Showing papers in "Journal of Pragmatics in 2012"

TL;DR: The authors suggests that disagreements are complex, multidirectional and multifunctional acts, which prevent straightforward labelling such as face-threatening/enhancing, (dis)preferred or (im)polite acts.

TL;DR: In this article, a cross-cultural, intra-English language sociopragmatic exploration of the way in which behaviour such as "banter" is manifested, co-constructed and manipulated for social bonding purposes in both Australian and British varieties of English is presented.

TL;DR: This paper evaluated the relative effectiveness of two types of form-focused instruction on the acquisition of the speech act set of constructive criticism by sixty-nine Vietnamese learners of English and found that the explicit group performed significantly better than the implicit group on all measures.

TL;DR: In this article, a corpus of over 200 everyday requests made by residential home staff to adults with an intellectual impairment, the staff tended to use formats which claimed high entitlement to be obeyed and made little acknowledgement of the contingencies facing their interlocutors.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw on data from two projects on workplace discourse, one focusing on multinational companies situated in Europe and one on small/medium firms (SMEs).

TL;DR: This article measured the extent to which so is used as a discourse marker by Belgian native speakers of Dutch who have almost reached the end of formal instruction in English, and found that the language learners use so significantly more often than their English peers.

TL;DR: In this paper, a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 120 English postings from the MailOnline has revealed the notable presence of emotional stance through conceptual implication, explicit expression, and emotional description.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss how the acceptance and fulfillment of requests is achieved, by examining two social action formats for favorably responding to requests and by showing how linguistic and embodied practices are variously employed in the two.

TL;DR: In French, a causal relation is often conveyed by the connectives car, parce que or puisque as mentioned in this paper, which are interchangeable in many contexts, even if they are still prototypically used in their respective domain in writing.

TL;DR: This article investigated the developmental patterns in the requestive behavior of foreign language learners of Greek and found that although several aspects of the learners' pragmatic competence develop with increasing proficiency, even the advanced learners’ performance lags far behind native speakers in several respects.

TL;DR: The authors argue that the shift to impersonal you works in one genre of interaction, research interviews by academic social science researchers, where the participants often use you where the previous turn might have projected the use of I or they, and explore three possible functions: recategorising the speaker and their category-associated experiences, displaying perceptions as shared, not merely individual, and invoking commonplaces to deal with dilemmas posed by the question.

TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that norms of appropriate verbal behaviour in a community can be established empirically by employing experimental methods, which reveal what guides their expectations, perception and performance in a given social situation.

TL;DR: In this article, a socio-pragmatic analysis of New Zealand English workplace interactions is presented, focusing on intercultural interactions between Māori and Pākehā.

TL;DR: This article applied contrastive ethnopragmatics to communicative style in initial conversational interactions in three varieties of Anglo English: Australian English, American English, and English English, using personal testimonies about cultural crosstalk, sociological and cultural studies, and contrastive corpus data.

TL;DR: In this paper, a small corpus of student e-mail requests to academic staff in a British and an Australian university was collected in order to investigate the cross-cultural nature of Englishes in these requesting events.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how emotive meaning is represented in visual images using the semiotic resources of facial expression, touch, and body orientation, the selection and combination of which constitutes a systemic functional "lexico-grammar" for analyzing and interpreting meaning making in visual imagery.

TL;DR: The authors investigate cases in which the recipients' affiliation with the speaker's affect in telling a complaint story is not only expressed through assessments or shorter comments or response cries but (also) through tellings of their own.

TL;DR: This paper proposes a way of analyzing mitigation as a form of modification of illocutionary force, whereby a mitigated act can be analyzed as an act with an additional preparatory condition, an additional sincerity condition, and a decreased degree of strength of the sincerity condition compared to the characteristic degree of the given act.

TL;DR: In this article, a cognitive-pragmatic definition of implicature is proposed where relevance-theoretic concepts are adapted accordingly to cater for the semiotic complexity of film communication.

TL;DR: In this paper, the relevance of group norms and shared practices for establishing how and whether disagreement occurs in the workplace context is argued. But the authors focus on skilled migrant interns entering the New Zealand workplace, and the analysis illustrates ways in which these newcomers are unintentionally hindered in their ability to learn and contribute to community norms.

TL;DR: This article analyzed usage contexts of a given connective as prototypical and less prototypical instantiations of its subjectivity category and showed that remarkable convergence exists across languages and across theoretical frameworks with respect to prototypical usage types of connectives.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on responsiveness in 185 disagreements and 219 agreements in the comments sections of eight personal/diary blogs and demonstrate how particular social (participation framework) and medium factors (message format and quoting) are tied with the linguistic realisation of disagreements and agreements.

TL;DR: The Basic Communicative Spaces Network (BCSN) as discussed by the authors is a model for the recursive patterning that characterizes perspective alternation in natural discourse, since the BCSN represents both the author's subjectivity and the subjectivity of other actors in the discourse, as well as the blends between these perspectives.

TL;DR: In this paper, the metaphorical time orientation in Chinese along its horizontal and vertical axes is studied, focusing on the controversy over its horizontal axis, readdressing the issue regarding whether the Chinese ego faces toward the future or past in metaphorical orientation of time.

TL;DR: The authors show that the teacher casts the student's problem as a mathematics problem, not as a language problem, and as a result it is the teacher's problem that gets to be explained.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of two types of consciousness-raising instruction (problem-solving tasks with metapragmatic discussion (PTW) and problem-s solving tasks without meta-grammar discussion (PTO) on learners' recognizing and producing English request downgraders were investigated.

TL;DR: This article found that irony is perceived as less complex and is more appreciated than implicitly evaluative irony, and irony markers were found to increase comprehension, reduce perceived complexity and make attitudes towards the utterance more positive.

TL;DR: This paper found that implicit compliments are preferred when evaluating someone's qualities, achievements or personal appearance in order to avoid face-threat, especially when the relationship between the interlocutors is still distant.

TL;DR: The authors describe listening practices in English conversation from an Emancipatory Pragmatics perspective, focusing on the role of the listener as a modality of action and seeking to evaluate linguistic behaviors like responses in terms of cultural assumptions about politeness, turn-taking, silence, and overlapping talk.