Volume 20, Issue 2

Verbal irony characteristically involves the expression of a derogatory, dissociative attitude. The ironical speaker is not only stating a blatant falsehood or irrelevant proposition; she is also communicating her stance towards its epistemic status. The centrality of attitude recognition in irony understanding opens up the question of which cognitive abilities make it possible. Drawing on Wilson (2009), we provide a full-fledged account of the role of epistemic vigilance in irony understanding and suggest that it relies on the exercise of first- and second-order vigilance towards the content, the ironic speaker as well as the source of the irony.

Adopting the bounds of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance-theoretic framework, this paper examines the emergence of humor in puns and the way puns are used in phatic communication. It argues that there is a so far unrecognized factor, which underlies their perceived humorousness, and which allows them to function as rapport builders. This factor, dubbed interpretative non-prototypicality, directly follows from the relevance-theoretic stand on utterance comprehension, and refers to the way the interpretation process plays out in puns, yielding utterances that go against what we have come to expect based on the default interpretative mode observed in the meaning derivation of non-punning utterances. The objective of the article is to argue, based on examples from English and Chinese, that it is the departure from the interpretative benchmark that can translate into the perceived humorousness of puns, whether linked to incongruity, the element of surprise or the manipulation of strategies used to inferentially work out utterance meanings. This departure, manifested in the low informative content characterizing puns used in such social practices as ping-pong punning, can also make them ideally suited for phatic communication.

Complaining constitutes a face-threatening and intricate speech act for native and non-native speakers of a language. Complaining implies reacting with discontentment to an act performed by the complainee, who is often urged to redress the predicament. In this context, pragmatic skills are vital because, unless endowed with an appropriate pragmatic repertoire and the corresponding language adequacy, speakers may jeopardize the communication process. Written complaints by non-native students have attracted scholarly attention in different contexts. However, written complaints by Spanish EFL students have been mostly neglected to date. Likewise, the influence of the writer’s gender on how complaints are performed has rendered some remarkable albeit scant studies. This study addresses the moves, strategies and substrategies deployed by Spanish EFL students in their emails of complaint, specifically looking into how the variable of gender influences their formulation of emails of complaint. For this purpose, emails of complaint of 90 L2 Spanish students with a certified C1 level were analyzed. Results show that students often transfer substrategies from their L1 and tend to delay the statement of the complaint in favor of lengthy openers, in contrast to native speakers. Furthermore, this preference for over-mitigation and over-politeness is especially employed by female students.

The relation between language, culture and cognition has attracted the attention of many scholars from various fields of study. Cultural Linguistics, as a multidisciplinary area of research that investigates the interrelationship between language and cultural conceptualizations, has managed to attract researchers from around the world. Drawing on different methodological approaches, researchers have employed its analytical and theoretical framework in a wide range of languages to look into the relationship between cultural cognition and language. In this article, after a brief introduction of Cultural Linguistics and its theoretical and analytical framework, some thoughts about several current issues in Cultural Linguistics are shared, including the lack of clarity of some terms, the relation between values and cultural conceptualizations, the interconnected nature of theoretical and analytical tools, the universality and variation of conceptualizations, some methodological issues in research, and globalization, politics and reconceptualization. This article hopes to encourage constructive discussions on these issues in Cultural Linguistics.