Pragmatics - Volume 35, Issue 2, 2025

In this paper, we revisit the long-held assumption that the Chinese second-person V pronoun nin 您 is an essentially ‘deferential’ pronoun. We examine uses of nin in settings where disagreement occurs and where conventionally the T pronoun ni would be preferred. Our research follows a bipartite design. First, we used a Discourse Completion Test to discover under what circumstances Chinese speakers use nin if disagreement emerges. The results revealed that uses of nin in disagreements are preferred in informal computer-mediated communication and by members of the younger generation. Second, based on this outcome we examined naturally occurring uses of nin in online data featuring disagreement. Here we relied on an interactional approach, which helped us to identify patterns of uses of nin. The existence of patterns in seemingly ad hoc occurrences of online disagreement shows that expressing deference is not the only pragmatic function of nin.

Genre analyses of research articles (RAs) have identified types of communicative purposes or moves achieved in different sections. However, very few studies have explored why moves are sequenced in specific manners. This study examines how writers relate moves to be coherent in the conclusion section of fifty applied linguistics RAs. The analysis shows that the writers achieved different types of moves in a relational manner for specific rhetorical intentions. The majority presented a summary of the study or previous research trends as background information to guide readers to acknowledge the significance of the study or the findings they later indicated. Some writers drew implications from findings of their studies they presented earlier to demonstrate the usefulness of the findings. Others provided recommendations for future studies based on the limitations of their studies that they indicated earlier to draw readers’ attention away from the limitations as potential weaknesses.

This longitudinal study examines the pragmatic development of Australian learners of Chinese in their use of internal modifiers of requests over the course of a semester. An eight-situation DCT was used to collect data. A perception questionnaire and informal interviews were also used to aid the interpretation of the data. Results indicate that despite considerable pragmalinguistic development in some areas, learners’ overall use of Chinese internal modifiers still lagged far behind that of native speakers. Moreover, there was only a little evidence of situational variation. Hence this study suggests the precedence of pragmalinguistic over sociopragmatic development. The study adds to the small but growing body of research on pragmatic development in L2 Chinese.

In this article, we ask how interlocutors proceed with their daily activities in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic when faced with new ways of communication due to social distancing and the use of face masks. We carried out a fine-grained analysis of different micropractices from daily work in a healthcare center in Brazil and built our analysis on multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), interactional linguistics (IC), as well as gesture studies (GS). The analysis revealed that particularly the following recurrent patterns seem to be characteristic for communication during the pandemic in the given microcontexts: (a) a high use of deictic gestures, (b) an intensification of prosodic means, (c) verbal strategies such as reformulation and repetition, (d) the integration of object manipulation and (e) mitigation strategies in case of new formats that imply intrusion such as controls at travel checkpoints.

The article examines the pragmatic functions of the Hebrew graphic laughter marker “hhh” in a particularly turbulent public-political discursive arena – online readers’ comments to Facebook posts by the two leading contenders for the post of Israeli prime minister during the 2020 election campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz.

We argue that “hhh” fulfills three functions dependent on its co-text, textual position, and length: (1) contempt marker – conveying contempt, ridicule, or disgust, towards a previous comment or post, their authors, or the associated political wing; (2) intention marker – signaling the employment of pragmatic strategies in the comment; and (3) interpretation marker – indicating the deciphering of pragmatic strategies in a previous post or comment.

The findings indicate that in all three categories “hhh” is used mainly to taunt the rival political wing, at times by creating an alliance with other commenters at the expense of their common rivals.

The study examines repair practices of speakers following an open class repair initiator (OCRI) in next turn in hospitality and tourism (HT) service encounters mediated through English as a lingua franca (ELF). The data comprise fifteen hours of naturally occurring ELF service encounters recorded at three HT sites in Thailand. Using conversation analytic procedures, the analysis reveals that speakers may offer multiple repair solutions following an OCRI, which appear oriented to a potential problem of understanding rather than one of hearing. The participants combine repetition of the trouble-source turn with comprehension-enhancing techniques such as lexical replacement, rephrasing of prior talk and explication of potentially problematic words. As it is pertinent that messages are accurately relayed and received, speakers adopt a proactive stance and combine repair practices to raise explicitness and improve communicative clarity. In ELF HT service encounters, the principle of increased collaborative effort prevails and underlies communicative effectiveness.