Volume 2, Issue 1

This paper argues that bilingual communication should not be conceived of as something distinct from everyday communicative interaction. Monolingual and bilingual children do not differ in what they do with language, but in how they do it. Whereas monolinguals rely on style switching and voicing, bilinguals employ these strategies in addition to their bilingual resources. Code-switching for bilinguals serves as an indexical strategy which functions much like other similar discourse level processes. We will demonstrate that classroom peer group talk creates an interactional space in which students are free to use all their bilingual resources. Such a safe space provides them an opportunity to talk about grammatical and comprehension issues. Code-switching becomes a resource which allows children to deal with their school tasks by applying their own peer group communicative knowledge (Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski 1999).

Holographic theories can be used as a metatheoretical vision of framing an original image or structure. The image can be distributed throughout various parts of that structure, with the complete image being encoded, so that the whole can be reproduced throughout the parts. This new field has direct implications for many areas of semiotics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics (within the Russian understanding). Lev Semonovich Vygotsky, father of Russian psychology, wrote about holism in this way, without any knowledge of holography. Alexander Romanovich Luria, father of Russian neuropsychology, also established his theories of language based on a holistic approach. Karl Pribram (who collaborated with Luria in Moscow) wrote much about holography and language, and Sergei Eisenstein (a close friend of Vygotsky and Luria) was a filmmaker and semiotician, writing in a similar vain, as did Valentin Vološinov. In particular, this paper discusses holographic views of the world, with an introduction to the language theories of A. R. Luria, and the role of image and inner speech within what can be called holographic psycholinguistics.

It has long been the contention of various scholars that Brown and Levinson's notion of face, in particular the concept of personal autonomy associated with negative face, is not appropriate for explaining politeness in Japanese. However, there has been little work on what might constitute a suitable alternative. In this paper, it is proposed that the concept of “place,” which has long occupied an important position in Japanese philosophy and language studies, is fundamental to instances of politeness in Japanese. It is suggested that Japanese politeness involves concern about both the “place one belongs” (inclusion) and the “place one stands” (distinction). Examples are then given to show how the concept of place can be useful in understanding politeness phenomena both cross-culturally and interculturally.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the pragmatic functions of the discourse markers well and bueno and to distinguish which of those functions are related to politeness phenomena in English and Spanish. For that purpose, our inquiry will be based on an analysis of different types of discourse samples taken from spoken corpora. The corpus for this study has been obtained from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo (COREC) developed at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Our results indicate that well and bueno function in a similar way by playing up both pragmatic and textual roles, all of them within the scope of four rapport management domains (Spencer-Oatey 2000, 2002), namely, illocutionary, discourse, participation, and stylistic domains. However, we contend that a strict distinction between textual and pragmatic levels obscures the fact that the very organization and structuring of discourse can function as a strategy to give face. In this respect well and bueno merge both functions in the same way that they combine uses as largely empty discourse markers with those as fully lexical adjuncts.