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English vague language (VL), as in general noun phrases, general extenders and general verbs, is central to casual conversation. It can have discourse functions and create an informality and solidarity. The rationale for the study described here was a gap in the literature vis-à-vis language learner metapragmatic awareness of VL in their L1. It was hypothesised that attitudes towards VL vary from language to language. This paper describes a comparative questionnaire study of German, Spanish and Mandarin speakers' attitudes to VL in their languages. Subjects were invited to translate English VL to their languages and to think of other vague forms: German speakers volunteered 'Dingsbums' and 'und so'; Spanish speakers suggested 'cómo se llame' and 'o algo así; Mandarin speakers noted 'na ge dong xi'. Subjects were also asked to describe social variables, domains and functions associated with their VL: German speakers saw VL as creating closeness but many felt that it made addressors sound unreliable and mildly impolite; Spanish speakers mostly saw VL as a way of showing a relaxed, close, comfortable, friendly, but a few saw it as an sign of laziness and impoliteness; Mandarin speakers responded that VL was a marker of friendly informality and solidarity but they mostly associated it with indifference, laziness, impatience, irritation, anger, disappointment, contempt and dishonesty. The paper concludes with suggestions of ways to incorporate tasks on VL into English language teaching classrooms, and to raise language teachers' awareness of English L2 users' beliefs and intercultural differences in terms of VL. • Vague language forms, functions and variation. • Close with family and friends. • Indifference, impoliteness with strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the connection between Spanish concessive future and evidentiality. More specifically, it is argued that concessive future does not merely represent a contextual variant of conjectural future ( Escandell, 2010 ) but a new use ( Squartini, 2012 ) which is restricted by the activated status of the proposition ( Dryer, 1996 ). Unlike conjectural future, concessive future does not have an inferential purpose; instead, it plays a role within the (counter) argumentation process. It actually develops a déréalisant function ( Ducrot, 1995 ). Therefore, although conjectural use and concessive use share the deictic value of future, they are the projection of this value over different levels of meaning. More generally, this paper shows that future in Spanish may intersect with several semantic and discourse categories, including – but not limited to – evidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I raise the question of how the concepts of speaker commitment and speaker involvement can be applied to evidential expressions. I therefore explore the distinction between commitment and non-commitment as a binary opposition (cf. Katriel and Dascal, 1989; Kissine, 2008 ) and show that a choice for a binary opposition leads to a clear differentiation of epistemic and evidential markers. Speaker involvement is different from speaker commitment, in that it is gradable. This notion will be relevant at both a propositional and an interactional level of analysis. At the propositional level, I claim that speaker involvement refers to the speaker’s processing of the evidential qualification when presenting a state of affairs. At the interactional level, speaker involvement will be shown to play a role in the online planning of the flow of discourse. In my corpus analysis of the Spanish evidential adverbials al parecer ‘apparently’ and por lo visto ‘seemingly’, I will argue that the coparticipant’s reply to evidentially qualified propositions is an important methodological tool to examine speaker involvement. Moreover, the monitoring of the evidential dimension in interaction will shed new light on non-commitment (cf. Déchaine et al., 2017 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper focuses on how students from China are institutionally constructed through everyday practice in a Madrid middle school, where three years’ fieldwork was conducted as part of a wider research project. Particular attention is paid to the Welcome Programme at this school, a new educational measure intended for students from a migrant background to learn Spanish before they enter mainstream classes. Taking critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a theoretical/methodological/analytical framework, interactional, discursive, and ethnographic data are used to show (a) what social identities are (re)produced and challenged through school practices, in connection with the ideological framework of the modern nation-state; (b) how these practices contribute to legitimizing a particular distribution/valuation of cultural and linguistic resources within the contemporary Spanish educational system; (c) what the institutional consequences are for these Chinese newcomer students. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]