Pragmatics - Volume 35, Issue 4, 2025

This paper presents a study on the distribution of wh-clefts – i.e. those having a nominal phrase in the cleft constituent position – in a corpus of TV interviews spoken in Brazilian Portuguese. This language variety has three types of wh-clefts, dubbed canonical, reversed and extraposed, which are analyzed in three levels: the informational-structural level, regarding the types of focus patterns; the macro-discursive level, on how these constructions distribute into topical-chain segments; and the micro-discursive level, with special attention to the rhetorical relations connecting wh-clefts to their immediate contexts. Nevertheless, only the two first levels are crucial for assessing their distribution. We put forward that the results may be explained by the features [unexpectedness] and [topicality], distributed hierarchically, since the first one forces a contextual question to become explicit, as canonical wh-clefts are considered to embed a semi-rhetorical question. The conclusion is that the notion of ‘prominence’ can connect the various results.

This qualitative research is the first attempt to analyse differences in the interpretation of politically correct (PC) expressions by using relevance-theoretic and lexical pragmatics tools. The results suggest that PC language can be non-euphemistic and euphemism-based. Non-euphemistic PC expressions achieve relevance by explicitly communicating their lexically encoded conceptual content. Euphemism-based PC expressions become relevant by communicating some concepts and propositions that are not lexically encoded by them and are inferred logically from the utterance context or/and by accessing encyclopaedic information. These concepts and propositions constitute euphemistic meaning and are recovered at explicit and implicit levels, as well as with varying degrees of strength.

Persuasion is a well-documented language phenomenon in the fields of rhetoric, communication, and sociopsychology. However, there is still a need for further research into persuasion on social media from a pragmatic perspective. The current research contributes to the existing literature on persuasion, particularly in virtual environments, by examining the tactics of online persuasion with a dataset of 409 excerpts from WeChat Moments. It examines the frequency and percentage of persuasive strategies deployed by fourteen Chinese real estate agents. Additionally, a qualitative analysis of each tactic is conducted, supported by specific examples. The findings indicate that, in increasing order of frequency, persuasion attempts on the participants’ WeChat Moments are primarily realized through rational, ethos, and emotional appeals. The determinants of this strategic inclination are examined with respect to the anonymity afforded by the Internet, media effect, community of practice and Chinese cultural particulars.

Prior studies have focused on the prevalence, causes and impacts of patients’ negative emotions during doctor-patient communication. However, to date, there is a paucity of research focusing on doctors’ emotion-regulating strategies and their effects on online medical consultation (OMC). In this connection, drawing on the concept of extrinsic emotion regulation, this paper analyzes empirically the doctors’ strategies in regulating patients’ emotions and examines the effects based on data from Dingxiang Yisheng, one of the largest online medical consultation platforms in China. It is found that doctors deploy extensive discourse of relational work and diagnosis to regulate patients’ negative emotions. Comments from patients not only reveal the effectiveness of doctors’ strategies in alleviating negative emotions but also showcase that patients attribute the relief of their emotions to doctors’ expertise, attitude, response speed, and communication skills. All these findings contribute to theoretical insights into emotion regulation and have practical implications for online doctor-patient communication.

In this paper, we investigate crazy literature, a newly emerged genre on Chinese Internet in which posters portray themselves as being mentally instable or, simply, insane. Based on data collected from the Internet and findings from a survey of college students, we argue that the image created by crazy literature is best captured by the notion of mock self-impoliteness. That is, although the image of insanity is damaging to the self-face of the poster, the impolite self-image is a persona, not the real image, motivated by transactional effectiveness. In addition, crazy literature helps the blogger to appear humorous, to express their helplessness in vulnerable situations, and to gain a sense of belonging. Our paper, therefore, contributes to the pragmatics literature by drawing scholars’ attention to a (possibly) hitherto non-existent type of language use, offering an analysis of the genre that is innovative, and demonstrating a need for investigating Internet pragmatics seriously.

The present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew media talk and pays particular attention to its coordination with co-expressive verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources. Drawing on the interactional approach to language and embodied action, the study demonstrates that EC can convey four contextual meanings — concentration, hedging, negation, and totality — depending on the context in which it occurs and the verbal material with which it is co-produced. The paper proposes that these contextual meanings are derived from the more general meaning of disengagement conveyed by EC. Moreover, the present paper suggests several potential semiotic connections between the basic physiological use of EC as a reflex of self-protection and evasion and its observed contextual meanings. This provides evidence for the co-optation of the basic functions of facial gestures for communicative purposes via metaphorical-metonymical extensions.