Showing papers in "Journal of Pragmatics in 2008"

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the role that metadiscourse markers play in the construction and attainment of persuasion in opinion columns and find that both textual and interpersonal markers are present in English and Spanish newspaper columns, but that there are variations as to the distribution and composition of such markers, specifically in the case of certain textual categories (i.e. logical markers and code glosses).

TL;DR: The Dynamic Model of Meaning (DMM) as discussed by the authors was proposed to give equal importance to message and actual situational context in meaning construction as described above, and blend the external and internal approaches to context.

TL;DR: The authors argue that cognitive linguistics and relevance theory provide complementary perspectives on metaphor, and suggest detailed hypotheses on metaphor understanding that surely are part of a comprehensive theory of metaphor, which both aim to capture essential aspects of the reason for metaphor and how people ordinarily use and understand metaphor in daily life.

TL;DR: In this article, the perceived emotional weight of the phrase I love you in multilinguals' different languages was investigated and found to be associated with self-perceived language dominance, context of acquisition of the second language, age of onset of learning the first language, degree of socialization in the second, nature of the network of interlocutors in the L2, and selfperceived oral proficiency.

TL;DR: In this article, a cross-disciplinary model of analysis of political discourse is proposed, which integrates a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic accounts to describe the legitimization of actions sought by politicians in front of their audiences.

TL;DR: The role of eloquent silence in Roman Jakobson's communicative model is discussed in this paper, where various roles of silence in the metalinguistic function range from its being a discourse marker to reflecting the right to silence.

TL;DR: This article is an empirical investigation of how other-initiations of repair present a diagnosis of the trouble source and how addressees respond to this diagnosis, claiming that there is a preference for trying the least serious solution first.

TL;DR: This article studied the type and extent of use of apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic and shed light on the socio-cultural attitudes and values of this community using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT).

TL;DR: This paper explored the structures and dynamics of conflict talk, showing how participants contextualize their interaction as conflict, and explored various types of humor and their effects on conflict sequences, concluding that the effectiveness of humor depends on the seriousness of the conflict, the social power relationship between the participants, the kind of humor, fourth, the reactions of the participants and finally, who initiates the humor.

TL;DR: This paper investigated the complex relationship between social interaction and socio-cultural values in Chinese diasporic families in the UK and found that conflicts in values and identities are negotiated, mediated and managed in bilingual interaction and the emergent nature of new family dynamics and values.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the acquisition order of coherence relations between discourse segments, and show that cognitively complex relations show up later than cognitively simple relations.

TL;DR: The authors examined the differences in use between distal and proximal demonstrative terms (e.g., singular "this" and "that", and plural "these" and 'those" in English) through a corpus-based quantitative study of the deictic use of demonstratives in Dutch.

TL;DR: This article investigated the apology strategies used by the speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic and found that there were more differences between Jordanian male and female respondents than between American respondents, which may be attributed to the fact that there is a greater similarity between how boys and girls are raised in the U.S. than between how they were raised in Jordan.

TL;DR: In this article, a contrastive analysis of a pragmatic marker can help identify its meaning and functions, which is supported by an analysis of the occurrences of well in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral and their functional equivalents in the Catalan and Spanish dubbed versions.

TL;DR: The authors tried to describe the workings of film discourse by focusing on the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension and design of verbal exchanges on screen, where the audience acts as an overhearer in the sense of Goffman (1976, 1979).

TL;DR: In this article, disagreement and humor intertwine to enrich pragmatic and cultural knowledge and display personal identity among near-native users of English in cross-cultural communication, and the emphasis lies on their use of teasing and disagreement as educational tools rather than conflict indicators.

TL;DR: The authors examines how pragmatics and semiotics intersect by unveiling what I claim to be a blind spot in language studies, i.e. objects' textual agency, which is the capacity to produce speech acts or, more broadly, discursive acts.

TL;DR: This article proposed a new distinction between simple and complex communicative acts, which can include any kind of pragmatic phenomena, including deceit and irony, and found that complex acts are more difficult to comprehend than simple acts.

TL;DR: This paper proposed a classification of opposition relations supported by linguistic evidence and clarified commonalities and differences among the semantic categories of the opposition relations, and classified them into three major categories: contrast, concessive, and corrective.

TL;DR: This article examined how Vietnamese adult learners of Australian English modified their criticisms in a peer-feedback session and found evidence of an acquisitional order for criticism modifiers: learners tended to acquire lexicalized modifiers before they acquired grammaticalized modifiers.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present two complementary approaches that can be used to reveal what is hidden under news texts. One of them draws on central concepts of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, while the other is based on the Appraisal framework.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors employ a multimodal analysis of a picture book in order to ascertain the extent to which visual and verbal components create meaning, based mainly on Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic analysis and Hallidayan linguistics.

TL;DR: This article examined the similarities and differences in the rhetorical practices of male and female academics in their construction of a disciplinarily appropriate identity, and found that there is no one-to-one relation between gender and language, gender and discipline identities cross-cut each other in significant ways in the context of professional self-conception and personal preferences.

TL;DR: The authors presented the results of a descriptive analysis of discourse structuring devices in written texts and established a categorisation of organisational metadiscourse markers, i.e., linguistic items that signpost the discourse organisation on the metadISCourse level.

TL;DR: The authors explored the semantic-pragmatic intricacies of two related types of interactional humor, hyperunderstanding and misunderstanding, in the context of the British television series Blackadder.

TL;DR: This paper investigated what can be described as a Japanese cultural way of thanking, o-rei, and found that conversational participants cooperate to achieve a mutual pragmatic goal of "debt-credit" equilibrium.

TL;DR: This paper defends that attested language use gives us clues about inferential patterns that guide what Lakoff and his followers have addressed in terms of the so-called internal logic of image-schemas and introduces some innovations and modifications derived from the consideration of domains other than emotions and from the inclusion of both metaphorical and non-metaphorical expressions.

TL;DR: This paper argues that three types of conditional perfection have to be distinguished: two specific ones (only if p, q and only if not p, not q), and a more general one (ifNot p, then not q).