Pragmatics - Online First

This study investigated how the gender of the contestants in TV talent competitions affects male and female judges’ management of their advice, exemplified by evaluative talks in two Taiwan-based talent contests. In addition to the pragmatic configuration of the advising acts, the internal and external modifiers of the advising speech events were also analyzed in an attempt to gain insights into whether and how the advice messages are instrumental in the construction of gender identities. Results showed that deviating from the stereotypical gendered style of communication, the female judges utilized significantly fewer politeness mechanisms than did their male counterparts to moderate their advice. Besides, the psychological needs and face want of the male and female advice-receivers remarkably influenced the discursive moves of the given advice comments. These findings suggested that in the public media discourse, the speech context outweighs the socially prescribed gendered styles of communication on one’s advice-giving behavior.

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.

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.

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 study focuses on one type of audible gesture, designedly single claps (DSCs), as used by different people at an educational institution. The institution is designed to provide second language English users with opportunities to use English in various situations. Through the use of Multimodal Conversation Analysis, the analysis first focuses on the shape of DSCs and what makes them visible as not projecting further claps. Next, the analysis focuses on how DSCs are used within their sequential context. DSCs can take a variety of shapes, in that there are different ways not to project further claps; they can be used to attract attention of multiple recipients, and thus as one resource to manage interaction; and they are used as such a resource by representatives of the educational institution, who take on teacher roles within the interaction, with responsibility and deontic authority to manage shifts in activity and participation framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the forms and functions of answers to proposals for joint action, implemented through polar interrogatives, in Greek telephone calls. Our analysis indicates a distinct functional distribution of three types of accepting answers to such proposals. Particle-type answers do ‘simple’ acceptance of the proposal, i.e. they only display the respondent’s willingness to take on the proposed action and nothing else, while repetition-type answers display the speaker’s epistemic/deontic stance towards additional aspects of the proposal. With a third type of responses, speakers accept the proposal in a mitigated manner. Our findings align with Enfield et al.’s (2019) conclusion that particles serve as pragmatically unmarked polar answers. They do not, however, evince the prevalence of this type of answer to proposals to the same extent as to epistemically oriented polar interrogatives.