Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

This special issue brings together European researchers that have carried out studies into the translation of swearwords from English into Danish, Greek, Italian and Spanish. The articles analyze the strategies used by the translators in a variety of genres, including television series, films, novels and plays. This introduction surveys the most important publications on the translation of swearwords, a subarea of research within translation studies that has gradually attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners, as the abundance of articles, book chapters and M. A. and Ph D. theses available in the past two decades attest. The contributors to this special issue analyze the pragmatics of swearing in translation by considering aspects such as emotional force, level of offensiveness, intended inferences of the original texts and their translation, and perlocutionary force.

Conversational humour, which broadly encompasses (sequences of) utterances that are designed to ‘amuse’ participants or are treated as ‘amusing’ by participants across various kinds of social interaction, is an inherently social phenomenon involving not only the speaker but at least one recipient. An episode of conversational humour includes (at least) a humour bid proffered by the speaker and the response to it by the recipient. This study focuses on the recipient’s responses to humour and introduces a framework for analysing responses to humour bids which is grounded in a close analysis of the sequential trajectory of humour episodes. Drawing on data from intercultural initial interactions in English, and focusing on the sequential trajectory of humour episodes through the lens of interactional pragmatics, this study proposes a typology of responses to humour bids, offering a basis for operationalisation in talk-ininteraction. Within this framework, there are five sequentially distinct types of responses that can follow a humour bid: 1) disattending humour, 2) minimal response to humour: sequence closure, 3) minimal response to humour: serious response, 4) minimal response to humour: agreement, and 5) post-expanding humour.

Research on the speech acts of compliments (Cs) and compliment responses (CRs) has attracted a wide variety of research attention over the last several decades. Cs and CRs index an array of relational dimensions that govern sociocultural expressions of rapport and solidarity. Their importance has been well documented in intra- and intercultural communication pragmatics research across different languages. This study used a discourse analytic approach to examine one type of rare and often underutilized CR strategy, the praise upgrade, and its surprisingly frequent use as a CR response across a corpus of casual conversations between US English speaking young adults in a serious dating relationship. The analyses demonstrate that praise upgrades were often exaggerated and playful responses that re-position the compliment as somewhat absurd and thus not entirely serious. Ironic or playful CR upgrades to Cs worked to dilute the C itself while also attending to the subject-side risks of both the one formulating the C and the one receiving it. Three types of praise upgrades were identified: 1) praise upgrades that playfully rendered the compliment as absurd; 2) praise upgrades with tongue-in-cheek self-praise or boasts; 3) praise upgrades that redefined the compliment on the recipient's terms.

This paper explores how apology strategies are used to rebuild the public's trust using evidence from Chinese e-commerce live-streaming hosts' apology letters. It is found that live-streaming hosts can use two strategies to rebuild the public's trust: apology-related metalanguage labels and apology-related supportive moves. The former are routine formulas generally used to give an explicit apology, such as “sorry.” The latter are strategies used to support apology-related metalanguage labels, including offering explanations, taking responsibility, making promises, showing empathy, and expressing integrity. Further quantitative analyses indicate that metalanguage labels alone cannot rebuild the public's trust. Trust can be rebuilt only by combining metalanguage labels and supportive moves. This paper contributes to the theoretical study of trustworthiness building in the public arena and can enhance trust relationships between e-commerce and the public.

Much public debate today is carried out on Twitter (now X), where the participants employ a range of diverse resources to convey their ideas effectively. Disentangling the resources into clear and understandable structures and patterns presents a fresh challenge for discourse pragmatics. This article addresses that challenge methodologically by evaluating existing methods for identifying and classifying pragmatic patterns, revealing their drawbacks, and advocating for a new coding system. This categorizes tweets based on a post's primary pragmatic function (informing, appealing, or expressing emotivity), considering subsidiary functions. The study then applies this new scheme to analyze the Twitter debate on the Polish Turów lignite mine, which became a subject of international dispute as the Czech and European authorities sought the mine's closure to eliminate its negative environmental impact. The debate unfolds mainly in Polish, Czech, and English, each language being associated with a distinct discourse. The English discourse emphasizes a transnational appeal for widespread decarbonization, contrasting with the predominantly oppositional, national political perspectives in the Polish and Czech discourses. These rely heavily on emotivity directed, in the Polish case, primarily against the country's ruling party, and in the Czech one against the deal eventually reached with Poland to mitigate the problems.

Across languages, demonstratives grammaticalize into various grammatical and discourse-pragmatic markers. Using corpora of natural conversation and scripted drama conversation, and employing the theoretical frameworks of grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification, this study demonstrates that the Korean demonstrative construct i-ke ya ‘(it) is this’ has developed into an affective stance marker, a development not yet discussed elsewhere in the literature. As a stance marker, the form can encode (a) an emphasizing stance and (b) a boasting stance. The study shows that the development of i-ke ya is an instance of subjectification and of intersubjectification, as the functions of i-ke ya changed from exophoric (pointing to a physical object), to discourse deictic (pointing to a referent in a discourse), and then to expressive (encoding the speaker's stance). The analysis of its shifting functions indicates that i-ke ya obtained its affective meanings due to its frequent use in negative and disaffiliated contexts. Frequency information and a prosodic analysis further testify to the emergence of the new affective meanings of i-ke ya. The study contributes to recent research that investigates various emotive functions of demonstratives beyond accounts based on physical proximity.

This research examines the politicians' and experts’ use of the two evidential markers I think and I know for authority and solidarity in UK government Covid briefings based on a corpus-assisted analysis. It not only analyses their evidential constructions, but also explicates their discursive functions in the British cultural context when public health was under challenge. It aims to demonstrate the different epistemic and affective stances of British politicians and experts and to highlight the power of I know in displaying leadership and facilitating solidarity in the discourse of crisis. It may also shed light on the distinctive stance strategies of British public health discourse in terms of the two evidential markers.

This study explores the potential of including AI-generated language in pragmatic analysis– a field that has primarily been conducted on human language use. With the rapid growth of large language models, AI-generated texts and AI-human interactions constitute a growing field where pragmatics research is expanding to. Language data that humans used to hold a full authorship may also involve modifications made by AI. The foremost concern is thus the pragmatic qualities of AI-generated language, such as whether and to which extent AI data mirror the pragmatic patterns we have found in human speech behaviours. In this study, we compare 148 ChatGPT-generated conversations with 82 human-written ones and 354 human evaluations of these conversations. The data are analysed using various methods, including traditional speech strategy coding, four computational methods developed in NLP, and four statistical tests. The findings reveal that ChatGPT performs equally well as human participants in four out of the five tested pragmalinguistic features and five out of six sociopragmatic features. Additionally, the conversations generated by ChatGPT exhibit higher syntactic diversity and a greater sense of formality compared to those written by humans. As a result, our participants are unable to distinguish ChatGPT-generated conversations from human-written ones.