Pragmatics - Volume 30, Issue 4, 2020

Impoliteness is a common phenomenon across various democratically elected parliaments. However, in multilingual legislative bodies such as the European Parliament speakers have to rely on interpreters to transfer pragmatic meaning, including face-threatening acts and impoliteness. The existing research in the field of Interpreting Studies offers much evidence of the filtering effect that interpreting may have on impoliteness, through facework strategies introduced by interpreters. The main question here is whether female interpreters tend to mitigate grave, intentional impoliteness to a greater degree than male interpreters. My analysis of a large corpus composed of English-Polish interpretations of speeches by Eurosceptic MEPs shows that mitigation of impoliteness by interpreters is a widespread phenomenon. The illocutionary force of original statements is often modified by means of diverse interpreting strategies. However, the quantitative analysis of interpreter facework does not reveal a statistically significant gender-based difference in the distribution of approaches towards impoliteness.

Recently, the Netherlands witnessed an agitated discussion over Black Pete, a blackface character associated with the Saint Nicholas festival. This paper analyzes a televised panel interview discussing a possible court ban of public Nicholas festivities, and demonstrates that participants not only disagree over the racist nature of the blackface character but also over the terms of the debate itself. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic work on stancetaking, it traces how panelists ‘laminate’ the interview’s participation framework by embedding their assessments of Black Pete in contrasting dialogical fields. Their stancetaking evokes opposing trajectories of earlier interactions and conjures up discursive complexes of identity/belonging that entail discrepant judgments over the acceptability of criticism. The extent to which a stance makes explicit the projected field’s phenomenal content, it is argued, reflects the relative (in)visibility of hegemonic we-ness.

This study explores the functions of I think in synchronous, computer-mediated cross-cultural communication of Japanese and Taiwanese university students. The data used in this study were collected from the Cross-Cultural Distance Learning corpus, which contains transcriptions of recorded synchronous spoken and written interactions between Taiwanese and Japanese university students. To examine the functions of I think, occurrences of the phrase were screened, analyzed, and categorized based on collocation pattern, discourse context, and sequentiality. The Taiwanese students showed a greater tendency to use the various functions of I think in discourse than the Japanese students, who rarely used its functions in their online cross-cultural communication. The results suggest that their respective perceived conversation strategies may be a significant cause of variation in the frequency of use of I think functions.

This study investigates native Japanese speakers’ context-dependent linguistic knowledge of cooking recipes. Recipes are a typical example of a register, defined as the use of language in a particular social situation for a specific purpose. Thirty participants in the present study were asked to write a recipe for curry rice (a popular dish in Japan) or an unnamed soup (shown in a photo) on a blank piece of paper without access to any resources. Most participants’ texts contained specialized vocabulary and basic procedural organization. On the other hand, few integrated the typical grammatical features of commercial recipes. It suggests that the latter details are not part of the communicative repertoires of most participants. The grammatical characteristics of commercial recipes are likely a product of careful editing, aimed for clarity and consistency. Professional editing appears to have a significant role in shaping the grammar of the written register.

Using natural conversation corpora, I demonstrate that the Korean x-tunci ha ‘x-or do’ and x-kena ha ‘x-or do’, which originally list options (e.g., ‘x or y do’) have emerged as independent constructions that can indicate approximation, epistemic uncertainty, tentativeness, and even polite hedging. I argue that these Korean “general extenders” (Overstreet 1999) followed a similar (inter)subjectification process to English x-or something and Japanese x-tari suru ‘x-or do.’ I also illustrate how these two Korean general extenders specialize in different hedging strategies.

Ironically, Korean tunci ha and Japanese tari suru can also convey a speaker’s negative affective stance. I demonstrate that tunci ha was frequently used in making non-imposing suggestions (hedging) and obtained its negative affect in the context of suggesting an obvious but untried solution (i.e., the frustration of the suggesting speaker). This result differs from Suzuki (2008)’s argument of the Japanese case which attributes this development to a speaker’s non-committal attitude.

The paper explores the disagreement pragmeme as a culture-bound notion (Mey 2016a, 2016b, 2001) in the language use of English-speaking and Serbian-speaking politicians. The objectives are to establish the types, frequencies and cultural specificities of disagreement allopracts in political interviews. Furthermore, the research analyses allopracts in relation to the single and multiple dispute profiles (van Eemeren, Houtlosser and Henkemans 2007). The starting assumption is that allopracts will be realised in culturally specific ways despite the fact that the analysed pragmeme belongs to the same communication genre, which is the Immediately Relevant tertium comparationis (Krzeszowski 1990) of the research. The hypothesis to be verified is that the Serbian sub-corpus will yield more examples of strong disagreement. Another aim is to classify the obtained allopracts according to their degrees of strength. The analysis is based on the corpus of 50 political interviews, involving 30 politicians and 262 allopracts.