[, Pragmatics & Beyond New Series]

It is natural for people to make the distinction between in-group (Us) and out-group members (Others). What is it that brings people together, or keeps them apart? Ethnicity, nationality, professional expertise or life style? And, above all, what is the role of language in communicating solidarity and detachment?

The papers in this volume look at the various cognitive, social, and linguistic aspects of how social identities are constructed, foregrounded and redefined in interaction. Concepts and methodologies are taken from studies in language variation and change, multilingualism, conversation analysis, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, as well as translation studies and applied linguistics. A wide range of languages is brought into focus in a variety of situational, social and discursive environments. The book is addressed to scholars and students of linguistics and related areas of social communication studies.

The book presents an integrated model of vagueness as an implicit and persuasive strategy, pervasive in everyday language use and public discourse. It considers three macro-dimensions of the phenomenon: linguistic-theoretical, psychological, and social-discursive.

It shows how vagueness can be strategically employed to elude recipients’ critical evaluation of intended contents, to deresponsibilize the source and make their arguments unchallengeable.

It explores the semiotic, semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic nature of vagueness, and looks at its use in contemporary public (with a focus on Italian) discourse.

It also delves into under-explored aspects of the phenomenon such as: the continuum of intentionality in the use of vague expressions; the evolutionary significance of vagueness; its implicitating and persuasive functions; the phenomenon of vagueness by implicature; the interaction between vague expressions and context precisation; the cognitive functioning of vague expressions; the use of vagueness in contemporary persuasive vs. non-persuasive text types; gender-based differences in the use of vagueness in public discourse.

This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume, its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.

This study investigates the functions, meanings, and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare’s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in, above, and below the clause, following morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexicographical, pragmatic, social and contextual criteria. Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance, the study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential, interpersonal and textual markers. Shakespeare’s vocatives construe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, habitus and identity. They illustrate relationships or messages. They reflect Early Modern, Shakespearean, and intra- or inter-textual contexts. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is interdisciplinary. It draws on approaches from (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, Hallidayean grammar, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, socio-historical linguistics, sociology, and theatre semiotics. This study contributes, thus, not only to Shakespeare studies, but also to literary linguistics and literary criticism.

Traditional text types (or genres) are complex linguistic, sociocultural and cognitive phenomena that can only be analysed in flexible interdisciplinary frameworks fusing structural and process-oriented approaches and combining quantitative description with qualitative interpretation and evaluation. The theoretical and methodological implications of the prototypical text type concept which is developed in this book are explored in an exhaustive case study of a representative (ie prototypical) genre: the wedding report, a conventional type of news report published in local English newspapers. The distinctive contextual and textual features — situational context, text production processes, function, thematic structure, and form on the macro- and microlevel — are analysed synchronically and diachronically. The linguistic findings are integrated into a comprehensive view of the interplay between the genre as a linguistic frame and its sociocultural context. The study puts special emphasis on addressing the methodological problems arising from the inherent fuzziness of traditional text types, and can thus serve as a detailed working model of genre analysis, designed to be adapted to the specific requirements of similar studies.

Located at the intersection of historical pragmatics, letters and manuscript studies, this book offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611. It investigates multiple ways in which socio-culturally and socio-familially contextualized reading of particular collections may increase our understanding of early modern letters as a particular type of handwritten communicative activity. The book also adds to our understanding of these women as individual users of English in their historical moment, especially in terms of literacy and their engagement with cultural scripts. Throughout the book, analysis is based on the manuscript letters themselves and in this way several chapters address the importance of viewing original sources to understand the letters' full pragmatic significance. Within these broader frameworks, individual chapters address the women's use of scribes, prose structure and punctuation, performative speech act verbs, and (im)politeness, sincerity and mock (im)politeness.

Winner of ABC's award for Distinguished Publication for 2006

This book explores effective written communication across cultures both theoretically and practically. Specifically it conceptualizes cross-cultural genre study and compares English and Chinese business writing collected from Australia, New Zealand and China. It is also one of those inspired by contrastive rhetoric but has contributed innovatively and uniquely by incorporating research findings from genre analysis, in particular, the sociocognitive genre perspective into this cross-cultural study.



On the one hand, the endeavor represents an in-depth theoretical exploration by considering not only discourse community and cognitive structuring, but also the deep semantics of genre and intertextuality, while broadening genre study by integrating insights from cross-cultural communication as well as the Chinese perspectives. On the other hand, the book also addresses pragmatic issues. As a particular feature, it solicits professional members’ intercultural viewpoints; thus confirming the shared social "stock of knowledge" employed in the culturally defined writing conventions.

Last but not least, this book explores the implications for genre education and training, and develops an appropriate model for cross-cultural genre learning, which encourages learning through legitimate peripheral participation and intercultural learning in business organizations.

Pretend play in early childhood arises in the context of social interaction and, as such, constitutes a form of discourse indigenous to the child's world. The present study is a first detailed investigation of thematic-ideational structure in young children's dyadic pretend play with special emphasis on major generative strategies involved in the realization of coherent play action sequences. Play was conceptualized as a story in a dramatic mode where two actors jointly generate or attempt to generate ideationally coherent action sequences or play plots resulting in a complex, ever-evolving thematic structure at a number of levels of analysis. Methodological problems of analysis resulted in the creation of an analytic procedure — Master Text — that simultaneously addresses structural and processual features of play and is able to deal with lengthy play segments. The results characterize playing as a form of discourse which proceeds according to patterned regularities at the level of Thematic Core Structures and associated schemata which underly the plot surface. The realization of such structurizations comes about during the play process in a complex interplay with features of the setting and requires establishing and modifying a shared knowledge base. These findings are discussed in light of their significance for childhood socialization.