Pragmatics - Online First

Since 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.

This paper uses interactional data to investigate the acoustic characteristics of polite or deferential speech in Korean. We asked fourteen Korean speakers to perform two tasks with two different interlocutors: a status superior and a friend. Consistent with previous studies of non-interactional data, deferential speech has lower pitch and shimmer, and quieter final syllables. However, divergent from previous studies, deferential speech featured higher jitter (in some locations), higher shimmer and higher H1-H2 (on one task). Through analysis of different locations in prosodic structure, we found that females used more pitch variation on final syllables in deferential speech. We argue that these mixed results show the importance of context in signalling vocal politeness, and also complexities of using interactional data. The findings advance the study of multimodal politeness beyond the analysis of experimental data.

This paper explores the use of the non-lexical schwa-like sound öö in three Hungarian self-initiated same-turn self-repair phenomena, namely, searching, replacing, and searching converted into aborting. Since self-repair inherently prevents the turn from progressing towards possible completion, by deploying the non-lexical öö in the course of the three repair operations, speakers can vocalize and promise continuation without producing lexical elements. Öö thus serves as a delaying technique and an indication that the speaker is aware of the obligation to make the unit-under-way recognizably complete, and is ready to satisfy this obligation. When the turn-in-progress is halted and verbally marked with öö in the course of the three repair operations under investigation, the speaker displays to the other participants that the turn is problematic in some respects, but she is ready to attend to the problem in order to produce a recognizably complete action.

In this article, we ask how interlocutors proceed with their daily activities in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic when faced with new ways of communication due to social distancing and the use of face masks. We carried out a fine-grained analysis of different micropractices from daily work in a healthcare center in Brazil and built our analysis on multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), interactional linguistics (IC), as well as gesture studies (GS). The analysis revealed that particularly the following recurrent patterns seem to be characteristic for communication during the pandemic in the given microcontexts: (a) a high use of deictic gestures, (b) an intensification of prosodic means, (c) verbal strategies such as reformulation and repetition, (d) the integration of object manipulation and (e) mitigation strategies in case of new formats that imply intrusion such as controls at travel checkpoints.

Genre analyses of research articles (RAs) have identified types of communicative purposes or moves achieved in different sections. However, very few studies have explored why moves are sequenced in specific manners. This study examines how writers relate moves to be coherent in the conclusion section of fifty applied linguistics RAs. The analysis shows that the writers achieved different types of moves in a relational manner for specific rhetorical intentions. The majority presented a summary of the study or previous research trends as background information to guide readers to acknowledge the significance of the study or the findings they later indicated. Some writers drew implications from findings of their studies they presented earlier to demonstrate the usefulness of the findings. Others provided recommendations for future studies based on the limitations of their studies that they indicated earlier to draw readers’ attention away from the limitations as potential weaknesses.

This longitudinal study examines the pragmatic development of Australian learners of Chinese in their use of internal modifiers of requests over the course of a semester. An eight-situation DCT was used to collect data. A perception questionnaire and informal interviews were also used to aid the interpretation of the data. Results indicate that despite considerable pragmalinguistic development in some areas, learners’ overall use of Chinese internal modifiers still lagged far behind that of native speakers. Moreover, there was only a little evidence of situational variation. Hence this study suggests the precedence of pragmalinguistic over sociopragmatic development. The study adds to the small but growing body of research on pragmatic development in L2 Chinese.