Pragmatic Act Research Articles

Responding to dard-e-del (lit. pain of the heart) in Persian

Abstract Drawing on insights borrowed from Mey’s pragmatic act theory (2001) and Sharifian’s framework of Cultural Linguistics (2011, 2017a), this study attempts to explore the pragmemes associated with the speech act of responding to dard-e-del (lit. pain of the heart) in Persian and the cultural pragmatic schemas underlying them. Dard-e-del can be described as the verbal communication of suffering, sadness, or hardships to others, mainly for the purpose of discharging negative emotions, finding relief, and strengthening social bonds. This study argues that the language used by speakers of Persian to respond to dard-e-del can be categorized into three groups of pragmemes. Pragmemes, according to Mey (2010: 2884), are defined as “general situational prototypes of [pragmatic] acts that are capable of being executed in a particular situation or cluster of situations.” Besides, it is illustrated that the identified pragmemes cannot be correctly used and interpreted unless the interlocutors are aware of the cultural pragmatic schemas informing them. A cultural pragmatic schema is described as the (assumed) shared knowledge by members of a cultural group, which is reflected in different features of their language (Sharifian 2017a, 2017b). Data for the present study was collected from a number of online forums, where speakers of Persian communicate their dard-e-del to other users. As a cultural insider, the author has also drawn on personal observation and insights from some Persian literary works. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that interlocutors mainly employ three pragmemes to respond to dard-e-del. These pragmemes include wishing to suffer instead of the sufferer, cursing the cause of suffering, and inviting the sufferer to submit to god’s will. Each pragmeme has the potential to be expressed in a variety of ways (practs), depending on the context. The speech act of responding to dard-e-del in Persian and the associated pragmemes and practs draw on the three cultural pragmatic schemas of ghorbâni, tavakkol , and nefrin , which have their roots in religion.

Nigeria’s 2019 electioneering discourse

The paper interrogates the various discourse strategies adopted by the electorate on social media (SM) to delegitimize political opponents and engender rivalry in the build-up to the February 2019 presidential elections in Nigeria. A total of forty-two (42) Facebook (FB) posts on Nigerian political discourse were purposively selected between November 2018 and January 2019, and subjected to pragmatic and evaluative analysis, adopting Mey’s (2001) pragmatic acts theory and Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory.From our analysis, fourteen (14) different delegitimization strategies were found to have been utilized by the writers to achieve the pragmatic acts of discrediting political opponents as unworthy of being voted into powers, while concurrently persuading the electorate to support their side instead. These strategies include the following categories: facts and evidence, issue-based rhetorical question, frank issue-based opinion, contrastive engagement, and dysphemism. Others are implicit antithesis, direct verbal attack, allegations, irony, demonization, self-indictment, lexical gymnastics, sarcasm, and prophetism. The findings show overt and covert persuasive strategies and interactivity towards the pragmatic act of delegitimizing political opponents, showing words as the real weapons on the battlefield of politics. The analysis further reveals that people tend to support a SM post not necessarily because it is true, but because it supports the chances of their candidate or hurts the opposing side. Thus a platform has been provided for implicit and explicit political stance taking, which may be difficult outside SM due to certain insecurity and face threats. SM has become a site for a running, fierce, and open political discourse, the new voice for the voiceless, as well as for issue-based campaigns in Nigeria. It may well become a space where general elections are won and lost even before a vote is cast.

Collective pragmatic acting in networked spaces: The case of #activism in Arabic and English Twitter discourse

This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users’ sense of agency in networked spaces.

Imaginary scenarios: On the use and misuse of fiction

AbstractThis paper argues that the examination of representational (formal) and semantic (referential) features of fictional and factual narratives would be incomplete without discussing specific pragmatic (communicative, performative, heuristic, and cognitive) functions of fiction – how and why “fictions” are used in literature and arts, but also in scientific, philosophical, and everyday discourses. On the one hand, the pragmatic approach blurs the fictional/ factual divide and identifies similarities in the use of fiction across disciplinary borders. On the other, as we argue, to avoid panfictionalism inherent in Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if” the pragmatic act of boundary-crossing should be accompanied by mapping out new “cross-territorial” forms and distinctions. The paper revises and recasts the “cross-territorial” concept of scenario as a narrative structure and a type of fictional modeling and explores its semantic and pragmatic features.

Home as Love: Transcending Positionality in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator

Contrary to hegemonic Western representations of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Muslim men, Sudanese-Scottish Leila Aboulela’s The Translator depicts a Muslim woman, Sammar, whose sense of home and belonging is predicated on her romantic love for her late cousin and husband, Tarig. Therefore, after his death, she feels alienated from her home in Sudan and leaves for Aberdeen, Scotland, where she is ostracized because she is Muslim. While this Muslim identity proves indispensable for her survival and gradual healing, ultimate normalcy and belonging are restored when she reclaims the world of love and acceptance she has lost with Tarig’s death through a new relationship. The romantic love and the language she uses in this relationship allow Sammar to restore the sense of being and the belonging she had at home within the spaces she occupies in Aberdeen, ending her alienation and reclaiming her subjectivity. Using feminist theory and postcolonial theories of place and identity, as well as Lila Abu-Lughod’s notion of emotional discourse as a pragmatic act, this study investigates the novel’s depiction of place and identity as constructed entities embedded in emotion. This depiction, this study proposes, undermine various positionalities and binaries, such as self/other and east/west, allowing Aboulela to approach them more critically.

Conversion of Ajarians to Orthodox Christianity: Different Narratives and Perceptions

Based on field research and interviews conducted in both Ajaria and Tbilisi, this article focuses on the different interpretations of the conversion of ethnically Georgian Muslim Ajarians to Orthodox Christianity. It is argued that Orthodox Christianity is an important aspect of self-identification and the national narrative of all Georgians. For many Muslim Ajarians, conversion appears to be a pragmatic act, with the ultimate goal of being recognised as ‘fully Georgian’ by both state and society.

Conversational humour in a Nigerian radio news programme: A case study of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode

This paper investigates the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode (LIABK), a Nigerian secondary gatekeeping radio news programme, with the aim of indicating the stages of the genre where conversational humour typically occurs, and then it analyses humour types in the data through the neo-Gricean concept of untruthfulness and pragmatic act theory. The data for the study constitute a ten hour audio recording of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode from two radio stations in Ekiti and Ondo States, South-Western Nigeria. The GSP of LIABK is constituted by five obligatory elements: Opening (O), Advertisement (A), Pre-news Presentation (PnP), News Presentation (NP) and Closing (C). The genre-based expectations for O, PnP and C, and then NP are to provide entertainment and information to the listeners respectively. Thus, humour typically occurs in the O, PnP, and C stages of the programme, and rarely occurs in NP. Four humour types are indicated: song-as-humour, absurdity, joint fantasising and speaker-meaning-telic humour respectively. While song-as-humour resists being neatly categorised as autotelic humour, absurdity and joint fantasising are easily characterised as thus. The pragmatic act analysis reveals the incremental, sequential and co-constructed nature of the humour types. Furthermore, the pragmemes of entertainment and offering of opinion by the news presenters constitute the affordances or genre-based expectations that constrain the social activities that constitute LIABK. The study contributes to the scholarship on secondary gatekeeping in Nigeria broadcast media, conversational humour and pragmatics.

MEANING NEGOTIATION IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: A TYPOLOGY OF CITATIONS AS SEMANTIC MARKERS

In academic discourse, citations constitute a multifunctional pragmatic act: they acknowledge the property rights of writers, create intellectual or conceptual linkages, and enhance the persuasiveness of a text. Citations can, furthermore, serve to negotiate term meaning within the text. In this capacity, they acquire a dual dialogic quality: as citations, they participate in the social construction of knowledge by engaging in a ‘dialogue’ with the writers of previous texts but, as semantic markers, they also interact with the text’s readers by responding to plausible needs for semantic clarification. The article’s main focus is to present a typology of citations used as semantic markers. An analysis of the rhetoricity of semantic markers in academic discourse is also included in the discussion.

CONTEXTS AND ACTS IN TODAY'S MARRIAGES: A CARTOON DIMENSION TO MARITAL CONFLICTS IN NIGERIA

Marriage is a universal social institution recognised and respected all over the world and it is instrumental to a healthy society. It is nevertheless characterised by conflicts. The literature indicates studies on marital issues such as factors that contribute to social problems, diversities in marriage cultures, rituals, naming and so on. However, language scholars have not focused on the depiction of marriage in cartoons, especially the aspect of conflict among couples in this generation. This study, therefore, examines marital conflicts in the interactions of husbands and wives (Mr and Mrs) in Vanguard newspaper and their pragmatic implications for marital discourse in Nigeria. Mr and Mrs cartoons in the Vanguard newspaper have been identified as channels where conflicts among couples are brought to limelight through humour. The theory of pragmatic act by Jacob Mey was used to analyse pragmatic elements in the texts aided by linguistic features in foregrounding areas of conflict in the interactions. The data comprised 120 cartoons published at different times out of which 25 were purposively selected for analysis because of thematic recurrence. Ten practs: accusing, challenging, concealing, condemning, controlling, discontentment, eliciting, informing, threatening and warning were identified within three contexts, cultural, financial and social to principally interrogate norms and to subtly advocate gender equality. This shows that the cartoons do not merely convey utterances with semantic implications that provoke humour but also rely on contexts to perform acts in addition to understanding linguistic elements. Article visualizations:

Pragmatics of Crisis-Motivated Humour in Computer Mediated Platforms in Nigeria

Humour, an established means of releasing stress and tension has attracted scholarly attention over the years. In the Nigerian discourse context, studies on Crisis-Motivated Humour (CMH) via CMC platforms are scanty. This paper investigates humour shared through the social media which reflects the socioeconomic/political challenges in Nigeria in order to identify CMH as a form of humour through which real-life experiences of other people can be understood. Ethnography of Communication and Pragmatic act theory serve as the theoretical framework. Ten anonymous humorous compositions were randomly selected from WhatsApp and Facebook. CMH is a creative composition of jokes which reflects the Nigerians’ experiences, perceptions, imaginations and assumptions. They are purposefully composed by Nigerians, in order to downplay the effects of the crisis and bring temporary reliefs to the audience. These jokes elicit amusement, high-level wits and satirise the crisis situation(s). CMH are composed mainly in English with a blend of pidgin and a reflection of some Nigerianism. They are replete with verifiable, but exaggerated facts deployed through varying practs. Use of the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ and second person singular/plural ‘you’ with the use of simple present tense of verb among other grammatical elements, are a norm. All these make some of the jokes believable and also establish CMH as a unique genre of humour with an unlimited audience. CMH are often preserve-able and re-usable and thus serve as a relevant medium through which political leaders can assess the plights of the populace and access first-hand information on the ‘real’ impacts of the crisis.

Beyond Copenhagen: The Political Economy of Securitising “Outside Influences” in Bali

ABSTRACTSecuritisation theory has contributed greatly to critical security studies. However, the Copenhagen School’s focus on discursive analysis fails to answer the “so what” question of why issues are securitised and for whose benefit. This article contends that more nuanced explanations can be provided by taking seriously the political economy context within which the process of securitisation is embedded. The article has two aims. First, it contributes to further refining securitisation theory by embedding Balzacq’s pragmatic act – which implies that securitising actors gain the assent of an audience based on a shared view of vulnerabilities – within a broad social conflict analysis. This latter can explain the socio-political struggles that create popular support for securitisation, and what social groups benefit from it. Second, it contributes to explanations of Bali’s contemporary political economy by operationalising the refined approach to explain how struggles over the spoils of tourism have created a receptive audience among a cross-class section of Balinese for the securitisation of “outside influences” – a euphemism for migrants, non-local investors and Western cultural influences. Securitisation has resulted in conservative elite groups marginalising progressive voices; “traditional” institutions being favoured in accessing state resources; and in a policing landscape in which migrants are harassed and exploited.

Prompting offers of assistance in interaction

AbstractOne of the ways in which we can get someone to do something for us is through hinting. However, studies that have attempted to systematically examine requestive hints have faced difficulties in identifying hints as they are designed, by definition, to be ambiguous with respect to the intentions of that speaker. An alternative to this kind of circularity is to shift the analytical lens away from putative speaker intentions as the starting point of analysis. In this paper it is suggested that a properly pragmatic account of prompted offers requires systematic analysis of the situational conditions which afford the participants’ understanding of themasprompted, along with an appreciation of the three-part sequential architecture that is immanent to prompting offer sequences. It is concluded that pragmatic act theory has an important contribution to make to ongoing efforts to better understand fundamental processes of social action formation and ascription.

Lexemes, practs, and those who have yet to decide

Mey’s (2001) action-theoretic societal pragmatics known as pragmatic act theory nurtures the idea that the explanatory movement in pragmatic theories should go from the outside in (i. e. from actual situational contexts into prior contexts encoded in the utterances used). Kecskes’s (2010, 2013) socio-cognitive approach challenges Mey’s position, and argues that the explan-atory movement should go in both directions: from the outside in and from the inside out. To challenge Mey’s view and to nurture his own position, Kecskes resorts to a dialectical socio-cognitive perspective on human communication (Kecskes 2003, 2008), and uses situation-bound utterances as evidence to support his theory. In this paper, I will provide an overview of both theories and argue in favor of Mey’s position.

“Are you saying …?”

This study explores metapragmatic comments in Nigerian quasi-judicial public hearings, involving interactions between complainants, defendants and a hearing panel, with a view to investigating their forms, features, distribution and functions. The data are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively from a discourse-pragmatic framework that incorporates Verschueren’s theory of metapragmatics, Mey’s pragmatic act theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversation analysis. Four types of metapragmatic comments are used: speech act descriptions, talk regulation comments, maxim adherence/violation related comments and metalinguistic comments. Their distribution and functioning are shown to be partly predictable from properties of the speech event, while they also co-determine the nature and development of the analysed hearings.

A pragma-semiotic analysis of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria

In response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Nigerian government on 1st January 2012, Occupy Nigeria Group, a protest movement, embarked on different mass strike actions and demonstrations including online activism. The civil resistant actions geared towards reversal of petrol pump price increase deployed certain verbal and visual means in portraying the government and its actions. Previous studies on online protest discourse in Nigeria have adopted sociolinguistic and discourse analysis approaches in examining issues of identity and self-determination with little attention paid to visual-pragmatic strategies in representing people and their actions. This article, therefore, undertakes a pragma-semiotic investigation of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria with a view to examining verbal and visual modes of representing people and their actions in the event. Seventy-two online protest posts purposively sampled from the groups’ page are used to identify and categorize various pragma-semiotic elements and functions in the representations using insights from Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. It is observed that the verbal mode complements the visual in projecting the demands and resistance of the group. The posts which are classified under six semantic fields, namely divine intervention, security consciousness, innovation, exaggeration, defamation and abusive placards have various visual-pragmatic strategies such as prayer, negative labelling, humour, mockery, abuse, passionate and fierce appeal, including photo trick. The strategies correspond to the dominant pragmatic acts such as demonstrative, assertive, suppository, condoling and stipulating. All these acts are presented within the Nigerian socio-political and linguistic context.

Variations in the use of intertexts at the macro-contextual level: The case of English press news

An intertext (e.g. Home Smart Home) adopts or adapts an earlier source text (e.g. Home Sweet Home) in such a way that the intertextual meaning can be constructed or appreciated in terms of the source text. This article explores variations in the use of intertexts across six English newspapers in different macro contexts. Drawn from the six newspapers were 1,681 full-length news stories, from which 253 intertexts were identified. The ensuing intertextual and macro-contextual analyses of the identified intertexts show that (i) they were largely situated in the context of a large newspaper for speakers of English as a native/official language, (ii) the most adaptable intertextual sources are formulaic expressions, media products, and literary and scholarly works, (iii) intertexts tend to appear in salient discourse units (namely, the headline, lead, and coda) to realize a pragmatic act, and (iv) formal intertexts find greater affordance of playfulness in salient discourse units and in native-speaking contexts than the other intertexts. The survey and analyses have shed some light on the affordance between intertexts and their macro contexts.

Impoliteness and taking offence in initial interactions

The notion of “offence” lies at the core of current models of impoliteness. Yet is also well acknowledged that being impolite is not necessarily the same thing as being offended. In this paper, it is suggested that previous work on causing offence (Culpeper, 2011) can be usefully complemented by an analysis of taking offence. It is proposed that taking offence can be productively examined with respect to a model of (im)politeness as interactional social practice (Haugh, 2015). On this view, taking offence is analysed in part as a social action in and of itself, which means those persons registering or sanctioning offence in an interaction, whether explicitly or implicitly, can themselves be held morally accountable for this taking of offence. It is further suggested that taking offence as a form of social action can be productively theorised as a pragmatic act which is invariably situated with respect to particular activity types and interactional projects therein (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014). This position is illustrated by drawing from analyses of initial interactions amongst speakers of (American and Australian) English who are not previously acquainted. It is suggested that ways in which taking offence are accomplished both afforded and constrained by the demonstrable orientation on the part of participants to agreeability in the course of getting acquainted.

La parataxe dans le parlé spontané et dans l’écrit littéraire

The article argues that parataxis is a specific syntactic relation, since it holds between clauses and phrases within one major textual unit. The research is based on spoken and written (literary) corpora, and reports on the quantitative and qualitative differences in both modalities. In speech, the major textual unit is the Utterance, which corresponds to one pragmatic act, and the onset of paratactic relations follows from its information structure. When the linguistic content is distributed through various textual units (60% of utterances), it is combined in accordance to paratactic relations and does not follow compositional syntax. In writing, the major textual unit is the Period, which is identified by strong punctuation and does not correspond to a pragmatic act. The content within the period follows compositional syntax and mainly corresponds to one proposition with one main clause. However, corpus analysis shows that roughly 25% of periods comprise more than one main clause, linked by weak punctuation or lexical connectors. These clauses have independent modality and therefore are not strictly compositional within a single syntactic configuration. In these cases, the clauses stand in a paratactic relation.

Pragmatic Acts In HIV/AIDS Social Management Advertisements

Studies on the social management of HIV and AIDS have focused on how awareness about HIV and AIDS has been created through organised and interpersonal communication. These studies have not investigated context-constrained language use in the advertisements on the disease despite the wide coverage and potential effectiveness of the public sensitisation about HIV and AIDS. This study, therefore, investigated the pragmatic features of language in selected HIV and AIDS management advertisements with a view to identifying the pragmatic acts of the language. Aspects of pragmatic act theory, noted for negotiability of meaning context based interactional situations was adopted for the research. All the 25 advertisements broadcast between December 2006 and June 2009, to all African countries on both private and government-owned television stations in Nigeria by an International non-governmental agency known as 'it begins with you' (YOU) constituted the data. Fifty–four utterances were generated from the adverts and were subjected to qualitative analysis and reported in simple percentages. Six pragmatic functions manifested in the advertisements: Co-opting and Projecting were realised through inference (INF), shared situational knowledge (SSK) and relevance (REL) to bring the audience into the war against HIV/AIDS. Encouraging and Emboldening were projected through SSK and INF to motivate the audience to go for HIV test and speak openly about the virus. Instigating was done using indirect speech act to empower the female against discrimination and stigmatisation. Advising was achieved through SSK and INF to promote fidelity and safe sexual behaviour. The analysis of YOU advertisements through pragmatic act theory presupposes that pragmatic functions were exploited by the advertisers to sensitise the audience, promote social ties and project into an HIV free generation.

Atos de fala e a lei

O presente artigo busca colocar a velha questão da ‘força das palavras’ em uma perspectiva pragmática, especialmente na medida em que a lei e os textos legais são colocados em questão. Ao se questionar a sabedoria do velho ditado “Dizer não é fazer”, mostro que as palavras realmente têm um efeito (o que os filósofos e linguistas têm tentado entender, utilizando os conceitos de ‘ato de fala’ ou ‘ato pragmatico’), e que os constituintes legais desta ‘força’ são precisamente o que faz com que os atos contratuais sejam válidos. Aqui, também, as palavras às vezes podem ser omitidas, ou substituídas por ações, desde que o contexto o permita. Baseado em alguns casos históricos e contemporâneos, o artigo sugere, além disso, como as palavras de fato podem fazer a diferença em uma variedade de contextos: sociais, legais e outros. O ângulo pragmático (isto é, a orientação para o utilizador) é sempre primordial, e as nossas palavras devem obedecer às condições pragmáticas, muitas vezes chamadas de ‘affordances’, da situação em que elas estão sendo proferidas.