{"title":"Expressive commitments","authors":"Xavier Villalba","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Pragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based on commitments at different levels of meaning, namely, the descriptive and expressive level, can be devised and it can offer interesting answers to old issues, like the contribution of exclamations to discourse, or their at-issue status, while raising new theoretical and empirical questions on lying and deceiving and commitment strength.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139864341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From everyday exposure to pragmatic mastery","authors":"S. Wermelinger, Moritz M. Daum, Anja Gampe","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, we review recent findings on the development of communicative behaviour of monolingual and bilingual toddlers and preschoolers. We describe how the unique experience of growing up with two (or more) languages affects children’s everyday experiences and the pragmatics of their communicative behaviour. Deriving from this literature, we introduce a novel perspective on children’s development of communicative behaviour (COMmmunicative-Experience, COME), discussing potential mechanisms behind this pragmatic behaviour. It assumes that children experience communicative situations of varying efficiency and that these experiences shape their communicative behaviour: The more experiences children have with non-effective communicative situations, the larger their communicative repertoire becomes and the more flexibly this repertoire can be applied in a given situation. Notably, the COME perspective is not limited to bilingual communicative development but can be applied to a variety of other pragmatic contexts. Therefore, we broaden the discussion by identifying open questions for future research.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139803001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"That is not done","authors":"Miguel A. Aijón Oliva","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Spanish third-person reflexive clitic se allows for passive and impersonal uses that can sometimes be pragmatically interpreted as directive in spite of their declarative form, e.g. Eso no se hace ‘That is not done’. This paper explores the grammatical, semantic and referential factors that promote such an interpretation, using a corpus of oral and written Peninsular media discourse and adopting a qualitative approach. Deontic readings are shown to be connected with more general uses of reflexive constructions as evidential and/or modal markers. Agent defocusing and imperfective verbal aspect construct an objective viewpoint of discourse whereby the event is detached from particular communicative circumstances. At the same time, contextual elements acting as space builders counter such objectivity by guiding the interpretation of the utterance as primarily concerning the direct participants. The analysis suggests that the inherent meanings of grammatical constructions are at the basis of their pragmatic potential in specific contexts.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139804739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"That is not done","authors":"Miguel A. Aijón Oliva","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Spanish third-person reflexive clitic se allows for passive and impersonal uses that can sometimes be pragmatically interpreted as directive in spite of their declarative form, e.g. Eso no se hace ‘That is not done’. This paper explores the grammatical, semantic and referential factors that promote such an interpretation, using a corpus of oral and written Peninsular media discourse and adopting a qualitative approach. Deontic readings are shown to be connected with more general uses of reflexive constructions as evidential and/or modal markers. Agent defocusing and imperfective verbal aspect construct an objective viewpoint of discourse whereby the event is detached from particular communicative circumstances. At the same time, contextual elements acting as space builders counter such objectivity by guiding the interpretation of the utterance as primarily concerning the direct participants. The analysis suggests that the inherent meanings of grammatical constructions are at the basis of their pragmatic potential in specific contexts.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139864666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unconditionally conditional","authors":"Patrick Duffley, P. Larrivée","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The purpose of this study is to assess from a corpus-based discourse-pragmatic perspective certain claims made in the literature concerning English wh- concessive conditional constructions (e.g. Whoever/No matter who comes to the party, it will be fun), namely that these utterance-types correlate with interrogative semantics, scalarity and potential modality. By means of an extensive investigation of corpus data these claims are shown to be largely unsupported by attested usage. Based on Dancygier and Sweetser’s classification of conditional constructions, it is found that potential modality is paradigmatic only of content-level concessive conditionals, and not of the epistemic, speech-act or metalinguistic varieties. Contrary to claims in the literature, scalarity is demonstrated to not be typical of wh- concessive conditionals. The lack of scalarity in most wh- concessive conditionals is argued to cast into doubt the category label “concessive conditional” applied to these constructions in a substantial part of the literature and to favour an alternative designation such as “irrelevance conditional.” The empirical data further reveals that wh- concessive conditionals practically never involve pure ignorance, and this is argued to be problematic on the discourse-pragmatic level for the claim that they have interrogative semantics.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139862802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prototype-based pragmatics of confessing","authors":"Nobuhiko Yamanaka","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper discusses a subtype of the speech act of confessing, namely, telling something which the speaker assumes to be unknown to the hearer and damaging to him/herself. Based on Coleman and Kay (1981), a prototype of that subtype is hypothesised and cases lacking in any of its elements are illustrated. Further, the prototypical scenario proposed in Lakoff (1987) is applied to the speech act of confessing to describe all the processes and effects of confessing. The data consist of confessional scenes played by characters in literary works either written in or translated into English.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139865913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The pragmatics of communicating threat and constructing the future in the discourse of the Iranian Supreme Leader","authors":"Ali Basarati, Fateme Zohrabi","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The paper aims at studying how the discourse of the Iranian Supreme Leader communicates threat and how it presents the reality of Iran’s future in light of policy options. Our data comes from 50 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader, delivered between 2005–2020. Adopting the Proximisation Theory, we indicate that spatial and axiological threats are conceptualised in the SL’s discourse as encroaching upon the present and future to impact the Islamic Republic of Iran. But, at the same time, the SL’s discourse depicts the impact consequences as relatively remote from Iran’s present and possible to materialise in the future space provided that certain preliminary circumstances are fulfilled. In this regard, aiming to neutralise the construed threats, the SL’s discourse depicts the privileged vision of the future space involving hortatory preemptive policies. We indicate that the SL’s discourse employs the construal of threats to necessitate and justify taking up future-building preemptive policies.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139865616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unconditionally conditional","authors":"Patrick Duffley, P. Larrivée","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The purpose of this study is to assess from a corpus-based discourse-pragmatic perspective certain claims made in the literature concerning English wh- concessive conditional constructions (e.g. Whoever/No matter who comes to the party, it will be fun), namely that these utterance-types correlate with interrogative semantics, scalarity and potential modality. By means of an extensive investigation of corpus data these claims are shown to be largely unsupported by attested usage. Based on Dancygier and Sweetser’s classification of conditional constructions, it is found that potential modality is paradigmatic only of content-level concessive conditionals, and not of the epistemic, speech-act or metalinguistic varieties. Contrary to claims in the literature, scalarity is demonstrated to not be typical of wh- concessive conditionals. The lack of scalarity in most wh- concessive conditionals is argued to cast into doubt the category label “concessive conditional” applied to these constructions in a substantial part of the literature and to favour an alternative designation such as “irrelevance conditional.” The empirical data further reveals that wh- concessive conditionals practically never involve pure ignorance, and this is argued to be problematic on the discourse-pragmatic level for the claim that they have interrogative semantics.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139803054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Expressive commitments","authors":"Xavier Villalba","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01601004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01601004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Pragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based on commitments at different levels of meaning, namely, the descriptive and expressive level, can be devised and it can offer interesting answers to old issues, like the contribution of exclamations to discourse, or their at-issue status, while raising new theoretical and empirical questions on lying and deceiving and commitment strength.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139804412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Infodemic in the era of the pandemic","authors":"Winping Kuo","doi":"10.1163/18773109-01502003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01502003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The COVID-19 pandemic has not only brought considerable challenges to public health, but also diffusions of fake news on social media platforms, taking on the moniker of “infodemic”. To have a better understanding of the infodemic, this research takes 580 pandemic-related fake news stories from two Taiwanese fact-checking platforms and 180,000 real news articles from four major newspapers in Taiwan spanning from January 2020 to August 2021. The paper presents lexical usages and discourses of fake news from the perspective of corpus-assisted discourse study. Keyword comparison and collocational network analysis are adopted as the major analytic framework to identify keyness keywords and to uncover the discourses embedded in COVID-19 fake news. Results suggest that pandemic-related fake news tend to emphasize the themes of virus, vaccine, and immunity regarding the content keywords. Personal pronouns that differentiate us and them, conjunctions used to construct causal explanations, time-frames that denote a confirmed social fact in false stories are also prominent lexical usages in COVID-19 fake news. Notably, verbs related to promoting action and expressions of polite requests are often fabricated in fake news messages. Collocational network reveals five main themes in pandemic-related fake news: virus, vaccine and vaccination, symptom, food and drink, caution and warning and mask wearing. This paper concludes that more than simply differentiating between true and false, fake news involve miscellaneous discursive constructions of existing political, social, and cultural dimensions within alternative and unverified reality.","PeriodicalId":43536,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41329326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}