Typologizing intentional silence in argumentation between Thai state authorities: structural, engagement, and communicative perspectives

According to Hinds’ typology of languages on discourse level, Japanese and Korean are both considered listener-responsible languages, whereas English is classified as a speaker-responsible language (Hinds, 1987). However, in conversation, Yoon (2009) demonstrated that Korean should be classified as a speaker-responsible language based on her contrastive analysis of daily conversations between married couples in Japanese and Korean, where address terms and fillers are used as contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982) to convey a speaker's intention to the interlocutor metacommunicatively. The purpose of the present study is to show that Japanese is listener-responsible, while Korean is a speaker-responsible language on the level of conversational communication. In order to test the hypothesis, surveys and recordings of real conversations of Japanese and Korean people were conducted and analyzed.The informants in the present study consisted of four groups: Japanese university students who live in their own country, Japanese university students who live in the U.S., Korean university students who live in their own country and Korean university students who live in the U.S. A Discourse Complete Test (DCT) was completed by Japanese and Korean university students to compare the differences in speaker responsibility in apologies. The results suggest that Korean should be classified as a speaker-responsible language for understanding in conversations, since Korean speakers produce many more utterances and convey more information per utterance to the interlocutor than Japanese speakers. Furthermore, it is found that the responsibility for the understanding of utterances correlate with daily use of American English, especially in the case of Japanese university students.

English-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are less capable of using prosodic cues such as intonation for irony comprehension. Prosodic cues, in particular intonation, in Cantonese are relatively restricted while sentence-final particles (SFPs) may be used for this pragmatic function. This study investigated the use of prosodic cues and SFPs in irony comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without ASD. Thirteen children with ASD (8;3–12;9) were language-matched with 13 typically developing (TD) peers. By manipulating prosodic cues and SFPs, 16 stories with an ironic remark were constructed. Participants had to judge the speaker's belief and intention. Both groups performed similarly well in judging the speaker's belief. For the speaker's intention, the TD group relied more on SFPs. The ASD group performed significantly poorer and did not rely on either cue. SFPs may play a salient role in Cantonese irony comprehension. The differences between the two groups were discussed by considering the literature on theory of mind.

In recent years, within the cognitive linguistics approach there has been a trend of scholarly research committed to exploring the motivation for language change. The way in which people use language in communication, together with principles of human categorization, are the locus where language change and innovations are to be found. Interactional contexts in particular, seen as playing a crucial role in bringing about syntactic change (Traugott 2010b), have figured prominently in recent contributions on diachronic micro-changes, bringing to the fore the role played by dialogue as both the manifestation of the participants’ own voices and the realization of the constant negotiation that characterizes human communication. Against this background, this contribution focuses on a particular use of the Occitan post-verbal negatorpasin negative rhetorical questions, which was very productive in fifteenth-century collections of religious theatrical texts. It is claimed that these dialogic contexts allowed a polyphonic use ofpas, crucially restricted to this post-verbal negator, which is key to identifying the reasons behind the eventual establishment ofpasas the generalized sentential negator in the modern language.

To examine interrater agreement and validity of the Functional Communication Classification System (FCCS) for young children with cerebral palsy (CP) aged 2 or 3 years. Speech-language pathologist (SLP) and parent FCCS ratings for 31 children with CP (aged 2y, n=16; aged 3y, n=15; 18 males, 13 females) were examined for interrater agreement using a weighted Cohen's kappa statistic. Relationships between FCCS (SLP) ratings and: (1) concurrent validity with the Language Use Inventory, a standardized pragmatic assessment for children aged 18 to 47 months, (2) gross motor and fine motor function, (3) associated impairments (visual and intellectual), and (4) primary expressive communication mode were examined using Spearman's correlation coefficients. Almost perfect interrater agreement between SLP and parent FCCS ratings were found (kw =0.94). Correlations with FCCS (SLP) were excellent for pragmatic function (rs =-0.83,p<0.001), intellectual function (rs =0.89, p<0.001), and primary expressive communication mode (rs =0.92,p<0.001). Correlations were good for gross motor function (rs =0.72,p<0.001) and visual impairment (rs =0.70,p<0.001) and fair for fine motor function (rs =0.53,p<0.002). Analysis was unwarranted for epilepsy (n=1 out of 31) and hearing-associated impairments (n=0 out of 31). The FCCS has excellent interrater agreement and validity for communication classification of children with CP aged 2 or 3 years and is highly suitable for surveillance and research purposes. What this paper adds The Functional Communication Classification System (FCCS) is a valid instrument for children with cerebral palsy (CP) aged 2 or 3 years. Excellent agreement exists between speech-language pathologist and parent FCCS ratings. The FCCS has excellent correlation with intelligence, pragmatic function, and primary expressive mode. Stronger correlations with the Gross Motor Function Classification System and vision exist for children aged 2 or 3 years. Weaker correlations with manual ability exist when compared to older children with CP.

Verb-based pragmatic markers (VPMs) have formal properties derived from their respective sources. One of these is that, as other pragmatic markers, VPMs appear peripherally in the leftmost or rightmost position of different discourse units. This property is significant since it seems to influence the development of peculiar pragmatic functions. Distributional properties, together with morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of the verb-source, play an important role in their process of (inter)-subjectification. This chapter investigates the pragmatic functions of three VPMs in spoken Italian, namely guarda “look”, prego “please, you are welcome”, and dai “come on, really?”, and their interaction with the position the VPMs occupy. Moving from a classification of discourse units on the basis of the Val.es.co. model, this study describes the correlation between pragmatic functions of markers and position, also considering the type of discourse unit in which they appear and they have scope over, the dialogual vs dialogic context of occurrence, and corresponding variations in types of functions performed. Results show that verbs are a category prone to pragmaticalize and that their semantic extensions are sufficiently general and abstract to allow them to acquire intersubjective meanings. The three VPMs analysed can appear both in the LP and RP, but their position determines pragmatic functions and interacts with types of discourse units in which they appear, their focus on the context of interaction, on the act of speaking or on the content of the utterance, but also with their degree of pragmaticalization, and their dialogic or dialogual orientation.

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

IntroductionThis paper studies the pragmatic force that heritage speakers may convey through the use of the diminutive in everyday speech. In particular, I analyze the use of the Spanish diminutive in 49 sociolinguistic interviews from a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. where Spanish is the heritage language. I compare the use of the diminutive in heritage Spanish to the distribution of the diminutive in the speech of a Spanish monolingual community (18 sociolinguistic interviews) from the same dialectal region. Although Spanish and English employ different morphosyntactic strategies to express diminutive meaning, the analysis reveals that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a productive morphological device in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona (i.e., similar diminutive distributions to their monolingual counterparts). While heritage speakers employed the diminutive -ito/a to express the notion of “smallness” in their Spanish-discourse, the analysis indicates that these language users are more likely to invoke a subjective evaluation through the diminutive -ito/a when talking about their family members and/or childhood experiences. This particular finding suggests that the concept “child” is the semantic/pragmatic driving force of the diminutive in heritage Spanish as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children. The analysis further suggests that examining the pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech can provide important insights into how heritage speakers encode and create cultural meaning in their heritage languages.MethodsIn this study, I analyze the use of Spanish diminutives in two U.S.-Mexico border regions. The first data set is representative of a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S., provided in the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona (The CESA Corpus). The CESA Corpus comprises 49 sociolinguistic interviews of ~1 h each for a total of ~305,542 words. The second data set comprises 18 sociolinguistic interviews of predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers from the city of Mexicali, Baja California in Mexico, provided in the Proyecto Para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y de América (PRESEEA). The Mexicali data set consists of ~119,162 words.ResultsThe analysis revealed that the Spanish diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a productive morphological device in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona. In addition to its prototypical meaning (i.e., the notion of “smallness”), the diminutive morpheme -ito/a conveyed an array of pragmatic functions in the everyday speech of Spanish heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region. Importantly, these pragmatic functions are mediated by speakers' subjective perceptions of the entity in question. Unlike their monolingual counterparts, heritage speakers are more likely to invoke a subjective evaluation through the diminutive -ito/a when talking about their family members and/or childhood experiences. Altogether, the study suggests that the concept “child” is the semantic/pragmatic driving force of the diminutive in heritage Spanish as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children.DiscussionIn this study, I followed Reynoso's framework to study the pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech, that is, speakers' publicly conveyed meaning. The analysis revealed that heritage speakers applied most of the pragmatic functions and their respective values observed in Reynoso's cross-dialectal study of Spanish diminutives, and hence providing further support for her framework. Similarly, the study provides further evidence to Jurafsky's proposal that morphological diminutives arise from semantic or pragmatic links with children. Finally, the analysis indicated that examining the semantic/pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech can provide important insights into how heritage speakers encode and create cultural meaning in their heritage languages, which can in turn have further ramifications for heritage language learning and teaching.

While synonymy in standard Armenian is a well-established field, its manifestation in dialectal contexts, particularly in the historically rich Syunik-Artsakh region, remains underexplored. This study offers a comprehensive analysis of the semantic and stylistic stratification of synonyms, with a particular focus on the highly expressive conceptual domains of “lazy” and “foolish”. Integrating diachronic and synchronic methodologies, the research draws on a diverse range of sources, including Classical Armenian (Grabar) texts, dialectal data from philological studies, and original oral fieldwork. The analysis identifies a vast network of synonymous words and idioms that differ not only in form and meaning but also in pragmatic function, emotional tone, and stylistic register. It examines the key mechanisms of synonym formation, tracing the evolution of native vocabulary (e.g., the semantic shift of anban from ‘irrational’ to the dialectal anpen ‘lazy’) and the adaptation of loanwords from Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Russian. The study highlights how metaphorical extension, often based on animal or object imagery, contributes to the expansion of these synonymic sets. Findings demonstrate that dialectal synonyms operate as a dynamic, multi-layered system where distinct word families and conceptually related terms merge into flexible semantic fields. Word choice is shown to be heavily contingent on situational context and speaker intent. The study concludes that stylistic stratification, shaped by the interplay of native linguistic development and prolonged foreign influence, is essential for understanding the functional and register-based distinctions that underpin the remarkable expressive richness of dialectal Armenian.

Numerals

Ye “also/too/as well” is one of the most frequently used adverbs in Mandarin Chinese. Although the lexical meaning and syntactic properties of ye have been widely discussed, there are few analyses of ye expressions in interactional discourse, let alone analyses examining its interactional functions. Under the framework of interactional linguistics, this paper investigates the interactional functions of ye in second positions within natural spoken conversations. The findings show that ye indicating similarity between two states of affairs seems to be generalized in different interactional contexts with two interactional functions, i.e., rapport building and conflict mitigation. These functions are deployed by speakers to establish online alignment between interlocutors, expressing their affiliative stances and highlighting (inter)subjectivity, though practices of achieving a certain alignment vary in different environments. Hence, a continuum of similarity and the underlying evolution of language use is proposed to account for the diverse range of uses of ye expressions in face-to-face conversation. This paper not only reveals the interconnected relationship between linguistic forms and the construction and maintenance of social rapport but also sheds light on studying grammar entities with an interactional approach.

The concept of rhetorical questions and their role in conveying pragmatic meanings has been of interest to many researchers in the field of language learning as these questions form one of the pillars in language communication. The main purpose of this empirical study is to find out whether learners are able to recognize rhetorical questions as well as their pragmatic functions, i.e., their illocutionary force. A total of 30 junior students majoring in English, participated in this study. The data were collected via a 25-item test followed by post-performance. They listened to 19 dialogues, and were asked to identify and interpret the pragmatic meanings of the rhetorical questions contained. Data analysis showed that while it was relatively easy for the test-takers to recognize rhetorical questions, they encountered some problems when trying to interpret their pragmatic functions. Complexity of speech acts, availability of contextual clues, background knowledge, and natural reasoning seemed to be the main variables that affected the test-takers’ inferencing. Making combinations between various ideas contained in a single dialogue in addition to lack of proper courses geared towards developing this skill, seemed to be responsible for learners satisfactory or unsatisfactory achievement.

The concept of rhetorical questions and their role in conveying pragmatic meanings has been of interest to many researchers in the field of language learning as these questions form one of the pillars in language communication. The main purpose of this empirical study is to find out whether learners are able to recognize rhetorical questions as well as their pragmatic functions, i.e., their illocutionary force. A total of 30 junior students majoring in English, participated in this study. The data were collected via a 25-item test followed by post-performance. They listened to 19 dialogues, and were asked to identify and interpret the pragmatic meanings of the rhetorical questions contained. Data analysis showed that while it was relatively easy for the test-takers to recognize rhetorical questions, they encountered some problems when trying to interpret their pragmatic functions. Complexity of speech acts, availability of contextual clues, background knowledge, and natural reasoning seemed to be the main variables that affected the test-takers’ inferencing. Making combinations between various ideas contained in a single dialogue in addition to lack of proper courses geared towards developing this skill, seemed to be responsible for learners satisfactory or unsatisfactory achievement.

Pre-emptive use of deixis involves speakers’ psychological tendency towards using deixis to pre-empt the non-deictic ways of referring to the relevant person, time or place, while anti-pre-emptive use of deixis refers to the phenomenon of non-deictic words substituting deixis. Both the pre-emptive use and anti-pre-emptive use of deixis produce significant pragmatic functions in language communication. This paper discusses the anti-pre-emptive use of person deixis and the pre-emptive use of social deixis in Chinese and concludes that their pragmatic functions are of the same nature.

BOOK NOTICES Conversation: Cognitive, communicative and social perspectives. Ed. by T. Givón. (Typological studies in language 34.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins , 1997. Pp. viii, 302. This book contains papers presented at the Symposium on Conversation, University of New Mexico, TuIy 1995. Each paper in some way addresses one of the following dichotomies in current analyses of conversation: information flow vs. social interaction, speech-situation models vs. cognitive models, natural contexts vs. controlled experiments, and narrative discourse vs. conversational discourse. All ofthe papers focus on the need for further investigation of face-to-face communication. In the first paper, 'Dialogue despite difficulties: A study of communication between aphasie and unimpaired speakers', Anne H. Anderson, Alasdair Robertson, and Kerry Kilborn address the question of what happens to the communicative process when speakers have suffered a brain injury resulting in damage to their linguistic resources. From a study of 16 people with left hemisphere cardiovascular injuries , Anderson et al. conclude that conversation between aphasie and unimpaired speakers is deeply collaborative, yet effective, in nature. In 'Polyphonic topic development', Wallace Chafe addresses the question of what determines the direction in which thoughts, which are continually replaced by other thoughts, move in conversation. Chafe demonstrates that traditional transcripts are artificial and argues for the reanalysis of conversations as constant interplays of changing ideas. Also arguing for a rethinking of the ways in which conversational features are described Jennifer Coates offers the metaphor of a jam session for women in conversation in the following paper, "The construction of a collaborative floor in women's friendly talk'. Arguing for a running mental model of a speech situation in the speaker's and hearer's minds during communication in their paper 'Memory and conversation : Toward an experimental paradigm', Connie Dickinson and T. GrvóN show a correlation between cooperation ofan interlocutor and the amount ofepisodic information recalled. In the following paper, "The occasioning and structure of conversational stories ', Susan M. Ervin-Tripp and Aylin KUntay examine alterations in internal structure through embedding contexts. Per Linell and Natascha Korolija claim that episodes, not single utterances, support topics in their paper 'Coherence in multi-party conversation: Episodes and contexts in interaction'. Linnel and Korolija also introduce a coding system fortopical episode analysis. In the following paper, 'Choosing the right quantifier: Usage in the context of communication', Linda M. Moxey and Anthony J. Sanford argue that neither a formal logico-linguistic approach nor a scaling approach explains why and when speakers choose certain quantifiers. Moxey and Sanford use corpus linguistics to study the variation in communicating a quantity. In order to investigate how conversation participants resolve differences ofopinions in an argument, as well as to describe conflict talk in general, Nancy L. Stein and Ronan S. Bernas report on a study of 178 high school students asked to resolve an argument between two friends in their paper, 'Conflict talk: Understanding and resolving arguments'. Their study has implications not only for theories of everyday memory and eyewitness testimony but also for theories ofconversational analysis. Finally, in 'Communicating evaluation in narrative understanding' Tom Trabasso and Asli Özyurek investigate the types of linguistic devices used in expressing the evaluation of a narrative life experience, claiming that shared understanding of an event serves to achieve organization among multiple participants. [Richard W. Hallett, Murray State University.] Sprachgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung. Vol. 1. 2nd edn. Ed. by Werner Besch, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann, and Stefan Sonderegger . (Handbücher zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft/ Handbooks oflinguistics and communication science/Manuels de linguistique et des sciences de communication. Vol. 2.) Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. Pp. 1013. DM 698. Volume 1 of the new edition of Sprachgeschichte (see Herbert Penzl's astute assessment of the first edition: Language 65. 638-43 [1989]) represents the first ofthe second generation, that is, ofnew editions ofan impressive and ambitious series of 'Handbooks of linguistics and communication science' (or, following the German title, HSK) published by Walter de Gruyter. Constituting the first of three volumes planned, these over 1,000 pages are already nearly half the length of the two volumes of the first edition (1984-85). With 232 articles (in 21 chapters) instead 464 BOOK NOTICES...

In every language there is the possibility for linguistic manipulation, and in every community there exist secret codes and linguistic taboos. Given the world-wide existence and sociocultural importance of secret languages and avoidance registers, it is striking that these phenomena have long been considered relatively marginal by linguists. There are, in spite of literally hundreds of case studies on the phonological, semantic and sociolinguistic aspects of these codes and practices, only very few comparative studies and typological approaches to them. An early attempt to create a typology is Van Gennep's {1908) study, which bases a typology of secret languages on their uses and contexts. More recent typologies concentrate on phonological types of secret codes (Bagemihl 1995), their historical emergence in different functional contexts and modalities (Blake 2010), their social semiotics and ways of use (Storch 2011), and the different manifestations of taboo through manipulation (Allan and Burridge 2006). Senft and Basso (2009) present a systematic discussion and paradigmatic case studies of types of ritual communication and demonstrate the diversity in creating 'ritual communication [as an] artful, performed semiosis, predominantly but not only involving speech, that is formulaic and repetitive and therefore anticipated within particular contexts of social interaction'.