningful and context-sensitive way, and (iii) what role cultural reference terms play in shaping the lexical cohesion of such CPDs. By proposing a multi-layer framing model of cohesion, this paper shows how lexical cohesion results from interactions of four frames activated in the production and reception of a text: sociocultural, generic, interpersonal and conceptual. The study concludes with some practical implications for the writing of CPDs in English for intercultural communication.

Negative existentials containing empty NPs are understood colloquially as representing how things stand in the world. Moreover, utterances of such sentences seem to express propositions or thoughts that are informative and true. Standard static semantic theories cannot provide a straightforward account of these intuitive phenomena. In such frameworks, sentences with empty NPs are considered as being unable to express truth-evaluable contents. This paper investigates two alternative theories of negative existentials. A common feature of these theories is that they adopt a dynamic approach to meaning. I will argue that neither of these alternatives provides a reassuring solution to the apparent truth-conditional problem generated by the utterances of negative existentials.