Volume 18, Issue 2

Efficient communication requires the interplay of linguistic, cognitive and social skills, including the ability to make contextual inferences and to understand others’ intentions and emotions. The capacity to effectively use language in specific contexts (i.e., pragmatic ability) develops with age, and an assessment of this ability is important for understanding both typical and atypical development. The Pragma test was originally developed and validated on Finnish children to assess social-pragmatic comprehension. The present study utilizes a slightly adapted version of the Pragma test, translated into Italian, and presents the results of the test given to 110 typically developing Italian children (4–8 years of age). The Italian version of the Pragma test shows content and concurrent validity, interrater reliability, and internal consistency, and it proves to be sensitive in detecting an age-dependent pattern of performance, across pre-school and school age children, in the pragmatic parameters investigated. The present study has ramifications for clinical contexts, as data for typical pragmatic development enables identification of strengths and weaknesses in the pragmatic performance in clinical populations. Finally, the results indicate that the Pragma test is relevant to both Finnish and Italian cultural contexts, thus providing the opportunity to make cross-cultural comparisons.

This paper presents the results of a study seeking insights into how speakers express oppositional stance in an online genre (businesses’ responses to negative customer reviews on TripAdvisor). The research is contrastive, exploring the differences between the practices of speakers in two types of setting – L1 English-speaking countries and countries where English is L2 – when performing oppositional speech acts (e.g. disagreement, criticism of the review/reviewer, etc.). Although there exists a large body of work concerned with contrastive differences in speech act realizations, oppositional speech acts remain under-researched – especially in contexts of non-politeness or impoliteness. This paper presents the results of a mixed-method qualitative/quantitative analysis revealing substantial differences along two principal dimensions of variation: the (in)directness with which opposition is expressed, and the downgrading (mitigation) or upgrading (aggravation) of oppositional speech acts. Some of these differences can be traced to well-known tendencies related to L1 versus L2 language use, while others represent new empirical findings that open up potential avenues for future research.

This cross-cultural study examines the differences in communicative styles between English and German email responses to customer complaints by analysing their discourse structure (through a rhetorical move analysis) and the frequency of first-person references ( I and we and their different forms). The framework is given by House (House, Juliane. 2006. Communicative styles in English and German. European Journal of English Studies 10(3). 249–267.), who suggests that English speakers tend to use a more interpersonal (i.e., people-oriented) communicative style, while German speakers show a preference for a transactional (i.e., content-oriented) style. In addition, first-person references within the genre of email responses to complaints are associated with either the customer service agent’s personal or corporate identity. The data consist of 150 English and 84 German authentic emails. The results of the move analysis reveal that the discourse structure of both data sets is mainly similar, but the few differences point into the direction of support for House’s framework, in particular the dimension on addressee- or content-orientation. Although agents generally use more we than I- references in both data sets, thus exhibiting mainly a corporate identity, they tend to use the opposite in some moves (e.g., Apology ), which points to pronominal shifting across move level, as suggested in previous research (Zhang, Yi & Camilla Vásquez. 2014. Hotels’ responses to online reviews: Managing consumer dissatisfaction. Discourse, Context and Media 6. 54–64.). Overall, the German agents use more we- references compared to their British colleagues. Finally, agents use pronominal shifting within move level to distance themselves from the company.

This paper examines the relationships among cultural variation, power, disagreement, and mitigation devices. Based on a multi-modal analysis of original data from two TV shows ( Shark Tank in the US and Dragon’s Den in China), it is found that investors’ linguistic performance shows greater frequency and variation in both disagreement and its mitigation, influenced by power and politeness. Regarding the role of cultural variation, this study challenges some stereotypical conceptions of culture with the finding that Chinese participants use negation more often than their US counterparts. Meanwhile, Chinese and American participants choose different disagreement-mitigation formats: In the US Shark Tank investors tend to initiate disagreements by enforcing explicitness and entrepreneurs tend to mitigate them by offering explanations, while in the Chinese Dragon’s Den investors tend to utter negations and then mitigate them with qualifiers or alternative statements. Moreover, the American show also contains cases where the pre-set power-asymmetrical relationship changes during the course of presentation, and entrepreneurs with increasing power start to challenge investors by asking them various questions. However, this alteration of power relationships appears to be more difficult in the Chinese context.