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This study investigates the communicative practices in English and German online discussion fora as exemplified by two thematically related sample threads. Combining first- and second-order approaches to (im-)politeness, the paper focuses on the question of how participants use intergroup rudeness as a means of in- and outgroup construction and examines how intergroup rudeness is metapragmatically negotiated as the discussions unfold. The results show that intergroup rudeness as well as metapragmatic comments are handled very differently in the two communities explored. Suggesting cultural preferences, there is a much higher degree of interactivity and a clear preference for negotiation at an interpersonal level in the German discussion group; its English counterpart favours negotiation at an intergroup level. Both threads provide metapragmatic evidence that the frequent use of rudeness tokens does not automatically make rudeness an accepted norm.

This paper attempts to show that a cognitive perspective of the Gricean concept on the conversational maxims opens new perspectives on two problems which have not been dealt with in detail in the original model and in most successive work on conversational implicature: speaker activity and a cognitive underpinning of the maxims of conversation. As pinpointed in section, the first problem is the need for a shift in focus towards the actual production of linguistic utterances fulfilling or flouting the maxims in particularized conversational implicature. The second problem is explaining how the adherence or non-adherence to the maxims can be conceptually accounted for on the basis of some general cognitive principles. While section is devoted to a cognitive re-evaluation of the speaker's perspective, section will discuss some recent pragmatic developments, such as Levinson's notion of pragmatic marking in generalized implicature, which can be applied to particularized conversational implicature and fruitfully underpinned by more general cognitive principles. Section will present an outline of some basic cognitive principles involved when speakers fulfill or flout the maxims. In the course of the paper it becomes clear that both current pragmatic research and cognitive analysis contribute to a new understanding of Grice's ideas.

This study focuses on political discourse among laypersons in public Internet-based political discussion groups and analyzes emotive communication as a product, which is viewed as a continuum including both emotional attachment and emotional detachment. It analyzes 11,000 words of discussion in 180 contributions produced by a total of 65 participants of three political message boards with regard to a selected range of linguistic token features signaling emotional commitment. The results obtained are compared to their frequency in private conversation and newspaper registers to determine where the message boards range within the scale of related registers. The findings are discussed against the background of the framing conditions of political message board communication.