Pragmatics - Online First

Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N-resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.

This study examines the question types, witness responses, and Gricean maxim violations in Filipino and English courtrooms and analyzes how language mediates legal power and evidentiary control. Both languages employ open-ended questions in direct examination and closed-ended ones in cross-examination. Filipino transcripts exhibit five hybrid question forms absent in English, reflecting heightened institutional asymmetry, especially in courts with no interpreters. These structures exacerbate power asymmetry between the witness and interrogator. Witness responses include clarification, compliance, and two newly identified types: complete and incomplete. The maxim of quantity is most frequently violated in both languages through open-ended questions, leading to overinformative responses. Violations of manner, relevance, and quality reflect cognitive strain and institutional pressure. Findings call for a forensic pragmatics lens to examine how courtroom discourse operates under institutional constraints and attest that the courtroom is not a neutral vehicle for truth but a discursive battleground that reflects linguistic asymmetries and institutional power.

This study investigates the conceptual semantics of the English verb speak, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to semantic analysis. The analysis is corpus-assisted, relying mainly on two corpora: one very large (enTenTen21, more than fifty-two billion words), the other small and purpose-built (about 500 ‘speak’ sentences from twelve recent novels). Using the traditional “definitional” criterion for polysemy, the analysis recognises four senses of English speak, which form a polysemic web or network of meanings and usages. A range of supporting lexicogrammatical evidence is adduced, such as the proposed polysemic meanings having distinctive morphosyntactic properties, collocational profiles, and associated derivatives and phraseology. The paper also raises an ethnoaxiological question for linguistics as a discipline: To what extent has the discourse of mainstream Western linguistics been guided or shaped by an Anglo-English metapragmatic model of speaking, whereby “saying” is framed as individual, purposeful, contentful, and oral/aural?

This paper explores whether denial strategies can rebuild public trust, using evidence from a hospital’s statement regarding cancer incidents in its laboratory. A discourse analysis of the hospital’s statement reveals that explicit and implicit denial strategies are used to rebuild public trust. Specifically, the hospital uses explicit denial to refute the identity or severity of the affected individuals. Besides, the hospital uses implicit denial to construct a trustworthy image of ability, transparency, and benevolence, thereby addressing public concerns. Further experimental studies indicate that neither explicit nor implicit denial alone is sufficient to rebuild trust. Instead, a combination of both strategies is essential for effectively rebuilding trust. Based on these findings, this paper offers suggestions for rebuilding public trust.

This study investigates advice-giving during Chinese New Year family celebrations when older relatives tend to provide unsolicited advice for younger family members. First, we consider New Year advice featured in social media recordings through the lens of interaction ritual, using a corpus of TikTok videos. Second, we investigate how older and younger evaluators assess behaviours in such mediatised events. We found that the behaviour of older family members has typical ritual features: it is conventionalised in a frame, it unfolds according to conventionalised topics, it triggers self-display and it  enhances rapport between older participants. This analysis has also shown that young participants never explicitly accept the advice of their elders. The results of the second step showed that all evaluators assessed the behaviour of older participants as acceptable. However, when it comes to the behaviour of younger participants, older evaluators mostly found it unacceptable, whereas young evaluators endorsed it.

This paper presents a study examining the pragmatic strategies employed by Zeng Guofan in his renowned family letters to craft qici (启辞, ‘salutation’), as well as the potential relationship between social hierarchies and the specific wording used in these opening phrases. The study reveals that, across 1,449 letters containing salutations, Zeng Guofan deployed seven distinct patterns of salutation. Significant differences were observed in his use of third-person address terms, ticheng yu (提称语, ‘elevated address terms’), verbs, self-address terms, and expressions of good wishes and well-being, depending on the recipient of the letter. These variations suggest clear metapragmatic efforts to maintain respect and deference in his communications, providing evidence that certain patterns of polite salutations were shaped by the perceived social status between the addresser and the addressee in ancient China.

Research on self-disclosure is well-established in psychology and communication studies; however, unprompted self-disclosure as an action in conversation has not received as much attention. First encounters are often marked by social uncertainty, and self-disclosure plays a crucial role in facilitating conversation. Using a qualitative approach informed by insights from pragmatics and Conversation Analysis, and complemented by an analysis of frequencies of acts performed in conversation, this study analyzed video conference recordings of twenty-two dyads of unacquainted international postgraduate students in Malaysian universities. This paper describes how interlocutors use unprompted self-disclosure as interactional strategy in first encounters, focusing on the patterns of self-disclosure that emerge and the functions they serve. The findings extend understanding of how interactants navigate epistemic territories to achieve interactional goals in initial conversations, where knowledge about one another is limited.

This article develops a pragmatic model for the analysis of emotion in socio-cultural contexts and applies it to the study of the messages written on David Bowie’s mural/memorial in London. The data consists of 584 messages written and drawn on the mural between February and December 2016, after the artist’s death. The model allows for the analysis of the semiotic resources used for the expression of emotive pragmatic acts and their intensification. Results show that all the messages contain emotive pragmatic acts, which include the expression of emotions such as love and missing, the expression of good wishes, blessing, thanking, praise, commitment to remembrance and tribute. Emotive pragmatic acts are expressed mostly verbally but also visually. Emotion is more frequently expressed covertly by figurative means and evoking positive connotations. Emotion is intensified by recurrent lexical (hyperbole) and non-lexical (orthographic, grammatical) means.

This study sets out to discuss the distribution and linguistic features of hedging strategy, investigating how they are realized in L1 English, English as a lingua franca (ELF), and L1 Chinese within the academic spoken genre. To this end, a systematic procedure for identifying hedging devices was developed, applied to two languages and an international variety. Results indicate functional diversity in hedging conventions, with L1 English exhibiting a colloquial propensity compared to ELF and L1 Mandarin. Conversely, ELF speakers display the highest frequency of hedges but with less diversity. L1 Mandarin speakers show a preference for author-oriented hedges, while L1 English speakers favor audience-oriented ones. The findings are interpreted considering language differences, linguacultural practice, cognitive interpretations, and socio-pragmatic awareness within academic communities. The study also contributes to further discourse analysis and scholarly peer communication by highlighting the importance of hedging in usage-based research.

In the framework of the socio-cognitive approach, this article investigates how Chinese doctors’ use of metapragmatic expressions (MPEs) facilitates the construction of emergent common ground (ECG) in oncological consultations. Based on extracts from our medical corpus, this paper reveals that doctors primarily employ eight types of MPEs as ECG construction builders in interactions, i.e., commentaries, message glosses, evidentials, hedges, performatives, stance displayers, signaling expressions, and rapport indicators. It is found that oncologists use them to (1) construct ECG of information for clarifying the patients’ life-threatening condition, correcting patients’ misconceptions, and justifying treatment recommendations; and (2) construct ECG of (dis)affiliation for preemptively or retrospectively reconciling their institutional needs with the addressees’ emotional needs. This article aims to shed light on our understanding of the functioning mechanism of MPEs in ECG construction for the accomplishment of communicative tasks in highly sensitive Chinese oncological consultations.