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.

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.