Pragmatics - Volume 35, Issue 3, 2025

This paper uses interactional data to investigate the acoustic characteristics of polite or deferential speech in Korean. We asked fourteen Korean speakers to perform two tasks with two different interlocutors: a status superior and a friend. Consistent with previous studies of non-interactional data, deferential speech has lower pitch and shimmer, and quieter final syllables. However, divergent from previous studies, deferential speech featured higher jitter (in some locations), higher shimmer and higher H1-H2 (on one task). Through analysis of different locations in prosodic structure, we found that females used more pitch variation on final syllables in deferential speech. We argue that these mixed results show the importance of context in signalling vocal politeness, and also complexities of using interactional data. The findings advance the study of multimodal politeness beyond the analysis of experimental data.

Since Iran’s 1979 revolution, Sanctions Against Iran (SAI) has been one of the most crucial issues concerning Iran and the US’ relationships, and both parties employ different metaphors to depict the situation in line with their own ideologies. This study explored the conceptual metaphors (CM) concerning the sanctions against Iran in two corpora of the editorials and news extracted from an international American newspaper (New York Times) and a local Iranian English press (Iran Daily). Following Charteris-Black’s (2004) framework for Critical Metaphor Analysis, sixty editorial news texts (thirty for each), since 2013 until 2021, were scrutinized for the CMs in the two corpora. The findings revealed that although both newspapers took advantage of the metaphors in description of the sanctions against Iran, there were significant differences between them in the employment of the CMs. The American newspaper enjoyed more frequent and diverse metaphors to represent the sanctions compared to the Iranian newspaper, and “SAI is a pain/illness” (22.7%) was the most frequent conceptual metaphor in the New York Times whereas “SAI is a human” (32.4%) and “SAI is a journey” (18.9%) were the common metaphors in Iran Daily. The results suggest how language could be manipulated to serve different purposes.

The Colloquial Singapore English or Singlish particle hor has been observed to convey different pragmatic effects when pronounced with either a rising or falling intonation contour. In this paper, I propose, using a relevance-theoretic framework, that hor encodes the procedural content that the proposition it marks is accessible to the addressee, i.e. it can be readily recalled by the addressee. Pronouncing hor with a rising or falling intonational contour then indicates that this procedural content should be interpreted as a question or directive respectively – a rising contour indicates a check on whether the hor-marked proposition is accessible to the addressee, while a falling contour indicates an instruction to the addressee to make the hor-marked proposition accessible. This analysis also accounts for hor’s unacceptability with directives that seek to impose a new obligation on the addressee that requires immediate action, which has not been previously observed in the literature.

This study explores compliments given by judges to contestants on the TV talent show Arab Idol. A total of 120 comments from the third season 2014–2015 were analyzed for compliment types, structures, lexicon, and supportive remarks. Spenser-Oatey’s (2000, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2008) rapport management theory was employed to determine how judges managed rapport with contestants through compliments. The analysis shows that the majority of judges’ compliments on the show were explicit compliments that were based on three syntactic patterns and four types of positive semantic carriers conveying complimenting adjectives, verbs, nouns, and adverbs. A smaller category of implicit compliments involved such strategies as comparison/contrast, rhetorical questions, and praising contestant’s country. Both categories were typically qualified by supportive or weakening elements such as repetition, encouragement, and criticism, resulting in a third category of ‘macro-compliments’. The study shows that rapport management accounts to a large extent for the judges’ complimenting behavior.

This paper explores the use of the non-lexical schwa-like sound öö in three Hungarian self-initiated same-turn self-repair phenomena, namely, searching, replacing, and searching converted into aborting. Since self-repair inherently prevents the turn from progressing towards possible completion, by deploying the non-lexical öö in the course of the three repair operations, speakers can vocalize and promise continuation without producing lexical elements. Öö thus serves as a delaying technique and an indication that the speaker is aware of the obligation to make the unit-under-way recognizably complete, and is ready to satisfy this obligation. When the turn-in-progress is halted and verbally marked with öö in the course of the three repair operations under investigation, the speaker displays to the other participants that the turn is problematic in some respects, but she is ready to attend to the problem in order to produce a recognizably complete action.

“Egocentrism” in communication usually refers to the fact that interlocutors are subconsciously influenced by their cognitive environment. However, being egocentric may be the product of the interlocutors’ conscious choice rather than the unavoidable impact of cognitive experience. In order to explore some emotive conflicts during the fight against COVID-19 in China, this study distinguishes active egocentrism from passive egocentrism. We further contend that the interplay of the cognitive environment and the active assessment of social context differ in speaker processing and hearer processing, which may result in emotive miscommunications. The facets of the actual social context assessed by interlocutors are also investigated to explain the formation of active egocentrism.