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Between a world war and a home affair: Discourse constructions of Russia’s ‘special operation’ International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Piotr Cap
This paper explores the discourse of the Russia-Ukraine war to outline and tentatively characterize the dominant narrative schemas anchored in the spatial geopolitical representations of globalness and localness. It employs a collection of analytical tools from the domains of critical cognitive discourse studies and narrative research to distinguish between two apparently most salient schemas: the
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The cognitive mechanisms involved in the “DEGREE ADVERB + PROPER NAME” construction: Evaluating proposals from Construction Grammar and Formal Semantics International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Gabriel Frazer-McKee, Patrick J. Duffley
There are broad disagreements between existing models regarding the mental representations and processes involved in the “DEGREE ADVERB + PROPER NAME” construction, including divergences regarding the semantics of the degree device, the category status of the proper name, the construction’s expressed meaning, its compositionality, and, crucially, the operation holding between the degree device and
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Collaboratively balancing stories and identities in Belgian WWII interviews International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Kim Schoofs, Dorien Van De Mieroop
In this study, we scrutinize the collaborative balancing of stories and identities in a corpus of Belgian WWII interviews. Specifically, we zoom in on three dimensions—tellability, morality and credibility—to explore how interactants jointly construct testimonies that are in line with social norms—and are thus acceptable—within the WWII remembrance storytelling context. By relying on a narrative as
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The dynamics of institutional performatives: Between practical reasoning and symbolic value—A case study from Roman antiquity International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Marco Mazzone
The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the dynamics of performatives, with special focus on normatively charged institutions as legal-political ones, with the help of a case study coming from Roman antiquity: the appointment of Julius Caesar as “perpetual dictator”, as it is analyzed by Licandro (2022). That analysis shows both how institutional performatives are established and how they are
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Epistemic sentence-initial constructions as incongruity markers: English “it is ironic [that]” vs Persian “bāmaze ast [ke]” International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Reza Arab
This article compares the sentence-initial constructions it is ironic that in English with the Persian bāmaze ast ke [lit. with.taste is that] to argue that such framing clauses seem to be ‘epistemic phrases’ expressing event knowledge of speakers, being utilised in the form of extraposed initial constructions for focus-marking. They are discourse markers that are intended to frame perception of event
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The meaning of a yawn International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Luis López
I present empirical arguments that bodily gestures may communicate a propositional meaning with assertoric force and trigger implicatures based on violations of Relation. Crucial in the analyses are Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning as well as Tim Wharton’s extended argument that bodily gestures instantiate a third type of meaning defined by the spontaneous production
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Troubles talk and complaints in teacher-student interactions: Affiliative and disaffiliative reactions International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Mostafa Morady Moghaddam
Expressions of dissatisfaction are made either through troubles talk or complaints (Haugh, 2016). Against this backdrop, through the analysis of naturally occurring data in classroom interactions, this paper explores Iranian university students’ troubles talk and complaints, and how teachers reacted to them. The study’s findings reveal that female students generated more cases of troubles talk, whereas
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Expressive commitments International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Xavier Villalba
Pragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based
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From everyday exposure to pragmatic mastery International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Stephanie Wermelinger, Moritz M. Daum, Anja Gampe
In this paper, we review recent findings on the development of communicative behaviour of monolingual and bilingual toddlers and preschoolers. We describe how the unique experience of growing up with two (or more) languages affects children’s everyday experiences and the pragmatics of their communicative behaviour. Deriving from this literature, we introduce a novel perspective on children’s development
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The pragmatics of communicating threat and constructing the future in the discourse of the Iranian Supreme Leader International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Ali Basarati, Fateme Zohrabi
The paper aims at studying how the discourse of the Iranian Supreme Leader communicates threat and how it presents the reality of Iran’s future in light of policy options. Our data comes from 50 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader, delivered between 2005–2020. Adopting the Proximisation Theory, we indicate that spatial and axiological threats are conceptualised in the SL’s discourse as encroaching
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Prototype-based pragmatics of confessing International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Nobuhiko Yamanaka
This paper discusses a subtype of the speech act of confessing, namely, telling something which the speaker assumes to be unknown to the hearer and damaging to him/herself. Based on Coleman and Kay (1981), a prototype of that subtype is hypothesised and cases lacking in any of its elements are illustrated. Further, the prototypical scenario proposed in Lakoff (1987) is applied to the speech act of
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That is not done International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Miguel A. Aijón Oliva
Spanish third-person reflexive clitic se allows for passive and impersonal uses that can sometimes be pragmatically interpreted as directive in spite of their declarative form, e.g. Eso no se hace ‘That is not done’. This paper explores the grammatical, semantic and referential factors that promote such an interpretation, using a corpus of oral and written Peninsular media discourse and adopting a
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Unconditionally conditional International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Patrick Duffley, Pierre Larrivée
The purpose of this study is to assess from a corpus-based discourse-pragmatic perspective certain claims made in the literature concerning English wh- concessive conditional constructions (e.g. Whoever/No matter who comes to the party, it will be fun), namely that these utterance-types correlate with interrogative semantics, scalarity and potential modality. By means of an extensive investigation
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‘In fact’ on PTT Gossip International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Hui-Wen Liu
This study used shell noun as the starting point to analyze language activities that used the word shì shí shàng ‘in fact’ by Internet users on PTT, to understand the truth event that this empty shell noun signifies; and to identify the characteristics of pragmatic practice in the texts screened by the shell noun. Through the PTT Tool, posts with more than 100 comments on the PTT Gossip board during
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The usage of Sinographs in relational communication about ethnic Chinese identities on YouTube International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Lu-Yen Ko
This study analyzes the usage of Sinographs (Chinese characters) across globally dispersed user communities on YouTube, and focuses on their usage patterns in relational communication about ethnic Chinese identities. This is achieved by analyzing YouTube comments on the official music video for the Mandopop (Mandarin pop music) song “Fragile” (玻璃心) as a corpus. Firstly, the history and media environment
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Crises of reputation as asynchronous online polylogues International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Agnieszka Pluwak
Crises of reputation are rarely studied from the linguistic point of view, which results in several research gaps. Therefore, in this study three selected crisis cases have been analyzed as asynchronous online polylogues—Internet debates performed by stakeholders in different sources from the moment of publication. In this approach corpus analysis has been combined with the theory of computer-mediated
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Orientalist representation of Iranian women in three American newspapers International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Mostafa Morady Moghaddam, Fatemeh Mozafari
This article explores three famous American newspapers as an attempt to find out how Iranian women are depicted in these three American newspapers. Three national newspapers (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post) were consulted as authority to gain information about Iranian women. Two hundred and thirteen headlines about Iranian women were identified in these three newspapers
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Pragmatic competence in native German adults with and without Developmental Dyslexia International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Laura Hüser, Katharina von Kriegstein, Christa Müller-Axt
Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a life-long deficit in reading and spelling with unclear causes. DD negatively impacts many language skills. Relatively little is known about whether skills of pragmatic competence are compromised in individuals with DD. Here, we assess DD symptomatology in a group of native German dyslexic adults. We first test for the presence of DD subtypes along the dimensions of
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The sociopragmatics of compliment in the media discourse International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Chihsia Tang
This study investigated whether and how the gender of the judges in the TV talent competitions affects the pragmatics of the compliments in their evaluative comments addressed to the contest participants. The explicitness of the compliments, the distribution of positive semantic carriers and intensifiers, the personal focus of the compliments, and the supportive discursive moves in the male and female
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Dialogical humour in evening service encounters in the hospitality industry in Seville, Spain International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Manuel Padilla Cruz
Given that humour greatly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty, this paper explores the dialogical forms of humour occurring in evening service encounters. It reports on a study focusing on interactions between baristas and customers. The latter belong to two groups: university students in their late teens and twenties, and regulars over forty years old. The establishments selected for the study
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Explicit and implicit offensiveness in dialogical film discourse in Bridgit Jones films International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Anna Bączkowska
The paper discusses the concept of offensiveness, both explicit and implicit, in film dialogical discourse based on three parts of a romantic comedy. The differences between explicitness and implicitness on the one hand, and between implicitness and (in)directness on the other are presented in the theoretical part. Indirectness and implicitness are treated in the study as independent concepts that
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Exploring the didactic-psychological features of the dialogical discourse patterns in an online classroom context International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Konul Hajiyeva, Misgar Mammadov
From the communicative-cognitive point of view, it is necessary to look at dialogic discourse as an active phase of the transition of language skills to speech skills. In this regard, discourse is considered as the articular form of consciousness consisting of a set of knowledge that motivates the speech activity of the interviewees. This empirical study draws on recent developments in dialogic approaches
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Online comments as inwards and outwards-directed acts in Polish and English International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
The main focus of the paper is to analyse selected English and Polish online comments on the Russia-Ukraine war (2022) from the perspective of dialogical discourse and define to what extent the exchanges satisfy the criteria of different types of dialogism with regard to their self- or other-referential character, i.e., inwards- or ingroup- directed, and what other circumstances are decisive in the
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Political dialogue across time, space and genres International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Paul Chilton, Monika Kopytowska
The objective behind this paper is to outline an integrated cognitive-social-pragmatic approach to the re-emergence of far-right cultic politics along with the role of social media in enhancing the dialogic impact of contemporary discourses of hostility. We start from the assumption that while deixis and speech acts enable attribution of status functions and deontic powers, and thus legitimation on
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Shades of green International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Douglas Mark Ponton
Discursive interaction involves the co-construction of meaning between interlocutor/s and intended audience, a process which involves both explicit and implicit meanings (Kecskes 2016). However, since language is at best an imprecise tool for describing reality, even so-called explicit meanings are found to require effort to disambiguate, and true precision may not be attainable, despite sincerity
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Expectations about upcoming discourse referents: Effects of pitch accents and focus particles in German language production International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Nicole Gotzner, Katharina Spalek
In the current study, we explore how different information-structural devices affect which referents conversational partners expect in the upcoming discourse. Our main research question is how pitch accents (H*, L+H*) and focus particles (German nur ‘only’ and auch ‘also’) affect speakers’ choices to mention focused referents, previously mentioned alternatives or new, inferable alternatives. Participants
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The speech act of advising in teacher-teacher interaction: A pragmatic perspective International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Dina Abdel Salam El-Dakhs
The current study aimed to examine how university teachers advise their fellow teachers with a focus on solicited advice. To this end, 60 university teachers who use English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as the medium of their everyday communication completed 8 role-plays in which newly hired teachers sought the advice of their colleagues regarding work issues. The role-plays were recorded and transcribed
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‘This study aims to …’: Connecting metadiscoursal features and rhetorical moves in research articleintroductions across two disciplines International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Mohsen Khedri
Using Swales’ (1990) CARS model and Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study takes a pragmatic approach to explore the rhetorical structure and metadiscoursal features of research article introductions in a comparable corpus of 40 introductions from applied linguistics and chemistry. Specifically, this article reports on a rhetorical analysis of introduction moves and an identification
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Turkish EFL learners’ interpretation of metaphors: A study on conceptual socialization International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Şeyma Kökcü, Deniz Ortaçtepe Hart
This study investigated Turkish EFL learners’ conceptual socialization in terms of their interpretation of English metaphors in three categories; a) conceptually and linguistically similar, b) conceptually similar, linguistically different, and c) conceptually and linguistically different metaphors. Data were collected through sentence level and situation-based tests. Learners’ responses were analyzed
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“What a beautiful world. But is it the world we live in?”: The case of language learners’ exposure to (responses to) impoliteness strategies in simplified versus non-simplified sources of language learning input International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Marzieh Khazraie, Hossein Talebzadeh
The present two-phased study set out to identify simplified and non-simplified sources of input popular among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and to compare and contrast the manifestations of impoliteness strategies and responses to them in such resources. First, a rather comprehensive survey conducted among 250 adult EFL learners revealed that English TV series and movies of comedy
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‘The common good’: Social orders and politeness as conceptualised through other-criticism International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Mostafa Morady Moghaddam
In this study, I attempt to propose a conceptualisation of interactive politeness which is anchored in the investigation of a kind of other-criticism known as ‘eršâd šodan’ or being exposed to verbal guidance, which is an important religious value among Muslims. The concept of ‘eršâd šodan’ has an imperative load that is expected to contribute to negative impoliteness (Culpeper, 2016). However, as
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Development of pragmatic competence among L2 learners: Examining compliment responses in intercultural virtual exchanges International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Shannon M. Hilliker, Chesla Ann Lenkaitis, Barbara Loranc-Paszylk
Although compliments and compliment responses seem to play an important role in discourse of second language (L2) classrooms (Khaneshan & Bonyadi, 2016), the influence of virtual exchanges on enhancing the use of compliment responses remains unexplored. Twelve L2 learners of English from Poland met in groups for six weeks, via video conferencing, with Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
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Grammaticalization in action and beyond: The emergence of en plan as a pragmatic marker in 21st century Spanish International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Florencio del Barrio de la Rosa, Ignacio Arroyo Hernández
As a result of the rapid development of en plan in contemporary Spanish a wide range of recent studies have paid attention to the grammaticalization process transforming this adverbial locution (meaning ‘in a certain way, with a certain purpose’) into a pragmatic marker. However, previous research fails to capture the complex semantic networks and synchronic multifunctionality of en plan. The present
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Metadiscourse variations in the generic structure of disciplinary research articles International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Hadi Kashiha
Research articles have begun to occupy the status of a prominent academic genre, as publishing one is a significant way to gain credibility and to establish oneself as a researcher among members of a discourse community. One way to distinguish discourse communities is to look at the linguistic features used in the generic structure of their research articles. One of these linguistic features is metadiscourse
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Metaphoric interpretation: Comparison or categorisation? International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Xinmeng Lu, Timothy Pritchard
This paper compares two different theoretical approaches which have been developed to account for metaphoric interpretation: the comparison approach and the categorisation approach. Following a brief review on the history of the two theoretical approaches, the paper points out in part 5 that these two approaches are not fundamentally incompatible. It is further argued in parts 6 and 7 that while the
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The use of hēi diào (‘to turn black’) and its related [V diào] forms in social media: A corpus-based study International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Siaw-Fong Chung, Meng-Hsien Shih, Hui-Wen Liu, Chi-ling Lee, Yueh-Hui Vanessa Chiang
Hēi diào ‘to turn black’ (黑掉) denotes a change-of-state meaning, but in social media, it has a special pragmatic use that emphasizes “bad consequences” following an uncooperative act, whether right or wrong. This metaphorical and new transitive use of hēi diào, which is unique among netizens, has changed the literal status of hēi ‘black’ to other additional accomplishment/achievement meanings. Our
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‘You would not want to be the murderer of our dreams and options, right?’: An analysis of the communication between university students and their lecturer on the web 2.0 International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-21 David Rodríguez Velasco, María Cecilia Ainciburu, Xiaoxu Katia Liu
Studies of how adult Chinese speakers express disagreement at work or in business have a well-established tradition; whereas, studies on young students and university lecturers are scarcer. In general, the description of relationships with authority figures has been characterised by evidence of greater distance and a greater rituality than equivalent Western uses. The objective of this work is to verify
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Analyticity and modulation: Broadening the rescale perspective on language logicality International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Salvatore Pistoia-Reda, Uli Sauerland
Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for the idea that language includes a deductive system. In recent discussion, two accounts have been presented in the literature to explain the available evidence. According to one of the accounts, grammatical analyticities are accessible to the system but a pragmatic strengthening repair mechanism can apply
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Evaluating pragmatic competence: A case lost in translation training International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Alireza Akbari, Monir Gholamzadeh Bazarbash, Raheleh Alinejadi
This paper presents an investigation into the impact of teaching pragmatic competence to translation students who translate from English (L2) to Persian (L1). For the experiment, the participants were requested to identify implicit discourse markers in a source text and to transfer them into the target text. This investigation used Think Aloud Protocols (TAP) to monitor students’ inferential translation
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The good, the bad and the creative: Language in Wittgenstein’s philosophy International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Piotr Stalmaszczyk
The following text is a review of Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, edited by Sebastian Sunday Grève and Jakub Mácha (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ISBN 978-1-137-47253-3. xxi + 314 pages). Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language is a collection of eleven essays investigating the creative potential of language within Wittgensteinian philosophy language. The essays
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An implicature account of metaphorical perspective International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Madeleine Arseneault
This paper develops an account of metaphor and its cognitive value. The motivation for this account lies in two considerations: 1) there is a problem, the proposition problem, that plagues many accounts of metaphor and its cognitive value, and 2) a recent criticism of Grice’s program and its semantic-pragmatic distinction by Lepore and Stone (2015) is grounded on the assumption that its account of
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Institutional perspective on writing for international publication: Publishing in English at the University of Silesia International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Adam Wojtaszek
The paper focuses on the institutional background of the publishing practices of Polish scholars, with special emphasis on publications in English. The University of Silesia in Katowice represents a Polish Higher Education Institution which places significant emphasis on international publications. On the basis of two data collection instruments, a report on point-winning publications (2017–2020) and
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Inviting individual voice to second language academic writing International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Iga Maria Lehman, Robin Anderson
Our purpose in this paper is to present the findings of a study aimed at investigating how second language (L2) student-writers construct their identities as academic authors in tertiary education. We consider the restraints institutionalized text production can place on the constitution of writer identity, and call for pedagogical approaches to writing to take on board our findings to better help
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Expansion-relevant final but for preference organisation International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-08-19 Kazuki Hata
This article focuses on the utilisation of but in English at turn-final placement regarding provisions for what follows next, where the token is not a display of a traditional sense of content-level contrasts. The production of final buts in this article is a point of expansion relevance and emergent as a means of intersubjectively creating another opportunity space to deal with the ongoing disaffiliation
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Puzzles for pragmatics and rhetoric and advent of pragma-rhetoric International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-08-19 Guojin Hou
No other interdisciplinary issue has inspired a greater debate than the pragmatics-rhetoric border. This paper explores the pragmatics-rhetoric boundary issues and the possibility of marrying pragmatics to rhetoric for pragma-rhetoric. It first addresses the twenty ‘puzzles’ or predicaments the past studies of pragmatics and rhetoric have met with. It is held that similarities between the two disciplines
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Relevance, effects and affect International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-08-19 Louis de Saussure, Tim Wharton
In this paper, we argue that the successful integration of expressive acts of communication into an inferential theory of pragmatics faces a major challenge. Most post-Gricean pragmatic theories have worked to develop accounts of the interpretive processes at work in the communication of propositions; the challenge, therefore, is how expressive acts be integrated when their content is, as it appears
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Representation, conceptualization and positioning in Critical Discourse Analysis International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-08-19 Piotr Cap
The present paper explores the current nexus between Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), focusing on theories of conceptual positioning, distancing and perspective-taking in discourse space. It assesses the strengths, limitations, and prospects for further operationalization of positioning as a valid methodology in CDA, and political discourse studies in particular. In
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The combination of Discourse Markers in Persian International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Gholamreza Kassaei, Mohammad Amouzadeh
This paper sets out to investigate the ways in which some of the Discourse Markers (DM s) in Persian are used by looking at a corpus of 475 million words. By adopting Fraser’s notion of DM (2009), it will analyse all possible combinations of thirty DMs categorized into three groups: contrastive, elaborative, and inferential. This categorization will be based on the types of semantic relationship they
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Leadership, credibility and persuasion: A view from three public policy discourses International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Iga Lehman, Łukasz Sułkowski, Piotr Cap
This short paper makes a tentative attempt to capture the most salient of persuasion strategies engaged in the construction of leadership in three different yet apparently interrelated domains of public life and public policy, political communication, management/business discourse, and academic communication. It explores the cognitive underpinnings, as well as linguistic realizations, of such conc
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Manner implicatures and how to spot them International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Jessica Rett
The goal of this paper is to help develop a general picture of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) by looking beyond scalar implicature to see how the phenomenon behaves in a general sense. I focus on non-scalar Quantity implicatures and Manner implicatures. I review canonical examples of Manner implicature, as well as a more recent, productive one involving gradable adjective antonym pairs (Rett
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Shaping identities in interaction by cognitive meanings: The variable usage of usted (es) as second-person object in Spanish International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 María José Serrano
This is not an address forms research. The purpose of this paper is to study the variation of the Spanish singular and plural second-person object usted (es) (SPU object) by means of the cognitive properties of salience and informativeness. Each variant of the second-person object constitutes a meaningful possibility used by speakers to define their particular position in relation to the communicative
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Vague language challenged: Australian customs encounters International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Grace Q. Zhang
Existing studies focus on the effectiveness of vague language (VL). This study offers a balanced account by highlighting the ineffectiveness of VL. Drawn from institutional data involving the interactions between Australian custom officers and passengers, this study finds that while VL was effective in most cases, it was challenged in 8 % of cases. The data reveals a correlation: the more severe a
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Different scalar terms are affected by face differently International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Marina Terkourafi, Benjamin Weissman, Joseph Roy
Research on the effect of face-orientation on scalar implicatures has claimed that face-threatening contexts are one type of context in which scalar implicatures are not warranted. However, that research has been based on the two staples of scalar implicature research, some and or. Given research on scalar diversity has shown that these terms are rather exceptional in inducing high rates of scalar
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Exclamatives, exclamations, miratives and speaker’s meaning International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Christoph Unger
Exclamations, exclamatives and miratives are utterances that do not merely convey some informative content, but are designed to express the emotional attitude of surprise. In this paper I argue that analysing what it means to express surprise must be based on three main ideas: (1) the idea that exclamatives are instances of metarepresentational use; (2) the idea that what is communicated in exclamatives
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Gradual conventionalization of pragmatic inferences: The y/e and o/u alternation in Spanish International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Errapel Mejías-Bikandi
The alternation in Spanish between y and e on the one hand, and u and o in the other, is examined. It is proposed that the standard account under which the choice of one variant over the other is sensitive only to the phonetic context is incomplete. Specifically, the paper argues that pragmatic inferences that typically appear cross-linguistically associated with these connectors, and that result in
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Invited presuppositions and the pragmatics of trick questions International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Nathaniel Lotze
Trick questions are a subgenre of puzzles that have undergone little, if any, semantic-pragmatic study, in part because they are often conflated with riddles. While they do share some mechanisms with riddles, they lean much more heavily on pragmatic mechanisms, and how they make use of them is quite different. This paper focuses on three types of invited presuppositions (box, red herring, and rug)
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Negated tautologies and copular contradictions: Interpretive strategies International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Elena Vilinbakhova
This paper investigates utterances with the structure A is not A, showing that they can be fully informative and are felicitously used and understood in discourse. Relying on the notions of metalinguistic and metarepresentational negation, we argue that the class of utterances A is not A is heterogeneous and differs in regard to the lower-order representation under the scope of the negative operator
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A note on Contextual Blindness as extended to only International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Salvatore Pistoia-Reda
This paper discusses the Contextual Blindness principle as extended to the exclusive operator only. It focuses on the interaction between only and alternatives derived from a special category of contextual orders, generally referred to as “rank orders”. It submits problematic evidence for the principle and argues that access to contextual information is required in the relevant cases. Its conclusion
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Speaking figuratively: The role of the tacit in artful language International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Kathryn O’Shields
This article addresses two forms of artful language: similes and metaphors. It argues that their artful quality arises from a deliberate omission of information, requiring the listener to fill in the missing parts. Sentences of the form ‘A is like B’ have two uses: as plain comparisons (called similatives) stating that two individuals (item A and item B) are comparable and share properties, and as
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Current issues in the ontology and form of directive speech acts International Review of Pragmatics (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-05-14 Nicolas Ruytenbeek
A general issue in pragmatics concerns the definitions of speech act (SA) types. Cognitive linguists agree that a directive SA involves a speaker exerting a force towards her addressee’s (A) performance of some action, and the subtypes of directives have been approached in terms of a metaphorical grounding based on force image-schemas. These idealized cognitive models include graded features, the values