International Review of Pragmatics最新文献

Expressions of dissatisfaction are made either through troubles talk or complaints (Haugh, 2016). Against this backdrop, through the analysis of naturally occurring data in classroom interactions, this paper explores Iranian university students’ troubles talk and complaints, and how teachers reacted to them. The study’s findings reveal that female students generated more cases of troubles talk, whereas male students complained more in their interactions with teachers. In reaction to troubles talk, female teachers’ affiliative responses drastically outnumbered male ones, whereas in reaction to complaints, male teachers’ disaffiliative responses largely outnumbered female ones. The conclusion is that gender differences and the appraisal of the expression of dissatisfaction as troubles talk or a complaint play a pivotal role in teachers’ responses. In this study’s institutional context, complaints were not welcomed by the teachers, in that they linked students’ expressions of dissatisfaction to low self-efficacy or subjective judgment of teachers’ performance. This study highlights the importance of local contexts and practices in understanding the nature of complicated speech acts such as complaints.

The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the dynamics of performatives, with special focus on normatively charged institutions as legal-political ones, with the help of a case study coming from Roman antiquity: the appointment of Julius Caesar as “perpetual dictator”, as it is analyzed by Licandro (2022). That analysis shows both how institutional performatives are established and how they are subject to tensions and changes in their course of application. On that basis, I will make two hypotheses. First, the power of legal-political performatives is (also) grounded in what I will call “symbolic value”: a special feature of certain linguistic expressions which is historically related to religious rituals. Second, symbolic value and practical (i.e., means-end) reasoning are not alternative explanations, they are partners both in establishing legal-political performatives and in driving their application through time.

In this study, we scrutinize the collaborative balancing of stories and identities in a corpus of Belgian WWII interviews. Specifically, we zoom in on three dimensions—tellability, morality and credibility—to explore how interactants jointly construct testimonies that are in line with social norms—and are thus acceptable—within the WWII remembrance storytelling context. By relying on a narrative as social practice-approach, we confronted fine-grained analyses of identity work in the interviews with master narratives circulating in the wider remembrance context. Our analyses reveal unique norms regarding tellability (i.e. the tellability of typically untellable topics), morality (i.e. the condemnation of outgroup affiliations) and credibility (i.e. the importance of trustworthy narratives). We argue that these norms not only resulted from the storytelling world’s specific time-space configuration, but were also informed by the WWII storyworld, which may attest to the existence of a WWII remembrance community of imagination.

I present empirical arguments that bodily gestures may communicate a propositional meaning with assertoric force and trigger implicatures based on violations of Relation. Crucial in the analyses are Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning as well as Tim Wharton’s extended argument that bodily gestures instantiate a third type of meaning defined by the spontaneous production of a gesture and the explicit exhibition of it.

There are broad disagreements between existing models regarding the mental representations and processes involved in the “DEGREE ADVERB + PROPER NAME” construction, including divergences regarding the semantics of the degree device, the category status of the proper name, the construction’s expressed meaning, its compositionality, and, crucially, the operation holding between the degree device and the proper name. Our corpus-based investigation of two competing models from Construction Grammar and Formal Semantics shows that while both make useful contributions to the scientific understanding of the construction, neither is empirically adequate. Most importantly, we find that the construction participates in several non-predicted expressed meanings; multivariate analyses show that the three meanings amenable to statistical analysis cluster with different semantic usage-features. We argue that the best way to account for the construction’s semantics/pragmatics is via a previously-dismissed cognitive mechanism: an enrichment/strengthening-type operation whereby a pragmatically-supplied scale is added to the message.

This paper explores the discourse of the Russia-Ukraine war to outline and tentatively characterize the dominant narrative schemas anchored in the spatial geopolitical representations of globalness and localness. It employs a collection of analytical tools from the domains of critical cognitive discourse studies and narrative research to distinguish between two apparently most salient schemas: the Global Conflict Reality (GCR) narrative and the Local Conflict Reality (LCR) narrative. The GCR narrative conceptualizes the Russia-Ukraine war as a growing international conflict, extremely likely to produce serious political, economic and, not least, material consequences for the global community. GCR uses an emotionally charged coercive rhetoric to call for immediate political and military measures to support Ukraine so the war can be stopped before it spreads beyond its current borders. The principal narrator of GCR is the state of Ukraine itself, though the narrative is re-contextualized in a variety of other countries located in geographical proximity to the conflict, such as Poland and other states of Central Europe. In contrast to GCR, the LCR narrative, performed mostly by the Kremlin, construes the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an essentially local affair (merely a ‘special operation’ conducted by Russian forces) providing no legitimate reasons for foreign intervention. Involving fewer explicit ploys used for threat generation and public coercion, LCR is distinctive for its large number of sub-narratives appropriated for different geopolitical audiences, which include not only the Russian and the Ukrainian people, but also specific audience groups in the West and the Global South. Altogether, the inherent complexity of both narratives, and the process of their re-composition in the global discourse space requires further studies, focused not only on their conceptual design but on strictly linguistic features and lexico-grammatical markers of the GCR/LCR status.

This article compares the sentence-initial constructions it is ironic that in English with the Persian bāmaze ast ke [lit. with.taste is that] to argue that such framing clauses seem to be ‘epistemic phrases’ expressing event knowledge of speakers, being utilised in the form of extraposed initial constructions for focus-marking. They are discourse markers that are intended to frame perception of event incongruity and are submitted as a matter of intersubjective deliberation in the form of sentence-initial phrases in the sense that they mark the speaker’s orientation towards what they (are about to) say—presenting speakers’ epistemic knowledge of events and the conceptual (in)coherence of the world.