Pragmatics - Online First

Previous work has shown that masculine vocatives are increasingly used beyond their typical context of designating a masculine addressee across a range of languages. Building on this scholarship, this study investigates the Saudi Arabic vocative yakhy (‘my brother’), drawing on a self-report survey and a corpus of X.com (formerly Twitter) posts. The findings reveal that yakhy exhibits usage patterns comparable to those of several vocatives in other languages. It is used to address both men and women and serves various interactional functions. Moreover, yakhy displays rich stance-taking and indexical properties, making it a useful resource for navigating interactional and cultural contexts. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of yakhy and offer broader insights into the cross-linguistic patterning and development of masculine vocatives.

The agentive passive involves agent demotion; consequently, its use is closely linked to information structure in fixed word-order languages, but its function in flexible word-order languages is less clear. The present corpus-based study examines the use of the agentive passive with the -n/-t participle in Slovenian, a flexible word-order language, focusing on how the register and the semantic and pragmatic factors influence its use. Two reference corpora of contemporary Slovenian were used in the analysis: GOS, comprising spoken discourse, and KRES, comprising mainly written discourse. The results show that the passive with s strani is used more frequently than the traditional passive with od. A cross-register comparison reveals considerable differences in the use of the agentive passive with s strani and od. The findings also reveal that the agentive passive is often used to reduce the responsibility of the agent to avoid assigning blame or to create the impression of objectivity.

This study conducts a comparative analysis on the use of multimodal interactional metadiscourse by U.S. and Chinese companies on Twitter. Six hundred tweets generated by twelve U.S. and Chinese online retailing, technology, energy, and automobile companies were analyzed. The results indicate that corporate tweets are highly interpersonal in nature, rich in interactional metadiscourse. Attitude markers, self-mentions, and a series of engagement markers are particularly prominent. Various non-textual devices, such as pictures, videos, @-mentions, hashtags (#), and hyperlinks, are co-deployed with textual elements to construct interpersonal meanings. Overall U.S. companies used more engagement markers, while Chinese companies employed more stance markers, with other salient differences observed in different subcategories. These variances can be attributed to various sociocultural and contextual factors. The study contributes to the still scarce research on multimodal metadiscourse in online business discourse and uncovers the influence of sociocultural and contextual factors on the use of interpersonal resources in digital business genres.

Research on parliamentary debates has often called unauthorised turns ‘interruptions’, emphasising their conflictual and monological nature. Our study aimed to examine their pragmatic functions and interactional nature, and to reflect on the terminology commonly used. Drawing upon data from the Finnish Eduskunta, French Assemblée nationale, and German Bundestag, we applied conversation analysis to the sequential analysis of these turns, while considering restrictions related to written transcripts. To highlight the non-interruptive and dialogical character of these unauthorised utterances, we propose labelling them unofficial turns. In our analysis, we demonstrate that these unofficial turns carry both affiliative and disaffiliative functions, which also contribute to the management of interpersonal relations. As a result, our study challenges the monological view of unofficial turns and highlights their co-constructional nature.

Metadiscourse has been a major focus of research over the last twenty-five years, attracting methodological approaches from the areas of textual pragmatics and discourse studies, many of which are supported by corpus linguistics. A major challenge in corpus-based discourse studies, however, is subjectivity, which may affect their quality and undermine their methodological rigor. To reduce subjectivity and guarantee consistency, assessing reliability of coding is essential. This study advocates combining quantitative with qualitative approaches to reliability. We argue that this mixed-method approach will provide a better assessment of reliability. To this aim, this methodological synthesis surveyed research covering empirical corpus-based studies on metadiscourse published in indexed and peer-reviewed journals. One major finding is that most studies did not report conducting any reliability measure. Issues in reliability accounts were also identified for those that did. Another major finding is a pervasive lack of transparency and comprehensiveness in reliability reports. Recommendations for enhancing reliability are listed.

This study examines the pragmatic-rhetorical functions of turn-initial Hebrew ki ‘because’-clauses in readers’ comments on politicians’ Facebook posts. An analysis of 100 ki-clauses, responding to either politicians’ posts or comments by other commenters, reveals that they provide explanations and justifications for claims and positions regarding a particular action, general conduct or way of thinking of the previous speaker, or a third party. It is argued that such explanations serve to either support or challenge others’ positions, both sincerely and ironically, in accordance with the corpus’s dual nature as both a platform for uniting political camps and a battleground for opposing camps. When affiliative, ki-clauses justify the previous speakers, at times by ironically justifying third parties, making them a shared target. Conversely, when disaffiliative, ki-clauses expose the absurdity underlying the position of the previous speaker, often ridiculing them through ironic echoing.

Student injury incidents serve as institutional nexuses where health emergencies intersect with peer conflicts, requiring teachers to negotiate the competing demands of medical immediacy and moral culpability. Drawing on conversation analysis of audio-recorded student incident calls between teachers and parents, this study investigates how teachers navigate these challenging scenarios through the systematic management of agency and urgency. Analysis reveals two distinct yet interrelated patterns in teachers’ reporting practices. First, teachers treat agency (injurer) and urgency (injured student) as discrete components linked to responsibility attribution; they systematically background both elements when reporting to injured students’ parents while foregrounding them in communications with injurers’ parents. Second, the initial attenuation of urgency, while serving to mitigate conflict, necessitates subsequent upgrades to secure immediate involvement from injured students’ parents. These findings illuminate how teachers’ institutional practices systematically prioritize conflict mediation over medical urgency.

Sacks and Schegloff (1979; Schegloff 1996) identify a preference for recognitional references to persons over non-recognitional forms of references. Furthermore, they identify as a subsidiary preference that, among recognitional forms, personal names are preferred over recognitional descriptors. However, as Sacks and Schegloff indicate, these preferences in no way limit the use of names to conclusively recognizable persons, nor do they even inhibit references to persons by name when recognition is not at all practicable. In this report, we first describe those practices that manage (and thereby exhibit) levels of confidence regarding the recognizability of personal names. We then examine several environments in which personal names are employed in introducing persons as previously unknown to recipients, and we describe one family of practices for doing so. Finally, we identify storytelling as a principal environment in which personal names are used, and we describe where unknown persons are introduced by storytellers.

Linguistic expressions of negation have been investigated from various perspectives: sociolinguistic variation, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. However, this linguistic phenomenon has received little attention in discourse studies. This corpus-pragmatic case study presents a systematic analysis of the use and functions of NOT-negation in oppositional discourse, specifically in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Methodologically, it combines a variationist approach and corpus-based discourse analysis. The findings, analyzed through the lens of audience design, reveal that Coates’s use of NOT-negation contributes to a conversational style of writing which can be interpreted as a strategy to maintain a dialogical flow of discourse.

This study investigates the pragmatic functions of custom WhatsApp stickers, with a particular focus on those integrating images and text. Building on prior research, the study develops a classification scheme that highlights three core dimensions: the sender’s intention, the sticker-centred act of communication, and the audience’s interpretation of its meaning. The analysis is based on a corpus of 598 user-generated stickers from Spanish WhatsApp conversations, comprising 496 multimodal and 102 text-only stickers. The analysis reveals that stickers predominantly serve to clarify or emphasise the sender’s intention (56.9%), including self-representation, social status, group identity, and humour. A second set of functions is related to the sticker’s role in the act of communication (24.67%), such as substituting text, conveying emotion, and mimicking nonverbal behaviour. Lastly, stickers play a part in audience inference (18.41%), helping to soften, challenge, or elucidate messages, thereby enhancing overall message clarity.

Drawing on an indexical approach, this study explores practices and evaluations of translanguaging across Japanese and English in two datasets, one of audiorecorded naturally occurring meetings among Japanese employees at a global corporation and another of online commentary about translanguaging practices. It focuses on the relationship between linguistic normativities and indexical meanings. By analyzing the translanguaging practices of Japanese corporate employees and lay people’s evaluations of such practices in metapragmatic discourse, the study demonstrates how people’s orientations to different linguistic norms give rise to distinct indexical meanings, forming different indexical fields for translanguaging accordingly. This study also illustrates how a dominant linguistic ideology can impact individual assessments of translanguaging, and how mediatized representations are entangled with linguistic norms in the indexical process. The findings suggest the importance of paying close attention to the different levels or aspects of the centering authorities to which people ultimately orient in discourse.

The article systematically examines metaphor-motivated zeugmatic constructions in web-based promotional tourism discourse, drawing on texts from the official destination websites of Georgia, the UK, and the USA. Employing a mixed-method research design, which combines quantitative data inspection and qualitative discourse analysis, the study identifies formal, functional, and positional peculiarities of zeugmas in the analysed material. These findings corroborate, enrich, and challenge prevailing assumptions in contemporary scholarly literature on zeugma and metaphor (Lanham 1991; Steen 2016; Tartakovsky and Shen 2023). The paper highlights that metaphor-motivated zeugmas represent another form of deliberate metaphor, thereby broadening the scope of its manifestation patterns. Furthermore, the study reveals that such zeugmas are often strategically used at key points in promotional texts to frame and emphasise essential messages. These insights may provide valuable guidance for marketers in developing comprehensible, impactful, and emotionally resonant promotional content, which is essential in cross-cultural contexts of tourism promotion.

Pragmatic markers (PMs) have been defined as linguistic constructions typical of spoken language which help interaction (D’Arcy 2017). Previous study abroad (SA) research (Magliacane 2020) shows that contact with the local community can enhance PM production. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to how SA students recognize PMs and how aware they are of PM use. This aspect of pragmatic development is crucial given that awareness is a necessary step for any pragmatic production to occur (Sánchez-Hernández and Alcón-Soler 2019). Against this background, this study analyzes longitudinally changes in PM awareness by eighteen Chinese students enrolled in English-speaking universities. The participants completed a pre- and a post-test version of the PM awareness test (Magliacane and Sánchez-Hernández 2024), developed for the purpose of the study. The results revealed that, while abroad, participants increased their metapragmatic awareness of PMs, which contributed to their L2 pragmatic awareness development.

This study examines the pragmatic functions of Longxi Qiang interrogative pronoun lê (‘what’) in natural conversation. Based on approximately ten hours of transcribed data, we found that lê is used in question and non-question functions such as filler, reversed polarity question marker, attention attractor, negative stance marker, non-specific referent, general extender, and universal term. Most instances of lê in the data serve various interactional functions rather than seeking information. The non-question functions of lê are related to negative, rather than positive, meaning; for example, negative evaluation, stance, or providing little to no information of the referents under discussion.

Corpus-based research on the “filled pauses” um and uh has shown that um is gaining frequency relative to uh, with um used more frequently by women and younger people. There has been some speculation that the rise of um is linked to a new discourse function or meaning, but this has not yet been fully substantiated. This paper approaches the problem from a perceptual angle, reporting the results of two experiments investigating participants’ judgments of the indexicalities of the “filled pauses” um and uh in two media: instant messaging and speech. Participants’ qualitative and quantitative responses suggest that readers and listeners associate the use of um with hesitancy, femininity, politeness, and thoughtfulness, but that uh is primarily associated just with hesitancy. I argue that these indexicalities may be linked to the ongoing change, with um indexing a potentially more desirable type of hesitation than uh.

This study examines the possible intended references of unidentified initiators — agents or experiencers — of Spanish infinitives in a corpus of digital news texts and readers’ comments to them. Four basic referential interpretations are discussed: external references, generic ones, the audience, and the writer. They largely depend on contextual elements functioning as viewpoint builders and including the semantics of the predicate, spatial and temporal locatives, grammatical marks of the direct participants, and other defocusing constructions. Quantitative analysis reveals patterns of co-occurrence between the referential categories and the different types of viewpoint builders. Besides, such references are unequally distributed across the two kinds of textual sequences considered. The results underscore the complexity of the interpretive processes involved in reference assignment. While all uses of the infinitive are semantically unified by its function of construing events as ungrounded, they can produce quite different pragmatic outcomes in interaction with contextual and situational features.

This paper aims to examine the conceived self-identities by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctors in the digitalized scenarios of healthcare. With the textual posts collected from Sina Microblog, this study systematically analyzed 474 pieces of narrative posts (97,737 Chinese characters) of TCM doctors who were officially registered on Sina Microblog. Results indicate that TCM doctors normally envisaged three types of self-identities on Sina Microblog: modern professionals, tradition defenders, and cultural inheritors. Specifically, solution-oriented, emotion-oriented, and legitimation-oriented strategies were discursively adopted by some TCM doctors to express their acceptance of digitalization, whereas various linguistic devices were employed to resist digitalization in TCM, such as analogies, rhetorical questions, and the usage of attitudinal markers. This study contributes to existing knowledge of the evolution of TCM through digitalization by pragmatically examining the identity work of TCM doctors under online circumstances in Oriental scenarios.

This article examines the system of address forms in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, as well as the underlying principles of social hierarchy and cultural values as encoded in their grammatical structures. Field research in Hasidic communities of the UK, USA, Israel, and Canada reveals a tripartite address system, not-known in the pre-WWII varieties of Yiddish. I argue that two options for polite address encode fundamentally distinct social meanings, rather than represent two levels of formality: third person nominal address manifests deference, while 2pl pronominal address signifies consideration. Finally, I discuss the origin of the tripartite system of T/V distinction in Yiddish, suggesting a hypothesis that the third person address as a full-scaled address mode is a recent development in Hasidic Yiddish that took shape in the second half of the twentieth century.

Previous research has extensively examined corporate apologies as webcare in public settings. However, it has paid less attention to apologies made directly to the public despite their potential to evoke responses that reflect social expectations. This study examines corporate public apology strategies and social media users’ follow-up comments, specifically focusing on impolite comments and their underlying rationale. The findings reveal that, despite employing various apology strategies in response to food safety incidents, corporations continue to receive criticism and impolite comments online. These comments frequently reference the moral value of 良心 liángxīn ‘conscience’, which serves as a moral ground for public criticism. Specifically, these comments highlight a set of moral expectations constituting liángxīn: being responsible, being honest, avoiding being profit-centric, and caring for customers. Such impolite comments function as a rite of moral aggression aimed at reaffirming and restoring moral orders. This study enriches our understanding of public responses to corporate apologies and underscores the role of online criticism in shaping societal norms.

In recent years, the vocative tío/a has attracted specific attention because of its frequency and salient pragmatic functions in everyday conversation in European Spanish. This paper presents a conversation-analytical approach to the feminine variant, tía, in extracts from a single conversation of almost twenty minutes among young women friends, who focus on the telling of stories of a personal nature and employ this form as a vocative around thirty times. The analysis demonstrates that the vocative tía has a central role in managing and negotiating affiliation in the focused interaction, highlighting: (a) uses to mitigate disaffiliation in the mid-telling and to friendly manage oppositional stances; (b) uses as a strategy to prepare the ground for affiliation in the narrative climax; (c) uses to mobilize affiliation after emotive assessments and to accentuate reciprocity by the recipient’s matching use; and (d) uses to pursue affiliation in expansions of storytelling.

It is well-established that amateur sports teams constitute a site of pervasive contradictory dynamics, with affable solidarity and camaraderie offset by ubiquitous competition between players. While these qualities have been identified in sport psychology and sociology, their in-situ accomplishment through players’ endogenous interpersonal relations has not yet been explored. In this article, I explore this issue, investigating how players in an amateur Australian football (soccer) team utilise conversational teasing to enact relational camaraderie and competition in subtle, nuanced ways. Examining naturally occurring data collected using ethnographic methods and analysed through a CA-informed lens, I demonstrate the endogenous co-constitution of these relational qualities, connected to the negotiation of teasing sequences. In this way, the in-situ accomplishment of camaraderie and competition as a relational dialectic, in line with the players’ dynamic interpersonal relationships, is elucidated.

Facing the increasing enrolment pressure, most Chinese universities launch enrolment posts on WeChat. Yet the way posts are written is under-researched. This study analyses metadiscourse resources in thirty Chinese university enrolment posts with the purpose of examining how Chinese universities promote themselves. The findings suggest that Chinese universities attempt to construct positive rapport with prospective students by means of metadiscourse resources. The posts extol universities with attitude markers, hedges and boosters, create intimacy with prospective students with self-mentions and reader-pronouns, and invite readers with reader pronouns, directives and attitude markers. The study suggests that Chinese universities present a paradoxical image, being approachable and superior to readers. The discourse affordance of WeChat, promotional culture in higher education, the traditional identity of the university and its affiliation to the government work together to contribute to the discourse strategies used in the enrolment posts.