Volume 19, Issue 4

Starting from a non-dualistic view on embodiment this paper approaches the relationship between cognition, gesture, language, and cultural practice by analyzing the gestural construction of the cultural concept jeitinho in talk-in-interaction. After introducing our phenomenological view on embodiment and gesture in interaction, we give a short overview of some main studies broaching the issue of cultural matters before presenting the concept jeitinho as delineated in historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches. In the empirical section, we offer a fine-grained analysis of four videosequences taken from a conversation about jeitinho between two Brazilian and two German professors who have lived in Brazil for more than 20 years. We show that the gestural style of both Brazilian professors differs significantly from the gestural engagement of the German professors since they schematically embody a sinuous gesture style and construe the cultural concept jeitinho as a qualium by adopting a character viewpoint while the German participants remain observers regarding their gestural performance.

Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics are inherently multifaceted and varied, given discipline’s breaching of numerous cross-disciplinary boundaries. In fact, research in Intercultural Pragmatics represents merely new ways of thinking about language and, thus, of researching interactants’ (non-)verbal behaviors: With core common ground and shared knowledge about conventionalized frames of the target language being limited, intercultural communication features a number of unique characteristics in comparison to L1 communication. This being said, the range of methods employed in data collection and analysis in Intercultural Pragmatics is not only wide, but highly heterogeneous at the same time. The present paper takes a scientometric approach to data collection methods and data types in Intercultural Pragmatics research. In order to provide an extensive diachronic survey of methods and approaches featuring in empirical studies published specifically by the journal Intercultural Pragmatics (edited by Istvan Kecskés), this study includes a self-compiled corpus of 358 papers in 17 volumes published since its launch in 2004 thru 2020. The aim is to carve out diachronic method preferences and emerging as well as declining trends in data collection methods and data types adhered to within this discipline. These are further discussed within the context of relevant state-of-the-art accounts that have specifically offered surveys of methods and methodologies pertaining to issues in data collection and data analysis in (Intercultural) Pragmatics in recent years.

This study explores five Swahili discourse-pragmatic features – ati/eti, yaani, pole, sasa and sawa – which are borrowed from Swahili into Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes, with a view to investigating their meanings, frequencies, positioning, collocational patterns, syntactic distribution and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the International Corpus of English-East Africa and the Kenyan and Tanzanian components of the corpus of Global Web-based English, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a variational and postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The study reveals that the Swahili discourse-pragmatic features occur more frequently in the Kenyan corpora than in the Tanzanian corpora, except in the case of sasa , which occurred with the same frequency in the online corpus. The paper identifies ati/eti as an attention marker, a quotative marker, a hearsay marker, an inferential marker, and an emotive interjection, yaani as an emphasis and elaborative marker, while pole is an attitudinal marker that expresses sympathy and sarcasm. While sasa is only an attention marker, sawa is an agreement and attention marker. The paper shows that these borrowed discourse-pragmatic features contribute to the distinctive nature of East African Englishes.

This study has aimed (1) to look into the meaning and origin of eight similes used by older, but not by younger, native speakers of Jish Arabic and (2) to explicate their meanings using simple, universal human concepts. It is hypothesized that, with the passage of time, these similes will go extinct. That is, not only will they stop being used, but they will also not be recognized by native Jish Arabic speakers. Thus, by discussing their meaning and etymology, these similes can be preserved in writing, especially as Jish Arabic does not have any written records. By explicating them using simple, universal language, their meaning will be accessible to cultural outsiders.