{"title":"Recent changes of now as a discourse marker in spoken English","authors":"Inji Choi","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the evolving role of <em>now</em> in spoken English using data from two distinct corpora complied in the 1990s and 2010s. Analyses of randomly selected tokens distinguish occurrences of <em>now</em> as either a temporal adverb or a discourse marker (DM), with a focus on positional patterns, social factors (age and gender), functional distribution, and co-occurrences with other DMs. Findings reveal that while the DM <em>now</em> predominantly appears in turn- or utterance-initial positions, its occurrence in utterance-medial positions has notably increased, reflecting broader pragmatic development. The DM <em>now</em> is increasingly used for textual and affective functions, such as shifting topics, marking contrasts, or indicating stance, beyond its time-referential role. In terms of speaker demographics, the rise in DM <em>now</em> usage is largely driven by younger speakers, indicating a generational shift from two decades earlier; gender, however, does not significantly affect overall frequency. Analysis of DM co-occurrences shows that additive patterns are most frequent, whereas compositional and juxtaposed forms are less common. Overall, these results underscore the growing versatility of <em>now</em> in contemporary English, reflecting broader trends in discourse structuring, interaction management, and generational language shift.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 175-194"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143908266","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 in reverse: Expectations of English role noun use based on speaker identity","authors":"Benjamin Weissman","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Insights from pragmatics and sociolinguistics have informed theories of social meaning, inferences about a speaker's identity that a hearer draws based on utterance properties such as lexical choices. One example is the use of a gender-neutral role noun (<em>salesperson</em>) rather than a gender-marked form (<em>saleswoman/salesman</em>); choosing this form can serve as an index of a speaker's progressiveness (Papineau et al., 2022). This study investigates social meaning in reverse, exploring to what extent hearers expect speakers to use these role noun forms based on their beliefs about the speaker's beliefs. In two experiments, participants meet fictitious characters, introduced as having either a conservative or progressive ideology. Experiment 1 finds that participants predict gender-neutral forms at a significantly higher rate for progressive speakers than for conservative speakers, taken as evidence that a hearer's beliefs about a speaker motivate expectations related to markers of social meaning. Experiment 2 finds no significant reading time effects regarding the form of the noun and the ideology of the speaker, suggesting the pattern from Experiment 1 does not manifest in real-time language processing. Experiment 2 does find a significant hearer-speaker ideological alignment effect whereby participants who were ideologically aligned with the character read significantly faster than those who were not.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 141-155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143908284","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":"Defending speaker intention in a model of the hearer's meaning","authors":"Yueyuan Li , Chaoqun Xie","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Hansen and Terkourafi present a compelling challenge to traditional models of meaning that privilege speaker intention as the primary determinant of communicative success. Their proposed alternative model, which centers on the hearer's interpretation while rendering speaker intention theoretically redundant, offers a valuable corrective to intention-centric approaches. While we concur with Hansen and Terkourafi's general critique of traditional models of meaning as overly reliant on speaker intention, we identify three limitations in their argumentation. First, their critique relies on an unnecessarily restrictive conceptualization of intention as an opaque and inherently inaccessible mental state. Second, existing research in both psychological and cultural studies provides robust counterevidence to claims about intention's inaccessibility. Third, the very evidence they cite regarding the indeterminacy of speaker intention in distinguishing “what is said” from “what is meant” can be reinterpreted to underscore the significance of speaker intention. Furthermore, we maintain that speaker intention plays a crucial role in shaping the hearer's interpretation, particularly when it comes to accounting for conversational roles. In conclusion, we argue that a comprehensive model of meaning needs to integrate both the speaker’s and the hearer’s roles, recognizing their interdependence in the communicative process.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 126-140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143903330","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":"When veracity is in the balance: Requests for reconfirmation as preliminary information receipts","authors":"Marit Aldrup","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Responding to new information is a recurrent task in ordinary conversation. In contrast to alternative information receipts, such as change-of-state tokens (e.g., <em>oh</em>), evaluative appreciations (e.g., <em>wow</em>), or assessments (e.g., <em>that's nice</em>), newsmark-type responses (e.g., <em>really</em>) are preliminary in the sense that they invite the informer to, at a minimum, reconfirm their previous statement, making a more definite response contingent upon the informer's reaction. As expressions of ‘ritualized disbelief’ (Heritage, 1984), newsmarks proper do not simply take the information provided at face value but question the veracity of the prior statement in a pro-forma manner to highlight its news- or noteworthiness. However, reconfirmation-seeking turns are also regularly used to genuinely call the validity of a prior statement into question and treat it as problematic.</div><div>This interactional-linguistic study investigates the whole spectrum of reconfirmation-seeking responses, alternatively referred to as ‘requests for reconfirmation’ (RfRCs), and reveals that different instances of these preliminary information receipts fall on a continuum between newsmark-like and problem-indicating RfRC uses. Through detailed sequential and multimodal analyses of reconfirmation sequences from video recordings of informal German and English face-to-face conversations, it also shows how sequential context and turn design contribute to action disambiguation and the contextualization of different epistemic, evaluative, and affective stances towards the information in question across the two languages under investigation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 108-125"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143903331","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":"Exploring the fuzzy boundaries between newsmarks and change-of-state tokens in High German and Low German talk-in-interaction – A variational-pragmatic and interactional perspective","authors":"Kathrin Weber , Katharina König","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>By adopting the approaches of variational pragmatics and interactional analysis, this paper presents a comparative analysis of ‘newsmarks’ as token-based responses, registering a prior turn as new information in mundane conversation in two different varieties of one language, namely North-West High German (NHG), a regional near-standard variety, and the Westphalian Low German dialect variety (LoG). It aims to illustrate how a variational perspective can further our understanding of analytic concepts that are largely based on single-language studies. In particular, we address the fuzzy boundaries between newsmarks and change-of-state tokens (CoSTs). Based on a mixed methods approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show that NHG and LoG differ in the formats routinely used for marking a prior as news. Moreover, our study reveals that while in NHG newsmarks and CoSTs tend to be lexically specialized resources, speakers of LoG routinely deploy polyfunctional resources such as the CoST <em>achso</em> as newsmarks. In addition, we discuss the role of prosody as a contextualization cue in the use of <em>achso</em> as a polyfunctional token. In sum, this paper sheds new light on the continuum between newsmarks and CoSTs in talk-in-interaction and contributes to our understanding of these indexes in comparative variational pragmatics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 93-107"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143899347","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}
Alan Bale , Maho Takahashi , Miguel Mejia , David Barner
{"title":"The effect of online methods on epistemic inference and scalar implicature","authors":"Alan Bale , Maho Takahashi , Miguel Mejia , David Barner","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How is research on semantics and pragmatics impacted by the growing use of online methodologies, and how does the modality of presentation impact our ability to detect and use a speaker's knowledge state in the service of a linguistic inference? In three experiments, we investigated scalar implicatures both in-person and across three online modalities (text, text + pictures, and video) using a task that required participants to monitor contextual information to infer the mental states of speakers (i.e., whether they were knowledgeable or ignorant with respect to stronger alternative statements). In Experiments 1 and 2 we found no consistent differences across modalities in rates of scalar implicatures, and found that participants rarely computed implicatures when speakers were ignorant (i.e., participants were sensitive to a speaker's knowledge state across all modalities). However, in these first two experiments participants were explicitly reminded to monitor the knowledge state of speakers. In Experiment 3, when these reminders were removed, we again found no effect of modality when speakers were knowledgeable, but found a significant effect when speakers were ignorant. In particular, participants were more likely to erroneously compute implicatures when tested in-person relative to when they were tested online with text only, or with text and pictures. These findings suggestf that online methods may in certain cases offer a useful alternative to in-person testing of pragmatic reasoning, but that care should be taken in selecting methods when they probe subtle mental state reasoning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 76-92"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143896131","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":"Apologies in Mandarin Chinese conversation: Lexical format and the reflexive construction of ‘apologizeables’","authors":"Guodong Yu , Chase Wesley Raymond , Yaxin Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper uses the theory and methods of Conversation Analysis (CA) to explore the lexical design of apologies in naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation. We present three recurrent lexical formats used to issue apologies—(i) 不好意思 <em>bùhǎoyìsī</em>, (ii) 对不起 <em>duìbùqǐ</em>, and (iii) 抱歉/道歉 <em>bàoqiàn/dàoqiàn</em>—all of which are regularly translated into English as “(I'm) sorry” and/or “I apologize”. Rather than being used interchangeably, we argue that each of these formats is fitted to particular sorts of ‘apologizeables’, which are reflexively constructed as such through the issuing of the apology turn. The formats can therefore be arranged on a cline with regard to the gravity of the offense thereby indexed, with more ‘minimal’ offenses addressed with <em>bùhǎoyìsī</em>, comparatively graver apologizeables addressed with <em>duìbùqǐ</em>, and morally laden circumstances constructed with <em>bàoqiàn</em> and <em>dàoqiàn</em>. We also consider how lexical formats can be modulated through other aspects of turn design, like subject expression and adverbials, which likewise contribute to apology actions and their sequential relevancies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 60-75"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143891278","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":"Its prominence is her prominence: On the relationship between propositional and individual anaphoric reference","authors":"Timo Buchholz , Jet Hoek , Klaus von Heusinger","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The same proposition can be encoded e.g. as a main clause or as a subordinate clause in a complex sentence. Such structural configurations influence whether and how a proposition is subsequently built upon in the discourse, e.g. by anaphoric referral. It is an open question to what extent anaphoric reference to individuals and propositions works in the same way: are the same mechanisms responsible for whether a proposition can be referred to as for whether an individual referent can be referred to? Do they affect both similarly?</div><div>We present three sets of paired anaphor resolution experiments in German manipulating the prominence relation between two competing entities: in each pair we tested the influence of how two clauses are structurally integrated on individual reference in one experiment, and on propositional reference in the other. The manipulations (syntactic configuration and typography) were the same in each pair, but between experiment pairs, we varied the type of discourse relation between the two clauses (<em>backward causality, forward causality, violation of expectation</em>). We find a basic pattern of correspondence between the prominence level of the proposition and of the individual referents, independent of the type of rhetorical relation between the two clauses. We propose that this is due to a process we dub <em>Prominence Inheritance</em>: individual referents “inherit” the relative prominence of the larger units they are part of. Our study investigates individual and propositional prominence in parallel for the first time, providing new insights into the differences and similarities between them, and into how structural and pragmatic factors impact accessibility and anaphor resolution.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 36-59"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143878610","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":"Deciphering the electrophysiological signature of discourse connectives","authors":"Cecile Larralde, Ira Noveck","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The discourse connectives <em>but</em> and <em>so</em> trigger specific kinds of inferences, which are characterizable as contrastive and causal, respectively. Inspired by Diane Blakemore’s notion of procedural meaning, we carry out two studies while relying on a paradigm we developed in previous work, in which 1) connectives are part of thematically bare sentences presented as a word-finding game, e.g. <em>There is a B but there is no T</em>, and; 2) these two connectives are compared to the less informative conjunction <em>and</em>. Experiment 1 instantiated our behavioral paradigm while imposing the kind of constraints one finds in an EEG study (e.g., the discourse connective is isolated and presented for a predetermined duration). The results from Experiment 1 replicated our previous behavioral findings, confirming the design's reliability. Experiment 2, an ERP study based on this modified paradigm, yielded three main findings. 1) relative to <em>and</em>, the discourse connectives <em>but</em> and <em>so</em> trigger a more pronounced P200 followed by Positive Slow Waves (PSW) of greater amplitude. These data point to extra inferential processing triggered by <em>but</em> and <em>so</em> relative to <em>and.</em> 2) the higher amplitude of the P3b component linked to negated segments following <em>but</em> indicates that these were anticipated more than those that follow <em>and</em> or <em>so</em>. 3) post-connective affirmative segments were, surprisingly, linked with a more pronounced P600-like component in <em>and</em>-trials relative to the <em>but</em>- and <em>so</em>-trials. Overall, this study allows one to more deeply appreciate the inferential processing linked to discourse connectives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"241 ","pages":"Pages 144-163"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143874162","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":"Different ways of deriving majority judgements: An experimental study of Chinese dabufen","authors":"Yuli Feng, Lei Chu","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.04.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study experimentally investigates the interpretations of the Chinese majority expression <em>dabufen</em>, testing competing approaches to majority quantification. Majority expressions are typically analyzed as generalized quantifiers or superlative adjectives. However, our corpus-based investigation reveals that neither analysis can fully account for certain properties of <em>dabufen</em>, particularly its ability to associate with proportions below 50%. To address this gap, we propose a comparative approach, deriving majority judgements through comparison with a standard that can be contextually sensitive.</div><div>The findings from our experiment further validate the comparative approach while highlighting the inadequacy of the existing approaches. Specifically, our experiment reveals a population split among native speakers: the “Rigid Cluster”, which adheres to the above-50% interpretation, and the “Flexible Cluster”, which accepts below-50% uses across various contexts. Within the Flexible Cluster, we further identify subclusters that use <em>dabufen</em> to express superlativity relativized to the whole partition or to compare with a contextually salient proportion. The inter-cluster differences reflect the participants’ varying ways of determining the standard of comparison.</div><div>By uncovering the interpretational variability of <em>dabufen</em>, this research expands the understanding of majority quantification in natural language. It demonstrates that the conceptual category of ‘majority’ can be realized in diverse ways—both within a single language and across languages—and underscores the theoretical value of experimentally exploring majority expressions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"242 ","pages":"Pages 12-35"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143864256","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}