Volume 18, Issue 5

This paper investigates the Lebanese conversational style in relation to Lebanese cultural values. The study adopts a discourse analysis approach based on interactional sociolinguistic methodology for the analysis of audio-recordings and semi-structured interviews involving Lebanese nationals (multi-active culture) and members of linear-active cultures, in addition to participant observation. Four distinctive linguistic features characterizing the Lebanese conversational style are identified: topic (focus on personal topics and abrupt topic shift), pacing (overlap and fast pace), expressive phonology and intonation, and formulaic language. The findings of this study reveal that the Lebanese have a high-involvement conversational style as a result of their cultural values which reflect those of high-context, multi-active and collectivist cultures. Furthermore, a connection is made between cultural and communicative differences which can account for instances of stereotyping and misunderstandings between members of the two cultural groups.

This paper sets up to show how accountability for communicative action is constructed in online journalism as an object of talk, comparing British English and Israeli Hebrew discourse communities. The analysis utilizes a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference supplemented by cognitive semantics and corpus-assisted tools. The discussion draws on data collected from the websites of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph , Ha’aretz and Ynet . Focusing on self- and other-positioning of commenters and columnists as citizens , we explore how the accountability of the elite for communicative action and the accountability of their actions to citizens are discursively constructed by ordinary persons (in their role as commenters) and by non-ordinary persons (in their role as columnists, including journalists, experts and authors). The analysis indicates conceptual similarities coupled with discursive differences between the discourse communities under study.

It has become almost a cliché to say that we live in a post-truth world; that people of all trades speak with an indifference to truth. Speaking with an indifference to how things really are is famously regarded by Harry Frankfurt as the essence of bullshit. This paper aims to contribute to the philosophical and theoretical pragmatics discussion of bullshit. The aim of the paper is to offer a new theoretical analysis of what bullshit is, one that is more encompassing than Frankfurt’s original characterization. I part ways with Frankfurt in two points. Firstly, I propose that we should not analyze bullshit in intentional terms (i.e. as indifference). Secondly, I propose that we should not analyze it in relation to truth. Roughly put, I propose that bullshit is best characterized as speaking with carelessness toward the evidence for one’s conversational contribution. I bring forward, in the third section, a battery of examples that motivate this characterization. Furthermore, I argue that we can analyze speaking with carelessness toward the evidence in Gricean terms as a violation of the second Quality maxim. I argue that the Quality supermaxim, together with its subordinate maxims, demand that the speaker is truthful (contributes only what she believes to be true) and reliable (has adequate evidence for her contribution). The bullshitter’s main fault lies in being an unreliable interlocutor. I further argue that we should interpret what counts as adequate evidence, as stipulated by the second Quality Maxim, in contextualist terms: the subject matter and implicit epistemic standards determine how much evidence one needs in order to have adequate evidence. I contrast this proposed reading with a subjectivist interpretation of what counts as having adequate evidence and show that they give different predictions. Finally, working with a classic distinction, I argue that we should not understand bullshit as a form of deception but rather as a form of misleading speech.

One of the key problems in comparative studies based on frame semantics is the question whether frames can become an interlingua. This paper argues that not only single frames, but their systems or frame semantic domain representations consisting of frames and their relations are also useful in comparative studies. Such a system of frames helps one explain why seemingly unrelated expressions in different languages find a common denominator in higher-order frames, thus becoming semantic-pragmatic equivalents. To support this argument, an analysis of Polish, English and German lease agreements as parallel texts is conducted and the benefits of this approach to comparative studies are presented. The study is in line with the recent FrameNet initiatives, such as the Global FrameNet and automatic translation studies. However, it differs in some methodological aspects. Instead of using FrameNet as the given lexical resource, domain specific frames are defined starting from common general concepts of the analyzed semantic domain. A text-based approach rather than a comparison of bi-sentences or phrases is adapted. The work thus introduces a new approach to comparative studies based on frame semantics and frame semantic research. It also follows the recent research trend of adding a pragmatic dimension to frame semantic analysis by analyzing frames in context.