Volume 20, Issue 5

In face-to-face conversations, interlocutors might recognize the ironic intent of a speaker relying on the incongruity of the comment relative to a situation, and on irony markers such as the ironic tone of voice and specific facial expressions. In instant messaging, acoustical and visual cues are typically absent, and the context is not always shared. We investigated the role of emoji as cues to detect irony, hypothesizing that they might play the role of the conversational context. We administered to 156 Italian adults a questionnaire, presenting them with WhatsApp messages followed by an emoji, which was congruent or incongruent with the (non-)evaluative positive or negative comment, and found that evaluative incongruent items were rated as more ironic, and that incongruent positive messages were more easily recognized as ironic (criticisms) compared to incongruent negative messages (ironic compliments), in line with the asymmetry of affect hypothesis.

In this study, we explore how language affordances are exploited in intercultural communication using the socio-cognitive approach. Based on previous discussions of language affordances, we divide the exploiting practices into three categories, namely, enabling a language affordance, constraining a language affordance, and presenting multiple language affordances. Data were collected from 16 roundtable discussions that took place over four seasons of a Chinese TV program. Each roundtable discussion involved four L1 Chinese speakers and eleven L2 Chinese speakers. The L2 speakers are multilingual, frequently speaking more than one language, including English. A quantitative analysis of the data reveals a collective pattern in the participants’ exploitation of language affordances, that is, they tend to activate more core common-ground knowledge than the knowledge of emergent common ground. In addition, they are inclined to construct multicultural common ground, which they actively align themselves with. Their awareness of communicative goals and self-identification as competent multilingual speakers also influence their choice of language affordances.

This study explores the Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN (‘you don’t understand’) construction in a corpus of casual conversation. Employing the methodology of Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Conversation Analysis, we show that deployment of this construction is fixed and formulaic and only rarely denotes the recipient’s lack of understanding. Based on a mostly synchronic analysis, we suggest a grammaticization path followed by this construction from a negative epistemic subject-predicate construction denoting literal lack of understanding to a discourse marker signaling the opening of a new narrative, while seeking recipient alignment with the speaker’s intensified affective stance. The path described reveals that embodied conduct, as well as prosodic, morphophonological, and syntactic features of the construction correlate with the weakening of its literal meaning. This sheds light on the uses speakers make of the construction, on how heightened engagement may be achieved in discourse, and on the dialogic nature of interaction and grammar.

Business email has a significant impact on commercial activities and organizational image. Intercultural pragmatics is the new development of pragmatics, moving its focus from mono-cultural communication to multi-cultural communication, aiming to describe how communicators seek, activate, and create common ground to complete tasks in intercultural communication contexts. Drawing on 1,477 separate English emails exchanged between a Chinese auto parts export company and its business partners in different parts of the world, we find, from the intercultural pragmatics perspective, that different types of interpersonal strategies, i.e., alliance building, other-caring, and self-enhancing/defending, are employed to construct virtual intimacy and to create and highlight interpersonal relationship dimensions in international business communication. These strategies are intended to facilitate the accomplishment of communication tasks by creating emergent common ground, reflecting the dynamics and interculturality of business communication. This research deepens our understanding of the mechanism of relationship management in international business communication.