Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

This paper examines the use of honorification for inanimate subjects in Korean, a linguistic phenomenon that, although traditionally ungrammatical, has been increasingly used in recent years. Despite negative perceptions and deliberate national campaigns to discourage it, its continued use requires a systematic investigation. Thus, to explore its social and linguistic functions, we conducted a questionnaire and a self-paced reading experiment. The questionnaire results suggest that native Korean speakers are well aware of the grammatical irregularity of such expressions. Nonetheless, these expressions are rated more positively only in the presence of an honorifiable addressee, indicating speakers’ sensitivity to the social nuances of inanimate honorification within interpersonal relations. The self-paced reading experiment further suggests that this sensitivity is particularly pronounced during real-time language processing, as no processing difficulty was observed for sentences with inanimate honorification when the addressee was honorifiable. The findings indicate that the contemporary use of inanimate honorification in Korean likely serves as a politeness strategy, where speakers intentionally deviate from grammatical norms to convey respect and garner positive evaluation from their interlocutors.

As collaborative discourse participants, interlocutors are expected to convey how certain they are about the proposition that they put forward in the discourse. In spoken language literature, speakers use various strategies to convey their certainty like attitude verbs, prosody, or gestures. Sign language literature reports that signers mostly modulate their manual (hands) signs and nonmanuals (face and body movements), yet there is no study investigating how both channels interact in the expression of certainty. The current study tests the degree to which different sentence types and nonmanuals affect the signer certainty in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) in a rating study. I show that signers interpret signer certainty by taking into account cues from both manual and nonmanual channels. Within the framework of threshold semantics, I discuss how sentences set the certainty threshold, and show how nonmanuals boost or deboost the threshold. Specifically, head nod increases the threshold while squint decreases it, thus providing further support for the dynamic nature of thresholds.

This study investigates workplace interactions where peer's linguistic backgrounds are topicalized. Analyzing video recordings of backstage interactions (Goffman, 1959), the research highlights different interactional consequences of topicalizing peers’ native languages and how it results in transformations in participation frameworks and thereby in the situated identities of participants. To address the main aim, the study uses an ethnomethodological conversation analytic approach to examine how participants respond to language-related inquiries, such as “How do you say X in your language?”, and how these inquiries serve as membership inference-rich devices. The findings reveal that topicalizing a peer's language (other than the main medium in the group) can trigger various activity types, including jocular interactions and informal learning. Moreover, the interaction may lead to the display of possible vulnerability, as unfolding talk can position individuals as marginal within the group and thus occasion stance-taking toward that positioning with resistance.

Speakers sharing the same language have been found to use this language in systematically different ways. Language-internal pragmatic variation can be observed across nations, regions, and social groups, correlating with such demographic factors as ethnicity, gender, and age. Yet, while there is a huge body of work examining pragmatic differences between languages, the study of pragmatic differences within languages is, by contrast, relatively recent and still developing. Much early work in this area has been carried out on a handful of speech acts in some national varieties of, notably, Spanish and English, by employing experimental methods such as discourse completion tasks and role plays. Since then, varieties of lesser studied Indo-European languages as well as of non-Indo-European languages have been considered, including post-colonial varieties, and there is a wide range of further novelties concerning in particular procedures of data gathering and the pragmatic features investigated, thus broadening the scope of the analysis. The aim of this article collection is to showcase the diversity in this growing subfield of pragmatics, while this introductory article provides an overview of the topics, methods, and findings in the papers included in this collection, with a view to encouraging more research into pragmatic variation within languages.

The following paper deals with the division of pragmatic labor between two types of wh-interrogatives in Marzahn German (MG). Use of the first type, marked by the enclitic particle n ([n-int]), is near obligatory for and confined to canonical, i.e., information-seeking question acts. The second type, lacking n ([∅-int]), has to be employed in non-canonical questions, such as rhetorical ones. This pattern of apparent markedness-reversal challenges the pretense-based approach to exam questions by Plunze and Zimmermann (2006) (Section 2) and plausibilizes an approach to information-seeking questions in terms of social cost in the sense of Levinson (2012) (Section 3.1). Overall empirical evidence, however, favors an account of n-marking as reinforcement of question act defaults in line with Farkas (2022) (Section 3.2). Section 5 offers a formulation of reinforcement in terms of the "table model" of discourse (Farkas 2022), such that the peculiar status of MG [n-int] follows from the prohibition of contextually overriding "basic conventional discourse effects".

In the course of the above discussion, we will scrutinize different notions of interrogative sentential force (Sections 1, 2, 5), illustrate the form and workings of several types of non-canonical questions (guess, rhetorical, echo etc.), and analyze question use in the light of institutional settings and interpersonal effects (3.3).

This article explores the dynamics of epistemic positioning and knowledge-building in classroom interaction in two postgraduate neuroscience classrooms. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining multimodal Conversation Analysis and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), it examines how lecturers and students negotiate epistemic stance and status through interactional practices, and how these practices legitimise certain stances or “gazes” in relation to doing neuroscience. Drawing on six hours of video-recorded classroom interaction, the study uses detailed transcripts to uncover the epistemic positioning practices of two lecturers teaching modules on neurobiological bases of psychiatric disorders and addiction. The interactional data are reanalysed from the knowledge-building perspective of LCT, revealing that the two lecturers were operating different specialization codes and activating different gazes in terms of the social relations of both themselves and their students as knowers. The analyses demonstrate how slight shifts in interactional practices around epistemic positioning can have significant consequences for legitimating different knower positions in postgraduate neuroscience education. By combining micro-analysis with the sociological framework of LCT, the study offers insights into the complex dynamics of knowledge-building in advanced academic settings and offers tools for reflection on and enhancement of teaching practices in postgraduate science education contexts.

Teaching is a highly complex and context-dependent activity that requires teachers’ strategic employment of embodied resources tailored to the specific instructional contexts. Particularly, the coordination of teachers’ whole-body movements, or mobility, becomes indispensable for instructions during small-group rounds (Jakonen, 2020), where teachers monitor and guide students, organize on-task activity, and engage in social talk. Drawing upon multimodal conversation analysis, the present study explores teacher movement, extending beyond walking to encompass leaning in, bending over, sitting with, and kneeling next to students, during a prolonged desk interaction. The analysis demonstrates how mobility is a professional resource that can be skillfully deployed in creating pedagogical opportunities that promote students’ task engagement. The findings also reveal how students respond through mutual displays of bodily engagement that are sequentially and temporally aligning to the instruction. Overall, the study hopes to offer further insights into teacher mobility through fine-grained analysis of subtle bodily movements that engenders mutual student engagement during small-group rounds.

This article examines the use of surprise frames in judicial opinions of the HKSAR. Specifically, it examines the semantic variation of surprise frames and the discourse purposes for which they are used. In doing so, it explores the underlying interactivity of surprise frames by distinguishing between performative expressions of surprise (those that emanate from the current author's reflection) and descriptive expressions (those that report on another's sense of surprise). Recognising that legal discourse scholars often neglect lower courts, the paper contrasts opinions from three levels of court in the HKSAR. Genre and court-specific patterns emerge: a key similarity is that all three courts, performatively and descriptively, most often use the TYPICALITY frame. Key differences include a significantly greater use of the TYPICALITY frame by the appeal courts in relation to the trial courts; more qualitatively oriented analysis shows that the use of surprise frames maps onto the common law standard of review, i.e., the appeal courts largely use surprise frames to focus on legal issues. In contrast, the trial courts focus on facts and evidence. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the main findings for researchers and professionals.

This paper compares three types of embedded root clause (verb second in complement clauses, embedded imperatives and embedded inverted interrogatives) in German and English. It will describe in detail how these constructions differ from their non-root counterparts syntactically and pragmatically, and how equivalent constructions in German and English differ from each other. I will then use Farkas's (2022) version of the Table model to formalise how the pragmatic characteristics of these constructions falls out from a mixture of the generations of a conventional implicature and language-specific rules on how perspectives may shift under attitude predicates.

Scientists are under increasing pressure to enhance public awareness of the societal implications of their research. This involves recontextualizing highly specialized knowledge into forms accessible to diverse audiences, varying in levels of expertise. While much research has focused on the reformulation of ideas for popularizing purposes, less emphasis has been placed on the pragmatic strategies involved in adapting expert knowledge for varied audiences in digital contexts. A pragmatic approach that leverages both verbal communication and digital tools could provide insights into these dissemination strategies. This study examines how digital research digests, which are concise versions of research articles, make scientific research accessible to non-experts. The study identifies two key sets of strategies: expert-oriented, which emphasize authority and credibility, and audience-oriented, which simplify complex ideas and relate them to everyday life. These strategies blend to form a unique narrative voice that balances authority with accessibility. The paper argues that effective digital dissemination should integrate both linguistic and pragmatic methods to successfully communicate complex information across different digital practices.