Pragmatics & Beyond New Series

This edited volume showcases new work on discourse analysis by big names in the field and promising early-career researchers. Arising from the latest in the series of IWoDA workshops in Santiago de Compostela, it provides novel insights into both the explicit and the implicit characteristics of discourse as used in verbal interaction. Discourse markers, as their name indicates, are among the explicit signals of coherence, while discourse relations may be either explicit or implicit. Similarly, the discourse used for purposes of evaluation, stance-taking and interpersonal engagement is either overt or covert, as is also true of the expression of emotions and empathy. This, in general terms, is the challenging terrain into which the contributors to this volume have ventured. The book combines theoretical issues with a practical orientation, comparing languages, analysing different registers, studying the openings of Skype conversations, and much more besides; it will prove highly relevant for postgraduate and advanced practitioners of discourse analysis, interaction studies, semantics and pragmatics.

This book departs from the premise that context and appropriateness represent complex relational configurations which can no longer be conceived as analytic primes but rather require the accommodation of micro and macro perspectives to capture their inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context and appropriateness from interdisciplinary perspectives. The papers use different theoretical frameworks, such as situation theory, speech act theory, cognitive pragmatics, sociopragmatics, discourse analysis, argumentation theory and functional linguistics. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive, interactional and typological perspectives, and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use, as an interactional resource available to language users, in both written and spoken language. In addition, the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English, Estonian, Finnish, and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.

Why is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric.

Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.

This volume deals with a variety of pragmatic issues involved in cross-language and interlanguage studies as well as second-language acquisition and cross-cultural studies. Part I contains papers dealing with general issues stemming from contrastive work, for example, the question of tertium comparationis and its place in the development of contrastive studies as well as the applicability of generalizations proposed by speech-act theorists in contrasting concrete languages and cultures. The second part tackles a number of pragmatic issues involved in second-language learners' written productions, classroom discourse, as well as more general questions pertaining to pragmatic errors and learners' interlanguage. An Index of terms and an Index of names complete the volume.

This volume explores contrastive rhetoric for audiences in both ESL contexts and international EFL contexts, exposing the newest developments in theories of culture and discourse and pushing the boundaries beyond any previously staked ground. The book presents a comprehensive set of empirical investigations involving a number of first languages; 13 of the 17 authors are English-as-a-second-language speakers, many working in non-US contexts. This work develops a coherent agenda for contrastive rhetoric researchers, studying genres such as school writing, grant proposals, business letters, newspaper editorials, book reviews, and newspaper commentaries. Four chapters provide ethnographies and observations about contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of EFL and ESL. The book ends with a look to the future, suggesting it is more accurate to use the term ‘intercultural rhetoric’ to account for the richness of rhetoric variation of written texts and the varying contexts in which they are constructed.

This volume brings together researchers in conversation analysis who examine the practice of alternating between English and German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in the classroom. The collection shows that language alternation is integral to being and learning to become a bilingual, and that being and learning to become a bilingual are accomplished through a remarkably common set of interactional objects and actions, whose sequential organisations are quite similar across languages and educational sectors. This volume therefore shows that having recourse to more than one shared language provides an important resource for getting the work of language learning and teaching done through an orderliness that can be described and evaluated. The findings and the suggested pedagogical applications described in the volume will be of significant interest to researchers and teachers in a range of fields including second and foreign language teaching and learning, conversation analysis, teacher education and bilingualism.

This book investigates the notion of conversational dominance in depth, and seeks to establish a systematic method of analysing it. It also offers a new insight into the role of gender and the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms in the first and second language conversations among native speakers of Japanese.

Drawing upon a critical synthesis of insights from several different fields, including Conversation Analysis, the Birmingham school of discourse analysis, and dialogical analysis, the author proposes an innovative analytical framework for operationalising the concept of dominance in conversation. She then applies this framework to the empirical analysis of Japanese speakers’ L1 and L2 conversations, finding direct evidence for the important role of gender and pragmatic transfer in conversational dominance.

By integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to discourse analysis, the author offers a new perspective into the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms. She does so by demonstrating how the notion of self-oriented and other-oriented conversational styles and strategies can affect the level of transfer of interactional behaviour differently for male and female speakers.

This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory, it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation, showing how features ‘emerge’ during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new (‘ad hoc’) concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances, but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson’s Cognitive Principle of Relevance.

Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.