E-Book of Abstracts - FINAL

UNIVERSITY OF MALTA, VALLETTA CAMPUS
30
TH
MAY - 1
ST
JUNE 2014
B O O K O F A B S T R A C T S
6
th
International Conference on
Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication
University of Malta
L-Universit ta' Malta

6
th
Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication Conference
University of Malta, Valletta Campus
30
th
May - 1
st
June 2014
Table of Contents
(All abstracts are listed alphabetically in accordance with the surname of the rst author)
Plenary Talks........................................................................................1
Special Interest Panel...........................................................................4
Main Session......................................................................................10
Conference convenors:
Stavros Assimakopoulos (University of Malta)
Istvan Kecskes (State University of New York at Albany)
Conference Logistics:
University of Malta Conference Unit
Supported by:
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Mouton de Gruyter
Elsevier Limited
i
Conference Timetable
ii
Friday, 30th May 2014
iii
8.00 REGISTRATION OPENS REGISTRATION OPENS REGISTRATION OPENS REGISTRATION OPENS REGISTRATION OPENS
9.20
Inauguration (Aula Magna)
Joe Friggieri (Pro-rector, University of Malta)
9.40
PLENARY TALK (Aula Magna)
Istvan Kecskes - Can intercultural pragmatics bring some new insight into pragmatic theories?
10.40 COFFEE BREAK COFFEE BREAK COFFEE BREAK COFFEE BREAK COFFEE BREAK
Aula Magna Auditorium Lecture Room 1 Lecture Room 2 Lecture Room 3
11.10
Eva Ogiermann
Intercultural
Communication in
Polish/English families
Julia Kolkmann &
Ingrid Lossius
Falkum
English possessives: A
semantic or pragmatic
phenomenon?
Maaike van Naerssen
(Dis)preferred responses
in Dutch and
Indonesian: A matter of
politeness?
Monika Kopytowska
Identity, multimodality
and social semiotics
ENIEDA Panel
Jess Romero-Trillo
& Laura Maguire
Bilingual education and
the development of
context awareness: A
longitudinal corpus
based study.
11.40
Jrg Meibauer
Towards an intercultural
pragmatics of lying
Thorstein Fretheim
The Pragmatics of Yes
and No
Wan Jumani Fauzi,
Noraini Ibrahim &
Marlyna Maros
Impoliteness in counter
service: A case study on
the perceptions of
service providers
Jagoda Granic
Ideology and language
as markers of identity
ENIEDA Panel
Thi Thuy Minh
Nguyen & Soe Marlar
Lwin
The pragmatic particles
of Singapore Colloquial
English: Implications for
socialization of bilingual
pre-school children
12.10
Lubov Tsurikova
Non-native discourse
strategies as a barrier to
intercultural
communication
Stavros
Assimakopoulos
& Michael Spagnol
Smurng stuff: The
semantics and
pragmatics of
placeholder lexical items
Chihsia Tang
Evaluation in media
discourse: Managing
criticisms in Taiwanese
talent shows
Angela Wang &
Zohreh Eslami
Identity presentation on
social networking sites
ENIEDA Panel
Irena Kuzborska
The role of context in
meaning construction: A
longitudinal study of
international students
reading perspectives
12.40 LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH
13.40
Nino Daraselia
Blessing formulas across
cultures (on the material
of Georgian, English
and Russian)
Jacques Moeschler
Back to negative
particulars and their
non-lexicalization: A
truth-conditional
pragmatics proposal
Liliana Ionescu-
Ruxandoiu
Exploiting intra-cultural
variability to express
(im)politeness
Sharon Millar
Digital identity
management in contexts
of provocation on a
Danish online discussion
forum
ENIEDA Panel
Eva Alcn
Does instruction work
for pragmatic learning
in study abroad
contexts?
14.10
Tatiana Larina &
Neelakshi
Suryanarayan
Pragmatics of advice:
Cross-cultural
perspectives
Alison Hall
Pragmatic enrichment in
subsentences and
fragment answers
Mihaela-Viorica
Constantinescu
Impoliteness in the
Romanian court life
(seventeenth-eighteenth
centuries)
Jala Garibova
Emerging identity
formats in post-Soviet
Turkic states
ENIEDA Panel
Naoko Osuka
Investigating mastery of
conventional expressions
in a study-abroad
context
14.40 SHORT BREAK SHORT BREAK SHORT BREAK SHORT BREAK SHORT BREAK
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Friday, 30th May 2014
iv
14.50
Anna W. Gustafsson
Empowering
communication in
intercultural encounters
Joanna Garmendia
In defense of Grices
account of irony
Marianna
Chodorowska-Pilch
Formal and informal
treatment in marketing
images
Svetlana Kurtes &
Rose Clark
Multimodal approaches
to knowledge
construction and
representation:
Teaching, learning and
assessment
ENIEDA Panel
Elly Ifantidou
Positive transfer and
pragmatic competence
in L2
15.20
Magdalna Bil &
Alena Ka"mrov
Is prosody a relevant
variable in rendering
power and solidarity? (A
non-native speakers
view of American
English)
Maria Dynel
Implied untruthfulness
and quality-based tropes
at the service of irony
Marilynn Johnson
Maxim of politeness,
please
Noemie Waldhubel
Weaving intercultural
competence into the
classroom:
Understanding gender
and globalization
ENIEDA Panel
Didier Maillat
Reference assignment
with a twist:
The pragmatics of
referential
disambiguation in L2
across the lifespan
16.20
Karol Janicki
Non-typical behavior,
language, and conict
Eleni Kapogianni
A comparative
examination of verbal
irony strategies in
Modern Greek and
British English
Sean McKinnon &
Pilar Prieto
The role of prosody and
gesture in the perception
of mock impoliteness
Hassan Bashir &
Hamza Bin Jehangir
From national to
civilizational
understanding: Ethical,
social and political
implications of identity
construction via school
textbook revisions in
Pakistan
ENIEDA Panel
Donald C. Smith
Audience adaptation
where it counts:
Teaching public
speaking to international
students from their point
of view
16.50
Liesbeth De Bleeker,
Soe Decock & Ellen
Van Praet
Between conict and
rapport: An inter- and
cross-cultural analysis of
service encounters
between French- and
German-speaking
customers and Belgian
internal sales advisors
Victoria Escandell-
Vidal & Manuel
Leonetti
Isnt it ironic? Syntax
and irony in Spanish
Filippo Domaneschi
Processing
presupposition triggers
ENIEDA Panel
Discussion
Invited discussant:
Istvan Kecskes
Liyin Zhang
What lies behind the
mirror: An intercultural
pragmatic study of
citations in academic
writing by novice
Chinese ESL/EFL
writers
17.30
Eline Zenner &
Dorien Van de
Mieroop
The pragmatics of
English loans in conict
situations
Esther Breuer,
Mariya Chankova &
Irena Vassileva
How does the Internet
transform students
information search
behavior?
Mrta Szcs & Anna
Babarczy
The role of
metapragmatic
awareness in the
development of irony
comprehension
ENIEDA Panel
Discussion
(cont.)
Phyllisienne Gauci,
Sandro Caruana &
Elisa Ghia
The pragmatic
competence of student-
teachers of Italian L2
18.00
Rita Scotti Juri# &
Isabella Matticchio

Pragmatics of
intercultural
communication:
Differences between
monolingual and
bilingual speakers
Andra Vasilescu
Mitigating devices in
scientic verbal
interactions: A corpus
analysis with a view to
cross-cultural variation
Ingrid Lossius
Falkum & Marta
Recasens
Young childrens
metonymic skill
ENIEDA Panel
Discussion
(cont.)
Andrea Scibetta
Chinese University
students acquisition of
pragmalinguistic skills in
Italian as a second
language
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Saturday, 31st May 2014
v
9.00
Robyn Carston - Pragmatics, polysemy and the lexicon
10.30
George O'Neal
The pragmatics of
intercultural phonetic
repair in English as a
lingua franca
interactions
Anne Reboul

Is implicit
communication a way to
escape epistemic
vigilance?
Etsuko Oishi

Austins speech act
theory revisited
Ilaria Venuti
A comparison of the
realization of requestive
speech acts in Italian
and German
Anita Fetzer &
Augustin Speyer
Discourse relations
across contexts and
genres: An analysis of
English and German
discourse
11.00
Arto Mustajoki
Why is
miscommunication more
common in everyday life
than in lingua franca
conversation?

Diana Mazzarella
Politeness, relevance and
scalar inferences
Maria Ponte
Now and performatives
from a pluralistic
perspective
Maria Economidou-
Kogetsidis
Data collection methods
and native speakers
requests: A comparison
of WDCT (written
discourse completion
test) and naturally-
occurring requests
Sonja Mller

Redundancy effects in
discourse:
On the modal particle-
combinations halt eben
& eben halt in German
11.40
Kyu-Hyun Kim &
Kyung-Hee Suh
Formulating practices in
Korean conversation:
Managing actions in
terms of relationship
categories
Anne Furlong
Whats so literary about
play texts? A relevance-
theoretic view of
interpreting drama
Alessandro Capone
The pragmatics of
indirect reports and
slurring
Elena Gavruseva
Man, that guy is an old
dude!:
The pragmatic functions
of male terms in
American English
Paulo Pinheiro-
Correa
Exploring syntactic and
prosodic marking of
narrow focus in a
compared Brazilian
Portuguese-Spanish
corpus
12.10
Zsuzsanna Nmeth
Four repair operations in
Hungarian
Manuel Padilla Cruz
Attitudinal adjectives: A
relevance-theoretic
approach
Biancamaria
Cepollaro
It's not just a matter of
good manners: Slurs
Anne Barron & Emily
Black
"Oh ok. (.) Yeah, do you
have like Christmas
exams or anything?"
Constructing small talk
in learner-native speaker
voice-based
telecollaboration
Michael Chiou
Future defaults in
Modern Greek
13.40
Stefanie Stadler
Ownership in
intercultural business
negotiations: When
authoritative and
democratic interactional
styles clash
Stephen Neale

The metaphysics,
pragmatics, and
formatics of implicit
reference
Irina Pandarova
I would never ever kick
you up the arse. Sure I
think you're great. The
Irish English discourse
marker sure at the
semantics/pragmatics
interface
Els Tobback
Do we still understand
each other? A cross-
cultural analysis of
discourse practices in
French and Dutch
political debates
Lorella Viola
Italian dubbing from
pragmatic interference
to language change:
Evidence from the
analysis of two back-
channel signals
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Saturday, 31st May 2014
vi
14.10
Belinda Crawford
Camiciottoli
The interpersonal
pragmatics of
intercultural nancial
discourse: a contrastive
analysis of European vs.
Asian earnings
conference calls
Francesco Bellucci &
Ahti-Veikko
Pietarinen
A rhapsody on theme
by Peirce: Grices
lectures on Charles S.
Peirces theory of signs
Takahiro Otsu
Modulation maker: A
relevance-theoretic
account of After All and
Datte
Fabienne H. Baider &
Maria Constantinou
The inter-cultural lingua
franca of the intra-
political extreme-right
newspeak on French and
Greek political forums
Kroly Bibok
Instrument-subject
alternation from a
lexical-pragmatic
perspective
14.50
Jessica Ha & Sylvia
Wchter
Is there an exemplary
function of the
others?
Tnanh Nyan

Internalised context:
How did this come
about?
Catherine Wearing
Meaning and imagery in
metaphor interpretation
Monika Pleyer
Translated impoliteness:
Understanding and
evaluating impoliteness
in translated texts for
children
Enik Nmeth T.
Theoretical and
methodological issues in
the research into implicit
arguments in Hungarian
15.20
Ulrike Schrder
The function of
metacommunication in
the interactive
construction of culture-
related key words
Marla Perkins
Hobongan discourse
markers: Lexical items
as indications of
pragmatic priority
Elmar Geir
Unnsteinsson
Carston on eternal
sentences
Gila A. Schauer
Its really insulting to
say something like that
to anyone: an
investigation of English
and German native
speakers impoliteness
perceptions
Valeria Molnar
The predicationality
hypothesis
16.20
Bla$enka Filipan-
%igni#, Vladimir
Legac & Katica Sobo
Intercultural awareness
of Croatian teenage
foreign language
learners
Cristina Grisot
The conceptual/
procedural distinction:
Empirical perspectives
and quantitative
measures
Richard Valle
Color sentences,
compositionality and
truth
Maarten Franck
Translating sports news:
A closer look at the
interplay between
international press
agencies, the national
news agency Belga, and
Flemish news sites
Pawe& Rutkowski
On the pragmatics of
pointing: The case of
Polish sign language
(PJM)
16.50
Sarah Hopkyns
English as a lingua
franca and its effect on
cultural identity in the
Arabian Gulf
Joanna Blochowiak
Conceptual and
procedural meaning of
connectives
Dan Zeman
Disagreement in
semantics: On recent
contextualist answers to
the challenge from
disagreement
Gunnar Bergh &
Slve Ohlander
Talking footie: A
pragmatic study of
English football
language
Zohreh Eslami
The pragmatics of
wedding invitations
17.30
Kepa Korta - Tomorrow itll rain (or not): Notes on assertion, prediction and truth
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Sunday, 1st June 2014
vii
9.00
Yuka Shigemitsu
Question-answer
sequences for the rst
conversation with new
people in an
intercultural setting:
English and Japanese
conversation between
English and Japanese
speakers
Alessandra Fazio
Usage and a corpus-
based approach in ESP
teaching: A pilot study
in the eld of sports
sciences based on
patterns and collocations
Lada Rybnickova
The transfer of culture
specic items in
audiovisual texts and a
pragmatic approach to
an assessment of its
adequacy: A case study
of a Czech dubbing
translation of a police
procedural drama TV
series
Elena Dominguez
Romero
Synesthesic perception
in English and Spanish:
A corpus-based
approach
Monika
Bogdanowska & Ewa
Bogdanowska-
Jakubowska
(Im)politeness and
gender: An analysis of
public exchanges
between male and
female politicians
9.30
Jos Ochoa
Amazonian intercultural
expression on knowledge
Olivier Mric &
Laurent Gautier
Learnability of inter-
cultural pragmatic
competences verbalized
in tourist guide
discourses
Elena Savchenko &
Elena Prikazchikova
The adequacy of
translation and the
cognitive aspect of the
text category authors
individual style
Gabriela Stoica
The Romanian cultural-
anthropologic pattern
and the expression of
emotions: Some
diachronic and
synchronic aspects
Maria Antoniou

Politeness in translation:
The case of political
discourse
10.10
Christopher Long
A social cognitive
account of relational
work
Galip Kartal
The use of discourse
markers in British and
American feature length
movies: Implications for
EFL classrooms
Olaf Immanuel Seel
Presuppositions,
paralanguage, visual
kinesics: Three culture-
pragmatic categories of
errors and
misunderstanding in
translation and
interpreting illustrated
on the basis of the
language pair German/
Greek
Francesco Scaglione
From espaol
coloquial to italiano
colloquiale: Pragmatic
variation as the basis for
the study of colloquial
language in Italy
Douglas Ponton
Malcolm X and the
pragmatics of
argumentation
10.40
Robert Crawshaw
Emancipatory
pragmatics, situated
discourse and the
interpretation of cross-
cultural exchange
Ziyad Ali

A crosssectional study of
Syrian EFL learners
pragmatic development:
Towards a taxonomy of
modication in
interlanguage requests
Zoltn Kond,
Gergely Szab,
Zoltn Dsa, Zzsef
Pntya & Tnde
Polonyi
Explicit and implicit
attitudes toward identity
relevant cultural
memories
Rados&aw Wjtowicz
Partitive of subjectivity
in Finnish adjectival
predication
Matheus Odorisi
Referentiation and
ideology: The
construction of
homophobic speech in
new Pentecostal minister
text
11.40
Jonathan Culpeper - Politeness in British and other Englishes: A corpus-based investigation of metalanguage
12.40
Closing session (Aula Magna)
Ray Fabri (Chairman of the Institute of Linguistics, University of Malta)
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Robyn Carston
University College London, UK & CSMN Oslo, Norway
Pragmatics, polysemy and the lexicon
On the one hand, work in lexical pragmatics has shown the range of different senses a word
may be used to communicate on different occasions of use and the way in which new (ad hoc)
concepts or senses can be pragmatically inferred in context. On the other hand, work in lexical
semantics has shown that words can have a range of related conventionalised senses (the phe-
nomenon of polysemy), which has raised a number of questions, including: How is polysemy
(as distinct from homonymy) represented in the lexicon? What, if anything, do all the related
senses have in common?
In this talk, I aim to do two things: (a) To relate the pragmatic phenomenon of ad hoc concept
construction to the apparently semantic phenomenon of polysemy, including cases that cross
syntactic categories (e.g. you can stopv a car and you can pull out the stopsn on an organ);
(b) To consider what polysemy indicates about the nature of standing (encoded) word mean-
ing: whether it is (i) fully conceptual (semantic), or (ii) non-conceptual, so semantically under-
specified - either schematic, so always requiring enrichment in context, or overly rich, so al-
ways requiring selection/filtering in context, or (iii) essentially non-existent, involving just a
pointer or a link to a grab-bag of materials, which may include both conceptual and imagistic
information.
[email protected]
Jonathan Culpeper
Lancaster University, UK
Politeness in British and other Englishes: A corpus-based investigation of
metalanguage
Frequently, it is scholars based in Western locations that have introduced ideas with preten-
sions to universal application, including ideas which are commonly regarded as major mile-
stones in the field of politeness studies. Typically, the role of scholars from non-western areas
has been to present culture-specific evidence to challenge or tinker with these ideas. One conse-
quence of this is a tendency to believe that politeness conceptualisations emanating from west-
ern locations reflect the actual understandings of politeness used by communities in those loca-
tions. In fact, there is a relative paucity of emic studies of western cultures, often leading in
turn to acceptance of certain cultural stereotypes, such as the idea that British politeness by
1
PLENARY TALKS
which English English politeness is meant is characterised by off-record or negative polite-
ness. This paper probes British peoples understandings of politeness, contrasting them with
speakers of other Englishes.
Some work on politeness has bewailed the fact that scholars have constructed pseudo- scien-
tific politeness theories (so-called politeness2) that seem remote from or pay little attention to
the lay persons usage of politeness terms and what they might mean (so-called politeness1).
However, scholars of whatever persuasion have done little to investigate the lay persons polite-
ness metalanguage. Certainly, the full armoury of corpus-based techniques that characterise
most present-day dictionaries has not been deployed. This study attempts to fill this gap. More
specifically, it investigates usage of the term polite, deploying various methods from corpus lin-
guistics. It shows how patterns of metalinguistic usage afford glimpses into understandings of
politeness.
[email protected]
Istvan Kecskes
State University of New York at Albany, USA
Can intercultural pragmatics bring some new insight in pragmatic theories?
This paper argues that intercultural pragmatics may direct attention to issues and phenomena
that are taken for granted in Gricean pragmatics. What standard pragmatics assumes about
how things work in communication depends on there being commonalities, conventions, stan-
dards and norms between speaker-hearers. This, however, may not be exactly so in intercul-
tural communication. Commonalities, conventions, common beliefs, norms, shared knowledge
create a core common ground on which intention and cooperation-based pragmatics is built.
(Of course, there are plenty of varieties within those commonalities.) However, when this core
common ground appears to be limited as is the case in intercultural communication interlocu-
tors cannot take them for granted, rather they need to co-construct them, at least temporarily.
So what is happening here is that there appears to be a shift in emphasis from the communal
to the individual. It is not that the individual becomes more important than the societal.
Rather, interlocutors in intercultural interactions function more like core common ground crea-
tors rather than just common ground seekers and activators as is the case in L1 communica-
tion.
As a result the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) argues that Grice was right when he tied coop-
eration to the speaker-hearers rationality. However, egocentrism has to be added to speaker-
hearers rationality. We human beings are just as egocentric (as individuals) as cooperative (as
social beings). Egocentrism in the SCA refers to attention-bias that is the result of prior expe-
rience of individuals. It means that interlocutors activate and bring up the most salient infor-
mation to the needed attentional level in the construction (by the speaker) and comprehension
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(by the hearer) of the communication. So there is nothing negative about egocentrism if the
term is used in this sense.
Integrating the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism the SCA
emphasizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communica-
tion, albeit in varying degree. We cooperate by generating and formulating intention that is
relevant to the given actual situational context. At the same time our egocentrism means that
we activate the most salient information to our attention in the construction (speaker) and
comprehension (hearer) of utterances. The interplay of these two phenomena drives interac-
tion and generates meaning.
[email protected]
Kepa Korta
ILCLI & University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Spain
Tomorrow itll rain (or not): Notes on assertion, prediction and truth
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
John MacFarlane, in his celebrated Future contingents and relative truth (2003), revisited Ar-
istotles discussion about future contingents, truth, time and propositional content to argue for
doubly relativized propositions, i.e. propositions whose truth is relative to their context of utter-
ance as well as to their context of assessment. Without discussing other merits of MacFarlanes
relativism, I will show, first, how his argument about future contingents loses much of its ap-
peal when it is assessed via the speech act-theoretic notions of propositional content and direc-
tion of fit. And second, I will sketch an account of predictions (utterances of declarative sen-
tences about future contingents) that makes justice to the two sorts of intuitions that moti-
vated MacFarlanes discussion:
(a) the determinacy intuition, according to which a prediction has a definite truth-value, as it may
share its propositional content with assertions about the present or the past;
(b) the indeterminacy intuition, according to which a prediction does not have a definite truth- value,
given that the future is indeterminate or open.
Unlike MacFarlanes, my account does not require to give up truth-conditionally complete
(non-relative) propositional contents, but it will tell assertions and predictions apart as speech
acts with different direction of fit and, hence, different propositional content conditions. It
turns out that, at the time of utterance, predictions lack referential truth-conditions and only
have what I call utterance-bound truth-conditions. To conclude, I will discuss the impossibility
of expressing singular thoughts about future (contingent) entities.
[email protected]
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Multimodal Variations of Identity Construction: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy
Panel organizers:
Svetlana Kurte! & Monika Kopytowska
This panel is held under the auspices of the European Network for Intercultural Education Activi-
ties (ENIEDA www.enieda.eu), a collaborative academic network exploring innovative initiatives
that promote the values of plurilingualism, democratic citizenship and intercultural cooperation.
Not restricting our activities geographically and geo-politically, we are committed to setting up ex-
ploratory dialogue within, across and beyond regional, cultural and disciplinary boundaries.
The panel presentations will be followed by a discussion with Professor Istvan Kecskes.
Bashir, Hassan
1
& Hamza Bin Jehangir
2
Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar
From national to civilizational understanding: Ethical, social and political
implications of identity construction via school textbook revisions in Pakistan
School textbooks in the humanities and social sciences are crucial initial sources for political
socialization of the citizens. In this paper we revisit Pakistani social science and humanities
textbooks in K-12 public schools to understand the manner in which the Pakistani state has in-
tentionally crafted a unique national identity via constant manipulation of the historical narra-
tive of Pakistans creation. We demonstrate that these textbook show a trend in which official
accounts of Pakistans creation become increasingly mythical with little attention to historical
accuracy. These revised, and historically incorrect, accounts show Pakistan as the stronghold
of the religion of Islam whose roots can be traced directly to the early eighth century Arab in-
cursions in South Asia. The story of Pakistan thus becomes a cross civilizational story of the re-
ligion of Islam in South Asia. We argue that this evolving imagined narrative, deemed neces-
sary by various military/ dictatorial regimes to gain political legitimacy, has played a signifi-
cant role in developing unique notions of cultural self-understanding in Pakistan. A prominent
consequence of this renewed cultural self-understanding is the unprecedented role of religion
in legitimizing not only the political but also social and moral dimensions of the Pakistani soci-
ety. We argue that the Pakistani case is instructive for scholars interested in bridging the civili-
zational differences to develop hybrid models of understanding self and other especially in east-
ern contexts. The paper draws upon research conducted under an ongoing National Priorities
Research Project # 4-1195-6032 which focuses on difficulties faced in developing hybrid ana-
lytical models of joint East-West/ inter-civilizational approaches towards understanding of the
professional conduct.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
4
SPECIAL INTEREST PANEL
Jala Garibova
Azerbaijan University of Languages, Azerbaijan
Emerging identity formats in post-Soviet Turkic states
The nation-building process in post-Soviet Turkic states has marked the shaping of new iden-
tity formats reflecting the interplay of factors both from the Soviet and post-Soviet times. Iden-
tity is a complex, multi-layered, at times contextual, and a flexible phenomenon, and manifests
itself at the individual, group, national and supra-national levels. These features are also dis-
played in new identity formats of the post-Soviet Turkic nations, which are emerging in a vari-
ety of models, including discrete-national, mixed and in-group. Certainly, due to the complex-
ity and flexibility of the identity phenomenon, none of these models emerged as a simple, pure
and a unitary pattern, and each model involved some features of this or another model.
More specifically, the discrete-national identity format was the most obvious among the new
models, and was fed by the nation-building and national integration tendencies in the new
Turkic societies. Among mixed paradigms, the formation of a set of values based on the mix-
ture of national and Russian elements (linguistic or cultural) is the most visible. This covert
Russian element in the mixed identity format does not contradict with the national element,
but instead harmoniously coexists with it. Finally, the paradigm referred to as the in-group
identity is based on such concepts as clan relationships, place of origin, social class. This for-
mat is not always explicitly expressed as other formats are, but shows itself in social behavior,
language attitude, political views and socio-cultural preferences.
The presentation, therefore, discusses some of the emerging identity formats, contextualizing
them and problematizing them within the framework of the panel topic.
[email protected]
Jagoda Grani!
University of Split, Croatia
Ideology and language as markers of identity
Ideology, the totality of ideas underlying a theory with which an individual or social group iden-
tifies, plays a vital role, just as language does, in constructing individual and collective identity;
it is never a neutral role. The extent to which ideology and identity overlap as concepts is clear,
given that one of the main roles of ideology is its identificational role.
It is identity that lets us show our uniqueness vis--vis Others, through which we recognize our-
selves and through which the Others recognize us. Identity construction is a two-way process
that simultaneously includes and excludes, affirms and denies. A dialogue arises between our
identity and what we recognize as Other. Communication creates identity, and, in a way, rein-
forces it, since without information about the Self there is no perception of the Other. No iden-
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tity should ever take part in obstructing new identities, since one identity is not lost when it rec-
ognizes another identity.
Many speakers see the identificational function of language as its most important function. In
particular circumstances language can become both the object and also the means of ideologi-
zation, of politicization, even of manipulation with the help of certain negative ideologies.
The individual ought to be able to demonstrate all his or her identities in a multicultural mi-
lieu, but risking no sanctions and relying on the fact that this same milieu has allowed him to
gain the multiple identities. An individual's language repertoire simply points to the co-
existence of plural language identities that abolish anonymity and are manifested on local, re-
gional, and national levels. On the supranational level ideology has not disappeared, despite its
global character that assimilates everything national and explicitly promotes neutrality, for
neutrality does not exist in the real world. Furthermore, this is the well-known ideology of rul-
ing circles that always and everywhere has a privileged position.
[email protected]
Monika Kopytowska
University of !d", Poland
Identity, multimodality and social semiotics
The presentation introduces the panel Multimodal variations of identity construction: theory,
practice, pedagogy, focusing on the triad of identity, discourse and society. Starting with the
premise that identity and social reality are discursively constructed and maintained, it presents
an overview of approaches towards a web of interrelations among these three, with a particular
emphasis on linguistic and social constructivism, performativity, and representation. Durk-
heims concept of collective representations referring to the images of self and other (Durk-
heim 1982) and Moscovicis concept of social representations as ways of world making (Mos-
covici 1988: 231; see also Farr and Moscovici 1984) are revisited in the context of Searles the-
ory of social ontology (Searle 1995, 2006), pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis and social
semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996,. Discursive practices are seen both as the sites for
identity formation processes (Bamberg et al. 2011: 189), and as a reflection of power dynamics
and identity construction hence their socially constituted and constitutive nature (cf. Fair-
clough and Wodak 1997).
Following Bamberg et al. (2011), it is demonstrated that identity reflection/construction/
negotiation in and through discourse can be examined from three angles: (1) agency and con-
trol, 2) difference and sameness, and 3) constancy and change. Since multimodal resources are
used by social actors to create regimes of truth (Foucault 1972) in these three dimensions
and thus to shape perceptions of self versus others across time and space, inter alia, through
the media and educational practices, a case is made for a multimodal approach. As one of pos-
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sible applications of such an approach, the author analyses (multimodal) discursive construc-
tion of identity in political blogs.
BAMBERG, M., A. De Fina, A. & D. Schiffrin (2011) Discourse and identity construction, in: S.J. Schwartz, K.Luyckx & V.L. Vignoles (eds.),
Handbook of identity theory and research. Berlin: Springer Verlag., pp.177-199. DURKHEIM, . (1982). The elementary forms of religious
life. London: George Allen & Unwin. FARR, R.M. & S. Moscovici (eds.) (1984) Social representations. Cambridge: CUP. FAIRCLOUGH, N.
& R. Wodak (1997) Critical discourse analysis, in van Dijk, T. (ed.) Discourse as social interaction. London: Sage, pp. 14-31. KRESS, G.
& T. Van Leeuwen (1996) Multimodal analysis. London: Arnold. MOSCOVICI, S. (1988) Notes towards a description of social representa-
tions, in European Journal of Social Psychology 18: 211-250.
[email protected]
Svetlana Kurte"
1
& Rose Clark
2
University of Portsmouth, UK
Multimodal approaches to knowledge construction and representation: Teaching,
learning and assessment
Twenty first century higher education has seen a major paradigmatic shift from knowledge-
based to participatory and competence-based instruction and assessment. This was addition-
ally prompted by the graduate labour market requirements, involving a range of general and
transferable skills and intercultural awareness alongside subject-specific expertise.
The presentation discusses the pedagogical context of the construction and representation of
knowledge, focusing in particular on its multimodal manifestations and taking, in particular,
the UK higher education environment as an example. Drawing from the relevant literature in
the field (e.g. Goffman 1981; Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001; Pauwels 2005 etc), we will present
and briefly discuss a possible instructional and assessment model that enables the students not
only to develop expert knowledge and appropriate skills, but also to express themselves
through a range of multimodal frameworks that are in harmony with their individuality, expres-
sivity and learning style. The model in question was implemented during the delivery and as-
sessment of a final year undergraduate unit designed for international students attending a UK
based university. The students were encouraged to reflect on their own identity, explore it, de-
fine and (re)locate interculturally and, finally, express themselves using a range of semiotic re-
sources and multimodal frameworks.
The presentation will conclude by suggesting further pedagogical potentialities of the model
and contextualizing it within the remit of the panel topic.
GOFFMAN, E. (1981) Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia. KRESS, G. & T. Van Leeuwen (2001) Multimodal discourse:
The modes & media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold. PAUWELS, L. (2005) Websites as visual and multimodal cultural
expressions: Opportunities and issues of online hybrid media research, in Media, Culture & Society 27: 604-613.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
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Sharon Millar
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Digital identity management in contexts of provocation on a Danish online discussion
forum
Understanding identity to be linked to concepts of face and rapport management (Spencer-
Oatey 2007), the paper will consider instances of perceived provocative discursive behaviour,
such as rudeness, threats and trolling, and how these impact on identity issues (e.g. identity as
computer user, member of debate forum, democratic citizen) (cf. Graham 2007). The data de-
rive from threads from a meta-debate category 'sol debat', which allows users to debate a dis-
cussion forum offered by sol.dk and includes responses from the forum's moderators. As these
threads also link to the actual exchanges which have caused some form of offence, it is possible
to combine metapragmatic and pragmatic analyses to explore the role of normative expecta-
tions concerning politeness, sociality and democratic debate in the co-construction and man-
agement of digital identities.
GRAHAM, S.L. (2007) Disagreeing to agree: Conflict, (im)politeness and identity in a computer-mediated community, in Journal of Prag-
matics 39: 742-59. SPENCER-OATEY, H. (2007) Theories of identity and the analysis of face, in Journal of Pragmatics 39: 639-56.
[email protected]
Nomie Waldhubel
Ethnologie in Schule und Erwaschenenbildung e. V. (ESE), Germany
Weaving intercultural competence into the classroom: Understanding gender and
globalization
Looking at social changes over the past decades, living in a multicultural society has become an
omnipresent fact. Due to the increase of globalization and migration, contact between people
of different cultures is constantly increasing. Intercultural competence has become a buzz-
word.
The process of acculturation into a new society often times involves children and teenagers as
willing or unwilling participants. This is especially true for Germany, a country where individu-
als of 190 different countries currently live. In Germany, education is the responsibility of the
state (Bundeslnder); the federal government only plays a minor role. In this light, this paper
will offer an insight into a three year project currently taking place in the city of Mnster,
called Wann ist ein Mann ein Mann (When is a man a man, WIEMEM). This project aims to
contribute to the identity formation of boys and girls in German society through a positive view
of gender roles. Integrating intercultural competence into the classroom has been an integral
part of this project.
WIEMEM is implemented by the NGO Ethnologie in Schule und Erwachsenenbildung (Anthro-
pology in School and Adult Education, ESE e.V.). Over the past twenty years, ESE has devel-
oped and taught intercultural competence trainings aimed at children and adult education.
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ESEs WIEMEM project seeks to enhance childrens active role in building an equitable society
by realizing ones own stakes in it.
[email protected]
Angela Wang
1
& Zohreh Eslami
2
Texas A&M University, USA
Identity presentation on social networking sites
Immediately after the Internet era made computer-mediated communication easily accessible,
along came social networking sites (SNS) which enable one to create personal profile that can
be used to bring old classmates and friends together and give possibility for new friends to
meet online. Among all social networking sites, Facebook is indeed one of the most popular so-
cial networking sites that attract users of different nationalities. Comments, information, and
interactions left on SNS provides researchers with abundant interesting and fascinating infor-
mation on how individuals present themselves in the virtual community: whether they would
present the true authentic self, the ideal self, or a fabricated self that may lead to false impres-
sion.
Without face-to-face interaction, one would have to create more incentives and skillfully select
appropriate information to urge strangers to become friends by attracting their attention and
interest in the cyberspace. For example, the Hyperpersonal model, established by Tidwell and
Walther (2002), suggested CMC users frequently have the likelihood to decide what to say or
reveal, presenting the most positive aspect of the self to their interlocutor, in order to improve
interpersonal relationship (Vitak, 2008, p. 24).
The presentation will show results of a recently conducted study that has aimed to discover
whether there is a difference between SNS users online and offline identity and discover fac-
tors that affect identity presentation on Facebook. The following research questions guided the
study:
(1) How do individuals present and manage their self-image on Facebook?
(2) Is there a gap between individuals online and offline identity?
A multiple-method approach by using both interviews and surveys was used to collect data.
Participants included 25 males and 25 females. The findings have implications for cyber com-
munication and online identity development in social networking systems.
TIDWELL, L.C., & J.B. Walther (2002) Computer-mediated communication effects on disclosure, impression, and interpersonal evaluations:
Getting to know one another one bit at a time, in Human Communication Research 28: 317-348. VITAK, J.M. (2008) Facebook friends:
How online identities impact offline relationships. Unpublished master thesis: Georgetown University.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
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ALCN, Eva
Universitat Jaume I, Spain
Does instruction work for pragmatic learning in study abroad contexts?
The main focus of acquisitional interlanguage pragmatics has been on the factors that poten-
tially influence awareness and production of speech acts in naturalistic and instructional set-
tings. Within instructional settings, several classroom based studies have provided evidence on
the teachability of pragmatics and the effectiveness of different teaching approaches. In con-
trast to classroom settings where opportunities for pragmatic input and output are con-
strained, the present study aims to explore the effect of instruction on pragmatic learning in a
context with intensive target language exposure. More specifically, the present study aims to
explore whether pragmatic instruction makes a difference in study abroad contexts, and, if so,
whether the instructional effects are sustained over time.
Participants were 60 Spaniards following the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum in
the south of England for one academic year. They were divided into two groups, 30 received ex-
plicit instruction on email requests and 30 formed the control group, and their English lan-
guage proficiency level was upper intermediate. Five emails per students were collected on
four different occasions from the email requests that IB students sent to their learning mentors
between September 2011 and June 2012. Emails were analysed as regards the frequency of in-
ternal mitigators. Results of the study show that the treatment group displayed an advantage
over the control group in frequency of request mitigators in the post-test, which was sustained
in the delayed post-test, but not in the post-delayed test. Findings from the study show that in-
struction works for immediate and short term pragmatic gains, but not for long term gains, sug-
gesting that length of stay is a crucial factor when we address the effects of pragmatic instruc-
tion in study abroad contexts. In addition, the data reveal that type of request mitigator may be
an issue to consider in assessing the effects of instruction on pragmatic learning.
[email protected]
ALI, Ziyad
University of Bristol, UK
A crosssectional study of Syrian EFL learners pragmatic development: Towards a
taxonomy of modification in interlanguage requests
This paper is part of a larger cross-sectional study which aims to contribute to the underdevel-
oped area of pragmatic research on Arabic EFL/ESL learners (Al-Momani 2009) by investigat-
10
MAIN SESSION
ing developmental patterns in the requestive behaviour of Arabic-speaking Syrian students
learning English as a foreign language (SEFL). Employing a 12-item written discourse comple-
tion task (WDCT), off-line production of equal-status and unequal status requests in English
was collected from 130 learners (51 elementary, 40 intermediate and 39 advanced) and com-
pared against baseline data from 20 English native speakers (ENS). Applying a speech act
analysis (SA), the request data were coded using a combination of classification schemes
(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, Schauer 2006, Woodfield 2012) and analyzed quantitatively and quali-
tatively at two different levels: internal and external modification.
Consistent with previous studies (e.g. Trosborg 1995), the quantitative analysis showed that
the learner group, in comparison with ENS, underused internal modification and opted for ex-
ternal modification, whereas the qualitative analysis revealed that these learners exhibited a
range of new external modification patterns. A number of categories emerged which suggest a
need to revise existing taxonomies for such L1 (Arabic) speakers. Based on these findings, this
paper proposes a taxonomy of request modification devices as employed by SEFL learners. To
that end, existing taxonomies will be first examined with the aim of outlining their variation
both in their number of categories and in their category types and operationalization. Then, de-
velopment of the proposed taxonomy in this paper will be discussed in the light of some exam-
ples extracted from the qualitative data pool followed by a discussion of pedagogical implica-
tions concerning the integration of this new taxonomy in the Syrian EFL context with the aim
of fostering SEFL learners appropriate use of request modification devices.
AL-MOMANI, H. (2009) Caught between two cultures: The realization of requests by Jordanian EFL learners. Unpublished doctoral disserta-
tion. Indiana University of Pennsylvania. SCHAUER, G.A. (2006) The development of ESL learners pragmatic competence: A longitudinal
investigation of awareness and production in K. Bardovi-Harlig, J., C. Flix-Brasdefer & A. S. Omar (eds.) Pragmatics and Language Learning,
vol. 11. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 135-163. TROSBORG, A. (1995) Interlanguage pragmatics: Requests, complaints, and apolo-
gies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. WOODFIELD, H. (2012) I think maybe I want to lend the notes from you: Development of request modifica-
tion in graduate learners in M. Economidou-Kogetsidis & H. Woodfield (eds.) Interlanguage Request Modification. Amsterdam: John Benja-
mins, pp. 9-50.
[email protected]
ANTONIOU, Maria
National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Politeness in translation: The case of political discourse
The present study aims to explore, from a contrastive point of view, the conditions that rule the
political discourse in terms of linguistic politeness. Following Kerbrat-Orecchionis (2013) dis-
tinction, we intent to proceed to a classification of some linguistic markers that express polite-
ness (but also impoliteness). In order to do so, we shall put in contrast linguistic markers of
(im)politeness in French and Greek. We shall try to discover the underlying operations and the
constraints that regulate the use of such markers. By describing and contrasting the data, we
will be able to conclude about the existence or not of symmetrical uses of our two languages of
study as well as about problems that might appear in the target text.
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The theoretical framework we are following is that of Brown and Levinson and the one of the
Theory of Enunciation. Our data consists in examples drawn basically from journals written in
French and translated into Greek (Monde Diplomatique) and vice versa. Sometimes we exam-
ine examples drawn from oral texts (radio, interviews).
KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, C. (2013) Politeness, impoliteness, non-politeness, polirudeness: The case of political tv debates, D. Jamet & M.
Jobert (eds.) Aspects of linguistic impoliteness. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, p.16-45.
[email protected]
ASSIMAKOPOULOS, Stavros
1
& Michael Spagnol
2
University of Malta
Smurfing stuff: The semantics and pragmatics of placeholder lexical items
Even though they are cross-linguistically widely used in everyday informal conversation, place-
holder lexical items (such as thingy, what-dyou-call-it, as well as certain uses of stuff and
do, etc.) have been extremely understudied, with the few papers dedicated to them adopting
mainly a typological perspective and dealing only marginally with the description of their se-
mantic and pragmatic properties (but see Enfield 2003), usually classifying them under the
general categories of vagueness and (recognitional) deixis.
In the first part of this talk we will assess this classification with a view to showing that general
descriptions of this sort do not do full justice to the intricate ways in which such lexical items
are used, as they do not exclusively substitute for parts of an utterances encoded content but
can also be used to communicate the speakers non-committed attitude with respect to some
specific explicitly expressed proposition. Then we will turn to discuss the apparent productivity
exhibited by a particular sub-class of such placeholders, namely those that can be derived from
the pure demonstratives this and/or that in certain languages. In this instance, we will be
drawing from examples in Maltese like the following (from Aquilina 1987:195):
(1) Xinhu l-dak tieg!u?
What is his DEF-that?
(2) Tfajt il-la!am fit-ta"en u dakejtu.
I put the meat in the frying pan and I that-VERB.
In conclusion, we will put forth a characterization of placeholder terms from a relevance-
theoretic perspective, which typically assumes that our ability to effortlessly infer speaker-
intended meaning against contexts of utterance typically overrides the need for utterances to
always encode some fully propositional semantic content (cf. Carston 2002). Such a view, we
will argue, motivates the existence and widespread use of the lexical items at hand.
AQUILINA, J. (1987) Maltese-English dictionary (vol. 1). Malta: Midsea Books. CARSTON, R. (2002) Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Black-
well. ENFIELD, N.J. (2003) The denition of WHAT-dyou-call-it: semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis, in Journal of Pragmatics
35: 101-117.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
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BAIDER, Fabienne H.
1
& Maria Constantinou
2
University of Cyprus
The inter-cultural lingua franca of the intra-political extreme-right newspeak on
French and Greek political forums
Over the last thirty years, although marginalized by the mainstream mass media, the extreme-
right parties and movements have developed and used increasingly a worldwide network of fo-
rums, blogs and websites to reach their targeted audiences and widen their electorate. A previ-
ous study (Baider & Constantinou in press) examined how the emotions of contempt (towards
the out-group) and pride (towards the in-group) were constructed in the far-right extremist dis-
course of the Golden Dawn party to convince the electorate, reminiscent of the arguments
found in the Nazi discourse (Billig 1978; Musolff 2008). Discursive strategies based on these
emotions are used to encourage a strong sense of nationhood, constructed on the division of
Us and Them (Foucault, 1967; van Dijk et passim). These selves constructing a specific nation-
hood are dependent upon images (Lynn & Lea, 2003) and formulaic language. Bearing in
mind the different socio-political contexts in which the National Front in France and Golden
Dawn in Greece were born and have developed over the last years, we highlight the discourse
strategies used to build the consensus and the common identity transnationally among the fol-
lowers on forums. We argue that a lingua franca which we have called extreme-right newspeak
has emerged. We anchor our discussion within the three main dimensions (Context, Common
ground and Salience) considered to be the factors defining intercultural communication and
pragmatics (cf. Kecskes 2013). Through examples we will show how differently and similarly
followers of both parties construct discursively and symbolically the concepts inherent in this
newspeak. We show how an intercultural, inter-national (but intrapolitical) network is being
created by working on:
- the saliency of the emotion of pride built within the in-group conversations;
- the commonality of divisive concepts, such as racialism, (white) antiracism and phrases such as
national preference and border control issues;
- the socio-historical context to explain how and why GD participants push further the polarity and
the intensity of the emotion and its entailments (Martin & White 2005) in their discourses and em-
blems.
The study integrates findings of Rhetorical Psychology (for instance Billig 1978) and Intercul-
tural Pragmatics (Kecskes 2011, 2013) as well as CDA (van Dijk 1995 et passim); our methodol-
ogy includes as well corpus linguistic tools such as AntConc and SketchEngine and takes into
account statistical parameters such as frequency and specificity to evaluate qualitatively the
context of the utterances (Wodak 2002), as well as KWIC abstracts. Our data consist of letters
by followers appearing on the GD and FN sites; internet users comments on YouTube videos;
articles and messages posted on various Greek and French speaking blogs and forums of far-
right ideology and internet users reactions to them.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
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BARRON, Anne
1
& Emily Black
2
Leuphana Universitt Lneburg, Germany
"Oh ok. (.) Yeah, do you have like Christmas exams or anything?" Constructing small
talk in learner-native speaker voice-based telecollaboration
Developments in technology, and amongst these, the use of synchronous telecollaborative
tools promise to address the challenge of providing pragmatic input and opportunities for inter-
action in the foreign language classroom (Belz 2007: 128, cf. also ORourke 2007). Data for
the present study is drawn from Language LINC, a corpus of telecollaborative interactions be-
tween German NS learners of English and Irish English NS learners of German. The study in-
vestigates how learners and native speakers co-construct small talk in the opening phase of the
recorded interactions. Specifically, the in-depth analysis focuses on learner and native speaker
self and other-oriented topic initiation (Morris-Adams 2014: 156), and topic development
(Maynard & Zimmerman 1984: 7-8). This case study examines the interactions of two German
NNS Irish English NS dyads. The NNS in one dyad exhibits a high level of interactional com-
petence by using topic shifts to actively participate in topic development. The other reveals an
interactionally unsuccessful initial small talk exchange in which the NNS shows no active par-
ticipation in topic development, leaving the interactional burden on the Irish English NS. The
analysis highlights the need to teach interactional competencies and also the suitability of the
voice-based telecollaborative context for applying interactive competencies. It also adds to our
understanding of individual differences in small talk construction in the foreign language.
BELZ, J.A. (2007) The development of intercultural communicative competence in telecollaborative partnerships, in R. O'Dowd (ed) Online
intercultural exchange: An introduction for foreign language teachers. Clevedon, BU: Multilingual Matters, pp. 127-166. MAYNARD, D.W., &
D.H. Zimmerman (1984) Topical talk, ritual and the social organization of relationships, in Social Psychology Quarterly, 47: 301-316.
MORRIS-ADAMS, M. (2014) From Spanish paintings to murder: Topic transitions in casual conversations between native and non-native
speakers of English, in Journal of Pragmatics 62: 151-165. OROURKE, B. (2007) Models of telecollaboration (1): eTandem, in R. O'Dowd
(ed.) Online intercultural exchange: An introduction for foreign language teachers. Clevedon, BU: Multilingual Matters, pp. 41-61.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
BELLUCCI, Francesco
1
& Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
2

1Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
2University of Helsinki, Finland & Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
A rhapsody on theme by Peirce: Grices lectures on Charles S. Peirces theory of
signs
Among the H. Paul Grice Papers (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) there is a manuscript con-
cerned with the theory of signs (semeiotic) of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). The manuscript
was probably intended as the text for Grices lectures at Oxford during the early 1950s. It con-
tains an analysis of Peirces semeiotic together with material preparatory to Meaning (Grice
1957). It has never been published, but we are preparing a transcription of it to be published in
the near future.
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The manuscript furnishes evidence that Grice studied Peirces semeiotic in depth, and that his
account of meaning developed, at least in part, from his reaction to him. This paper discusses
two aspects of the influence that Peirce exercised upon Grice:
(1) In Meaning Grice presents his theory of meaning as a better formulation of the tradi-
tional distinction between natural and conventional signs. In the manuscript, Grice restates
Peirces claims about signs in terms of meaning. Peirces division of signs into icons, in-
dexes and symbols is a division of things having different kinds of meaning: indexes approxi-
mate natural meaning, while symbols approximate non-natural meaning. Icons do not corre-
spond to either type. They do not mean naturally but may be used to mean non-naturally.
(2) Peirce distinguished between type-signs and token-signs. Grice takes Peirces type-token
dichotomy as equivalent to his own distinction between what a sentence means and what
the speaker means by using a sentence: the former corresponds, in Peircean terms, to the
meaning of a type-sentence (timeless meaning) the latter to the meaning of a token-sentence
(speakers meaning). Grice believes that the same account can be found in nuce in Peirces
theory of signs. Therefore, his discussion of the speakers meaning may well be taken, as he
himself declares, as a rhapsody on theme by Peirce.
GRICE, H.P. (1957) Meaning, in The Philosophical Review 66: 377-388.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
BERGH, Gunnar
1
& Slve Ohlander
2
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Talking footie: A pragmatic study of English football language
The language of football can be seen as the worlds most widespread special language (Sager et
al. 1980:68), where English has played and still plays a dominant role. However, in con-
trast to many other special languages, relatively little research seems to have been carried out
on its linguistic properties (Lavric et al. 2008:5). A similar lack of coverage can also be noted
as regards football language at the crossroads of language, culture and cognition, where there
are several interesting football repertoires that warrant further scholarly attention.
The present paper discusses some subvarieties, or codes, of English football language, spoken
as well as written, from a pragmatic perspective. Such varieties include (i) official language, as
used in the documents issued by FIFA and UEFA, e.g. The field of play must be rectangular;
(ii) journalistic reporting, as used in live broadcasts and post-match commentaries, e.g. It was
a good time to score; (iii) participant talk, as used on the pitch and in the dressing-rooms, e.g.
Man on!; and (iv) supporter language, as used in fanzines and on the terraces, e.g. You are not
singing any more! (Bergh & Ohlander 2012). In addition, as regards the latter two, there is a
third, non-verbal medium of football language which is of particular pragmatic and intercul-
tural interest, namely body language. Typically consisting of gestures of different kinds, such
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language can be either codified or non-codified, the former illustrated by the repertoire of sig-
nals used by referees and the latter by the various gestures used by players and fans.
It is argued, among other things, that while football language can be seen as a fairly well-
defined register on its own, it tends to divide into different dialects, each with its typical charac-
teristics in terms of channel and style. As such, these dialects contain specific pragmatic fea-
tures and formulae in terms of lexis, grammar and body language that can be distinctly related
to specific user groups (Leith 1998).
BERGH, G. & S. Ohlander (2012) Free kicks, dribblers and WAGs: Exploring the language of the peoples game, in Moderna Sprk
106:11-46. LAVRIC, E., G. Pisek, A. Skinner & W. Stadler (eds) (2008) The linguistics of football. Tbingen: Gunter Narr. LEITH, A. (1998)
Over the moon, Brian: The language of football. London: Boxtree. SAGER, J., D. Dungworth & P. McDonald (1980) English Special Lan-
guages. Wiesbaden: Oscar Brandstetter.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
BIBOK, Kroly
University of Szeged, Hungary
Instrument-subject alternation from a lexical-pragmatic perspective
Dudchuk (2007) formalizes Levins (1993) idea about facilitating and intermediary instru-
ments in terms of verbal classes. Manner verbs (e.g. Russian vymyt wash) are compatible
with facilitating instruments while instruments of result verbs (e.g. Russian razbit break) are
intermediary. Only result verbs allow the so-called instrument-subject alternation, i.e. syntac-
tic constituents with instrument semantic role appearing as subjects instead of agentive sub-
jects.
However, manner verbs may occur with both kinds of instruments and their intermediary in-
struments do alternate syntactically as attested and illustrated by the Hungarian equivalent of
vymyt wash, namely, felmos in (1)(4) below.
(1) Pter felmosta a padlt egy felmosronggyal.
Peter washed the floor with a floor-cloth.
(2) *A felmosrongy felmosta a padlt.
The floor-cloth washed the floor.
(3) Pter felmosta a padlt egy takartgppel.
Peter washed the floor with a cleaning machine.
(4) A takartgp felmosta a padlt.
The cleaning machine washed the floor.
The present paper attempts to work out an account of the instrument-subject alternation that
has the following advantageous features. First, by means of a pragmatically oriented weaker no-
tion of causation (Koenig et al. 2008) a more solid basis is assumed to determine which verbs
alternate and which verbs do not. Second, cases when a single verb does occur in both construc-
tions are explained by a single underspecified lexical-semantic representation. Third, syntactic
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alternations are not treated as lexical or constructional phenomena. However, they fit a lexical-
constructional approach which naturally extends to lexical pragmatics (Bibok 2010).
A lexical-pragmatic perspective which favors encyclopedic and contextual information to con-
vert encoded word meanings into full-fledged concepts guarantees an economic way to get con-
structional meanings appearing in syntactically alternating structures. Furthermore, in such a
case the issue about the direction of their derivation from each other does not emerge either
(contra Dudchuk 2007).
[email protected]
BIL, Magdalna
1
& Alena Ka#mrov
2
University of Pre$ov, Slovakia
Is prosody a relevant variable in rendering power and solidarity? (A non-native
speakers view of American English)
One of the factors in maintaining conversation is speaker meaning and/or intention. This can
be understood not only as a cognitive notion but also as a deontological notion: what the
speaker is committed to in interaction (Haugh 2013). Such commitment may imply the expres-
sion of social stratification in language and is achieved through recognizing the level of formal-
ity and adopting appropriate language means. Germanic languages like English lack a system
based on morphological and syntactic markers for expressing attitudinal/social deixis. It fol-
lows that this kind of deixis is either given different significance, or employs (the combination
of) language means across the language system. Since in English the study of the issue of
power and solidarity is not attributed to the usage of T/V pronouns, in the make-up of speaker
meaning other language levels may well be considered as variables. The research to be pre-
sented focuses on the phonic level in interaction with a pragmatic view, on the pragmatic inter-
pretation of selected suprasegmentals in the genre comparable with natural conversation. The
research material is pre-scripted text, film dialogue in one episode of drama series Gilmore
girls. The methodology of research includes firstly, the analysis of the exchanges in terms of
providing the typology of assumed T/V relations employing implicature and explicature; sec-
ondly, measuring turn-taking pause duration and melody contour; thirdly, interpreting the
share of the obtained data in communicating (in)formal relationship. Our assumption is that a
native speaker of English is unconsciously aware of the concept of T/V distinction; however,
this is embedded in the mindset and not overtly expressed. This provides the primer for testing
the hypothesis that suprasegmentals provide a key to perceiving T/V distinction, i.e. can serve
as a variable in understanding how power and solidarity as a type of speaker meaning is ren-
dered in (American) English.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
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BLOCHOWIAK, Joanna
University of Geneva, Switzerland
Conceptual and procedural meaning of connectives
This paper argues in favour of the view that semantic meaning of connectives is minimal, non-
ambiguous, and the meaning variations in use are the result of pragmatic processes (Horn
1972, Carston 2002).
Since Grice (1989), the hypothesis of logical part of meaning as the core semantics has been
adopted for logical connectives, i.e. these having their counterpart in logic as and, and here it
will be extended for the analysis of non-logical connectives (as because).
The main hypothesis is that connectives serve to express pragmatically tuned reasonings,
which can be well formulated with the notions of procedural and conceptual meaning (Sperber
& Wilson 1986, Wilson & Sperber 1993, Blakemore 1987, 2001).
First, connectives do have some minimal conceptual meaning which is restricted to the proper-
ties of relations they convey. For instance, and requires additivity (cf. Zeevat & Jasinskaja
2007) while because necessitates asymmetry. Second, the procedural meaning of connectives
corresponds to practical reasoning (Woods et al. 2002) based on conceptual rules reflecting
speakers encyclopaedic knowledge about regularities and the conceptual meaning imposes
some constraints on the premises of such reasoning (type of laws/rules).
The interplay between conceptual and procedural meanings manifests itself in different prag-
matic relations (implicatures, explicatures) that help to elucidate the behaviour of connectives.
Inter alia, it explains (i) why and can express causality only in the order matching the tempo-
ral course of events, namely: temporal ordering is compatible with additivity and (ii) why the
causal interpretation of and is cancellable, namely: what goes beyond the additivity is not nec-
essary, thus, cancellable.
The resulting model will also explain in a uniformed framework different uses of connectives
in natural language (for instance, different domains of use as defined by Sweetser 1990) as well
as some well known puzzles related to the use of and (for instance Horns example and the
puzzle of juxtaposed sentences (Carston 2002)).
[email protected]
BOGDANOWSKA, Monika
1
& Ewa Bogdanowska-Jakubowska
2
University of Silesia, Poland
(Im)politeness and gender: An analysis of public exchanges between male and female
politicians
In spite of the officially declared equality, the Polish public space, and especially the political
scene, is dominated by men. The few female members of the Polish Parliament are approached
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by male members with a mixture of gallantry, respect and patronizing. Such an approach to
women is deeply rooted in Polish culture, in which a traditional division between mens and
womens social roles is still extremely powerful among the conservatively thinking Poles. Male
members of right-wing parties represent the type of hegemonic masculinity (the dominant
form of masculinity, associated with marriage, power and physical strength), and perceive
women mainly in terms of their gender identity, rather than in terms their political views and
achievements (cf. Connells theory of gender, 1987).
Gender is performed during social interaction, and is constructed through a ritualized repeti-
tion of norms (Butler 1993: x). People, creating their identity during interaction with others,
are constantly negotiating their gender. Thus the individuals identity, gender identity in-
cluded, like face, is both relational and interactional, and as such is created only in relation to
other people during social interaction.
The aim of the paper is to analyse public conversational exchanges between male and female
politicians in terms of the way women are referred to and addressed by men. In the study we
use the discursive approach to (im)politeness (Watts 2003, Locher 2006), which allows us to
analyse longer conversational exchanges instead of single utterances. The data used in the
study come from parliamentary debates and interviews with Polish politicians presented in the
Polish channel TVN24.
BUTLER, J. (1993) Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. London: Routledge. CONNELL, R.W. (1987) Gender and power. Soci-
ety, the Person and Sexual Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. LOCHER, M.A. (2006) Polite behavior within relational work: The discursive
approach to politeness, in Multilingua 25: 249-267. WATTS, R. (2003) Politeness. Cambridge: CUP.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
BREUER, Esther
1
, Mariya Chankova
2
& Irena Vassileva
3
1Cologne University, Germany
2South-Western University Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
3New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
How does the Internet transform students information search behavior?
The present paper reports the results of a pilot investigation on students information search
behaviour as part of a large-scale study on academic communication in multimedia environ-
ment. Methodologically, the pilot study consisted of two rounds of questionnaires distributed
to students in Germany and in Bulgaria. The questionnaire focused on the users assessment of
their online search behavior and their communication habits. General concerns about the
methodology for studying the impact of multimedia environment on academic communication
underlie the elaboration of the questionnaire. As hyperlinks are the embodiment of hyper-
space, providing communication paths between webpages, e-documents, and different kinds of
multimedia content, an enquiry into the hyperlink preferences is also included in the survey.
The results point to differences as well as similarities between students from Germany and Bul-
garia. For instance, both groups are fairly dissatisfied with the possibilities of finding academic
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information in physical libraries as well as online. Besides, German students state more of-
ten that they would not copy and paste information from the Internet for academic purposes
while students from Bulgaria admit to using small parts of text without references to the
source. The results point to what can be perceived as a general underuse of the potential of mul-
timedia environment and partially to a need to improve students search skills.
The pilot-study will be followed by experiments employing the screen-capturing software Cam-
tasia which will make it possible to compare the students self-assessment with their actual
search behavior.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
3 [email protected]
CAPONE, Alessandro
University of Palermo, Italy
The pragmatics of indirect reports and slurring
According to Volosinov (1971) there is a tension between two indirect discourse practices; one
in which the reported messages integrity is preserved and the boundaries between the main
message and the embedded reported message are formally marked and one in which such
boundaries are dissolved as the reporting context allows the reporting speaker to intrude to a
greater extent and transform the message by stylistic interpolations. This tension is clearly re-
solved, in the context of my paper on indirect reports, through the recognition of pragmatic
principles which assign default interpretations (according to which the boundaries between
the reporting message and the reported message are clearly visible and the reported speakers
voice prevails at least within the embedded message), while allowing context to create priori-
ties which override the default interpretations and make the otherwise costly violations of the
pragmatic principles worthwhile thanks to the facilitation and subordination of the informa-
tion flow to the exigencies of the embedding context.
[email protected]
CEPOLLARO, Biancamaria
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy
It's not just a matter of good manners: Slurs
Slurs are derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual
orientation, nationality and so on. Some examples of slurs in English are faggot, nigger and
bitch. Usually, slurs have a so-called neutral counterpart, i.e. a term that does not possess de-
rogatory force, but identifies the same set of people as the corresponding slur. For example,
the neutral counterparts of the above-mentioned pejoratives are, respectively: homosexual,
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black and woman. In the last fifteen years philosophers and linguists have turned their at-
tention to slurs. On one hand, this interest is due to the fact that slurs possess puzzling linguis-
tic properties; on the other hand, slurs are worth investigating since the questions they pose
are related to other crucial issues, such as the descriptivism/expressivism divide, the
semantic/pragmatic divide and, generally speaking, the theory of meaning. There are three
main kind of theories about slurs: semantic, pragmatic and content-less. Despite these recent
investigations about pejoratives, there is no fully adequate explanation of slur: in my paper I
assess the main theories formulated so far and I point out their weaknesses, focusing on the no-
tions of conventional implicature and pragmatic presupposition. My aim is to analyze the diffi-
culties that the main theories encounter and to identify the characteristics that a satisfactory
account of slurs must have.
[email protected]
CHIOU, Michael
Future defaults in Modern Greek
Given the description in traditional grammar, future tense (henceforth FUT) in Greek is
formed with the particle tha (%& = will) followed by the perfective or the imperfective non-past
verb forms (PNP and INP). In recent work (Giannakidou 2009, 2012 and Giannakidou & Mari
2012), it is claimed that the particle tha is not a future tense marker but it is an epistemic mo-
dal operator with present (now) perspective. Moreover, the Greek non-past verb forms are
treated as a non-deictic time, i.e. as forms that cannot function as tense markers on their own.
Prima facie, it appears that there is a gap between the coded meaning of FUT constructions
and their preferred or default interpretation in communication. The major question that
needs to be addressed is how hearers induce future readings from the use of non future-
marked constructions.
In this paper, I agree with Giannakidou (2009, 2012) and Giannakidou & Mari (2012) that
FUT has a modal semantic base conveying epistemic modality and I argue that the preferred
future-time reference arises as a default, pragmatically enriched, more informative reading of
the modal semantic base. A way forward, is to propose that the future-time reading of FUT in
Greek is a presumptive meaning related to the neo-Gricean Principle of Informativeness
known as the I-principle (Levinson 2000).
This study adds up to the arguments in support of the theorising that futurity is subsumed un-
der modality and also it puts forward the idea that future-time reference is a product of the divi-
sion of labour between semantics and pragmatics.
GIAANNAKIDOU, A. (2009) The dependency of the subjunctive revisited: Temporal semantics and polarity, in Lingua 120: 1883-1908. GI-
ANNAKIDOU, A. (2012). The Greek future particle as an epistemic modal, in Z. Gavriilidou, A. Efthimiou, E. Thomadaki & P. Kambakis-
Vougiouklis (eds.) Proceedings of 10th ICGL. Democritus University of Thrace, pp. 48-61. GIANNAKIDOU, A. & A. Mari (2012) A modal
analysis of Greek and Italian future morphemes, in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17: 255-270. LEVINSON, S.C. (2000) Presumptive
meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[email protected]
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CHODOROWSKA-PILCH, Marianna
University of Southern California, USA
Formal and informal treatment in marketing images
As suggested by Levinson (1983), the use of informal (T) and formal (V) pronouns in Euro-
pean languages (Brown & Gilman 1960) represents a case of conventional implicatures (Grice
1975). Both for Spanish (Marn 1972) as well as universally (Brown & Levinson 1987), the con-
ventional meaning, encoded by the V pronouns or address, conveys formality, deference or po-
liteness toward the addressee or hearer (H).
By the end of the twentieth century, it has been observed that the use of the informal treatment
of the addressee has expanded or extended into new contexts, previously encoded by the for-
mal treatment (Blas Arroyo 1994-1995).
This paper analyzes the formal and informal treatment used in marketing images in the Span-
ish magazine (El Pas Semanal) over the period of one year (2004-2005). It is proposed that
the flouting of Politeness Rules (Lakoff 1973) is a marketing strategy to override determined
social factors, such as gender, age, and addressees purchasing power.
Although marketing images use the informal treatment in a greater proportion in comparison
with the formal treatment, flouting of the social distance or deference occurs less in commer-
cials related to cigarettes and beauty products for women at the higher range of price. The fre-
quent flouting of social distance (age, formality, purchasing power) seems to conduce to such
implicatures as inclusion of the addressee in terms of ageless and financially welcoming all so-
cial sectors (BMW, Mercedes, etc.).
Thus, Lakoffs (1973) rule (Dont impose) is flouted for the sake of rule Make A feel good-be
friendly, which conveys a positive, young, and enthusiastic attitude toward addressees. That,
in turn, is a marketing strategy to win over the addressee by apparent limitless possibilities to
purchase.
[email protected]
CONSTANTINESCU, Mihaela-Viorica
University of Bucharest, Romania
Impoliteness in the Romanian court life (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries)
The study of historical im/politeness (cf. Culpeper & Kdr 2010) favours not only the analysis
of cultural influence on linguistic communication, but also a deeper understanding of the im/
politeness phenomenon, usually studied from a synchronic perspective.
Impoliteness in Romanian language and culture has been analysed mostly from a synchronic
perspective. Our presentation focuses on some diachronic form-function mappings (Jucker
2008) concerning impoliteness, on the interactional patterns connected with the conditions of
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17th-18th centuries Romanian society. As regards the bad data problem (Labov 1994) of his-
torical pragmatics, for Romanian, we can rely mostly on constructed speech, scaling from im-
mediacy to distance (Koch & Oesterreicher 1985). The corpus is based on chronicles from the
late 17th and 18th centuries. As the chronicles are mainly presenting court life, the situations
will exhibit impoliteness in mainly formal settings, the informal settings being quite rare. The
court reveals inter and intra-cultural interactions, different power relationships, regarding
mainly internal and foreign politics. The setting allows for various observations as regards so-
cial norms and sociality rights (Spencer-Oatey 2002, Culpeper 2011).
Our study favours a first order impoliteness approach, thus emphasising the contemporaries
perspectives and their evaluations of events and interactions. Three aspects of impoliteness
will be taken into account (cf. Eelen 2001): expressive (linguistically coded), classificatory (ap-
praisal) and meta-pragmatic (auto reflexive). Intentionality and emotional aspects related to
impoliteness, as perceived by the target or audience (the uptake), will be approached too.
The analysis of Romanian interactions could bring forward the relation between a certain type
of culture (collectivistic) and the ways to express and evaluate impoliteness bearing in mind
the various cultural influences (Ottoman, Greek, Polish, Russian, Western European).
CULPEPER, J. (2011) Impoliteness: Using language to use offence. Cambridge: CUP. CULPEPER, J. & D.Z. Kdr (eds.) (2010) Historical
(im)politeness, linguistic insights. Bern: Peter Lang. EELEN, G. (2001) A critique of politeness theories. Manchester, St Jerome Publishing.
JUCKER, A.H. (2008) Historical Pragmatics, in Language and Linguistics Compass 2: 894-906. KOCH, P. & W. Oesterreicher (1985) Spra-
che der nhe - sprache der distanz: Mndlichkeit und schriftlichkeit im spannungsfeld von sprachttheorie und sprachgeschichte, in Romanis-
tisches Jahrbuch 36: 15-43. LABOV, W. (1994) Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell. SPENCER-OATEY, H.
(2002) Managing rapport in talk: using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of rela-
tions, in Journal of Pragmatics 34: 529-545.
[email protected]
CRAWFORD CAMICIOTTOLI, Belinda
Universit di Pisa, Italy
The interpersonal pragmatics of intercultural financial discourse: a contrastive
analysis of European vs. Asian earnings conference calls
The term interpersonal pragmatics has recently been introduced by Locher and Graham (2010:
1) to characterize research that explores in what ways social actors use language to shape and
form relationships in situ. However, interpersonal pragmatics focuses not only on the role of
language in creating relationships, but also on the relational work that unfolds in socially situ-
ated interaction (Locher 2013).
This study aims to shed light on the relational dimension of earnings conference calls. These
ICT-mediated events are now used by companies worldwide for oral financial reporting (Craw-
ford Camiciottoli 2013), and therefore offer unique opportunities to study the speech of partici-
pants from different cultural backgrounds who use English as a common language to communi-
cate professionally. The analysis is based on two corpora that contain the transcripts of earn-
ings conference calls held by European and Asian telecommunication companies, representing
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two cultural orientations that are widely recognized as having diverse approaches to interac-
tion. The following research questions were addressed:
- Which pragmalinguistic features are used to signal relational work in this communicative context?
- What differences in usage are there in European vs. Asian earnings conference calls?
- How is usage impacted by the cultural background of the participants and the virtual setting?
The analytical approach integrates both quantitative and qualitative methods. Text-mining soft-
ware was first used to extract pragmalinguistic features that encode relational aspects of com-
munication. This process revealed a marked presence of mitigators (e.g., a little bit) and boost-
ers (e.g., extremely) that strengthen or weaken the illocutionary force of propositions, expres-
sive speech acts (e.g., thanking) and various forms of address. Follow-up qualitative analysis
showed rather strong differences between the two corpora and, interestingly, not always in
alignment with presumed cultural orientations. The findings suggest that the participants rela-
tional use of interpersonal features is impacted by their cultural background, but also by the
need to achieve distinct professional goals in a technology-mediated setting.
CRAWFORD CAMICIOTTOLI, B. (2013) Rhetoric in financial discourse: A linguistic analysis of ICT-mediated disclosure genres. Amsterdam:
Rodopi. LOCHER, M. (2013) Relational work and interpersonal pragmatics, in Journal of Pragmatics 58: 138-151. LOCHER, M. & S.L. Gra-
ham (2010) Introduction to interpersonal pragmatics, in M. Locher & S.L. Graham (eds.) Interpersonal pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, pp. 1-13.
[email protected]
CRAWSHAW, Robert
Emancipatory pragmatics, situated discourse and the interpretation of cross-
cultural exchange
This paper, based on research conducted during my fellowship at the University of Konstanz in
2011 and arising out of the ESRC-funded Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication (PIC)
Project (2002-2006), considers the issues involved in analysing data derived from cross-
cultural exchanges in specific situations. It argues for an approach based on principles labelled
emancipatory by a group of international researchers (Hanks et. al 2009) who seek an alterna-
tive to what they see as western-dominated categories in pragmatics research such as face, po-
liteness and features based on individual speech acts. Instead they posit a methodology based
on the analysis of situated discourse where the emphasis is on negotiated meaning and deictic
markers which delineate the position of interlocutors in relation to each other. The situation
which acts as the point of reference for the discussion in this paper is that of English language
teaching assistants in French schools who are seeking information from the person designated
as their mentor during their period as a teacher in France. Retrospective, triangulated data re-
veals their feeling about the outcomes of the exchange and allows for close analysis of the lin-
guistic features which define their relationships with their interlocutor, enabling broader con-
clusions to be drawn about the application of pragmatics theory to research into cross-cultural
communication.
[email protected]
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DARASELIA, Nino
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia
Blessing formulas across cultures (on the material of Georgian, English and Russian)
The paper examines Georgian, English (British and American variants) and Russian blessing
formulas from the standpoints of frame semantics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. The em-
pirical data embraces samples of spoken and written discourse genres as well as the data ob-
tained from the informants.
The choice of the issue was determined by the following factor: current Georgian usage is abun-
dant in blessing formulas; in Georgia blessings are integrated into everyday speech etiquette
and serve as indispensable elements of different types of verbal rituals (both formal and infor-
mal). Quite often the given peculiarity is the main cause of interference errors made by Geor-
gian speakers of English or Russian.
The analysis of the empirical data has proved that the relationship between the literal meaning
and pragmatic function of a blessing formula can be of three types:
(1) A blessing fully retains its literal meaning and serves as a blessing proper in communica-
tion.
(2) It is partially devoid of its referential meaning and functions as an element of a verbal rit-
ual.
(3) A blessing is almost fully devoid of its propositional content, i.e. it is idiomatized and gram-
maticalized, and serves as a verbal routine, that can be a part of a verbal ritual.
The enumerated types of relationship are differently presented in the languages and cultures
under discussion; in Georgian all three types of relationship are evidenced; moreover, many of
the blessing formulas are polyfunctional and depending on a social context can fit any of the
three types. In the Russian data the samples of the first type are less numerous and polyfunc-
tional blessings are less frequent. Georgian and (to some extent Russian blessings) are sociolin-
guistically differentiated, i.e they are age/gender/social status/register specific. In the English
data the second and third types of relation are attested and blessing formulas reveal no poly-
functionalism; in the English data, samples from American English prevail.
The observations have shown that (despite differences) in Georgian, English and Russian,
blessing formulas are encountered in different discourse genres: public speeches, formal/
informal letters, seasonal postcards; they are elements of such verbal rituals as thanking, con-
gratulating, toast-making, expressing condolences, leave-taking etc. However, the frequencies
of blessing formula usage across these languages and cultures differ greatly.
[email protected]
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DE BLEEKER, Liesbeth
1
, Sofie Decock
2
& Ellen Van Praet
3
Ghent University, Belgium
Between conflict and rapport: An inter- and cross-cultural analysis of service
encounters between French- and German-speaking customers and Belgian internal
sales advisors.
This presentation is based on ethnographic fieldwork at the head office of a multinational in
the Flemish part of Belgium. We focus on the sales department, where several country teams,
consisting of the team leader and mostly Dutch-speaking internal sales advisors, communi-
cate with foreign clients via e-mail, fax, and phone about price offers, orders, and complaints.
More specifically, we interview and observe internal sales advisors from the German and the
French teams. We have access to their e-mail correspondence with German- and French-
speaking customers, and we are allowed to record their phone calls with these customers.
As the companys customers increasingly turn to the webshop for straightforward types of inter-
actions such as price offers and orders, e-mail and phone become a kind of second-line service,
in which the share of more complex conversational genres is augmenting. Whether the internal
sales advisors have to handle complaints about delivery and product quality, or are encouraged
to adopt an active sales policy (follow-up lost sales, find new prospects), their conversations
with foreign customers become more sensitive, and therefore more prone to intercultural
conflict and misunderstanding.
For this paper, we zoom in on e-mail and phone correspondence with French and German cus-
tomers. Which discursive patterns and strategies for building rapport and saving face can be
distinguished in these complex, and potentially conflict-laden service encounters? We will
tackle this research question both from an intercultural (interaction between Belgian internal
sales advisors and German- and French-speaking customers) and a cross-cultural (comparison
of German- and French-speaking customers) perspective, while paying specific attention to
(in)directness, politeness, intonation, pausing and turn-taking.
Relying on linguistic discourse and genre analysis and drawing on cross-cultural pragmatics as
well as interactional sociolinguistics, we shed light on how correspondents deal with the com-
plexity of intercultural contacts in an (after) sales context. From a methodological angle, the
case study shows the added value of integrating linguistic analysis and ethnographic research
methods (interviews & participant observation). Moreover, it illustrates how sensitive issues
related to multilingualism, intercultural conflict and trust are translated (or not) in a multina-
tionals language and sales policy.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
3 [email protected]
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DOMANESCHI, Filippo
University of Genoa, Italy
Processing presupposition triggers
Presupposition failure is said to happen when a speaker utters a sentence p containing a pre-
supposition trigger that activates a presupposition q, and q does not belong to the common
ground. If this failure occurs, speakers are supposed to repair the failure to make sense of the
utterances felicity. According to Glanzberg (2003, 2005), two subcategories of being infelici-
tous may emerge in case of presupposition failure depending on the kind of presupposition trig-
ger in use. On the one hand, certain syntactic structures or lexical elements activates strong
presuppositions, namely, presuppositions that in case of failure lead to obligatory repair of the
context. On the other hand, other kinds of triggers activate weak presuppositions that, in case
of presupposition failure, lead simply to optional repair of the context.
Taking into account Glanzbergs distinction between strong and weak presuppositions, I have
designed a study in Experimental Pragmatics providing two main results: (i) processing the
presuppositions triggered by Demonstratives, Cleft Constructions and Factive Verbs seem to
be mandatory, while, in order to understand the assertive content of an utterance, processing
the presuppositions of Focus Sensitive Particles and Iteratives, seem to be simply optional;
Change of state verbs represent an in between category of triggers. (ii) The cognitive demands
of different presupposition triggers do not primarily depend on whether they optionally or obli-
gatorily lead to process the presuppositions activated. Rather, their cognitive demands seem to
be related with the complexity of the mental representation of the presupposition required.
GLANZBERG, M. (2003) Felicity and presupposition triggers. University of Michigan Workshop in Philosophy and Linguistics, USA.
GLANZBERG, M. (2005). Presuppositions, truth values and expressing propositions, in G. Preyer & G. Peter (eds.) Contextualism in philoso-
phy: Knowledge, meaning, and truth. Oxford: OUP.
[email protected]
DOMINGUEZ ROMERO, Elena
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Synesthesic perception in English and Spanish: A corpus-based approach
Synesthesia also spelled synsthesia or synaesthesia, from the ancient Greek '() [syn], to-
gether, and &!'%*'+, [aisth-sis], sensation.is a neurological phenomenon in which stimula-
tion of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a sec-
ond sensory or cognitive pathway (Cytowic 2002, 2003, 2009, Harrison & Baron-Cohen 1996).
The present paper aims to explore the meanings, frequency and distribution of inferential uses
of English and Spanish perception verbs in which the attributes assigned to the subject refer-
ent reveal a synesthesic perception. Verbs under analysis include the following: look, pare-
cer, sound, sonar, feel, sentir, taste, saber, smell and oler. The selection draws
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on studies by Gisborne (2010) and Whitt (2009, 2010), who consider these perception verbs to
be lexical means to express evidentiality.
CYTOWIC, R.E. (2002) Synesthesia: A union of the senses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. CYTOWIC, R.E. (2003) The man who tasted shapes.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. CYTOWIC, R.E. & D.M. Eagleman (2009) Wednesday is indigo blue: Discovering the brain of synesthesia. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. GISBORNE, N. (2010) The event structure of perception verbs. Oxford: OUP. HARRISON, J.E. & S. Baron-Cohen
(1996) Synaesthesia: Classic and contemporary readings. Oxford: Blackwell. WHITT, R.J. (2009) Auditory evidentiality in English and Ger-
man: The case of perception verbs, in Lingua 119: 10831095. WHITT, R.J. (2010) Evidentiality and perception verbs in English and German.
Oxford: Peter Lang.
[email protected]
DYNEL, Marta
University of !d", Poland
Implied untruthfulness and quality-based tropes at the service of irony
According to the Gricean thought (Grice 1975, 1978), irony stems from the flouting of the first
maxim of Quality. This is why it may be conceptualised as originating in overt untruthfulness
(Dynel 2013a, 2013b). However, some manifestations of irony are more complex and seem to
divert from this prototypical model in that they either appear to rest on truthfulness or involve
untruthfulness other than that related to irony per se. The central objective of this presentation
will be to elucidate a number of subtypes of irony which display these less prototypical features
and to argue that they are amenable to a neo-Gricean analysis.
Firstly, attention will be paid to verisimilar irony (cf. Partington 2006, 2007) which operates
on what is said, whereby the speaker does communicate a truthful proposition (expressed liter-
ally), but primarily produces an ironic implicature (cf. Gibbs and OBrien 1991, Hamamoto
1998, Sperber and Wilson 1998, Colston 2000, Colston and OBrien 2000, Utsumi 2000, Part-
ington 2007, Kapogianni 2011, Dynel 2013a). It can be argued that in this case, an ironic impli-
cature arises from implied untruthfulness embedded in the Relation maxims flouting which
gives rise to an untruthful as-if implicature. Secondly, an ironic implicature may be piggy-
backed on another implicature originating in flouting the first maxim of Quality, which is pro-
moted by metaphor or metonymy (cf. Barbe 1995). An ironic implicature is recognised only af-
ter the one contingent on a metaphor has been understood (cf. Stern 2000, Bezuidenhout
2001, Popa 2009, Camp 2011). In this context, hyperbole and litotes, the remaining two tropes
fostering Quality-based implicatures may also be addressed. Rather than giving rise to an impli-
cature distinct from the ironic one, it will be shown, the two coincide with litotic and hyper-
bolic irony, frequently (wrongly) considered by researchers to rely on flouting Quantity max-
ims.
[email protected]
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ECONOMIDOU-KOGETSIDIS, Maria
University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Data collection methods and native speakers requests: A comparison of WDCT
(written discourse completion test) and naturally-occurring requests
The validity of data collection instruments to be used for cross-cultural and interlanguage prag-
matics research has been widely debated. More specifically, the research instrument most ap-
propriate for eliciting L1 and L2 speech act data and politeness strategies has been a promi-
nent topic of investigation for a number of studies in the field. The main data sources of speech
act performance have been naturally-occurring speech and elicited data via DCTs (discourse
completion tests) and oral role-plays. Since the first extensive and systematic use of the written
discourse completion test in the Cross-Cultural speech act realisation projects (CCSARP)
(Blum-Kulka 1982, Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), the DCT (written and oral) has been used to
gather and compare data in the majority of empirical studies in pragmatics research. Yet, de-
spite its widespread use, the WDCT has also been the most criticized elicitation instrument in
cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics with the main criticisms being related to the
WDCTs inability to capture the features of spoken language and natural interaction.
The present study examines the extent to which written DCT requests approximate naturally-
occurring requests in a standard, service-encounter telephone situation with respect to the (a)
degree of directness, (b) internal modification (syntactic and phrasal/lexical downgraders),
and (c) request perspective. Results from the study revealed a picture with two sides: DCT re-
quests and naturally-occurring requests presented significant differences in a number of di-
mensions but at the same time they followed similar trends in terms of directness and lexical
modification. Following the results, it is argued that the WDCT requests can, to a certain ex-
tent, approximate natural data and that WDCT data is therefore not without validity. It is
warned, however, that findings from WDCT data should be treated with caution and as prelimi-
nary and that the use of a WDCT should be used alongside other research instruments and
tested against other data through methodological triangulation. This will ensure greater valid-
ity and a better level of generalizability.
BLUM-KULKA, S. (1982) Learning to say what you mean in a second language: A study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew
as a second language, in Applied Linguistics 3: 29-59. BLUM-KULKA, S., G. Kasper & J. House (eds.) Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests
and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
[email protected]
ESCANDELL-VIDAL, Victoria
1
& Manuel Leonetti
2

1UNED, Spain
2Universidad de Alcal, Spain
Isnt it ironic? Syntax and irony in Spanish
While it is generally agreed that irony is a contextual phenomenon (cf. Wilson & Sperber
2012), many researchers have tried to identify overt clues guiding the hearer towards ironic in-
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terpretations, especially prosody and tone of voice (Bryant & Fox Tree 2002, 2005, Bryant
2010, 2011). Some syntactic constructions have been also identified as encoding irony.
In this talk we present the results of a survey carried out to gain understanding on the links be-
tween syntax and irony. Our data show that there are some sentence structures, corresponding
to a specific syntactic construction, Verum-Focus Inducing Fronting (Leonetti & Escandell-
Vidal 2009), to which speakers tend to assign an ironic interpretation, even when presented as
isolated sentences in a written form: apparently speakers do it on the basis of their grammati-
cal features only, without any phonetic clue or additional information about the situation. This
fact should be unexpected if one assumes as we do that irony is a contextual phenomenon.
After discussing our findings, we conclude that there is no grammatical feature that encodes
irony; rather, a cluster of factors can be identified that constrain the interpretive search space
in such a way that contexts compatible with dissociation and echoic use are easily evoked, thus
producing the illusion that irony is encoded. What those factors do, actually, is to make accessi-
ble a context where the ironic interpretation is an efficient solution to the limitations imposed
by the linguistic form. By identifying such factors and their role in interpretive processes, we
manage to solve the paradox, while providing new evidence in favor of Sperber and Wilsons
contextual approach to irony.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
ESLAMI, Zohreh
Texas A&M University, USA
The pragmatics of wedding invitations
Weddings (and like ceremonies) are a part of most cultures and societies in the world, but how
they are arranged and perceived can differ from nation to nation. Wedding invitations can
come in many shapes and sizesbig/small, short/long, bright/bland, simple/elaborate de-
pending on that particular societys cultural norms and expectations regarding wedding para-
phernalia.
Miller (1984) considers wedding invitations a homely genre, meaning that language users are
familiar of this type of genre and they can even predict the content found in wedding invita-
tions. Not much research has been done to explore wedding invitations. The main research
studies on this topic have been done by Al-Ali (2006) and Mirzaei & Eslami (2013).
The purpose of this research is to analyze American wedding invitations and explain how socio-
cultural values are reflected in the genre structure and content of these wedding invitations.
Genre analysis and critical discourse analysis are used to analyze the data. The following re-
lated research questions are addressed in this paper:
(1) How many American invitations follow the exact correct wording (most common form) pre-
scribed by well-known etiquette books?
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(2) How many American invitations follow the general pattern of moves prescribed by well-known
etiquette books?
(3) If invitations diverge from the traditional wording and pattern of moves, how do they diverge?
Why might they diverge?
(4) What are the optional components in American wedding invitations, and how often do they oc-
cur? Why might variations occur?
(5) How many American wedding invitations contain religious references (scripture verses; relig-
ious language e.g. holy or blessed)?
The findings indicate that wedding invitations have the potential to speak to the values of a so-
ciety, as marriage and weddings have a long history of importance in the majority of the world.
[email protected]
FALKUM, Ingrid Lossius
1
& Marta Recasens
2
1University of Oslo, Norway
2Stanford University, USA & Google Inc.
Young childrens metonymic skill
In metonymy an expression is used to refer to something that falls outside its conventional de-
notation, with a clear associative relation linking the conventional denotation and the contextu-
ally, determined, metonymic one, e.g., The ham sandwich left without paying. While meton-
ymic uses by adults are common, little is known about how metonymy is understood or used
by preschool children. To investigate this, we gave 47 children (aged 2;9 5;9) and 27 adults,
all native speakers of English, one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks.
In experiment 1, for each of nine stories, participants were shown a picture presenting two peo-
ple, one with a salient property. In the metonymic condition, the experimenter referred to one
of them using a metonym; in the literal condition, she referred to the property itself. The child
was asked to choose between a picture of the literal referent, the metonymic referent, and a dis-
tractor. In experiments 2 and 3, participants were asked (i) to refer to an unfamiliar game just
presented to them, and (ii) to name individuals with salient properties.
Results showed a significant interaction between age and condition for comprehension, with
older children more likely to choose literal than figurative interpretations of metonyms, and an
increase in metonym production with age in both elicitation tasks. Although children were out-
performed by adults, even three-year-olds could both understand and produce metonyms in
certain circumstances. Young children may find it easier to produce a metonym than a full de-
scription as a referring expression in certain contexts, and metonymy may serve as a useful
strategy in referring to unfamiliar entities. Between age four and five, there is an increasing ten-
dency to interpret metonyms literally. We suggest that this reflects in part a growing metalin-
guistic ability, which pushes children to over-emphasize literal meanings.
1 [email protected]
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FAUZI, Wan Jumani
1
, Noraini Ibrahim
2
& Marlyna Maros
3
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Impoliteness in counter service: A case study on the perceptions of service providers
This paper investigates the perceptions of impoliteness from the service providers perspective
in naturally-occurring counter service discourse. The study takes place at the International Of-
fice in a premier university in Malaysia and aims to find out how these perceptions affect the
counter service discourse. This context is chosen because it is a highly stressed context due to
the routine and meticulous nature of the job as well as pressure from international students, as
the services provided involve immigration issues when international students come to apply,
extend or terminate their student visas. Furthermore, dissatisfaction on the students' part can
affect international student enrollment, e.g., through word of mouth. Past studies on customer
service encounters have focused mostly on the customers point of view. Little attention is paid
to the service providers perspective although service encounters involve both customers and
employees whereas the perception of poor service by the customers may be the result of percep-
tions of impoliteness in the employees. Data to explain such phenomena are obtained through
the Hermeneutic Phenomenology approach using reflective written exercises and followed by
semi-structured interviews. Hermeneutic phenomenology is the process of interpreting and de-
scribing human experience to understand the central nature of that experience. Participants
are required to raise their level of awareness of their reasoning towards how they perceive im-
politeness and how it affects them. Findings are also based on service encounter observation
and discourse analysis of counter service interaction. In this context, we conclude that differ-
ent people do perceive some instances of impoliteness similarly but handle the interaction dif-
ferently. The difference in the service providers communicative behavior is based on a range
of factors such as their personality, philosophy towards work and the degree of empathy a pro-
vider has, i.e., the higher the level of empathy, the lower the perceptions of impoliteness.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
3 [email protected]
FAZIO, Alessandra
Universit degli Studi di Roma, Italy
Usage and a corpus-based approach in ESP teaching: A pilot study in the field of
sports sciences based on patterns and collocations
We agree with Bazermans (1994) attempt to apply speech act theory to long, complex written
texts. Also in Swales words, thinking of given stretches of discourse in terms of the actions
they are intended to perform brings a useful directedness to our perceptions of generic exem-
plars (2004:67). Some aspects of language are often underestimated. The aim of this paper is
to discuss the preliminary results of a pilot study carried out at the University of Rome Foro
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Italico on how teaching English for Sports Science Discourse in academic settings may require
language targeted techniques in an ESP class.
Analytic corpus-based research is essential for analysing and reproducing the language of a spe-
cific domain by means of representative text samples and with the aid of computational tools
(Biber et al. 1998, McEnery et al. 2006). A representative, although limited, corpus of written
standardised academic sports science texts comprising the whole corpus of scientific literature
used as reference in year-one postgraduate Sports Science courses was given to a group of 60
students. The analysis of key concepts and the examination of the related recurrent linguistic
features (patterns and collocations) was identified as the final target of the students knowl-
edge acquisition. Key words and examples of context extracted from the corpus were collected
and analysed by the students with the aid of a tool for computational analysis (AntConc).
These examples can provide the basis for a teaching project specifically designed for an
intermediate/advanced postgraduate series of English classes for students mastering in Sports
Sciences. Collecting and working on ESP language that is representative of a community of
practice (Wenger 1998) may enable us to identify new ways and /or directions of detecting
inter-relationships in apparently unstructured textual data.
BAZERMAN, C. (1994) Systems of genres and the enactments of social intentions in A. Freeman & P. Medway P. (eds.), Genre and the new
rhetoric. London: Taylor & Frances, pp.79-101. BIBER D., S. Conrad & R. Reppen (1998) Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure
and use. Cambridge: CUP. MCENERY T., R. Xiao & Y. Tono Y. (2006) Corpus based language studies. London: Routledge. SWALES, J.M.
(1990) Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge: CUP. WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: Learning, meaning,
and identity. Cambridge: CUP.
[email protected]
FETZER, Anita
1
& Augustin Speyer
2
1University of Augsburg, Germany
2University of Saarbruecken, Germany
Discourse relations across contexts and genres: An analysis of English and German
discourse
This paper argues that the signalling of discourse relations with discourse connectives is not
only interdependent on language-specific preferences but also on discourse genre. It compares
and contrasts the linguistic representation of coordinating and subordinating discourse rela-
tions in 21 English and German editorials and 20 personal narratives, paying particular atten-
tion to (1) granularity, (2) the overt representation of discourse connectives, and (3) the adja-
cent and non-adjacent positioning of discourse relations.
The methodological framework is an integrated one, supplementing Systemic Functional Gram-
mar (Halliday 1994) with Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides
2003), and applying them to a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data at hand. Con-
text is accommodated explicitly in the analysis: social context is accounted for through the dis-
course genres of editorial and small story, linguistic context is accounted for through adja-
cency, and cognitive context is accounted for through inference.
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In the editorials, there is a strong correlation between the overt representation of a discourse
connective in a clause / sentence and the locality of the clause / sentence standing in relation
to the clause / sentence under consideration. More precisely, if a sentence SA in German
stands in a relation to a sentence SB that does not immediately precede SA, but that is sepa-
rated from SA by at least one sentence, the readiness to signify the relation with a connective is
much more developed. For the British data, the readiness to signify subordinating discourse
relations between directly adjacent clauses with a connective is much more developed than for
non-adjacently positioned sentences. In the personal narratives, the use of discourse connec-
tives with adjacently and non-adjacently positioned discourse relations is far more frequent in
both sets of data, holding for both coordinating and subordinating discourse relations.
ASHER, N. & A. Lascarides (2003) Logics of conversation. Cambridge: CUP. DE FINA, A. & A. Georgakopoulou (2008) Introduction: Narra-
tive analysis in the shift from texts to practices, in Text & Talk 28: 275-281. HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1994) Introduction to English functional
grammar. London: Arnold.
1 [email protected],
2 [email protected]
FILIPAN-$IGNI%, Bla&enka
1
, Vladimir Legac
2
& Katica Sobo
3
1&2 University of Zagreb, Croatia
3Karlovac University of Applied Sciences, Croatia
Intercultural awareness of Croatian teenage foreign language learners
In today's world characterized by intense economic and cultural ties, global reach of the media
and communication networks into all spheres of life, interculturalism has become a sine qua
non of education of each individual regardless of their national, religious, linguistic and cul-
tural identity. The European Union is aware of the effects of migration, population growth and
foreign communities on multi-ethnic and multicultural character of European societies and in-
evitably tends to develop intercultural dialogue, especially when teaching foreign languages,
because within foreign language teaching one can very easily mediate cultural knowledge and
adopt positive attitudes towards Other cultures, and Others who are different, while at the
same time not losing the local or regional identity of an individual. Therefore, a need, aware-
ness and motivation for implementing interculturalism is present, but it has been observed
that in some countries not enough attention is given to this issue during education. For this rea-
son, the authors of this paper are doing research into the concept of interculturalism among
Croatian teenagers with the aim of finding out their intercultural awareness and attitudes, de-
tecting shortcomings and proposing improvements. Two main reasons can be given for the im-
portance of intercultural awareness in Croatia: coexistence of people of different nations (with
Roma being culturally particularly different) and the desire of many young people to go to the
other EU countries. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among 300 teenage students
learning English and German. The starting hypothesis is that regardless of the great signifi-
cance of this concept it has not yet been sufficiently developed among Croatian teenage stu-
dents so that a considerable percentage of them will demonstrate lack of cross-cultural knowl-
edge as well as negative attitudes towards members of other cultures.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
3 [email protected]
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FRANCK, Maarten
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Translating sports news: A closer look at the interplay between international press
agencies, the national news agency Belga, and Flemish news sites
The 2012 Summer Olympics in London were a grand event with 204 nations and more than
10,000 athletes participating. The event itself took place from July 25th to August 12th, and
got a hefty amount of media coverage. That media coverage, of course, did not start on July
25th, but long before the event itself took place; with athletes qualifying and the organization
of the event itself being just two common topics.
This paper focuses on the translation of news reports about events leading up to the 2012 Sum-
mer Olympics in London by Belgiums national press agency Belga and by major Flemish news
sites. Research on news (translation) too often focusses on political news solely, as Gambier
(2006:9) argues. However, we did not choose this topic for the novelty of it, but because of ap-
parent differences (and similarities) in source references between news reports in the current
research corpus and those in a previous research corpus (i.e. on the 2011 elections in the DR of
the Congo).
Three sets of tags were used to annotate formal changes (mostly on the phrasal level) between
source and target texts: 1. RE-actions; 2. Translation changes; 3. Pragmatic indicators. These
tags did not only generate quantitative data, but were also a heuristic tool for further discourse
analysis, focusing on the concept of framing.
Results show that the national news agency Belga plays an important intermediary role by
translating coverage from international agencies into Dutch. News sites were found to do very
little interlingual translation themselves; mostly taking over Belgas (translated) coverage.
Therefore, what Dutch speaking Belgians got to read online about events leading up to the
2012 Olympics was less dependent of the medium it was published by, and more dependent of
what the national press agency Belga decided to report upon.
[email protected]
FRETHEIM, Thorstein
NTNU, Norway
The pragmatics of Yes and No
Holmberg (forthcoming) claims that (1B1) Yes affirms the negative proposition that A requests
B to respond to, but Bs response words target the concept once more, confirming in B1 that
what is described in the negative complement of once more happened once again, and denying
it in B2. That B did not return the books on an earlier occasion is presupposed, it is not what
As question is about. Similarly, (2B1) confirms that Bs not dressing up for the occasion was
deliberate, and (2B2) denies it.
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(1) A: Did he once more not return the books on time?
B1: Yes.
B2: No.
(2) A: Did you deliberately not dress up for the occasion?
B1: Yes.
B2: No.
A test involving English tag question constructions suggests that native speakers intuitively do
not perceive questions like (1A) and (2A) as questions about a negative proposition. Twenty-
five native users of English were asked to assess the degree of acceptability of the following
four sentences:
(3) a. You deliberately didnt dress up for the occasion, didnt you?
b. You deliberately didnt dress up for the occasion, did you?
c. You didnt deliberately dress up for the occasion, didnt you?
d. You didnt deliberately dress up for the occasion, did you?
Everyone ruled out (3b) and (3c), and everyone liked (3d). As for (3a), the judgments were di-
vided. 16 accepted it, 9 rejected it. I am going to explain why. Then I asked them to tell me
what Yes and No would mean as answers to (3a) and (3d), and their responses then revealed
quite consistently that they judged (3d) to be a question about the negative proposition ex-
pressed, but not (3a) whose negative tag matches deliberately.
Holmberg, Anders, forthcoming. The syntax of answers to negative yes/no questions in English and Swedish. Lingua.
[email protected]
FURLONG, Anne
University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
Whats so literary about play texts? A relevance-theoretic view of interpreting drama
Sperber and Wilson (1995) developed relevance theory to account for the interpretation of ut-
terances, postulating a single exceptionless criterion guiding the interpretation process, both
generating and evaluating interpretations. Relevance involves a dynamic relationship between
effort and effect; when there are no longer adequate effects for the effort expended, we stop
processing the utterance (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 271-2). It is my view that we also engage in
non-spontaneous interpretation, aiming not at optimal but at maximum relevance. The ad-
dressee invests extra cognitive effort in order to achieve an interpretation which is exhaustive,
plausible, and unified. I contend that interpretations which satisfy these demands are what are
more usually called literary.
Typically, people interested in literary interpretation are interested in literary works. Its not
clear whether play texts are such works. Zamir claims that part of theatrical experience is re-
lated to theatres literary dimension and can be accessed by a reader without recourse to per-
formance (Zamir 2010: 233), and contends that the language provided by gifted authors can
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capture the essence of the expressed moment (ibid: 234). While some play texts those of
Shakespeare, for instance readily satisfy our intuitions of literariness, others such as those
of Chekhov or Beckett do not. Yet the stylistic distinctions between them are no greater than
between the prose works of Dickens, Hemingway, and Barth. Given that most students who
study plays treat them identically as they do short fiction, poems, and novels, its worth asking
what is literary about play texts.
Traditional approaches cannot adequately explain either success or failure in the teaching of
dramatic literature. A relevance theoretic model, I argue, supplies a robust account of treating
plays texts as literature as well as underscoring the shortcomings of this approach.
[email protected]
GARMENDIA, Joana
ILCLI (University of the Basque Country), Spain
In defense of Grices account of irony
The echoic account of irony was initially presented as an alternative to the Gricean approach,
which Wilson and Sperber consider to be simply a modern-dress variant of the classical ac-
count, [that] shares many of the same weaknesses (Wilson 2006: 1724). Grices approach,
they say, has certain basic problems for explaining ironic communication. According to Wilson
and Sperber (2012), on the theoretical level, the main problems of the Gricean account is that
it does not explain why a speaker should opt to be ironic, that it cannot account for the impor-
tance of the expression of a certain attitude in ironic communication, and that it does not offer
an explanation for the normative bias that is found in irony. I will show, however, that these is-
sues can be adequately addressed from a Gricean standpoint.
This does not indicate, however, that Grices account of irony is non-problematic. Grices ap-
proach does have some basic trouble in building a consistent theory of ironic communication.
Wilson (2006) indicated the following issues: to reanalyze figurative meanings as implicatures,
Grice must extend both his notion of implicature and his account of how implicatures are de-
rived; otherwise, Grices account of tropes does not go through. Moreover, certain ironical
cases do not violate the maxim, and if that were not enough, the opposite of the literal meaning
is not always the one conveyed via irony. These are the real troubles with Grices notes on
irony. Nevertheless, my aim is to show that there is nothing that a Gricean-inspired theory of
irony, such as the Asif-Theory (Garmendia 2010, 2011, 2013), which is based on Korta &
Perrys Critical Pragmatics (Korta & Perry 2011), cannot amend.
GARMENDIA, J. (2010) Irony is critical, in Pragmatics & Cognition 18: 397-421. GARMENDIA, J. (2011) Shes (not) a fine friend: Saying
and criticism in irony, in Intercultural Pragmatics 8: 41-65. GARMENDIA, J. (2013) Ironically saying and implicating, in C. Penco & F. Do-
maneschi (eds.) What is said and what is not: The semantics/pragmatics interface. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 225-241. KORTA, K. & J.
Perry (2011) Critical pragmatics: An inquiry into reference and communication. Cambridge: CUP. WILSON, D. (2006) The pragmatics of ver-
bal irony: Echo or pretence?, in Lingua 116: 17221743. WILSON, D. & D. Sperber 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: CUP.
[email protected]
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GAUCI, Phyllisienne
1
, Sandro Caruana
2
& Elisa Ghia
3
1&2 University of Malta
3University of Pavia, Italy
The pragmatic competence of student-teachers of Italian L2
Teacher-training courses normally focus on the methodology of teaching-L2-grammar, lexis,
intercultural notions etc. Pragmatics, however, features very sporadically in these courses and
it is therefore worth investigating whether student-teachers of an L2-are familiar with prag-
matic notions, especially those which are-L2-specific. Although student-teachers have a good
competence of the language they are learning to teach, studies conducted on advanced L2-
learners indicate that these generally possess a lower level of pragmatic competence than ex-
pected when compared to native speakers (NSs) and when considering their lexical and gram-
matical knowledge of the-L2-(Bardovi Harlig 2001:14). This suggests that student-teachers
are somewhat less knowledgeable than NSs in terms of pragmatic competence as indicated in
other studies on pre-service teachers in the EFL context.
In this study we present the results of an investigation held among 15 NSs-of Maltese following
a university course in order to become qualified teachers of Italian. Many of these university
students are exposed regularly to Italian (Caruana 2013), but have never followed explicit
courses on Italian pragmatics, although research indicates that specific didactic intervention
could indeed lead to better pragmatic competence (Gauci in print).
Data were collected via a closed role-play and a discourse completion task (DCT). These were
used in order to test participants abilities in producing speech acts such as requests and com-
plaints. Our study is therefore based both on spoken and written data, and the speech acts pro-
duced by the Maltese student-teachers are compared to those of Italian NSs and evaluated by
NSs for appropriateness and acceptability.
Preliminary results confirm that despite being in possession of adequate pragmatic compe-
tence, especially when compared to results obtained in studies conducted in different contexts,
this is still rated as being somewhat below that of NSs. Direct pedagogical intervention on prag-
matic aspects could therefore be beneficial: this could lead to a more native-like competence
and would make future teachers aware of the importance of pragmatics in L2 acquisition.
BARDOVI-HARLIG, K. (2001) Evaluating the empirical evidence: Grounds for instruction in pragmatics?, in K.R. Rose and G. Kasper
(eds.) Pragmatics in language teaching. New York: CUP, pp. 13-32. CARUANA, S. (2013) Italian in Malta: A socio-educational perspective, in
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16: 602-614. GAUCI, P. (in print) Teaching L2 pragmatics: from an empirical
study to recommendations for pedagogical practice, in S. Gesuato, F. Bianchi and W. Cheng (eds.) Teaching, learning and investigating about
pragmatics: principles, methods and practices. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
3 [email protected]
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GAVRUSEVA, Elena
University of Iowa, USA
Man, that guy is an old dude!: The pragmatic functions of male terms in American
English
This study investigates distribution, pragmatic functions and sociolinguistic meanings of com-
mon male terms - boy, guy, man, dude, bro and gentleman - in a Midwestern variety of Ameri-
can English. In prior work, male terms were shown to pattern by linguistic and pragmatic con-
text: for example, 'dude' functions as a gender-neutral address term and discourse marker in
confrontational contexts (Kiesling 2004). The goal here is to show that speaker/hearer gender
constrains the pragmatics of male terms by comparing their functions in mixed- vs. single-
gender contexts. The data comprise 1200 utterances (200 per term) that were collected from
informal conversations on a university campus, with detailed notes about social setting. For
each term, the data were separated by same- or mixed-gender context, which yielded four data
sets: M-to-M, F-to-F, M-to-F, F-to-M (50 utterances per context). Within each set, we identi-
fied four structures for capturing pragmatic differences across the male terms: (i) predication
structures (They are just being dudes), (ii) modifier structures ('real man', 'ladies man'); (iii)
co-occurence with another male term (These guys arent boys anymore, theyre men) and (iv)
uses as address terms and discourse markers (Dude, whats wrong with you, seriously?). Our
research suggests that guy is a pragmatically neutral term as it rarely appears in predication
and modifier structures, whereas the other terms exhibit a rich array of sociolinguistic func-
tions. For example, in female speech, 'gentleman' almost exclusively functions pragmatically as
a compliment commending courteous behavior towards women ('You are such a gentleman!').
Speaker/hearer gender is conspicuously implicated in the identified pragmatic functions, with
female speakers focusing on relationship-building connotations and male speakers on tradi-
tional masculine characteristics. In a broader linguistic context, this research has implications
for teaching intercultural communication practices as it highlights a diverse sociolinguistic
base for each gender term that is rarely discussed in a classroom.
[email protected]
GRISOT, Cristina
The conceptual/procedural distinction: empirical perspectives and quantitative
measures
This study aims to investigate the conceptual/procedural distinction based on linguistic judg-
ment tasks and multilingual translation corpora. The first attempts to define and characterize
conceptual vs. procedural information included qualitative features such as truth-conditional
vs. non truth-conditional (Wilson & Sperber 1993 give arguments against this association), rep-
resentational vs. computational, accessible to consciousness vs. inaccessible to consciousness,
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easily graspable concepts vs. resistant to conceptualization, capable of being reflected on vs.
not available through conscious thought (Wilson & Sperber 1993, Wilson 2011), to name but a
few.
In this proposal we want to enrich this list of features with two quantitative measures that we
identified for verb tense markers. We argue that the existent qualitative features and methodo-
logical criteria can be tested empirically through experiments based on linguistic judgment
tasks performed by native speakers. Following these experiments, we propose a quantitative
measure for the conceptual/procedural distinction: the Cohen Kappa coefficient measuring
inter-annotator agreement (Carletta 1996, Artstein and Poesio 2008). The kappa coefficient
has values from 0 meaning lack of agreement than that expected to occur by chance to 1 signal-
ing perfect agreement. Conceptual information results in consistent inter-annotator agreement
and high kappa values while procedural information results in inconsistent inter-annotator
agreement and low kappa values. The high kappa values for annotating conceptual information
are explained by the notion of accessibility to consciousness for native speakers of an easily
graspable intuitive concept. The low kappa values are explained by the fact that procedural cal-
culus depends on non-guaranteed pragmatic inferences that are non-demonstrative inferences
(Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995). The second measure that we propose is cross-linguistic varia-
tion quantity when analyzed in translation corpora. Conceptual information triggers little
cross-linguistic variation while procedural information is source of important variation. Specifi-
cally, the investigation of our parallel corpora revealed little variation for the translation of the
intuitive conceptual core of a verb tense expressing past time, specifically, event moment pre-
ceding speech moment and important variation for the contextual values taken by the proce-
dural feature considered, specifically the narrativity feature.
ARTSTEIN, R. & Poesio, M. (2008) Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics, in Computational Linguistics 34: 555-596. GRISOT
& B. Cartoni (2012) Jusquo les temps verbaux sont-ils procduraux?, in Nouveaux Cahiers de linguistique franaise 30: 119-139. SPERBER,
D., & D. Wilson (1986/1995) Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. WILSON, D. & D. Sperber (1993) Linguistic form
and relevance, in Lingua 90: 1-25. WILSON, D. (2011) The conceptual-procedural distinction: Past, present and future, in in V. Escandell-
Vidal, M. Leonetti & A. Ahern (eds.) Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 3-31.
[email protected]
GUSTAFSSON, Anna W.
Lund University, Sweden
Empowering communication in intercultural encounters
Linguistic competence and efficient communication are often mentioned as prerequisites for
the process towards empowerment in health care. Earlier research has discussed conversation
styles used by health care professionals promoting the patients experience of self-efficacy, an
aspect of empowerment (Feste & Anderson 1995, Funnel & Anderson 2004, Kettunen et al.
2001). These empowering conversation styles involve combinations of confirming and atten-
tive strategies that can be discussed as politeness strategies. The widely accepted claim that lin-
guistic realizations of politeness strategies vary between cultures and languages (see for exam-
40
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ple Bowe & Martin 2007) implies a language- and culture-specific linguistic realization of em-
powering communication.
This paper reports findings from a case study of encounters with doctors, immigrant patients
and interpreters were linguistic realizations of empowering counselling (praise, hedges, con-
ditional phrasing etc.) are examined. The study was performed at two childrens diabetes clin-
ics in Sweden. Four consultations were video recorded and transcribed using the chat-format.
A linguistic analysis of communicative strategies was performed.
The results of the study are highly relevant for research in intercultural communication while
suggesting that potentially empowering pragmatic features are differently distributed in en-
counters with and without interpreter. One of the most important results is the absence of
these empowering features in the interpreted consultation. These findings are consistent with
earlier studies indicating that non-native speakers are too occupied with the propositional con-
tent to pay attention to the interpersonal effects of hedges (Nikula 1997). Another explanation
might be that the interpreter attempts a cultural interpretation in order to preserve the pa-
tients trust in the doctor. Finally, the interpreter might not see the relevance of translating the
empowering conversation style used by the doctor. These findings have implications for the vo-
cational training of health care professionals as well as the education of community interpret-
ers.
[email protected]
HALL, Alison
University College London, UK
Pragmatic enrichment in subsentences and fragment answers
Discourse-initial fragments such as The third from the right, are analyzed by Stainton (2006)
as syntactically subsentential, and pragmatically enriched into a proposition. However, various
connectivity effects suggest that, despite lacking linguistic antecedents, such utterances have
sentential but elided syntactic structure (Merchant 2010, Mart forthcoming).
One connectivity effect is case-marking, found in discourse-initial fragments in many lan-
guages, and in fragment answers such as Bs here: A: What did you buy? B: A new shirt,
where, in German, the article must have the same case (accusative) as in the full sentence I
bought a new shirt. This is explicable on the assumption that sentential syntax is present, but
elided.
A second example: Frazier et al. (2013) elicited judgments on the following kind of answer,
finding that the version with that is significantly more acceptable than the version without:
A: What did Katy deny? B: (That) she took the keys. As the complementizer does not add
any linguistic meaning to the interpretation, they take inaudible syntax to be required to ex-
plain these results.
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To defend the enrichment approach, I explore the idea that what grammaticality/acceptability
judgments reflect are sometimes ease of processing; sometimes metalinguistic reflection. For
example, case-marking can be treated as playing a pragmatic role: providing clues to how what-
ever the fragment denotes fits into the proposition expressed. That case-marking is required
for grammaticality can be explained as an artefact of metalinguistic abilities: only fragments
that could be expanded into a full sentence are possible. In Fraziers example, what the comple-
mentizer adds is not linguistic meaning, but a pragmatic clue which eases processing: it indi-
cates that what follows should be interpreted as the direct answer. I aim to show that these two
factors sometimes alone, sometimes in combination between them obviate appeal to silent
syntax in these two varieties of fragment.
[email protected]
HA, Jessica
1
& Sylvia Wchter
2
UdK Berlin, Germany
Is there an exemplary function of the others?
Our qualitative study investigates the auto- and hetero-stereotypes marking the mutual percep-
tion of German and Spanish students. Both groups, but especially the German students, tend
to judge the respective out-group more positively than the in-group. These results seem to con-
flict with the prevailing understanding of the origins and functions of stereotypes.
Though considered as socially undesirable in our popular understanding, stereotypes certainly
serve as unavoidable mechanisms to cope with the complex chaos of the unfamiliar outer
world (cf. Lippmann 1997). Although Thomas (2006) implies that stereotypes contain positive
or negative judgments (also cf. Quasthoff 1973, Fiske 1998, Hahn 2002), the six functions of
stereotypes found by Thomas (2006) in consonance with the theory of social identity by Tajfel
(1982) logically suggest that the perception of the in-group should be more positive than the
perception of the out-group.
In 41 semi-standardized one-hour interviews university students in Spain and Germany were
asked about their self-perception and the perception of the other cultures members. Despite
the wide variety of opinions and different stereotypes detected, surprisingly, both groups show
tendencies to judge their in-group rather critically. Especially the German perception of the
Spanish reveals a distinctive exotism (cf. Erdheim 1994). The students describe a romantic im-
age of the passionate and traditional Spaniard in contrast to their perception of the boring Ger-
man suffering from value decay. On the other hand Spanish students rather emphasize the
leading role of Germany in the European Union as a positive example for their own country
than mentioning Germanys National Socialist past, for example.
Thus, we ask whether the six functions (orientation, conformation, resistance, self-expression,
identity, control/justification; cf. Thomas 2006) of stereotypes should be expanded by more
functions, such as an exemplary function of the out-group for the in-group.
ERDHEIM, M. (1994) Psychoanalyse und unbewusstheit in der kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. FISKE, S.T. (1998) Stereotyping, preju-
dice, and discrimination, in D.T. Gilbert, S.T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (eds.) Handbook of Social Psychology (vol. 2). New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.
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357-411. HAHN, H. & E. Hahn (2002) Nationale stereotypen: Pldoyer fr eine historische stereotypenforschung, in H. Hahn (ed.) Stereotyp,
identitt und geschichte: Die funktion von stereotypen in gesellschaftlichen diskursen, Frankfurt am Main: Europischer Verlag der Wissen-
schaften, pp. 57-72. LIPPMANN, W. (1997) Public opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks. QUASTHOFF, U. (1973) Soziales vorurteil und
kommunikation: Eine sprachwissenschaftliche analyse des stereotyps. Frankfurt am Main: Athenum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Tajfel, H.
(1982) Gruppenkonflikt und vorurteil: Entstehung und funktion sozialer stereotypen. Bern: Huber. Thomas, A. (2006) Die bedeutung von
vorurteil und stereotyp im interkulturellen handeln, in Interculture Journal: Online-Zeitschrift fr interkulturelle Studien 2: 3-20.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
HOPKYNS, Sarah
Zayed University, UAE
English as a lingua franca and its effect on Cultural Identity in the Arabian Gulf.
The role of English as a global lingua franca (ELF) leaves the world little choice but to learn
English to some degree. However, the question arises as to whether this, consciously or subcon-
sciously, also involves learning about English native-speaker culture and if so, how this affects
learners own cultural identity. Both attraction and resistance to learning English often leads to
a distinct conflict of desires. An instrumental desire to learn English in order to progress pro-
fessionally and be a player on the world stage is often in sharp contrast with a reluctance to
learn a language still seen as firmly tied to Western cultural values.
While important all over the world, there is perhaps no context more relevant to this sphere of
study than that of the Arabian Gulf. Its long and complicated history with English-speaking na-
tions, its unique culture and native language, its current extremely high expatriate community,
its youthfulness, and the fact that it is a region undergoing rapid change all make the issue of
cultural identity particularly relevant in this part of the world. This is especially true given the
dramatic spread of English in the sphere of education and everyday life in recent years.
In this presentation, the recent discourses on the pivotal themes of English as a Lingua Franca
and cultural identity will be discussed before exploring how the two areas often lead to conflict-
ing desires among English language learners. The specific context will then be examined, lead-
ing to a description of the study. The research project, which has been conducted at a large
government-sponsored university in the United Arab Emirates, explores the attitudes and per-
spectives of students and faculty members on the impact ELF has on Emirati cultural identity.
The presentation will end a description of the projected implications of the study.
[email protected]
IFANTIDOU, Elly
National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Positive transfer and pragmatic competence in L2
Pragmatic transfer traces back to Thomas (1983, 1984) definition of pragmatic failure as a
violation of sociolinguistic principles which result in misinterpretation (e.g. of others as rude,
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unfriendly, or dishonest) (for an overview, see Bou-Franch 2012). Negative transfer received a
great deal of attention for causing miscommunication in L2 and for requiring corrective strate-
gies towards native-like performance (Kasper 1992). In positive pragmatic transfer learners
succeed in communication by exploiting shared L1/L2 sociolinguistic conventions. Due to a
widespread concern with causes of miscommunication and difficulties in distinguishing be-
tween L1 knowledge and developing inter-language, positive transfer received less attention in
interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper 1992: 213).
In this study, pragmatic transfer is positively triggered by cognitive procedures rather than soci-
olinguistic skills (which rely on social perceptions activated in face-to-face interaction and
which individuals employ when speaking/interacting by taking into account variables such as
power, dominance, imposition as part of the social reality). I examine learners acquired ability
to infer pragmatic meanings in L1 and effects on L2 performance. Inferential underpinnings of
L2 pragmatic competence are traced in implicatures such as irony, metaphor or evidential in-
formation. More precisely, the study seeks to unveil facilitating effects of L1 on participants
pragmatic and metapragmatic awareness when interpreting speaker/communicator attitude
retrieved from newspaper editorials in L2.
Chi-square analyses were run on data received from a L1 pre-instruction test, a L2 pre-
instruction test and two post-instruction tests in L2. The evidence suggests that L1 abilities re-
late to L2 in terms of meta-pragmatic, pragmatic awareness and meta-linguistic competence. It
is shown that these manifestations of pragmatic competence can be significantly enhanced
with explicit instruction in L2. This is more evident for participants whose scores in L1 and
pre-instruction tests ranged from low to average and more evident in pragmatic awareness and
metalinguistic competence, rather than metapragmatic awareness where a weaker tendency to
improve was observed. I conclude that L2 pragmatic competence relates to abilities in L1, but
that improvement is attributed to intervention administered by explicit instruction.
BOU FRANCH, P. (2012) Pragmatic transfer, in C.A. Chapelle (ed.) The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. /ASPER, G.
(1992) Pragmatic transfer, in Second Language Research 8: 203231. THOMAS, J. (1983) Cross-cultural pragmatic failure, in Applied Lin-
guistics 4: 91-112. THOMAS, J. (1984) Cross-cultural discourse as unequal encounter: Towards a pragmatic analysis, in Applied Linguistics
5: 226-235.
[email protected]
IONESCU-RUXANDOIU, Liliana
Exploiting intra-cultural variability to express (im)politeness
The paper starts from the idea that cross-cultural communication does not involve just speak-
ers ability of switching among different languages, but also that of switching among different
variants of the same language. The authors intention is to illustrate how switching from one
variant to another within a particular turn at talk can become a resource for expressing polite-
ness and especially impoliteness, as proved by examples taken from different corpora of spo-
ken standard and local Romanian.
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Taking into account Kronenfelds concept of cultural models, the analysis of the data is mainly
based on Terkourafis unified theory of politeness, impoliteness and rudeness (even though the
distinction between impoliteness and rudeness is not maintained).
The focus is on the address forms, as Romanian has a complex system of politeness pronouns.
Besides some noteworthy formal differences between standard language and its local variants,
there are important differences in the usage conventions regarding the address forms as used
by urban and rural communities, as well as by age and professional groups.
In particular contexts, when the speaker mixes up address systems, using forms conventionally
associated with other local or social groups, the hearer will usually be able to infer the interlocu-
tors intention. Two basic cases are examined:
(1) system switching as a face-constituting action (both for the speaker and the hearer). It ap-
pears mostly when there are discrepancies in interlocutors experience: the user of a local sys-
tem or the speaker with a lower social status borrows some forms typical of the educated stan-
dard language users in an attempt to improve his/her own image and to flatter the addressee.
(2) system switching as a face-threatening action (for the addressee). It appears mainly in ad-
versarial contexts (TV debates, electoral confrontations, etc.): the speaker exploits the unmark-
edness of some address forms, using them ironically, to indirectly minimize his/her oppo-
nents individual image, without damaging his/her own.
Mixing up address systems is signaled out in different ways (speakers hesitations, comments
or specific responses of the interlocutors etc.), which attests to its functioning as a technique of
converting unmarked politeness into marked politeness (1) or even into marked impoliteness
(2).
[email protected]
JANICKI, Karol
University of Bergen, Norway
Non-typical behavior, language, and conflict
In the theoretical introduction, I endorse the prototype theory of the concept and advance the
claim that unlike the classical check-list theory, the prototype theory allows us to understand
why we tend to engage in conflict when facing non-typical cases of human behavior. Living by
the prototype theory of the concept should also allow us to avoid conflict.
As an illustration of the main point of the paper, I discuss the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to
president Obama in 2009. This prize was strongly supported by some people, strongly opposed
by others, and accepted by still others with a measure of doubt and hesitation. An atmosphere
of conflict about the prize was evident. In view of the formulations included in Alfred Nobels
will, Obamas achievements were easy to both support and challenge. Many people thought
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that something was fundamentally wrong with the Nobel Peace Committees decision, that the
committee was incompetent, or that it was biased and politically motivated.
In my view, a major reason for the conflict was that President Obamas achievements were
non-typical. If he had received his prize having stopped a war or done more tangible things
such as signing a treaty or armistice, he would have been much more typical as a candidate for
the prize.
The paper shows how people argued about what constitutes real achievements for the holding
and promoting of peace. The Obama Nobel Peace Prize conflict supports the claim that many
people still live by the classical theory of the concept, that is, that they accept only their own
definitions of words (here real achievements) and assume that others should follow them. Es-
pecially when we face fuzzy cases, disagreements about referents, meanings, categorizations
and evaluations abound and conflicts arise.
[email protected]
JOHNSON, Marilynn
CUNY Graduate Center, USA
Maxim of politeness, please
At the beginning of Logic and Conversation Grice sets aside what he calls the maxim of polite-
ness. In this paper I argue that although it has ostensibly been sidelined, a maxim of politeness
in fact plays an important yet unsung role in maintaining the Cooperative Principle and
making sense of implicatures in many of Grices canonical examples. My discussion begins by
detailing the difference between Group A, Group B, and Group C implicatures. Group A impli-
catures are those in which it is not clear a maxim has been violated; Group B implicatures are
those in which the violation of a maxim can be explained by a clash with another maxim;
Group C implicatures are those in which a maxim has been blatantly flouted. I argue that many
cases which appear to be Group C flouting implicatures are in fact Group B clash implicatures
with the proposed maxim of politeness. I make this argument through discussion of Grices
tea party and letter of recommendation cases. Having taken myself to have established a place
and a need for the maxim of politeness, I then go into the specifics of what this maxim would
look like by considering two accounts that have been given in linguistics literature. I first set
aside an account given by Jonas Pfister because it suffers from two major flaws in understand-
ing Grice. I then turn to an account of politeness by Geoffrey Leech that provides a helpful, if
imperfect framework, which I tailor to serve Grices purposes. Having developed my positive
account, I conclude by addressing possible concerns raised by my argument, relating to polite-
ness at the level of style, aesthetic and moral maxims, and the placement of the proposed
maxim of politeness within Grices framework.
[email protected]
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KAPOGIANNI, Eleni
University of Kent, UK
A comparative examination of verbal irony strategies in Modern Greek and British
English
The aim of this paper is to present and analyse the different rhetorical (pragmatic) devices em-
ployed to convey ironic meaning in two distinct languages/cultures: Modern Greek and British
English. Drawing on evidence from a compiled corpus of naturally occurring dialogues in both
languages, this investigation focuses on linguistic and cultural factors that affect the selection
of verbal irony strategies. The central assumption of this approach is that verbal irony should
not be viewed as a unified phenomenon but, rather, as a communicative goal that can be
achieved through a variety of rhetorical devices (strategies). Firstly, it is argued that, when ex-
amined within a framework of Neo-Gricean pragmatics, these strategies fall into two general
types, present in both Modern Greek and British English: the first type is achieved via meaning
reversal (typical examples such as great day +> horrible day), while the second type is
achieved through replacement of the expressed proposition by a completely new evaluative
statement (and I am the Easter Bunny +> your statement is invalid). The second step of
this investigation involves examining the language-specificity and culture-specificity of the
sub-strategies of the two general irony types. Two main findings are discussed: (i) the higher
frequency of the second general type of irony in the Modern Greek data and (ii) the presence of
sub-strategies that exploit the abundance of conventionalized expressions that convey sympa-
thy /solidarity in Modern Greek (such as Situation-Bound Utterances that express wishes cf.
Kecskes 2002: 111-112). It is finally argued that the sub-strategies of verbal irony used in Brit-
ish English rely on more subtle and less emotionally marked cues than the ones selected by
speakers of Modern Greek.
KECSKES, Istvan. 2002. Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
[email protected]
KARTAL, Galip
Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey
The use of discourse markers in British and American feature length movies:
Implications for EFL classrooms
Discourse markers are significant for fluent speech. Furthermore, they are significant for organ-
izing a conversation. This study examined the use and functions of discourse markers in Brit-
ish and American feature length films. The scripts of four movies (two British and two Ameri-
can) consisting of 44,597 running words were analyzed using the AntConc Concordance pro-
gram. The results showed that there is not a significant difference between British and Ameri-
can movies in terms of the frequency of discourse markers well, like, and you know. On the
other hand, it is found that oh is used significantly more frequently in British movies than
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American movies. The functional analysis of the movies showed that, discourse marker func-
tions of all these four discourse markers represent the use in the literature. In other words,
both British and American feature length movies represent the use of English discourse mark-
ers in native discourse. Hence, the movies could be used for teaching and learning of discourse
markers in foreign language environments. The results are discussed in terms of pedagogical
implications.
[email protected]
KIM, Kyu-Hyun
1
& Kyung-Hee Suh
2
1Kyung Hee University, South Korea
2Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea
Formulating practices in Korean conversation: Managing actions in terms of
relationship categories
This paper, from a conversation-analytic perspective (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974), aims
to analyze formulating practices (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970) in Korean interactional scenes. Us-
ing Korean TV news interviews and ordinary conversations as data, we show that formulating
practices, typically a third-turn phenomenon preceded by the question-answer sequence (Heri-
tage & Watson 1980), are also frequently produced as the (second-position) turn responding to
a sequence-initiating action and as the third-position repair (Schegloff 1992).
In the second position, the speaker may formulate the prior speakers action upshot in such a
way that the others intention or stance is presumptively referenced in a quoted form (e.g., A:
Im late for school. B: Are you (dare) asking me for a ride?). This practice furnishes speak-
ers with a resource for pre-emptively addressing the face-threat or adversarialness projected
by the others first-pair part action (e.g., pre-request). As the third- position repair, where the
speaker finds the others response to his/her turn problematic and initiates repair in the third
turn, the speaker may use a formulation to question the latters competence (e.g., A: ... then
the lettuce grows a stem high (expressed with a local vernacular term). B: Ah, are you saying
that the lettuce grows high? A: Oh my, (how come) you (being a doctor) are so ignorant as
not to know the meaning of such a simple (farmers) expression stem growing high!).
In both cases, the upshot of the prior action by the other speaker is subjected to scrutiny in
such a way that the other speakers stance (e.g., epistemic, evaluative, etc.) is problematized
in terms of the participants relationship categories (Sacks 1972). Comparable practices in Eng-
lish (and lack thereof) are examined, and the prevalence of formulating practices in Korean is
noted to be warranted by the need to remedy the immanently allusive turn-design features
of Korean conversation at a meta-communicational level.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
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KOLKMANN, Julia
1
& Ingrid Lossius Falkum
2
1University of Manchester, UK
2University of Oslo, Norway
English possessives: A semantic or pragmatic phenomenon?
English pre-nominal possessives encode a relation between two nominals, e.g. kinship (Johns
sister), time (yesterdays newspaper), control (Johns car), and probably many others given
that this relation is contingent upon context. However, the degree to which the context overtly
explicates this relation varies from utterance to utterance, ranging from low- information con-
texts (e.g. John walked into the pub. His coat was white from the snow.) to contexts which are
far more telling (e.g. John is a first-time author. His book has been a great success). This
raises the question where the possessive relation originates from: is it provided by the (linguis-
tic or extra-linguistic) context, does it come from the semantics of the head noun, or do we
need to appeal to both?
The locus of the possessive relation has been a matter of contention among formal semanti-
cists on the one hand (e.g. Barker 1995, Vikner & Jensen 2002) and cognitively-oriented prag-
matists (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Blakemore 2002, Aitken 2009) on the other: whilst
formal accounts often argue in favour of a default semantics for possessive constructions and
thus predict a rather minor contribution of the context to the relational information encoded
by the s, pragmatic accounts converge on the idea of an underspecified semantics enriched by
means of a pragmatic process that operates over decoded linguistic meanings and sets of con-
textually available assumptions.
In this paper, we present the results of a corpus analysis of 300 possessive constructions which
were analysed in terms of how much contextual explication the respective possessive relation
received, what kind of relation it encoded, and various other factors. We develop an account of
pre-nominal possessives based on what we call head noun pragmatics, where salient relations
are derived mainly by pragmatic means. Semantically, a possessive phrase Ns N encodes a
highly underspecified relation, from which the contextually appropriate reading is computed
on the basis of accessible encyclopaedic or situational knowledge, canonically made available
by N2, but may stem from a variety of sources. This approach has the advantage of accounting
not only for high-information cases but also for readily available interpretations in low-
information contexts.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
KOND, Zoltn
1
, Gergely Szab
2
, Zoltn Dsa
3
, Zzsef Pntya
2
&
Tnde Polonyi
2
1&2 University of Debrecen, Hungary
3Babe0-Bolyai University, Romania
Explicit and implicit attitudes toward identity relevant cultural memories
The dynamics of implicit and explicit attitudes was investigated towards identity relevant
cultural/historical memories among groups of Hungarians. Hungarian (N=86) and Hungarian
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diaspora students (N=84) participated in a laboratory experiment in which a version of Im-
plicit Association Test (IAT) combined with a semantic-differential method was administered.
An object classification task (Hungarian vs. Foreign historical names) was required to perform
in parallel with different attribute classification tasks (good-bad and strong-weak and active-
passive (block-wise)).
In a follow-up research, as an extension of the implicit measures, the individual differences in
national identity and cultural ethnocentrism was intended to measure even on the level of ex-
plicit attitudes as well as on the level of value priorities. To this end the Generalized Ethnocen-
trism Scale, the shortened version of the Portrait Value Questionnaire and the scales of Patriot-
ism, and Collective Self-Esteem were included. The experimental data and the explicit measure
scores were correlated across Hungarian and Hungarian diaspora students.
The performance differences between compatible and incompatible mapping conditions pro-
duced a robust IAT effect for Hungarian historical/cultural objects eminently in the evaluation
(good-bad) dimension. The results indicate a strong positive implicit attitude, i.e. own-group
bias toward the Hungarian historical/cultural memories. Furthermore, the almost complete
overlap in the pattern of results between the groups of participants may indicate the impor-
tance of national emotions in the cultural identity functioning independent from the current
cultural/historical context. Newest results and main implications will be presented and dis-
cussed in the presentation.
1 [email protected]
KUZBORSKA, Irena
University of York, UK
The role of context in meaning construction: A longitudinal study of international
students reading perspectives
The way individuals interact with each other and the type of meanings they construct from
texts are said to be influenced by their inherent pursuit of the establishment of a relationship
with others. Similarly, when entering a new reading community, individuals seek to become le-
gitimate members of that community and always look to others to learn what meanings they
should construct and what roles as readers they should adopt. The learning of reading is thus
argued to entail the learning of new values and expectations of their target community and
then making decisions about the extent of adapting to new values. However, little is known
about the learning of such adaptation.
This study investigated the development of reading perspectives of four international students
over one year of their postgraduate studies in a UK university and collected data using multiple
tools, such as students diaries, discourse-based interviews with students and their lecturers,
and document data. The expectations and beliefs that students brought to a reading event were
central to this analysis and had been shown to be highly resistant to change. The students re-
called their previous reading practices in a rather submissive way, hardly daring to question
text meanings offered by their tutors. The students also reported confusions about how to criti-
cally evaluate texts or how to assemble evidence to create a persuasive piece of writing in their
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new reading environment. The results of the study provide some support for the argument that
the process of entering new reading communities may be fostered through an increased empha-
sis on the importance of understanding the values and beliefs of the target community and on
the development and refinement of interactive reading skills.
[email protected]
LARINA, Tatiana
1
& Neelakshi Suryanarayan
2
1Peoples Friendship University of Russia
2University of Delhi, India
Pragmatics of advice: Cross-cultural perspectives
The present paper is part of an ongoing research project investigating the impact of socio-
cultural differences and values on politeness strategies and communication styles in British
English, Indian English (influenced by Hindi in northern India) and Russian. This study aims
to identify similarities and differences among the three communicative cultures concerning the
speech act of advice and explain them through cultural contexts. It is widely considered that
advice is a delicate and risky face-threatening speech act which requires negative politeness
strategies aimed at softening the imposition of advice-giving. Our results show, however, that
the perception of advice varies across cultures and it might also be seen as an involvement
and solidarity speech act rather than a face-threatening one, and can be given in a less miti-
gated and even direct form.
Advice-giving is a common activity that occurs in different settings and discourses (Limberg &
Locher 2012). We focus mainly on interpersonal interaction of family members, friends and
strangers and consider both solicited and unsolicited advice. The study is based on analysis of
the data obtained by ethnographic observation of the behavior of the British, Indians (north In-
dians) and Russians as well as the data collected through interviews and questionnaires con-
taining discourse completion tasks. Drawing on cultural dimensions, politeness theory (Brown
& Levinson 1987, Leech 1983, Watts 2003) and cultural scripts theory (Wierzbicka 2003,
2012), we have used a combination of ethnographic, contrastive and discourse analyses.
The preliminary results indicate significant differences across our British, Indian and Russian
samples in advice-giving practices which concern its frequency, appropriateness, force, sys-
tems of politeness and communicative styles and strategies. They also demonstrate a system-
atic correlation between language, communication, cognition and culture. This study is of prac-
tical use in SLA and also for developing intercultural communicative competence.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
LONG, Christopher
Tohoku Gakuin University, Japan
A social cognitive account of relational work
Postmodern accounts of politeness are based on the ontological belief that social phenomena
cannot exist independent of perception and therefore adopt the epistemological stance that
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theoretical accounts of social reality (i.e., politeness2) must be grounded in interlocutor inter-
pretations (i.e., politeness1). One consequence of this position, as argued by Eelen (2001), is
since politeness1 necessarily reflects the normative values of a specific (sub)group, the univer-
sal validity of politeness2 is questionable. Some have even declared an end to the age of
grand theorizing (Mills 2011:34). Alternatively, some accept the validity of culture-general
conceptualizations, but argue culture-specific emic constructs must form the basis of individ-
ual analyses (Arundale 1999, 2010). Although these approaches differ in their view on the util-
ity of universal conceptualizations, both incorporate culture-specific lay interpretations as
the basis of second-order analyses.
An alternative position, I argue, can be found in the postmodern discursive model (e.g., Locher
& Watts 2005, Watts 2003). Although the role of politeness1 and politeness2 in postmodern
accounts has been widely scrutinized (e.g., Grainger 2011, Haugh 2007, Terkourafi 2005), a fo-
cus on superficial inconsistencies has led critics to overlook the formal instantiation of these
conceptualizations. Specifically, politeness1 is represented not as lay interpretations of behav-
ior with regards to specific lexical items (as is typically assumed), but rather with regards to
the characteristics outlined in politeness2 (i.e., markedness and appropriateness). It is in
this sense, I contend, these models represent a valid culture-general theoretical conceptualiza-
tion of relational work which simultaneously expresses the fundamental tenet of social con-
structionism (i.e., the social construction of reality).
The current analysis also identifies remaining problems with the postmodern discursive model
(e.g., insufficient specification of the conditions markedness and appropriateness) and pre-
sents an alternative model based on theories of social cognition which addresses these issues
while maintaining the benefits associated with these accounts.
ARUNDALE, R.B. (1999) An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory Pragmatics 9: 119-154.
ARUNDALE, R.B. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement, in Journal of Pragmatics 42:
2078-2105. EELEN, G. (2001) A critique of politeness theories. Manchester: St. Jerome . GRAINGER, K. (2011) First orderand second or-
derpoliteness: Institutional and intercultural contexts, in Linguistic Politeness Research Group (ed.) Discursive approaches to politeness Ber-
lin: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 167-188. HAUGH, M. (2007) The discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative, in
Journal of Politeness Research 3: 295-317. LOCHER, M.A. & R.J. Watts (2005) Politeness theory and relational work, in Journal of Polite-
ness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture 1: 9-33. MILLS, S. (2011) Discursive approaches to politeness and impoliteness, in Linguistic
Politeness Research Group (ed.) Discursive approaches to politeness. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 19-56. TERKOURAFI, M. (2005) Be-
yond the micro-level in politeness research, in Journal of Politeness Research, 1: 237-262. WATTS, R. J. (2003) Politeness. Cambridge: CUP.
[email protected]
MAILLAT, Didier
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Reference assignment with a twist:
The pragmatics of referential disambiguation in L2 across the lifespan
This paper brings together pragmatics and second language acquisition, as we explore one of
the paths indicated by Foster-Cohen (2000, 2004) that research in the pragmatics of SLA
could take. We investigate pragmatic disambiguation processes in a second language (L2)
across the lifespan. In doing so we argue that a cross-sectional population of late L2 users of
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English provides an original and crucial insight into the pragmatic processes that govern refer-
ence assignment.
Taking a relevance-theoretic perspective on reference assignment (Sperber & Wilson 1995; Car-
ston 2002), we hypothesise that pragmatic performance will deteriorate in L2 contexts. How-
ever, we argue further that the limitations imposed by a L2 on pragmatic processes will be felt
even if the pragmatic process under scrutiny is not directly affected by the limitations in L2.
That is to say that we expect pragmatic degradation to be the result of a cognitive overload, as
opposed to semantic shortcomings and/or cross-linguistic interference. For this purpose, we
focus on low-level disambiguation explicatures (assigning referents) in late German-speaking
learners of English. Such processes would typically allow direct transfer from L1 into L2.
We use original experimental data that focus on the explicatures generated in reference assign-
ment processes. Based on designs derived from those developed by Keysar and colleagues
(1998), we observe in a cross-sectional population of 160 German-speaking learners of Eng-
lish, aged 10-80, how they assign referents in stimuli involving competing referents in a task
that requires that the participant adopt the perspective of the speaker/instructor. We contrast
these results with performance in a L1 control condition.
Our results show that pragmatic performance in L2 deteriorates significantly from the control
condition both in terms of accuracy and reaction time. L2 learners referential disambigua-
tion explicatures thus appear to be significantly hindered even when cross- linguistic positive
transfer is possible (cf. Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008). We propose that these results are best ac-
counted for in terms of a cognitive overload affecting pragmatic processes in L2. Further evi-
dence of the correlation between the general cognitive capacity and referential explicature at-
tainment is provided by a significant contrast across age cohorts.
We conclude by showing that our results provide a new insight in recent research on reference
assignment (Gibson & Pearlmutter 2011) that show age-related effects within a L1 context,
where young children systematically underperform adults in reference disambiguation tasks,
as the former seem unable to inhibit their erroneous initial inferential response.
[email protected]
MAZZARELLA, Diana
University College London, UK
Politeness, relevance and scalar inferences
Recent behavioural studies in the field of experimental pragmatics (Breheny et al., 2006; i.a.)
investigate the effect of contextual manipulations on the derivation of scalar inferences (e.g.
Not all X-ed from Some X-ed). Among these, Bonnefon et al. (2009) and Feeney and Bonne-
fon (2012) suggest that scalar inferences are less likely to be derived in face-threatening con-
texts.
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(1) A. What impression did I make during dinner?
B. Some of the guests thought you drank too much.
In (1) A would be less likely to derive the inference that not all of the guests thought I drank too
much from Bs utterance. Indeed, the authors even suggest that A might interpret Bs utterance
as communicating that all the guests thought you drank too much.
I suggest that the experimental evidence provided so far is not sufficient to support these
claims. The off-line paradigm adopted fails to track the distinction between what the addressee
takes to be the speakers intended meaning and what he infers about the actual state of affairs
in the world.
The results indicate that addressees are more reluctant in face-threatening contexts to rule out
the possibility that all X-ed, when told that some X-ed. This can be explained either (i) by as-
suming that face-threatening contexts block the derivation of scalar inferences (which is what
the authors suggest), or (ii) by assuming that in face-threatening contexts the scalar inference
is in fact derived but is less likely to be accepted (as true).
I analyse the results in light of Relevance Theory. I suggest that, in line with (ii), Relevance The-
ory predicts that in face-threatening context the scalar inference Not all X-ed is derived but
considerations about the communicators manifest preferences (e.g. her politeness concerns)
may affect its believability (Sperber et al. 2010).
BREHENY, R., N. Katsos & J. Williams (2006) Are generalised scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role
of context in generating pragmatic inferences, in Cognition 100: 434-463. BONNEFON, J.F., A. Feeney & G. Villejoubert (2009) When some
is actually all: Scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts, in Cognition 112: 249-258. FEENEY, A., & J.F. Bonnefon (2012) Politeness and
honesty contribute additively to the interpretation of scalar expressions, in Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32: 181-190. SPER-
BER, D., F. Clment, C. Heintz, O. Mascaro, H. Mercier, G. Origgi & D. Wilson (2010) Epistemic vigilance, in Mind & Language 25: 359-393.
[email protected]
McKINNON, Sean
1
& Pilar Prieto
2
1Indiana University, USA
2Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness
Even though mock impoliteness has generally been analyzed within the impoliteness frame-
work (cf. Culpeper 1996, 2011, Bernal 2008), recent proposals suggest that it is an essentially
different pragmatic phenomenon that requires a continuous conversational evaluation (Haugh
& Bousfield 2012). The present study had the goal of assessing the online evaluation process of
target genuine vs. mock impoliteness utterances, specifically the interaction of the situational/
discourse context with prosodic and gestural cues. 6 participants were asked to complete an
oral DCT (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, Billmyer & Varghese 2000) with 10 sentences, split evenly
between situations which mock or genuine impoliteness could arise. Both types of impoliteness
favored the use of the nuclear configuration L* L%, followed by H+L* L%, which was more fre-
quent with the genuine impoliteness data; other prosodic cues that have been frequently associ-
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ated with anger (Murray & Arnott 1993, Culpeper 2003) were also present in the genuine impo-
liteness data. The most common gesture for the genuine impoliteness utterances was furrowed
eyebrows, while in the mock impoliteness data it was a smile. Selected target utterances were
then chosen for two perception experiments. A total of 97 participants were either asked to
rate the degree of impoliteness of target genuine and mock impoliteness utterances in isolation
(Experiment 1), or to rate the same utterances preceded with a set of matched and mismatched
situational/discourse contexts which favored either a genuine or a mock impoliteness interpre-
tation (Experiment 2). The results of the two experiments show that (a) evaluations of mock
impoliteness utterances generate more uncertainty in listeners than genuine impolite utter-
ances; and (b) mock impoliteness evaluations are characterized by a more active use of ges-
tural cues. These results provide evidence that mock impoliteness triggers a more complex
evaluation procedure of a phenomenon that lies at the boundary between polite and impolite
behavior.
BILLMYER, K. & M. Varghese (2000) Investigating instrument-based pragmatic variability: Effects of enhancing discourse completion
tests Applied Linguistics 21: 517552. BLUM-KULKA, S., J. House & G. Kasper (1989) Investigating cross-cultural pragmatics: An introduc-
tory overview, in S. Blum-Kulka, J. House & G. Kasper (eds.) Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 1-
34. CULPEPER, J. (1996) Towards an anatomy of impoliteness, in Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349-367. HAUGH, M. & D. BOUSFIELD.
(2012). Mock impoliteness, jocular mockery and jocular abuse in Australian and British English. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1099-1114.
1 [email protected]
MEIBAUER, Jrg
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany
Towards an intercultural pragmatics of lying
Most researchers see lying as a communicative behavior that can occur in every discourse. On
the one hand, it is a cognitive ability serving at the manipulation of the truth and the deception
of interlocutors. On the other hand, it is deeply embedded in social and cultural practices be-
cause liars pursue certain social goals (Meibauer 2014). While the basic pattern of lying seems
to be universal, i.e., a speaker asserts something they do not believe, judgments on what ex-
actly constitutes a lie widely differ when speakers from different countries and cultures are
asked. Thus, while Sacks (1975) bluntly asserts that everyone has to lie, Blum (2007) even
suggests that there might be something like Chinese truth as opposed to other truths. In
fact, judgments on lying from an impressionist as well as an experimental angle show
some variation, e.g., with respect to prosocial lies or indirect lies, and one reason for this seems
to be the specific cultural background of the speakers. In this talk, intercultural parameters
with respect to lying, e.g., truthfulness, modesty, humor, face-saving, gossip, prosocial goals,
etc. are systematically discussed on the basis of previous findings and related to recent theoriz-
ing on intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes 2013). On the whole, it is argued that the core concept
of lying is universal while the different parameters leading to variation are dependent on the
impact of social and cultural values.
BLUM, S.D. (2007) Lies that bind. Chinese truth, other truths. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. KECSKES, I. (2013) Intercultural
pragmatics. Oxford: OUP. Meibauer, J. (2014) Lying at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. SACKS, H. (1975) Eve-
ryone has to lie, in M. Sanches & B.G. Blount (eds.) Sociocultural dimensions of language use. New York: Academic Press, pp. 57-80.
[email protected]
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MRIC, Olivier
1
& Laurent Gautier
2
Universit de Bourgogne, France
Learnability of inter-cultural pragmatic competences verbalized in tourist guide
discourses
Most people working in contact with tourists admit they need to master communication compe-
tences in various languages. The Common European Framework (CEF) defines them at three
interconnected levels: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic components. The latter is often
eluded in the learning process; however, it is part of the discourse, and it has to be trained to
reach a decent level of active inter-cultural communication. Furthermore, the communicative
performance of tourist guides relies on the way they handle this competence to manage their
group.
Willing to evidence the inter-cultural pragmatic competences within tourist guide discourses,
two French corpora have been made, one of traveller and guide interactions and the second
one of audio-guides. According to Petit (2010), both corpora are representative of professional
texts but the first one is built on spontaneous interactions thanks to pragmatic elements while
the second one stems from redacted texts following scenarios where pragmatic elements are
reduced to theatrical effects (Gautier & Mric 2014).
Within a sociolinguistic cognitive/usage-based approach (Geeraerts, Kristiansen & Peirsman
2010), the use of collostructional analysis to describe and compare the two corpus distribu-
tions will reveal the pragmatic characteristics (Barron & Schneider 2009: 429). A qualitative
analysis of speech acts and scripts will complete the variational pragmatic description also on
the basis of an adapted version of the proximity-distance-continuum.
The results will help to shape the involved discourse and functional competences which are the
main elements of the pragmatic competences needed by the future professional. Then, proposi-
tions will be suggested to improve flexibility, turn taking, thematic development, coherence
and cohesion, spoken fluency and propositional precision which are the CEF scales to evaluate
the pragmatic competence.
BARRON, A., & K.P. Schneider (2009) Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction, Intercul-
tural Pragmatics 6: 425-442. GAUTIER, L. & O. Mric (2014) Contextes culturels et cognitifs dans la traduction/adaptation du discours des
guides touristiques in C. Condei, L. Gautier & C. Teodorescu (eds.) La traduction spcialise: Approches et modles. Contexte(s), discours,
mdiation. Berlin: Frank & Timme. GEERAERTS, D., G. Kristiansen & Y. Peirsman (eds.) (2010) Advances in cognitive sociolinguistics: Ber-
lin, Mouton de Gruyter. PETIT, M. (2010) Le discours spcialis et le spcialis du discours: Repres pour lanalyse du discours en anglais de
spcialit, in E-rea, available at http://erea.revues.org/1400 (last access 30/09/2013)
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
MOESCHLER, Jacques
Back to negative particulars and their non-lexicalization: A truth-conditional
pragmatics proposal
In a series of papers, Horn has given a complete analysis of negative particulars in terms of Ar-
istotelian Square and his theory of semantic scales. Particulars are lower-bound expressions
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triggering upward inferences, that is, generalized conversational implicatures having the nega-
tion of their universal counterparts as content. The absence of lexicalization for negative par-
ticulars (O) is explained via the complexity of their meaning.
The main purpose of my contribution is to explain why O meaning is complex. The argument is
the following: what particulars trigger are not GCIs but explicatures, that is, truth-conditional
contributions to meaning. The analysis points out that Horns account correctly describes par-
ticulars as sub-contraries, but their uses cannot be extended to cases where only one of them is
true, the other being false.
The starting point is that negative and positive particulars (respectively some and some not)
have specific constraints on their semantics and their pragmatics. Their semantics is defined
by their position on the logical square. They are semantically incompatible with their contradic-
tories: some is incompatible with no, and somenot with all. On the other hand, their pragmat-
ics is limited by their upper-bound correlates: some is pragmatically incompatible with all,
somenot with no.
The two main consequences of this analysis are: first, the pragmatic incompatibility of particu-
lars is the consequence of their truth-conditions, not of their GCIs; second, the complexity of
negative particulars meaning is semantically expressed, within Boolean semantics. Negative
particulars are not lexicalized because their meaning is compositionally the result of two Boo-
lean operations: intersection of sets and complement of the intersection: some A are not B is
thus formally represented as A B (the difference of A and B), or as the complement of the in-
tersection of AB (C AB).
HORN L.R. (2004) Implicature, in L.R. Horn & G. Ward (eds.) The handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 3-28. HORN L.R. (2007),
Histoire d*O: Lexical pragmatics and the geometry of opposition, in J-Y. Bziau & G. Payette (eds.) New perspectives on the square of opposi-
tion. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 393-426. WILSON D. & SPERBER D. (2004) Relevance theory in in L.R. Horn & G. Ward (eds.) The handbook of
pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 607-632.
[email protected]
MOLNAR, Valeria
Lund University, Sweden
The predicationality hypothesis
Cataphoric propositional pronoun insertion (CPPI) in complex sentences underlies language-
specific restrictions. In Hungarian, the insertion of the cataphoric propositional pronoun azt
is possible in complex sentences with assertive matrix verbs (say), but not with factives (re-
gret):
(1) a. Pter (azt) mondta, hogy gyakran sszejnnek munka utn.
Peter said that they often meet up after work.
b. Pter (*azt) bnja, hogy elfogadta a meghvst.
Peter regrets that he has accepted the invitation.
German displays a mirror pattern CPPI is licensed in complex sentences with factive verbs:
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(2) a. Peter sagte (*es), dass sie sich nach der Arbeit oft treffen.
Peter said that they often meet up after work.
b. Peter bedauert es, dass er die Einladung angenommen hat.
Peter regrets that he has accepted the invitation.
We demonstrate, however, that information structure can influence CPPI: focusing or back-
grounding of the embedded clause has consequences for CPPI in both languages.
In our stricty modular theoretical framework we argue that CPPI is dependent on the syntactic
type and the realization of Spec-CP in the embedded clause. In accordance with Chomsky
(2008), we assume that the derivation of Spec-CP results from the instantiation of the edge-
feature (EF) in C. We argue that syntax universally provides for two clause types: those with
EF in C, and those lacking EF in C.
Narrow Syntax is, however, only responsible for the actual derivation of Spec-CP, not for the
interpretational effects of this position. The discourse-semantic content of this position can
vary in different languages. In Hungarian EF is associated with the predicational status, in Ger-
man with the non-predicational status of the embedded clause (cf. Predicationality Hypothe-
sis). (Non-)predicationality is closely related to the semantic concepts of assertion and presup-
position but also requires the inclusion of the pragmatic dimension: illocutionary force and fo-
cus.
[email protected]
MLLER, Sonja
University of Bielefeld, Germany
Redundancy effects in discourse:
On the modal particle-combinations halt eben & eben halt in German
This talk is concerned with the combination of modal particles (mps) in German, in particular
with the combinations of eben and halt.
(1) A: Peter is always so polite.
B: Er ist halt eben/eben halt Brite.
He is MP MP/ MP MP British
He is just British.
A common assumption is that the relative order of mps is fixed. As far as halt and eben are con-
cerned, this combination seems to be an exception because both orders are attested. One explanation
for this observation is that dialectal variation is at issue here (cf. e.g. Elspass 2005:17, fn 41 [halt eben
would have to be Southern German in this argumentation]), Autenrieth (2002:96) assumes that the
variation provides evidence for a speakers planning error and the combination is, therefore, not in-
tended as a linguistic unit, and Zifonun et al (1997:1541ff.) claim that halt eben is the order in impera-
tives, whereas eben halt occurs in declaratives. Against this background, the aim of my talk is two-
fold:
(1) I would like to contribute to solving the empirical puzzle which arises out of the contradicting
assumptions mentioned above. Looking at the largest corpora of written (Deutsches Referenzkorpus)
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and oral German data (Datenbank fr gesprochenes Deutsch) accessible as well as a webcorpus (DE-
COW2012), I claim that in present-day German halt eben is the unmarked and eben halt the marked
order. The results of two controlled rating experiments (N = 29/31, paired-comparisons) show that
the preference for halt eben applies across sentence types. As the testants came from the northern
part of North Rhine-Westphalia, I also cannot find evidence for the assumption that halt eben is
Southern German.
(2) I will suggest an explanation for the difference in markedness between the two orders by argu-
ing that a form of iconicity is at play here. By modelling the meaning contribution of halt and eben in
isolation within the formal model of discourse developed in Farkas & Bruce (2010), I argue that the
meaning of eben entails the meaning of halt. I explain the markedness of the order eben halt by build-
ing on independent work which shows that utterances involving the reinforcement of entailments are
marked (cf. e.g. Horn 1976:63ff., Levinson 2009: 20). Reinforcing entailed information involves a
type of discourse structural redundancy and although this does not lead to complete
ungrammaticality/unacceptability, the order which presents the information non-redundantly is usu-
ally preferred. As the experiments mentioned above also contained items of reinforced entailments in
the area of hyponyms/hyperonyms, they also provide evidence for the assumption that speakers are
sensitive to such ways of presenting information.
Therefore, my analysis traces the difference in markedness between the two orders of mps
back to a pragmatic requirement which has been assumed to hold in communication independ-
ently.
[email protected]
MUSTAJOKI, Arto
University of Helsinki, Finland
Why is miscommunication more common in everyday life than in lingua franca
conversation?
Hundreds of publications have been devoted to failures in lingua franca or other kinds of inter-
cultural communication, caused by cultural differences between the interlocutors. No one can
deny that any deviation in the mental worlds of communicants is a potential risk for proper un-
derstanding. Nevertheless, I argue that Ermakova and Zemskaia (1993) are right in alleging
that miscommunication takes place more frequently in everyday conversation between people
who know each other well that when speaking with foreigners. In my paper, I will discuss in
more detail the explanations for this paradoxical claim. Three features of everyday conversa-
tion make it especially prone to communication failures:
(1) It takes place in peoples leisure time. Communicants therefore try to avoid any extra cognitive
effort (Shintel, Keysar 2009), which leads to insufficient concentration on communication.
(2) Communicants tend to succumb to the common ground fallacy (Epley 2008): as a result of ego-
centric thinking they overestimate the similarity of their mental worlds (Keysar, Henly 2002,
Kecskes, Zhang 2009).
(3) Because of their wide-ranging personal communicative needs, coupled with confidence in their
communicative capacities, people discuss all possible topics, including those which are diffuse and
fuzzy (Mustajoki 2013).
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(4) The situation of communication is seldom optimal: noises, distance between communicants,
etc.
These (and some other) factors lead to a high frequency of traditional forms of communicative
failures: overguessing, misreference (referential ambiguity), misinterpretation of indirect
speech.
[email protected]
NEALE, Stephen
The metaphysics, pragmatics, and formatics of implicit reference
It is vital to clear-headed theorizing about language and communication to separate three ques-
tions: (1) In virtue of what facts does a speaker, S, refer to whatever S refers to in uttering some-
thing, x, on a given occasion? (2) What sorts of information, what principles, and what types of
cognitive states and processes are involved in the (typically spontaneous) arrival in the mind of
an interpreter of a (typically resilient) conclusion about what S is referring to in uttering x on
that occasion? (3) What sorts of information, what principles, and what types of cognitive
states and processes are involved in the formation of the referential intentions S has in uttering
x on that occasion? (1) is a question in metaphysics, a question about constitutive determina-
tion. (2) is a question in pragmatics, a question about epistemic determination that is an-
swered by a theory of utterance interpretation (which will include theories of lexical and com-
positional semantics). (3) is a question in what I call formatics, a question about aetiological
determination that is answered by a theory of utterance formation (which will also include
theories of lexical and compositional semantics). The widespread use of the unmodified word
determine in the philosophical and linguistic literature on semantics and pragmatics has led
to widespread conflations of constitutive, epistemic, and aetiological determination, leading to
strictly unintelligible debates about the rles of context and pragmatic inference in accounts of
language and communication, and a general conflation of questions in metaphysics, pragmat-
ics, and formatics that must be separated but whose answers are mutually constraining and all
rooted in a Gricean notion of communicative intention. Once this is appreciated, not only do
standard objection to intentionalism evaporate, but clean accounts of the metaphysics, prag-
matics, and formatics of speaker reference, including implicit reference, can be provided, an
account that (a) clarifies precisely what is at issue in debates about the underdetermination
of content by linguistic meaning, and (b) places serious constraints on what can be explained
by postulating aphonic expressions in syntax, and (c) explains the rigidity of referring expres-
sions in terms of what can reasonably be called the rigidity of acts of speaker reference, itself
explained in terms of what can reasonably be called the rigidity of belief and intentiontheir
tenacious grip on three-dimensional continuants in a dynamic and contingent world.
[email protected]
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NMETH T., Enik
Theoretical and methodological issues in the research into implicit arguments in
Hungarian
Critical evaluation of the literature on implicit arguments in different languages has demon-
strated that purely syntactic, pragmatic and lexical-semantic explanations are inadequate
(Cote 1996, Nmeth T. 2010). Purely syntactic accounts analyse only those implicit arguments
which have a position of their own in the syntactic structure of sentences and cannot consider
implicit arguments in contexts. Purely pragmatic accounts can describe all types of implicit ar-
guments, but cannot distinguish between them and do not rely on any grammatical informa-
tion. This leads to an analysis according to which every argument can be omitted if it is infer-
able, but this is not the case. The purely lexical-semantic explanations suggest that lexical-
semantic properties fully determine the verbs occurrence with implicit arguments, but data
from pro-drop languages attest the opposite. The criticism of these explanations has led to com-
plex approaches which consider both grammatical and contextual information (Goldberg
2005, Garca Velasco - Portero Muoz 2002).
Examining implicit arguments in a complex approach yields a number of theoretical and meth-
odological consequences and influences the spectrum of data. In my paper, I intend to present
and exemplify some of these consequences in the research into implicit arguments in Hungar-
ian. First, if the contextual factors can influence the occurrence of implicit arguments, we have
to accept that grammar and pragmatics intensively interact. Second, assuming such an interac-
tion, implicit arguments cannot be explained in sentential environments. Various occurrences
of implicit arguments in Hungarian judged ungrammatical in sentence-oriented accounts can
be interpreted in utterance contexts which can be extended with information from discourse,
physical and encyclopaedic contexts. And third, if implicit arguments are investigated in utter-
ances, the various data types (e.g. intuition, spoken and written corpora, thought experiments)
must be integrated.
These theoretical and methodological decisions result in a more complete and plausible ac-
count of implicit arguments in Hungarian.
[email protected]
NMETH, Zsuzsanna
Four repair operations in Hungarian
While previous studies have paid a great deal of attention to self-repair in the conversation ana-
lytic literature, relatively few of them have focused only on repair operations, i.e. self-repair
strategies in their own rights. Even fewer of them have examined repair operations relative to
each other, that is, contrasting them in self-repair from a certain aspect or aspects (the excep-
tions being Fox et al. 2009 and Fox et al. 2010 on recycling and replacement).
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The results of the literature involving nine languages in the examination suggest that the differ-
ence between the frequency of recycling and replacement self-repairs (which seems to be ap-
proximately universally constant) originates from their inherent properties independently of
their various manifestations in the different languages. This prediction makes us ask the follow-
ing question: If there exists such a difference between recycling and replacement, does it exist
among other repair operations as well?
The aim of my presentation is twofold. First, I attempt to offer an explanation for the cross-
linguistic difference between the frequency of recycling and replacement as self-repair strate-
gies by revealing their most important characteristics in Hungarian and making a comparison
with the languages examined in this respect so far. Second, I intend to extend my investigation
to another two repair operations, namely, insertion and aborting, and propose a model being
able to describe repair operations relative to each other on the basis of the ways they halt the
progressivity of the current turn-at-talk.
As approaching these aims requires the combination of data from different data sources, e.g.
spontaneous speech recorded in a corpus consisting of Hungarian, casual face-to-face conversa-
tions, intuition, and data from previous research, setting up the model makes a meta-
conscious treatment of the data necessary. For this reason I also offer a metatheoretical reflec-
tion on my study using a model of plausible argumentation (Kertsz & Rkosi 2012).
FOX, B.A., F. Wouk, M. Hayashi, S. Fincke, L. Tao, M.-L. Sorjonen, M. Laakso & W.F. Hernandez (2009) A cross linguistic investigation of the
site of initiation in same-turn self-repair, in J. Sidnell (ed.), Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 60-103.
FOX, B.A., Y. Maschler, & S. Uhmann, (2010) A cross-linguistic study of self-repair: Evidence from English, German, and Hebrew, in Journal
of Pragmatics 42: 2487-2505. KERTSZ, A. & C. Rkosi (2012) Data and evidence in linguistics: A plausible argumentation model. Cam-
bridge: CUP.
[email protected]
NGUYEN, Thi Thuy Minh
1
& Soe Marlar Lwin
2
Singapore National Institute of Education
The pragmatic particles of Singapore colloquial English: Implications for
socialization of bilingual pre-school children
The study reported in this paper is part of an ongoing, longitudinal research project that aims
to explore effects of parent-child interaction on early pragmatic development by a group of
young children in Singapores bilingual Chinese-English speaking families. Drawing on the the-
ory of language socialization (Ochs 1996), the study aims to examine (1) how parents and chil-
dren negotiate meanings and intentions through the use of two pragmatic particles lah and
ah that are characteristic of the vernacular variety of Singapore English (Gupta 1992), and
(2) how parents engage their children in co-constructing socio-cultural knowledge via these
pragmatic choices. The project collected data from 8 families with young children aged from 2
to 4 over a period of one year. Parents were instructed to audio-record at least one hour of
their conversations whenever they were together with their children (e.g. at meal times, craft-
making or play times) on a fortnightly basis. The data analyzed for this study comprised audio-
recordings of four parent-child dyads over six months. Preliminary analysis of data shows that
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(1) the above particles in Singapore English carry salient pragmatic meanings, occurring with a
wide variety of speech acts to modify their illocutionary forces, and (2) their choice is not only
linguistically constrained but also culturally motivated. The results thus suggest that these
pragmatic particles may serve as a mean of socializing children into the socio-cultural norms
and values of the community in which they participate as cultural members. These results con-
tribute to the current knowledge of bilingual pragmatic development and add to the existing
literature on the pragmatics of New Englishes.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
NYAN, Tnanh
University of Manchester, UK
Internalised context: How did this come about?
The idea that linguistic meaning includes constraints on context has been around for some
time (Ducrot et al. 1980, Cadiot et al. 1985, Blakemore 1987). The best known example is
probably that of discourse markers, which impose constraints on the interpretation of their
host utterances; but arising from Argumentation Theory and the ScaPoline (Anscombre 1995,
Nlke 1994) we also have a notion of utterance meaning that is construed, among other things,
in terms of indications regarding the (idealized) context of utterance.
If context albeit in a schematized form made its way into the conceptual structure of linguis-
tic meaning, how did this come about?
A possible way of furthering our understanding of this issue is to approach it from an adaptive
perspective, and more specifically, from that of Damasios theory of brain functions (Damasio
1994 & 2010).
This paper focuses on the second type of internalised context. It examines the possibly that
such a context has an analogue at the level of brain maps, from which it may derive.
Key adaptive assumptions include:
- The systems which an organism comprises contribute to survival.
- Language is rooted in our neurobiology.
- As a latecomer in the evolutionary process, language is in a position to co-opt solutions previously
devised to address its own problems.
- Processing systems tend to thrive towards ever greater efficiency, as part of being oriented towards
survival.
ANSCOMBRE, J-C. (ed.) (1995) Thorie des topo. Paris: Editions Kim. BLAKEMORE, D. (1987) Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford:
Blackwell. CADIOT, A., O. Ducrot, B. Fradin, T.B. Nguyen & A. Vicher (1985) Sous un mot une controverse: Les emplois pragmatiques de
toujours, in Modles Linguistiques 7: 105-123. DAMASIO, A.R. (1994) Descartess error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York:
Grosset/Putnam. DAMASIO, A.R. (2010) Self comes to mind. New York: Pantheon. DUCROT, B. et al. (1980) Les mots du discours. Paris:
Editions de Minuit. EDELMAN, G.M. (1989) The remembered present. New York: Basic Books. FUTUYMA, D.J. 1998. Evolutionary Biology.
Sunderland: Sinaer Associates. GIVN, T. 2005. Context as other minds: the pragmatics of sociality, cognition and communication. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins. JEANNEROD, M. (1994) The representing brain: Neural correlates of motor intention and imagery, in Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 17: 187-245. MAYR, E. 1976. Evolution and the diversity of life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. NLKE, H. (1994) Lin-
guistique modulaire: De la forme au sens. Louvain-Paris: Editions Peters.
[email protected]
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O'NEAL, George
Niigata University, Japan
The pragmatics of intercultural phonetic repair in English as a lingua franca
interactions
In English as a Lingua Franca interactions, which are defined in this presentation as any inter-
action in which people for whom English is not a native language interact in English, intercul-
tural misunderstandings caused by pronunciation differences are commonplace and well re-
searched (Jenkins 2000, 2002; Matsumoto 2011; ONeal 2013a, 2013b, 2014 in submission).
However, the interactional mechanisms which are used to reestablish mutual intelligibility af-
ter a misunderstanding caused by pronunciation variation has occurred are less well under-
stood. This presentation endeavors to describe one of the interactional mechanisms employed
to reestablish mutual intelligibility: Phonetic Repair. Phonetic Repair is a process in which
speakers of English as a Lingua Franca orient to a lexeme as problematic or unintelligible and
then subject it to a unique type of repair in which one or more speakers change one or multiple
phonemes in order to reestablish mutual intelligibility (Matsumoto 2011, Schegloff 2007). That
is, the interactional details manifest that speakers can orient to the phonetic components of lex-
emes, the phonemes, as unintelligible and substitute the problematic phonemes with intelligi-
ble phonemes in pursuit of reestablishing intelligibility. Indeed, the negotiation of phonemes is
one critically important practice utilized among speakers of English as a Lingua Franca
(Canagarajah 2013).
This presentation will begin with a three-way distinction between types of intercultural pronun-
ciation: unproblematic pronunciation, unintelligible pronunciation, and intelligible pronuncia-
tion. Furthermore, it will be argued that all three distinctions are justifiable within the conver-
sation analytic framework because speakers orient to pronunciation as such. Next, the presen-
tation will analyze a few instances of the phonetic repair of unintelligible pronunciation be-
tween university students and foreign exchange students at a Japanese university, and enumer-
ate the classes of phonemes that are usually subjected to phonetic repair. Last, it will be argued
that Phonetic Repair is a critical component of Performative Competence (Canagarajah 2013).
[email protected]
OCHOA, Jos
Universidad Politcnica Salesiana, Ecuador
Amazonian intercultural expression on knowledge
This paper presents the ongoing research aspiring to compile a full descriptive mapping of the
verbal expression on knowledge among the Amazonian peoples.
We work with the hypothesis that, despite their differences, all the cultures of the Amazon ba-
sin share one mind on issues such as the relationship with nature and the way of thinking: cre-
ating, transferring, preserving and sharing thought, learning, or experience.
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This epistemology differs significantly from the one expressed by the Western languages, not
only on their terms but in its fundamentals. The languages from Amazon region are expressing
a radical different way of seeing the world and the environment. In their cosmovision they can
attribute intellectual properties no just to the human but the other wildlife in the jungle. And
this worldview is in constant confrontation with the message arriving to the indigenous com-
munities through TV and internet.
In South America the Intercultural challenge is not just the coexistence of westernize mestizo
societies with the week indigenous cultures (most of them oral cultural or agraphic until re-
cently), but the understanding of a different approach to life and the fact of knowing, mani-
fested in the way the speak about it in normal conversation and through the surviving myths.
The methodological approach is not restricted to a lexicographical collection, but covers a
broad reflection of meaning in context through the use of descriptive techniques of speech
analysis.
This amplified semantics doesnt fit in a multilingual lexicon, of course, but needs a new way of
expression and a visual presentation to facilitate the gathered information with usability.
Our proposal is to use multimedia devices for capture the acts of speech and a multilayer con-
ceptual mapping visualization for the analysis, in order to allow a better use and understand-
ing of the findings of our research.
[email protected]
ODORISI, Matheus
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Referentiation and ideology: The construction of homophobic speech in new-
Pentecostal minister text
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how homophobic ideas are developed in the speech
of Brazilian new-Pentecostal church leaders. These ministers have predominant roles and air-
time in Brazilian media, and are always involved in polemic discussions concerning gay rights.
In their speech, they attack homosexual practices and identity, but in rhetoric that does not
damage their churchs image by means of non-aggressive remarks. In order to do that, they
abuse an argument that is now commonplace in new-Pentecostal speech: the defense of family.
Based on Text Linguistics theory, with a special application of referenced publications, it can
be observed how the referring process can develop a homophobic ideology. Also taken into con-
sideration for this analysis is the Critical Discourse Studies theory, which shows a special inter-
est in hate speech, and understanding that discourse has an intricate relationship with society
and cognition.
Homophobia in speech appears in how these ministers choose their words to refer to gays and
their allies, in addition to the arguments that put homosexuality alongside practices consid-
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ered perverted and against the traditional concept of family such as abortion, drug addiction
and pedophilia thus associating these concepts and inciting church followers to believe there
is a war between traditional family values, and homosexuality.
[email protected]
OGIERMANN, Eva
Kings College London, UK
Intercultural Communication in Polish/English families
The present study examines video-recorded conversations of English/Polish families. While
there is a long tradition of studying intercultural communication in the workplace on the basis
of video-recorded data (see e.g. Gumperz & Roberts 1991), studies of intercultural families are
relatively rare (but see Kolstrup 2013, Ogiermann 2013). Most studies looking at interaction in
bilingual families focus on the use of two languages across different generations of immigrants
(e.g. Li Wei 1994, Del Torto 2008) rather than communication in families where the partners
grew up in different countries and have different native languages.
This study analyses interactions where one language is used by all speakers as well as conversa-
tions involving both languages. Both are characterised by a relatively high potential for misun-
derstandings and pragmatic failure or dissonance.
A conversation held entirely in English (or Polish) puts the non-native speaker at a disadvan-
tage, whose communication style is being judged on the basis of the native speakers pragmatic
norms; or who may adjust to these norms but feel that he or she is compromising his or her cul-
tural and linguistic identity.
Interactions involving both languages, in particular those involving children who are raised bi-
lingually, may exclude the English speaking family members from conversations taking place
in Polish; or they may restrict their interactional choices if they do not speak the language suffi-
ciently well.
While in both cases at least one speaker seems to be at a disadvantage, the interactions show
different ways of dealing with these interactional difficulties, including code switching and
non-verbal cues. On the whole, analyses of conversations in binational families provide rich in-
sights into how a family identity is constructed through interactions involving different prag-
matic styles, cultural values, and different languages.
DEL TORTO, L.M. (2008) Once a broker, always a broker: Non-professional interpreting as identity accomplishment in multigenerational
Italian-English bilingual family interaction, in Multilingua 27: 77-97. GUMPERZ, J. & C. Roberts (1991) Understanding in intercultural en-
counters, in J. Blommaert & J. Verschueren (eds.) The pragmatics of intercultural and international communication. Amsterdam: John Benja-
mins, 51-90. LI, W. (1994) Three generations, two languages, one family. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. KOLSTRUP, K.L. (2013). Youre
not in charge here: Negotiations of control and connection in a binational stepfamily, in Multilingua 32: 441-461. OGIERMANN, E. (2013)
On the inclusive and exclusive functions of the other language in family talk, in Multilingua 32: 463-480.
[email protected]
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OISHI, Etsuko
Tokyo University of Science, Japan
Austins speech act theory revisited
It is generally assumed that Searle (1969, 1979) developed Austins ([1962]1975) idea and,
therefore, there are not any major differences between their ideas. Against this common as-
sumption, the present paper supports the contention that there are crucial differences between
them, in particular, concerning Austins idea of illocutionary effects and Searles idea of illocu-
tionary points.
The concepts of illocutionary effects and illocutionary points are based on Austins and Searles
ideas of what illocutionary acts are, and their categorizations of illocutionary acts on the basis
of illocutionary effects or illocutionary points, respectively, reflect their basic ideas about illocu-
tionary acts. Austins and Searles categorizations of illocutionary acts are different in crucial
points, and, in particular, there is a theoretical significance in the difference between Austins
category of expositives and Searles category of assertives. Austin (1975:161-63) says exposi-
tives are used in acts of exposition involving the expounding views, the conducting arguments,
and the clarifying usages and references, and the expositive is the clarifying of reasons, argu-
ments, and communication. Searle (1979:12) says the point or purpose of the members of the
assertive class is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to somethings being the case, to
the truth of the expressed proposition.
Expositive illocutionary acts bring about, as their illocutionary effects, changes in the on-going
discourse rather than changes in the world, which are brought about, say, by verdictives. Differ-
ent types of expositives import different objects, such as usages, references, descriptions, and
thoughts, to the discourse, and, when the acts are accepted as such by the hearer, the usages,
references, descriptions, and thoughts are shared by the speaker and the hearer. These acts are
not just the acts of committing the speaker to somethings being the case, as Searles assertives
do.
In the latter part of the talk, Grices (and the neo-Griceans) concept of implicature is reana-
lyzed from the new perspective based on the proposed interpretation of expositives.
[email protected]
OSUKA, Naoko
Investigating mastery of conventional expressions in a study-abroad context
As part on an on-going study investigating pragmatic development by Japanese learners of
English who studied in the United States for one semester, this presentation focuses learners
mastery of conventional expressions. It has been reported that L2 learners acquire conven-
tional expressions later in their language learning. Although much research has investigated
interpretation of conventional expressions by L2 learners, there have not been many studies
that examined learners production of such expressions.
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In this study, a multimedia elicitation task (MET) was employed to elicit oral data. The MET,
developed by the researcher, is a computer-based instrument containing eight request, eight
refusal, and eight thanking scenarios. Sixteen Japanese college students completed the MET
before and after they studied abroad, and their responses were compared with those of nine-
teen American college students to provide a baseline. Approximately twenty conventional ex-
pressions were identified in the American students production. On comparing pre- and post-
study abroad data of the Japanese students, it was found that although they increased in over-
all oral fluency after studying abroad, they only acquired a few new conventional expressions.
For example, none of them produced I was wondering if you could in a request, This seat
is taken in a refusal, or You didnt have to in thanking. The results of the follow-up interview
indicated that the students had heard most expressions while studying abroad and could under-
stand them; however, they still had difficulty in producing them. This could be explained by a
lack of equivalent expressions in Japanese, dependence on a limited range of expressions as
well as a lack of sufficient input. The results of the study indicate that six months exposure to
the target language is insufficient to acquire conventional expressions. This highlights the ne-
cessity of explicit instruction of these kinds of pragmatic expressions.
[email protected]
OTSU, Takahiro
Kyushu University, Japan
Modulation maker: A relevance-theoretic account of After All and Datte
Relevance Theory has consistently dealt with after all as a discourse marker that encodes a pro-
cedural constraint of confirming an existing assumption. This is based on the framework that
the procedure the marker encodes is activated in dichotomous representations, i.e. conclusion
and evidence. However, given the concessive use of this marker, a dichotomous analysis seems
insufficient for the unitary account of it. In this paper, I claim that after all encodes a con-
straint of modulating assumptions, in which after all or after all utterances have various ways
of resolving a contradiction between previous assumption and conclusion. These trichotomous
representations are able to integrate the Japanese conjunction datte, which is commonly re-
garded as an equivalent counterpart of after all.
Viewing the procedural constraint as a modulator will account for the multiple uses of these
two linguistic expressions whose discourse behavior can manifest entirely different characteris-
tics, and demonstrate that the unitary account elucidates the little investigated puzzle that a
single linguistic expression occurs in different contexts. The proposed modulation account
of after all, for instance, helps facilitate the argument that both concession and justification
share the common cognitive ground involving three assumptions: previous assumption, conclu-
sion and evidence. Just like after all, datte has been generally claimed to connect two proposi-
tions with a justificatory relation. However, data show that the conjunction often expresses
the communicators emotive attitude, especially when uttered independently, and also occurs
in the context of agreement (cf. Oki 2006). These different phases manifested by a single con-
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junction can be also recognized as a modulation of two assumptions, i.e. the communicators
and the addressees. Procedural approaches are more advantageous than coherent approaches
or speech-act theoretic approaches in the sense that they can offer a fine-grained account of
how each discourse marker or conjunction makes a distinctive contribution to utterance inter-
pretation.
[email protected]
PADILLA CRUZ, Manuel
Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
Attitudinal adjectives: A relevance-theoretic approach
Adjectives modify nouns attributively and predicatively and make up an open grammar cate-
gory comprising nouns pre-modifying other nouns and present and past participles, known as
participial adjectives (Geenbaum and Quirk 1993; Huddleston 1993). When used attributively,
they may have a passive interpretation (1), although the participle cannot be interpreted as a
passive when the corresponding verb is intransitive (2):
(1) Lost property [= property that has been lost]
(2) The escaped prisoner [= the prisoner who escaped]
Predicative uses of participial adjectives are possible only in some cases:
(3) The curtains are faded [= the curtains have faded]
Since adjectives and words functioning like them characterise nouns, they contribute to the
truth-conditional content of the utterances where they occur and are part of their lower-level
explicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1995).
There are some nouns and participial adjectives which, though functioning as adjectives, could
not be said to contribute to the truth-evaluable content of the utterances where they occur:
(4) Give him that damned gun!
(5) That fucking lady was so lucky she didnt get stuck between that car and wall!
(6) No he visto al puto niato. [I havent seen the fucking/bloody bastard]
They function very much like interjections and some particles (Wharton 2009; Padilla Cruz
2009a) in that they seem to express the speakers attitude towards either the whole proposi-
tional content of the utterance or a part of it, namely the modified noun. Although they can be
used attributively, when predicatively used they would sound weird or have a different mean-
ing. This presentation will suggest labeling such adjectives attitudinal. It will argue that they
encode a fuzzy concept associated with emotions or feelings (Padilla Cruz 2009b) and contrib-
ute to the utterance higher-level explicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wharton 2009).
GREENBAUM, S. & R. Quirk (1993) A Students grammar of the English language. London: Longman. HUDDLESTON, R. (1993) Introduc-
tion to the grammar of English. Cambridge: CUP. PADILLA CRUZ, M. (2009a) Towards an alternative relevance-theoretic approach to inter-
jections, in International Review of Pragmatics 1: 182-206. PADILLA CRUZ, M. (2009b) Might interjections encode concepts? More ques-
tions than answers, in !od" Papers in Pragmatics 5: 241-270. SPERBER, D. & D. Wilson (1995) Relevance: Communication and cognition.
Oxford: Blackwell. WHARTON, T. (2009) Pragmatics and non-verbal communication. Cambridge: CUP.
[email protected]
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PANDAROVA, Irina
Leuphana Universitt Lneburg, Germany
I would never ever kick you up the arse. Sure I think you're great. The Irish English
discourse marker sure at the semantics/pragmatics interface
The functions of sure in British and American English are relatively well known. Sure is used
as a backchannel and an agreement marker similar to yes (Aijmer 2009; Tottie 1991). Its em-
phasizer function in lexical bundles of the type (NP) sure + AUX, as in He sure is an odd fel-
low has also been cited as a marker of Americanness (Aijmer 2009; Tottie 2002). Additionally,
Aijmer (2009) suggests that sure developed as follows: manner adverb > epistemic adverb >
interactive discourse marker. A very different type of sure, usually in utterance-initial and -fi-
nal position, has been attested for Irish English (cf. e.g. Amador-Moreno 2006; Walshe 2009).
Its functions, however, are not yet well understood.
This paper offers an original account of Irish English sure as a discourse marker similar to af-
ter all (Blakemore 2002), Hebrew harey (cf. e.g. Ariel 1998, 1999) and German ja and wohl
(Blass 2000). The data (audio recordings and the ICE-Ireland corpus) show that sure is phonol-
ogically reduced, semantically bleached, and multifunctional. On different occasions sure-
utterances can indicate a contradiction or strengthening of a previous assumption, or a prem-
ise to a conclusion. It is suggested that these multiple functions should be understood as differ-
ent conversational implicatures which regularly attach to sure. These are all aided by its basic,
procedural meaning. Sure indicates that the material under its scope is considered by the
speaker to represent relevant contextually accessible information against which a contextual
implication can be drawn.
[email protected]
PERKINS, Marla
Northern Arizona University, USA
Hobongan discourse markers: Lexical items as indications of pragmatic priority
In a partial report on field work conducted in 2012-2013 on Hobongan, an Austronesian lan-
guage spoken by approximately two thousand people on the island of Borneo, I survey the
most commonly used discourse markers and note their influences on and interactions with
pragmatic priorities in the Hobongan communities. Specifically, the main discourse marker
[d"o#] not only connects clauses and provides continuity for discourse, but it also semantically
and pragmatically focuses on spatial-locational information in discourses. This accords with
the general cultural focus on spatial-locational information in discourses, to the extent that the
Hobongan do not recognize longer-than-sentence language as a unit of discourse unless
spatial-locational information has been given and focused (Searcy, p.c.). Further, Hobongan
contains temporal discourse markers that provide various levels of before and after informa-
tion but that do not specify an objective or measurable amount of time (e.g., [di]long-ago
past). The semantics of these markers depend on the pragmatic contexts in which they are
used; semantically, they are temporal deictics. Their meanings and uses accord with the prag-
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matic lack of emphasis on objectively measured time in Hobongan, and the pragmatic lack of
emphasis on ways to objectively measure anything, to the extent that, if Hobongan speakers
want to indicate a long time, they choose a number larger than four to indicate units of time
rather than being precise about time. There is also a category of discourse markers for aspect
(e.g., [tu.hi]onset). Another category of discourse markers provides various kinds of informa-
tion about causality (e.g., [ko]). These markers integrate different types of information in dis-
course. Hobongan discourse markers indicate pragmatic priority for spatial-locational infor-
mation with lesser priority on time and aspect, which corresponds with priorities inherent in
the cultural context.
[email protected]
PINHEIRO-CORREA, Paulo
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
Exploring syntactic and prosodic marking of narrow focus in a compared Brazilian
Portuguese-Spanish corpus
This paper discusses the realization of the pragmatic function focus (Lambrecht 1994; Dik
1997), in special, narrow contrastive focus in a compared oral corpus of two romance lan-
guages, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Spanish. We aim to describe the differences in syntactic
and prosodic possibilities of realization of narrow contrastive focus (as semantically classified
by Dik 1997) in languages which are considered typologically closely related. We base the analy-
sis on the following corpora: for Madrid Spanish C-Oral Rom and for BP, C-Oral Brasil (Belo
Horizonte City), which are comparable (Raso 2012). The hypothesis is that BP is a language in
a changing process of the subject parameter, as stated by Kato (1988) and Galves (2001), who
argue that BP is becoming a more and more strict word order language and also shows a topic
prominence. This could favor a prosodic-only marking of narrow focus in this language, as
stated, for example, for English, a typical non null subject language. Spanish, on the other
hand, is considered a null subject language and is characterized basically by a syntactic mark-
ing of focus (Martnez Caro 1995). Following the hypothesis stated here, earlier work in a com-
pared corpus (Moura 2013) showed prosodic-only marking of narrow focus in BP, contrasting
to a syntactically marking of the same focus in Buenos Aires Spanish. These differences could
be due to the interaction of subject parameter and focus marking strategies.
[email protected]
PLEYER, Monika
Universitt Heidelberg, Germany
Translated impoliteness: Understanding and evaluating impoliteness in translated
texts for children
In every speech community, certain inherent conversational norms are in operation, which in-
fluence speaker understanding of verbal interactions. The study of impoliteness is central for
the discovery of these cross-cultural differences.
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This talk argues that children growing up in a given speech community can and do draw on lit-
erary texts to acquire knowledge about which (linguistic) behaviour is deemed im/polite. Nar-
rative texts present impoliteness strategies in a clear, programmatic manner, taking into ac-
count childrens cognitive abilities (Kmmerling-Meibauer 1999). They are especially signifi-
cant for the acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1991) since impoliteness is rarely experi-
enced compared to adequate or polite behaviour (Culpeper 2011, Lachenicht 1980).
In Germany, many popular childrens books, such as J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, are
translated from English. While the two languages are closely related, their communicative pref-
erences differ concerning politeness (House 2006), and different linguistic strategies are seen
as hurtful and open to an interpretation as impolite (Culpeper 2011). Due to the globalisation
of the book market, translations are often produced under tight schedules. Consequently, con-
versational preferences of the German audience cannot be considered in all instances (Chace
2011). Thus I postulate that German and English children will differ in both understanding and
evaluating interactions and character intentions in childrens books.
Presenting selected examples from a corpus-based study on five English childrens books and
series and their German translations (target audience 9-12-year-olds), I will present evidence
for the importance of a close analysis of how impoliteness is used by characters, how it is com-
mented on by characters and the narrator and how it is understood and evaluated by German
and English child readers. As a theoretical framework, the talk proposes an innovative four-
step analytical model which includes elements from both theory-based and discursive ap-
proaches to the study of impoliteness (Watts 2003, Culpeper 2011, Bousfield 2008).
[email protected]
PONTE, Maria
Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
Now and performatives from a pluralistic perspective
Arthur Prior (1968) famously claimed that now is redundant, that is, that both p and it is
now the case that p have the same meaning. However, he also believed it was necessary to
have an operator for now. In other words, despite its redundant nature, there are some cases
where now plays an essential role as a pointing tool, an indexical that univocally and reflex-
ively points to the time of the utterance. It is my aim to analyze this reflexive pointing role that
now plays in natural language from a pragmatic perspective, paying particular attention to its
consequences for speech act theory.
I will start out outlining what I take to be the two standard accounts of now and emphasizing
aspects that will prove essential for my view: Priors (1968) account of now as a l-place propo-
sitional connective (see also Kamp 1971) and, most importantly, its relation to the present, and
Reichenbachs (1947) token-reflexive account of indexicals and his views on temporal refer-
ence.
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I will then go on to discuss the role of now from a pragmatic perspective making use of Korta
and Perrys (2011) views on utterance content and presenting an account of explicit performa-
tives similar in many respects to the one recently defended by Jary (2007). With all this at
hand, I will first argue that now contributes to the disambiguation between performative and
assertoric utterances, I will then offer an account for this and, finally, I will explore some of the
consequences of my proposal, both for the notion of now as a temporal indexical and for the
notion of explicit performatives.
JARY, M. (2007) Are explicit performative assertions?, in Linguistics and Philosophy 30: 207-234. KAMP, H. (1971) Formal properties of
now, in Theoria 37: 227-274. KORTA, K. & J. Perry (2011) Critical pragmatics: An inquiry into reference and communication. Cambridge:
CUP. PRIOR, A.N. (1968) Now, in Nos 2: 101-119. REICHENBACH, H. (1947) Elements of symbolic logic. New York: Macmillan.
[email protected]
PONTON, Douglas
University of Catania, Italy
Malcolm X and the pragmatics of argumentation
Malcolm X was a controversial figure in the American civil rights movement. He contrasted
with Martin Luther King, whose life and work were deeply infused with his Christian faith and
Ghandis non-violent teachings. Where King taught reconciliation and integration, Malcolm X,
at least in the early part of his career, was known to advocate violence and separation. Such an
approach was not confined to political or social strategies; as an orator and public performer
Xs discourse is polemical, again contrasting with the more conciliatory King. In his best
known speeches he tackles a series of rhetorical opponents; the white man, first of all, but also
Republican and Democratic politicians, as well as groups of blacks with softer solutions to
their problems.
This paper explores the argumentative strategies of Malcolm X from a pragmatic perspective,
attempting to trace the interplay and cause/effect relationships between features of discourse
and relevant social context. It uses recordings of his speeches and television footage of studio
interaction between X and white interlocutors. These reveal him as a formidable discursive ad-
versary, with a wide range of rhetorical techniques. This material is available on YouTube, and
we can see, via analysis of the comments section, that the social issues dealt with by Malcolm X
are still relevant today. A similar engagement in semantic distinctions and argument over con-
text features shows up here in the dialogues between enthusiasts and critics of X.
The perspective on argumentation follows Halmari and Virtanen (2005), among others seek-
ing to develop accounts of its role in political discourse; a role first identified at the dawn of rhe-
torical studies among the ancient Greeks (Johnson 2000: 4), but as yet imperfectly appreci-
ated.
HALMARI, H. & T. Virtanen (2005) Persuasion across genres: a linguistic approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. JOHNSON R.H.
(2000) Manifest rationality: A pragmatic theory of argument. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
[email protected]
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REBOUL, Anne
CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences, France
Is implicit communication a way to escape epistemic vigilance?
Von Fintel & Matthewson (2008) pointed out that, though it is highly difficult to find semantic
universals in world languages, one thing that is universal is implicit communication, i.e. impli-
catures and presuppositions. This is intriguing because it is hard to argue that implicit commu-
nication is part of UG. Additionally, implicit communication seems fraught with perils: its suc-
cess is far less guaranteed than is the success of explicit communication (that is true regardless
of the involvement of pragmatic processes in the recovery of explicatures), in the sense that the
hearer may miss the implicit content communicated. In other words, it is not clear why im-
plicit communication should be universal.
This question was tackled by Pinker (see Pinker 2007, Pinker et al 2008, Lee & Pinker 2010),
who proposed that the existence of implicit communication could only be explained on the ba-
sis of the idea that communicators often have conflicting interests in the social domain. This
commonsensical hypothesis has a major implication: communication may be dishonest and de-
ceptive, a consequence that has led to the evolution of mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, as
argued by Sperber et al (2010). I will extend Pinker's view from the social domain (politeness,
reputation, face saving) to the epistemic domain (argumentation, persuasion), on the basis of
the peculiarities of human reasoning noted by the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier
& Sperber 2011, Sperber & Mercier to appear), arguing that implicit communication also al-
lows speakers to escape hearers' epistemic vigilance. I will finally show why this does not con-
tradict Gricean cooperation as the basis of linguistic communication (see Grice 1989).
GRICE, P. (1989) Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. LEE, J.J. & S. Pinker (2010) Rationales for indirect
speech: The theory of the strategic speaker, in Psychological Review 117: 785-807. MERCIER, H. & D. Sperber (2011) Why do humans rea-
son? Arguments for an argumentative theory, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34: 57-111. PINKER, S. (2007) The evolutionary social psy-
chology of off-record indirect speech acts, in Intercultural Pragmatics 4: 437-461. PINKER, S., M.A. Nowak, & J.J. Lee (2008) The logic of
indirect speech, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(3): 833-838. SPERBER, D., F. Clment, C. Heintz, O. Mascaro, H.
Mercier, G. Origgi & D. Wilson (2010) Epistemic vigilance, in Mind & Language 25: 359-393. SPERBER, D. & H. Mercier, H. (to appear) Rea-
soning as a social competence, in H. Landemore & J. Elster (eds), Collective Wisdom. VON FINTEL, K. & L. Matthewson (2008) Universals
in semantics, in The Linguistic Review 25: 139-201.
[email protected]
ROMERO-TRILLO, Jess
1
& Laura Maguire
2
1Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Spain
2IE Business School, Spain
Bilingual education and the development of context awareness: A longitudinal corpus
based study.
Research in bilingual education has generally focused on the linguistic, cognitive and social de-
velopment of children attending bilingual schools with different levels of immersion. For exam-
ple, Hermanto et al. (2012) proved the role of intensive immersion programmes in the develop-
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ment of metalinguistic awareness in the target language, as in the case of Anglophone children
in French schools in Canada. Also, Ballester (2010) studied the specific case of Spanish chil-
dren in a bilingual programme through a cross-sectional study in which she found that 5-year-
old children showed sensitivity to grammaticality contrasts in their L2 English. However, few
studies have considered the role of context and of its prevention of misunderstanding in bilin-
gual education. The purpose of this talk is to analyze the role the development of context aware-
ness in the teacher talk of a bilingual school in Madrid within the Dynamic Model of Meaning
theory (henceforth DMM) (Kecskes 2006, 2008), and the theory of Adaptive Management
(Romero-Trillo 2007, Romero-Trillo & Maguire 2011). The data for the analysis is from the
UAM-LESC Corpus and comprises the longitudinal 6-year-long video-taped recordings of a bi-
lingual school class in Madrid. The quantitative results of the study along the six years of class-
room research will show the adequacy of the DMM and adaptive management as theoretical
constructs to explain the evolution of the second language in bilingual education.
BALLESTER, E.P. (2010) Child L2 development of syntactic and discourse properties of Spanish subjects, in Bilingualism: Language and Cog-
nition 13: 185-216. HERMANTO, N., S. Moreno & E. Bialystok (2012) Linguistic and metalinguistic outcomes of intense immersion educa-
tion: How bilingual?, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 15: 131-145. KECSKES, I. (2006) On my mind: Thoughts
about salience, context and figurative language from a second language perspective, in Second Language Research 22: 219-237. KECSKES, I.
(2008) Dueling contexts: A dynamic model of meaning, in Journal of Pragmatics 40: 385-406. ROMERO-TRILLO, J. (2007) Adaptive man-
agement in discourse: The case of involvement discourse markers in English and Spanish, in Catalan Journal of Linguistics 6: 81-94
ROMERO-TRILLO, J. & L. Maguire (2011) Adaptive context: The fourth element of meaning, in International Review of Pragmatics 3: 228-
241.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
RUTKOWSKI, Pawe'
University of Warsaw, Poland
On the pragmatics of pointing: The case of Polish sign language (PJM)
Polish Sign Language (polski j1zyk migowy, hereinafter PJM) is an understudied natural sign
language used by the Deaf community in Poland. The aim of the present paper is to discuss the
pragmatic role of the signing space in that language. I address this issue by examining the lin-
guistic properties of the pointing sign (an index handshape directed to a point in the signing
space). My research is based on video material selected from an extensive corpus of PJM
(more than 300 hours of footage), consisting of utterances produced by signers who either
have Deaf parents or have used sign language since early childhood. The informants are asked
to react to certain visual stimuli, e.g. by describing a picture or discussing a video recording.
This material includes numerous examples of how pointing signs are used in various contexts.
One of the most important questions to be addressed in my talk is as follows: should the point-
ing sign be treated as a grammaticalized linguistic element, akin to spoken-language pronouns,
or should it rather be considered mere gesturing. By discussing PJM corpus data, I attempt to
take a position in one of the most important debates in contemporary sign linguistics. Accord-
ing to many researchers (e.g. Emmorey 2002), sign-language pointing signs are pronouns in-
flected for person and number. Liddell (2003), on the other hand, assumes that the use of
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space for pointing is purely gestural (gradient) rather than linguistic, which in turn means that
all pronouns are simply deictic points (pronouns point to their referents in the same way as
hearing people point to locations while gesturing). I follow Liddell (2003) in assuming that
there are no reasons to distinguish several pronouns in PJM; however, this does not mean that
pointing is nonlinguistic. I conclude that the PJM pointing sign contributes not only to the syn-
tactic side of signed utterances (functioning as an argument), but also plays a crucial role in
phenomena like turn-taking, framing reference points, organizing discourse, etc. In short: the
use of pointing signs is one of the most fundamental elements of the pragmatic side of natural
discourse in PJM.
EMMOREY, K. (2002) Language, cognition, and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
LIDDELL, S.K. (2003) Grammar, gesture, and meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge: CUP.
[email protected]
RYBNICKOVA, Lada
Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic
The transfer of culture specific items in audiovisual texts and a pragmatic approach
to an assessment of its adequacy: A case study of a Czech dubbing translation of a
police procedural drama TV series
The paper proposes a methodology of translation adequacy assessment, based on the prag-
matic speech act approach, thus connecting pragmalinguistics with translation studies. The
presentation discusses an adequacy assessment of a transfer of intralinguistic and extralinguis-
tic culture specific items in audiovisual texts, namely of three episodes of the Czech dubbing
translation of the police procedural drama television series NCIS. This TV series was chosen as
a particularly suitable this kind of analysis because of its strong link to the source culture. Hav-
ing taken into consideration the constraints imposed on the text by its audiovisual nature, the
analysis of the primary illocutionary point of the speaker in both the source text and the target
text was chosen as a criterion of the adequacy assessment, applied on both intralinguistic and
extralinguistic culture specific items. The presentation argues that a pragmatic approach of
translation quality assessment of culture specific items is not only an appropriate, but also
highly versatile evaluating method.
[email protected]
SAVCHENKO, Elena & Elena Prikazchikova
Moscow State Regional University, Russia
The adequacy of translation and the cognitive aspect of the text category authors
individual style
The text category authors individual style is considered through modern linguistic ap-
proaches to text analysis in order to examine whether special features of an authors vocabu-
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lary, use of metaphors and sentence constructions have any possible influence on the way a
translator implements such peculiar features into the language of translation.
The authors state that in spite of the fact that cognitive and linguistic forms of information cod-
ing are different forms of knowledge presentation they are closely interrelated and can be iden-
tified by a translator as certain makers of an authors individual style. While analyzing the text
of the original a translator should pay special attention to both the cognitive and linguistic
markers of the authors individual style and find adequate sources to implement them into the
text of translation making the authors outlook clear for the representatives of another lan-
guage and other cultural traditions. Such cross-cultural decoding is an important element of a
translators work in modern conditions.
The main category of the research is the concept of an individual authors style, so it is very im-
portant to create a concept typology reflecting the characteristic features of his style and to find
out the linguistic means of their representation. The next step is to analyze the correlation both
with the types of their mental representation and with larger units cognitive structures. Con-
sequently, the translation of a bells letters can be considered as an adequate one only when all
the peculiarities of the authors style are reflected in it. On the examples from I. Flemings and
J. Steinbecks works possible translators mistakes are illustrated, special attention being given
to the translation of metaphors as it is through them the authors individuality (cognitive
mechanisms and linguistic features) is reflected in his works.
[email protected]
SCAGLIONE, Francesco
Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani, Italy
From espaol coloquial to italiano colloquiale: Pragmatic variation as the basis
for the study of colloquial language in Italy
This study represents a bridge between an analysis of the Italian linguistic repertoire and its
variation depending on the context and the pragmatic purposes. The research aim is to de-
scribe how colloquial language in Italy is structured, taking as touchstone the case of the es-
paol coloquial.
Starting from the conversational rasgos which mark colloquial Spanish language, it will be pos-
sible to detect, from a multilingual point of view, the varieties of the repertoire colloquial Ital-
ian is made up of. In particular, the varieties involved are: the local dialect (within the phe-
nomenon of code-switching/code-mixing); the italiano regionale (an Italian language influ-
enced by the diatopic area where it is spoken due to the presence of a local dialect); the italiano
neostandard (a variety developed by a re-standardization of the repertoire thanks to the accep-
tance in spoken use and semi-formal writing of elements coming from oral language in general
which had been considered for a long time out of the norm); the italiano substandard/popolare
(the language spoken by those who do not have a complete linguistic dominance of Italian but
whose items sometimes appear in informal conversation).
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This theoretical system is supported by an analysis of informal and spontaneous conversations
among people with similar diastratic features collected in Palermo, the biggest and most
densely populated town in Sicily. This corpus of vernacular allows to understand both the com-
plex structure of the colloquial Italian and, at a pragmatic level, the aim of every single item be-
longing to each variety together with the switches from a code to another (especially, Italian >
dialect), a very common practice in everyday communication.
[email protected]
SCHAUER, Gila A.
Universitt Erfurt, Germany
Its really insulting to say something like that to anyone: an investigation of
English and German native speakers impoliteness perceptions
This paper is part of the new intercultural impoliteness project, which investigates whether
English and German native speakers perceive authentic impoliteness events differently or simi-
larly.
The new intercultural project is a follow-up study to the cross-cultural impoliteness project by
Culpeper, Marti, Mei, Nirvala and Schauer (2009), which investigated 500 reports of impolite-
ness events by Chinese, English, Finnish, German and Turkish native speakers. The reports
were analyzed with Spencer-Oateys (2000) rapport management framework that differenti-
ates between different face and sociality rights categories, which interlocutors can adhere to or
violate. The findings of the cross-cultural impoliteness project showed that the reports by the
English and German participants differed significantly with regard to the offense type re-
ported. While the English respondents reported more offenses against their face, the German
respondents reported more offenses against their sociality rights.
However, the cross-cultural project could not address whether this difference in the amount of
reported events indicates differences in the perception of impolite behaviour in both lan-
guages. If certain utterances or behaviours would be perceived significantly differently in both
languages, then learners of both languages would need to be made aware of these differences.
The present paper addresses this issue by investigating English and German native speakers
perceptions of 20 authentic situations (10 reported by British English and 10 reported by Ger-
man German native speakers) that were collected for the cross-cultural project.
The authentic situations as well as two distractor items were presented to 15 English and 15
German native speakers, who were asked to evaluate and rate the appropriateness and polite-
ness of the individual situations and who subsequently shared their reasons for the evaluations
and ratings in one-to-one interviews with the researcher.
The talk will present the findings on differences and similarities and address reasons for both
that have been established with the interview responses.
[email protected]
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SCHRDER, Ulrike
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
The function of metacommunication in the interactive construction of culture-related
key words
Based on functional approaches to metacommunicative acts in relation to their interactional
goals, evaluations, rapport management and discourse organization (Techtmeier 2001,
Schwitalla 1979, Meyer-Herrmann 1978, Schmitter & Adamzik 1982), we will focus on meta-
communication in (filmed) authentic interactions between university exchange students. The
film shootings are part of a larger ongoing project initiated at the University of Minas Gerais,
Brazil in 2010 in order to create a growing corpus of filmed interactions in intercultural en-
counters, which are transcribed in the program EXMARaLDA (Schmidt & Wrner 2009) fol-
lowing the conventions of GAT-2 (Selting et al. 2009) (the project is called Intercultural Com-
muni cat i on i n I nt er act i on and can al r eady be accessed i n Por t uguese:
http://www.letras.ufmg.br/cicdm/).
Based on two shootings realized in the autumn of 2013 with one group of five Brazilian ex-
change students and one group of five German exchange students, I will show the role of meta-
communication for the joint construction of key words for drawing a line between the own and
the other culture. The discussions were stimulated by cards asking to talk about the expected
and already experienced differences between the target country and their country of origin re-
garding university, society, religion, family, friendship, relationships, conflicts, styles and lan-
guage.
The results reveal a complex interplay of verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal contextualization
cues (Gumperz 1982) where metacommunicative acts also serve as strategies to construct and
reflect on key concepts like being direct/indirect, individualism/collectivism or public/
private sphere.
One pivotal point is the crucial role of metacommunication in calibrating cultural evaluations
with regard to the recipient design (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974). Hence, we will pay spe-
cial attention to the question of the addressed and unaddressed participants, as well as the spe-
cial role of the bystander behind the camera (Goffman 1979) to show how metacommunicative
acts in fact should be seen as an attempt to control the ongoing interaction and to guide (exer-
citively) the hearers interpretation (Caffi 1984, 451).
[email protected]
SCIBETTA, Andrea
Universit per Stranieri di Siena, Italy
Chinese University students acquisition of pragmalinguistic skills in Italian as a
second language
Statistics show that the number of Chinese migrants in Italy is constantly increasing (Istat
2013), and that the total number of Chinese University students in Italy has grown in recent
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years as well. In particular, a bilateral agreement through Italy and China gave birth to the
Marco PoloTurandot project, through which Chinese undergraduates and postgraduates
can spend several months in Italy studying in intensive Italian courses. The above-mentioned
agreement has given a great contribution to the promotion of Italian in Chinese universities.
The main purpose of this work is to analyse in depth the processes of acquisition of pragmalin-
guistic skills in Italian as a Second Language of a rich corpus of Chinese University students at-
tending intensive Italian courses within the Marco PoloTurandot project at the University
for Foreigners in Siena.
According to a theoretical background (Valentini 1992, Banfi 2003, DAnnunzio 2009, Rastelli,
2010) and to a comparison with similar researches carried out in other countries (e.g. Wang
Yingpin 2007), and taking into consideration data gathered and analysed in previous personal
empirical studies about Chinese students acquisition of Italian and German conducted in the
EmpoleseValdelsa district (near Florence) in 2010 and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-
Universitt in Munich in 2011-2012, I will try to focus my attention to the most common diffi-
culties in the process of Chinese University students acquisition of pragmalinguistic skills in
Italian.
The main aim of the work is to try to explain the reasons of the diffusion and the persistence of
some kinds of irregularities, and to try to suggest new teaching techniques in order to help
these students to overcome them.
[email protected]
SCOTTI JURI%, Rita
1
& Isabella Matticchio
2
1University 'Juraj Dobrila' of Pula, Croatia
2University of Padua, Italy
Pragmatics of intercultural communication: Differences between monolingual and
bilingual speakers
It is well known that culture is the principal channel to understand and produce linguistic
meanings, but the effect of intercultural contact in everyday communication is still under inves-
tigation and requires a new awareness and knowledge in relational pragmalinguistics.
This research aims to study intercultural communication strategies that underlie the communi-
cation in bilinguals of the Croatian region Istria, in particular in situations of language conflict.
According to the Statute Istria has two official languages, Italian and Croatian, even if the
younger generations tend to an Anglo-Croatian bilingualism.
Starting from Bryam's (1997) basic definition of intercultural competence, we came to identify
in Van Ek's (1986) strategic and socio-cultural competence two axioms from which we can de-
velop additional elements for the pragmalinguistic data analysis.
The study begins with a brief analysis of two different corpora: 2 videos of quarrels in Croatian
language and 5 in Italian, taken from YouTube and accurately transcribed; the length is about
15 minutes for each language. After indentifying the basic elements of the monolingual commu-
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nications, we'll make a deeper analysis of the communication among Italo-Croatian bilinguals
from Pula (Istria), based on a corpus of 2 conversations long 15 minutes.
Beside the implicit elements present in conversational implicatures and presuppositions, bilin-
guals use other communication strategies like code-switching, code-mixing, modulation of illo-
cutionary force, and other intercultural negotiations.
BYRAM, M. (1997) Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. VAN EK, J.A. (1986)
Objectives for foreign language learning (vol 1: Scope). Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
1 [email protected]
2 [email protected]
SEEL, Olaf Immanuel
University of Corfu, Greece
Presuppositions, paralanguage, visual kinesics: Three culture-pragmatic categories
of errors and misunderstanding in translation and interpreting illustrated on the
basis of the language pair German/Greek
In functionally orientated translation theory the pragmatic dimension is a core element. Given
that pragmatics is the study of language as an action with a certain aim, as well as of the social
contexts in which linguistic action takes place, according to the functional translation theory,
translation as a special form of cross-cultural communication has to be looked upon as the
study of verbal and/or non-verbal action carried out by experts in order to functionally bridge
two different cultural backgrounds. The significance of this contrastive culture-pragmatic ap-
proach in translation is grounded on the fact that it reveals the culture-specific use of lan-
guage, text and mental concepts, which constitutes a major translational difficulty.
In intracultural communication, the use of presuppositions, paralanguage and visual kinesics
is intensively grounded on an unspoken common socio-cultural background, i.e. a culture-
specific knowledge system of common norms, traditions and habits, mental conception of the
world, expectations, behavior etc. Given that cultures differ from each other in terms of their
underlying knowledge systems, these three discourse elements constitute pragmatic obstacles
for translation and interpreting as cross-cultural communication. Thus, an imperfect knowl-
edge of the source cultures use of presuppositions, paralanguage and visual kinesics in specific
discourse situations may lead to misinterpretations of the source input and, hence, to a mis-
taken target output with possible misunderstandings.
On the basis of the above-mentioned theoretical framework, the central aim of this paper is to
demonstrate that misunderstandings may occur due to a false interpretation of presupposi-
tions, paralanguage and visual kinesics of the source culture by the translator/interpreter. For
this purpose, this paper will present three different examples from the language pair German/
Greek, one from translation and two from interpreting, by which the aforementioned catego-
ries of discourse are illustrated. In view of its significance, this paper concludes with sugges-
tions on specialized training for the elaboration of cross-cultural expertise of translators/
interpreters in their working languages.
[email protected]
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SHIGEMITSU, Yuka
Tokyo Polytechnic University, Japan
Question-answer sequences for the first conversation with new people in an
intercultural setting: English and Japanese conversation between English and
Japanese speakers
This study focuses on question-answer sequences for the first conversation with new people in
an intercultural setting. The goal of the first time meeting with new people is to get to know
each other. Participants try to get the information from the other participants. At the same
time, they would like to be more polite to the other participants since it is their first time meet-
ing. They need to build new relationships. The videotaped data analyzed for this presentation
are conversations between English speakers and Japanese speakers. Twelve of the conversa-
tions were conducted in English and two in Japanese. Each conversation has a 30-minute
length.
A previous study compared English conversations by English native speakers and Japanese
conversations by Japanese native speakers. These mono-cultural sets of data showed that Eng-
lish speakers tend to use polar questions (yes-no questions) and content questions (wh-
questions), while Japanese ones tend to use tag-like questions and disclaiming-knowledge type
of questions (e.g., Im not sure about that., I do not know about that.). Regarding answers,
the expected amount of answers and expected answering structures tended to vary in between
English and Japanese conversations.
The present study compares successful and unsuccessful intercultural conversation. Since Eng-
lish and Japanese speakers have different perspectives on and expectations about question-
answer sequences, participants in this intercultural setting occasionally experience discomfort
in conversation. This may be due to the choice of question type (polar-question, content ques-
tion, tag-question and so on), and also the amount of information provided in response to a
question. English native speakers provide sufficient information for Japanese participants;
therefore, Japanese speakers do not try to elicit more information, whereas English speakers
ask information more often, which makes Japanese feel that they are interrupted while talking.
This picture will be discussed in relation to language education and cultural awareness train-
ing.
[email protected]
SMITH, Donald C.
University of New Haven, USA
Audience adaptation where it counts: Teaching public speaking to international
students from their point of view
Public speaking is taught at virtually every college and university in the United States and stu-
dent presentations are an integral part of most every course. Some international students are
able to take the standard offerings and do well, but for others the basic course in public speak-
ing presents a hardship. Pain, humiliation, suffering, loss of face, shock, these are among the
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things that may not be readily visible to the students professors or peers. How is a public
speaking course different for the international population? How can culture hinder or en-
hance the classroom experience? How does ethnocentrism influence the grading process? Pub-
lic speaking is ranked as the number one fear of American students, is this true of those study-
ing from other countries? If so, how does this fear manifest itself? What can be done to tem-
per it? Is it possible to successfully teach domestic and international students in the same
course? How might the needs of international students differ from their American counter-
parts? How can we best address those needs? This paper takes a systematic and rhetorically
oriented look at public speaking education in the Unites States as it relates to international stu-
dents, with an eye toward developing a course well-tailored to the needs of this population. A
sample syllabus is included. Both the paper and suggested syllabus are presented by a Profes-
sor who set a national record for public speaking in the United States as an undergraduate and
who has traveled the world extensively. This person holds a PhD in Behavioral Science from
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has taught intercultural communication and
gender and communication for many years in the United States.
[email protected]
STADLER, Stefanie
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Ownership in intercultural business negotiations: When authoritative and
democratic interactional styles clash
It is common knowledge that cultural diversity brings with it difficulties to intercultural interac-
tions that would not occur to the same extent in intracultural interactions. Conversational style
preferences are among these issues in intercultural interactions that have been found to exces-
serbate personal differences and interpersonal friction. This paper focuses on an aspect of cul-
tural differences in the interactants orientation to conversational styles, which pertains to the
notion of authoritative as opposed to democratic interactional preferences. The focus of this pa-
per is the concept of ownership, in particular the interactants efforts to negotiate ascribed vs.
assumed membership categorization. It thereby addresses what happens when authoritative
and democratic interactional styles clash, how interactants try to resolve their differences and
whether the clash in styles allows interactants to hold on to ownership of their preferred mem-
bership identities. The paper examines in detail how interactants construct, deconstruct and
try to negotiate membership categorization. The findings indicate that clashes in authoritative
and democratic style preferences hamper desired ownership and self-determination of mem-
bership categorization, resulting in disempowerment and general dissatisfaction. Not only did
several issues of business remain unresolved due to such clashes, but they also led to unsatis-
factory interactional outcomes that left all parties involved feeling irritated and frustrated.
[email protected]
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STOICA, Gabriela
The Romanian cultural-anthropologic pattern and the expression of emotions: Some
diachronic and synchronic aspects
The paper deals with the cultural-anthropologic pattern of the Romanian culture and its inter-
cultural and cross-cultural communication implications, starting from the well-known theoreti-
cal framework of cultural dimensions variation developed by G. Hofstede (1984).
In the first part, we focus on the characteristics of old Romanian (16th 18th centuries) emo-
tionology (Stearns/Stearns 1985; the system of social and cultural feeling rules and display
rules (see Mesquita/Frijda/Scherer 1997)) and its related cultural-anthropologic parameters
(extroversion, transparency, in-group sharing of personal experience, the hierarchical codifica-
tion of social roles etc.), illustrated by the affective conceptualization, lexicalization and contex-
tualization in a representative corpus of old Romanian texts. We put forward that the appraisal
and the expression of emotions within a particular cultural setting (see the cognitive model for
the emotions, Russell 1991) is a basic marker of a larger specific cultural pattern that can in-
stantiate diachronic variations. For the old Romanian culture three basic cultural dimensions
seem to be salient: collectivism (undergoing a social-cultural frame of interdependence), extro-
version of self (as a consequence of the collectivistic characteristic), social-communicative hier-
archies. (Cross-)cultural differences may emerge along with these parameters.
In the second part, we illustrate these cultural characteristics by a case study, analyzing the
contextual-semantic occurrences of the word a s2ruta [to kiss]. Based on the corpus evidence,
two specific functions of s2ruta can be distinguished: (a) (lexical) marker of a real emotional
state, prototypically designating the somatic-behavioural expression of love or friendship; (b)
(lexical) marker of a pseudo-emotional state, indicating a stereotypical affective-expressive be-
haviour (usually performed as part of a formal, ritualistic protocol), highly complying with the
specific societal display rules. In relation to present-day Romanian culture, few mutations can
be noticed.
HOFSTEDE, G. (1984) Cultures consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills: Sage. MESQUITA, B., N.H.
Frijda & Scherer (1997) Culture and emotion, in Handbook of cross-cultural psychology (vol. 2): Basic processed and developmental psychol-
ogy. Boston, Allyn & Bacon, pp. 255-297. RUSSELL, J. (1991) Culture and the categorization of emotion, in Psychological Bulletin 110: 426-
450. STEARNS, P.N. & C.Z. Stearns (1985) Emotionology: Clarifying the history and emotional standards, in The American Historical Review
90: 813-836.
[email protected]
SZCS, Mrta
1
& Anna Babarczy
2
1University of Szeged, Hungary
2Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
The role of metapragmatic awareness in the development of irony comprehension
According to Verschueren (2000), metalanguage is an important topic for pragmatic research
because it reflects metapragmatic awareness, a crucial force behind the meaning-generating ca-
pacity of language use. In his approach, metapragmatic awareness, which is the ability to re-
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flect on language use in a conscious way, is central in verbal communication. That is, there is
no language use without a constant and a certain degree of consciousness or awareness. There-
fore, there is always a possibility of reflexivity towards the discourse structure, the linguistic be-
haviour of the speaker or the interpretation process.
In Ttrais (2011) cognitive pragmatic approach based on the above mentioned theory, irony is
treated as a metapragmatic reflection of a linguistically expressed representation of an implicit
viewpoint overwriting or making the interpretation or evaluation of the original representation
in the particular context or situation relative.
Kotthoffs (2003) results provide some empirical evidence supporting the metapragmatic the-
ory that, besides pragmatics of irony, metapragmatics can have a great importance in guiding
the overall evaluation of the ongoing interaction among the ironist, the utterance, the situa-
tion, and the public. In the developmental literature it is found that, although the comprehen-
sion of ironic-sarcastic implicatures was acquired late, it was accompanied by metapragmatic
knowledge when it was present (Bernicot et al 2007).
The specific aim of the present study was to investigate whether the development of metaprag-
matic (MP) awareness would play a role in irony comprehension of preschoolers.
Thirty-nine typically developing preschool children, whose percentages of an irony test in a pre-
vious study (Szcs in press) had been below 40%, were selected as participants of the experi-
ment. They were allocated into two groups: 20 children (aged 4;536;11) in the MP developing
group and 19 children (aged 4;237;2) in the control group. The MP developing group took part
in metapragmatic awareness developmental processes three times, during which they could
learn about the literal and the intended meaning of ironic utterances, the ironic intention of
the speaker, the difference between the deceiving and ironic language use. After the training
both groups were tested again with the original irony comprehension test, and the difference
between the first and the second results were compared.
The results have shown a significant difference between the two groups (t(37)=-5.386;
p<0.001): the development of the MP group was 53%, while that of the control group was only
3%. These findings suggest that the metapragmatic awareness can play a crucial role in the de-
velopment of irony comprehension at these ages.
[email protected]
TANG, Chihsia
National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Taiwan
Evaluation in media discourse: Managing criticisms in Taiwanese talent shows
Evaluative languages are prevalent in the media discourse these days with the growing popular-
ity of TV programs featuring talent competitions for people of different skills. In evaluative lan-
guages, praising and criticizing are the most oft-occurring illocutions. Different from compli-
ment, negative critical comment is potentially face-threatening, since it violates peoples desire
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to be appreciated by others. Criticizing illocution, therefore, is frequently mitigated in one way
or another. This paper sets out to investigate how criticism is modified in the media spoken dis-
course in the Chinese-speaking community in Taiwan where social harmony is highly accentu-
ated. Evaluative languages of the present research are elicited from the TV program Super De-
signer. Criticizing illocutions found in the episodes of the first season are analyzed. In this re-
search, Brown and Levinsons (1987) face-threatening politeness model is followed, particu-
larly the concept of positive and negative face. However, differently from Brown and Levin-
sons approach, a single sentence is not taken as the fundamental unit of illocution analysis. In-
stead, a speech move, a discourse unit that expresses the speakers communication intent, is
embraced as the analytical domain for examination of the concerned speech illocution. Criticiz-
ing illocutions are analyzed in accordance with the pragmalinguistic strategies proposed by
Brown and Levinson. Results show that while delivering criticisms, speakers may express their
negative remarks indirectly or directly. The indirect criticizing strategies include applying hypo-
thetical statements, rhetorical questions, suggestive statements, ellipses, and self-denigrations.
On the other hand, while delivering negative evaluations directly, speakers often modify their
speeches with positive and/or negative mitigation strategies, including emotionally-charged
words, hedges, imposition minimizers, general attributions, other attributions, personal attri-
butions. Although the imposition degree of direct criticisms is higher, speakers tend to express
their critical opinions in a direct manner, which should be attributed to the judges knowledge
power and relative higher status in the context of evaluation discourse.
[email protected]
TOBBACK, Els
Hasselt University & Ghent University, Belgium
Do we still understand each other? A cross-cultural analysis of discourse practices in
French and Dutch political debates
In 2011, Belgium broke the world record for going the longest time without a government. This
severe political crisis was a culminating point of Belgium's complex political history, in which
two major linguistic communities grew apart on many levels of society, including the public
sphere (Sinardet 2009). During this crisis, the question sometimes arose whether it was still
possible for the Dutch and the French speaking community to understand each other.
In this context, our research focuses on the cross-cultural and intercultural communicative
(and linguistic) dimension. More specifically, our aim is to examine discourse practices of both
language communities, in order to check whether (general) divergent conversational routines
and conversation styles may hamper/complicate intercultural communication and, particu-
larly, political negotiations.
Our paper presents the results of a pilot study consisting of a fine-grained quantitative analysis
of a corpus constituted by two long political debates (within similar programs that focus on po-
litical actuality), broadcast respectively by the Flemish (VRT) and the French (RTBF) public
broadcasting corporations in Spring 2012. Following Bal (2010), we examine some typical fea-
tures of the turn-taking system, such as turn-openers, backchannels, gaps between turns, over-
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laps and interruptions. The results show some statistically significant differences between
Dutch speaking and French speaking participants in the debates (e.g. gaps between journalist's
questions and participant's reactions being significantly longer in the Flemish debate). Interest-
ingly, these results confirm some of the differences observed by Bal between Australian and
French speakers.
On a more general level, our study takes part in the scientific debate opposing two hypotheses
with respect to turn-taking, the first one stating that turn-taking is a universal system with
minimal variability, the second one considering turn-taking as language and culture dependent
(cf. Stivers et al. 2009, Oloff 2009). Through the quantitative study of cross-cultural and inter-
cultural data sets, we hope to be able to contribute to the testing of both hypotheses.
[email protected]
TSURIKOVA, Lubov
Voronezh State University, Russia
Non-native discourse strategies as a barrier to intercultural communication
The paper analyses cross-cultural pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfers in L2 dis-
course production of Russian L1 speakers using English as their L2 in spontaneous role-played
interactions. The data was obtained through the cross-cultural pragmatic discourse analysis
technique that can be used as an efficient method for studying the influence on communication
of different culture-bound assumptions about the implicit rules and conventions that govern
social interaction.
The study explores communication between native and non-native speakers of English in every-
day situations, focusing on non-native discourse performance as compared to the native inter-
actions.
It has been shown that L2 speakers regularly transfer their native speech strategies into the tar-
get language discourse behaviour at the interactive organisation level (e.g., types of speech acts
and their order) as well as at the linguistic level. As their discourse strategies are different
from conventional speech patterns of the target language culture, even fairly advanced L2
speakers may fail to convey or comprehend the intended illocutionary force or politeness value
of speech acts when communicating with the native speakers of this language. As a result, lin-
guistically correct but pragmatically problematic expressions produced by non-native speakers
can be misleading and cause communication failure.
The data indicate that in cross-cultural communication the speakers native values and norms
of interaction tend to shape both the production and the interpretation of discourse even if
they converse in a different tongue. This may suggest that the participants cultural back-
grounds, as well as the socially and culturally shared frames of reference, play a significant role
in interpersonal communication which should not be disregarded or diminished when a com-
plicated multifarious phenomenon, such as intercultural communication, is analysed.
[email protected]
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UNNSTEINSSON, Elmar Geir
Carston on eternal sentences
In her Thoughts and Utterances (2002), Robyn Carston argues against what she calls the con-
venient abbreviation view of linguistic underspecification. Roughly, this is the view that al-
though the meaning encoded by a natural language sentence S usually does not fully encode
the proposition intended by an utterance of S, there always exists some eternal sentence S
that does. The fact that the proposition intended is usually underspecified by the speaker is
then merely a matter of effort-saving convenience, as an eternalization could always be sup-
plied (cf. Quine 1960, Katz 1972). Against this view, with some help from Wettstein (1979), Car-
ston maintains that its quite implausible that for every utterance there is a single eternal sen-
tence corresponding to the proposition intended. Thus there are many non-synonymous eter-
nalizations of a particular utterance of, say, She left in a hurry, and none of them seems to be
privileged in a particular context. Carston concludes that underspecification is essential to
natural language rather than an artifact of mere convenience.
Although Carstons conclusion should be accepted, this argument for the abbreviation view is
really invalid. Even if every utterance can be uniquely eternalized it doesnt follow that every
context-sensitive utterance abbreviates its eternalization. Convenient abbreviation is usually a
relation between two things of the same type, often two linguistic expressions. But no such rela-
tion could possibly hold between a particular utterance and the sentence that uniquely eternal-
izes the proposition intended by that utterance. We can even assume that speaker/hearers
have infinite memory and infinite intelligence, and that there is an enormous library that lists
all propositions, providing each one with a unique name. If such ideal speakers still speak a
natural language the meaning encoded by the sentences of the language will usually or always
underspecify the proposition expressed. Thus, Carstons alternative essentialist view of under-
specification should be argued for on other grounds. In the final part of my paper, I indicate
how such an argument might be formulated. Very briefly, if it is accepted that what is said and
the evidence provided by the speaker are different kinds of objects one may be a proposition
while the other is a sentence type in a particular language it is reasonable to think that one
cannot constitutively determine the other.
CARSTON, R. (2002) Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. KATZ, J. (1972) Semantic theory. New York: Harper and Row. QUINE,
W.V.O. (1960) Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. WETTSTEIN, H. (1979) Indexical reference and propositional content, in Philo-
sophical Studies 36: 91-100.
[email protected]
VALLE, Richard
Universit de Moncton, Canada
Color sentences, compositionality and truth
According to Travis (1995, 1997), the meaning of a simple color sentence like The leaf is green
does not determine its truth conditions because both the meaning the sentence and the world
can stay the same, while an utterance of that sentence might be true and another false. They
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must differ in truth conditions and such difference cannot be traced back to meaning. It is then
argued that the truth conditions of utterances are not fully determined by meaning.
My reply to Travis is grounded on multipropositionalism (Perry 2012). On that approach utter-
ances are at the center of the stage, and an utterance of a sentence determines many different
propositions, contents or truth conditions. Multipropositionalism also makes a clear distinc-
tion between different roles of content. The semantically determined content of an utterance,
the content determined by meaning only, has the role of cognitive significance of that utter-
ance. It must be distinguished from the content having the role of official truth conditions of
an utterance and assigned a truth value by considering facts. The same content can have both
roles. The contents playing these roles also sometimes differ. In any case, these roles must be
distinguished. Travis emphasizes the context-bound nature of utterances truth value assign-
ment. He is concerned with official content. First, I contend that Travis makes his point by in-
voking a common sense notion of truth that has no role in semantics. Semantics is not inter-
ested in truth-value assignment. The latter notion of truth prima facie motivates modifications
of content. Second, the content Travis is concerned with is not the semantically determined
content that has the role of cognitive significance of the utterance. As a consequence, Travis
argument impacts neither the principle of compositionality nor semantically determined con-
tents or truth conditions.
[email protected]
van NAERSSEN, Maaike
Leiden University, Netherlands
(Dis)preferred responses in Dutch and Indonesian: A matter of politeness?
People follow certain rules in conversation: when (not) to speak, when (not) to take turn,
when (not) to change the subject. These systems of conversational organization seem to be uni-
versal. But conversations are guided by a different set of norms as well; norms guiding the man-
ner in which we speak: what type of response is expected and accepted, what type of answer or
response is taken to be sufficiently informative, how you show disagreement or support. These
norms presumably differ from one speech community to another, but every (near-)native
speaker of a particular language supposedly has some basic standards and assumptions as to
what is valued and expected in conversation (Wierzbicka 2003). The way in which people show
(dis)agreement to what was said can provide insight in the conversational norms they observe.
Following Clark (1996), every initiating turn is believed to propose an activity or project for the
participants to undertake. Interlocutors generally try to formulate their utterance in a way they
believe to illicit a preferred response, i.e. a response that supports their proposed action. Based
on data from my contrastive Dutch-Indonesian corpus, I will demonstrate that what is ac-
cepted as a response differs strongly between the two languages.
In fact, what is and is not a preferred type of response seems to differ. For instance, whereas
Dutch interlocutors are direct and to the point, the Indonesian interlocutors often keep their
comments vague, marked by the abundant use of hints. I will argue that conversational norms
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guiding these preferences are best discussed in terms of politeness, or that maybe, politeness is
best understood in terms of such conversational norms.
[email protected]
VASILESCU, Andra
Mitigating devices in scientific verbal interactions: A corpus analysis with a view to
cross-cultural variation
Written texts seem to be the preferred way for communicating science. Nevertheless, there is a
great deal of verbal interactions focusing scientific topics: congresses, conferences, and round
tables, academic lectures and exams, study groups, talk-shows, editorial board meetings, talks
delivered in front of a non-specialized audience, spontaneous debates, small talk around news
in science, etc. Of course, several differences arise between written texts, on the one hand, as
products of a fully planned activity, and partly planned partly spontaneous discussions and
conversations, on the other hand.
A special interest has been paid to the relationship between transmitting accurate, reliable,
documented information and the authors negotiating his/her relationship with the readers in
scientific/academic written texts. Several mitigating devices/hedges have been identified, clas-
sified, and analyzed in point of scope and functions (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1985, Caffi 2007,
Fraser 1980, Haverkate 1992, Holmes 1984, Hyland 1998, Lakoff 1972, Markkanen & Schrder
1997, among others). Most authors concluded that mitigating devices in scientific/academic
texts are rather oriented towards good writing-practices in the community than subject to cul-
tural variation (Markkanen & Schrder 1992, Poveda Cabanes 2007, Prince et al. 1982,
Salager-Meyer & Salas 1991, Winardi 2009, among others).
My paper investigates mitigating devices in oral interactions among linguists discussing linguis-
tic issues. The analysis is based on a 7 hour corpus of recorded interactions among Romanian
linguists in various circumstances: work groups, public speeches, exams with students in lin-
guistics, informal meetings. The first part of the article briefly presents the theoretical frame-
work: an integrative approach which supplements Grices four maxims (Grice 1975) with a fifth
one intended to accommodate Brown and Levinsons theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson
1987) by proposing the Maxim of Prudence: mitigate your communicative contribution to pro-
tect yourself and others against undesirable side effects of the information transaction proc-
ess. The second part of the article is dedicated to the corpus analysis and reveals the mitigat-
ing strategies preferred by Romanian linguists. The third part contrasts the strategies observed
in the analyzed interactions to the strategies developed in written texts as presented in the lit-
erature of the topic, in order to detect specialized strategies in oral interactions vs. written
texts. The fourth part suggests correlations between the cultural style of mitigating in oral sci-
entific interactions and the Romanian style of interaction - as predicted by high contextualism
(in Hall (1976)s definition), moderate collectivism and masculinity, high power distance and
uncertainty avoidance (in Hofstede et al. (2010)s terms).
[email protected]
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VENUTI, Ilaria
University CaFoscari Venezia, Italy
A comparison of the realization of requestive speech acts in Italian and German
The purpose of this study is to draw a comparison between the realization of requestive speech
acts in Italian and in German, and to investigate the relationship between indirectness and the
perception of politeness in these two speech communities. After an introduction concerning
the main theories of verbal politeness belonging to the Western tradition (according to which
indirectness basically coincides with politeness), some alternative views (e.g. Wierzbicka 1985)
are offered and possible sources of intercultural miscommunication are outlined.
The empirical part of the study consists in the comparison of 320 requests formulated by Ital-
ian and German speakers. Linguistic data were elicited by means of a Discourse Completion
Test containing 4 socio-pragmatic situations. Realizations of requests were analysed accord-
ing to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Projects (CCSARP) coding manual, re-
ported in Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), and discussed at two levels: the cross cul-
tural variation and the situational variation.
Results show that both groups of participants are perfectly aware of the differences between
the situations proposed and tailor their requests according to the context. It is found that both
groups of subjects rely heavily on conventionally indirect strategies. On the whole, German
speakers appear to use more indirect request strategies than their Italian counterparts. Italian
speakers tend to select slightly lower levels of indirectness but compensate with a consistently
larger use of external modificators.
My results differ in interesting ways from general expectations in the situation in which the
face threat is arguably the highest, calling for further investigation of the difference in the per-
ception of the social parameters determining the rated face threat between the two speech com-
munities. Deeper insights into the link between indirectness and politeness in the two cultures
at issue are also needed in order to understand the reasons behind the pragmatic choices ob-
served.
BLUM-KULKA, S., J. House & G. Kasper (1989) Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood.
WIERZBICKA, A. (1985) Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics, 9, pp. 145
178.
[email protected]
VIOLA, Lorella
University of East Anglia, UK
Italian dubbing from pragmatic interference to language change: Evidence from the
analysis of two back-channel signals
There exists a number of studies (i.e., Pavesi 2005) concerning Italian dubbing which claim
various linguistic expressions to be interference phenomena due to the audio-visual translation
(AVT) process from (American) English. These studies also state such expressions have af-
fected the end users language. However, no empirical evidence of such an influence has been
provided so far. This research aims to empirically assess whether Italian dubbing can be consid-
ered as an agent in pragmatic language change.
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For this purpose, a total of 72 linguistic expressions have been gathered and categorised in the
light of the definition of pragmatic interference adopted throughout (Thomas 1983): linguistic
formulas that appear similar in their meaning or structure are transferred from one language
into the other. Three main categories stemmed from our review analysis: pragmatic markers
(sub-categorised in metadiscourse markers, attention getters, modality markers), formulaic
language (including forms of address, rituals, greetings and farewells), and fixed expressions
(simple formulas, sayings, similes).
A diachronic, lexicographic and quantitative analysis carried out within dictionaries and cor-
pora of written Italian (DiaCORIS, CORIS) led to a shortlist of 57 phenomena most likely to
have been affected by pragmatic interference from dubbing. From this investigation, 58 items
have been identified and their presence and frequency searched within spoken Italian corpora
(LIP; LABLITA; CLIPS).
In this paper, the results of two back-channel signals are presented: esatto (exactly) and s?
(yes?). The findings strongly indicate that, at the pragmatic level, an influence from dubbed
Italian on spontaneous Italian cannot be excluded.
CORIS (Corpus di italiano scritto) http://corpora.dslo.unibo.it/TCORIS/ DiaCORIS (Corpus diacronico di italiano scritto)
http://corpora.dslo.unibo.it/DiaCORIS/ LABLITA http://lablita.dit.unifi.it/ LIP (Lessico di Frequenza dellItaliano Parlato)
http://l anguageserver. uni -graz. at/badi p/badi p/22_advSearch. php LIP (Lessi co di Frequenza del l Ital i ano Parl ato)
http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/badip/badip/22_advSearch.php PAVESI, M. (2005) La traduzione filmica: Aspetti del parlato doppiato
dallinglese allitaliano. Roma: Carocci. THOMAS, J. (1983) Cross-cultural pragmatic failure, in Applied Linguistics 4: 91-112.
[email protected]
WEARING, Catherine
Wellesley College, USA
Meaning and imagery in metaphor interpretation
Lepore and Stone (2010) have recently sought to revive the Davidsonian view that a metaphor
has no meaning (or cognitive content) beyond its literal meaning. But Lepore and Stone make
clear that, on their view, its not just that the words dont mean anything beyond what they lit-
erally mean. The speaker doesnt mean anything either she doesnt communicate any deter-
minate content when she utters a metaphor. In this respect, they claim, metaphors are more
like jokes or hints than like ordinary literal assertions. One can use a metaphor to make a
point, they allow, but this point is not a property of the metaphor itself (ibid: 173). Instead, it
is something the speaker wants the hearer to notice but without communicating it to him
(ibid: 177).
I will aim in this talk to do two things. First, I will show that the parallel with jokes and hints
does not establish that metaphors lack a communicative dimension. Lepore and Stone rely too
much on the idea that metaphors either have cognitive content or act in a non-communicative,
indirect manner. Much more plausible, I shall contend, is to make room for both. Second, I
will take up the positive part of Lepore and Stones view, the claim that the point of uttering a
metaphor is to get the hearer to engage in metaphorical thinking. This metaphorical thinking
seems centrally to involve using imagery and searching for similarities. A number of other
authors have also suggested that these elements play key roles in the interpretation of meta-
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phors; I shall focus specifically on their relation to the communicative dimension of metaphori-
cal utterances, in order to pin down the extent to which they contribute to rather than merely
accompany a metaphors content.
[email protected]
WJTOWICZ, Rados'aw
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland & University of Helsinki, Finland
Partitive of subjectivity in Finnish adjectival predication
Applying the traditional distinction into pragmatics, syntax and semantics, partitive can be de-
scribed as a semantically conditioned grammatical case which is rarely found in worlds lan-
guages, among them Finnish. The present talk addresses the use of the Finnish partitive in ad-
jectival predicatives one of the constructions in which it is known to also carry some prag-
matic freight. While studies of Finnish adjectives in copular clauses tend to focus on con-
structed sentences considered in isolation, the research reported here is concerned with lan-
guage in actual use. On the basis of an analysis of spoken Finnish, the present talk points to
some interesting facts not attested before. When used in predicative APs, the partitive has func-
tions pertaining to discourse identifiability, the expression of speakers personal judgments
and points of view. These are approached under a global term of subjectivity, which is nomi-
nally understood as the expression of self and the representation of a speakers (or, more pre-
cisely, a locutionary agents) perspective or point of view in discourse (Finegan 1995:1).
Similarly to studies which, by focusing on language use, review and add to the description of
language structure (e.g. Helasvuo 2001), the present talk shows that there are factors con-
nected with the use of linguistic units in interactional discourse which help better understand
their meaning. I will address the interplay of form and use to demonstrate that the semantic
features of the partitive, e.g. non-referentiality, known from the presently available descrip-
tions of Finnish, need not necessarily be separated from the pragmatic ones. I will also touch
upon some theoretical issues and discuss whether the subjective use of the Finnish partitive re-
ported here can be treated on a par with similar uses in other types of constructions, e.g. exis-
tential clauses.
FINEGAN, E. (1995) Subjectivity and subjectification: An introduction, in D. Stein & S.Wright (eds.) Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Lin-
guistic perspectives. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 1-15. HELASVUO, M.-L. (2001) Syntax in the making: The emergence of syntactic units in Finnish
conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[email protected]
ZEMAN, Dan
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Disagreement in semantics: On recent contextualist answers to the challenge from
disagreement
Disagreement has been a reference point in the recent debate over the semantic content of ut-
terances between contextualism (understood here as a cluster of views according to which cer-
tain features of context have the role of providing elements into the semantic content of utter-
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ances) and relativism (understood here as a cluster of views according to which the same fea-
tures of context have the role of providing elements in the circumstances with respect to which
utterances are evaluated). One major argument for relativism has been contextualisms inabil-
ity to explain what I call the challenge from disagreement the allegation that contextualism
cannot account for the intuition of disagreement in dialogues containing the target expressions
(of the form Avocado is tasty. No, avocado is not tasty.).
In this paper I examine recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement. Two
main strategies have been employed. According to the first, relativists have focused on a lim-
ited range of uses of the target expressions, ignoring a host of other uses for which contextual-
ism can easily account for disagreement. According to the second, relativists have focused on
too narrow a conception of disagreement, ignoring a host of other ways in which people are le-
gitimately taken to disagree and with which contextualism is compatible. In connection to the
first strategy, I show that acknowledging those other uses of the target expressions is not
enough to fend off the challenge from disagreement, since that challenge focuses on specific
uses whose existence is hard to deny and that dont seem amenable by the contextualist with-
out additional theoretical costs. In connection to the second strategy, I show that acknowledg-
ing those other types of disagreement is, again, not enough to fend off the challenge from dis-
agreement, since that challenge focuses on a specific form of disagreement (what I call propo-
sitional disagreement) whose existence is hard to deny and that, in addition, is needed by the
contextualist herself to explain disagreement.
[email protected]
ZENNER, Eline & Dorien Van de Mieroop
University of Leuven, Belgium
The pragmatics of English loans in conflict situations
Lexical borrowing research has largely been conducted from a systemic and structuralist per-
spective, focusing on processes of adaptation and nativization of loanwords and on the borrow-
ability of various parts of speech. Recently, however, more attention has been paid to the prag-
matic effects of using loanwords (e.g. Furiassi et al. 2012; Zenner & Kristiansen 2013).
This paper aims to contribute to this emerging trend by studying the use of lexical borrowing
as a discourse strategy. More specifically, we present a local interactional analysis of the Eng-
lish loans used in the Dutch reality TV show Expeditie Robinson. The utterances from one se-
ries were carefully transcribed, resulting in a dataset of 3,120 utterances - 314 of which contain
English insertions. Our analysis zooms in on English multi-word units (e.g. home sweet
home), which are mainly used by three male participants on the show.
By means of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate how two of these partici-
pants form an ingroup; they form a community of practice that has its own discursive norms,
of which the regular use of English multi-word units forms an important part. Focusing in on
ingroup delineation in times of conflict, both within the ingroup and between the ingroup and
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other participants to the show, we demonstrate how strategic use of English multi-word units
allows both ingroup members to acquire and maintain a firm social position on the island.
An interesting opposite is found in the third male participant who uses English highly fre-
quently. In his case, this does not help him attain any notable social prestige on the island.
Through conflicts with various team members, he quickly becomes an outcast on the island.
This outcast identity is corroborated instead of overruled by the interactional processes con-
cerning his use of English multi-word units in discourse.
Overall, contrasting these two case studies allows us to illustrate the pragmatic effect of bor-
rowed phraseology in discourse.
[email protected]
ZHANG, Liyin
Nanjing University, China
What lies behind the mirror: An intercultural pragmatic study of citations in
academic writing by novice Chinese ESL/EFL writers
Writers in academic discourse are set in the socio-cultural context, searching for recognition
from potential readers with the relevance-governed and cooperation-directed citation as a
bridge. The issue of citation goes to the heart of cross-cultural relations that emerge in aca-
demic context. As a prominent feature of academic discourse, citation is viewed as the ability
to use sources effectively and appropriately and an essential skill which novice writers must ac-
quire (Pecorari and Shaw 2012). However, due to ESL/EFL writers insufficient disciplinary lin-
guistic competence and the unbalanced power realtions between them and potential readers,
appropriate citation may be hard to achieve, which is particularly true for ESL/EFL writers con-
sidering their ongoing cross-cultural construction of identities and the differences in various
disciplines. Studies on citations, in the context of novice Chinese ESL/EFL writers, have had a
myriad of foci, such as their perceptions, their strategies, genre features, culturally favored liter-
acy practices (Pennycook 1996), linguistic competence, inferential thinking, etc. These alto-
gether form the scattering image of the issue, which is far from being complete and integrated
to pursue. Due to the inherent fuzziness and complexity of the issue in question, any study
from one perspective, for example, cultural influence, would easily fall into stereotypes. This
paper reports on an emic, interview-based study investigating novice Chinese ESL/EFL writ-
ers accounts of their attitudes, motives and self-initiated strategies developed upon citations
in academic writing in English. The combination of the cognitive-philosophical approach and
the sociocultural-interactional approach are adopted to analyze their citation practices purport-
ing to piece together a complete image of the perplexing issue. The aim of this paper is to not
only help readers get a better understanding of ideology of novice Chinese ESL/EFL writers
but to also encourages more acceptance of ESL/EFL writers in general from the international
academic arena.
[email protected]
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