Pragmatics - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2021

Our study purports to examine the rhetorical structure of informal telephone conversation opening phase in Jordanian Arabic and the lexico-grammatical and stylistic encodings of these pragmatic options. To this end, a corpus of 100 telephone conversation recordings was collected from Jordanian Arabic. The recordings were based on the participants’ personal cell phones with their families and friends. Our data analysis drew on House (1982) and Sun’s (2004) models of interactional moves to find out the component options used to articulate this phase. The results revealed that although the group of participants use a set of functional components similar to those identified in other cultures, there are additional functional component options like ‘ostensible invitation’ and ‘God-wishes’ that are only used by Jordanians. Besides, they utilize various lexico-grammatical devices and stylistic options to articulate these components. These choices can be attributed to the socio-cultural background of the Jordanian Arabic native speakers.

This paper investigates the use of my as part of address formulae by means of a corpus consisting of eight British English plays published between 1899 and 1912. For each conversational turn, address terms, speaker, addressee, power and solidarity dynamics, and speech acts have been identified. The address terms most frequently modified by my have been selected for further investigation, which allows an analysis of the alternation between dear and my dear, as well as my lord/lady and your lordship/ladyship. Results show that, when my has impact on the power dimension, the address formula with my construes the addressee as less powerful than the speaker. When my has impact on the solidarity dimension, the address formula with my construes the addressee as a close interlocutor. The functional import of my varies depending on the address term it modifies, which is consistent with its function as a modulating element.

This conversation analytic study investigates the sequential organization and question constraints of alternative questions in English with a focus on response formats. Building on research on polar and wh-questions (among others, Enfield, Stivers and Levinson 2010; Raymond 2003; Thompson, Fox and Couper-Kuhlen 2015), this article shows that responses to alternative questions that include a repeat of one of the alternatives are type-conforming, those that do not are nonconforming. Additionally, even though the concept of contiguity (Sacks 1973/1987) might suggest that the second alternative be confirmed, participants confirm either alternative unproblematically. Finally, my work shows that alternative questions can create difficulties for action ascription, because as they are being produced, they often resemble polar questions. My study adds to our understanding of question-answer sequences in English by providing an overview of an understudied question type in English. The data are in American English.

The German second person personal pronoun du is commonly described as a deictic “shifter” or a T-address term, which is incorporated as an argument of a predicate. Exploring the ways in which participants use pronouns in everyday interaction, however, shows that these are not the only uses of du. In this paper, we examine vocative uses of du in German everyday interaction. Drawing on methods of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, we will show that speakers use vocative du for the management of being ‘with’ the other in terms of alignment as well as affiliation. What du locally accomplishes, however, is sensitive to its positioning within the temporal unfolding of turns and sequences as well as to the sequential environments in which it is used. Our findings demonstrate the context-sensitivity of du and underscore the importance of linguistic resources for the interactional establishment and maintenance of social togetherness and sociability.

The upsurge of interest in L2 pragmatics studies has coincided with a growing interest in pragmatic assessment. Employing the most efficient measure of pragmatics has led many researchers to examine the existing measures to pinpoint the most useful ones. This study was an attempt to compare and contrast Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT), Oral Discourse Completion Task (ODCT), and Role-play with Natural methodology in an EFL institutional context to see which measure approximated Natural methodology. To this end, data (requests) were collected from 27 intermediate–level Iranian EFL learners in a natural classroom institutional context over 15 weeks, and then the WDCTs, ODCTs, and Role-plays with the same contextual features were selected to elicit the intended data. The participants’ requests were transcribed and analyzed in terms of Schauer’s (2009) request head act strategy taxonomy and its internal and external modification devices. The results of Binominal tests indicated that, in spite of some minor similarities, none of the elicitation measures could approximate the natural data. The participants’ employment of direct, non-conventionally indirect request strategies, and internal and external modification devices were more conspicuous in the WDCTs, ODCTs, and Role-plays than those in the Natural methodology. The study implies that data collection methods should be selected based on researchers’ objectives and research questions.

This paper explores the pragmatics of emojis co-occurring with or embedded in text on Chinese social media with this central research question: what are the patterns and the communicative functions manifested by emojis in co-occurrence with Chinese text? Building on the metafunctional approach of multimodal analysis, popular online posts from Sina Weibo which contain both emoji(s) and text have been collected and analyzed to discover the representational, interactive, and compositional features manifested by emojis co-occurring with text. We have found that these emojis on Weibo appear most frequently at the end of the posts and reflect some unique Chinese cultural and linguistic features. Based on recurring pragmatic and functional patterns of text-emoji co-occurrences, it is proposed that emojis are used to perform speech acts, highlight subjective interpretations, and enhance informality, while substituting, reinforcing, and complementing the meanings conveyed by verbal language.