Socio-pragmatic Analysis Research Articles

Anger in action: Socio-pragmatic analysis of verbal exchanges in UK parliamentary debates

Abstract This article is an attempt to investigate theoretically and empirically how the emotion of anger is used in political discourse. The descriptive analysis is centred around the conversational analysis of anger, as present in the verbal exchanges in the UK parliamentary debates, correlated with the variables of power (P), social distance (D), and the concept of valence. The key idea underbracing this article is that affect permeates social communication. The central claims of this study focus on explaining how the socio-pragmatic variables of (P) and (D) weave the fabric of conflict talk and how they constitute the springboard for structuring the affective message in a tangible framework of social practice. The questions that inspire the current paper are the following: (1) How does anger determine the relationships of power and distance? (2) What is the reaction of the Offender and Defender in anger-driven interaction? (3) Are the roles of the ‘Emoter’ and ‘Receiver’ of anger evenly distributed in verbal communication? (4) Are valence and its strength indicators of anger experience? The paper concentrates on three theoretical problems including: (1) anger as an intrinsically threatening emotion, (2) anger as a constituent of context, and (3) anger as a gradable emotion. In addition, this study aims to explore how threats to positive face value in the form of unambiguous literal meaning that convey evaluative load (accusations, criticism, insult, irony, imposition etc.), explicitly provide information on P and D shifts in anger-driven discursive action.

Birthday, Culture, and Social Media

Life in the modern age is dominated by social media. What used to be very much a private affair, like birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc., is now celebrated in front of oftentimes the whole world, and not infrequently, through the medium of the language that is not our own.
 The object of investigation in the present paper is the speech act of birthday wish sent to someone via Facebook. The analysis demonstrates that although the speech act has a universal aim – to show interest in another person and make them feel good, and although in many cases the language of conveying wishes, beside the native tongues, is the same, this notably being English, the lingua franca of contemporary world, the way the wish is expressed may differ markedly from culture to culture, thereby showing the underlying cultural values and norms of the users and of their native language use. The socio-pragmatic analysis presented here focuses on posts collected from personal profiles of British, Polish, Indian, and Armenian users, and investigates, among others, the choice of language, the formulaic vs. personalised character of the wish, and the character of strategies that make the wishes more personally oriented, with the aim to demonstrate visible differences across cultures regarding the way birthday wishes are phrased.

Socio-pragmatic Analysis of Polite Phatic Invitations: On the Material of English and Georgian Prose

Socio-pragmatic Analysis of Polite Phatic Invitations: On the Material of English and Georgian Prose

Why did Trump say “I hope you will let Flynn go” to Comey?

Abstract In this paper, we analyse and discuss an utterance/pragmeme/pract proffered by US President Donald Trump and addressed to FBI Director Comey: ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’.1 We consider the explicature of this utterance (‘I hope you will drop the Russian investigation concerning Flynn’) and its illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. We argue that while Republicans opt for an Austinian or Searlean analysis, in the attempt to deny that this utterance constituted an attempt to influence Comey, there are reasons for adopting a Strawsonian analysis, casting it in the framework of pragmemes, devised by Mey (2001), that frame a socio-pragmatic analysis of utterance interpretation within context. This analysis shows, Trump illicitly tried to persuade Comey to drop the Russian investigation, and therefore attempted to interfere with the judiciary system. A reasoned case can be made for saying that Trump had the intention of interfering with America’s federal court system through this utterance.

Discursive (re)construction of “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as an identity in the eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trial records

Abstract This paper provides a qualitative historical (socio)pragmatic analysis of records of three eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trials using a socio-cognitive model of discursive community and identity construction. I aim to describe how the general social and legal context of witchcraft became situated and interpreted in the actual witchcraft trial records from the delegated officials’ perspective. I argue that in the analysed records, the officials did not simply apply a codified definition of “witchcraft”, but they discursively (re)constructed “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as the defendants’ identity. Thus, from the officials’ perspective, discursive community and identity construction established a relationship between the general context of witchcraft and the actual witchcraft trials. In order to reconstruct this process, I investigate the linguistic constructs by which the delegated officials actively created “witchcraft” and the defendants’ “witch” identity as mental constructs.

A socio-pragmatic investigation of the persuasive strategies in "al-ittijāh al-muʿākis" (‘The Opposite Direction’) on Al-Jazeera TV

This study is a socio-pragmatic analysis of persuasive strategies used by the participants in “al-ittijāh al-muʿākis”, “The Opposite Direction”, on the Al-­Jazeera TV channel. An ethnographic approach was adopted in the research; the analysis focused on the use of politeness strategies and face-saving and face-­threatening interactions in order to find out their persuasive factors. I observe that religious citations, prophetic sayings, proverbs, and metaphor are used predominantly by the participants in communicating various political issues. I argue that the persuasiveness of these rhetorical strategies stems from their aesthetic influence in establishing moral credibility and in evoking emotional responses. I also argue that these rhetorical strategies are speech acts that indirectly provoke responses and/or aim at saving the speakers’ and/or addressees’ face. The study concludes that persuasiveness is facilitated in part by transferring socio-pragmatic meanings through the use of some politeness and figurative devices such as honorific modes, metaphors and proverbs.

Methodological Approach to the Design of Digital Discourse Corpora in Spanish. Proposal of the CÓDICE Project

Having analyzed the current situation of Spanish corpora—and the scarce representativeness of digital communication in them— and corpora from different types of interactions on digital platforms (e-mail, chats, SMSs), we noticed the need to create a repository of stable language samples aiming to solve this deficiency. Before implementing the CODICE, an open and collaborative repository of language samples from the digital discourse in Spanish, it becomes necessary to deal with the specific problems of compiling and transcribing this type of data. The present work addresses this approach aiming towards two goals: 1) establishing common standards, mainly concerning contextual and situational factors, in order to facilitate sociopragmatic analysis, and 2) developing ethical standards to ensure the anonymization of participants.

Book review: Elisabetta Cecconi, The Language of Defendants in the 17th-century English Courtroom: A Socio-pragmatic Analysis of the Prisoners’ Interactional Role and Representation

Book review: Elisabetta Cecconi, <i>The Language of Defendants in the 17th-century English Courtroom: A Socio-pragmatic Analysis of the Prisoners’ Interactional Role and Representation</i>

The Strategies of Conveying Speaker and Hearer as Cooperators in Conversation Class: Sociopragmatic Analysis

This study explores the strategies of conveying speaker and hearer as cooperators suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) – the strategy of asserting or presupposing speaker’s knowledge of and concern for hearer’s wants, the strategy of including both speaker and hearer in the activity, and the strategy of giving (or asking) reasons. The data of the research is taken from conversation class in The Center Bandung, Indonesia. The teachers are the Americans and the members are the Indonesians. The writers observe the teachers as the speakers who use the strategies of conveying speaker and hearer as cooperators to make the conversation works. They use those strategies to encourage the students to use English courageously and actively. The goals of this analysis are to know the strategies used by the speakers in the conversation class and to examine the perlocutionary effects caused by the strategy used by the speaker to the hearer. The research uses a qualitative descriptive method. The data are analyzed using a pragmatic approach. The main theory used to analyze the data is the strategies to convey speaker and hearer are cooperators as the strategy in positive politeness, written by Brown and Levinson. The speakers use the strategy of asserting or presupposing speaker’s knowledge of and concern for hearer’s wants, the strategy of including both speaker and hearer in the activity, and the strategy of giving (or asking) reasons. The perlocutionary effects to the addressees are making them courageously speak English even though some of them are not fluent in English, giving their own opinion, and trying to ask voacbulary in English. The writers also will find out social variables constituted in the conversation.

The discourse marker odnosno at the ICTY: A case of disputed translation in war crime trials

What discourse markers mean depends not only on the local context (co-text), but also, and more widely, on global contexts such as political, ideological and institutional. This conclusion was derived from our cognitive and sociopragmatic analysis of the translation of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)33Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian has become a standard way to refer to the currently recognized post-Yugoslav national variants of the pluricentric language that used to be called Serbo-Croatian. The Montenegrin variant is still not included, although Montenegrin linguists and state authorities are pushing for the recognition of their own standardized variant. For more on this issue see Mišković-Luković and Dedaić (2010:12–17). discourse marker odnosno (‘that is’, ‘in other words’), which generally has two dominant functions: distributive and reformulative. We introduce a novel insight into this problem by applying the relevance-theoretic framework of ad hoc concept construction as our analytical apparatus. The selection of interpretation is analysed on the data from a trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in which the defence legal team disputed the way odnosno was translated by court translators/interpreters in several instances. We find the cognitive options that were taken as resources for the evasion of translator's responsibility towards a “disagreeable” meaning. By choosing the most neutral translation, however, the translator often steps aside from the court-required direct translation type.

Politeness and impoliteness in ethnic varieties of New Zealand English

Many aspects of New Zealand English (NZE) have been well described, especially the distinctive vocabulary, phonology, and some syntactic differences in relation to other varieties of English. Building on earlier research describing pragmatic features of NZE, and identifying ways in which politeness is expressed in New Zealand (NZ) workplace talk, this paper extends the socio-pragmatic analysis of NZE in several ways. Using the theoretical model that we have developed to analyse workplace interaction, we adopt an emic approach, focussing on intercultural interactions between Māori and Pākehā, and data from both Māori and Pākehā workplaces to throw light on distinctive features of politeness in NZE workplace discourse. With this goal, we examine the important value of egalitarianism in NZ society, and explore its pervasive influence on the ways in which politeness is interactionally achieved in different NZ communities of practice. We then discuss how this relates to the stylistic dimension of formality, exemplifying some distinctively NZ ways in which formality and informality are indexed in workplace interaction. The analysis illustrates how these influences are manifest in a number of specific aspects of workplace interaction, including small talk, humour, meeting protocols, and in the extension of the distinctive pragmatic particle eh to new domains.

A Sociopragmatic Analysis of Compliment Responses in Persian

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated in. The results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variables of age, gender, educational background, social distance, and relative power as well as compliment topics in determining the type of compliment response. The responses were further suggestive of the contextual effects of the three systems of hierarchical, solidarity and deferential as well as a newly coined system as kinship system.

Customer communication in distance shopping: how to reveal complexities through socio-pragmatic conversation analysis

In order to find the most appropriate fit between media to use and density of interaction in distance shopping, a thorough analysis of customer communication is needed. In this paper, the authors present two examples of such in-depth analysis (e-mail and telephone conversations). These analyses are based on a socio-pragmatic communication framework. The result uncovers deep complexities in the communication process between employees of distance selling companies and their customers. This complexity includes a number of different areas, such as the change of topicalisation of a conversation and context-dependence. The analysis of these customer conversations has also been translated into possible recommendations for customer communication.

Sociopragmatic analysis of Korean requests: pedagogical settings

Abstract The purpose of this investigation is to identify and describe sociopragmatic features of American KFL learners in the Korean communicative act of request. For this study, 50 female KFL learners were asked to respond in Korean to 12 different situations in which they carry out the speech act of request. Their Korean performances were compared to those of 50 female Korean native speakers in order to identify deviations and problems which the American KFL learners were confronted with when trying to acquire this particular communicative function. Fifty female American English native speakers also participated in order to provide baseline intra-cultural data as a possible source of the learners’ deviant realization behaviors from target norms. The data, collected from a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), were analyzed descriptively in terms of sociopragmatic aspects. In the analysis, 17 semantic formulae for request supportive move (RSM) in Korean were developed, and five semantic formulae for request head act (RHA) in Korean were established. On the whole, the request supportive move formulae usage patterns of the respective groups support a stereotypical description of Koreans as being more hierarchical, collectivistic, roundabout, and formalistic in comparison to Americans. In addition, the semantic formulae usage patterns of the KFL learners were consistent with those of the American English native speakers, indicative of an L1 transfer effect. Moreover, the request behaviors of the KFL learners were more verbose and varied in forms than those of the Korean native speakers.

Point of View in Drama: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle

The study of point of view in dramatic texts has been largely neglected by stylisticians. This is perhaps due to the fact that point of view is usually considered to be a narratological phenomenon, whereas most contemporary plays do not make use of narratorial mediation. Nevertheless, linguistic indicators of point of view do exist in dramatic texts and are not always the same as those which indicate viewpoint in prose fiction. I argue that studying point of view in drama can assist in the interpretation of dramatic texts, provide valuable insights into characterization and the relationships between characters, and also contribute to a greater understanding of how point of view is conveyed in language and communication in general. I demonstrate this through a socio-pragmatic analysis of Dennis Potter’s play Brimstone and Treacle, highlighting some of the viewpoint indicators which appear to be exclusive to dramatic texts.

La variació lingüística: el fet i la seva significació

This study is a general presentation of the phenomenon of linguistic variation, from the point of view both of its empirical reality and of its semiotic, linguistic and socio-pragmatic analysis. We distinguish initially between the interest in research into the invariant form, which has characterized strict linguistics, and the orientation of sociolinguistics towards the study of variation; between the concentration on the referential value of language as an arbitrary symbol and the concentration on the connotative value of language as an index of social relations; between the limitation on the consideration of category alternation (allophony) and research into structured variation (sociolinguistic variables); and between variation of a statistical character (such as the ones just mentioned) and variation based on discrete oppositions. The linguistic realities defined by the study of variation—styles, levels of language, natural varieties, registers—must be described not only in terms internal to the linguistic system but also in their relation to the social and sociocultural context; this terminological diversity reflects on occasions different linguistic modalities, and on others distinct methodological approaches, among which we stress the importance of the ethnography.