Discourse Pragmatics Research Articles

The Argument of the Matrix Verb Seems in Spec T: The Raised DP or the Given DP

Generative linguists claim that the argument of the matrix verb as in Mary seemed to be innocent is the DP (determine phrase), which is the raised argument of the to-infinitive clause being raised to be landed in the Spec T. However, the current study argues that the DP argument as the subject of the matrix verb seems to be the given DP and this is supported by functional linguistics. The argument in this study is statistically supported by the empirical evidence of international applied linguistic research articles. The data collection was English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which were indexed in the Q1 SCOPUS database. A total number of approximately 250,000 words was derived from 25 applied linguistics research articles, which contained 47 tokens concerning the argument with the matrix verb seem. The data analysis was divided into the framework of syntactic analysis and the quantitative study of inferential statistical analysis. The framework of syntactic analysis follows functional linguistics called the pragmatic discourse of givenness. The statistical analysis in this study was Pearson Correlation in SPSS29. The results showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between the given DP of the matrix verb seem and applied linguistic research articles. The p-value was reported at 0.044. Thus, the hypothesis in this study was accepted. The discussion follows the principle of cohesion and fixed colligations. It is recommended that the hypothesis in this study be tested by other English materials, such as novels and business documents, to contribute to the field.

Ukrainian biaspectuality: An instantiation of compositional aspect in a verbal-aspect language

Aspect, the perfective-imperfective contrast, is a universal phenomenon, part of man’s cognitive organization to reflect objective/subjective reality by conceptualizing referents of verbs and of nominals/NPs standing for participants in situations as temporal entities, residing in speaker-hearers’ heads and interacting between each other. Aspect is instantiated across languages through two archetypes: verbal aspect (VA) – grammatical, as in the Slavic languages, including Ukrainian; compositional aspect (CA) – complex semantico-syntactic, sporadically dependent on pragmatic discourse elements, as in English. The paper explores Ukrainian language data to, first, confirm that CA, realized mainly as a very complex interplay of sentence components, exists not only in CA languages but, albeit peripherally, also in VA languages, including Ukrainian. Second, to find out how the Ukrainian aspect is realized in sentences with biaspectual verbs and particular numbers of situation-participant NPs: three, two, one. The referents of verbs and of nominals/NPs standing for participants in situations in both VA and CA languages are part of the never-ending process of thinking and perpetual resorting to memory and are not some abstract self-contained system of symbols divorced from human cognition. Phrased otherwise, aspect, especially CA, cannot be understood within the domain of traditional grammar and mainstream linguistics with their naivist notions ignoring man’s cognitive capacity and maintaining, inter alia, that nominals/NPs are concrete/physical or abstract entities. The study of matter is ordained to physics. Linguistics must investigate not the material world but how language reflects this world and other possible (imaginable) worlds. A simple analogue is a woman in a mirror: it is not a material object but an image of a woman; likewise, a woman referred to through language is not a material object but a token of a woman. Hence, NP referents of material things are not physical entities but images of such entities, fully describable, and their kineticism is handled by verb referents, whereby the intricate CA mechanism, which is cognitive, can be observed, albeit peripherally, also in VA languages, including Ukrainian. Disclosure Statement The authors reported no potential conflicts of interest. * Corresponding author: Krasimir Kabakčiev, 0000-0002-5529-0872kkabakciev@atiner.gr

Экспликация авторской позиции в англоязычных аннотациях к научным статьям: сопоставительный анализ

This paper, inspired by interest in semantics and pragmatics of academic discourse, focuses on English-medium research article abstracts by authors with native languages other than English. The study assumes that in order to convey an authorial stance and establish an effective relationship with the reader, representatives of different cultures use a repertoire of metadiscourse devices varying in terms of quality and quantity. The theoretical basis of the research is K. Hyland’s taxonomy of stance markers. Hedging and boosting devices found in the corpus were analysed using the terminology proposed by K. Hyland and H. Zou. The analysis showed that hedges and boosters are important elements of academic discourse. They play a crucial role in authorial efforts to make claims tentative and avoid categorical statements or persuade readers of certainty and accuracy of research results. The study found that academic article abstracts by Latin American authors contain considerably more hedges than those written by their Russian counterparts, who make extensive use of boosters. Anticipating and acknowledging alternative points of view, Latin American authors are more careful when making claims, which is in compliance with the internationally accepted academic writing norms. The findings suggest that Russian novice academic writers should be taught stancetaking strategies in line with the academic writing norms.

Функционирование реактивных прагматических моделей в непрофессиональном интернет-дискурсе

The response pragmatics in political Internet discourse is one of the most interesting and understudied aspects of modern virtual communication. This research featured a model of non-professional Internet discourse in the genre of political Internet commentary and its pragmatics. The resulting models correlated with the general model, which was based on the communicative intentions of the authors of political Internet comments. The empirical material involved feedback lines from readers of the RIA Novosti news agency. Determining the textual entity by its sender’s macrointension, the authors established the genre of Internet commentary as reactive. The pragmatic options for response patterns were based on the addressee’s communicative role and the reactive macrointension implemented in non-professional Internet discourse. The paper describes two reactive models of non-professional discourse: 1) reaction to a political event; 2) reaction to a pragmatic context. The method of linguistic and pragmatic discourse analysis revealed that the reactive models contained the following types of reaction: positive, negative, and twofold. However, the Internet comments also included an interpretative component. The reactive intention of the subjects of non-professional Internet discourse was combined with their intention to introduce a fragment of personal experience.

Morphology and semantics of derivational metaphors in Spanish media discourse

The cognitive and pragmatic potential of derivational metaphorical nominations, actively used in the Spanish media discourse, represent a relevant direction of Discursive and Cognitive re-search that requires scientific comprehension.The article is devoted to the study of the linguo-cognitive specificity of derivational metaphors that verbalize new meanings, name new realities and frequently function as nomination-neologisms or occasionalisms. Derivational metaphors perform a pragmatic function, broadcasting an intentionally conditioned vision of the world in modern Spanish media discourse, and implement the intentional and evaluative discourse pragmatics. The objective of the study is to consider the morphosemantics of derivational metaphors and analyse the most frequent word-forming productive models of metaphorical nominations in Spanish media discourse.An integral methodological approach is used to the study of word-formation discursive metaphors, which combines contextual, semantic, interpretive and stylistic analysis methodologically opening up the possibility of a systemic study of the linguo-pragmatics of derivative metaphorical nominations that function in the Spanish media discourse. The most productive morphosemantic models of word formation for creating metaphorical concepts in the Spanish media space are affixation (prefixation and suffixation as well as their combination) and word compounding.The cognitive approach to the study of derivational metaphors through the prism of onomasiological theory allows one to interpret the process of word formation as a way of translating cognitive attitudes and meanings. The metaphorical meaning is generated by a derivational act. The morphological structure of a word change is not identical to the sum of the meanings of the derivational components involved in the creation of a new metaphor. In the discursive space the associative potential relative to the basic meaning of affixes or root morphemes in compound words brings a number of interpretations that vary the metaphorical rethinking of their semantics and integrate axiological evaluation.The discursive role of word-formation metaphors, which have an evaluative potential, lies in the implementation of the pragmatic function of updating meanings, aimed at influencing the consciousness and behaviour of the target audience.

SEMIOTICS OF HARLEY-DAVIDSON ADVERTISING THROUGH STYLISTICS AND PRAGMATICS

The article explores the semiotic construction of consumer identity through the stylistics and pragmatics of Harley-Davidson discourse, actualizing semiotic codes of its advertising. The findings provide evidence of the role of metaphorical expressions encoded in slogans and other stylistic devices in actualizing the hermeneutic code of the brand's advertising. The antitheses underlying the juxtaposition of brand values against mainstream ones underlie the symbolic code of the slogans' messages. The actional code relies on directives that stimulate the behavioral model, and implicit commissive acts, promising to fulfill the consumers’ needs. The obtained data demonstrate the semiotic function of the key signified Freedom and its derived sub-concepts in constructing the target brand identity

Pragmatic patterns and discourses on Twitter: Unpacking perspectives in the discussion of the Turów lignite mine

Much public debate today is carried out on Twitter (now X), where the participants employ a range of diverse resources to convey their ideas effectively. Disentangling the resources into clear and understandable structures and patterns presents a fresh challenge for discourse pragmatics. This article addresses that challenge methodologically by evaluating existing methods for identifying and classifying pragmatic patterns, revealing their drawbacks, and advocating for a new coding system. This categorizes tweets based on a post's primary pragmatic function (informing, appealing, or expressing emotivity), considering subsidiary functions. The study then applies this new scheme to analyze the Twitter debate on the Polish Turów lignite mine, which became a subject of international dispute as the Czech and European authorities sought the mine's closure to eliminate its negative environmental impact. The debate unfolds mainly in Polish, Czech, and English, each language being associated with a distinct discourse. The English discourse emphasizes a transnational appeal for widespread decarbonization, contrasting with the predominantly oppositional, national political perspectives in the Polish and Czech discourses. These rely heavily on emotivity directed, in the Polish case, primarily against the country's ruling party, and in the Czech one against the deal eventually reached with Poland to mitigate the problems.

Micro-sociolinguistic outcomes of language contact in different lects of Indian English

This paper explores language contact phenomena (substrate und superstrate influence, universal learning strategies) in the speech of English-dominant, Hindi-dominant and bilingual speakers of Indian English. In so doing, it describes the nature and extent of linguistic variation that spans a broad sociolinguistic spectrum. The empirical basis of the study targets two domains of language: morpho-syntax (the English present perfect) and discourse pragmatics (quotative marking). The stratification of the informants into English-dominant, Hindi-dominant and bilingual is diagnostic of the sociolinguistic settings in which varieties in contact have been acquired (predominantly English, predominantly Hindi or mixed). The results indicate that superstratal influence is most noticeable in the speech of English-dominant individuals. In contrast, Hindi-dominant and bilingual speakers demonstrate substrate-induced features in their speech. The universal learning strategies of simplification are limited to the linguistic repertoires of the individuals with predominantly Hindi background. Crucially, bilingual speakers appear to engage in the construction of creative coinages and lead an incipient language change in the domain of quotative marking. Against this backdrop, the study shows that bilingualism is a primary sociocognitive condition underpinning speakers’ linguistic creativity and its major prerequisite. The study also pinpoints the importance of sociolinguistic differentiation through meticulous ethnographic fieldwork in the study of linguistic variation.

Pragmatic Analysis of the Translation and Discourse of Surat-Al-Fatiha: A Gracian Approach

The Study in hands is inspired to study the language of the Holy Quran and its translation to understand the meanings that have been incorporated in the translation of the original text. The researcher took the translation of Jhon Arthur Arberry as a sample for the analysis. It also tries to identify the pragmatic meaning that is lost in the translation. The research adopts a qualitative approach in the analysis of data and discusses different elements under the given methodology. The Study utilizes “pragmatic discourse analysis” and takes Grice’s cooperative principles as a tool for the analysis of source text and target text. The application of the principles has made it easy to draw the connection between the verses of the chapter and their translations. It is observed that the source text is following the principles in totality and no violation or flouting has been observed. Nonetheless, the translation renders the loss of meaning and falls short to convey the meaning as efficiently as the source text of the Holy book. The research also validates that the study of context is necessary for the understanding of implicature.

Review of Ahmed Fal Sbai’s The Authenticity Dilemma in the Arab Pragmatic Discourse:

This book is a compelling contribution to modern criticism, and critical discourse analysis in particular. The book itself is a critique of the Arab pragmatic discourse, wherein A. F. Sbai (PhD.) lays great emphasis on wider developments and intervening factors, taking T. Abdel Rahman’s published works as a focal case for study to support his central implicit argument and intentions: the deconstruction of the entire Abdel Rahman-based discourse community and the introduction of his project of Islamic pragmatics. This review focuses mainly on the deconstructionism in action of primary sources, which is the critical approach Sbai adopts to arrive at his revolutionary findings successfully.

Exploring Multiple Identities in Barack Obama’s Speeches to the African and Arab Audience

Presidential speeches aside, being a type of political discourse is a viable expression of the different types of identities purposively constructed and negotiated to achieve intended communicative outcomes. Using two Barack Obama's speeches to the Arab and African communities, the study seeks to investigate how political actors construct their identities to a wider audience. Using an eclectic theoretical dimension of Stance Taking, Audience Design Theory and drawing insights from Discourse Pragmatics, the study notes that the discursive features of intertextuality, metaphor, rhetorical questions, pronouns, if conditionals, multiple audience, epistemic stance are deliberately deployed to reveal their individual, social, national, and racial identities of political actors to achieve both self and communal positionings. The study concludes that identity is consciously deployed in every form of language used to show both alignment and distinctiveness.

More than just a tree: Ecolinguistics and responses to the felling of ‘Hadrian’s tree’

In the current climate ecolinguistic research has arguably never been more important, as its basic premises regard the survival of life on Earth and key philosophical questions hitherto under-acknowledged by mainstream science. In recent decades, environmental thinking has made great advances in shaping current opinions towards nature and the non-human world. The goal of this paper is to explore certain currents of mediated thinking in modern Britain regarding nature, in order to assess how far expressions of sorrow for the felling of a prominent tree might correspond to a genuine ecological sentiment. The study explores public responses to an apparent case of eco-vandalism, the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023 in Northumberland, using data taken from social media and other online sources such as e-newspapers. From the point of view of Ecolinguistic theory and that of Positive Discourse Analysis it applies critical lenses such as Evaluation and Discourse Pragmatics to dig beneath the surface of texts produced on the topic, in order to explore diverse current attitudes to trees in the UK. The paper finds that, though there are instances in which people appear to express grief for the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree, it is possible to account for these in ways that lessen the likelihood that they are motivated by purely ecological sentiment. In practice human attitudes towards trees tend to be superficial and instrumental, and this tendency is also found here. The Sycamore Gap event brings many latent social attitudes into play, and this paper thus contributes to the developing field of Ecolinguistics by focusing on tree-centred narratives, distinguishing between inherent ideologies of pseudo- and authentic environmental sensitivity.

The Discursive Construction of ‘Good Parenting’ by Romanian Parenting Influencers

This article analyzes promotional and educational content published online by newly emerged parenting influencers in Romania to endorse parenting education programs, workshops, seminars, or books. The paper aims to investigate how these programs construct ‘good parenting’ practices at a discursive level, what (de)legitimation strategies they use to promote products or services, and how they shape power relations between experts and parents. The study uses a multidimensional thematic, critical, and pragmatic discourse analysis approach. The results show that, through discursive strategies, influencers portray ‘good parenting’ as an anxiety and value-driven process. This approach is rooted in a parental determinist view that emphasizes the influence of parental actions on children’s health and well-being. On the other hand, parenting expert influencers depict the ‘good parent’ as a ‘conscious parent’ (a parent that is both child-conscious, and attentive to their own needs and emotions) who should reform old parenting practices to ensure a secure relationship with their children and correct old parenting mistakes. The paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge on the changing nature of parental culture in post-industrial countries, with a particular focus on Romania.

Regulating free speech in a democracy: Lysias 10Against Theomnestosand the law on slander

AbstractLysias 10Against Theomnestosis the only surviving example of a classical Greek speech on a charge of slander (dikē kakēgorias). The case turns on establishing communal consensus in evaluation of meta-discursive claims: assertions as to what the law says about what citizens can say about their fellow citizens. I adapt Marmor’s account of the pragmatics of legal discourse to illuminate the litigants’ strategies as they seek to control interpretation of the legal question in this much-discussed case from 380s BC Athens. We see how each party used different assumptions about the law’s implicatures as well as its declarative meaning and presented these assumptions as grounded in common sense. The persuasive methods used by Lysias’ client are illuminated by means of cognitive narratology’s application of Lewisian possible-world logic to the creation of story-worlds and the relationships they generate between narrator and reader/audience. So understood, Lysias’ speech helps answer questions about the role and limits of free/frank speech (parrhēsia) in democratic Athens and about the relationship between individual agency and the collective agency of thedēmos, questions crucial to an understanding of the place of legal discourse and legal conflict in the ideology and day-to-day praxis of the democratic city.

Turn-initial na in Mandarin Chinese conversation

Demonstratives play an important role in communication. Traditional analyses of demonstratives focus primarily on their morphology, semantics, and syntax. From a discourse pragmatics perspective, studies demonstrate that demonstratives can develop beyond their pointing and tracking uses to convey different shades of the speaker's subjective and intersubjective stance. Adopting the empirical framework of interactional linguistics, this paper investigates how na, which literally means ‘that’, is used in turn-initial position in everyday Mandarin Chinese interaction, focusing in particular on the versatile non-referential usages. An analysis of a total of 13 h recorded data shows that in turn-initial position, the referent-tracking uses account for less than one-third of the total instances. The predominant (71%) non-referential na on the other hand is routinely employed by speakers to: (i) launch a question inquiring into the state of affairs evoked by the prior turn(s), but with a contrast or shift in focus; (ii) register a contrastive stance; and (iii) project a question or a disaffiliative turn. The results also suggest that these interactional functions of the non-referential usages are linked to the distal demonstrative's deictic meanings in the sense that the na-prefaced turn indexes that the current turn is built from a prior; nevertheless, there is a contrast or shift in focus or stance.

Latin American Perspectives on Parenthood and Disability: Vulnerability, Risk, and Social Inclusion

Despite the growing recognition and acceptance of disabled people’s sexuality, there are barriers to parenthood anchored in metaphors of vulnerability and risk. The social inclusion of disabled parents seems both desirable and risky, making disabled parenthood one of the current frontiers of inclusion for the disabled body. The interest in disabled parenting in Anglo-Saxon academic literature has barely been considered related to Latin American production. This article aims to address this gap by exploring the Latin American scientific community’s understanding of parenthood and disability. To do so, we conduct a pragmatic discourse analysis of Latin American scientific articles in Web of Science (in English) and RedALyC and SciELO (in Spanish). Our findings show how the Latin American scientific community draws on different models of disability—in some cases introducing an intersectional perspective—that reproduce metaphors of vulnerability/risk regarding parenthood. We conclude by highlighting the importance of establishing dialogues between critical perspectives on disability from the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American contexts to address the complexities of the reproduction processes of disabled people. These dialogues can contribute to problematising the metaphor of vulnerability/risk currently associated with disabled parenthood.

Discourse markers in L1 and L2 Italian: A cartographic analysis of the sentence-internal position

This article compares the use of discourse markers (DMs) in Italian as a second language (L2) produced by Belgian-Dutch learners, with the DMs produced by Italian native (L1) speakers. The quantitative analysis of the data shows that L1 speakers produce more DMs than L2 speakers, whereas the comparison between the levels of proficiency in L2 reveals an effect of the type of task on the frequency of DMs. From the qualitative analysis, interesting discrepancies emerge between the L1 and the L2 use of DMs, especially those uttered in sentence-internal position. We offer an analysis within the cartographic approach and we demonstrate that the sentence-internal DMs with an epistemic value realize specific syntactic positions dedicated to the expression of modality within the IP layer. We also show that the L2 learners, despite projecting the correct syntactic structure, realize it with pragmatically infelicitous forms as a result of linguistic interference with their L1. Our study brings original evidence on the syntactic status of DMs: given their multifunctionality, more syntactic options are available depending on the markers’ discursive and pragmatic import. Furthermore, sentence-internal DMs reveal intriguing properties of the L2 acquisition at the syntax and discourse–pragmatics interface.

GENRE FEATURES OF POPULAR LEGAL DISCOURSE

"The article intends to consider the genre features of popular legal discourse by analysing professional legal discourse services. Moreover, the article presents intersectioning features of media and popular legal discourse to reveal genre features of popular legal discourse in terms of the simplification of legal texts and the generalisation of the situation for informing citizens in articles and videos. General scientific methods such as synthesis and descriptive and content analyses were used to scrutinise the texts of the discourse to be studied. Moreover, pragmatic discourse analysis was used to distinguish popular legal discourse from legal discourse itself and identify the differences in discursive expressive language units and content. Materials for the analysis and consideration of this topic were popular legal texts from the law websites of law firms and the websites of public organizations. All texts and materials are in the public domain and free of charge for an unlimited number of people. As a result, the genre features of popular legal discourse were presented. Key words: US law firms, video information, legal discourse, media legal discourse, legal advice, and legal service. "

Patient Complaints to the Saudi Medical Call Center: Representative Response Strategies

ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate the strategies and modifications employed by the Complaint Unit Representatives (CURs) in response to complaints recorded in the formal workplace of a medical institution in the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH). A pragmatic discourse analytic approach was adopted to construct an analytical framework for authentic spoken complaint responses in the Saudi medical institution context. The data were randomly collected from 80 recorded phone conversations between patients and the CURs. It was transcribed verbatim, imported into MAXQDA for qualitative analysis of codes categorizations, and then into SPSS for statistical analysis. The findings showed that the staff employed a balance of transactional and interpersonal approaches in their response strategies, which varied in both quantity and quality depending on the phase or the major sequence of the moves made in the complaint call. Specifically, more transactional strategies were used during the main portion of a complaint and in the medial phase, while more interpersonal strategies were employed during the initial and the final phases of the call. The findings also showed that the CURs tended to downgrade and mitigate their responses to patients’ complaints, and they never used upgraders. The influence of the religious culture was also noticeable in their use of downgraders, including optimistic devices and religious expressions. These findings reveal practical implications that can aid the quality team of the Complaint Unit (CU) in assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of the CURs’ response strategies when handling complaints, and in providing more effective communication training as needed.

Analysis Discourse of “Blarak” Short Story by Yanusa Nugroho

In communicating, humans sometimes need to show directly what they mean. The use of language in communication between humans in dating is a form of discourse. Besides discourse being a form of language use, discourse is also an utterance. Discourse analysis based on context is, of course, inseparable from the use of pragmatics. Pragmatic discourse analysis in literary works has been done—analysis of the novel Bumi Manusia by Pramodya Ananta Tour, translated into English by Max. This study aims to analyze discourse with a pragmatic approach in the short story Blarak by Yanusa Nugroho. The type of research used in this research is descriptive qualitative research. The data of this study are the words or sentences contained in the short story Blarak by Yanusa Nugroho which are contained in the 2009 Kompas short story collection. The data collection technique in this study used note-taking techniques. This study's research instrument (data collection instrument) is from the researcher himself. The analysis technique used in this study is a qualitative data analysis technique. Based on the research results, it can be concluded that the deixis in the short story Blarak by Yanusa Nugroho includes personal deixis, place deixis, and time deixis. Keywords: analysis, discourse, short story