Volume 17, Issue 1 -

This article presents a multifaceted comparative investigation into the linguistic impoliteness in the negative online consumer reviews on one of the world’s largest e-commerce tycoons and the flagship giant Amazon. The findings were derived from 600 items of online consumer reviews from two comparative perspectives: cross-language (English vs. Chinese) and cross-sector (daily necessities vs. luxury goods). Four impoliteness strategies were identified, calculated and illustrated based on the collected dataset, ranging from January 2016 to October 2018. Findings indicate that in terms of decreasing frequency, the impoliteness strategies reviews are positive impoliteness, implicated impoliteness, negative impoliteness and sarcasm in the negative online consumer reviews of both languages and both sectors. The results reveal that, regardless of sector and language differences, on-record impoliteness is much more frequent than off-record impoliteness in the genre of online consumer reviews. Despite of similarities, discrepancies were also found with regard to the employment of impoliteness strategies in online consumer reviews across languages and sectors. As a timely effort, the findings offer impoliteness-related insights and implications to both theorists and practitioners in the e-commerce industry.

Although the use of the mobile application communication technology for interpersonal communication seems to be less physically threatening, building successful relationships has become more complex. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the way(s) British and Spanish university students manage a hostile situation when disputing among each other on WhatsApp, the present study aims to shed light on conflict management by investigating the differentiated topic management strategies the participants in the study deploy. This, in turn, will add new empirical evidence to the expanding field of intercultural pragmatics. Through a detailed analysis of the hostile interactions, the results show a differentiated linguistic process by means of which participants initiate, maintain and escalate conflict talk that also relates to the speaker’s failed attempts to understand and negotiate each other’s intended meaning in interaction.

This paper is an example of how contextual information interacts with the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs) in discourse. When we encounter an NP escorted by the definite article or a proper name, the expectation is triggered that the speaker is referring to some referent x that the hearer can normally identify. Strawson and Russell have agreed that a referent must be associated with a definite description so that the assertion containing it can be said to be true. In the case where a description does not refer to anything, the assertion is considered by Russell to be false, while Strawson says that the issue of truth or falsity does not arise. In this paper, we examine a case in which contextual information interacts with the interpretation of NPs in discourse and the hearer is not expected to identify a referent when hearing a proper name. In this case, the issue of truth or falsity does not arise, because the hearer does not identify the referent. In fact, s/he does not intend for the discourse to about a referent at all. These situations are primarily represented by sentences uttered during the course of a grammar lecture, in which the lecturer is explaining a rule of language and does not focus on external reality. The hearers are aware of this focus and do not process the NP (in general a proper name) to identify a specific referent. This discourse is of three types, which will be discussed at the end of this paper.

Depending on context: to depict soaring prices as fires is to perform the act of complaining ; to portray the perpetrator of a sex crime as a wolf is to accomplish the action of condemning ; to draw the ship of state sailing toward catastrophe is simultaneously to perform the action of warning and to issue a prediction; etc. It follows that, if political cartooning is action, then having a cartoon spiked is failure to act. The discussion of silenced speech acts cannot fail to have already been noticed by other scholars. Yet, so far little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, especially in multimodal and intercultural pragmatics. Apart from substantiating the claim that it makes sense to study speech acts in political cartoons, this article investigates the situational factors that may affect the editorial decision-making of a given newspaper. Using a corpus of selected American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian cartoons, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) visual speech acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the context models of the participants (cartoonists/viewers).