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I defend the idea that there are universal fictions, and that the Routley-Deutsch-Kapsner way of generating them – namely, with a story including deliberately and explicitly the proposition Everything is true – is still the best one. I reconstruct Wildman and Folde’s Finean criticisms to universal fictions a la Routley-Deutsch-Kapsner based on the idea that the universal quantifier in such fictions may not target the intended range of quantification, that is, all propositions. I show that Wildman and Folde’s argument does not succeed, for they fail to show that every universal sentence has to be understood as involving a restricted quantifier.

Callender claims that `time is the great informer' (Callender 2017, chapter 7), meaning that the direction(s) in which our `best' physical theories inform are temporal. This is intended to be a metaphysical claim, and as such expresses a relationship between the physical world and information-gathering systems such as ourselves. This paper gives two counterexamples to this claim, illustrating the fact that time and informative strength doubly dissociate, so the claim cannot be about physical theories in general. The first is a case where physical theories inform in directions that we have no reason to regard as temporal. The second is a case where our best physical theories fail to inform in directions that we have independent (pre-theoretic) reasons to regard as temporal. Taking these two cases into account suggests that the connection Callender makes between time and informativeness is perspectival. The second case demonstrates that, although scientists often seek information in temporal directions, the behaviour of the physical world can present serious difficulties for finding it. In response, this paper proposes a perspectival reading of Callender's claim, according to which the connection between time and informative strength has more to do with the aims and objectives of science than the workings of the physical world.

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these components can meaningfully be attributed to innovation groups. This means that we can also attribute the virtue of creativity to group agents involved in innovation. Recognizing creativity as a collective virtue in innovation is important because it allows for a more accurate evaluation of how successful innovation generally happens. The innovator who takes a collective virtue account of creativity seriously will give attention to the facilitation of an environment where the group can flourish collectively, rather than only nurturing the individual genius.

Cette étude tente d’analyser un certain nombre de campagnes publicitaires à la lumière de 4 concepts clés relevant du domaine des études culturelles : le stéréotype culturel illustré par une campagne de publicité anglaise, le prototype culturel illustré par une campagne de publicité écossaise, l’approche multiculturelle interprétée à travers la campagne publicitaire réalisée par HSBC en 2002 et la rencontre interculturelle interprétée à travers la célèbre campagne Benetton.Pour terminer, elle souligne l’imprévisibilité qui sous-tend la rencontre interculturelle et l’écart qui peut exister entre l’intention de communication et la réaction du récepteur, comme en témoignent certains heurts culturels engendrés par la campagne Benetton. This article proposes to analyse contemporary cultural advertising in the light of 4 key concepts from the field of Cultural Studies: cultural stereotypes as illustrated by an English advertising campaign, cultural prototypes as illustrated by a Scottish advertising campaign, multiculturalism as interpreted by the 2002 HSBC advertising campaign and the intercultural encounter as interpreted through the famous Benetton campaign.To conclude, it underlines the unpredictability of intercultural encounters where the intention of the emitter may clash with the reaction of the receptor, an occurrence illustrated by a number of cultural clashes in connection with the Benetton campaigns.

Now that Justin Trudeau’s “independent” Senate has had a full term to orient itself, how do we characterize the emerging relationship between it and the House of Commons? To answer this question, this article examines quantitative and qualitative changes in the Senate’s impact on legislation since 2015. I look first of all at quantitative changes in Senate-Commons interaction, as assessed through the Senate’s strong challenges to the Commons, more normal legislative review, and proactive policy influence. I then turn to qualitative case studies of Bills C-14, C-48, and C-69 to provide a more in-depth assessment of Senate review of legislation related to its core institutional mission. Overall, I argue that the newly independent Senate has been a much more assertive participant in the legislative process, but ultimately has been very mindful of reputational considerations and avoided going beyond “moderate” review. As a result, there are lingering questions about the practical significance of Trudeau’s reforms.

The investigation of speech acts has been of interest, especially in cross-cultural pragmatics, to many L1/L2 researchers for many years (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). Favor-asking, as an important speech act, is centered upon having the other party of conversation do a specific act (Goldschmidt 1999). Although some research has been done on favor-asking in different contexts, studies on this speech act are still scarce, if any, in Persian settings. The main thrust of the current study was to investigate favor-asking among a sample of 20 native speakers of Persian (10 women and 10 men). The participants were selected from graduate students, since the employed oral DCT scenarios were designed to elicit favors asked from three different academic statuses: Higher, equal, and lower (professors, peers, and students, respectively). A total of 240 responses were then analyzed to identify the recurring patterns under the three open-coded categories of pre-favor, favor, and post-favor. The examination of the responses illustrated some variation triggered by gender and academic status differences, namely, the length of favors, frequency of some (sub)themes, and formality degree. Additionally, some relevant syntactic issues were explored (e.g. plural/singular pronouns/verbs), which contributed to the formality/informality of the favors, depending upon the contexts in which they were incorporated. Finally, some insights into Persian sociocultural interactions, favor-asking in particular, were provided.

This paper identifies salient properties of how talk about video communication is organised interactionally, and how this interaction invokes an implied order of behaviour that is treated as ‘typical’ and ‘accountably representative’ of video communication. This invoked order will be called an interrogative gaze. This is an implied orientation to action, one that is used as a jointly managed interpretative schema that allows video communication to be talked about and understood as rationally, purposively and collaboratively undertaken in particular, ‘known in common’ ways. This applies irrespective of whether the actions in question are prospective (are about to happen) or have been undertaken in the past and are being accounted for in the present or are ‘generally the case’ – in current talk. The paper shows how this constitutive device also aids in sense making through such things as topic management in video-mediated interaction, and in elaborating the salience of the relationship between this and the patterned governance of social affairs – viz, mother-daughter, friend-friend – as normatively achieved outcomes. It will be shown how the interrogative gaze is variously appropriate and consequentially invoked not just in terms of what is done in a video call or making such calls accountable, but in helping articulate different orders of connection between persons, and how these orders have implications for sensible and appropriate behaviour in video calling and hence, for the type of persons who are involved. This, in turn, explains how a decision to avoid using video communication is made an accountably reasonable thing to do. The relevance of these findings for the sociology of everyday life and the philosophy of action are explored.

Showing material objects by bringing them to the camera or turning the camera toward them are pervasive practices in domestic and recreational video-mediated communication (VMC). We here discuss a set of specific showing practices characteristic of digitally embedded video-mediated settings, which may be called ‘digital showings’. These involve participants’ collaboration to retrieve a digital object so as to ensure a shared perceptual experience on screen of said object. We draw on data from multiparty Google Hangouts On Air (HOAs) to show that while digital and material showings share an overall sequential organization, the former display the emergence of unique collaborative practices that at times become collective performances of computer literacy. We focus on three instances of digital showings: (a) screenshares of pictures – showing an image by sharing one’s screen; (b) screenshares of videos – showing a running video by sharing one’s screen; and (c) link-share showings – showing by sharing the link to a showable content that may be independently retrieved while experienced jointly.

Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2005) rapport-management model to analyze data collected in open role-play interactions in Lima, Perú, this paper expands research on the preferred communicative patterns of Peruvian Spanish speakers when expressing gratitude in a situation exhibiting high social distance (+SD) and no power (-P) difference between interlocutors, and where the benefit received from the interlocutor is considerable. It is argued that although the development of interpersonal communication in social interactions reflects the relationship of each speaker with his/her interlocutor and his/her “own values and personal standards” (Furukawa 2000), it also reflects their cultural preferences to manage interpersonal relationships (Spencer-Oatey 2005).Results show that participants exhibited what apparently is prescribed behavior in this socio-cultural context in the realization of their interactional goals: The creation and enhancement of the relationship using communicative strategies respecting the association and equity principles and enhancing the interlocutor’s identity face. Despite the fact that disrespect to the interlocutor and violations to her autonomy were voiced, it is asserted here, that given this specific context, this might be expected and permitted behavior.

Research on the apology spans over half a century and has been quite prolific. Yet, a major issue with numerous studies on apologies is a lack of findings from naturally occurring interaction. Instead many studies examine written elicitations. As a result they research how respondents think they apologize, not how they do apologize. This project, in contrast, stresses the importance of studying the apology as a dynamically constructed politeness strategy in situated interaction. Apologies are part of the ever-present relational work, i.e., co-constructed and co-negotiated, emergent relationships in a situated social context. Hence, the focus is not on the illocutionary force indicating device (IFID) alone, nor on the turn in which the IFID is produced, but on the interactional exchange in situ. Naturally, data eliciting produces a larger sample size of apologies than the taping and transcribing of naturally occurring interaction does. To remedy the issue, this study uses interactions from situation comedies, which provide a large sample of apologies in their interactional context. Sitcom interactions constitute a valid focus of pragmatic research as they share fundamental elements of natural interactions (B. Mills 2009; Quaglio 2009). The validity of this approach is tested using findings from published conversation analytic studies on apologies. The analysis is set within the framework of discursive pragmatics and leads to new insights on apologies and responses to apologies.

This paper analyses the organization of ‘openings’ in Skype video-mediated conversation. It uncovers order in their apparent complexity by showing the relevance of a particular sequential adjacent pair organization, the appearing/noticing sequence, and its particular instantiation as an appearance-for-the-first-time greeting. The paper shows how this is a crucial resource in establishing a joint video interactional frame for the parties involved. This accounts for the occurrence of some specific phenomena in Skype openings, such as multiple greetings, and for the use of greetings which reflexively index their being occasioned by an appearance and related greeting, such as the French ‘coucou’, even when these do not occur at the start of Skype calls. When analysed this way, Skype openings, though complex, can be seen as an accomplished ‘dance of appearances and multiple greetings’.

This paper argues for revisiting the traditional adscription of ambiguous readings of personal pronouns, such as hearer-dominantweor genericyou, pluralis maiestatis and pluralis modestiae to specific genres and/or registers. Indeed, in many languages these phenomena are considered typical for a certain genre, register or discourse context. In this paper, I will argue, on the basis of quantitative data and a qualitative analysis of examples taken from different genres (including purposefully creative language use in fiction), that a more accurate account may be formulated in terms of (inter)subjective effect, viz. the attention to the (inter)locutor (among others Benveniste 1966), as a more suitable explanation for the variation of these phenomena attested in corpora.The hearer-oriented uses ofwe, for instance, are considered typical for relationships characterized by power asymmetries such as teacher-student, doctor-patient (Haverkate 1984: 87; Brown & Levinson 1987), whereas generic and speaker-referringyouhave been considered a feature of (informal) oral language than written discourse (Hidalgo Navarro 1996). Recent corpus-based analyses including quantitative and qualitative analyses, however, call for a more nuanced view (De Cock 2011 on Spanish and English; Tarenskeen 2010 on Dutch). We may, for example, find hearer-oriented or even hearer-dominant 1stperson plural forms (Have we taken our medicine?) in contexts where no power- relationship can be defined, e.g. among couples.It will be shown that these uses have different intersubjective effects, however. Their distribution is in line with overall differences as to intersubjectivity according to register and genre, beyond referential ambiguity. The concept of (inter)subjectivity then allows for a more comprehensive analysis of these phenomena and their occurrence in specific registers and genres, addressing the way in which the (inter)locutor is taken into account in each genre.

This paper examines the situated ways in which Moroccan immigrant children in Spain create imagined, alternative life worlds and explore possible forms of identification through an investigation of these children’s hybrid linguistic practices in the midst of play. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) notions of heteroglossia and hybridity, the analysis focuses on the meanings of codeswitching practices that a group of Moroccan immigrant girls deploy in pretend-play sequences involving dolls to construct female identities; identities that they treat as desirable in the context of Spanish idealizations of femininity, but that are considered transgressional by adults in Moroccan diaspora communities in Spain. Neighborhood peer group play affords Moroccan immigrant girls’ transformations and engagement in subversive tactics, in that these activities take place outside the scrutiny of parents and other adults. The rich verbal and sociocultural environment of Moroccan immigrant children’s peer groups provide us with an excellent window to investigate peer language socialization processes in relation to how immigrant children negotiate, transform, and subvert in the midst of play the different, and often incongruous, socio-cultural and linguistic expectations and constraints that they encounter on a daily basis. Use of Moroccan Arabic and Spanish in this pretend play, in particular, results in a heteroglossic polyphony of voices imbued with moral tensions (Bahktin 1981, 1986). This analysis highlights the importance of these hybrid linguistic practices in immigrant girls’ explorations of alternative processes of gendered identification in multilingual, culturally-syncretic environments. Through surreptitious pretend-play, Moroccan immigrant girls explore imagined transgressional possible identities and moral worlds. In this sense, this research also underscores the implications of children’s language use and language choice in pretend-play for larger processes of cultural continuity and transformation in transnational, diasporic communities undergoing rapid change.

This paper focuses on how conversation and a shared participation frame are maintained in video-mediated family conversations which ordinarily do not have a particular agenda. In order to examine this question, how conversations are maintained whilst being sometimes improvised, the paper analyses a particular interactional phenomenon, namely, the image-based topic management accomplished via two methods: showings and noticings. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of family video mediated conversations, it shows how these methods are used for introducing or changing topics and hence sustaining talk. Moreover, by describing the practical actions that involve technological and social dimensions, the paper highlights the link between interaction, personal relationships and technology. The analysis of showings and noticings, enabled by the technical features of the systems used by the participants, reveals how video-communication technology is mobilized by family members as a resource for maintaining intimacy in distant relationships.

Speech act studies are increasingly likely to use retrospective verbal protocols to record the thoughts of participants who produced targeted speech acts (e.g., Cohen & Olshtain, 1993). However, although communication is always a two-way street, little is known about the recipients’ perceptions of speech acts. In academic communication at universities, it is critical for students to gain awareness of the socio-cultural norms as well as knowledge of appropriate linguistic forms in interacting with instructors. Therefore, gathering perceptual information from instructors, the recipients of many speech acts such as apologies, serves an important role in realizing successful student-instructor communication. Targeting instructors’ perceptions, two forms of an online survey were created via surveygizmo.com, with one including 12 spoken apologies and the other including 12 emailed apologies. An equal number of native (NS) and nonnative English speaking (NNS) students produced these apologies. The 150 instructors who responded to the survey gave significantly higher ratings to apologies made by NS students than to those made by NNS students. An analysis of instructors’ explanations after the ratings showed that both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge (Thomas, 1983) were valued in the successful realization of apologies, with the majority of instructor explanations addressing the sociopragmatic aspects of apology productions. In their comments on highly-rated student apologies, instructors appreciated the fact that students took responsibility in apologizing, offered worthy explanations, and delivered the messages with minimum grammatical mistakes. Poorly rated apology messages did not contain sufficient or valid evidence, inconvenienced the instructors through inappropriate requests, and usually had multiple grammatical mistakes. This study provides useful source of information to be used in university classrooms that can orientate novice learners towards socio-cultural expectations and appropriate lexical markers to be employed in making successful apologies in academic settings.

This paper examines the question of politeness in political interviews, looking particularly at the use of loaded questions. Comparison is made between the two principal paradigms of politeness, Locher and Watts (2005) and Brown and Levinson (1987). The paper focuses on the interviewing style of Steven Sackur (HARDtalk, BBC) who employs loaded questions in his political interviews in keeping with the analysis of Walton (1991) who argues that loaded questions can function as a ‘reasonable’ means to constrain the response of an interviewee and in turn further discourse. Sackur employs loaded questions selectively to convey and reinforce a presupposition to which an interviewee is not committed. In so doing, he is able to constrain the contribution of his interviewee. Loaded questions are a linguistic means of (im)politeness used strategically by Sackur to further the discourse of his interviews.

This article seeks to advance the usage-based discourse research that investigates meanings and processes of meaning construction in interaction by elaboratingan empirically grounded interdisciplinary model. The paradigmatic and sequential analysis employed here brings together linguistic discourse analysis with an ethnomethodological perspective, and presents an innovative take on category organization in talk,explaininghow to capture knowledge resources such as asymmetrical category contrast pairs in talk. In analyzing in detail the speaker’s taxonomy constructionin a sample conversation, the papersystematicallyexploresthefollowing two topicsrelated to the speaker: what category characteristic he is orientingto as a resource for his present talkandwhat socialmeaning the speaker’s taxonomizing isconsistentlycommunicatingin the flow of talk. The proposed model captures a color binary–used to categorize people–of the ‘colored’versus the ‘white’, entailed in theexpression ‘a so-called yellowcolored people’,and reveals that the category pair is used as an organizational device in the speaker’s argument.The paper claims that taxonomy analysis in sequence is useful to examine the selected words in relation to their semiotic resources.

Recent years have seen a growing body of research concerned with objects in interaction and the numerous interactional methods and functions of creating a shared vision of some non-present scene. This multimodal Conversation Analytic study of second language interaction uncovers a combination of these two foci, showing the ways in which people use objects to create a shared vision of these objects may be used in the future. This frequently used practice of ‘pre-enactment’ is uncovered from a corpus of video recorded lesson planning discussions between English ‘native’ and ‘non-native speaker’ teachers who ‘team-teach’ together in Japanese schools. To these discussions, participants bring various objects that will be used in upcoming collaborative classes, such as clocks, word cards, and other printouts. By shifting from describing to demonstrating how such objects may be used, an authentic and pervasive image of a possible future is created. This has many functions, such as informing the current planning talk and providing a platform for other important actions to take place, such as suggesting alternatives or making requests. By examining this manipulation of objects, this study considers the ways people switch between the present and a possible future in planning talk. As such, this study adds an important layer of understanding to practices utilized in future-oriented interaction, particularly those involving people who do not share a first language.

In modern Danish, the most frequently used pronoun for generic reference is man, developed from the noun man(d) ‘man’. Recently, though, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. A large-scale, longitudinal study of the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish has documented a rise in the use of generic du in Copenhagen (and later in the rest of Denmark) during the period from the early 1970s, where generic du was practically non-existent, till the late 1980s where du comprised around 25% of all pronouns with generic meaning. However, recordings from the 2000s show that the use of du has peaked and is now decreasing or stabilizing at a lower level.This article focuses on intra-individual and intra-conversational variation within the LANCHART corpus with the aim of uncovering the pragmatic effect of using du instead of other generic pronouns. All passages in the recordings have been coded according to macro speech act, activity type, type of interaction and genre as well as enunciation. The results of a statistical analysis using mixed models show a number of correlations as to the use of generic du (in comparison with man), and by and large support the claim that generic du is used as a resource for construing involvement, arguably by exploiting the ambiguity of du between a generic and a specific second person meaning. These quantitative results make up the point of departure for corroborating qualitative analyses of the discourse framing of the use of generic pronouns.

The present contribution examines how interlocutors resolve reference problems concerning the second singular person (2sg) in ongoing conversation. Apart from its ‘normal’ reading as a term of address, generic and also speaker-referring uses have been documented and studied for a variety of languages. However, there are amazingly few documented cases of interlocutors who openly display having problems of disambiguation between forms of address and reference to a larger entity ‘anybody in this particular situation’. A sequential analysis shows that interlocutors tend not to ask for further specification of reference in a possibly ambiguous situation, most likely for face reasons: Instead, they tend to rely on contextualization in later conversational development and on all available conversational resources. Ambiguous reference that leads to misunderstandings only becomes a topic once serious conversational problems arise and the need for disambiguation becomes more important than interlocutors’ face needs.

The phenomenon ofmisunderstandingis a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats tointersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.

The present study analyzes the discursive strategies of manipulation in the political genre of a discourse in Parliament with an aim to convince the audience that the Prime Minister and his party are innocent of receiving illegal cash donations from a slush fund run in the party. For that purpose, we have usedVan Dijk’s (2006)scheme of strategies of manipulation at several levels of discourse (content, lexis, topics, syntax, rhetoric, and order of discourse). Findings of the study show that the Prime Minister’s speech presents characteristics of ideological discourse, since it follows a general strategy of positive in-group and negative out-group presentation, which has an overall legitimating function. At other levels of discourse, the denial of controversial actions is made manipulative by following strategies of emphasis of our positive and their negative actions with the final aim of self-legitimating himself and his discourse. The discourse is further made manipulative by using appropriate contextual constraints and defensible semantics of representation.

This paper draws together discussions around public and private, represented talk, and conviviality by showing how an interviewee uses linguistic features to frame instances of talk as either “represented private talk” or “represented public talk”. My empirical focus is an interview that was recorded as part of fieldwork on leadership practices in the Indonesian bureaucracy. In this interview with a department head it seems that he adds authenticity to accounts of his leadership practices by performing them through represented talk. His use of Javanese in instances of represented talk also helps index intimate social relations between himself and his staff, while in some instances the combination of reference to place and participants also helps to nest ideas of private within represented public talk.

Towards the turn of the 20th century, a new wave of hip hop music emerged in Nigeria whose sense of popularity activated, and was activated by, the employment of complex linguistic strategies. Indirection, ambiguity, circumlocution, language mixing, pun, double meaning, and inclusive pronominals, among others, are not only used by artists in performing the glocal orientations of their music but also become for them valuable resources in the fashioning of multiple identities. In this paper, I interrogate some of these linguistic markers, using four broad paradigms: “Signifying,” “slangifying,” “double meaning,” and “pronominals and ghetto naming.” Under each of these areas, I show how Nigerian hip hop music is creating–through the mediation of language–sub-identities and a new subculture for a generation of urban youth.

The present paper analyses speech level shifts in Japanese from a different perspective. By applying Symbolic InteractionistRole Theory, speech level shifts are categorised as the linguistic realisation of aninteractional role, or ‘dissociative role’ Icall in this paper. Dissociative roles are improvised identities, which occur when the speaker perceives a psychological change in relation to the other participant in the on-going interaction. Plus-level shifts (shifts from plain to polite forms, masu/desu) are triggered when the speaker experiences cautious, attentive, thoughtful and/or grateful feelings at a certaintime of interaction, which conforms to the original nature of honorifics. This prompts a dissociative role which creates a certain psychological distance between this role and the other interactant. On the other hand, minus-level shifts (shifts from masu/desu forms to plain forms) are the implementation of the speaker’s another dissociative role, which is assimilated with the other interactant, giving rise to empathy or drawing the other into the speaker’s world. Whether plus or minus level shifts occur, the interactants’social roles, i.e.,their original roles when the situation is defined, continue to exist throughout the discourse. The interactants are fully aware of their social roles such as teacher and student, friends, family members, and senior and junior in company(= Institutional Roles in this paper). However, when an Improvised Role is created, it is forwarded to the on-going interaction and linguistically implemented as a speech level shift.This paper also clarifies that both speech level shifts and the so-called ‘conventional’honorifics are situationally determined, and that they are not separate entities but the two ends of continuum by examining the features they share from the viewpoint of ‘roles’.

This study explores the phenomenon of multiactivity during recreational video-mediated communication (VMC) through the analysis of competing engagements. From a data corpus of naturally occurring interactions in public Google Hangouts, we focus on instances of competing engagements triggered by the co-presence of unratified participants in broadcasters’ physical environments. As users are immersed in their everyday spaces, interferences from their domestic sphere are common occurrences that break the participatory framework established in the digital sphere. Following a conversation analytic approach, we intend to show that these interferences lead to competing engagements that can be exploited rather than simply dealt with. Drawing on literature on multiactivity, we argue that participants at times organize and coordinate these multiple engagements to add playfulness and advance their interactions. In sum, this study aims to highlight how situated competing streams of action are coordinated and the purpose they may serve in recreational VMC.

In this paper I examine Chinese perceptions of (in)appropriateness and offence from a cross-cultural pragmatic point of view, by exploring (in)appropriate evaluations in the context of a major social offence, and the influence of Confucian ideology on people’s evaluative tendencies. By doing so, I aim to contribute to pragmatic understandings of Confucianism as an ideology that underpins evaluative attitudes in Chinese culture. On the theoretical level, I argue that one needs to carefully examine dimensions of ideologies that underlie evaluative tendencies, and also the ways in which ideologies are invoked, rather than making sweeping claims. I believe that is possible to adopt ‘ideology’ as an analytic notion in interpersonal pragmatics and (im)politeness research, but only if the influence of ideology on interpersonal interaction and evaluative tendencies is captured with the aid of qualitative and quantitative evidence, that is, only as far as one avoids using a certain ideology as an umbrella term to analyse culturally-situated data.

International audience; The aim of this article is to complement and refine Ellen Prince's well-known taxonomy of given/new information (Prince 1981, 1992), which distinguishes between discourse-related and assumed familiarity-related newness/givenness. What we suggest is that a new category should be added to the existing hearer new, hearer old, and inferrable information categories, so as to include cases where the informational status of an entity or a propositional content cannot be determined with certainty. We call this new category 'the (hearer) indeterminables', and we justify its existence through a case study on non-restrictive, relevance oriented constructions (appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers, apposition). We also argue that it is possible for speakers/writers to simulate informational statuses for politeness considerations, and that such simulation should be included in the definition of assumed familiarity.

In a sentence where the disjunction huo ‘or’ appears under the negation mei ‘no’ (e.g.: Ta mei chi qingjiao huo qiezi. ‘He did not eat green peppers or eggplants.’), the sentence is globally ambiguous between the conjunctive interpretation and the disjunctive interpretation. The primary goal of this study is to investigate if there is a default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. Data collected from the self-paced region-by-region reading experiment indicated that the participants consistently preferred the conjunctive interpretation. Additionally, in the conjunction-biased condition where the sentences turned out to favor the disjunctive interpretations at the end, there was reading time penalty at the last region of the sentences and participants spent significantly longer time judging the appropriateness of those sentences. Contrary to Jing’s (2008) assertion that both disjunction and conjunction readings are equally prominent in an out-of-the-blue context, the results from the quantitative data revealed that the conjunction reading is the default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. The findings of the current experiment provide essential implications to the study of child language acquisition. Specifically, we argue that understanding the adults’ linguistic patterns is a prerequisite to the study of children’s language acquisition patterns.

Recurrent word sequences, referred to as “lexical bundles”, may be structurally incomplete, but they serve important communicative functions. Despite the essential roles of lexical bundles in discourse, many methodological issues have been raised in the process of identifying lexical bundles, which is generally frequency-based. The present study identifies three-word and four-word bundles in Chinese conversation and news, and efforts are made to respond to methodological challenges encountered in previous studies. We employ a more sensitive dispersion measure, DP, and an internal association measure, G, which help filter out high-frequency word sequences with no identifiable function and reduce the workload of further manual interventions. An exploratory data analysis is then conducted to compare the distributional patterns of lexical bundles in Chinese conversation and news. In Chinese, both the type number and the density of lexical bundles are higher in conversation than in news. This appears to be a strong cross-linguistic tendency that reflects the real-time pressure speakers face in spontaneous speech. The exploratory data analysis also shows that the elements in Chinese bundles are closely associated with each other. This suggests that lexical bundles are useful phrasal units in Chinese discourse, and thus invites further investigations of how lexical bundles are used in Chinese.

This paper investigates metaphor in Hakka proverbs by examining a corpus of 933 couplets based on a refined analytic framework from Lakoff & Turner (1989). For the source domain, the being of the state of affairs and the rhetorical relations of the two chunks are identified. For the target domain, the projected theme and the connotative tendency are examined. The results show that source domains significantly correlate with the rhetorical relations and target domains, respectively. Four metaphorical mapping mechanisms based on the generic is specific metaphor are proposed for the operation of the global construal. A mirror image mapping is demonstrated: whole-for-part metonymy in the source domain and part-for-whole metonymy in the target domain. Both the evoked knowledge schemas, encompassing real-life Hakka folk experiences, and the projected themes, including family values, individual characters, and evaluations or standards of life, are found to be culturally constrained. A coalescence of linguistic, cultural, and affective forces is claimed to represent the metaphors in Hakka proverbs. The study contributes to a better understanding of metaphors in proverbs by establishing a solid ground from their linguistic and cultural features, and to expanding the conceptual metaphor theory by building the conceptual universality with specific cultural information.

This study analyzed the uses and functions of speech levels and speech level shifts in natural conversations between two unacquainted males. Similarities and differences between Japanese and Korean languages have been investigated. For the Japanese language, speech levels do not clearly reflect the hierarchical relationships based on the interlocutors’ age by utilizing “non-marked utterance (NM)” This finding implies that modern Japanese people tend to avoid the use of honorifics which clearly indicates the hierarchical relationships between speakers at the sentence level. On the other hand, speech level shifts reflect hierarchical relationships between speakers, which means that Japanese seem to conform to normative language use at the discourse level. For the Korean language, both speech levels and speech level shifts clearly reflect the hierarchical relationships based on the interlocutors’ age. This result suggests that Korean have a strong tendency to preserve the normative honorific usage of polite forms according to age difference both at the sentence level and at the discourse level. These results suggest that speech levels, considered to be socio-pragmatically obligatory, have a strategic-use aspect for both languages, including the use of “non-marked utterances” and that of downshifts. It was also discovered that Japanese tend to use speech levels more strategically than Korean. Consequently, Japanese uses honorifics strategically in order to evade hierarchical relationships based on age, whereas Koreans tend to conform to social norms that derive from tenets of Confucianism, a philosophy emphasizing politeness toward older people; such practice encourages younger people to use polite forms to their elders.

Fake attributives in Chinese are the result of the interaction between syntax and prosody. For syntactic reasons, certain objects of complex verbal constructions and verbal quantifiers cannot be realized in situ; but they can be spelled out in some roundabout ways, one of which is to form fake attributives through de-insertion. In the forming process of fake attributives, the clitic de plays an important role, and de-insertion is frequently resorted to in facilitating the correspondence between the phonological structure and the syntactic structure, with the aim of ensuring meaning conveyance. It is concluded that fake attributives are initiated, to some extent, by mismatches between syntactic and phonological structure and derived when de is inserted to enhance their correspondence.

The current article offers a comparative account of the address system of two dialects of Arabic, Najdi and Tunisian Arabic. Capitalizing on the theory of Idealized Cognitive Model, the article defends the view that the two systems display Idealized models, which are central to the system, and non-Idealized models, which are peripheral to it. Najdi Arabic includes Idealized terms such as first names, teknonyms, and kinship terms while non-Idealized models include a battery of terms of address. Tunisian Arabic Idealized models hinge on Si/Lalla + first names, first names, and kinship terms while non-Idealized models make use of endeared first names, kinship terms, and diminished kinship terms. The two systems are shown to differ at the level of types of encounter (including formality, closeness, and deference), availability of address options, social horizontality-verticality, and use of metaphor and metonymy.

In recent work, Arundale proposed a Face Constituting Theory based on the Conjoint Co-Constituting Model of Communication. His main concern is directed towards a shift from the individualistic conception of face and (im)politeness to a non-summative view on communication based on fundamental insights from conversation analysis. Based on two film shootings between German and Brazilian exchange students, which are part of the larger corpus NUCOI, we will take a closer look at moments in which face comes to the fore in the light of (dis)alignment and (dis)affiliation. While in the German example facework is negotiated metacommunicatively, in the Brazilian example facework is calibrated in more subtle ways represented by prosodic and visual cues, which are either given or held back by the co-participants. We will show that these two different patterns may be related to culture-specific construals of face.

English Profile (EP) is an ongoing empirical exploration of learner English initiated by Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English, among others. EP aims to create a set of empirically-based descriptions of language competencies for English. ‘Reference Level Descriptors’ already exist as part of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) but are intuitively derived and not designed for one specific language. The English Grammar Profile (EGP, www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile) is a sub-project of EP which aims to profile learner competence in grammar. This paper details the rationale for the study and the methodology that was developed to investigate the Cambridge Learner Corpus to arrive at over 1,200 grammatical competence statements. Key findings which link to existing corpus-based second language acquisition work are also presented.

The present study provides an overview of the quotative utterances made with itta (past form of iu ‘to say’) and itte ita (the combination of iu and the past form of the -te iru construction) in naturally occurring conversations in Japanese. The examination of approximately 13 hours of conversations shows that itta is used in 91.1% of first-person quotations (‘I said that…’). In second-person (‘you said that…’) and third-person (‘he/she said that…’) quotations, itte ita is used in 90.0%, and 77.3% of the cases, respectively. The present study argues that the high percentage of itte ita for second- and third-person quotative utterances is due to the fact that the -te iru construction, which is included in itte ita, is used as an evidential marker. The present study also analyzes the deviant cases from the dominant pattern (i.e. using itta for third-person utterances), and demonstrates how -te iru’s evidential function is utilized manipulatively in conversation.

This study aims to investigate the rhetorical genre components and the pragmatic evaluation options used to articulate the communicative function of ArBR genre, and find out how these generic and evaluation options contrast with those reported in other languages and cultures. To this end, a corpus of 50 book reviews written by 50 Arab reviewers was collected and analyzed within the rhetorical components developed and applied by Motta-Roth (1998) to English book reviews. The present study drew on Hyland (2000), Gea Valor (2000–2001), Moreno and Suárez (2008a) and Alcaraz-Ariza (2010) in order to examine how the qualities of ArBRs are evaluated and in which terms (i.e., criticism or praise). The results indicated that the Arab reviewers employed additional sub-moves that have not been used by other researchers. Unlike English book reviewers, Arab reviewers try to avoid criticism. Instead, they usually devote most of their book reviews to describe and summarize uncritically although critical appraisal is supposed to be the backbone of this genre. These purposive generic component preferences and evaluation tendencies can be explained with reference to the goal of the academic community and the writing culture that constrain Arab reviewers' academic behavior. I hope that the results of this study will provide graduate students and novice researchers with further awareness of the acceptable generic strategies, the linguistic choices and pragmatic evaluative options that can be used to write an evaluation of a piece of research.

This paper investigates the sluicing-like constructions (SLCs) in Isbukun Bunun, a language which always places its wh-words at the left-peripheral position, and it is argued that genuine sluicing is not available in this language. The evidence in favor of the pseudo-sluicing analysis draws on the behavior of how-phrases, the failure of implicit discourse anaphoric arguments and the absence of sloppy identity reading in Isbukun SLCs. These properties are otherwise hard to accommodate in a movement and deletion approach but rather follow from the view that SLCs in Isbukun Bunun are derived from independent syntactic operations including pro-drop.

Racism as a means for accomplishing homogeneity is at the center of this study which draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and focuses on descriptions of racist behaviors included in immigrant students’ school essays. We investigate how the dominant assimilative and homogenizing discourse operates in Greece and how immigrant students position themselves towards this dominant discourse. Our analysis focuses on the ways the immigrant students of our sample construct legitimizing and hybrid resistance identities. We demonstrate that legitimizing identities are found in the vast majority of the essays of our data due to the racist behaviors experienced by immigrant people. On the other hand, the explicit description of such behaviors appears only in few essays. We argue that in these few essays, via referring to racist behaviors of majority people against them, immigrant students manage to build hybrid resistance identities.

The function of students’ email requests to faculty is both transactional and interactional. Students’ emails are not only sent with the aim of receiving some form of service but they also need to adhere to the interactional function of language in order to establish and maintain social relationships. Therefore, how to address their lecturers and how much directness is appropriate in the requests performed through this medium, are some of the most difficult choices that students have to make. This study investigates how L2 university students’ academic requests are formulated through the medium of email, and examines the correlation between the forms of address, the degree of (in)directness and the degree of imposition of their email as a way to express e-politeness.

This study demonstrates that two types of language ideologies (linguistic nationalism and feminine language normativity) influence how Japanese contemporary novels represent non-Japanese characters’ speech. It investigates the role of gender and observes that novelists only infrequently assign highly gendered utterance-final forms to non-Japanese characters when they speak in Japanese. This tendency is more salient among the representations of male non-Japanese characters. Masculine expressions seem to belong to a set of linguistic resources that are considered available only to the Japanese. This exclusivism, i.e., linguistic nationalism, might explain the lack of highly masculine forms among non-Japanese characters in novels. As for the relatively frequent assignment of gendered language for female characters, the normativity of feminine language makes it part of the basic language of all female speakers including non-Japanese individuals. In addition, feminine expressions are not as strongly associated with authenticity as masculine expressions.

As Chinese legal system follows a statutory tradition, the writing of Chinese judicial opinions is normally considered as an invariant sequential process of stating the law, presenting the fact, and finally providing the conclusion. The official ideology is further reinforced by the fact that Chinese judges need to follow various authoritative writing guidelines and templates prescribed by the official bodies of legal profession. This paper examines to what extent this ideology is a trustworthy description, and to what extent it is only an imagined myth related to the rhetorical practices of Chinese legal profession. Theoretical constructs employed in the study are genre, text type, and rhetorical modes, and analytical data include exemplar judicial opinions, intertextual legislative documents, and insiders’ accounts. According to the research findings, while the official ideology remains a strong shaping force in the composing of Chinese judicial opinions, Chinese judges do take compelling moves to add dialogic elements to the traditionally monologue-dominated discursive sphere of legal writing.

This paper sheds light on the concept of complimenting, based on its practice in the Moore language spoken in Burkina Faso, West Africa. It revisits Holmes’ (1986) definition of “compliments” and proposes a model which gives new insight into the concept of complimenting behaviour across languages and cultures. The proposed model may have implications for our understanding of politeness strategies as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), particularly with the urge to integrate third person in the model, as a close examination of data from Moore would suggest. The data analyzed were collected in naturally occurring discourse.

This article reports an eight-month investigation into the long-term impact of explicit instruction on the learnability of different aspects of email requests by a group of Vietnamese university students. Two intact classes were randomly assigned to the treatment (N = 13) and control conditions (N = 19). Over a four-week period, the treatment group received six hours of instruction which comprised consciousness-raising, meta-pragmatic explanation, repeated output practice and teacher feedback. The control group, on the other hand, only followed the usual syllabus. Results of the study indicate that the treatment group obtained significantly greater pre-to-posttest gains than the control group, and that their improvement was retained by the time of the eight-month delayed post-test. Despite the learners’ overall progress, however, it was also found that different aspects of their performance appeared to respond differently to instruction. The article supports the need for instruction of email politeness and discusses implications for future pedagogy and research.

This paper analyses the linguistic resources used by speakers to profile the participants in taboo actions, focusing on expressions for the concept abortar 'to abort' in Spanish sociolinguistic interviews. The tokens referring to the action are analysed in terms of linguistic features that affect agentivity at the level of verbs, subjects and objects. The combination of different linguistic features is classified in three levels of agentivity (prototypical agents, non-prototypical agents and non-agents) with various sublevels. The presence of modals further contributes to reducing agentivity, causing the maximally agentive profiling to be rather infrequent. Second, though the direct construal abortar is generally preferred, the levels of agentivity interplay with onomasiological variation. Third, social variables are not significantly correlated with the levels of agentivity. The paper concludes that mitigating agentivity is a euphemistic strategy against the taboo of a fully agentive woman who aborts, based on the cultural conceptualization of unwanted abortion.

The article is devoted to the actual problem in design projection of children’s choreographic costumes based on a bionic creative source. The analysis aimed to identify the scope of use of vegetables as a creative source for the production of fashion collections. It has been found that designers use vegetables for making clothes, for sketching the models of clothes, as well as a source of inspiration for form, decoration and colour choices. A figurative and stylistic analysis of bionic creative sources and the transformation of plant images into stage costumes for a children’s dance show was carried out in order to come up with models of stage costumes. During the process of costume design, the following principles were adopted: imitation of the bioform in separate elements of the costume, analogousness of silhouette solutions to natural bioforms, bionic design projection with the identification of functionality, and figurative and associative expressiveness of the costume. As a final step, the scenario of performance, as well as the requirements of the children and the creative source were considered when designing a collection of children’s stage costumes.

The purpose of this study was to create a detailed characterization of the nature of the sensory perceptions associated with after-death communication. A primary aim was to determine if perceptions of after-death communication (ADC) support one or more of three hypotheses: (1) they are the result of hallucinations or day-to-day thoughts about the deceased; (2) they are subjective phenomena reflecting the extrasensory perception of remote events; or (3) they constitute objective phenomena, perceived more solidly, as if within the physical world. Methods: The study included a quantitative analysis and qualitative first-person narrative description of part of the data set from a detailed questionnaire study (991 viable cases) investigating the phenomenology of spontaneous ADCs. Results and Conclusions: A majority of respondents reported that ADCs were distinctly different from simple thoughts about the deceased. Specifically, relative distribution of ADCs across the senses was 46% visual, 44% auditory, 48% touch, and 28% olfactory, with 34% sensing the presence of the deceased without input from the five senses. ADCs often were perceived as external and having properties of the material world (e.g., solidity, tactile qualities). Even the more nebulous 'sense of presence' cases were perceived as having a distinct location in space and as being identifiable as a specific deceased presence despite the lack of sensory cues. These elements are more compatible with hypotheses 2 and 3 than hypothesis 1.

The article aims at showing how far the technologies of audiovisual registration affect not only the ontology of images but also our sense of realism in politics and history. As argue Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, historical events have become “tele-events” after the birth of these technologies. Our handling with images has changed accordingly. As argues Pietro Montani, we no longer consider them as “copies” of real objects but rather as “occasions” for initiating processes of “validation” of history. Hannah Arendt’s opposition between the ancient concept of history being based on praxis and the modern concept of history as “fabrication” (poiesis) of the humankind must be therefore reconsidered. History is rather the negotiation between these two attitudes (praxis and poiesis): cinema might be one of the exemplary sources of this negotiation, as epitomized by the documentary work in the audiovisual archives conducted by Esfir Shub (1927) and Harun Farocki (1992). Representation (Louis Martin) becomes thus a dynamical power of imagination dealing with historical and political reality; consequently, the “ideal spectator”, just as the “ideal reader” for novels (Umberto Eco), is charged with a new task of actualizing the sense of images with regard to their historical and political references.