Pragmatics - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2026

Culture can influence how people communicate and the reasons behind linguistic choices. However, the evaluative process has been mostly neglected, particularly in comparative studies. This paper aims to fill this gap. It compares how two sets of participants, Italian and British-English speakers, rated own/others’ performances in roleplays involving different request scenarios and it unpacks how their perceptions of sociopragmatic variables, such as social distance and request’s weight, influenced their evaluation process. Follow-up retrospective interviews were employed and content-analysed, to unpack participants’ evaluations. The results showed cross-cultural differences in importance, interpretation and expectations attached to different variables and underlying values.

A fundamental aspect of psychotherapeutic conversation is the joint work of therapist and patient on articulating something previously hidden or repressed. If the patient refuses to comply with the therapist’s questions or suggestions, such cooperative work is limited. A possible non-cooperative response by the patient is the claim of not-knowing. This study examines conversation analytically, using video recordings of German-speaking outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapies, how patients express two different claims of not-knowing (German ich weiß nicht (‘I don’t know’) and keine Ahnung (‘no idea’)) as a response to a question. The analysis results in four different functions: refusing to answer, indexing difficulties, projecting continuation, and disconfirming, which can only be determined by means of the context and not the structure of ich weiß nicht or keine Ahnung. Some of the outlined functions might be context-specific for (psychodynamic) psychotherapy.

News discourse comes along with the presumption of newsworthiness, and this also holds for one of its constitutive parts: headlines. This paper adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective to the formatting and discursive function of quotation headlines in the printed British quality press. It addresses (1) the constitutive parts and felicity conditions of quotation; (2) its linguistic formatting as direct, indirect, scare, mixed and mixed type, and its signalling with metadata, and (3) its uptake and (re)contextualisation in the news story. In the data, quotation headlines are signalled linguistically with quotatives and typographically with single quotation marks, colons or empty spaces. Their uptake in the news story is signalled with double typographic quotation marks and supplemented with metadata (participants, local, temporal and discursive coordinates). As for their discursive functions, quotations not only import context into the news discourse, but their mention also implies that some prior, taken-for-granted contextualisation requires re-negotiation.

This paper explores the semantics and pragmatics of the Hebrew word shahid (שהיד). Because this word was borrowed from Arabic, its meaning is compared to that of Arabic shahīd (شهيد) ‘roughly, martyr.’ Using corpus analysis and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method, the meaning of the Hebrew loan word is explicated, and its explication is compared to that of Arabic shahīd. The two explications demonstrate that the differences between the two words are greater than the similarities. Consequently, when Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs use the words interchangeably, intercultural miscommunication is highly likely to occur.

The present research aims to uncover cross-linguistic differences (involving British English and Italian), as well as cross-gender differences (men and women) concerning use and preference of strategies and pragmatic modification, in verbal disagreements. The analysis of spontaneous conversations from the Spoken BNC2014 corpus (McEnery et al. 2017), for the English sample, and from the KIParla corpus (Goria and Mauri 2018), for the Italian sample, has brought to light divergences in the realization of disagreements, both at the cross-linguistic and at the cross-gender level. Methodologically speaking, models of analysis used for past empirical studies (Muntigl and Turnbull 1998; Rees-Miller 2000; Johnson 2006; Paramasivam 2007) were drawn from for the annotation and codification of strategies and pragmatic modifiers. Results obtained from quantitative analyses are explained in the light of previous research findings, although the latter are partially disconfirmed and thus call for further future investigations.

Studies on communication in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) have shown that the immersive qualities of VR — the sense of presence, and a sense of embodiment through increasingly realistic motion tracking and avatars — have an impact on verbal communicative interactions in the new medium. Misunderstandings and moments of linguistic creativity are observable, and many of them revolve around ambivalent locations, doubled ‘bodies’, and issues while coordinating attention, i.e.: they concern deixis. This paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis of deictic terms in verbal interactions in SVR. It demonstrates that the unusual communicative circumstances in immersive VR directly affect a speaker’s origo, the deictic zero-point of orientation in space and time. This paper concludes that the term blended origo may serve as an analytical concept to understand deixis while SVR users communicatively interact in two ‘realities’ simultaneously.