Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

From observation to elicitation: An ethnographically grounded approach to pragmatic variation in Namibian English

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-30 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.004

Anne Schröder , Pawel Sickinger

{"title":"From observation to elicitation: An ethnographically grounded approach to pragmatic variation in Namibian English","authors":"Anne Schröder , Pawel Sickinger","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Efforts to theorise pragmatic variation in (new) varieties of English have primarily been made in the area of Variational Pragmatics (VarPra) (Barron and Schneider, 2009; Schneider, 2021) and Postcolonial Pragmatics (PP) (Anchimbe and Janney, 2017; Anchimbe, 2018). In this contribution, we will illustrate how criticism voiced in PP can be addressed within a VarPra framework. Taking the pragmatics of Namibian English as our primary research object, we will present an ethnographically grounded and data-driven approach to the investigation of speech acts and related concepts, following principles laid down in Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006, 2014; Charmaz and Thornberg, 2020). We will detail the development of a research tool specifically designed for the Namibian context, describing how a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire was devised in close cooperation with Namibian research partners and the Community of Practice under investigation, thereby avoiding ethno-centrist bias and guaranteeing ecological validity. This centrally includes a systematic and synergistic combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, allowing us to adhere to the principles of contrastivity and comparability central to VarPra while properly taking into account the emic perspective of the post-colonial language community in question. We believe that the methodology proposed could function as a blueprint for systematically introducing pragmatic inquiry into World Englishes (WE) research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"235 ","pages":"Pages 99-111"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142756645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

“Sorry it took me a long time to reply”: Sorry as a discourse-pragmatic feature in African Englishes "对不起，我花了很长时间才回复你"：对不起作为非洲英语中的一种话语语用特征

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.003

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah , Florence Oluwaseyi Daniel, Deborah Abiola Fifelola

{"title":"“Sorry it took me a long time to reply”: Sorry as a discourse-pragmatic feature in African Englishes","authors":"Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah , Florence Oluwaseyi Daniel, Deborah Abiola Fifelola","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the use of <em>sorry</em> as a discourse-pragmatic feature in three African varieties of English: Ghanaian English, Nigerian English and Ugandan English, in terms of its frequencies, forms, positioning, collocational patterns, pragmatic functions and use with different clause types and in various text types. The data for the study, which are extracted from the Ghanaian, Nigerian and Ugandan components of the International Corpus of English, are examined from a variational pragmatic framework, with insights from rapport management theory. The results show similarities and differences in the use of <em>sorry</em> in the three varieties. In all three varieties, <em>sorry</em> appears more often as a single lexical item than in other forms, occurs more frequently with declaratives, and appears more often in the clause-initial position. Moreover, <em>sorry</em> occurs more frequently in Nigerian English than in the other two varieties; it collocates more often with intensifiers and interjections in Ghanaian English, honorifics and politeness markers in Nigerian English, and interjections in Ugandan English. In addition, <em>sorry</em> is used to mark self-repair, regret, empathy, polite redirection, correction, mitigation and interruption at varying degrees in all three varieties. Possible first language influence may have led to some of the differences between the three varieties.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"235 ","pages":"Pages 60-74"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142722262","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

“Being your son is rather tiring”: Assessments and assessment responses in initial interactions in Mandarin Chinese "当你儿子挺累的"：汉语普通话初始互动中的评估和评估反应

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.001

Wei-Lin Melody Chang

{"title":"“Being your son is rather tiring”: Assessments and assessment responses in initial interactions in Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Wei-Lin Melody Chang","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, initial interactions in which Mandarin Chinese speakers are getting acquainted are investigated, with a particular focus on the assessment sequences. Drawing on approximately 18.5 h of audio(visual) recordings, I examine a particular sequential practice in which self-disclosures are found to be followed by assessments sequences, either positive or negative, by other speakers, which then trigger diverse responses by the assessment recipients. From the analysis it emerged that both positive and (implicated) negative assessments are deployed to establish relational connection with the unacquainted recipients, that is, to index <em>solidarity</em> and <em>familiarity</em>. Relational connection is accomplished, on one hand, through initiating positive assessment that the recognition and approval of one’s “face”; on the other hand, it can be also accomplished through launching (implicated) negative assessment with which assessors presuming one’s knowledge about the other and projecting their epistemic authority, i.e., claiming their independent knowledge with respect to the recipients, and thereby establishing <em>familiarity</em> with their counterpart. These findings suggest that assessments and assessment responses are crucial to the negotiation of new interpersonal relationships in initial encounters.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"235 ","pages":"Pages 43-59"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142722383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

That's the understatement of the century: Understatement as a meta-rhetorical expression in the Corpus of American Soap Operas

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.002

Claudia Claridge

引用次数: 0

“I'll get it”: Payment offers, payment offer sequences and gender on First Dates "我来付"：付款要约、付款要约顺序和初恋性别

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.006

Anne Barron

{"title":"“I'll get it”: Payment offers, payment offer sequences and gender on First Dates","authors":"Anne Barron","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Settling the bill is an integral part of a first date, with payment negotiation potentially involving a number of speech acts, not least payment offers. Research on payment offers and on payment negotiation sequences represents a desideratum. Furthermore, psychological and sociological research points to payment negotiation in dating as a site of gender construction. However, pragmatic research on gender variation and payment offer sequences is lacking.</div><div>We address payment offers and payment offer sequences across genders by exploring payment negotiation interactions broadcast in the United Kingdom on the reality television series, <em>First Dates</em>. Examining the sequential patterns around payment offers and pragmalinguistic realisations of payment offers and suggestions to share expenses, the analysis sheds light on media representations of how interactants negotiate the wider payment event and how this negotiation relates to gender. Findings highlight gender variation on a sociopragmatic and discoursal level in uses of both speech acts and in their sequencing. On a pragmalinguistic level, payment offers were typically realised directly; realisations of suggestions to share expenses were more varied, pointing to individual variation, changing conventions and to interactional dynamics in identity co-constructions. The study has implications for gender pedagogy and for the role of media discourse in the representation of gender.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"235 ","pages":"Pages 4-25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142722261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Recent advances in the syntax of speech acts 言语行为句法的最新进展

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.005

Andreas Trotzke

引用次数: 0

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.011

Serena Coschignano

引用次数: 0

Towards a social syntax 走向社会语法

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.010

Andreas Trotzke

{"title":"Towards a social syntax","authors":"Andreas Trotzke","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper proposes a new approach to the interface between linguistic form and speech acts. The basic idea is to rethink prevailing canonicity assumptions about the inventory of syntactic forms used to perform speech acts. I argue for a new concept of canonicity in that domain, which is based on the following claim: pragmatically unmarked versions of the major speech acts requests, questions, and assertions comply with the socio-pragmatic principle of ‘maximize politeness’. According to this principle, speakers try to minimize the risk of failure in achieving the relevant illocutionary goals of individual speech acts, and they can minimize that risk by using unambiguous linguistic forms that express politeness. I illustrate this account for unmarked forms of requests, questions, and assertions in German because in this language, the pragmatically unmarked versions of each of those speech acts can be signaled by dedicated particle elements (<em>bitte</em> ‘please’ in requests; <em>denn</em> ‘then’ in questions; and <em>ja</em> ‘yes’ in assertions). I claim that these particles are an overt realization of a syntactic head of a functional projection that encodes socio-pragmatic meaning in the left periphery of the clause. The paper sketches a unified syntactic analysis that holds across speech acts and that can potentially be extended to further phenomena of politeness marking in natural language.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"234 ","pages":"Pages 122-139"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142660218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Embedding answers into ongoing story (and other extended) telling in conversational interaction 在会话互动中将答案嵌入正在进行的故事（和其他扩展）讲述中

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-15 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.008

Takeshi Hiramoto

{"title":"Embedding answers into ongoing story (and other extended) telling in conversational interaction","authors":"Takeshi Hiramoto","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.10.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Drawing from a conversation analytic investigation of Japanese speakers' face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, this study investigated a conversational device that allows speakers to stay on as tellers while answering questions. The device consists of various forms of embedding practices that make the teller's continuation of extended telling <em>recognizable as an answer</em> to the recipient's confirmation requests. These include the following: first, vocabulary incorporation with word replacement, in which the teller's original lexical choice is replaced with a new word used in the recipient's confirmation request; second, vocabulary incorporation without word replacement, in which the teller repeats a word (with possible syntactic modification) included in the recipient's confirmation request; and third, transformative answers, in which the teller designs their continuations with adjustments to the original question posed to them. In addition, two types of syntactic operation construct a turn-in-progress as a continuation of extended telling: repeating the same syntactic formulation of the preceding utterance of the teller and producing a syntactically continuous component of the preceding utterance. These practices enable tellers to move their extended telling forward while answering the request for confirmation, thus securing their status as tellers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"234 ","pages":"Pages 99-121"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142660217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Saying goodbye to and thanking bus drivers in German-speaking Switzerland 在瑞士德语区向巴士司机道别和致谢

IF 1.8 1区文学

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2024-11-14 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.09.011

Adrian Leemann , Carina Steiner , Péter Jeszenszky , Jonathan Culpeper , Lea Josi

{"title":"Saying goodbye to and thanking bus drivers in German-speaking Switzerland","authors":"Adrian Leemann , Carina Steiner , Péter Jeszenszky , Jonathan Culpeper , Lea Josi","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.09.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.09.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The present study investigates the dynamics of leave-taking and thanking on buses in rural versus urban settings. Employing a mixed-methods approach, Study A involved an online survey with 1000 participants from 125 locations in German-speaking Switzerland, while Study B observed 236 passengers' behaviors in urban and rural contexts whereby contextual factors such as location of exiting, time of day, and passenger demographics were systematically varied. Results revealed an urban-rural divide, with rural areas demonstrating more frequent leave-taking and thanking. Factors like door location on the bus, number of exiting passengers, and passenger age influenced the realization of these speech acts, with front-door, solo exits and older passengers displaying more leave-taking and thanking. Furthermore, in rural areas, bus drivers often initiated the interactions. Subsequent qualitative interviews after the conduction of Study B revealed several possible reasons for the urban vs. rural divide: in the rural countryside, bus lines can be geographically more exposed. Roads can be dangerous, particularly in wintertime. This could increase the probability of wanting to bid farewell to the bus driver and to express gratitude for bringing them home ‘safely’. This research sheds light on the subtleties governing social exchanges within public transportation contexts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"234 ","pages":"Pages 78-98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142660216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0