Pragmatic Perspective Research Articles

Rethinking Critical Sociology, Transcending the Transcendental

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors’ power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour’s constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists’ practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application.

Risk communication: lessons from an ethnographic, pragmatic, and Canadian regulatory perspective

In a regulatory context, it is important to understand how effective risk communication fits into the overall risk assessment, management, and decision-making process. This includes recognizing the intersections between risk analysis and the 3Ps: policy, politics, and publics, and understanding the barriers to effective communication. Risk communication is especially challenging when it requires the audience to follow and act on authoritative information or advice. Risk communicators must factor attributes such as risk perception, tolerance, and behaviors, and tailor the delivery of messages to diverse audiences. This paper captures the discourse from an intradepartmental workshop on risk communication with participants from Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada. The workshop provided an opportunity to discuss and share references to existing frameworks, pertinent documents, and examples of effective risk communication strategies based on the authors' ethnographic and pragmatic experiences. The workshop aimed to strengthen risk communication by better understanding the value in collaborating with interdisciplinary teams, applying a systems thinking lens, and finding opportunities to experiment and evaluate risk communication strategies for regulatory purposes.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Hedges in English Economic News: Taking the Financial Times as an Example

Since Professor L. A. Zadeh put forward the vagueness theory in 1965, a growing number of scholars have used it as a theoretical basis for preliminary discussions on the fuzzy phenomenon in many fields. However, there are not many studies on the analysis of the fuzzy phenomenon in news, especially the study of hedges in English economic news is yet to be enriched. Economic news plays an important role in people's daily lives. Economic news requires accuracy, objectivity, and conciseness, as well as acceptability and politeness. It seems to imply that hedges cannot exist in English economic news. However, the use of hedges in economic news can precisely achieve these purposes. To prove that there are a large number of hedges in economic news and that hedges play an important role in strengthening the credibility of news, avoiding giving details, achieving politeness, and enhancing self-protection, I take the news from the Financial Times as the source and explores the pragmatic function of hedges in English economic news and its specific application by combining the classification of hedges from the perspective of pragmatics, namely, strengthening the credibility, avoiding giving details, enhancing self-protecting and achieving politeness. By analyzing these results, the author hopes to contribute to the further development of economic news theory in English and also to help readers better grasp the essentials of economic news writing.

Stakeholder engagement: the role of facilitators and gender in ‘opening up’ conversations and enabling participation

ABSTRACT A successful global transition to net-zero emissions requires complex transformational change involving stakeholders from across society. Traditionally, stakeholder engagement has been debated predominantly from a pragmatic, functionalist and instrumental perspective. Recent approaches in business communication, sustainability, energy and environmental management show that meaningful and ‘sustainable’ stakeholder engagement is helpful in maintaining an organisation’s social licence to operate. We problematise the notion of participation in deliberative processes and analyse whether the outcomes of an online Australian citizens’ panel are truly representative of all participants or whether specific cultural and demographic factors, particularly gender, influence participation, potentially shaping the outcome. The study shows how gender need to be considered and managed as part of a legitimate deliberation process. Applying Gastil’s input-process-outcome model as a framework, we examine the engagement achieved through deliberations conducted on Zoom. We focus on gender as a variable and the role of the facilitator in managing participation. The results suggest that participants’ contributions to discussions vary based on gender of both participants and facilitators. Based on findings, the challenges of achieving equality in participatory processes are identified. The facilitator’s role is re-defined as a curator of the stakeholder engagement processes, complementing existing theory on stakeholder participation and engagement.

Main Character Analysis in “Great Expectations” Based on Cooperative Principle Theory

“Great Expectations” is one of representative novels written by the British writer Charles Dickens. It shows the growth of the protagonist Pip. Compared with Dickens’s other works, predecessors have done less research on “Great Expectations” and mainly focused on the theme and personalities. However, few studies analyze the personalities of the main characters in “Great Expectations” from the perspective of pragmatics through conversations in the novel. This thesis attempts to use Cooperative Principle to explore the four main characters of Pip, Estella, Joe, and Havisham. The study finds that the use of the four maxims of Cooperative Principle can effectively grasp the pragmatic strategies of the main characters in Great Expectations, revealing the different personalities of the main characters in this novel, and help readers understand and appreciate “Great Expectations” better.

Analysis on Wang Xifeng’s Conversational Meanings in Dream of the Red Chamber from a Pragmatic Perspective

Analysis on Wang Xifeng’s Conversational Meanings in Dream of the Red Chamber from a Pragmatic Perspective

Ler com o corpo, escrever na pele: um caso de blast over com literatura, ilustração, edição e tattoo dentro

ABSTRACT Inspired by the concept used in the “tattoo scene” of blast over, which designates the use of spaces between tattoos to add others, without hiding or disguising the previous ones, we propose an exercise of analysis of an artist’s book, Coração com Estrela-do-mar Dentro [Heart with Starfish Inside] by Filipe Homem Fonseca (2019). The concept emerged from one of the pages of the book to become a target of questions of literary reading, from a pragmatic perspective as well. The proposal will follow a route: enter the text through the book-object that gives an important place to the illustration, by death_by_pinscher, remove it from there and then include it again to make the global reading, in order to also enhance the appeal of the potential young reader to the text.

Translation and Emotional Expression: An Analysis of Emotion Translation Strategies in the Chinese Translations of Murder on the Orient Express from a Pragmatic Perspective

Translation and Emotional Expression: An Analysis of Emotion Translation Strategies in the Chinese Translations of Murder on the Orient Express from a Pragmatic Perspective

Exploring the use of deictic expressions in police interrogations: A pragmatic perspective

People are in need to be provided with a number of approaches of understanding the nature and the relationship of the police interrogation between interrogators and suspects inside the interrogation room from a pragmatic point of view. Nevertheless, extracting the truth from the mouths of the suspects is not that easy task unless it is preceded by certain skills and strategies utilised by the detective to arrive at the confession and the judiciary evidences. The present paper deals with the concept of deixis of American police interrogations. What is more, the current study tries to answer the following questions: first, what are the types of deixis that are used in police interrogation? Second, what is the most frequent one that is used by both interlocutors. Third, what are the pragmatic functions of these uses? Moreover, the paper aims at investigating the deixis pragmatically and finding out to what extent their use could serve the process of interrogation and truth seeking and to survey the relevant pragmatic theory of deixis and certain account of the process of police interrogation. The methodology of this paper is based on Brown all the types of deixis. This paper concludes that: deictic expressions are heavily utilized between the interlocutors as a reference to the set of the events under discussion and they serve to locate every single detail of the events to be interrogated.

IMPOLITENESS IN THE TAMING OF THE SHREW: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

Pragmatics, as a sub-field of linguistics, requires social, situational and textual contexts to understand language in use in certain speech events. Moreover, gender is a defining factor in pragmatics that shows interlocutors’ limits, capacities and roles in society. This present paper aims to demonstrate how Jonathan Culpeper’s Impoliteness Strategies are adopted by Petruchio and Katharina, the two main characters in The Taming of the Shrew and demonstrate their values, relationship and linguistic impoliteness from a pragmatic perspective with a discourse analytic approach. Gender roles in the play determine how the female and male characters communicate and employ impoliteness strategies according to traditional gender roles. The play deals with a patriarchally enforced marriage and gender roles determined by the patriarchy. The selected dramatic extracts show that Katharina, a socially inappropriate and defiant female protagonist, attacks Petruchio, her suitor, with positive impoliteness, while Petruchio keeps employing positive politeness. However, their marital bond obliterates the social distance between them. Katharina has no choice but to face her husband’s positive and bald on record impoliteness to find peace towards the end of the play.

A Study on Japanese Translation Strategies and Methods of Sichuan-Chongqing Tourism Promotion Texts from the Perspective of Cross-cultural Pragmatics

A Study on Japanese Translation Strategies and Methods of Sichuan-Chongqing Tourism Promotion Texts from the Perspective of Cross-cultural Pragmatics

A pragmatic perspective article: synergistic photocatalytic–photothermal effect with its practical applications and future prospects

The synergistic photocatalytic–photothermal effect realizes more effective utilization of solar energy, which can be used in the fields of hydrogen generation, carbon dioxide reduction, sterilization and membrane separation.

Coordination between vehicles in traffic

Abstract This study belongs to the ethnomethodological tradition of identifying the everyday practices accounting for the oiled machinery of social organization and applies this approach to understanding direction light usage. We observe a set of episodes videorecorded in North-East Italy in the urban traffic. We first unpack the meaning of direction light usage from a pragmatic perspective and then test our interpretation against the cases in our collection that seem to deviate from it. We argue that direction lights’ usage works as an announcement to some road users and a request to a subset of them; in both cases, direction lights convey contextualized (indexical) coordinates about the vehicle’s prospective trajectory. We then explain the cases in which signaling is omitted and draw some implications for traffic coordination and safety.

COMPRENDRE LES PRATIQUES ET LES ARRANGEMENTS EVALUATIFS ENTRE STAGIAIRES ET MAITRES DE STAGES DANS LA FORMATION DES INSPECTEURS DE LENSEIGNEMENT AU SENEGAL

The Senegalese education system has in its system a body responsible for the control, management and planning of education. This inspection body is trained at FASTEF. The training plan is dynamic and has changed a lot in terms of content relating to the profile of inspectors needed by the system. However, some aspects of the training, including the internship report, have changed very little in terms of their content and their importance in the dynamics of communication and interaction between the practice settings and the University. This communication focuses on the understanding of practices and the evaluative arrangements perceived through the internship reports of student inspectors. Our conceptual framework is based on a socioconstructivist and systemic approach inspired by Bronfenbrenners theory of human ecological development (1979, 2000, 2004). The choice of such an approach makes it possible to identify and describe the interactions between the individual and his environment. Bronfenbrenner situates these interactions of concentric structures at four levels: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem. In an approach combining documentary analysis, use of individual interviews and open questionnaires, we were able to identify, among other elements: 1) the relationships of the actors based on a kind of moral contract anticipating future situations 2) a descriptive structure of the internship reports 3) a weakness in the exploitation of the contents of the reports. Also, the development of reflective practice among inspectors in internship situations, the development of pragmatic perspectives are real challenges for FASTEF.

Memanifestasi Deiksis dalam Film “Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap” Karya Bene Dion Rajagukguk: Analisis Pragmatik

This research aims to analyze the use of deixis in the film "Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap" from a pragmatic perspective. Deixis is an important aspect in linguistic studies which is related to the use of signs that refer to the context of space and time. The film text analysis method is used to identify and analyze the use of deixis in the context of situations involving characters, location, time, and interactions between characters. The research results show that the use of deixis in this film aims to create a communicative effect and build relationships between the characters and the audience, by using personal, time, place, atmosphere, and social deixis. The use of pointing signs, such as body gestures and the placement of objects in scenes, is used to clarify the spatial relationships between characters and objects in the story. Pronouns are also often used to replace previously introduced references, maintaining cohesion in the narrative. In addition, the effective use of time-telling words helps the audience understand the sequence of events and establish chronology in the story. This research provides deeper insight into the use of language in communicative situations in the context of films, as well as a contribution to the development of pragmatic theory and an understanding of the audience's experience.

Wooden Language as a Form of Political or Media Communication - An Object of Interdisciplinary Study

Analysing the uses of the wooden language in political and media circumstances first requires situating this concept in an appropriate field of scientific research. This field is indeed multidisciplinary, because the wooden language, as a manifestation of language and a phenomenon of communication inspiring speakers with "an ordinary rhetorical feeling" (Krieg-Planque), constitutes a kind of "metalanguage specific to political discourse" (Fiala, Pineira, Sériot, 1989 and Krieg-Planque, 2010), whose analysis thus places us at the crossroads of at least three different disciplines, but close at the same time: linguistics, discourse analysis and information and communication sciences (although the path can take us to sociology, rhetoric or political science). This interdisciplinary rapprochement, as explained by Claire Oger in a chapter of the book Discourse Analysis and Human and Social Sciences, opens up "possibilities of interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of communication phenomena", from a pragmatic and enunciative perspective targeting the practices and discursive strategies of the social and political actors who are at their origin. In this perspective, the study of the wooden language can involve us in a field of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary analysis at the same time, because it is a question in particular of analysing the modes of manufacture and manifestation of this element integrated in the material of political and social discursive reality.

An analysis of Arabic tautology in English compounds used in customer-service settings in Jordan: A pragmatic perspective

This paper examines the utilization of Arabic tautological expressions, provided by customers as a reiteration of an element of an English compound such as ‘apple pie’ [fatˁi:rit ʔabil bai ‘an apple pie pie’], from the perspective of Relevance Theory (RT). Data was collected from 90 participants, divided into two groups: 40 native speaker informants recruited from various shopping malls, and 50 shop assistants in Amman, Jordan. The first group was interviewed, whereas the second group filled out a multiple-choice task aimed at identifying the type of expression they typically receive when taking orders from customers. The data analysis revealed that Arabic tautological expressions are more frequently used compared to other alternatives. Drawing on RT, we argue that Arabic tautological expressions function as an ostensive stimulus. We propose that tautological expressions, utilized within a code-switching context, function as a means of pragmatic enrichment. This occurs through the process of ad hoc construction, wherein speakers refine the originally encoded concept to convey corrective or contrasting meanings. Instead of lacking information, the use of tautological phrases can be seen as a pragmatic tactic to maximize relevance by minimizing cognitive effort, optimizing successful communication of the intended meaning, and reinforcing contextual effects.

Induced or Natural? Toward Rapid Expert Assessment, with Application to the Mw 5.2 Peace River Earthquake Sequence

Abstract Based on information available at the time, several questionnaire-based schemes have been developed to provide a qualitative assessment of whether a specific earthquake (or earthquake sequence) was likely induced by anthropogenic activities or is inferred to be natural. From a pragmatic perspective, the value of this assessment is arguably the greatest in the immediate aftermath of an event (hours to days), because it could then better serve to guide regulatory response. However, necessary information is often incomplete or uncertain, and there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the most distinctive attributes of induced (vs. natural) earthquake sequences. We present a case study of the Mw 5.2 Peace River earthquake sequence (Alberta, Canada), evaluated using two published frameworks for origin interpretation. The Alberta Energy Regulator initially considered the sequence to be natural, but a study published ~4 mo later came to the opposite interpretation. Prior to this publication, we convened a panel of experts who completed questionnaires as set out by the frameworks; results using both schemes indicate that experts believe the sequence was likely induced. Based on these expert responses, we critically evaluate information that was available publicly in the weeks to months following the mainshock on 30 November 2022; reassess the relative importance of various components of the questionnaires from a parsimonious, rapid-response perspective; and consider other types of information that could be critical for near-real-time assessment of whether an event was induced or natural.

Science education in the Anthropocene: the aesthetics of climate change education in an epoch of uncertainty

We have a responsibility as science educators to work with young people to enact education that enables collective rebalancing of relationships between humans and more-than-humans that are disturbed by human-induced climate change. However, to date, climate change education has not been prioritized in school science at a policy, curricula, classroom and community level, due to an aesthetic which does not sufficiently value climate science or recognize the social impacts of science as part of the discipline. We argue in this conceptual research paper from a pragmatist perspective that an aesthetic shift is required to include science as part of climate change education as a transdisciplinary endeavor that focuses on addressing socio-ecological challenges through student agency and community action. We explore the synergy between science education aesthetics and climate change aesthetics as we advocate for a transformative aesthetics of climate change education. We do so through a process of reflection on and conceptualization of our stories of climate change education in Australia. We propose that such an aesthetic (how we ought to value) should not be considered in isolation but rather that it forms the basis for the ethics (how we ought to conduct ourselves) and logic (how we ought to think) of young people being with us in a community of inquiry in the Anthropocene. We argue that we (teachers and students) ought to conduct ourselves in loving ways toward human and more-than-human kin that necessitates that we think as a community of inquiry to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. In doing so we suggest that we can realize a radical pragmatist meliorism for climate change education that is underpinned by the three normative sciences, the most foundational of which is aesthetics.

Abordarea tipologică a textelor din domeniul sănătății publice produse în perioada pandemiei Covid-19

The article aims to carry out a typological analysis of specialized texts produced in the specific socio-communicational context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The synthesis of the theoretical postulates and the description of the traditional classifications (A. Bidu-Vrănceanu, J.-M Berthelot, A.-M., Loffler-Laurian, D. Rovența-Frumușani, Kocourek, Rostislav) allow the identification of relevant features in order to establish the typologies according to the sender, the recipient, and the target domain. During the public health crisis, official international and national websites are an important source of information. Thus, informational and descriptive texts such as weekly epidemiological bulletins, communication documents, summary reports, posters, video and audio information, epidemiological studies with key statistical data on confirmed cases, the incidence of detection and hospitalization, variants of the virus, and vaccination contribute to the internationalization of the terminology used in the pandemic discourse. These texts target a heterogeneous audience from the perspectives of knowledge, information, and application. The specialized text related to the pandemic context is the linguistic unit that transmits certain knowledge specific to a field, having an informative, descriptive, and argumentative value and a stance-taking impact. The communicative role of public health texts during the Covid-19 pandemic is well specified and defined, making them an interesting source of analysis from a terminological, pragmatic, and stylistic perspective.