Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

This study explores aspects of experiencing space, focusing on uses of the Japanese proximal spatial deictic expressions (JPSDs). These expressions may or may not be accompanied by a pointing gesture. In the analysis of interactions between the driver and passengers during a car trip, this study compares the uses of JPSDs and investigates how the participants organize their spatial experiences. It makes three observations: (1) a JPSD used with a pointing gesture differentiates a spatial feature as its referent in the environment, (2) a JPSD without a pointing gesture refers to the participants' current location and organizes the location as experienced in the temporal unfolding of the ongoing driving activity, and (3) a pointing gesture, accompanying a JPSD referring to the participants’ current location, positions this location in its geographical relationships with other landmarks. How spatial experiences are organized varies according to what activity the participants are currently engaging in. Spatial experiences involve temporal and social dimensions.

Bilmes's work in the last decade of his career was primarily concerned with the approach he developed and called Occasioned Semantics. Bilmes based OS on Sacks' (1995) membership categorisation work together with components of taxonomical analysis derived from ethno-semantics. While the approach was primarily aimed at the field of Semantics, Bilmes also argued that OS offered a way to develop upon Sacks' work by situating categorial inferencing within ‘occasioned fields of meaning’ within which categorial definitions and descriptions evolve through a taxonomic branching texture. In this paper we explore the potential analytic intersection between aspects of Bilmes' OS and Sacks' category analysis together with later developments in Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA). In particular we revisit the ‘consistency rule’ together with ‘omni-relevance’, which provides a way of understanding shifts in fields of meaning as hierarchical and multi-layered. The combined approach allows to bring into view multi-layered sequential and categorial flow with taxonomic branching that takes place within an ongoing, unfolding and contingent interactional context of ‘who-we-are-and-what-we-are-doing’.

This paper focuses on live streams as interactional phenomena from an ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) perspective. It discusses how streamers and viewers manage attention and engagement and how noticing-based actions constitute a powerful and crucial resource to produce and display these, finely tuned to the asymmetric communicative affordances of live streams, which, in the case of expository live streams, enact a streamer on display for the perceptual consumption of remote viewers. It discusses how streamers and viewers may produce noticing sequences and noticing-based sequences. It also discusses how the orientation towards noticing in expository live streams may become contagious and lead to a ‘noticing effervescence.’

Sharing experience via social media communication has been examined in psychology, sociology, communication and linguistic studies. While this research has mostly examined consumption experience and health issues, how people make meanings and develop interactions while sharing mundane matters needs more investigation. This paper reports on a pragmatic investigation into individuals sharing their exam experiences in social media groups. Data were collected from two support groups on Douban, a Chinese social networking site that encourages users to share their thoughts, interests and experiences. A total of 400 original posts, 200 each from a group sharing experiences of failure in examinations and a group sharing their success in examinations, were collected and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings showed that the two groups were significantly different in the ways they voluntarily disclosed their identities and in the types of expressions they employed to refer to different participants. In addition, they differed significantly in how they sought or offered support in interactions. Similarities and differences between the two groups’ sharing are discussed in relation to the instructions of the two groups, their identity construction, the affordances of social media, and the importance of politeness and face in Chinese culture.

This study explores the use of hand points in competitive epistemic and speakership environments in Mandarin-speaking conversation. It examines incoming speakers’ points at a current speaker. This study employs multimodal conversation-analytic methods to analyse 334 min of triadic interaction. 40 points directed at a current speaker by an incoming speaker are the focus of analysis. This study finds that these points indicate an upcoming bid for the floor, thereby carrying out self-selection for speakership. In addition, the turn introduced by the incoming speaker's point suggests that they know at least as much as the current speaker about the issue at hand, and can implicate epistemic and speakership competition. As such, these points foreshadow delivery of a weakly aligning turn or a disaligning turn, and may accomplish either affiliation or disaffiliation. This study generates new knowledge about the interactional functions of points in multiparty conversation, and suggests potential phenomena for cross-linguistic comparison.

This paper explores the procedural meaning of the Spanish adverb apenas, proposing that it carries the procedural meaning of right-hand APPROACHING. This procedural meaning effectively accounts for various interpretations and argumentative orientations of apenas in different contexts. The analysis demonstrates that apenas consistently implies a closeness or minimality, whether in quantitative or temporal domain. The procedural meaning also explains the negative argumentative orientation of apenas. Therefore, the different meanings of apenas can be analyzed in a holistic way. Through this analysis, the study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of adverbial usage in Spanish and potentially guide analogous investigations in other languages.

By examining the employment of personal deictic terms in Persian interactions, this study focuses on the dynamic and emerging uses of them in order to shed some light on how to interpret the construction of interpersonal relations of Persian speakers. More importantly, it aims to account for the alternation mechanism between paradigmatic pronouns of lowering and elevating one's status within a single interaction. A cognitive-dialogic analysis of approximately 20 h of everyday conversations and videotaped broadcasts reveals that interlocutors' use of personal deictic terms is a fluid, emergent, and contingent practice, governed by at least six possible interactional factors: i) the speaker's emotions, ii) the speaker's situational intentions, iii) the prior speaker's turn, iv) the shift of discourse topic, v) bystander(s), and vi) the message content. Interlocutors' emergent shift from lowering into elevating terms and vice versa brings about a fluctuation of interpersonal relationships in the course of interaction. By taking these factors into account, this study shows that each usage of lowering and elevating terms conveys multiple, but distinct referential and indexical meanings about the interactants and the context in which it occurs. It also reveals that Persian speakers are aware of the potential indexical meanings of these terms, and that they use them (un)consciously and strategically to define, negotiate, or reshape their social relationships. Above all, this study argues that interlocutors' (inter)subjectivity essentially regulates the alternation of using lowering- and elevating-deictic forms.

This study investigates a previously unresearched use of the discourse marker so: prefacing answers to questions from an interlocutor, informally coined “backstory so” and found to signal that the answer necessitates background information, or more complexity or length than the asker assumes the questioner expects, a function known to be carried out by well. This investigation was motivated by (i) negative attitudes toward this use of so, describing the speakers with attributes like annoying, condescending, confusing, and wrong; (ii) layperson claims that it is new; and (iii) non-scholarly writings by linguists reporting controversy over whether answering questions with so is actually new or a Zwickian Recency Illusion. This paper draws on spoken data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English from 1990 to 2016, and presents findings of 774 target tokens by 544 unique speakers starting in 1992. Results of a logistic regression show a statistically significant increase in the rate of this form over that time. I tentatively suggest that previous constraints against the discourse marker so prefacing answers to mark added information seem to have undergone a rapid language shift, competing with the older use of well, and supporting the layperson intuitions of newness.