Pragmatics - Volume 36, Issue 2, 2026

Drawing on Relevance Theory, the paper sketches out a framework that accounts for inference-making in creative multimodal texts, taking advocacy campaign posters as its case study. The analysis shows that in each poster semiotic resources are employed to create a micro-narrative exemplifying actors affected by a sociopolitical problem, whose function is to create assumptions against which a higher-order intention is recognized. The text-internal relevance within the micro-narrative is optimized by combining verbal and visual elements to communicate multimodal explicatures and implicatures. The visual elements are employed to invoke non-propositional effects that activate perceptual mechanisms to maximize emotional attachment with the issue advocated for. These non-propositional effects communicated by visual connotation carriers are essential, rather than extra, elements, contributing to the understanding of the propositional meaning communicated at the text-external level. The analysis shows that an inferential approach to multimodality is indispensable to account for (non)propositional content across different modes.

The Gricean GCI-PCI divide has long been questioned in linguistic pragmatics. Taking Chinese méimù in the CCL corpus as the case, the present study proposes the cognition-pragmatics diachronic model to examine Grice’s GCI-PCI divide. It is found that with the frequency of repeated usage increasing over time, PCIs develop into GCIs; these two types of conversational implicatures are not easily divided. Semantic change from PCIs to GCIs is a dynamic process of cognition from individual entrenchment to collective conventionalization. By schematization and categorization, the former gradually builds an individual’s knowledge network with many entrenched PCI nodes, while the latter is reflected as sharing some parts of the individual’s knowledge network in the collective minds, i.e., the community’s knowledge network with some conventionalized GCI nodes, further forming socio-cultural conventions in a speech community. During this process, there is a division of labor between context and conventions. Therefore, the diachronic study sheds new light on the relationship between GCIs and PCIs.

Social media discourse is characterized by the post-truth phenomenon, in which feelings and personal beliefs appear to exert greater influence on shaping public opinions than truth. In such cases, the truth of news may be blurred and reported events are often reversed along revelations of the facts. Reverse news on social media is, in a sense, a typical instance of post-truth discourse. This study attempts to provide a corpus-based description of attitude appraisal and illocutionary acts in reverse news on social media, with the aim of investigating semantic and pragmatic properties of post-truth discourse. The corpora for this study consist of social media posts in Chinese and English about a defamation lawsuit, which were collected from Weibo and Facebook.

The results indicate that the English corpus emphasizes the use of appreciations and judgments with more complex co-occurring relations among three attitudinal domains while the Chinese corpus contains more judgments than appreciations and affects. Meanwhile, both corpora exhibit higher frequencies of assertives and expressives than the other acts, yet the Chinese corpus presents more complicated illocutionary act sequences than the English corpus. After the verdict, the frequencies of both attitude appraisal and illocutionary acts decrease in the Chinese corpus but increase in the English corpus. Based on this, we propose that the development of post-truth discourse may go through three functional stages: starting with expression, progressing to appeal, and ending with representation. The sequence of these stages may vary depending on sociocultural contexts.

It is widely acknowledged that subjective elements emerge in the initial position of an utterance, known as the left periphery, whereas intersubjective elements typically emerge in the final position, referred to as the right periphery. However, this functional asymmetry is not invariably maintained. This study advances the argument that the discourse marker well can serve a dual purpose, simultaneously expressing both a speaker’s subjectivity and intersubjectivity at the outset of an utterance, specifically on the left periphery. Essentially, well indexes the speaker’s subjectivity mediated through intersubjectivity. Additionally, the study explores the intricate relationship between intersubjectivity and the textual function of well as a discourse marker. This study reveals that intersubjective functions can contribute to the development of textual functions.

This research studies a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes the macro- and microstructure of their emails and their pragmatic competence. In order to study the features and context adequacy of their communication, a corpus of 135 emails written by fourth-year students was analysed to identify the uses and preferences concerning subject lines and opening and closing moves, and to investigate the uses and functions of strategies related to disagreement in their communication to a faculty member. Our results have reflected the obstacles that the vast majority of students manifest in the use of Spanish when it comes to adequately achieving their communicative purpose in a given context. Data also proved that the emails analysed were inappropriate due to insufficient mitigation, lack of acknowledgement of the imposition involved and lack of status-congruent language.