Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

This study examines a unique form of intertextual reference – the personification of case names in legal discourse. In the U.S. legal system, the holdings of courts in prior cases can function as binding law, and the resolution of most legal issues relies on an overt, conventionalized system of intertextual citations to these cases. I analyze references to case names in an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court that involve personification, which I operationalize as subject-verb pairings of case names with verbs that are normally associated with animacy or agency. I find that cases which appear more frequently in the oral argument are more likely to be personified, with the most frequent cases being bestowed with traits that are increasingly explicit in their humanization, such as the ability to communicate, make utterances which can then be presented as direct reported speech, and express emotions and intentions. I argue that the existence of this cline suggests that the participants in the oral argument use personification as a means of managing information in sequences that are particularly dense with intertextual references to case law. Implications for research on intertextuality, personification, and legal discourse are then explored.

In Mandarin Chinese, ritual refusals are often employed to enhance politeness or to test the sincerity of the invitation or offer. This study examines whether native listeners can accurately judge the sincerity of refusals when hearing complete sentences or keywords, and whether their judgement is associated with specific prosodic cues. Twelve native Mandarin speakers each produced 10 sincere and 10 ritual refusal sentences containing the keyword buyong (‘you don't need to’). These 240 complete sentences and 240 keywords extracted from the complete sentences were used in an Aural Sincerity Rating Task. Seventy-two native listeners listened to these stimuli and judged their sincerity (forced choice). Results showed that listeners could judge the sincerity of refusals when listening to complete sentences as well as keywords, the latter of which did not contain any contextual information. This suggests that they relied on prosodic cues to make their judgement. Acoustic Analyses conducted on the accurately-perceived stimuli revealed that ritual refusals tended to have a higher mean pitch, a larger pitch range, and a slower speech rate than sincere refusals. This study demonstrates the critical role of prosody in conveying nuanced speaker intention in Mandarin.

In this paper I explore in detail the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of two understudied discourse markers of Upper Austrian German: ma indicates surprise, while geh indicates a discrepancy between speaker and addressee. In terms of their context of use, these discourse markers, which are restricted to turn-initial position are — at first sight — similar to the sentence-internal discourse particles leicht and doch. It is shown that these four markers display systematic similarities and differences, which invites the conclusion that their distribution is regulated by grammatical knowledge. An analysis in terms of Wiltschko's (2021) Interactional Spine Hypothesis is developed according to which ma and geh are interactional pro-forms (ProGroundP) which mark a reaction to the speaker's or the addressee's current epistemic state, respectively. In contrast, leicht and doch are analysed as (covertly) associating with the head of the grounding phrases thereby indicating whether or not the propositional content is in the interlocutor's ground.