Volume 19, Issue 2

The present article examines the broad function of attention-getting embodied by parenthetical look in Chinese, Dutch, English and Italian. It analyzes a sample of the marker’s occurrences in corpora of spontaneous conversations and of interviews and discussions in terms of a systematic typology of parameters of interactional behavior and adopts a range of statistical methods to uncover patterns of (dis)similarity. The results include, inter alia, a cross-linguistic preference for clause-initial and turn-initial/medial position, a strong association across languages with assertive and expressive speech acts and an attraction to the onset of quotations. Variation in and exceptions to these tendencies are observed too. The findings are explained with reference to phenomena such as persistence and entrenchment and contribute to a better understanding not only of attention-getting in different languages but also of intersubjectivity, constructed dialogue, and illocutional concurrences.

Emojis are pictographs added to messages on social media and websites. Researchers have observed that emojis representing kissing faces are often used to close instant messaging conversations. This has been interpreted as an imitation of cheek kissing, a common behavior in some cultural contexts. We analyze the use of seven types of kissing emojis in three corpora of WhatsApp chats, one from Spain (where cheek kisses in face-to-face interaction are commonplace in many situations), the other from Germany (where kisses are occasionally given), and the third from the German-speaking part of Switzerland (where cheek kisses are a common greeting between relatives and friends). To do so, we systematically categorize and compare the use of a sample of these emojis on WhatsApp. The analysis suggests that there are differences between the three corpora in the use of the kissing emojis. The emoji “face throwing a kiss” is often included in closing messages in the Spanish and Swiss-German data, while in the Federal German corpus kisses do not appear at the end of a conversation; using these emojis in openings is uncommon in all three corpora. This suggests that these emojis can exhibit cultural variation, but they do not clearly mirror face-to-face behavior.

In this paper, I analyze the cyclic linguistic evolution of questions via Bardenstein’s ‘persistence principle’ (Bardenstein, Ruti. 2020b. Persistent argumentative discourse markers. The case of Hebrew rectification-marker be-ʕecem (‘actually’). Journal of Pragmatics 172. 254–269) and argue that questions become “polysemous” via a core function. I show that it is the question’s initial rhetorically-recruited function that motivates its semantic change (alongside grammatical and prosodic changes) and it is that function that also persists throughout its history. I focus my analysis on question-based exclamatives whose peresistent function is the speaker’s strong stance and show that this function persists even when the question-based exclamative cyclically evolves into an adverbial NPI (Negative Polarity Item).

Research suggests that laughter can serve several communicative functions beyond indicating mirth, and as such, may hold propositional meaning. The present study analyzes cross-linguistic differences in the propositional content of laughter in American English and Central Thai television shows. A framework for classifying laughter by propositional content was first developed by drawing on existing literature and bottom-up analysis of the laughter found in American English and Thai shows. The framework includes categories of positive valency, negative valency, and humor, along with subcategories of disbelief, support, expressive, and pride. A multi-modal corpus of laughter was then created by compiling all laughter instances in the first 100 min of three American English television shows and three Thai television shows. The meanings of all 848 laughter instances in the corpus were categorized by propositional content of laughter. Results show that humor laughter and negative-support laughter are more frequent in American English, and positive-support laughter and negative-pride laughter are more frequent in Central Thai. These findings provide further evidence that laughter contains propositional content because they indicate that laughter use is subject to cross-linguistic variation that aligns with existing linguistic patterns and cultural values.