{"title":"Beyond stereotypes: Cognitive abilities underlying social meaning","authors":"Inbal Kuperwasser , Einat Shetreet","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.014","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.014","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>‘Social meaning’ refers to a relation between social identity and linguistic features, and often concerns stereotypical knowledge. In this study, we propose this relation can also be mediated by cognitive abilities, as these are affected by social context and are required in meaning processing. As a case-study, we tested the negative effects of social outgroup (through political affiliation) and Theory of Mind skills (ToM) on the processing of a highly-regularized pragmatic phenomenon (scalar implicatures) in Hebrew and English speakers. First, we replicated previous findings showing a decrease in the rates of pragmatic responses for an outgroup speaker compared to a control speaker with no group affiliation. More importantly, we showed that this effect is associated with ToM abilities, such that individuals with lower baseline ToM abilities in the outgroup condition were less likely to give pragmatic responses than individuals with similar ToM abilities in the control condition. This suggests a role for ToM in mediating the negative effect in the outgroup condition, therefore supporting the expansion of social meaning to more general, non-stereotype-specific, cases where social characteristics affect pragmatic interpretation, through the mediation of social cognition abilities. Our results highlight that social meaning is ingrained in pragmatic processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 1-11"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143860673","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}
{"title":"Grammaticalization and social meaning in the Japanese causative-benefactive construction: Celebrities crafting connections with their audience","authors":"Kimiyo Matsui","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines how semantics and pragmatics interact in the process of grammaticalization to generate social meaning in the Japanese causative-benefactive construction, <em>-(s)ase-te</em> <em>itadak-u</em>. The construction’s original meaning is that one humbly receives permission from a respected party (a specific causative benefactor) to do something beneficial to oneself. It has, however, grammaticalized to develop synchronic, contextual variation, as shown in the data for this study, taken from a celebrity TV talk show. From the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics, this study argues that celebrities in this talk show employ the construction to express involvement with their audience when they describe their own actions and, thereby, project a positive celebrity persona. This social meaning of involvement stems from two aspects of grammaticalization: semantic generalization, which decreases the specificity of the original causative benefactor to various degrees, and semantic persistence, which maintains the speaker’s sense of humility and benefit. In the most prominent use of the construction in the data, this allows speakers to involve their audience as non-specific, highly generalized senses of benefactors who somehow facilitate the speaker’s actions and to express humility concerning these actions and gratitude for the opportunity to perform them.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 130-143"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143855999","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}
{"title":"Egyptian advice in casual conversations: A deep dive with corpus-based insights","authors":"Rania Al-Sabbagh","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent studies suggest that Egyptians perceive advice-giving as social cooperation and solidarity, deeply rooted in their collectivist culture. These studies indicate that Egyptians tend to employ direct advice more frequently than individuals in individualistic cultures, where advice-giving is often regarded as face-threatening. However, these conclusions have primarily been drawn from role-play scenarios and multiple-choice questionnaires, which may not fully capture the cultural and linguistic nuances of Egyptian Arabic. This study builds on previous research by analyzing the CALLHOME Egyptian Arabic corpus, a collection of unscripted phone conversations among friends and family, to provide a more nuanced understanding. The findings confirm previous conclusions, revealing that direct advice constitutes 58.3 % of cases, with no significant influence from interlocutors' social status or advice level of imposition. Notably, 15.5 % of this direct advice consists of emotionally supportive phrases such as “don't worry” and “take care” rather than practical guidance. A distinctive form of hedged advice also emerged, marked by hedging imperatives, such as “try” (e.g., “try to find reasons” instead of “find reasons”). Additionally, the corpus highlights how indirect advice is embedded within other speech acts, including requests, prayers, opinions, questions, and wishes. The results, which align with prior conversation analysis research on advice in British and American cultures, suggest that Egyptians exhibit similar behaviors when giving advice. This indicates that conversational expectations, beyond the collectivist-individualist cultural dichotomy, play a critical role in shaping advice-giving strategies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 116-129"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143851490","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}
{"title":"","authors":"Matteo Di Cristofaro","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 113-115"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143842892","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}
{"title":"Explicit positive assessment as a compliment in one-on-one language teaching","authors":"Yoshiyuki Hara","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This multimodal conversation analytic study explores the multifunctionality of explicit positive assessments (EPAs) in one-on-one Japanese language teaching. Focusing on selected segments in which learners treat instructor's EPAs as compliments, this study investigates how instructors design focal assessments to make the learner's next action conditionally relevant. The analysis identifies several distinct linguistic, sequential, and multimodal features of the focal EPAs that collectively contribute to making the assessment more interpretable as a compliment to its recipient. The study further demonstrates that EPAs with identified interactional features make the referent of the positive assessment more attributable to the learner, thereby rendering these learners' subsequent responses a relevant next action. The findings highlight the role of the instructor's configuration of various interactional resources in conducting assessments. They also contribute to a deeper understanding of positive assessment as social action and illuminate the multifunctionality of assessment in language pedagogy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 92-106"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143783449","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}
{"title":"Social meaning as Hearer's Meaning: Integrating social meaning into a general theory of meaning in communication","authors":"Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper addresses P. Eckert's call to incorporate social meaning into a more general theory of meaning. The notion of social meaning can be defined in both a narrow and a somewhat broader sense, the latter of which forms the basis for the paper. I review recent research showing how social meaning may impact on pragmatically central aspects of utterance interpretation, including lexical access, ambiguity resolution, reference assignment, presupposition projection, implicature derivation, and truth value assessment, as well as the hearer's expectations regarding future interaction with the speaker. Conversely, pragmatic features of linguistic expressions may facilitate the use of those same expressions to convey social meanings. I argue that, being fundamentally speaker-centered and reliant on intention-recognition, mainstream theories of meaning in communication are poorly equipped to integrate social meaning, due to the latter's often unintentional, indexical and/or multimodal nature. I suggest instead that Hansen & Terkourafi's recent model of Hearer's Meaning is intrinsically well-suited to the task, and I present that model in more detail, focusing however on those aspects of it that are of most direct relevance to integrating social meaning, viz. its conceptual anchoring in Peircean semiotics, and its explicit incorporation of hearers' assumptions about the identities of speakers, as well as about their social relationship with the speaker.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 81-91"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143746187","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}
{"title":"(Inter)subjectivity and information structure: The pragmatics of left and right peripheries in spoken Mandarin","authors":"Carmen Lepadat","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study provides a novel data-driven analytic model for the study of the utterance peripheries. The model operationalises the relationship between information structure and (inter)subjectivity, uncovering how speakers simultaneously manage cognitive and social aspects of communication. Using a sample of 21 spontaneous telephone conversations between Mandarin native speakers (CallFriend Mandarin Corpus), all aboutness and framing topics (Lambrecht, 1994; Frascarelli, 2017) occurring at the utterance right periphery were identified and compared with an equivalent number of topics produced at the left periphery. The study provides a multifactorial analysis including referent activation (Chafe, 1987), subjectivity (Du Bois, 2007) and intersubjectivity (Tantucci and Wang, 2018), demonstrating that multiple dimensions must be taken into account to grasp the differences between the two peripheries of the utterance. In fact, rather than differing in activation profiles or presence of (inter)subjectivity, they are characterized by distinct combinations of these dimensions. Specifically, right-peripheral topics frequently display the simultaneous presence of active referents, a subjective stance conveyed by the speaker – most frequently negative – and a peripheral marker of intersubjectivity. The complex interaction between these dimensions suggests that right peripheries serve as a key site for negotiating social relationships, aligning perspectives, and managing politeness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 61-80"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143725643","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}
{"title":"Automatic behaviour analysis reveals links between facial expression and speech acts’ illocutionary point, strength, and valence","authors":"Marc Mehu, Savannah Sweeting","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is abundant literature indicating that, beyond its role in emotional communication, facial behaviour could be essential in the way individuals carry out performative functions of speech. Using speech acts theory, we formalised three ways facial signals could relate to verbal utterances: 1) by authenticating the illocutionary point of statements, 2) by authenticating the valence of the mental states underlying speech acts, and 3) by supporting attempts at modulating the strength of a speech act's illocutionary force. We investigated these relationships in an observational case study of a public hearing of the U.S. Senate. Overall, facial behaviour was more intense during performative than during declarative speech acts and we observed a negative relationship between facial expressivity and the illocutionary strength of speech acts. Facial behaviour was also related to the valence of speech acts, albeit to a lesser extent. While we observed multiple links between individual facial Action Units and speech acts, the pattern of results does not indicate a unique set of associations between specific facial movements and specific properties of speech acts. The present study supports the idea that facial behaviour plays a role in the pragmatics of social interaction in that it could be used by speakers to show the authenticity of their communicative intentions and to modulate the illocutionary force of verbal statements. It also suggests that the cognitive and emotional states underlying the production of speech acts could share structural and functional elements with the appraisal processes involved in the production of facial behaviour.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 41-60"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143705673","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}