
 This study examines the speech act of criticizing in online comments on the COVID-19 lockdown breaches in Jordan
 in 2020. Drawing on speech act theory and the face-saving perspective of politeness, the study investigates the strategies used to
 criticize these breaches. The analysis of 356 online comments revealed that Jordanians used ten strategies to criticize these
 lockdown breaches: Insulting, Appealing to the divine, Intertextuality, Rhetorical questions, Stylized threats, Framing criticism
 as request, Framing criticism as advice-giving, Framing criticism as warning, Invoking legal authority, and Invoking religious
 ‘haram’. These criticisms were driven by safeguarding the collective interests of community members rather than merely expressing
 personal condemnation of the breaches. The breaches were constructed in these criticisms as communally reproachable, legally
 answerable, and religiously proscribed. Given their public nature, these criticisms appear to be motivated not by politeness but
 by expressing strong emotions, showing in-group solidarity, and aligning with other community members.

Criticizing for the public interest and aligning with others


Intertextuality refers to the quality that connects the author and the reader within a single text or, more broadly, the relationship between texts. This study considered the author’s implicit textual intention and the expected effect on the text reader to analyze intertextuality. This study’s subject was the news text from the Russian news program Vesti Nedeli. The motivation behind this study was that anchor briefings are often used in news reports and that the anchor’s value judgments are often highlighted. Using previous researchers’ framing and orientation criteria, I examined how these factors manifested themselves in the news text under investigation. Furthermore, I proposed additional analysis criteria for strategic exposure and metaphor usage. Strategic exposure refers to empowering the text’s development and the text producer’s logic by intentionally exposing a specific scene, whereas metaphors emphasize an object’s positive or negative connotations by using a specific image.

A study on the intertextuality of Russian media

Abstract When speakers combine (or blend) expressions – that is, utter them in overlapping fashion – there is usually some degree of semantic overlap between the expressions. There is much agreement on this point. Some authors have gone further and suggested that the expressions involved are usually synonyms or near-synonyms. Others have gone further still, claiming, at least implicitly, that blends always involve synonyms or near-synonyms. In this paper I show that in many cases where expressions are combined they differ substantially in meaning, in some cases even expressing distinguishable events. I show that there is regularity in the nature of the differences in meaning, and that the differences often correspond to construal distinctions identified in the cognitive linguistics literature. Four degrees of semantic overlap between combined expressions are identified: synonymy; subsumption, where the meaning of one expression encompasses that of the other as well as contributing a bit extra; partial complementarity, where each expression conveys some element of meaning not conveyed by the other; and distinctness. Despite the parsing cost to the hearer of the speaker combining two expressions rather than choosing one over the other, the many cases of partial complementarity can be seen as serving a useful purpose. By combining semantic content that is not conventionally combined the speaker can cover more of his/her intended meaning. And by combining different construals of the same semantic content (e.g. interpretive and descriptive, different viewpoints, stative and dynamic, agentive and non-agentive, etc.) the speaker can equivocate in areas where conventionally a commitment is required. Twelve recurrent meaning differences are illustrated with examples from three different datasets.

Boris Gasparov

Papers

Speech, Memory, and Meaning