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This article explores pragmatic aspects of lexical borrowing, based on examples of borrowing from German into British English. While borrowing from English is widely studied, the focus on German sheds light on a more unlikely source language. A cross-linguistic, corpus-based comparative analysis focuses on contrasts in the use of post-1900 loans in the German source language and the British English recipient language. Contrasts in the uses of a number of these loans as well as a detailed analysis of the borrowed prefix uber-/uber-in English and German show that a recipient language may adopt specific uses that are marginal in the source language and that it can also put the loan to different uses than evident in the source language. Such contrasts are discussed as a result of pragmatic adaptation of the loan into the recipient language. The loan is de-contextualized from its use in the source language and becomes re-contextualised into different uses in the recipient language which reflect the communicative needs and hence the pragmatic interest in the loan from within the recipient language, partly or even entirely irrespective of its uses in the source language.

This paper focuses on the question of identity in relation to jocular interactional practices. The metapragmatic analysis is based on qualitative interview data where native speakers of Australian and British English were shown a number of videos with potentially jocular verbal behaviours. The main objective of this paper is to observe what role jocular verbal behaviours play in claims to identity as well as in the attribution of identity to others via their interactional behaviour. The results suggest that in the analysed data identity related to jocular verbal practices primarily manifests itself in three different, though sometimes overlapping, ways: via (1) perceiving oneself as part of a cultural context where particular preferences are shared by the majority of people (what is referred to here as ‘collective identity’); (2) arguing that one's evaluations and reactions to jocularity depend on personal characteristics (‘individual identity’); and (3) suggesting that the understanding of and reactions to humour are limited to a particular situation and the interactants involved (‘situated identity’).

With data from two comparable corpora of spoken British English, the London-Lund Corpus and the new London-Lund Corpus 2, this study tracks the development of the reactive what-x construction half a century back in time. The study has two goals: (i) to describe the uses of the construction over time and (ii) to establish the motivations and mechanisms related to its development in spoken dialogue. The corpus data show that the reactive what-x construction was already in use in the mid-20th century but has gained ground since then. By combining Invited Inferencing Theory with focus on speaker-initiated decisions in interaction and a Cognitive Semantic approach to meaning shift and change from a Construction Grammar perspective, we demonstrate that the development of a construction has to be explained with reference to both the social motivations in spoken conversational discourse and the cognitive processes that operate at the conceptual level. The development of the reactive what-x construction, which is simultaneously used to express reaction and make a request, was motivated by the interaction of discourse-structuring and turn-taking inferences at the functional level that proceeded through metonymic micro-adjustments of the conceptual structure of the construction itself.

Inthispaperweexamineturntakingpatternsinconversationalstorytelling.Ithaslongbeennotedthatturntakinginevery-daynarrative differs on a number of counts from turntaking in regular conversation. The differences, however, have, at best, been researched qualitatively based on casual observations and small datasets. Here, we base our analysis on two specialized corpora of conversational narrative, the Saarbrucken Corpus of Spoken English (SCOSE) containing American English 4- and 5-party stories and the Narrative Corpus (NC) containing British English 4- to 7-party narratives, as well as the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC). The analysis is decidedly quantitative and statistical in orientation. Specifically, we are concerned with turn order and turn distribution in conversational multi-party narrative. The aims are twofold. We wish to examine the validity of Sacks’ description of storytelling as ‘‘an attempt to control a third slot in talk, from a first’’ (Sacks, 1992:18), a turn order pattern we refer to as the N-notN-N pattern. We further investigate whether individual speakers’ turntaking styles have an impact on turn distribution, a measure intimately related to turn order. Moreover, given the structural differences in the data at hand (the SCOSE being raw-text, the NC being densely annotated) we employ largely different methodologies particularly in addressing turn order. The results on turntaking styles suggest that this factor cannot account for the noticeable increase in the narrator’s turn share as soon as the conversational activity moves into storytelling. The results on turn order reveal the N-notN-N pattern’s statistical overrepresentation in all multi-party narrative types examined. The implications of this finding are far-reaching. First, Sacks et al.’s dictum that turn order is not fixed in advance does not hold true for conversational narrative. Also, turn order in conversational narrative is not locally controlled, on a turn-by-turn basis, but globally, on the basis of the activity the conversationalists are involved in, viz. storytelling. Second, a fundamental correlate of the N-notN-N pattern is the avoidance of double-responses, that is, of two consecutive response turns following the narrator’s turn. This avoidance suggests that the turn order system underlying multi-party narrative is that of 2-party talk.Further,thedouble-responseavoidancesuggeststhepossibilitythatthesourceoftheturn-orderbiasinnarrativeisatacitagreement between the recipients to promote the single-recipient filling the single-response slot to a ‘spokesperson’ taking the turn on behalf of all otherrecipients.Wealsonotethepossibilityoftherebeingarecipient-subsystemforturntakingatthesingle-responseslotinteractingwith

In Early Modern English Dialogs: Spoken Interaction as Writing (2010), Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kyto discuss the function and distribution of interjections such as Ah, Oh, and “pragmatic noise” such as Tush in Early Modern English, as represented in A Corpus of English Dialogs 1560–1760. Although they recognize trials as major sources of data close to speech, Culpeper and Kyto mention them only briefly in connection with interjections. I explore the use of the interjections Oh, O, Ah, Ay(e), and Ha(h) in the Modern British English Old Bailey Corpus (1720–1913). As might be expected from trial records, the interjections are used with low frequency. Most appear in narratives by defendants and witnesses, but a few also occur in interactions among courtroom participants. After identifying the inventory of interjections used in the Old Bailey Corpus, I analyze their functions, and the extent to which they evidence change between Early Modern English, as described by Culpeper and Kyto, and Modern English as represented in the later parts of The Old Bailey Corpus.

When formulating a request for an object, speakers can choose among different grammatical resources that would all serve the overall purpose. This paper examines the social contexts indexed and created by the choice of the turn format can I have x to request a shared good (the pepper grinder, a tissue from a box on the table, etc.) in British English informal interaction. The analysis is based on a video corpus of approximately 25 h of everyday interaction among family and friends. In its home environment, a request in the format can I have x treats the other as being in control over the relevant material object, a control that is the contingent outcome of ongoing courses of action. This contingent control over a shared good produces an obligation to make it available. This analysis is supported by an examination of similarly formatted request turns in other languages, of can I have x in another interactional environment (after a relevant offer has been made) in British English, and of deviant cases. The results highlight the intimate connection of request format selection to the present engagements of (prospective) request recipients.

In this article we set out to develop a comprehensive description of the speech functions of tag questions (TQs) in British English dialogue. Our first aim is to outline a descriptive framework with the relevant semantic-pragmatic and formal features to capture all the speech functions fulfilled by TQs. Critical features to the classification of TQs into speech functions are: the commodity being exchanged (information or desired action), whether the TQ realizes an A-event, B-event or AB-event, and adjacency. Features that have typical correlations with the different speech function types are: intonation, polarity, clause type of the anchor, the presence of modals, the position of TQs in adjacency pairs and turns, and responses to TQs. Our second aim is to identify and typify the wide range of speech functions that TQs can realize. It turns out that real, information-seeking questions account for only a small portion of our TQ dataset. Most TQs express statement-question blends, but they can also convey pure statements, commands and offers, and even responses to a preceding question or statement. As the quantitative instantiation of categories is an intrinsic part of a usage-based description, we will examine the relative frequencies of the various speech functions and their properties in our dataset.

This paper is a corpus-based study of the Bathroom Formula, a speech act that refers to the phrases speakers use to express their need to leave any ongoing activity in order to go to the bathroom (e.g., I’m gonna go to the bathroom ). The data were retrieved from the Longman Spoken American Corpus, the Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English and the spoken component of the British National Corpus. More than 80 ‘anchor’ words and phrases found in the literature were searched for (e.g., loo , pee , wash my hands ). The results show that a large majority of all instances are based on a small number of lexicalized sentence stems ( I ((SEMI-)MODAL) V to the bathroom/loo/restroom/toilet ; I ((SEMI-)MODAL) ( go ) pee / potty ). It is argued that the lack of creativity is connected to ease of comprehension and production and to speakers’ wish to be unobtrusive. Apart from some lexical differences between the regional varieties (e.g., AmE bathroom and BrE loo ) there was little sociolinguistic variation. The desire to be unobtrusive is also reflected in the responses to the formula: about half the tokens are not responded to at all, and the most common verbal response involves simple acknowledgements (e.g., okay ).

This paper investigates euphemism strategies used in Saudi Arabic and English. It shows that there are some similarities and differences, which can be attributed to cultural and religious beliefs and values. The strategies of euphemism found in the Saudi responses are ‘part-for-whole’, ‘overstatement’, ‘understatement’, ‘deletion’, ‘metaphor’, ‘general-for-specific’, and ‘learned words and jargons’. The British participants employed ‘understatement’, ‘deletion’, ‘learned words and jargons’, ‘metaphors’, and ‘general-for-specific’. This indicates that Saudi Arabic seems to have more ways of expressing euphemisms. The study also reveals that there is no relationship between euphemism strategy choice and gender. Another significant finding is that the Saudis and the British resort to taboos, when handling death and lying, but hardly ever for bodily functions. Euphemistic language, like language in general, is influenced by its users’ cultural and religious beliefs, life-styles, and norms. The study suggests that increasing second/foreign language learners’ awareness of euphemism is essential for intercultural communication.

This paper combines interactional and phonetic approaches to examine the phonetics–interaction interface in the initiation of closings in everyday, British-English telephone conversations. Specifically, it investigates the phonetic and interactional properties of “multi-unit sequence transition turns” (such as “yes + okay then”), which are regularly employed by speakers to manoeuvre the call from some on-topic talk into the closing section. Such shifts are managed by these turns having a two-unit design in which the first unit attends to the preceding sequence and serves to close it down, and the second unit offers and makes relevant the subsequent action of call closure. In addition to commonalities in interactional function, these turns have systematic phonetic designs with various parameters such as pitch, loudness and glottalisation patterning together in different ways. The most striking phonetic regularity observed is the common occurrence of a click at the boundary between the two units. This paper contributes to our understanding of the organisation of call closings in British-English telephone interaction and demonstrates the fruitfulness of conducting context-bound, interactional and phonetic investigations hand-in-hand.

This paper contributes to the debate on the precise nature of face as a universal phenomenon, and the cultural variability within it. Specifically, we bring the ‘Southern’ perspective to the debate by discussing the previously neglected African dimension. Recent scholarship suggests that the concept of face and the notion of self in traditional African culture may have more in common with Eastern collectivist cultures than with Anglo-American culture. We examine the interactional management of an encounter between a Zimbabwean English speaker and British English speakers in a community singing group. We argue that, while face needs may be universally relevant in such a situation, the way in which they are oriented to in interaction depends on cultural understandings of which aspects of face are paramount in particular circumstances. Since these assumptions are deep-seated and invisible they are not easily open to explicit negotiation and hence can lead to misinterpretation. By conducting an ethnographic study of the communicative event and combining it with a detailed examination of the co-construction of meaning in this interaction, we show how the participants’ contributions can be related to differing – and potentially conflicting – interpretation frameworks. These frameworks are informed by culture-specific notions of appropriate self-presentation.

Research in conversation analysis has shown that speech rhythm is a relevant parameter for turn-taking amongst native speakers of British English. Not only is individual participants’ speech rhythmically structured, but rhythmic patterns also continue across speaker transitions. Participants employ such rhythmic integration as an interactional resource. By rhythmically integrating next turns into prior turns they display conversational alignment with previous speakers, whereas non-integration is treated as noticeable and non-default. British English has a tendency towards stress-timing, that is, stressed syllables occur at roughly regular intervals in time, with great variation in syllable duration. This paper investigates whether cross-transitional speech rhythm also occurs when speakers of primarily syllable-timed languages, whose syllable duration is less varied, are in conversation with speakers of primarily stress-timed languages. Do speakers of syllable-timed backgrounds integrate their turns rhythmically into the stress-timed pattern? If so, how are those continuations realised? The data show that rhythmic patterns are indeed continued across speaker transitions, however, only in up to half of all turn transitions, and predominantly only for the first stressed syllable of the turn. This suggests that incoming speakers of the syllable-timed language initially comply with the tendency towards rhythmic alignment before continuing ‘in their own time’.

In this article, I am concerned with the prosodic realization of negative expressions in spoken British English. Negative expressions introduce new information into an utterance, and it has therefore long been assumed that speakers realize negative items with prosodic emphasis to highlight their importance with regard to the overall meaning of the sentence [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 74 (1983) 1155; Pierrehumbert, Janet, Hirschberg, Julia, 1990. The meaning of intonation contours in the interpretation of discourse. In: Cohen, P.R., Morgan, J., Pollack, M.E. (Eds.), Intentions in Communication, 271–312. Cambridge: MIT Press]. However, Yaeger-Dror [Language and Speech 28 (1985) 197; Language Variation and Change 9 (1997) 1] questioned that assumption and argued—based on her analysis of a corpus of American English—that speakers may de-emphasize and contract negative items if they express disagreement with a previous speaker's turn and thus threaten the face of the conversational partner. My quantitative analysis of a large amount of British English data tallies with Yaeger-Dror and shows that there is a strong tendency for negative items to be realized without prosodic emphasis. However, the fact that disagreements are indeed unlikely to be realized with prosodic prominence cannot be taken as the only explanation for the low rate of prominent negative items as disagreements are infrequent in my data. Rather, prominence on negatives can be shown to be register-dependent.