Pragmatics - Volume 29, Issue 3, 2019

This paper discusses Akan Advice under ethnopragmatics. It adopts persuasion, speech acts of directives and expressives, and Akan proverbs to discuss advice with the insight from Akan culture. The adviser expresses some feelings and emotions and directs the advisee to act and behave towards the benefits of the individual, the group or society. The paper taps data from participant observations and audio taped recordings at arbitrations, marriage and naming ceremonies. There is another data from Adi’s (1973) Akan literature book, Brako that covers pieces of advice on travelling, settlement and occupation. The Akan texts are translated into English and analysed. The analysis covers semantics, pragmatics, stylistic devices, and proverbs.

Recent scholarship on language use has developed a resurgent interest in the complex interrelationship of language and materiality; given its longstanding investigation of both non-verbal communication and political economy, language socialization research is well-positioned to make important contributions to this investigation of language materiality. This paper advances such a project by demonstrating how the discursive processes of language socialization make the material affectively meaningful. Through an exploration of prompting interactions in cross-border conversations within transnational Salvadoran families, the paper elucidates how processes of material-affective semiosis produce subject positions that are made normative for some individuals, in this case, differentiating between migrant and non-migrant kin. Drawing out the role of materiality in such processes thus reveals how language socialization functions as a scale-making resource that turns the inequalities of transnational migration into constitutive features of family life.

Drawing on theoretical approaches to personal/group behaviour, and informed by Michael Hoey’s priming theory, this paper presents a corpus-assisted discourse study of European Parliament interventions from 2004 to 2011. The study aims to identify the group in the self and the various selves in the individual. For the analysis, three corpora from the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive are explored: EP_EN (with EP interventions: 26,959,446 tokens), HC (with House of Commons interventions: 70,567,728), and SandD_david_martin (with member of European Parliament – MEP – David Martin’s interventions: 116,781). The main tool of analysis is the keyword, as generated by WordSmith 7.0. The analysis proceeds in three stages: stage 1, where the EP_EN and HC wordlists are compared, resulting in EP key priming; stage 2, where the SandD_david_martin and HC wordlists are compared, exposing David Martin’s idiosyncratic productions; and stage 3, where the EP_EN and SandD_david_martin keyword lists are manually compared, leading to the identification of EP priming in David Martin’s interventions.

Much of the research on affiliation to date has focused on how people do (dis)affiliation. This paper explores the remedial work that follows instances of disaffiliation between interactants who are getting acquainted. Building on an interactional pragmatics analytical approach informed by methods and research in conversation analysis, findings indicate that extended remedial accounts recurrently follow moments of disaffiliation in initial interactions. These remedial accounts enable participants to reposition a prior disaffiliative stance as (ostensibly) affiliative. It appears in initial interactions, then, that remedial accounts play an important role in modulating troubles in affiliating. We propose that the considerable interactional work undertaken by these participants to modulate such troubles reflects a general preference for agreeability in initial interactions, at least amongst (Australian and British) speakers of English.

The role of cognitive processes in compliment-response (CR) exchanges is an underdeveloped area of investigation. This article aims to probe whether Persian speakers’ responses to compliments change in line with their appraisals of the situation. To achieve this aim, Persian speakers’ responses to compliments are analysed based on their first and second appraisals of the event. In this study, with a focus on the CR exchanges, Persian speakers (N = 160) were observed and audio-recorded during everyday conversation. The results of this study manifest that Persian speakers have distinct (and even opposite) reactions based on their first and second appraisal of compliments. This suggests, therefore, that Appraisal 1 and Appraisal 2 undergo different sociocognitive processes that reflect automatic and non-automatic responses to compliments. It is concluded that the relation between Appraisal 1 and Appraisal 2 is mostly contradictory rather than confirmatory, in that the first compliment is mostly appraised as a politeness strategy (a social lubricant), whereas the second compliment is frequently appraised as purposeful or strategic praise. In addition, the first compliment is responded to automatically, whereas the second compliment is approached non-automatically.

This study addresses the question of how focused code-switching practices can become. It takes two complementary approaches to determine sorts and degrees of focusing, namely, a sequential analyst perspective, and a holistic perspective involving general sociolinguistic data and member’s perspectives. The case study presented involves a multilectal interaction between urban speakers of Oshiwambo, the main ethnic language of Namibia, where it cohabits with English and Afrikaans, the country’s lingua francas. The analysis reveals a range of structurally or qualitatively distinctive CS patterns involving Oshiwambo (dialects), English, and Afrikaans, used by all participants. Mostly alternational CS and specific types of backflagging display sequential regularity, while other CS patterns seem randomly distributed, at first sight an attribute of ‘free variation’. However, the examination of social indexicalities attached to the observed CS patterns shows that they all contribute to the performance of a multi-layered balancing act between urban and ethnic authenticities.