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The aim of this pilot study was to explore the feasibility and language outcomes of coaching parents to implement an aided language stimulation intervention using Pragmatic Organisation Dynamic Display (PODD) communication books. Two parent--child dyads, with children aged 4 years 6 months and 4 years 8 months participated in a home-based intervention. An AB design was used. Data were collected in mealtime and play activities. Dependent variables were frequency of parent use of AAC symbols and speech and frequency of child symbol use (speech, signs or graphic symbols). The intervention was feasible as parents reported they were confident in implementing it and the timeframes were appropriate for single-case research designs. An increase in parent AAC symbol use was associated with PODD book use in mealtime and for one parent in play. Both children increased their symbol use, with the clearest association in the mealtime activity. Overall, the encouraging results suggest that this approach warrants further research using stronger designs.

Deception is a misrepresentation of reality that attracted many researchers examining it from various perspectives. However, no due attention has been given to the discursive deception strategies in the work of think tanks. This study aims at exposing the deception strategies deployed in the conservative American think tanks' discourse which concern itself with the (re)production of socio-political realities. The study holds the significance of the detection and explication of argumentative and pragmatic discursive deception strategies which impose ideological hegemony and socio-political polarization of the positively presented "Self" against the negatively presented "Other." This study attempts to answer a twofold question: what are the discursive deception strategies involved in the work of think tanks, and why/how these strategies are applied? To this end, eight political texts from three think tanks were analyzed adopting an eclectic model based on van Dijk (2000) and Yule (1996). The analyzed data mainly focuses on four political themes namely (1) terrorism in Islam, (2) Russian role in the Middle East, (3) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (4) the U.S. policy in the Middle East. The results demonstrate the pervasiveness of discursive deception strategies in the think tanks' discourse which endeavor to communicate an ideological polarization of a positive presentation of the "Self" against a negative presentation of the "Other" and reinforce a hegemony of particular socio-political realities. Findings can be beneficial for students of (critical) discourse analysis, media, communications studies, and English for special purposes.

The improvement of the quality of foreign language education is necessary to achieve subject-learning outcomes for the development of graduates' pertinent communication strategies in foreign language communication in various social situations. The research purpose is to develop the communicative strategies (CS) in foreign language (FL) communication in university students with the help of an elaborated communication strategy training technology based on the linguocultural reflection. As main methods of this study a quantitative approach with a survey design were used. The article presents the main provisions of the FL learning process, which determine the effective formation of pertinent communication strategies in students in the FL education at the university. In a 16-week English as a Foreign Language course 197 learners of the experimental groups received CS training within the framework of a training technology designed for the purpose of the present research. Data analysis of pre- and post-test procedures used the following mathematical coefficients: average indicator (AI), efficiency coefficient (CE), absolute growth (G) and growth rate (Y). The findings revealed that participants in experimental groups, where the training technology was used, significantly outperformed the reference group as to the level of development of communication strategies.

This study examines the frequency and the functions of code switching in informal conversations among Jordanian pilots, who have created their own jargon. It also explores the most frequent English expressions that the pilots switch to in their informal Arabic discourse. The conversations of eight Jordanian pilots aged between thirty and fifty-five were tape-recorded in three separate informal natural settings. The data were used for the purpose of finding out what the pragmatic and communicative functions are that the pilots' code switching serves, and to investigate the most frequent expressions used in their conversations. The results showed that eight main conversational functions can be identified in their code-switching routines, namely: to compensate for the lack of exact equivalents in Arabic, to avoid interruption to the communication when not knowing the Arabic equivalent, to replace long and technical terminology in Arabic with acronyms in English (acronyms are not common in Arabic), to use aviation titles and ranks, to quote/ directly report phrases of speakers, to say the numbers, to refer to names of companies, places, documents, and organizations, and to insert some English formulaic expressions. The findings also showed that the most frequent terms and expressions used in code switching amongst Jordanian pilots are more related to the aviation register than to common-core vocabulary.

In this study, we examined the use of compliments, self-praise, and self-denigration, as exchanged among nonnative English users. This was part of participation in an online cross-cultural exchange project (Ibunka 2019), which involved learners from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). The aim of the study was two-fold: first, to contribute to the burgeoning research on the three speech acts in online settings; second, to unravel how the project participants -- as nonnative users -- managed to build and sustain rapport/comity via these social acts, despite their assumed linguistic deficiency. The study's data were extracted from a corpus of 2055 posts and comments ([approximately equal to] 368654 words) and analysed in terms of: distribution (1105, 301, and 361 tokens were identified, respectively), topics (core vs. peripheral), sequential organisation (vertical vs. horizontal), and rapport/comity building potential. The findings were extensively discussed in light of the existing literature, especially relative to social networking sites. Some of these findings are of a particular interest to English language teachers, namely: using linguistic proficiency and incompetence as topics for the three speech acts and the latter deployment as metacomments and message openers/closers as well as for the management of relational work.

This study aims to investigate the complaining strategies used by Facebook users on Zain Facebook page (Zain Jordan). It also aims to identify the most and least frequent strategies used by Facebook users and to examine the similarities and differences between complaining strategies found on Zain Jordan and those found in other studies in terms of types of strategies used and the linguistic features of the language. To this end, the researchers built a specialized corpus. The corpus was manually annotated to include pragmatic information on the types of complaining strategies used on Zain Jordan. The data were analyzed based on Olshtain and Weinbach (1993). In addition, 6 new strategies were identified by the researchers in a pilot study and were added to the adopted taxonomy. The results show that there are 10 complaining strategies used by Facebook users on Zain Jordan. The results also demonstrate that the majority of complaining strategies used on Zain Jordan were direct, which was attributed to the lack of face-to-face interaction and the anonymity provided by Facebook. Moreover, complaining strategies on Facebook have their own linguistic features. The study concludes with recommendations for further research.

This study aimed to investigate how initiating acts affect refusal strategies realization. The subjects were 45 English Education Program students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Palembang. The study used Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which consisted of 12 situations covering four initiating acts; suggestion, request, offer, and invitations, and the classification of refusal strategy by Beebe et al was also used to categorize refusal strategies realized. The results showed that initiating acts were not insensitive towards the use of direct strategy. However, it has an impact on the realization of indirect strategies and adjuncts. It was also found that both initiating acts and the social status of interlocutors play an important role in producing refusal utterances. Hence, it is highly suggested to introduce initiating acts and social status factors to EFL learners so that they would be able to produce an appropriate refusal depending on the context.

Since its inception, pragmatic competence has been studied vastly; the majority of these studies, however, have examined pragmatic production, and pragmatic comprehension is chiefly under-researched. This lack of adequate research also stands true for the underlying pragmatic comprehension processes and strategies. Therefore, the present investigation aimed to find out L2 pragmatic comprehension strategies used by 40 (F=20, M=20) Iranian EFL learners and to discover whether there would be any differences between interlanguage pragmatic comprehension strategies used by male and female learners. Participants, selected based on stratified random sampling, were chosen on the basis of their performance on a paper-based TOEFL out of the initial sample of 90 students. Three data collection instruments were employed: a validated pragmatic test (Tajeddin & Ahmadi Safa, 2010), concurrent verbal think-aloud protocols, and retrospective verbal think-aloud protocols. Data analysis revealed three classes of pragmatic comprehension strategies. First, socio-pragmatic strategies that included politeness, formality, indirectness, and distance/power influences. Second, lexico-pragmatic strategies which were more frequent than grammatical strategies in the second category. Third, the cognitive strategies that comprised both top-down and bottom-up processing strategies in L2 pragmatic comprehension. Furthermore, it was found that gender did not play any significant role in the use of pragmatic comprehension strategies. Study findings suggest that explicit teaching of pragmatic comprehension strategies helps learners promote their L2 pragmatic comprehension.

With the booming of Chinese internet corporations, various wrongdoings have been frequently exposed to the public, which damages their corporate image. To face the challenge, these companies usually resort to apologies for image restoration. This study investigates how apology strategies are employed by Chinese internet corporations to restore image in the event of wrongdoings. Based on a self-built corpus and by means of textual analysis, we identified different apology strategies characterized by various linguistic features. The results show that "Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs)" and "damage repair" are two of the most frequently used move types which are normally marked by such key linguistic features as personal pronouns, modal verbs, performative verbs and intensifiers. It is also found that IFIDs, "giving account" and "admitting mistakes", "offering repair" and "inviting further interaction" are often incorporated together to show the company's sincere apologetic stance which contributes to the ultimate goal -- rebuilding corporate image and regaining the public's trust. However, direct expressions of "asking for forgiveness" are seldom found in apologies crafted by Chinese internet corporations. This study on apologies in the domain of internet corporations is believed to shed light on research on corporate apology in particular and corporate image restoration in general.

Language is a communication tool for every human being and is used to convey ideas, messages, intentions, feelings, opinions to others or even to meet daily needs. Intercultural communication is a communication that frequently occurs in the community. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that discusses aspects of language as a communication tool. When combined with culture, intercultural communication that occurs in society can be understood. In order for a speaker's language to be accepted in a society, he needs to fully understand the rules that apply in that society, including an understanding of the appropriate use of certain language functions or speech acts. There is a close relationship between pragmatics and the concept of politeness. Politeness is fundamental in pragmatics because this is a universal phenomenon in the use of language in social contexts. The focus of this research is to identify the politeness strategies used by the two main characters in the Shanghai Knights film, Chon Wang and Roy O'Bannon, and analyze them in terms of the cultural background of the two main characters. This is a qualitative descriptive study. The results show that the politeness strategy used is strongly influenced by their cultural background. The strategy used most often is the bald-on record strategy while the Off-record politenses strategy is the strategy that is the least used by the two main characters of the film. This suggests that an understanding of politeness strategies is needed to realize face-threatening actions (FTA). In other words, politeness strategies are used to maintain continuity and success in communicating.

This study investigates the initial encounters of 30 Thai senior citizens and the four Thai musician-celebrity coaches in the blind auditions of "The Voice Senior Thailand season 1". The analysis was drawn from studies on compliments, politeness, and face work. The analysis found that both overt-oriented and covert-oriented compliments were used extensively when the coaches evaluated the senior contestants' vocal performances. The use of such compliments exhibits the shift from a distant relationship to a closer one. The prominent use of covert-oriented compliments as face-maintenance and face-enhancing strategies and as distance-minimization or imposition-mitigation strategies (Blum-Kulka, 2005) suggests rapport management between the four coaches and the senior contestants. Such interconnectedness of the multidirectional functions of compliments in Thai as well as face and politeness found in this study could exemplify how both younger and older generations of Thai people interact to form and shape a closer relationship in their first encounters in contemporary Thai language. This study could shed some lights on cross-cultural studies of complimenting behaviors and politeness in similar contexts or in other contexts related to younger and older generations in aging societies (e.g., workplace contexts or senior-education settings).

Translation receives a lot of attention from sociology, psychology, computer sciences, information technologies and from linguistics, from which it originates. With the advances in technology in the 21st century, studies show that translation is not a sterile linguistic activity, but a reflection of a set of skills and capabilities of the translator/interpreter (T/I). In this respect, the formation of translation competence and related practices requires a thorough perception of worldwide affairs embodying value systems that a language holds framed through sociocultural practices. The achievement of the nature of both source and target languages, henceforth, allows for the establishment of effective linguistic competencies. In turn, such sociolinguistic, communicative, strategic, pragmatic and semiotic competencies provide the T/I with the opportunity to consider the translation/interpretation task from a variety of perspectives, all of which might initially seem independent of each other, but inherently correlated in their nature. Especially, the study of the physical properties of speech helps interpreters perceive a wide range of sounds for fluency and strategic thinking. Therefore, translation/interpretation is said to be a communicative activity, to be recognized and acknowledged by practitioners more in the sense that language -- the tool of the craft -- is a reflection of value systems framed through sociocultural practices and a mindset formulated with critical and creative thinking. This is believed to play a key role in the way translation/interpretation is perceived and, hence, its success upon implementation. In accordance with this framework, this paper provides a set of key qualities accounting for a T/I's success.

Numeral classifiers have been studied by both linguists who consider them to be function morphemes with no semantic significance and those who contend that they are semantically loaded. While considering both views not to be incorrect, this study, leaning toward the latter view, demonstrates that speakers use classifiers to achieve their intended communicative goals. Questionnaires were administered to native speaker informants to ascertain whether Thai native speakers are bound by linguistic rules when matching a noun with its classifier. In many cases, the assignment of classifier to noun was found to be indecisive. Such indecisiveness suggests that the assignment of a classifier to a noun is not rigidly rule-governed. In addition to the questionnaire, informants were asked to read four short scenarios, each of which consisted of a misuse or flouting of a classifier. Not judging the flouting as a mistake, they stated what communicative goal was achieved via such flouting. The results show that classifiers, in addition to having semantic contents, can be used as pragmatic devices.

One of the emerging issues of the use of text-messaging over the WhatsApp application, among teachers and students is concerned with students' impoliteness. A body of literature has extensively argued that students are less polite language users when sending texts to their teachers, and the current study sought to examine the politeness strategies used by the two groups. Specifically, it aimed to examine whether or not there is a significant difference between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and students in the use of politeness strategies in sending text messages to each other. To this end, the study addresses secondary EFL teacher-student WhatsAppp communication and presents an analysis of politeness strategies from a total of 200 WhatsApp texts. The analysis of the politeness strategies was based upon on Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness framework. Findings of the study revealed that students employed more politeness strategies than their teachers. With the emphasis on age and social status, Indonesian EFL learners perceived teachers to be of a higher social class where students were required to highly respect them.

Silence as a communicative act in face-to-face spontaneous interaction has been under-investigated in linguistic politeness research in Thailand. With the recent increase in the influx of foreign students gaining admission into Thai universities yearly, the result is that such universities will be a coexistence of cultures. This study therefore aims to investigate the situational face-threat contexts where Thai students use silence as a politeness strategy. This aim is guided by the main research question of what different situational face-threat contexts could lead to the use of silence by Thai students in their foreign-peer interactions in a Thai multicultural university context. Twenty students' interactions were sampled using micro-socio-ethnographic technique, with data from observation, interview, and questionnaire. The main findings revealed that: uncertainty of language proficiency, expected hurting words from interlocutor, and unexpected negative change in hearer's mood, amongst others, were the main circumstances where Thai students use silence as a face-saving politeness strategy. The findings imply better intercultural awareness in multicultural university contexts.

The present paper stems from an awareness that English has become the most widely used means of intercultural communication on a global scale. Therefore, intercultural communication is more likely to occur through English used as a lingua franca than in any other language used as a lingua franca. English has transcended boundaries and has allowed people from distant cultures to come closer and find common grounds. If, on the one hand, the rise of English has been criticized as a threat to minority languages and cultures, on the other, English has been the means by which people are connected across national and international borders. European Universities and University Language Centres are known to be multicultural environments that provide students with opportunities to familiarise with diverse cultural backgrounds and experience non-native English speech. If therefore, university staff and professionals engage regularly with a multilingual population, they have to be prepared to deal with and respond to their different needs. Within this framework, University degree programs need to be able to cope with a changing cultural and linguistic environment where multilingual speakers increasingly interact in English with other non-native English speakers. In the light of these considerations, this small case study intends to raise awareness of the need to integrate academic degree programs with courses which specifically address Intercultural Communication and English as a Lingua Franca. A sample of Italian university websites has been analysed with a view to identifying the extent to which the aforementioned issues are incorporated within the course programs observed. Preliminary results will be described and considerations suggested.

Apology is an inevitable part of human communication as an act of face-saving strategy. It is necessarily uttered if an offence is made. This research is an attempt to reveal the apology strategies used as well as to analyse the influence of social distance and relative power to the realization of apology strategies, as seen in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince," and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2." In total, there are 125 data found and those are classified according the apology strategy employed. The result shows that the majority of the speakers employ indirect apology strategy "Explanation or Account of Cause" to apologize. Furthermore, this research also found that social distance and relative power are taken into account during the apology process and they affect the linguistic realization of apology strategies in the movies.

This paper examines the employment of pragmatic empathy as a grand strategy in business letter writing. To account for the realization of pragmatic empathy in business letters, we make a corpus-based manual analysis of four types of business letters. It is found that (1) the choice of deixis is a major concern in most letters: while second person is often used in competitive letters, first or third person frequently appears in other three types of letters; (2) conventionalized indirectness strategy is often used in competitive business letters while mitigation strategy is preferred in conflictive business letters; (3) the employment of different strategies is an adaptation to various empathetic concerns in business letter writing. It is concluded that different types of business letters are characterized by different pragmatic strategies to achieve empathy. This paper, which is an attempt to investigate business letters from the empathy perspective, sheds light on business discourse research in general and business letter writing in particular.

People especially them who use English as foreign language tend to feel difficult to understand the implicature, they need to infer the implicature in order to get what the actors mean in a movie. This study is aimed to identify the implicature and their maxim violation and find out how the violating maxims occur in Daredevil web series movie. The study is conducted by using a mixed (qualitative-quantitative) method. The research object of this study is about implicature and the violation of the maxim. The subject of this study is a web series movie script entitled Daredevil, the scripts are taken from season 1 episode 1 until 3. To collect the data, the writer uses note taking technique. The writer uses pragmatic referential method ("metode padan pragmatis") to analyze the data qualitatively, and then count the frequencies of the data quantitatively. The result shows 25 implicatures in Daredevil web series movie that occur because of its violation of the maxim. There are 20% implicature by violating the maxim of quantity, 36% implicature by violating the maxim of quality, 26% implicature by violating the maxim of relation, 18% implicature by violating the maxim of manner. By violating the maxim, the characters produce some implied meanings which can be used to misleading the hearer. The implied meaning of the utterances refers to an expression of agreement, denial, refusal, acceptance and indirect sentence, it depends on how the character uses the implicature.

This study investigated the similarities and differences in the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative essays of American undergraduate students (AMs), Thai with high-English exposure (THHs) and Thai with low-English exposure (THLs). The data of these three groups were collected from 60 essays; 20 essays were from the corpus of University of Michigan with a total of 43 essays, the 40 Thai data were selected from 300 Thai university students based on their English exposure scores. Adopting the theoretical framework of Halliday and Hasan (1976), Biber et al. (1999), and Cowan (2008), there were five categories of DCs in this study: Additive, Adversative, Causal, Temporal, and Continuatives. The data were statistically analyzed in terms of mean, standard deviation, t-test, and One-Way ANOVA. It was found that there was a significant difference in two categories: Causal and Temporal. The t-test for Causal was 0.007, and the t-test for Temporal was 0.005 (p < 0.05). The differences in the use of DCs in AMs and THHs and THLs could be the effect of interlanguage processes, i.e., Language Transfer, Transfer of training, and Strategies of second language communication. Additive category was most frequently used by all three groups, especially the use of the DC lexis "and." It is interesting to discover that pragmatically speaking "and" represents many discourse functions beside Addition. It is used in all main categories, i.e., Adversative, Causal, Temporal and Continuatives.

This study compares how the native speakers of Thai (TTs) and American (AEs) as well as the Thai learners of English as a foreign language with high exposure to English (TEHs) and those with the low exposure (TELs) perform the speech acts of compliments (Cs) by taking the context of age into their consideration. The data were collected by means of a written discourse completion task (WDCT). The analysis of the data examined the pragmatic structures and in particular, strategies of Cs. The six pragmatic structures in terms of head acts [H] and supportive moves (S) were found. They were [H] only, [H]+(S), [H]+(S)+[H], (S)+[H], (S)+[H]+(S), and (S) only. Surprisingly, as opposed to other speech act studies, the AEs showed their preferences towards (S)-oriented structures while the TELs tended to favour [H]-oriented structures in giving Cs in all given situations in the context of age. A closer look at the C strategies exhibited cultural specific preferences among the AEs and the TTs which explain the interlanguage phenomena among the TEHs and the TELs. The interlanguage phenomena found in the two groups of learners may be seen as their incomplete mastery of English but they also could be interpreted as the communication strategies of the TEHs and the TELs to smooth their interactions in English. [Contains an English Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT in English), and a Thai Written Discourse Completion Task translated version of English WDCT into Thai.]

The article provides analysis of the interrupted communication as part of the communication in the election discourse. The authors explored the most typical reasons for the interrupted communication in the electoral discourse analyzed communication failures as a kind of ineffective communication. Communication failures are presented as a result of interrupted communication, which may be determined by several reasons. The paper disclosed the key reason of these failures--the intention of the speaker--the reluctance to continue the conversation for one reason or another. The communication failures in terms of the election discourse were typical largely for the election debate, characterized by the impossibility of predicting future responses, uncomfortable questions that often required non-standard speech decisions on the part of the speaker. The study established the relationship between the ability of a politician to maintain effective communication and the creation of his positive or negative political image. Psychological causes of interrupted speech present a separate group: the emotional state of the speaker, his perception or non-perception of the opponent, the ability to transfer the required opinion in an expressive way.

The present study attempted to describe the request, apology, and request mitigation strategies utilized by international postgraduate students in confronting different situations. In addition, it examined the effects of the situational factors of social distance, power, and imposition on the students' choice of request and apology strategies as well as the modifications in requests. Another objective has been to categorize the difficulties students face in the production of the speech acts. One hundred and thirty international postgraduate students majoring in different fields voluntarily participated in this study. A Written Discourse Completion Task Questionnaire (Liu, 2005) and semi-structured interview were utilized for data collection procedure. The results of the questionnaire illustrated that the participants made use of IFID strategy for apologies and conventionally indirect expressions (Preparatory questions) for requests more frequently than other strategies. Moreover, the situational factors of social distance, power and imposition did not affect the participants' choice of request and apology strategies but they had some influences on the use of mitigating strategies in different situations. Regarding modifiers, the students opted out external modifications (66.6%) more than internal modifiers (33.3%). Among the external mitigation types, "please" with 21% and grounders with 25% respectively have been utilized more than other external mitigation types. Finally, the results of the interviews indicated that the difficulties that students face in the production of the speech acts were grammar, expression, vocabulary and structure. This study has some implications for second language acquisition research and intercultural communication.

This study examined the teaching approaches and techniques that Iranian instructors utilize for teaching L2 pragmatics in their classroom practices. 238 Iranian instructors participated in this study. The data for this study were accumulated through questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. In terms of the instructional approaches, both the quantitative and qualitative results showed that instructors make use of inductive and implicit approaches more than other two approaches, deductive and explicit, to teach L2 pragmatics .With regard to the pragmatic consciousness-raising techniques, the results revealed that instructors mostly make use of conversation topics and also situations to raise learners' awareness of the speech act under study. In addition to this technique, instructors make use of field experience to give input to learners. Regarding the pragmatic communicative practice techniques, the quantitative and qualitative results showed that instructors mostly make use of role-play and pair- work techniques to engage learners to practice speech acts. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire and interview with regard to pragmatic corrective feedback techniques showed that instructors almost give feedback implicitly by reformulating learners' mistakes and repeating their errors On the contrary, instructors give less metalinguistic information and explain the inappropriate expressions to learners. In terms of culture teaching techniques, the results illustrated that instructors share their knowledge of what they hear or read about other cultures with their learners. The results of this study have some implications for language instructors.

This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager's model of the language-culture nexus, within which the intersection of language(s) and culture(s) in a communicative event is conceptualised as a nexus of linguistic, languacultural, discursive, and other (non-linguistic) cultural resources and practices. The paper operationalises this intercultural communication theory in a new and exploratory way to investigate how cultural complexity is manifest, and interactionally managed, at different levels of meaning. The substantive analysis shows how a range of divergent resources, brought in by the different participants, are drawn upon and externalised as communicative practices in both legal advice meetings. Understanding is negotiated interculturally at different levels of meaning -- the linguistic, the languacultural, and the discursive -- in contrasting ways in each meeting. Methodologically, the paper argues that a strength of Risager's framework is that it supports a methodical and structured analysis of communicative events characterised by linguistic and cultural complexity, which can be linked to other discourse analytical approaches. The model's complexity, and its foregrounding of verbal over other semiotic modes, are highlighted as challenges for the analyst.

This paper examines the role played by malevolent linguistic creativity in the generation and maintenance of anti-immigration communities on Twitter. In order to understand this phenomenon, we combined data science and qualitative techniques for the analysis of 112,789 pro- and anti-immigration tweets with a focus on their hashtags. Our analysis pointed to the fact that anti-immigration users on this social media platform have a distinct behavior and employ a series of specific strategies in creating echo chambers online. One of these strategies has to do with the use of new words and slogan variations which have a clear identity function and serve the pragmatic purpose of building community. Some reflections on the relation between creativity and social media are offered at the end.

Background: This study is a longitudinal follow-up to prior work examining the important pragmatic skill of communication repair (i.e., the ability to respond effectively to a request for clarification of an unclear message) across three neurodevelopmental disabilities in which language skills are impaired: fragile X syndrome with and without autism spectrum disorder (FXS-ASD; FXS-O), idiopathic ASD (ASD-O), Down syndrome (DS) and controls with typical development (TD). Prior work examining communication repair skills at younger ages indicated impairments in boys with FXS-ASD and ASD-O, with females performing comparably with each other across groups. Aims: To characterize communication repair skills in young individuals with FXS-ASD, FXS-O, ASD-O, DS and TD, across groups and over development. A secondary aim included documenting sex differences in FXS (with and without ASD) and DS. Methods & Procedures: Sixty young individuals with FXS-ASD (49 males, 11 females), 38 with FXS-O (13 males, 25 females), 38 with ASD-O (males only), 42 with DS (21 males, 21 females) and 41 with TD (21 males, 20 females) participated in the study, with a subsample reported on here who were retested at a second time point 2.7 years later on average. Participants completed a structured, picture-based task designed to assess the ability to repair breakdowns in communication. Participants' responses were compared across groups and sexes at the second time point, and interpreted with respect to previously published (Time 1) findings. Outcomes & Results: Key findings included that, with age, male groups (including those with FXS-ASD and ASD-O, who showed difficulty at Time 1) performed more comparably, decreasing their use of inappropriate responses, in spite of relatively little change observed in general cognitive or structural language abilities in the clinical groups. However, girls with FXS and DS became more non-responsive with age, and differences between boys and girls with FXS-ASD emerged over time as well. Conclusions & Implications: Findings suggest that impairments in a critical pragmatic skill--the ability to repair communication breakdown--show significant change with age across three neurodevelopmental disabilities, with important sex-specific patterns. These developments were often observed in spite of a relative plateau in cognitive and language growth, suggesting that repair skills may be more malleable and therefore an excellent target for intervention. Findings not only inform the nature of pragmatic impairment across groups but also can importantly inform clinical practice, suggesting that clinicians should monitor pragmatic skills such as repairs throughout development and also consider the role of sex in clinical efforts.

Requesting plays a key role in human communication. One can request the same thing in multiple ways (e.g., "Pass the salt" vs. "Could you pass the salt?"). How do speakers determine which request form to produce? And how does this choice affect a recipient's evaluation of a request? Previous analyses of naturalistic conversations suggest that a speaker's "entitlement" -- their expectations that the recipient of a request is able and willing to fulfill it -- can influence their formatting decisions. However, the role of entitlement in format selection has not been tested experimentally, nor is it known how a requester's entitlement impacts a recipient's evaluation of a request form. Across several online experiments, we asked whether manipulations of a speaker's entitlement influenced formatting preferences across requesters and recipients. While requesters robustly "recognized" normative mappings between entitlement and request formatting (Experiment 2), they did not necessarily follow these mappings unprompted (Experiments 1-1b); instead, they tended to produce modal interrogative requests ("Can you do X?"), regardless of entitlement. Recipients, however, systematically modulated their preferences for particular forms as a function of a requester's entitlement (Experiment 3). We also conducted exploratory analyses on the data from each experiment using human-normed judgments about entitlement and other social-interactional variables (e.g., "degree of imposition"); critically, for both Experiments 2 and 3, judgments about a requester's entitlement explained variance in participants' responses above and beyond other variables.

Discourse connectives (DCs) are multi-functional devices used to connect discourse segments and fulfill interpersonal levels of discourse. This study investigates the use of selected 80 DCs within 11 categories in the argumentative essays produced by L1 and L2 university students. The analysis is based on the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) which consists of essays written by native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) from 10 countries and regions in Asia. WordSmith Tools were used to generate the quantitative profile of the DCs, while follow-up qualitative analysis in the context of usage provided additional interpretive insights. The total frequency of DCs used by Hong Kong and Singaporean students is significantly less than do L1 writers, mainly because the addictive "and" is by far less frequent in the essays produced by L2 writers. Hong Kong students use much more enumerating, resultive and summative DCs than both L1 writers and L2 writers from Thailand and Singapore. Thai students, on the other hand, employ the causal device "because" much more than both L1 and other L2 writers. Hong Kong and Singaporean students are more formal in tone than L1 and Thai students when using the adversative and resultive DCs. Despite the apparent differences, there are considerable similarities of usage, with "and", "but", "because", "so", "however" and "therefore" occurring among the top 10 most frequently used devices of both L1 and L2 writers, although with strikingly different frequencies. These findings shed light on the pragmatic uses of DCs by L1 and L2 writers as a way to influence the interpretation of the message, and thus succeed in achieving their communicative intentions.

There are important cultural differences in attitudes towards and use of electronic text communication. Consistent with Hall's high-context/low-context conceptualization of culture, electronic inter-cultural communication, just as verbal inter-cultural communication, is affected by the culturally-specific assumptions and preferences of message writers.

The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter's global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered 'translingual' framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused on the specific kinds of communicative actions it marks and organises. I shall use the notion of formatting as the point of departure: hashtags, as part of an innovative online scripted register, can be seen as formatting devices that introduce, proleptically, a recognisable framing effect on the statement (the tweet), often as a reframing response to other statements giving keys for complex and multiple but equally formatted forms of uptake. The hashtag, thus, appears to have powerful interactional structuring effects in formatting specific lines of action.

The study focuses on the strategies English as a foreign language (EFL) learners choose to take on in requests without evaluating them against the norm of a native speaker, as the concept of native speaker is ideologically problematic in the time of super-diversity. The study uses cultural scripts proposed in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics to interpret the strategies of EFL learners in making requests. Seventy-six requests were elicited from twenty-six undergraduate Omani EFL learners through Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs). The results obtained from the DCTs were supported by the results of the focus discussion group and our personal observations as faculty members and students' advisors. The study shows that contrary to the claims made in most of the literature on requests in interlanguage pragmatics, EFL learners use indirect strategies. In addition, they use address terms and provide reasons for their requests. These strategies are shaped by cultural scripts that prioritize the values of politeness, strong family, and tribal orientation in the Omani society. Findings suggest that awareness of these communication strategies promotes tolerance and sensitivity towards the communication styles of others.

Previous studies on hesitation strategies used by beginner or advanced L2 learners revealed that beginners mostly leave their hesitation pauses unfilled which causes their speech to sound disfluent, and advanced learners tend to use various fillers in order to sound like native speakers. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the distribution of hesitation discourse markers including silent pauses, silent pauses and fillers, fillers, and non-lexical words used by Iranian university students in an oral (L2) test. The study examines the location of the discourse markers of hesitation across utterances produced by the participants. The respondents were a group of students registered in the Tertiary English Language Program at a university in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The aim was to identify the frequency of all hesitation strategies used in four locations of Initial, Middle, and Final position of the utterances to find out the most frequent location of hesitation during an oral (L2) test.

The present study was designed to examine the ways power relations influence politeness strategies in disagreement. The study was an attempt to find out whether different power status of people influences the the choice of appropriate politeness strategies and speech act of disagreement by Iranian EFL learners, in a university setting. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was utilized to elicit the required data. The sample included 20 Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners who were selected based on their scores on a proficiency test. The DTC consists of five scenarios in which the subjects are expected to disagree with two higher statuses and two with peers and one with a lower status. Selection of disagreement situations in DCT was based on relative power and status of people. The main frameworks used for analyzing data were the taxonomy from Muntigl and Turnbull (1995) for counting and analyzing the utterances of disagreement and Brown and Levinson' (1987) theory of politeness. It was found that EFL learners employ different kind of politeness strategies in performing this face threatening speech act. When performing the speech act of disagreement, they used more direct and bald on record strategies. The findings of this study provide some evidences for the relation between the type and frequency of disagreement and choice of politeness strategies associated with people with different power status. It concludes by arguing that the results can be closely related with learning contexts and textbook contents and some suggestions were put forward regarding the issue. It is also hoped that the findings of this study will provide some worthwhile knowledge into the teaching and training of communication skills in EFL courses. Furthermore, this study may reveal some cultural differences between Iranian societies and others.

Although there has been a steady rise of empirical studies investigating pragmatic strategies in oral communication using English as a lingua franca (ELF), there have been relatively few published studies about pragmatic strategies in written ELF communication. Email, despite its current popularity, has scarcely been examined in ELF communication. To extend the existing research on ELF into email discourse, this study investigates Chinese-English bilingual professionals' real-life emails in ELF communication. Email data were collected from 15 Chinese-English bilingual professionals in Mainland China. The paper analyzes and discusses the pragmatic strategies employed by these Chinese bilingual professionals both to solve and to avoid problems of understanding when writing their emails in ELF communication. The results reveal no evidence of non-understanding and only a few misunderstandings. The Chinese bilingual professionals employed various pragmatic strategies to prevent and resolve problems of understanding in ELF communication and to facilitate understanding and ensure communicative effectiveness.

This article provides clinicians and educators a useful conceptualization of general instructional strategies often used to promote the performance of requests in children with developmental disabilities, and which can be applied in interventions that utilize augmentative and alternative communication. A case study illustrates the specialized intervention of a 7-year-old boy with Down syndrome taught to make requests using a picture-based strategy. The intervention describes how environmental arrangement and generalized cues were used to promote spontaneous communicative attempts during a reinforcing social-communicative context, and explains how prompting and modeling were used to facilitate the performance of effective communication behaviors across multiple requesting opportunities. Following the intervention, the child showed significant increases in his use of functional communication, with collateral gains in speech, as demonstrated by the performance of requests. These results are discussed within the context of the extant research. Relevant practical considerations for clinicians and educators are provided.

We describe a speech-language pathology and occupational therapy service delivery program for preschoolers with developmental delays and communication and related impairments. Key features included interprofessional collaboration; parent professional partnerships; naturalistic environment; opportunities for choice and control; use of a relationship-based approach; and communication, sensory, and positive behavioral strategies. Participants were 16 boys and 4 girls, ages 3 years, 2 months to 5 years, 8 months, who attended the program two mornings per week. Outcomes measured were pragmatic language and participation as well as parent satisfaction. Results indicated that children demonstrated significant improvements in pragmatics and participation and that parents expressed a high level of satisfaction. Children also achieved additional clinical objectives. Implications of findings are discussed.

In the context of more diverse communicative practices and social relations in globalization, scholars are increasingly defining English as constituting socially constructed situational norms in specific contexts of interaction, and not a homogeneous language or even discrete varieties of English. This shift requires treating pragmatics and not grammar, social context and not cognition, as more significant in accounting for one's language competence. To address such changes in pedagogical practice, language teachers have to focus more on developing procedural knowledge (i.e., a knowledge of "how," or negotiation strategies) rather than propositional knowledge (i.e., a knowledge of "what," or norms and conventions of a language) in their classrooms. This article illustrates how teachers can cultivate procedural knowledge by developing language awareness, rhetorical sensitivity, and negotiation strategies among their students.

Conversational repairs are an important pragmatic language skill. We identified types of responses to requests for clarification and their frequencies in typically developing 4;0-6;0-year-old Jordanian children. This study was motivated by the fact that there are no Arabic data regarding this issue and by the limited range of forms of requests for clarification reported in previous studies in other languages. Repair strategies were identified from videotaped records of 30 Jordanian children. The examiners used seven forms of request for clarification to elicit responses, across two tasks: story and play. Our main result revealed that Jordanian children use the same repair strategies as children who speak different languages, but with different frequencies. Addition was the most frequent repair strategy used. Additional results indicated significant differences among participants in the use of strategies other than addition across forms and tasks. Specifically, certain forms of request for clarification, such as (an Arabic word meaning) "What?" elicited the most age-appropriate responses by the participating children. These results suggest that teachers and speech language pathologists working with this age group, should use easy forms such as "What?" rather than harder forms such as "What do you mean?" when asking for clarification to facilitate communication.

Extending Lee's (Pragmatics 15: 395-422, 2005) work, the researcher further investigates the requestive behaviour of a group of Cantonese learners of English (CLEs) in Hong Kong in terms of their strategy and linguistic preference. The data were collected from a discourse completion test (DCT). Their requestive behaviour is studied in three social and power hierarchical situations (low-high, equal-equal and high-low) in the university context and is compared with a group of native Cantonese speakers' (NCSs) and native English speakers' (NESs) requestive behaviour, respectively. The dual comparison results in three important findings. First, the evidence shows some L1 influence on the syntactic structure of the CLEs' query preparatory strategy. The equivalent interrogative form of "(Nei[superscript 1]/Ngo5) ho2 ji5/h2 m ho2 ji5: (you/I) can/can-not-can" in Cantonese and "Can/Could/May you/I...?" in English contributes to the frequent use of the CLEs' indirect requestive behaviour in English. Nevertheless, the difference in direct and indirect strategies between the two groups is significant (p less than 0.005). Second, there is cross-cultural agreement on indirect requestive behaviour in the three situations between the CLEs and the NESs. Both groups use the politeness marker of "cing2" or "please" to mitigate imposition and increase politeness. However, the CLEs demonstrate limited pragmalinguistic resources to enhance the force and politeness of the speech act compared to the NESs. The strengths and weaknesses of CLEs' requestive behaviour, their limited pragmalinguistic resources and the limitations of the study are discussed.

Whereas the speech act of refusal is universal across language, the politeness value and the types of linguistic forms used to perform it vary across language and culture. The majority of the comparative pragmatic research findings were derived from one single source of data (i.e., either production data or perception data). Few attempts have been made to collect different sources of data to triangulate the findings. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the problems that Chinese learners of English encounter when performing refusal responses through the comparison of production and perception data between an NS group and a Chinese learners of English group. The results showed that one major problem found in Chinese EFL learners' production and perception regarding refusing in English involved their relying on the indirect L1 communication style manifested in the less frequent use of direct refusal strategies and frequent use of excuse/reason with specific and significant details in L2 refusals. The other major problem in Chinese EFL learners' refusal responses concerned the ungrammatical sentences and inaccurate word choice, which often caused confusion.

This study contributes to the growing field of research on interlanguage pragmatic development with a study on the development of argumentative discourse ability by second-language learners of German. I will be focusing on "facework"--that is, the use of verbal strategies that allow the speaker to have his or her social identities, particular personal qualities, and attributes validated by others. The study approaches the data, which were gathered from learners of German at 3 levels of proficiency, from the perspective of sequential and preference organisation. The analysis shows that argumentative sequences develop from a simple 2- or 3-turn structure, which consists of merely 1 "core" adjacency pair (assessment/opinion-agreement/disagreement), to being extended by postsequences and insertion sequences. It is only for learners of higher proficiency, however, that these extensions serve to further the argument rather than merely building on agreement. When disagreeing, learners increasingly use agreement turns to sharpen forthcoming disagreement or use their interlocutors' turns to serve that purpose. These developments are then explained from a sociocognitive perspective. I will argue that developments are due to learners overcoming processing constraints as proficiency progresses as well as their changing frames of reference for the task.

The article examines the communication strategies of four bilingual, immigrant women entrepreneurs within the context of their businesses. The analysis revealed that L1 and L2 use is crucial to the business success of the participants. L1 conversations consisted of largely private speech and directives. The women positioned themselves as powerbrokers by creating cultural bridges and community networks with their in-group workers while facilitating business interaction with out-group customers. L2 use consisted of the mastery of basic conversation openings and closings, and various rapport-building methods such as small talk and socially expanded talk. Rapport-building strategies enabled the women to create lasting relationships as well as extended opportunities for English-language development. The study found that immigrant women entrepreneurs have a mastery of the pragmatic functions of speech that allow them to be competent communicators who know how to go about their business and how to get things done in the workplace. (Contains 2 tables.)