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This study aims to uncover whether or not factors such as national and professional identities and the medium of interaction (i.e., e-mails), affect the way Turkish and British conference organisers begin their Call for Papers for international conferences (CFPIC), and when and how they use inclusive ‘we’ pronouns in messages written in English. The survey also examines if there is a relationship between these three factors and the interpretation of (im)politeness by comparing whether or not writers with different cultural backgrounds, while trying to reach their aim (i.e., collect conference papers), (dis)obey some of the politeness rules proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) . The corpus for this study consisted of e-mailed CFPIC collected between January 2002 and February 2006. CFPIC were related to areas such as linguistics, foreign/second language education and literature. The findings of the research suggest intricate and dynamic relations between a number of the micro- and macro-contextual factors, and some features of e-mails in English written by members of Turkish and British cultures. It is hoped that the results of this study will contribute to enhancing knowledge in the field of politeness and electronic communication, raising awareness of the relationship between cultural and professional identities and the interpretation of (im)politeness, thus providing valuable insights into intercultural communication conventions.

Although it is a very small part of the research paper, the title plays an important role as the first point of contact between writer and potential reader and may decide whether or not the paper is read. Research paper titles in the widely differing fields of science, literature and linguistics are studied in detail with a view to showing what researchers from each discipline implicitly feel are important features in the succinct knowledge transmission required in title design. Three basic types of titles in the three disciplines are analyzed: full sentence, compound and a remaining group made up largely of noun phrases with or without postmodification. Very clear-cut differences in frequency and form were found across the three disciplines reflecting fundamental differences in pragmatic intention inherent in the disciplines concerned. Analysis focusses on the role of titles in informing the reader as to what the paper is about and also in attracting him/her to read the paper. Discussion of how these functions are met rests on techniques involved in both information packaging and advertising.

In a collection of fifty related articles in molecular genetics, most had one introductory self-referential sentence that had (1) a first person pronoun, (2) a present tense verb, (3) most often report, (4) with a nominal complement, and (5) an adverbial referring deictically to the present or the paper itself. A typical sentence of this type is: ‘In this paper we report the finding of a novel mechanism of RNA processing’. These sentences mark each article's main knowledge claim, the assertion that the authors do not attribute to anyone else and for which they hope to be cited. Though they are not performative utterances (the sentence just quoted does not itself report the novel mechanism) they share some features of explicitly marked assertive speech acts, and raise some of the same issues concerning the form and status of assertions of fact. Different choices of verb and tense make for different assertions and different kinds of knowledge. In the texts studied, these self-referential introductory statements can be recognized in contrast to the other declarative sentences before or after them by the shifts in subjects, verbs, tenses, or the use of deictic expressions. A comparison to claims in another discourse, that of linguistics, suggests how pragmatic analysis of texts may contribute to an understanding of social acts in the production of scientific knowledge.

This paper proposes a theory of interpreting argument types as an integral part of a systematic and comprehensive ‘hermeneutics of persuasive discourse’. It first explains how such a hermeneutics can be developed based on pragmatic insights about the use of language for persuasive purposes expressed in the philosophy of argument. Then, after having provided an overview of the main hermeneutical stages involved in interpreting persuasive discourse, the paper focuses on the stage of argument type identification. It formulates a ‘hermeneutics of argument type’ in terms of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA), an argument categorization framework systematizing existing accounts of arguments in the broad sense of the term (topoi, loci, argument schemes, fallacies, means of persuasion). For each of the three parameters within this framework, ‘argument form’, ‘argument substance’, and ‘argument lever’, the paper describes how to determine their value by analyzing several examples of natural arguments.

This paper develops an account of additive concessive conditionals, ACCs, such as the German Wir gehen wandern, auch wenn es regnet ‘We will go walking even (lit. also) if it is raining’. Concessivity is here understood as an essentially modal notion: the actual world does not conform to contextual assumptions, expectations or priorities (Muller 2016). I adopt a modal analysis of conditionals which interprets them relative to an ordering source (Kratzer 1986). With ACCs, the concessive interpretation arises from the contradiction between the asserted conditional “if p then q” and the conditional perfection (CP) “if p then not q” of the conditional presupposed by the additive “if not p then q” (Pasch 1995). This contradiction triggers the inference that the actual world does not conform to the ordering constraints that restrict the CP of the additive presupposition. This account predicts that additive conditionals should not receive a concessive interpretation in contexts that do not support conditional perfection. This prediction is borne out. The ACC data for this paper will be drawn from German and Cuzco Quechua.

This paper proposes that a relevance-focused production heuristic plays a role in the production of communicative acts. The relevance-theoretic account of communication and other pragmatic theories focus on both communicators and their addressees, but there has been more focus on the pragmatic processes of comprehension than on communication, with few specific suggestions about the role of pragmatic processes in production. This paper outlines a research programme which aims to build on work by other researchers by making a proposal about this. The central claim is that production is constrained by at least one dedicated heuristic, which shares some properties with the relevance-guided comprehension heuristic proposed in earlier work. The main aim of the paper is to consider some questions about the nature of this heuristic and to propose an initial characterisation. The production of communicative acts is extremely complex. Our claim is that a production heuristic is one of many factors involved in this and that this proposal can help contribute to accounts of communicative behaviour.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This paper is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the use of the word respect by the main advocates in the High Court and Supreme Court hearings of R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the ‘Brexit case’). Courtroom discourse has received substantial research attention in pragmatics, and previous work has largely focused on notions of face and im/politeness exhibited in power-asymmetric encounters between lawyers and witnesses in hostile cross-examination. In contrast, this paper focuses on lawyer-lawyer and lawyer-judge interaction in appellate hearings and explores the ways in which advocates negotiate the task of making face-threats that are inherent to the discourse situation, while maintaining the levels of professional courtesy demanded by the institution. The word respect has a particular role in managing this balance, and has attached to it well-established implicit, indexical and professional meanings within the judiciary. The corpus analysis here shows that, although the advocates in question use respect in seemingly formulaic and ritualised ways, it is used to achieve multiple facework and interactional goals. Throughout the analysis we see advocates use respect when (dis)agreeing with judges, challenging opposing counsel and making recommendations to the court.

This paper examines explicit positive assessments (EPAs) in personal training, that is, the personal trainer’s positive evaluations of the client’s physical performance, including comments such as bra (‘good’). The data consist of video-recorded training-sessions in Swedish from Finland and Sweden. The methodological framework is interactional linguistics, and the study explores the actions that EPAs perform as well as their linguistic design and embodied and sequential environment. The main actions performed by EPAs in personal training include transitioning between activities, encouraging the client, and making positive evaluations. The personal trainer (PT) may vary the lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and embodied features of the EPA to emphasize any of these actions or a combination of them. Overall, EPAs are a central resource for fulfilling the institutional goals of personal training by guiding the clients through the training-program and motivating them. In addition to their use as feedback on actions in the present moment, EPAs also include forward-focusing aspects aimed at guiding clients’ future behavior. This paper examines explicit positive assessments (EPAs) in personal training, that is, the personal trainer's positive evaluations of the client's physical performance, including comments such as bra ('good'). The data consist of video-recorded training-sessions in Swedish from Finland and Sweden. The methodological framework is interactional linguistics, and the study explores the actions that EPAs perform as well as their linguistic design and embodied and sequential environment. The main actions performed by EPAs in personal training include transitioning between activities, encouraging the client, and making positive evaluations. The personal trainer (PT) may vary the lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and embodied features of the EPA to emphasize any of these actions or a combination of them. Overall, EPAs are a central resource for fulfilling the institutional goals of personal training by guiding the clients through the training-program and motivating them. In addition to their use as feedback on actions in the present moment, EPAs also include forward-focusing aspects aimed at guiding clients' future behavior. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Drawing on video recordings of people playing video games with their entire bodies, this study examines the interactional relationship between simultaneously occurring player movements and spectator utterances. More specifically, this paper investigates quasi-instructions by which I refer to spectator utterances designed with typical instruction formats and produced as players perform their game relevant movements with their bodies. The analysis demonstrates that quasi-instructions orient to the imminent player movements and their projectable trajectories within the interactional ecology, as well as exhibiting sensitivity to the game events. This paper argues that by producing quasi-instructions, spectators exhibit co-presence and togetherness with players in the video gaming activities, rendering them joint endeavors. Participants in the data speak Turkish.

Reader engagement has often been explored from a metadiscourse perspective, but little research has been conducted on the variation in engagement across participants, especially readers. Based on data from a collection of 120 Chinese letters of advice from governments and hospitals produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, a cross-interactant analysis of metadiscourse is conducted in this paper, and the interactants’ impacts on reader engagement are discussed. The findings reveal that (1) both governments and hospitals utilize engagement markers, boosters, attitude markers, and frame markers more than other types of metadiscourse items; (2) differences exist in the use of metadiscourse among the issuing agencies; (3) as reader identity varies from ingroup to outgroup membership, the probability of booster use by a hospital is higher than that by a government; and (4) the likelihood of using frame, transition and attitude markers is higher for governments than for hospitals. The paper concludes by discussing different communicative styles adopted by two agencies in a crisis context.

This special issue on crying and responses to crying is composed of six papers that investigate the ways children's crying is produced and responded to in everyday interaction in a range of languages, settings, and cultures. Crying episodes are approached from a multimodal interactional perspective, by paying attention to the participation frameworks and precipitating events in which it emerges (e.g., peer conflicts, accidents), its verbal and embodied production, and the ways caregivers and other adults and children respond in displaying stances, performing social actions, and (re-)engaging the crying children into activities. In addition to interactional micro-analysis of crying and responses to crying, the papers discuss the implications of crying episodes for children's pragmatic socialization, including stance, social action, identity, and morality.

Meeting someone for the first time is one of the most basic interpersonal communication events. Yet there have only been a limited number of studies that have examined variation in first encounters between previously unacquainted persons across different languages and cultures. This special issue on the pragmatics of initial interactions contains four papers that draw together cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives on first encounters between previously unacquainted individuals in a range of different linguistic and cultural settings, including Austrian German, Australian English, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), French, Italian, and Japanese. The papers focus on the pragmatic dimensions of the initial stages of getting acquainted, including the role of address terms, self-disclosures, backchannels, and humour in first conversations.

This paper examines the strategies that speakers employ in response to children's crying in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye, in northern Australia. Drawing on spontaneous interactions amongst Murrinhpatha speaking families, we analyse instances of crying by children aged 0;6 to 8;11 years, and the ways in which they are responded to. Results indicate that adult Murrinhpatha speakers manage children's distress through a variety of verbal and non-verbal strategies, and multimodal combinations thereof. The selection of strategies directly relates to the developmental stage of the crier. Adult caregivers respond differently to the crying of infants, of children who can walk unaided but are producing little if any language, of children who can talk intelligibly, and children more advanced again who have a degree of social independence. In the particular strategies that caregivers apply, they guide children towards a developmentally appropriate self-sufficiency. Caregivers encourage autonomy in ways that reflect a child's current abilities, be it physical, linguistic, emotional, or social. By exploring responses to crying in an under-researched cultural and linguistic context, this paper offers a unique perspective on the pragmatics of managing distress and what this reveals about local constructions of personhood within the context of carer-child interaction.

The paper is a case study on socialising a Nigerian celebrity new to Twitter and the co-construction of relational connection among the interactants on Twitter Nigeria. The data comprise tweets retrieved from the Twitter timeline of the celebrity and subjected to interactional pragmatics analysis. The analysis reveals that the Twitter users deployed the interactional practices of joint fantasising, intertextual allusions and ethnolinguistic repertoire to orient to the newcomer-celebrity's identity, mark their own regular users' identity and co-construct the need for caution by the celebrity. The paper argues that socialising celebrities new to Twitter might include emphasising that their statuses as celebrities might expose them to more savage replies and targeted bullying in the form of ‘dragging’, perhaps more frequently and at a much larger scale than an ‘ordinary’ Twitter user; and that they need to be cautious in their deployment of micro-celebrity strategies targeted at amassing followers/fans on Twitter and in their overall interactional and relational behaviours on Twitter as celebrities. Concerning relational connection, as the architecture of Twitter is not built around people who have prior connections, it is argued that relational connection may need to be co-constructed from scratch by interacting Twitter users who may be total strangers.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) represents a criminal justice setting exceptionally welcoming to discourse scholars. The court website provides ample information about ongoing cases, hearings are livestreamed, and transcripts, video footage, and other relevant documents are available online. Against this background of comprehensive transparency, this paper explores the additional value of physically attending ICC trial hearings. An auto-ethnography of how the ICC court landscape structures the visitor's path to the courtroom gallery, it is claimed, brings out the staged nature of the Court's projection of transparency. The ensuing discussion explicates the implications of these staging practices for the hearing transcripts published on the ICC website. It is argued that these transcripts contribute to this projection of transparency by obfuscating the processes through which the Court constitutes its audiences, both the ‘physical’ gallery audience as well as its ‘virtual’ counterpart browsing through the materials on the ICC website. In this sense, the paper enhances our understanding of ICC hearing transcripts as ethnographic objects, because it shows that their sociocultural entanglements also extend to the ways in which they are disseminated and the role they play in staging the ICC as a transparent institution.

The paper examines teacher pragmatic acts (verbal and embodied) in response to children's crying in a Russian preschool. It focuses on crying episodes associated with children's inability or unwillingness to follow the norms and expectations surrounding children's conduct (e.g., crying when not allowed to do something). The paper employs discourse analysis; the data are 40 h of video- and audio-recorded interactions. The analysis shows that teachers used directives and other pragmatic acts (e.g., assessments, explanations) that encouraged children to stop crying. The directives were produced in multi-party participation frameworks where peers were referred to or recruited as active participants. Teachers used positive and negative assessments of crying. Crying was presented in a negative light in contrast with positive non-crying behaviors; positive assessments (praise and affectionate touch) were offered when crying stopped. The consequences of crying were presented as negatively affecting others. It is argued that such discursive treatment of crying contributes to socializing children to conformity. The paper contributes to our understanding of how through the use of pragmatic acts, child crying is discursively treated in ways that invoke norms of pragmatic conduct (e.g., not crying when asked to participate in a planned activity) and social values regarding group membership.

This paper investigated dominance depolyed by Chinese doctors during online medical consultation. Based on data retrieved from https://chunyuyisheng.com , the paper aims to explore when, how, and why doctors implement dominance during online medical consultations in China. The results of the paper revealed that Chinese doctors dominated the patients when they came across with resistance or inadequate cooperation from the patients. Moreover, two types of dominance-constructing strategies (upgraded request and mitigated elicitation) were identified and analyzed. Last but not least, the paper discussed the connection between doctor dominance and patient-centeredness while underpinning OMC as a goal-centered activity with a common goal between e-patients and doctors. The findings above provided evidence to challenge the prior studies regarding the dichotomy that doctor-patient interaction is either doctor-centered or patient-centered.

One of the functions of prosody in discourse is to convey pragmatic values that add up to the core semantic meaning of spoken units or segments. Regarding mitigation, Caffi (1999: 890) specifically discusses “the very important prosodic and kinesic means of mitigation, such as changes in pitch prominence, rhythm, speech rate, as well as eye-contact, gaze, gaze aversion, smile, particular postures, etc.” In this paper, I focus on some prosodic factors such as pitch, intensity, duration and speech rate that can be used in European Spanish, in combination with pragmatic meanings. The first aim is to establish a theoretical deliberation on prosody as a clear marker to convey pragmatic meaning. The second is to clarify a very complex casuistic, with mitigation being considered as an initial clue to that realizing aim. As I problematize in this paper, the lowering of prosodic expression is not the only phonic mechanism that expresses mitigated meanings; there are additional possible situations, such as mitigated segments expressed by means of phonic emphasis instead. Moreover, discourse segments can be mitigated using only phonic means (i.e. without the concurrence of verbal elements). In conclusion, this paper attempts to outline this complex panorama in which prosody, associated with non-linguistic factors such as face, can be used as a trigger to express (and later, identify) meanings that depend heavily on contextual interpretation.

Employing a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, this paper investigates apologies in a parliamentary context, using as data Hansards of the Parliament of Ghana (2005–2018). It identifies various apologetic expressions in the data, examines the display of (in)sincerity and apology acceptance as well as socio-pragmatic factors influencing the acceptance of the apologies. The apology terms identified include apology, (be) sorry, regret, forgive, pardon, excuse, did not mean to, (it is/was not my/I have no) intention to and the newly identified term withdraw. The paper shows that parliamentarians display sincerity by combining the following elements of sincerity in different ways: acknowledgement of the offence, show of remorse or regret, acceptance of responsibility for the offence, offer of repair, and expression of forbearance, without any ifs, buts or any manner of undoings, obfuscations, among others. It is found that sincerity can be compromised by giving a caution/warning/justification, giving a condition, throwing a challenge, showing superficiality and giving an explanation. The study also reveals that several contextual variables account for the acceptance, or otherwise, of an apology. It concludes that in the parliamentary context, sincerity is not a necessary condition for the acceptance of apologies.

Both impoliteness and hate speech deal with offensive behaviour, yet it is also obvious that they are not exactly the same. This paper aims to tease out the similarities and differences. The first part concentrates on theorising by impoliteness and hate speech scholars, and thus takes a second-order perspective. It discusses the notions of face (largely overlooked in studies of hate speech), incitement (largely overlooked in studies of impoliteness) and intentionality (and related concepts) (examined in both studies of impoliteness and hate speech, though often without explicit connections to the other field). The second part of the paper, taking more of a first-order perspective, concentrates on the metapragmatics of the labels impoliteness and hate speech, which are approached through the terms impolite and hateful. Hateful, in comparison with impolite is characterised by more extreme behaviours, the emotion of hurt, and associations of prejudice. This part of the paper also provides a demonstration of what one can do with corpus-methods. Overall, it is hoped that this paper will promote theoretical synergies, and also greater awareness of the labels that are used.

The paper explores the performance of face-threatening speech acts by Chinese and Japanese in BELF emails, focusing on the genre structure and the linguistic realizations of mitigation. Based on a corpus of 469 emails, the study identifies a five-move structure, i.e., openings + reasoning supportive moves (RSMs) + head acts + mitigating supportive moves (MSMs) + closings, for performing FTAs in business emails and finds that the major difference between Chinese and Japanese move structures lies in that Chinese tend to use more MSMs than Japanese. Both Chinese and Japanese exhibit a preference for the “RSMs + head acts” sequential pattern. In terms of the mitigating devices in MSMs, Chinese demonstrate a preference for the expression of gratitude as a mitigating strategy while Japanese prefer to use tag questions and apologies. The findings of the research can be explained from the perspectives of mode of thinking, language education and cultural identities. The study aims to shed some light on BELF communication by raising our awareness of certain taken-for-granted patterns in email interactions between two seemingly similar cultures to avoid possible communicative breakdown. In addition, the paper offers some pedagogical implications for business English teaching.

Proverbs have cognitive and socio-cultural value. As tools for socialisation, proverbs are channels of shared moral and cultural values in communities of practice. The paper investigates the functions of, and the cultural values embodied in selected proverbial sayings in Tafi, a Ghana-Togo Mountain language, and their counterparts in Ewe, a Gbe language. The analysis is based on a small corpus of proverbs gathered during immersion fieldwork among the Tafi, and relies on ethnographic and linguistic methods. The Ewe versions are extracted from proverb collections and from the equivalents provided by Tafi bilinguals. From a semantic and a pragmatic perspective, proverbs have both textual and indexical, context-dependent, meanings. I explore the textual semantics of some of the Tafi and Ewe proverbial sayings drawing on the semantic template for proverbs used in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It is suggested that the semantic structure of proverbs comprises framing components of traditionality and of their status as folk wisdom, as well as components describing the message, namely, the recurrent situation that calls forth the proverb, the advice and the analogy in the proverb. The paper reveals that patterns of proverb performance are similar across the languages suggesting shared practices due to language and cultural contact in proverbial language use.

This special issue on the pragmatics of translation contains eight papers on translation outcomes and processes and highlights a pragmatic angle of understanding the transfer of language phenomena across cultures and intra-culturally. Translation is approached from a broad perspective, including written textual translation as well as other modalities such as signing, oral simultaneous translation or audiovisual translation. The combination of classic pragmatic topics such as the study of im/politeness and identity construction with translation studies shows the challenges that interpreters and translators face in the attempt of rendering the nuances of a source text in a target text. The papers focus on the interaction between cross-cultural pragmatics and the study of the translation as product in its own right.

The potential for pragmatic insights to be enriched, and even generated, from investigation of people with communication disabilities has been vastly underutilised in theoretical pragmatics. An adequate pragmatic theory must account for the full range of human communication, including that of people with communication disabilities. A similar argument has been made regarding pragmatic explanations of the natural non-verbal behaviours accompanying speech, which has lagged behind exploration of non-natural linguistic meaning. These two domains – pragmatic research into the meaning of non-verbal behaviours and clinical research into the communicative strategies of people with aphasia (the communication disability that commonly follows a stroke) – have the potential to inform each other. This paper builds on the idea that a relevance-theoretic ostensive stimulus is typically a complex of linguistic elements, which usually convey propositional information, and non-verbal behaviours, which carry emotional or attitudinal information that supplement the verbal content. Many people with aphasia, however, rely much more heavily on the use of non-verbal behaviours. What do these convey? How can what is conveyed best be described and explained? This paper will use the ‘bi-dimensional continuum’ in which meaning and showing are plotted against determinate and indeterminate intended import (Sperber and Wilson 2015, p. 147) to demonstrate the complexity of non-verbal communication in dyads where one partner has aphasia.

In this paper, I analyse the usage of a discourse marker =mari, belonging to the epistemic paradigm attested in Upper Napo Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador). I show that the use of =mari indicates that the information is known well to the speaker, but also to some extent familiar to the addressee. In situated language use, the marker contributes to creating a knowing epistemic stance of the speaker. The analysis presented here is based on a 13-h documentary corpus of interactive Upper Napo Kichwa discourse, recorded on audio and video. For the purpose of the paper, the relevant utterances are analysed in their broad interactional context, including not only the surrounding text, but also relationships between the interlocutors, their shared life experience and possible shared knowledge derived from other sources. First, I analyse the semantic and pragmatic contribution of =mari to the conversational turn it occurs in, drawing on conversations extracted from the corpus. Following on from that, I show how tokens of =mari are situated in interactional sequences, and examine how the semantics/pragmatics of the clitic contributes to the discursive actions achieved by the turns which contain it.

Shaping fictional characters is an important part of story-telling and the forces which shape identity are worth examining as they add to pragmatic theorizing on identity construction. The paper suggests that translation practice offers multiple contexts where the various workings of identity formation through discourse may be explored. The study uses Bucholtz and Halls's (2005) identity formation principles in two Greek versions (1947, 2017) of the same playtext to heighten awareness of alternative identity representation patterns, which employ various identity formation principles. Results show a significant shift in the translators' shaping the identity of the father figure, through target discursive options assuming a shifting gender position in the target societal environment and a different perception of societal values. Questionnaire respondents favoured certain target options probably for the intensity they created. The paper concludes that an integral part of a character's identity is conveyed through the non-/offensive value of items which regulate the translators' renegotiation of the character's identity. The paper advances understanding of pragmatic aspects in fictional identity formation and im/politeness through translation. It shifts attention to cross-cultural pragmatics, highlights the relational dynamic in the characters' communication, and the translator evaluation intention manifesting how intra-cultural variation affects the translator's task.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of phygital highlighting. Phygital actions, by their very nature, are intertwined, simultaneously produced both physically and digitally, and may be used for practices of highlighting. The aim of this paper is therefore to revisit Goodwin's (1994) concept of highlighting and expand it to include phygital actions. We show how phygital highlighting is a participant method for achieving joint attention while engaged in face-to-face, computer-supported cooperative activity. Phygital highlighting is shown to be an observable and socially recognisable practice, composed of multimodal resources, specifically related to pointing practices and indexical terms in combination with moving the mouse and cursor, all of which are used to achieve a shared reference to specific parts of the displayed content. The paper is based on video ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis of a single case from an open office environment, which is considered a perspicuous setting for research into phygital highlighting.

Negative social and environmental consequences caused by corporate activities (e.g., workplace incidents, oil spills, and product-related accidents) can significantly affect the success and survival of a business. When there is bad news to report, how will companies handle the information disclosure? This paper examines discursive strategies UK and Chinese Fortune 500 companies used for communicating negative aspects in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Based on 50 UK and 50 Chinese CSR reports, the study shows how companies legitimize the bad news via the strategies of Denial, Deflection, Mitigation and Admission. Two major differences were observed in the legitimation efforts made by Chinese and UK companies: i) almost all legitimation strategies were more frequently found in UK reports, and ii) UK reports mobilized a wider range of linguistic and rhetorical resources for realizing the strategies. The paper discusses the results by considering cultural, social, and organizational factors that may shape CSR discourse in the two countries. Findings add to the understanding of crisis communication and image repair strategies used by large corporations and the genre of CSR reporting in different cultures.

This paper explores the potential effect of emotion on the use of stance expressions by columnists in their comment on acts of terrorism in the UK and in other European countries. The paper brings together work on epistemicity and effectivity (Marin-Arrese 2011, 2015), and stance strategies in discourse (Englebretson 2007; DuBois 2007). The paper focuses on epistemic stance, aimed at striving for control of conceptions of reality, and on effective stance, aimed at striving for control of relations at the level of reality (Langacker 2009, 2010). The strategic interplay of epistemic and effective expressions serves the persuasive purpose of legitimisation of knowledge about events and of action plans. The paper addresses the following research issue: the potential effect of emotion on variation in the deployment of epistemic and effective stance markers in three types of texts along a cline from high to neutral cultural/emotional proximity. It is hypothesized that columnists’ expression of epistemicity and effectivity in their comment on terrorism will vary in relation to cultural/emotional proximity or distance towards the event. The paper presents results of a case study with data from an ad hoc corpus of opinion columns published in The Guardian and The Observer.

Indeed is a polyfunctional item which functions both as an epistemic adverbial and a connective discourse marker (cf. Traugott and Dasher, 2002 ; Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer, 2007 ). This paper focuses on the treatment of its connective functions in Polish translations. By examining the transcripts of EU parliamentary proceedings in an English-Polish parallel corpus, this paper attempts to demonstrate that the polyfunctionality of indeed and a higher degree of grammaticalization it shows in comparison with its Polish equivalents provide a challenge to translators, and affect their interpretation of its connective functions. The problems result in the employment of various underspecification techniques (cf., Crible et al., 2019 ) in translation. The analyzed translations reveal frequent omissions of indeed, cases of functional mismatch, generalization and particularization of its meanings, as well as the use of double equivalents. They also indicate the tendency for the connective functions of indeed to be overgeneralized onto its Polish epistemic equivalents which are not sufficiently grammaticalized to perform them.

This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch between a speaker’s communicative intention and the undesirable humorous effect of his/her utterances. Based on a case study of a sports media interview, it focuses on how the interviewee may violate the communicative norms governing the expected responses, and how such a violation, motivated by the desire to avoid personal accountability, generates unintended humour in the media reception framework. Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.

In the context of our research work focused on mapping the latest multimodal and hypermodal strategies of constructing and communicating expert knowledge (e.g. Maier, 2014; Maier and Engberg, 2019; Engberg and Maier, 2015a, 2015b; Engberg and Maier, 2019), in this paper we address hypermodal strategies used for conveying domain-specific knowledge and offering practical guidance to various audiences. The empirical evidence is represented by a cluster of digital texts from the Harvard Business Review webpages ( https://hbr.org/ ). This digital context aimed at communicating domain-specific knowledge and practical guidance is characterized by hypermodal communication strategies meant to accommodate various levels of expertise and interests. The paper presents and explains methodological tools suitable for investigating comprehensibility and engagement enhancement when addressing potentially non-academic receivers in a website context. For this purpose, we explore the interaction of semiotic modes as well as hypermodal combinations of the web-based genres. In this context, we aim especially at identifying the roles of the digital affordances in communicating professional expertise and practical guidance with a basis in the same Internet venue. The impact of promotional strategies is also explained. The relevance of this research work lies in its contribution to a better understanding of the complex hypermodal strategies used for reframing the communication of domain-specific knowledge to various audiences.

This paper analyzes signs and written messages aimed at regulating people's behavior in public spaces. Based on a collection of more than 700 verbal and pictographic signs, the paper focuses on how the formulation of the directives reflect and construct the authors' deontic authority, how they account for the social legitimacy of the directive and how they seek to evoke the addressee's goodwill and cooperativeness. The analysis shows that the author's entitlement to perform the directive may be grounded in references to institutional authority, or that it may be manifested in the linguistic or pictographic expression itself, such as use of imperative mode, exclamation marks, or threats of sanctions. Entitlement may also be established by providing accounts for the legitimacy of the directive. These take the form of reference to rules and norms or information about benefits of the requested action to the recipients or third parties. Finally, the analysis shows how signs may seek to evoke positive attitudes in the addressee by creating affiliation or by using humor and poetic devices. By comparing with previous research on directives in conversation, the paper identifies request practices that are specific to this form of written communication.

Many studies have shown the role played by reported speech in complaint stories, e.g., adding authenticity to the claim or displaying the egregiousness of the offence. In this paper I build on that research to examine the identity positionings achieved through animations of self and others in complaint stories produced during talk between clients and their stylist in a hair salon. The data at hand comprise 17 complaint sequences directed against specific individuals in which reported speech is used during the telling. Using conversation analytic methods and drawing on the framework of Narrative Positioning Analysis, the paper examines two reported speech situations: those where the complaint target is the last character animated to speak in the complaint; and those where the complainant is given this speaking position. I show that who is animated to speak, and in which order, are important means whereby the complainant achieves positioning of self and others. I also show that recipients receive the complaint differently depending on the positioning achieved by the complainant through their use of reported speech.

In pragmatics, the proverbs serve as one of the major tools of politeness and indirection. They effectively help the composer to politely comment on very delicate issues without incurring the displeasure of his audience. This paper examines the use of proverbs in Ghanaian folksongs. It highlights the pragmatic aspects, didactic and communicative functions of proverbs. The data for discussion is based on Akan proverbs extracted from four popular songs by the late Alex Konadu, a renowned highlife musician. The paper is discussed under the theoretical framework of linguistic politeness, which reflects the use of tactful and practical language to obviate crisis. We will subject the proverbs to sociolinguistic semantic, stylistic and pragmatic analyses. The paper argues that proverbs are indispensable in Akan oratory and politeness systems and form part of speakers’ communicative competence. Konadu spices his songs with proverbs that enrich the lyrics. The paper demonstrates that generally music serves as a storage facility for the documentation of Akan proverbs. It finally comments on the absence of proverbs in current Ghanaian highlife lyrics and its replacement with vulgar language, and recommends ways for improving this precarious literary situation.

This paper presents a contrastive pragmatic analysis of the use of the expressions (M)minzu-zhuyi 民族主义 and nationalism in the Chinese and U.S. American linguacultures. In research informed by ‘Western’ interpretations of nationalism, it has often been assumed that nationalism is an essentially negative phenomenon. The present paper argues that any contrastive pragmatic analysis involving the term nationalism needs to critically revisit this assumption. We argue that nationalism has no direct equivalent in Chinese because the Chinese expression minzu-zhuyi, the counterpart of nationalism, is used in two entirely different ways: a) as a common noun (minzu-zhuyi) in a (usually) negative way to refer to nationalism in a ‘foreign’ sense and b) as a proper noun (Minzu-zhuyi) in a positive way to refer primarily to domestic politics. Our inquiry is divided into two parts. Firstly, we conduct a two-fold diachronic discourse analytic investigation of the development of (M)minzu-zhuyi and nationalism by examining two different corpora: political speeches and print media texts. Secondly, we check the validity of the findings of our contrastive diachronic analysis, by examining interviews which we conducted with speakers of Mandarin Chinese and American English. The results of our study indicate that the automatic projection of ‘Western’ interpretations of notions such as nationalism onto other linguacultures is problematic.

Expressions of resistance to violence metaphors for cancer provide important insights as to how these metaphors are perceived and which specific aspects of their use are deemed inapt or inappropriate by actual language users. The first objective of this paper is to examine different types of resistance standpoints that are expressed in critical responses to violence metaphors for cancer as well as the different metaphor dimensions these standpoints are focused on. Secondly, the paper aims to demonstrate the value of a close analysis of standpoints of resistance to metaphor from a combined argumentation theoretical and metaphor theoretical perspective. It will be shown how a combined argumentation theoretical and metaphor theoretical framework constitutes a useful and structured method for understanding the nature of resistance standpoints and the specific dimension(s) of metaphor they address. In this paper the combined framework will be put into practice in six case studies, each illustrating different manners in which language users express their disapproval of a particular use of violence metaphors for cancer.

This paper aims to investigate the use of disclaimers in interpersonal interactions from a metapragmatic perspective through a corpus-based study. Two types of disclaimers are discussed in this paper: meta-negation disclaimer and meta-prohibition disclaimer. The meta-negation disclaimers follow formulaic pattern of bushi + wǒ + V (I don't mean to, but…), and serve as face-threatening mitigation devices when criticising the hearer. The meta-prohibition disclaimers follow formulaic patterns of bie + guaiwǒ + V (don't blame me for…) and nǐ bie + bu + ADJ (don't feel… if…), and disclaim the speaker's negative identity when flouting the face of the hearer. Both meta-negation disclaimers and meta-prohibition disclaimers are related to an aspect of Chinese culture called lǐ (politeness) that stresses attentiveness to others and avoidance of conflict and confrontation. To some extent, the findings presented in this paper will enrich our understanding of indirect criticism from a metapragmatic perspective and contribute to rapport management in interpersonal interactions.

Using video-recordings from one day of a theater project for young adults, this paper investigates how the meaning of novel verbal expressions is interactionally constituted and elaborated over the interactional history of a series of activities. We examine how the theater director introduces and instructs the group in the Chekhovian technique of acting, which is based on “imagining with the body,” and how the imaginary elements of the technique are “brought into existence” in the language of the instructions. By tracking shifts in the instructor’s use of the key expressions invisible/imaginary/inner body or movement through a series of exercises, we demonstrate how they are increasingly treated as real and perceivable bodily conduct. The analyses focus on the instructor’s attribution of factual and agentive properties to these expressions, and the changes that these properties undergo over the series of instructions. This case demonstrates the significance of longitudinal processes for the establishment of shared meaning in social interaction. The study thereby contributes to the field of interactional semantics and to longitudinal studies of social interaction. Using video-recordings from one day of a theater project for young adults, this paper investigates how the meaning of novel verbal expressions is interactionally constituted and elaborated over the interactional history of a series of activities. We examine how the theater director introduces and instructs the group in the Chekhovian technique of acting, which is based on "imagining with the body," and how the imaginary elements of the technique are "brought into existence" in the language of the instructions. By tracking shifts in the instructor's use of the key expressions invisible/imaginary/inner body or movement through a series of exercises, we demonstrate how they are increasingly treated as real and perceivable bodily conduct. The analyses focus on the instructor's attribution of factual and agentive properties to these expressions, and the changes that these properties undergo over the series of instructions. This case demonstrates the significance of longitudinal processes for the establishment of shared meaning in social interaction. The study thereby contributes to the field of interactional semantics and to longitudinal studies of social interaction.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the act of reporting an utterance which was produced in a context other than the current interaction. The most common pragmatic approach to the act of reporting concentrates on the relations between the initial speech event and the way it is presented by the different forms of reported speech. Thus, direct and indirect reported speech are often referred to as depictive and descriptive acts respectively. The current paper goes beyond this distinction and considers the reporting act in its entirety as a speech act. Based on contextual sources and constraints allowing the reporting speaker to communicate his/her message in the current interaction, a three-way distinction is proposed between descriptive, depictive and simulative reporting acts, where the latter category refers to direct and indirect reported speech where the apparently reported utterance never took place as such. This three-way distinction is supported by an empirical investigation of F0-patterns in utterances containing reported speech in conversational Modern Israeli Hebrew, showing the influence of different degrees of syntactic and pragmatic continuity/discontinuity on the prosodic structure of utterances containing reported speech.

This paper argues that argumentative discourse markers pragmaticalize and become 'polysemous' via a single core function. The focus of the paper is on discourse markers of rectification, where an accessible assumption or claim is replaced with another, rectifying claim (in the form of an explanation, clarification, definition, justification etc.). Specifically, I discuss Hebrew be-ʕecem, originally a prepositional phrase meaning ‘in a bone’ and its evolution into a polysemous discourse marker whose meaning is versatile: ‘on second thought'/‘actually’/‘essentially’/‘basically’. I claim that it is its persistent core function of argumentative rectification not only serves as the motivation behind its linguistic evolution, but also serves as the link connecting all of its meanings/uses. Pragmaticalization is therefore given a new light, highlighting the discourse marker's core function which governs the course of its history.

This paper investigates how the interviewer (IR) employs repeats of his interviewees' (IEs') prior turns to further their (IEs') agenda and stance in Aljazeera's al-itijaah al-mu'akis (‘The Opposite Direction’, hereafter). ‘The Opposite Direction’ is a weekly news interview program that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views. Twenty, 50 min episodes were studied and transcribed following Conversation Analysis as my analytic method. This paper argues that the IR uses a specific questioning practice with those interviewees whom he favors, I refer to them as interviewees in the favorable position (IEFs), allowing them to further their agenda against the other's. The paper shows how the IR's actions of agenda furthering is achieved by repeating his IEFs' previous turns in a question format which allows IEFs an opportunity to confirm and highlight a previous turn for the overhearing audience. I refer to this IR practice as the Affiliative Other Initiated Repeats (AOIRs). This study has implications that are multidisciplinary for Conversation Analysis, Arabic linguistics, cross cultural studies, and Arabic media studies.

The multiple-grammar model (Iwasaki 2015) was proposed based on the observation that the same speaker produces radically different forms of language in the spoken and written modes of language use. The model relies strongly on recent developments in usage-based grammars and cognitive linguistics, and considers speakers’ actual experience as the key to developing different grammatical systems in two distinct linguistic environments. It also acknowledges that a speaker may develop different systems (e.g. grammars) in different varieties, such as conversations and public speeches, within the same mode of language use. In order to understand how such grammatical varieties are structured, we focus in this paper on copula (desu) constructions in Japanese, which include a typical predicative copula construction (PCC), e.g. hon desu ‘(it) is a book,’ an unusual non-predicative copula construction (NPCC), e.g. soshite desu ne ‘then, you know,’ and the formulaic copula constructions (FCC), e.g. soo desu ne ‘that’s right.’ These constructions are distributed differently not only across speech activities, but also across individual speakers. This paper suggests that speakers’ differential experiences with the constructions used in different speech activities may be the cause of such variability.

In this paper, we apply a mixed-methods approach on epistemics and evidence in interaction to the investigation of the unstressed German modal particle wohl and its different functions as a linguistic resource for displaying knowledge in interaction. In addition, the paper takes a regional perspective based on the observation that speakers from the Northwest German area use wohl differently in constructing knowledge stances than speakers of other German varieties. Methodologically, we follow a combined approach of conversation analysis and multivariate statistical analyses of German Face-to-Face interactions. In contrast to traditional classifications of wohl displaying an assumptive [K–] stance, the results of the sequential analyses in the paper reveal that the modal particle is used to display all functions of the epistemic gradient from a [K–] to a [K+] stance. Moreover, the quantitative analysis shows that there is a regional effect, as primarily Northwestern German speakers use the epistemic [K+] function of wohl in interactions. We discuss the results with regard to the role that interaction analysis and regionality should play in investigating modal particles. Finally, we link our findings to the historical and contact induced factors that especially determine the divergent usage of wohl in the Northwestern area.

A murder of a Slovak investigative journalist in February 2018 led to a wave of massive rallies across the country and abroad which demanded a fair investigation of the murder as well as some political concessions. The grass-roots protests were held under the slogan Za slusne Slovensko (For a Decent Slovakia) in which the concept of slusnosť (decency) was chosen to echo the ethos of the November 1989 Velvet Revolution. In a wave of ensuing societal discourses about (im)politeness, slusnosť has proven to be a highly contested term. This contestedness is examined in two threads from Internet discussion fora which are attached to news articles reporting on March 9, 2019 mass gatherings. The analysis demonstrates how posters negotiate their understandings of slusnosť with regard to their group-based stances and identities. Also, the paper points out the indexical resources which posters use to construct their own and others' identities and demonstrates how (im)politeness, morality and identity construction are closely interrelated. The paper adopts the approach of ʽpoliteness as a social practiceʼ and uses ʽtactics of intersubjectivityʼ as the main analytical tool. The metapragmatic analysis of a societal change is contextualized within wider socio-political developments in post-1989 Slovakia.

This study interrogates the frequently made claim that mirroring behavior is directly linked to interpersonal rapport. The paper proposes a more nuanced conceptualization of the positive effect of mirroring, showing it to be underpinning not affiliation as such but instead speakers' joint commitment to a common interactional cause. The analysis of naturally occurring talk shows that sound imitation is primarily an affiliation-neutral resource that facilitates the progression of interaction. The paper argues that socially embedded mirroring behavior is more than a behavioral manifestation of the motor resonance described in social neuroscience. Mirroring as part of jointly achieved talk is one of several mechanisms for conversational participants to establish progressivity, that is, trajectories of social action, sequence and stance. The data also show that sound mirroring, when it is part of naturally occurring interaction, is not automatic, but that participants choose to mirror, or not. It is proposed that socially situated imitation is reconceptualized as facilitating social collaboration and the joint achievement of interaction more broadly, rather than empathy or rapport in a narrow sense. Such a reconceptualization of mirroring allows us to describe more accurately how humans build sociality.