Pragmatic Phenomena Research Articles

Pragmatic Analysis of Maxim Violations in Animated Conversations on the Dhot Design Channel

Maxim violation is a pragmatic phenomenon that occurs in various communication contexts, including in entertainment media such as animation. This research aims to analyze the maxims' violation in the conversation of the Dhot Design School animation series titled “Tour Bareng Keluarga Tiffany”. This research focuses on the four maxims of cooperation proposed by Grice, namely the maxims of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. This research uses a descriptive qualitative approach with pragmatic discourse analysis techniques. The data were obtained through transcription of conversations in the animated video and then analyzed based on the types of maxim violation. The results show that in the animated conversation, there are various maxims violations used as communication strategies. The findings show that maxim violations in animation do not always hinder communication, but often serve to create humorous effects, build characters, and enhance the appeal of the story. Thus, this study contributes to understanding how maxim violation is used in entertainment discourse to enrich verbal interaction.

Contrasting the Pragmatics of Spanishes

Abstract This special issue explores contrastive pragmatics with a focus on Spanish in comparison with other languages and varieties. The collection assembles studies comparing Spanish with Chinese, Greek, English, French, and Italian, as well as investigations of pragmatic variation across different varieties of Spanish. The contributions examine a diverse range of pragmatic phenomena, including humour, impoliteness, aggression, mitigation, requests, complaints, and mourning practices, across various communicative contexts from face-to-face conversations to digital platforms. Methodologically, the studies employ both naturalistic corpora and experimental approaches, with many incorporating multimodal analysis to account for the complexity of contemporary communication. The collection highlights how platformization reshapes interactional norms through multimodal affordances, structures genre-specific speech act patterns, and complicates methodological approaches in pragmatic research. By exploring how pragmatic meaning and interactional patterns vary across languages, communities, and digital/physical contexts, this special issue contributes to our understanding of pragmatic variation, particularly in interpersonally sensitive communicative activities, while raising important questions about the assumptions and methods of contrastive pragmatics in an increasingly globalized and digitally mediated world.

“Shall we talk? Everyone is talking”

Abstract This study explores how study-abroad learners perceive and interpret gaps in their L2 pragmatic knowledge. While previous research focuses on pragmatic development in specific speech acts or pragmatic phenomena, this research adopts a learner-centered approach, emphasizing pragmatic challenges noticed by learners themselves during naturalistic interactions. Data were collected through learning journals and interviews with five Chinese students studying in the United Kingdom over one academic year. Results reveal that learners predominantly notice pragmatic gaps in three scenarios: (1) encountering unfamiliar sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic features, (2) experiencing difficulties in negotiating social or moral meanings, and (3) receiving implicit feedback from interlocutors regarding their pragmatic choices. Pragmatic awareness was particularly triggered in rapport-sensitive interactions with tutors and non-transactional conversations like small talk. While noticing sometimes led to metapragmatic reflection, learners often overgeneralized or misinterpreted sociopragmatic norms. The findings highlight the need for specialized pragmatics instruction in ESL/EFL contexts to support SA students.

Pragmatic Diversity in Dialogue: Analyzing Maxim Violations and Communication Strategies in The Batman (2022)

This study investigates the pragmatic phenomenon of maxim violations in the 2022 movie The Batman, employing Grice's cooperative principle as the theoretical framework. Understanding how characters intentionally deviate from conversational norms is crucial for appreciating the complexity of human communication, particularly in diverse social contexts where individuality and group dynamics shape dialogue. This research fills a gap in the literature by focusing on a contemporary cinematic text that portrays multifaceted characters from varying social strata, thus contributing to studies on communication diversity, minority-majority interactions, and identity expression through language. This study used descriptive qualitative analysis to interpret the data. Following that, the data were analyzed using the Matching technique and the Pragmatic Identity Method to examine the data refers to the context. There were 15 violations of total in the data. It was found, that the results which violates maxim quality with 5 data, 2 data for violations of maxim quantity, 5 data for maxim of manner violations, and violations of maxim relation with 3 data. Both violations of maxim quantity and manner were violated the most in The Batman movie. The results shows that the film’s portrayal of diverse communicative behaviors and enriches our understanding of how pragmatic competence is exercised in complex social interactions. In short, this research underscores the importance of cooperative principles in everyday communication and their strategic manipulation in storytelling to convey nuanced character traits and social tensions.

How to investigate implicit pragmatic phenomena in corpora

How to investigate implicit pragmatic phenomena in corpora

Anecdotes-questions: thematic, pragmatic, speech-genre structure

One of the fairly common (more than 300 texts on the «Anekdoty iz Rossii» [Anecdotes from Russia] website (https://www.anekdot.ru) related to this type) structural types of anecdotes is considered - anecdotes-questions (AQ). The study includes content (themes of anecdotes and more particular moments of the semantic structure) and formal (with possible access to the structural type) analysis. Two types of AQ are contrasted in content, the main (genre-forming) of which (AQ<sub>1</sub>) goes back to comic aphorisms-questions. Pragmatically, the interrogative form strengthens the connection with the addressee of the anecdote, thereby additionally drawing attention to the content of the aphorism. The second group of AQ (AQ<sub>2</sub>) is a depiction of a situation of dialogical communication (including Internet communication), where the interrogative remark belongs to one of the characters. In the case of AQ<sub>1</sub>, the focus is on the semantics (the topic) and formal structure of the question itself, including aesthetic aspects, while AQ<sub>2</sub> focuses on the pragmatics of the depicted dialogue situation. Thematically, questions in AQ<sub>1</sub> (anecdotes-sentences) differ from AQ<sub>2</sub> (dialogues): the former usually have a more general, “global” character, while the latter are more often concrete and everyday, tied to current events-names (and in this sense, it seems, infinitely diverse). Pragmatically, a replica-question can quite fully create an image of its author, who can act as a “bearer of folk wisdom” or “logic of idiocy”, contain implicit information about the status, education of its author, as well as a more private life position, for example, political. It is shown that AQ (both AQ<sub>1</sub> and AQ<sub>2</sub>) represent a pragmatic phenomenon that is quite widespread on the Internet, combining features of a monologue and a dialogue.

Implicit pragmatic phenomena in headlines of Hungarian health-related fake news

Abstract Fake news is often designed with clickbait headlines to reach a wide readership. The current work focuses on implicit pragmatic phenomena in fake news headlines, namely implicit arguments, implicit contents in speech acts, and implicatures, in order to add to the findings of earlier research on the topic. It provides a corpus-based analysis of Hungarian health-related fake news headlines. It concludes that (i) implicit arguments in headlines create an information gap and are only used as tools of manipulation to generate clicks; (ii) the intended perlocutionary effect of the headlines that appear as speech acts with incomplete propositional content or implicit illocutionary force is not the effective transfer of information but rather to evoke emotions manipulatively; (iii) the goal of the unfair use of implicatures may be to avoid responsibility. This study reveals that the special combination of explicit and implicit content in fake news headlines can create or widen an information gap, manipulate readers by generating psychological effects, convey false information, and stimulate peripheral processing.

Analyzing naturally-sourced Questions Under Discussion

The Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework of discourse has been a highly influential theoretical device in many accounts of various pragmatic phenomena, yet there has been comparatively little work assessing the extent to which the QUD can be reliably inferred from naturalistic contexts. In this paper, we focus primarily on measuring the variability across individuals in QUD inference, while also verifying other related, commonly held assumptions about QUD theory. To this end, we collect QUDs from many theoretically naive subjects tasked with processing a radio interview utterance by utterance. We consider various analyses designed to address the problem of measuring question similarity. Overall, we find that there exists moderate variability among subjects, consistent with possibly the insufficiency of context in determining QUD, or possibly also the simultaneous coexistence of multiple valid QUDs. To more adequately tease apart these possibilities, we also propose additional analyses for addressing the issue of question identity.

Does ‘a couple’ pattern with scalars or numbers - Insights from inference and ‘so’ tasks

Previous research establishes that paucal quantifiers like ‘a couple’ are ambiguous between the literal meaning of ‘at least two’ and the enriched meaning understood as conveying a restriction on quantity, the latter of which can be explained by a pragmatic phenomenon, i.e. scalar inference (SI). To address whether this ambiguity patterns with that of scalars or numbers, our Experiment 1 explored the behaviours of ‘a couple’ and scalars with two types of probe questions in inference tasks, and Experiment 2 continued this theme by testing the naturalness rating for ‘a couple’ and scalars in an ‘X so not Y’ construction. The results of our experiments indicate two natures of ‘a couple’: a non-monotonic /cardinal (approximately two) and proportional (a small proportion of).

First acquiring articles in a second language: A new approach to the study of language and social cognition

First acquiring articles in a second language: A new approach to the study of language and social cognition

La producción oral en L2 a través de prácticas reflexivas en escenario autónomo

Oral production competence is a complex challenge in second language acquisition. Its teaching is often associated with non-authentic materials and the ephemeral and emergent nature of spoken language reveals disappointing learning outcomes at all levels and in all contexts. This research promotes their learning through reflective practice in an autonomous environment such as Tandem (Spanish-German). The five pairs participating in this activity were composed of a Spanish and German speaker each. All participants evidenced a B1 level of German and a B2 level of Spanish in the L2. The discursive typology “interview” and a proposal based on four steps are being presented as a tool for learners to promote, first, a deeper and more conscious knowledge and strategies of interactional and pragmatic phenomena in conversation and, second, a better approach to how these phenomena take place in the L2.

КОРПУСНА ПРАГМАТИКА – НОВА ГАЛУЗЬ КОРПУСНОЇ ЛІНГВІСТИКИ

The article is devoted to corpus pragmatics as a new branch of corpus linguistics that combines quantitative methods of language data analysis with qualitative approaches of pragmatics. Thanks to the development of computer-based text processing methods and the expansion of electronic corpora, it has become possible to study pragmatic phenomena in large amounts of data, which allows obtaining more reliable results than traditional intuitive or experimental approaches. The work covers the history of corpus linguistics – from the creation of the Brown Corpus to modern multimodal and specialised corpora, as well as the main stages of the formation of pragmatics as a science. The relationship between the language form and its pragmatic function is analysed, which is one of the key issues in corpus analysis. The methods of corpus pragmatics, such as concordance analysis, collocation and frequency pattern analysis, as well as the use of annotated corpora for automated detection of speech acts and discourse markers are considered. Examples of the analysis of pragmatic units based on the general corpus of the Ukrainian language and the author’s own small corpus of German-language texts are presented. Prospects for further development of corpus pragmatics, in particular, the use of artificial intelligence to improve methods of automatic analysis of language data, are outlined.

Exceptions, Instantiations, and Overgeneralization: Insights into How Language Models Process Generics

Abstract Large language models (LLMs) have garnered a great deal of attention for their exceptional generative performance on commonsense and reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate LLMs’ capabilities for generalization using a particularly challenging type of statement: generics. Generics express generalizations (e.g., birds can fly) but do so without explicit quantification. They are notable because they generalize over their instantiations (e.g., sparrows can fly) yet hold true even in the presence of exceptions (e.g., penguins do not). For humans, these generic generalizations play a fundamental role in cognition, concept acquisition, and intuitive reasoning. We investigate how LLMs respond to and reason about generics. To this end, we first propose a framework grounded in pragmatics to automatically generate both exceptions and instantiations – collectively exemplars. We make use of focus—a pragmatic phenomenon that highlights meaning-bearing elements in a sentence—to capture the full range of interpretations of generics across different contexts of use. This allows us to derive precise logical definitions for exemplars and operationalize them to automatically generate exemplars from LLMs. Using our system, we generate a dataset of ∼370kexemplars across ∼17k generics and conduct a human validation of a sample of the generated data. We use our final generated dataset to investigate how LLMs reason about generics. Humans have a documented tendency to conflate universally quantified statements (e.g., all birds can fly) with generics. Therefore, we probe whether LLMs exhibit similar overgeneralization behavior in terms of quantification and in property inheritance. We find that LLMs do show evidence of overgeneralization, although they sometimes struggle to reason about exceptions. Furthermore, we find that LLMs may exhibit similar non-logical behavior to humans when considering property inheritance from generics.

‘’Ah, uhm, yeaaaah, maybe.’’ Developing a New Data Collection Instrument to Explore the Gendered Realisation of Refusals by Young Adult Speakers of Irish English

Presenting the development of a specifically created data collection tool, the online spoken discourse completion task (OSDCT), this study aims to shed light on how young adult Irish-English speakers aged 20-30 realise refusals and the factors which influence linguistic choice. The novel OSDCT was created using Google Forms and the Mote browser extension. Eight situationally controlled audio prompts eliciting refusals were recorded onto the form. The 18 participants (9 male and 9 female) responded orally to the prompts by recording their own audio response via the Mote browser extension. The use of the OSDCT resulted in more natural responses and facilitated the consideration of both linguistic and paralinguistic features. The oral-based nature of the tool highlighted, in particular, the prominence of (para)linguistic modifiers such as elongations, pauses, tuts and dysfluencies as pragmatic phenomena present in refusals. The results indicate that the social need to avoid threatening face played a greater role than gender in realising the speech act of refusal; however, gender-based differences emerged when the age of the prompter was taken into account.

Raising the (meta)pragmatic awareness of non-native pre-service teachers of L2 Italian with a telecollaborative data-driven learning project on formal email writing

This study aims to determine whether a data-driven learning approach in a telecollaborative setting can effectively aid in the preparation of non-native pre-service teachers (PSTs) of Italian concerning pragmatic aspects of the target language. The study outlines a 4-week telecollaboration module focusing on formal email writing, involving eight PSTs at an Austrian university paired with Italian students. The participants were asked to analyze specific parts of emails written by native and non-native speakers and plan a lesson. The data analyzed came from questionnaires as well as from materials produced during the module itself. Ten Italian university professors offered baseline data. Descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis were employed. The results indicate, on one hand, a small but significant improvement in the PSTs' understanding of target pragmatic phenomena after the intervention. On the other hand, not all the teaching strategies suggested in the module were fully grasped for potential future use by the PSTs. However, there is some evidence of PSTs’ autonomy in investigating, analyzing, and reflecting on pragmatic issues, offering a promising approach to enhancing teacher training in pragmatics.

The Winter’s Tale on the Greek stage

Abstract The study examines two Greek target versions (1952, 2004) of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611) in order to examine how politeness orientations and awareness of power distance change to shape the relational dynamics between characters. In the two target versions male characters vary intra-culturally and interculturally, while themes such as female submissiveness and gender relations show intra-cultural variation. Analysis of naturalistic translation data shows variation in the way certain characters are reshaped in the two versions, which is confirmed by experimental data elicited by a questionnaire. The significance of the research lies in that pragmatics may provide a basis for the study of intra-cultural variation in characters’ identities in a play, and in that translation is a rich resource for tracing pragmatic variation in the manifestation of pragmatic phenomena.

The Case for Referential Quantifier Phrases

In this paper, I argue that the referential/attributive distinction that Donnellan introduced for definite descriptions applies to other quantifiers phrases as well. Furthermore, I argue that the referential use of some quantifier phrases is as standard and conventional as the referential use of definite descriptions. This supports the idea that the referential use of some quantifier phrases is a semantic rather than a pragmatic phenomenon.

Political Philosophy and Moral Thinking as Phenomena and/or Personages: An Essential Short Guide of a Pragmatist Reader

Despite their similarity in style, language, and performance, symmetry, repetition, and the game of arbitrariness are represented by parallel intentional paths. After years of amorphous searching through the compilation of ruins and rubble, we could, with this study, carry out the situational need for the signifier and the signified by establishing a short theoretical framework that helps illuminate the striking appearance of pragmatic phenomena. For underlying concrete acts of interpretation, to understand the meaning to the required extent, alternatively constructed enactment must manage moral thinking and political practice to rationalise the symbolism on the map at the core of the theoretical construction. Since reports, as Mehan and Wood (1975) scholarly warrant, are decoded on behalf of the facts, not of social beings, certain pragmatics of a linguistic complex, according to Saussure (1959), show that word order alone expresses the thought.

Aesthetic Judgments, Evaluative Content, and (Hybrid) Expressivism

Aesthetic statements of the form ‘X is beautiful’ are evaluative; they indicate the speaker’s positive affective attitude regarding X. Why is this so? Is the evaluative content part of the truth conditions, or is it a pragmatic phenomenon (i.e. presupposition, implicature)? First, I argue that semantic approaches as well as these pragmatic ones cannot satisfactorily explain the evaluativity of aesthetic statements. Second, I offer a positive proposal based on a speech-act theoretical version of hybrid expressivism, which states that, with the literal utterance of ‘X is beautiful’, we perform two illocutionary acts simultaneously, an assertive and an expressive one. I will specify this theory in detail and argue that it can satisfactorily account for the evaluative content of aesthetic statements. I will also discuss the advantages of the theory over other variants of expressivism in meta-aesthetics.

Heart Theory as an Alternative Politeness Model

Face theory is an important pragmatic theory regarding politeness in human communication. As the central term of the theory, the face, a part of the human body, is seen as a metaphor for dignity and respect. The heart is put forward in this paper as an alternative politeness metaphor. Due to the differences between Western and Eastern politeness ideologies, face theory sometimes fails to explain certain pragmatic phenomena in China. By replacing the face in face theory with heart, the paper tries to inject an Eastern perception of human relationships into the traditional pragmatic theory.