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Pragmatics - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
1 - 20 of 30 results
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“Why we are voting Biden-Harris” : A multimodal cohesion analysis of the Democratic party’s 2020 Presidential Campaign ads
Author(s): Ana Belén Cabrejas-PeñuelasAvailable online: 07 February 2025More LessAbstractThe present study explores how text-image cohesion is achieved in a dataset of thirty-seven political ads in the playlist “Why we are voting Biden-Harris,” which is part of the 2020 Biden for President Campaign. A further objective is to analyze how multimodal cohesion contributes to persuasion in political campaign ads. Using methods from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Hasan 1976) and multimodal views of cohesion (Tseng 2013; Bateman 2014), both quantitative and qualitative results are obtained. The quantitative results reveal that most cohesive types are of the lexical type, followed by referential, conjunction, ellipsis, and substitution. Also, the visual and verbal chains outnumber the audio chains and, thus, they are responsible for cohesion in the ads. The qualitative results show that multimodal cohesion is a powerful tool for supporting persuasion in political campaigns by appealing to emotions, a hypothetical future, rationality, voices of expertise, and altruism (Reyes 2011).
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Delineating how PCIs develop into GCIs from a cognition-pragmatics diachronic perspective : A case study of Chinese méimù
Author(s): Nina Liang, Yanfei Zhang and Yuan ZhangAvailable online: 21 January 2025More LessAbstractThe 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.
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Dual function of (inter)subjectivity in the use of well as a discourse marker
Author(s): Ryo TakamuraAvailable online: 20 January 2025More LessAbstractIt 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.
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Semantic and pragmatic properties of post-truth discourse : A description of reverse news on social media
Author(s): Zhonggang Sang and Tongtong ShiAvailable online: 17 January 2025More LessAbstractSocial 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.
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Blended origo — Deixis in virtual reality
Author(s): Karsten SenkbeilAvailable online: 16 January 2025More LessAbstractStudies 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.
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“What are you talking about? That is not true” — Men’s and women’s disagreements in English and Italian interactions
Author(s): Vittorio NapoliAvailable online: 16 January 2025More LessAbstractThe 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.
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Tracing relevance beyond codes and across modes : A multimodal pragmatic analysis of children’s rights advocacy campaign posters
Author(s): Turath Awad Al Tamimi and Thulfiqar H. AltahmaziAvailable online: 16 January 2025More LessAbstractDrawing 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.
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Loan words can cause intercultural miscommunication : The case of Hebrew shahid
Author(s): Sandy HabibAvailable online: 16 January 2025More LessAbstractThis 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.
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Indexing a withdrawal from one’s previously-taken position : Using the multiple saying duì duì duì in Mandarin Chinese conversation
Author(s): Shuling Zhang and Mengying QiuAvailable online: 20 December 2024More LessAbstractUsing conversation analysis as the research method, this article investigates what participants do with the multiple saying duì duì duì (‘right right right’) when they take divergent positions in Mandarin Chinese conversation. A participant may deploy duì duì duì to claim recalibrating understanding, which indexes a backdown or withdrawal from a previously-taken position. There are two trajectories to make such concessions. One is “Claim X — Concession (duì duì duì) — Claim Y”, with Y taking the co-participant’s perspective into account and duì duì duì serving as a pivot for the new Claim Y. The other is “Claim X — Concession (duì duì duì)”, in which conceding means abandoning. Through these trajectories, participants find out something different and implicate that their prior action is problematic due to not taking something into account, so they concede and change. This article will contribute to both concession and multiple sayings studies.
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Claims of not-knowing as patients’ responses in psychodynamic psychotherapy
Author(s): Carolina FennerAvailable online: 16 December 2024More LessAbstractA 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.
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Quotation headlines in the printed British quality press : (Re-)contextualisation meets entextualisation
Author(s): Anita FetzerAvailable online: 12 December 2024More LessAbstractNews 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.
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The sociopragmatic dimension of language use and evaluations of interactional behaviour : A cross-cultural investigation of Italian and British-English speakers’ perceptions
Author(s): Valentina BartaliAvailable online: 14 November 2024More LessAbstractCulture 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.
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Crazy literature : A case of mock self-impoliteness
Author(s): Shiyu Liu, Rong Chen and Fengguang LiuAvailable online: 18 October 2024More LessAbstractIn this paper, we investigate crazy literature, a newly emerged genre on Chinese Internet in which posters portray themselves as being mentally instable or, simply, insane. Based on data collected from the Internet and findings from a survey of college students, we argue that the image created by crazy literature is best captured by the notion of mock self-impoliteness. That is, although the image of insanity is damaging to the self-face of the poster, the impolite self-image is a persona, not the real image, motivated by transactional effectiveness. In addition, crazy literature helps the blogger to appear humorous, to express their helplessness in vulnerable situations, and to gain a sense of belonging. Our paper, therefore, contributes to the pragmatics literature by drawing scholars’ attention to a (possibly) hitherto non-existent type of language use, offering an analysis of the genre that is innovative, and demonstrating a need for investigating Internet pragmatics seriously.
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Eye closures in spoken Hebrew : Conversational functions and meaning semiosis
Author(s): Leon ShorAvailable online: 15 October 2024More LessAbstractThe present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew media talk and pays particular attention to its coordination with co-expressive verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources. Drawing on the interactional approach to language and embodied action, the study demonstrates that EC can convey four contextual meanings — concentration, hedging, negation, and totality — depending on the context in which it occurs and the verbal material with which it is co-produced. The paper proposes that these contextual meanings are derived from the more general meaning of disengagement conveyed by EC. Moreover, the present paper suggests several potential semiotic connections between the basic physiological use of EC as a reflex of self-protection and evasion and its observed contextual meanings. This provides evidence for the co-optation of the basic functions of facial gestures for communicative purposes via metaphorical-metonymical extensions.
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Brazilian Portuguese wh-clefts in a multilevel analytic perspective
Author(s): Aroldo Andrade and Juliano Desiderato AntonioAvailable online: 10 October 2024More LessAbstractThis paper presents a study on the distribution of wh-clefts – i.e. those having a nominal phrase in the cleft constituent position – in a corpus of TV interviews spoken in Brazilian Portuguese. This language variety has three types of wh-clefts, dubbed canonical, reversed and extraposed, which are analyzed in three levels: the informational-structural level, regarding the types of focus patterns; the macro-discursive level, on how these constructions distribute into topical-chain segments; and the micro-discursive level, with special attention to the rhetorical relations connecting wh-clefts to their immediate contexts. Nevertheless, only the two first levels are crucial for assessing their distribution. We put forward that the results may be explained by the features [unexpectedness] and [topicality], distributed hierarchically, since the first one forces a contextual question to become explicit, as canonical wh-clefts are considered to embed a semi-rhetorical question. The conclusion is that the notion of ‘prominence’ can connect the various results.
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Towards a distinction between non-euphemistic and euphemism-based politically correct expressions : A relevance-theoretic perspective
Author(s): Tatiana GolubevaAvailable online: 03 September 2024More LessAbstractThis qualitative research is the first attempt to analyse differences in the interpretation of politically correct (PC) expressions by using relevance-theoretic and lexical pragmatics tools. The results suggest that PC language can be non-euphemistic and euphemism-based. Non-euphemistic PC expressions achieve relevance by explicitly communicating their lexically encoded conceptual content. Euphemism-based PC expressions become relevant by communicating some concepts and propositions that are not lexically encoded by them and are inferred logically from the utterance context or/and by accessing encyclopaedic information. These concepts and propositions constitute euphemistic meaning and are recovered at explicit and implicit levels, as well as with varying degrees of strength.
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China’s real estate agents’ persuasion realizations on WeChat Moments
Author(s): Jianyou He and Dengshan XiaAvailable online: 22 July 2024More LessAbstractPersuasion is a well-documented language phenomenon in the fields of rhetoric, communication, and sociopsychology. However, there is still a need for further research into persuasion on social media from a pragmatic perspective. The current research contributes to the existing literature on persuasion, particularly in virtual environments, by examining the tactics of online persuasion with a dataset of 409 excerpts from WeChat Moments. It examines the frequency and percentage of persuasive strategies deployed by fourteen Chinese real estate agents. Additionally, a qualitative analysis of each tactic is conducted, supported by specific examples. The findings indicate that, in increasing order of frequency, persuasion attempts on the participants’ WeChat Moments are primarily realized through rational, ethos, and emotional appeals. The determinants of this strategic inclination are examined with respect to the anonymity afforded by the Internet, media effect, community of practice and Chinese cultural particulars.
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“It’s nothing serious, take it easy” : Chinese doctors’ emotion-regulating discourses on the online medical consultation websites
Author(s): Qingsheng Jiang, Yansheng Mao and Yihang WangAvailable online: 10 June 2024More LessAbstractPrior studies have focused on the prevalence, causes and impacts of patients’ negative emotions during doctor-patient communication. However, to date, there is a paucity of research focusing on doctors’ emotion-regulating strategies and their effects on online medical consultation (OMC). In this connection, drawing on the concept of extrinsic emotion regulation, this paper analyzes empirically the doctors’ strategies in regulating patients’ emotions and examines the effects based on data from Dingxiang Yisheng, one of the largest online medical consultation platforms in China. It is found that doctors deploy extensive discourse of relational work and diagnosis to regulate patients’ negative emotions. Comments from patients not only reveal the effectiveness of doctors’ strategies in alleviating negative emotions but also showcase that patients attribute the relief of their emotions to doctors’ expertise, attitude, response speed, and communication skills. All these findings contribute to theoretical insights into emotion regulation and have practical implications for online doctor-patient communication.
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Metaphors to describe sanctions against Iran in American and Iranian newspapers
Author(s): Rasoul Mohammad Hosseinpur and Mahdi MansouriAvailable online: 14 May 2024More LessAbstractSince Iran’s 1979 revolution, Sanctions Against Iran (SAI) has been one of the most crucial issues concerning Iran and the US’ relationships, and both parties employ different metaphors to depict the situation in line with their own ideologies. This study explored the conceptual metaphors (CM) concerning the sanctions against Iran in two corpora of the editorials and news extracted from an international American newspaper (New York Times) and a local Iranian English press (Iran Daily). Following Charteris-Black’s (2004) framework for Critical Metaphor Analysis, sixty editorial news texts (thirty for each), since 2013 until 2021, were scrutinized for the CMs in the two corpora. The findings revealed that although both newspapers took advantage of the metaphors in description of the sanctions against Iran, there were significant differences between them in the employment of the CMs. The American newspaper enjoyed more frequent and diverse metaphors to represent the sanctions compared to the Iranian newspaper, and “SAI is a pain/illness” (22.7%) was the most frequent conceptual metaphor in the New York Times whereas “SAI is a human” (32.4%) and “SAI is a journey” (18.9%) were the common metaphors in Iran Daily. The results suggest how language could be manipulated to serve different purposes.
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A relevance-theoretic analysis of Colloquial Singapore English hor
Author(s): Junwen LeeAvailable online: 14 May 2024More LessAbstractThe Colloquial Singapore English or Singlish particle hor has been observed to convey different pragmatic effects when pronounced with either a rising or falling intonation contour. In this paper, I propose, using a relevance-theoretic framework, that hor encodes the procedural content that the proposition it marks is accessible to the addressee, i.e. it can be readily recalled by the addressee. Pronouncing hor with a rising or falling intonational contour then indicates that this procedural content should be interpreted as a question or directive respectively – a rising contour indicates a check on whether the hor-marked proposition is accessible to the addressee, while a falling contour indicates an instruction to the addressee to make the hor-marked proposition accessible. This analysis also accounts for hor’s unacceptability with directives that seek to impose a new obligation on the addressee that requires immediate action, which has not been previously observed in the literature.
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Pragmatic markers
Author(s): Bruce Fraser
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Learning to think for speaking
Author(s): Dan I. Slobin
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Language ideology
Author(s): Kathryn A. Woolard
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