Volume 17, Issue 4

The purpose of this study is to investigate how viewers who speak different languages interpret cinematographic metaphors in a filmic advertisement. The study is organized in three parts: First, we offer a theoretical model that predicts the offline mental mechanisms that occur while people interpret filmic metaphors, based on an existing model of visual metaphor processing. Second, we evaluate the model in a think-aloud retrospective task. A TV-commercial is projected individually to 30 Spanish, 30 American, and 30 Persian participants, who are then asked to verbalize their thoughts. The commercial was previously segmented, analyzed using FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure), and marked for metaphoricity by two independent analysts. The collected data is then evaluated in two formal content analyses. In the first one, two independent coders classified all the clauses used by the 90 participants in relation to the steps outlined in the theoretical model. In the second analysis, those clauses in which the participants were constructing their metaphorical interpretation of the filmic advertisement were annotated for the type of metaphor they constructed. The general results show that: (1) some mental processes seem to be more prominent in some cultures and not in others, and (2) genre-related knowledge plays a crucial role in constructing filmic metaphors in certain cultures and not in others. With this study, we theoretically formalize and empirically test the types of operations reflected in the language that viewers use to describe how they interpret filmic metaphors, thus advancing the current theory and methods on filmic metaphor interpretation from cognitive, semiotic, and cross-cultural perspectives.

Building on the theoretical insights into the socio-cognitive approach to the study of interactions in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF)), this paper reports on the idiosyncratic phenomenon that ELF speakers do not adhere to the norms of native speakers, but instead create their own particular word associations during the course of the interaction. Taking the verbs of speech talk, say, speak , and tell as examples, this study compares word associations from three corpora of native and non-native speakers. The findings of this study reveal that similar word associative patterns are produced and shared by ELF speech communities from different sociocultural backgrounds, and these differ substantially from those used by native English speakers. Idiom-like constructions such as say like, how to say , and speak in are developed and utilized by Asian and European ELF speakers. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that ELF speakers use the prefabricated expressions in the target language system only as references, and try to develop their own word associative patterns in ELF interactions. Moreover, the analysis of the non-literalness/metaphorical word associations of the verbs of speech in the Asian ELF corpus suggests that ELF speakers dynamically co-construct their shared common ground to derive non-literal/metaphorical meaning in actual situational context.

In this study, we focus on a specific form of metacommunication found in an emerging digital genre: Hotel reviews posted on TripAdvisor. In particular, we investigate how tourists represent their service encounter interactions. The main goal of the present study is to identify what these digital metacommunicative practices reveal about communicative norms and expectations among groups of reviewers writing in three different languages. We analyzed a multilingual dataset of 1800 reviews written in English, Dutch, and Italian. The results reveal that reviewers commented upon a broad range of aspects when evaluating service encounters interactions, for instance, describing the quality of the interaction (e.g. polite, correct), or a lack of communication when a specific type of communication is expected (e.g. absence of greetings, or apologies after a service failure). Further, we found similar cross-linguistic patterns, such as appreciation for being able to communicate in one’s mother tongue during the hotel-guest encounter. At the same time, a few differences across languages emerged, such as the preference for precise and correct information within British reviews. Since service interactions are of fundamental importance for customer satisfaction, our findings contribute not only to the current research on metacommunication in digital contexts, but may also be significant for service providers in the hospitality industry.

In a context of increasing globalization of academic discourse, considerations of the impact of culture on different communicative genres and discursive practices become more relevant than ever, as the construction of pragmatic meaning and its appropriate interpretation by the recipient is seen to depend on lexico-grammatical features whose use is greatly affected by cultural factors. This paper concerns the genre of blind peer review, and examines how disagreement and negative evaluation are expressed in two cultural and linguistic settings, and to what extent they are mitigated. It is based on peer reviews submitted, in English and Russian, to the Russian Journal of Linguistics, in which the reviewer provides a negative evaluation (either “reject” or “to be resubmitted after substantial revisions”). Such reviews entail possible face damage, in the terms of (Brown and Levinson 1978); and therefore one might expect reviewers to engage in discursive strategies of mitigation. The paper analyses 120 authentic blind reviews (70 Russian and 50 British English), using a pragmatic, contextual and contrastive methodology. Drawing on discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics, (im)politeness theory and cultural studies, we explore the construction of alternative meanings in reviewers’ messages, and theorise that consideration for the face requirements of the reviewee and politeness strategies, may account not only for individual but also culture-specific choices. The results show that, as well as variations in reviewers’ individual styles, there are some culture-specific traits in this area. Mitigation strategies are more typical of English communication than Russian. We account for these differences in terms of the sociocultural context, value differences and the use of different mechanisms of politeness. Our results suggest that politeness is based on different communicative styles and expressive traditions, which appear to vary across cultures.