Pragmatics - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2021

This paper examines the pragmatic properties of what we define as a ritual act of ‘admonishing’. We argue that admonishing represents a historically embedded realisation type of the speech act Suggest. We explore admonishing in ancient Chinese political and governance texts dated before the 2nd century BC. The results of our analysis show that admonishing often not only affords but even triggers paradoxical pragmatic behaviour. This paradox stems from the fact that, in many historical linguacultures like the ancient Chinese, admonishing was directed at a recipient, most typically a ruler, who was more highly ranked than the admonisher himself. While this context normally precluded threatening the recipient’s face, admonishing was realised in a ritual frame in which such a face threat was deindividuated. In pragmatics, a research gap exists in the study of the historical act of admonishing, and so the current study fills a knowledge gap.

This paper analyses postings made by student applicants on Korean online communities about how best to handle interactions with potential future PhD supervisors at UK universities. The questions they posed reveal the lack of relevant contextual information they experienced, especially around the rights and obligations of supervisors. This paper thus analyses students’ metapragmatic comments and argues for greater attention to be paid within interpersonal and intercultural pragmatics to interactional goals and conceptions of role relations, especially the rights and obligations associated with them. The analysis has revealed that background information on role relations is of great importance for relational management and communication planning in high stakes intercultural interaction. This suggests that potential cultural variation in the perceived rights and obligations associated with a given role (in this case, PhD supervisor) and their implications for assessments of role relations are of central concern.

This study examines other-initiated repair sequences in everyday conversations between a bilingual youth with autism and his family members. The analysis is centered on the types of repair initiators produced by the youth, the targets of his repair elicitations, and his family members’ subsequent actions. Findings include two dominant patterns in the data that indicate marked differences in the ways the youth’s parents interact with him. The discussion highlights the youth’s ability to shift the participation framework to facilitate his understanding of a previous utterance; the analysis also reveals the strategies employed by some of his family members to encourage interactional progressivity. The concluding section addresses implications of the study for understanding how bilingual youth with autism target trouble sources, enact alignment, and draw from their bilingual proficiencies in everyday conversations.

This study focusses on the use and functions of so-called taboo vocatives (e.g. dickhead, you bastard, bitch) in the language of London teenagers, based on the analysis of over 500 examples extracted from COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language) and LEC (London English Corpus). Findings illustrate a wide variety of items in this category, and show that these cannot be regarded as mere insults, since they often serve to reinforce the bonds between young speakers as well, and indeed can even carry affectionate connotations. The majority of these items are nouns and denote some kind of sexual reference, an abnormal or strange human condition, or a pejorative, animal-related allusion. There does not seem to have been any major changes in the use of these forms from the 1990s to the first decades of the current century, although many of them have broadened their meaning and can now be used with either male or female speakers.

This article explores grammatical and functional properties of mi-nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘youth language.’ In the standard variety, the suffix -mi nominalizes an adjective stem: fuka-mi ‘deep-nmlz’ (= ‘profoundness’). This suffix is also used in youth language, but its productivity has expanded considerably. To mention a few, -mi applies to not only an adjective (stem) but also a verb, a noun, a pronoun, their phrasal counterparts, and even an onomatopoeia. We claim that these properties of -mi are flexibly captured in the framework of nominalization recently proposed by Masayoshi Shibatani. This framework leads us to describe further unique properties of mi-nominalization, such as “double nominalization” where an already-nominalized form undergoes a further nominalization process and the “sentential use” of a nominalized structure where a nominalized element functions as a sentence, with which an illocutionary speech act is performed.

The goal of this study is to propose a pragmatic analysis of what we call Emotive Taste Terms (ETTs) in Korean, compared to English. What makes Korean taste adjectives special is its multidimensional meaning: In descriptive dimension, (i) the literal meaning concerns the taste; or (ii) it can be extended toward the situation, yielding a figurative meaning. In expressive dimension, (iii) the choice of particular derivation form reflects the speaker’s positive or negative emotional attitude; and (iv) another potential expressive meaning concerns honorification, thought it is not part of the meaning of ETTs. We thus propose that ETTs are a novel subcase of expressive elements, triggering Conventional Implicature. We show how the analysis of ETTs as a CI allows us to successfully derive subtle connotational differences amongst numerous variants. Finally, we show how the co-occurrence pattern of multiple expressives, ETTs and other expressives, within the sentence can be captured by Compatibility Condition Model.