Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

During scenic opera rehearsals, the participants create performance bodies – fictive behaviours that portray the characters in the libretto. They use depictions – interactional practices comprised of short scenes staged for the other participants – to propose and negotiate performance bodies that suit the developing aesthetics of the production. In this paper, we focus on non-serious proposal depictions: depictions that become treated as laughable and not suitable for the performance. Non-serious depictions can accomplish joint fictionalizations, especially with teasing (Cantarutti, 2022), and are used in contrast with an ideal performance (Keevallik, 2010). Building on this work, we analyze how non-serious depictions are used to decide what the wished performance will be. We discuss two types of non-serious depictions in the workplace setting of the opera rehearsal process and show how negotiations over the seriousness of depictions achieve aesthetic intersubjectivity among the colleagues. The ambiguity between serious and non-serious proposals is exploited as a resource when navigating the unknown territories of a piece of art under development. The material consists of 20 h of video-recorded opera rehearsals in Swedish and English, with an Italian libretto.

Vocalizations are a central resource for instructing in orchestra rehearsals. Conductors use them to make the musicians understand what they want to hear, i.e., through singing and rhythmic vocalizations they imitate or depict the envisaged musical qualities. In this contribution, I examine what vocalizations of orchestra conductors look like and how they are embedded in the instructional interaction between conductor and musicians. Based on a corpus of orchestra rehearsals in France and Italy, the paper uses multimodal conversation analysis to describe the vocal resources used by the conductors for singing, the interactional and sequential organization of vocalizations, as well as their functional properties. Vocalizing appears to often be accompanied by other semiotic resources, such as gestures and gaze, in order to form vocal-gestural demonstrations that embody musical aspects, e.g., tempo, phrasing, articulation, etc. The analysis reveals that vocalizations are employed by conductors for various purposes that exceed the simple action of imitating the music. Data are in French, Italian and English.

The current study investigates the development of metapragmatic awareness in conversational competence among Chinese children aged 4–12 years. Utilizing eight cartoons, children were engaged with a series of metapragmatic questions targeting violations of four maxims of cooperation. By assessing their performance in a task involving conversational principles, we explore the progression of their metapragmatic skills. The results shows i) The metapragmatic awareness in different age groups increased. The early school-age stage was the transitional period in the development of children's metapragmatic awareness. The development range of metapragmatic awareness did not continuously increase in the later school-age stage. ii) Metacognitive awareness was in the salient position in the preschool stage, and in the early school-age stage metarepresentational awareness was predominant. Three forms of metapragmatic awareness did not develop sequentially. iii) The Chinese paratactic language structures and their profound cultural backgrounds influenced children's performance of metapragmatic awareness. This research provides a new paradigm for developmental pragmatics and it has a certain value for the treatment and intervention of the children with pragmatic impairments.

Despite the continued drive for sharing the self online, social media users have been increasingly orienting to practices of ‘not sharing’ in the context of wider debates about digital wellbeing. In this article, we investigate how celebrities manage and navigate online sharing. We focus on media ideologies in social media posts that announce the celebrities' decision to ‘take a break’, i.e. to stop posting and/or engaging with social media content. Our analysis of these announcements as rich examples of metapragmatic awareness points to three main discourses that justify celebrities' decision to take a break: (a) mental health and wellbeing, (b) public-private boundaries, and (c) social justice and protest. These justifications of ‘not sharing’ are associated with metapragmatic typifications of celebrities who position themselves as vulnerable, but also as agentive, professional and role models for their fans. The article offers empirical insights into how power players of the social mediascape, such as celebrities, understand and orient to meanings and practices of digital sharing. In terms of practical implications, the study of celebrities' metapragmatic discourse reveals how fans, as ordinary users, are presented with opportunities and models of managing social media activity, owning mental health issues and acting on them.

This paper investigates the discourse particle vallë in Albanian. It provides the first in-depth description of the distribution and functional meaning of vallë. I argue that vallë is restricted to speech acts containing questions as opposed to assertions. The meaning of vallë is expressive in nature since it contributes to the non-at-issue content of the utterance and expresses speaker's attitude of wondering towards the truth of the proposition. I provide an analysis in terms of Traugott's subjectification approach, according to which vallë expresses the speaker's epistemic stance.

While previous studies on ostensible speech acts mainly concern ostensible invitations, ostensible refusals or ostensible compliments, few have touched upon ostensible criticisms. To fill the knowledge gap, this study collected online data through Baidu search engine to examine criticisables and functions of ostensible criticisms in Chinese contexts, and discusses the underlying sociocultural factors. The findings reveal that (1) the criticisables are “good shortcomings” that can range from addressee's being overworking to absentee's being too showy. (2) such ostensible criticisms can function to express implicit flattery, construct positive image or convey humblebrag; and (3) factors such as conflicting communicative needs, belief in Confucian doctrines of “lǐmào” (politeness) and “héxié” (harmony), and face sensitivities may underlie the performance of ostensible criticisms in Chinese context.

Joint actions like everyday conversations feature the use of speech particles like back-channels or discourse markers to coordinate transitions from one part of the action to another. Transitions can be either horizontal (within tasks or subtasks; i.e., moving from one step to the next in a task) or vertical (between tasks or subtasks). In English, okay is typically used to coordinate vertical transitions. In institutionalized joint actions, okay is used especially by institutional representatives to manage the joint action. Little is known about these uses of okay in other languages, or about when okay may have diffused into those languages. We investigated the use of okay as a vertical coordination marker in Swiss German research interviews and Swiss French job interviews. Okay was consistently used as a vertical transition marker in both settings, especially by interviewers. Younger participants used okay more often than older participants. The findings suggest that okay may have diffused into other languages not only as a marker of agreement, but also as a marker for coordinating transitions.

This study examines the usage of the English politeness marker please on a Chinese microblogging platform, focusing on its functional adaptation and the motivations for its borrowing. The findings reveal that please, as a pragmatically borrowed item (i.e., a pragmatic borrowing), differs from both its English etymon and Chinese equivalents. While it retains the preference for clause-final positions and the politeness-enhancing function of its English etymon, it has become predominantly used with imperatives on the public social media platform, often accompanied by features that indicate a strengthened requesting force. Additionally, please has acquired a new function of marking in-group identity and positive politeness among Chinese youth on social media, a function absent in the native equivalents. This study suggests that the unique function of please motivates its adoption by Chinese young people who seek to balance closeness and politeness in peer communication. The functional adaptation undergone by please exemplifies a common pattern in pragmatic borrowings that compete with native equivalents.