Pragmatics - Volume 34, Issue 1, 2024

Employing a cross-generational perspective, this study attempts to deepen our understanding of the politeness strategies Saudi females use when responding to compliments in English from an English speaker. The study investigated how Saudi females from two generations respond to compliments in an educational setting in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Participants included sixty-two female undergraduate students and sixty-four female lecturers from one university in the KSA. Following a mixed methods approach, the study included two primary sources of data: a quantitative Discourse Completion Task questionnaire for eliciting compliment responses (CRs) from the two generations; and qualitative semi-structured interviews with six participants from each group. Findings indicate that participants from both groups tended to accept compliments although there was a tendency to question the sincerity of the compliments.

The Hebrew negation adverbial bilti ‘not’ seems to function very differently in Biblical Hebrew than it does in Contemporary Hebrew. This paper addresses this difference and discusses its evolution. The main question addressed in this paper is: How has Hebrew bilti, originally an exceptive marker (with sentential scoping), ended up functioning solely as a privative in contemporary Hebrew? First, this paper argues that the biblical usage of bilti was expanded and turned into a polyfunctional (or ‘polysemous’) item. This happened via a constructionalization process which led to grammatical changes (‘grammaticalization’): The initially implicated negation (via a generalized implicature) turned explicit (semantic). In addition, in Hebrew’s later periods, the usage of bilti was narrowed and it became a privative. Thus, firstly, a pragmatically motivated path of constructionalization of bilti in Biblical Hebrew is suggested. That is, the “pragmatic negation” that arose via a generalized implicature shifted to the semantic level (performing semantic negation, explicit negation). Secondly, bilti’s functions in post-biblical Hebrew periods are outlined, tracing its narrowing functions until its fixation in Contemporary Hebrew as a privative.

The few studies on Family Language Policy in Singapore (FLP) have generally focused on FLP in local and immigrant Chinese families. This article explores language policies that seem to undergird Singaporean-Japanese families’ language practices. In-depth interviews and observations with five such families showed that Japanese only functions as the language of communication between the Japanese parents and their children if parents have invoked particular language policies to support its transmission and use at home. For most families, English was the main medium of communication among family members. Language policies and practices in these families were heavily influenced by the value emplaced on each language within the parents’ linguistic repertoire and their beliefs regarding language learning.

This study examines the linguistic and discursive format as well as the functions of hypothetical quotations in everyday, informal conversations amongst Greek Cypriot friends. Drawing from a dataset of 270 minutes of naturally-occurring conversations, this study documents the linguistic format of sixty-one hypothetical quotations and examines why speakers resort to formulating such quotations to begin with. To do so, Goffman’s (1981) work on footing and participation framework is employed along with an analysis of these quotations in interaction following the work of Goodwin (2007). This study shows that most instances of hypothetical quotations are formulated as direct quotations. There can be both self- and other-quotations, and the quotative can take various forms. Hypothetical quotations serve an array of discursive functions, such as showing the listener’s involvement in an interaction, creating humour, supporting one’s argument or refuting the argument of the other, in line with other studies in the literature.

This study explores the role of cross-speaker repetition in creating interpersonal connections between interactants in Japanese. The analysis focuses on Japanese non-reciprocal conversations between senpai ‘senior’ and kōhai ‘junior’ interactants, where the kōhai are normatively expected to speak using the honorific desu/masu markers. The analysis demonstrates that in such conversations, the kōhai sometimes drop the honorific markers while repeating the senpai’s utterances, thereby momentarily transcending the vertical boundary separating them from the senpai. Two types of plain form repetition are presented: (1) the kōhai repeat the senpai’s funny and/or questionable comments to savor the expressions, and (2) the kōhai repeat the senpai’s ideas, wishes or assessments to synchronize with the senpai. The analysis explicates how cross-speaker repetition allows the kōhai to drop the honorific markers in a way that is acceptable to the senpai. This study underscores the significance of the cross-speaker repetition device for creating harmonious relationships in Japanese.

In the age of Internet communication, car sharing as well as other types of sharing (accommodation, offices, etc.) has led to the emergence of the so-called sharing economy platforms, such as BlaBlaCar. Previous studies have demonstrated that millennials (i.e., those born between 1981 and 1999) are the most representative generational cohort regarding their interests in activities organized around BlaBlaCar and similar sites (Činjarević, Kožo and Berberović 2019). One direct consequence of this fact is that the way in which millennials communicate in this particular affinity space (Gee 2005; Jenkins 2006) may be highly informative of their discursive identities (Bucholtz and Hall 2005).

Against this backdrop, this study examines 1,000 online reviews taken from www.BlablaCar.es, in order to, first, understand how millennials conceptualize their experiences in BlaBlaCar; second, examine how identity emerges through labels and implicatures (Bucholtz and Hall 2005); and third, discuss and understand the relationship between the discourse identity shaped in BlaBlaCar reviews and millennials’ social identity. The findings reveal that BlaBlaCar reviews are highly informative of users’ identities and their relational needs. Also, these reviews no longer comply with traditional definitions of ‘consumer reviews’, and a re-conceptualization is needed.