Editorial

The pragmatic perspective on language, as has been frequently emphasized and demonstrated here, entails interest in all levels of linguistic structure and contexts of language use, as well as various aspects of the language-society-cognition interface. The present issue of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, exploring a web of such interconnections and interdependencies across various public spaces and social domains, comprises five research articles and one book review. The contributions address various aspects of language use in social interactions along with its cognitive dimension and cultural embedding. The theoretical perspectives adopted by the authors draw on cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and interactional linguistics. The data analysed in the articles, the assumptions adopted and the results that follow, seem to confirm the validity of the points made by Gunter Senft in his Understanding pragmatics book (2014), namely that 1) languages are used by their speakers in social interactions to create social bonds and accountability relations, 2) “[s]peech is part of the context of situation in which it is produced” (p. 3), 3) language users follow conventions, rules and regulations, 4) “[t]he meaning of words, phrases and sentences is conveyed in certain kinds of situative contexts” (p.4), and 5) language is used to “fulfil specific functions in and for these speakers’ communicative behavior” (p. 4). What could perhaps be added here is that language is both grounded in and constitutive for cognitive processes, as Adam Wojtaszek’s contribution demonstrates.

In the first article, couched within politeness theory, Marla Perkins focuses on the strategies used by the Hobongan to indicate politeness and impoliteness. Based on her fieldwork conducted in Indonesia, she explores the dynamics of idiomatic politeness routines and situational politeness, thus challenging once again the universal character of politeness concepts and domains and underlining implications for both typology and terminology within this field.

The second paper, by Anna Danielewicz-Betz, also draws heavily on politeness theory and the Goffmanian concept of face, discussed in the context of Wierzbicka’s cultural scripts and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The author brings under scrutiny the pragmatic strategies of indirect negation in two cultures where face is said to “virtually rule human interaction and actions, and where the word ‘no’ is rarely heard”, namely Saudi Arabia and Japan.

In the third contribution, Li-Chi Lee Chen, makes an attempt to characterise the notion of wúlítóu ‘nonsense’ and its social-pragmatic functions in Taiwanese verbal interactions, as well as the discursive strategies used to construct it.

The fourth article by Adam Wojtaszek delves into the cognitive dimension of language use and interpretation process. Drawing on Dynamic Model of Meaning, the Conceptual Integration Theory, Resource Integration Principle, GeM Model and Graded Salience Hypothesis, Wojtaszek demonstrates how various contextual factors and the multimodal nature of communication impact on the way in which messages are understood by the audience. Information processing, as he shows with his press advertisements experiment, relies heavily on the interface of the textual and pictorial channels in advertising discourse.

In the last contribution, Mélanie Petit, François Nemo and Camille Létang also focus on the interpretation process with a view to exploring the semantic/pragmatic interface and the linguistic marking and lexicalization of pragmatic meanings. Highlighting the crucial role of prosodic constraints and defining the notions of nonstructural prosody and free lexical prosody, the paper addresses this issue at word and utterance levels. Importantly, the authors also provide an overview and assessment of the methodology and techniques used in existing programs for the automated discrimination of prosodic forms and the mapping of prosodic forms onto interpretations.

The issue ends with a book review by Bahram Kazemian, who discusses a book edited by Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren, entitled Discursive pragmatics (Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights, Vol. 8).