Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

Toward a granular analysis of the discourse marker ti: in Tunisian Arabic 突尼斯阿拉伯语语篇标记语ti的粒度分析

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-30 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.006

Mohamed Jlassi

{"title":"Toward a granular analysis of the discourse marker ti: in Tunisian Arabic","authors":"Mohamed Jlassi","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study offers a granular analysis of procedural relevance by challenging the traditional view of discourse markers as performing a fixed procedural function. The analysis draws on a corpus of Tunisian Arabic supported by a speaker survey to examine the pragmatic effects of <em>ti:</em> across diverse communicative contexts. Focusing on the understudied yet pervasive discourse marker <em>ti:</em> in Tunisian Arabic, the paper relies on corpus data and speaker insights to disambiguate its complex functional load. The findings reveal that the frequency of <em>ti:</em> stems from its high degree of multifunctionality: it serves diverse conversational roles, influences the trajectory of interaction, and reflects the dynamics between discourse participants. The paper argues that this multifunctionality is rooted in <em>ti:</em>’s multicategorial status, enabling it to perform multiple communicative tasks across different discourse domains. As such, <em>ti:</em> exemplifies a “multiperformative” discourse marker—an element that simultaneously encodes various pragmatic functions with minimal speech effort. This efficiency points to broader implications for the typology of discourse markers, both in Arabic and crosslinguistically. Ultimately, the study underscores the need for a more nuanced, crosslinguistically grounded model of procedural meaning—one that accounts for multifunctionality, categorical flexibility, and interactional economy. Such an approach, situated within pragmatics, opens the door to productive interfaces with other linguistic fields.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 139-153"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145221746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Interpreting verbal irony in Mandarin Chinese: The role of prosody and proficiency among L2 learners of Chinese 汉语反语的翻译：韵律和熟练程度在汉语第二语言学习者中的作用

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-26 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.004

Fengming Liu

{"title":"Interpreting verbal irony in Mandarin Chinese: The role of prosody and proficiency among L2 learners of Chinese","authors":"Fengming Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the intersection of second language pragmatics and prosody, focusing on L2 Chinese learners' ability to interpret ironic intentions through prosody. Irony, as a form of non-literal language, relies on cues such as prosody for interpretation. For L2 learners, recognizing these prosodic cues is crucial to disambiguating meaning and avoiding communicative breakdowns. The study employs a cross-sectional design, including intermediate (n = 29) and advanced (n = 23) L1 American English speakers learning Mandarin as a second language, as well as native Chinese speakers (n = 60). Participants completed an experimental interpretation task designed to assess the impact of proficiency and prosody on interpreting speakers' intentions. Stimuli included utterances delivered in three prosodic tones: ironic, enthusiastic, and neutral. Results showed that proficiency enhanced learners' ability to interpret irony through prosody, with advanced learners outperforming intermediate learners. Advanced learners showed greater sensitivity to ironic tones, while intermediate learners relied more on literal meanings and overlooked prosodic cues. These findings highlight the developmental trajectory of L2 learners’ pragma-prosodic competence, and shed light on future pedagogical practice.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 120-138"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145156343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The palm-up open hand gesture across language modalities: A comparison of German and DGS (German Sign Language) 不同语言形态下手掌向上张开的手势：德语和德国手语的比较

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-26 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.008

Sandra Debreslioska , Anna Kuder , Pamela Perniss

{"title":"The palm-up open hand gesture across language modalities: A comparison of German and DGS (German Sign Language)","authors":"Sandra Debreslioska , Anna Kuder , Pamela Perniss","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>It is a well-established fact that the use of gestures is a ubiquitous feature of communication with language. This is true for both spoken and signed languages. However, while in spoken languages, gestures are produced in a different modality than speech (visual versus vocal/auditory, respectively), gestural elements in sign languages are produced in the same modality as sign (both are visual). This study investigates whether this difference in the modality of language production influences the discourse-pragmatic functions that gestures fulfill. We focus on palm-up open hand (PUOH) gestures and examine their frequency and contexts of use in German and DGS (German Sign Language) narrative productions. We find that German speakers and DGS signers use PUOHs similarly often, but differently on the functional level. Speakers deploy PUOH gestures for information structural purposes (in particular, to signal new(er) information), while signers use PUOH gestures on a discourse management level (in particular, to signal the ending of narratives). We argue that this cross-linguistic and cross-modal difference reflects the differing affordances that spoken versus signed languages offer, thereby revealing new insights into the language-gesture relationship, and the multimodal nature of language more generally.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 99-119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145156256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Relevance beyond the implicated proposition 超越隐含命题的相关性

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.003

Elly Ifantidou

{"title":"Relevance beyond the implicated proposition","authors":"Elly Ifantidou","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>What makes an input worth attending to from the mass of competing stimuli? In relevance-theoretic terms, perceivable experience (an utterance, a sight, a sound, a memory) is relevant to us when it connects with available assumptions to make a worthwhile difference to our representation of the world. For example, the news that “Cardiff orchestra cuts Russian composer from concert” (<em>The Guardian</em>) may make little worthwhile difference to my representation of the world, while “Russia invades Ukraine” (<em>The Guardian</em>) is far more likely to attract my attention, and lead me to compute the consequences (in the form of a range of inferences) that are likely to be most worthwhile for us.</div><div>Because all cognitive processing is effortful, an input becomes <em>maximally</em> relevant at the smallest possible processing effort, as predicted by Relevance Theory. The question is: What else, apart from a set of salient contextual assumptions, can impact on the expended processing by accelerating the interpretation process while expanding its rewarding effects?</div><div>I present evidence from neurolinguistics suggesting that pragmatic inference involves a series of steps that are not constrained by cognitive processes alone, and I argue that the maximum benefit from the most relevant stimulus available to an individual at a time is not exclusively propositional. The spontaneous formation of assumptions in the process of inference is often interspersed with spontaneous activation of emotions and images, those experiential resources which free up our limited cognitive resources. In defense of this view, I discuss examples of metaphor and mirative evidentials, and how non-propositional objects may be represented in an expanded notion of implicated content which would then be more open-ended and more nuanced than previously thought.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 84-98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145109760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Speech prosody and pragmatic scalar inferences: Divergent cognitive strategies in adults with high and low levels of autistic traits 言语韵律与语用标量推理：高、低水平自闭症成人的不同认知策略

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.002

Yuhan Jiang , Ting Wang

{"title":"Speech prosody and pragmatic scalar inferences: Divergent cognitive strategies in adults with high and low levels of autistic traits","authors":"Yuhan Jiang , Ting Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Background</h3><div>Given the communicative challenges associated with autistic traits (ATs), individuals with higher levels of ATs can sometimes make certain pragmatic inferences, such as quantifier scalar implicatures. However, it remains unclear whether they can effectively integrate prosodic cues when drawing these inferences.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>This study examines scalar quantifier interpretations and reaction time (RT) among Mandarin-speaking adults using computer-based Picture-Sentence Judgment & Selection Tasks, considering prosodic cues and cognitive abilities. Samples included 18 adults with lower (11F, 7M) and 27 with higher (19F, 8M) levels of ATs.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>Our study found that when prosodic cues were present, low AT individuals showed greater delays in response times but were less likely to change their interpretations. This suggests heightened sensitivity to prosodic cues and stronger conviction in their initial judgments. Additionally, while prosodic focus affected cognitive factors in both groups, low AT individuals relied more on Theory of Mind (ToM), whereas high AT individuals relied more on Executive Functions (EFs).</div></div><div><h3>Conclusions</h3><div>Higher levels of ATs are linked to greater difficulty with pragmatic scalar inferences, but compensatory cognitive strategies offset this. This study highlights the role of prosodic focus and the distinct cognitive strategies used by individuals with varying levels of ATs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 70-83"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145098110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

#greenCNPC, #CleanerEnergy: Pragmatic use of self-praise metaphors in Chinese corporate discourse on Twitter/X # greennpc， #CleanerEnergy: Twitter/X上中国企业话语中自我表扬隐喻的实用主义使用

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-19 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.001

Ya Sun, Pan Zheng, Chenle Li

{"title":"#greenCNPC, #CleanerEnergy: Pragmatic use of self-praise metaphors in Chinese corporate discourse on Twitter/X","authors":"Ya Sun, Pan Zheng, Chenle Li","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In an era of globalized corporate communication, Chinese corporations face a pragmatic challenge of balancing cultural norms of modesty with the imperative of self-promotion on international social media platforms like Twitter/X. While metaphors offer an indirect strategy to moderate self-praise, their role in facilitating communication accommodation, particularly in cross-cultural contexts, remains understudied. This study uses the qualitative corpus analysis of tweets to investigate how two leading Chinese petroleum corporations strategically employ metaphors on Twitter to frame self-praise. This study identifies fourteen high-frequency metaphors (<span>green, clean, friend, partner, home, smart, warm, high, low, lead, progress, advance, protect,</span> and <span>record)</span> across four source domains (<span>object, human, journey,</span> and <span>competition</span>), encoding four key attributes of corporate self-praise: <em>propriety, capacity, normality,</em> and <em>tenacity.</em> Crucially, they modulate self-praise intensity via three tiers of pragmatic explicitness: explicit self-praise metaphors directly highlighting positive qualities; conventional self-praise ones aligning with cultural norms; contextual self-praise ones deriving positivity from situational framing. The analysis reveals how self-praise metaphors facilitate communication accommodation through enhancing interpretability, balancing interpersonal control, facilitating discourse management, and fostering emotional empathy. This study highlights metaphor as a dual pragmatic tool of mediating self-praise indirectness and communication accommodation and offers actionable strategies for enterprises to navigate global discourse.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 57-69"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145098109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

“Not right now”: Children's resistance during online grooming interactions “现在不行”：孩子们在网上梳理互动时的抵触情绪

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.013

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus , Craig Evans

{"title":"“Not right now”: Children's resistance during online grooming interactions","authors":"Nuria Lorenzo-Dus , Craig Evans","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we examine children's resistance strategies during online grooming interactions, specifically the different ways they use facework to counter groomers' advances. The study identifies types of children's discursive resistance based on established politeness and impoliteness taxonomies (Brown and Levinson, 1987; and Culpeper, 2016; respectively), and quantifies the tendency for children to produce these based on evidence from a specialist corpus of 80 online grooming chatlogs, shared by UK law enforcement for research purposes. The study also examines how children perform resistance discursively as part of a dynamic interactional process. Our research finds that children produce resistance that is fairly evenly balanced between politeness and impoliteness-based types. The majority of politeness-based resistance is oriented to positive face needs, reflecting children's personal/romantic relationship goals, while children's negative politeness-based resistance is attributable to adult-child/manipulator-victim power imbalance in online grooming interactions. The majority of impoliteness-based resistance is also oriented to positive face needs, primarily acting against these through the strategy ‘Ignore, snub’, while children's negative impoliteness-based resistance tends to take the form of blocking. This is the first study to systematically identify resistance types and their discursive realization in a sizeable corpus of real online grooming chatlogs. Its findings help inform preventative technologies to counter the globally escalating problem of technology facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 44-56"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145098108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Negotiating truth and relevance: A new typology of English rising declaratives 谈判的真实性和相关性：英语上升陈述句的新类型

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-17 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.010

Johannes M. Heim

{"title":"Negotiating truth and relevance: A new typology of English rising declaratives","authors":"Johannes M. Heim","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Rising declaratives have been a prolific test bed for investigating the contribution of sentence-final intonation to the interpretation of assertive speech acts. In the past, this contribution has almost exclusively been described as a qualification of the speaker's commitment to the truth of the proposition. In this paper, I argue that we can only incorporate the full variation in uses of English rising declaratives if we expand conversational negotiations to include negotiations of relevance. Returning to the established insight that qualified commitment grounds in the avoidance of the risk of losing face, I propose that speakers not only avoid commitment if uncertain about propositional truth; they also avoid it if the relation to the question under discussion is unclear. In addition to accounting for the traditional divide between inquisitive and assertive uses of rising declaratives, the proposed expansion can also incorporate incredulous and narrative uses, which are void of any uncertainty and still come with a sentence-final rise. The latter seeks to resolve an epistemic clash; the former suspends the negotiation to add further information pertaining to the question under discussion. The proposed typology rests on the analysis of rising declaratives elicited in a Map Task study. To illustrate the variation in use conventions, I draw on the analogy of the negotiation table and frame the notion of relevance by situating this negotiation in the question-under-discussion framework.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 23-43"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145097654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Conventionalization of politeness and questions under discussion in pragmatic inferencing: Interpreting scalars in interpersonal contexts 礼貌的惯例化与语用推理中讨论的问题：人际语境中标量的解释

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-15 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.012

Jun Zhang , Yan Wu

{"title":"Conventionalization of politeness and questions under discussion in pragmatic inferencing: Interpreting scalars in interpersonal contexts","authors":"Jun Zhang , Yan Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates how scalar expressions are interpreted in interpersonal contexts. Prior research suggests that weaker scalars (e.g., <em>some</em> or <em>youxie</em>) may serve as polite hedges that suppress scalar implicatures (SIs), especially in face-threatening acts. However, findings remain inconclusive, often neglecting the role of discourse structure and hearer-based inferences. Drawing on a frame-based model of politeness, we argue that politeness is not inherently encoded in scalar statements but emerges from hearers' inferences shaped by contextual expectations, particularly questions under discussion (QUDs) and conventionalized response strategies. Across three experiments in Mandarin Chinese, we first elicit the QUDs associated with scalar utterances, then examine conventionalized speaker responses to these QUDs, and finally assess hearers’ interpretations of scalar utterances. Results reveal that politeness-based interpretations, which can suppress implicature derivation, emerge primarily when the utterance is judged to serve a face-mitigating function, especially in contexts where the QUD highlights a stronger, more face-threatening alternative. By contrast, SIs are more likely to be derived when the speaker is perceived as aiming to be truthful, particularly when their utterance deviates from conventionalized expectations for indirectness. These findings challenge traditional speaker-intention-based accounts and support a hearer-driven, discourse-sensitive approach to politeness and pragmatic inferencing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 1-22"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145061687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

IF 1.7 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-09-05 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.011

Heidi Puputti, Iira Rautiainen

引用次数: 0