Pragmatics - Current Issue

Over the last decade there has been growing relevance-theoretic interest in the interpretation of creative metaphors. Much of this interest has focused on non-propositional aspects of interpretation: mental image effects/emotive effects. Central to this enquiry is the following question: are non-propositional effects essential to the metaphorical interpretation process? The implications of answering this question are important, since, if the answer is positive, then the delivery of metaphorical interpretation depends, not only on utterance processing, but also on the hearer’s formation of mental images as well as emotive experience. Relevance-theoretic studies argue that mental images do not fulfill an essential role in the metaphorical interpretation process. While the supporting evidence is solid, it requires experimental substantiation. The current paper responds to this requirement, taking on board emotive effects, too, apart from mental images. Ultimately, the current work concludes that the role of non-propositional effects in metaphorical interpretation is not essential.

Pragmatic markers are recognised to be a fundamental aspect of spoken language, in particular conversation, as they allow the processing of information within a specific context by providing the addressee with cues on how to interpret utterances. As far as audiovisual dialogue is concerned, pragmatic markers are considered as a hallmark of naturalness and orality which is fundamental to ensure the audience’s immersion in the world represented on screen. Thanks to both distributional and translation-oriented analysis of corpus data, the paper aims to compare the use of pragmatic markers in anglophone, dubbed Italian and original Italian film dialogues as well as highlight the strategies employed in translating English pragmatic markers into dubbed Italian.

This paper examines notices with a directive function that have been translated from Greek into English in the public spaces of Thessaloniki. In particular, it explores the ways in which Greek politeness is expressed and how this politeness is rendered in the English translation of the original Greek texts. The paper uses photographic data collected in 2020. Using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) concept of face, the methodology used is a combination of the qualitative ethnographic approach employed in contemporary linguistic landscape research and Bourdieu’s habitus approach used in the sociology of translation. The analysis shows that the translations examined often retain aspects of Greek politeness strategies, affecting the message of the English target text to varying degrees.

With the stride of technology, new media and online communication bring innovative language phenomena to the fore, in particular, the spread of internet buzzwords. In 2021, the internet buzzword juejuezi gathered momentum on the internet. Enlightened by this online catchword, this paper investigates the popularity behind “xx-zi” and its three types of word-formation, then takes juejuezi derived from “adj.+zi” as the example, conducting a qualitative encoding and analysis of the posts sourced from Weibo based on NVivo 20. Additionally, the study examines the specific pragmatic strategies, such as, praise, compliant and irony, embedded in the posts for further explicating how individuals employ juejuezi to express a chain of connotations in online communication. Notably, the internet buzzword provides channels to mirror the discourse ecology of the internet era, the public’s attitudes and behaviors regarding to shifts of politics, economy and culture change, thus providing a supplement for further research on internet buzzwords.

This article aims to develop an analysis of scrambling or word order variation in Korean from a pragmatic/cognitive perspective. Although extensive research has been carried out on this issue, most extant research attempts to provide analyses of the phenomenon by identifying grammatical features posited for syntactic operations. Unlike the previous research, we demonstrate that word order variation needs to be understood with respect to its communicative function; it is motivated by the speaker’s intention to convey information more effectively. It is emphasized that understanding the association between information structure and word order variation should be an essential task for the analysis of the latter phenomenon. We further discuss five conversational strategies that motivate non-canonical word orders, which include juxtaposition, backmasking, right dislocation, add-on, and floated quantifier strategies.

This cross-sectional study explores the phrase jag tänker ‘I think/cogitate’ in Swedish talk-in-interaction and compares it with two similar phrases, jag tycker ‘I think/find’ and jag tror ‘I think/believe/guess’. It consists of a quantitative overview of the three phrases and a qualitative, interactionally informed analysis of jag tänker in task-based group conversations with L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish. The results show that jag tänker has a stance-taking function in L1 interactions and projects more talk, which typically accounts for the reasoning behind the point the speaker is making. However, the L2 speakers do not use jag tänker as a stance-taking phrase; instead, they may deploy jag tror or jag tycker to project turns that accomplish similar actions to those that the L1 speakers accomplish with jag tänker.