Volume 21, Issue 5

In recent years there has been an increased recognition of the need for learners to understand language as social action. However, language learners are often left on their own to develop the ability to adapt to the unanticipated demands of real-world interaction. To encourage this development, attention is turning toward the notion of interactional competence (IC). The present study contributes to efforts to better understand Japanese learners’ IC. Specifically, this study aims to better understand how learners naturally accomplish compliment and consolation speech acts and for what social purposes, including how learners adapt linguistic forms to do acts that go beyond the act most commonly associated with those forms. Conversation analysis of foreign language housing mealtime conversations revealed two core observations. First, based on preempirical descriptions, compliments occur with more frequency than consolations. Compliments also tend to be deployed as the first part of a compliment-response pair, while consolations tend to be deployed as a response to the public exposure of a challenge or a troubling emotional state. Second, when looking instead at how participants use turns that are construed as compliments regardless of linguistic form, we find that compliments are also used to do activities other than what their surface formulation suggests. A discussion of what these results mean for developing deeper understandings of IC in speech acts performed by language learners is provided.

This study investigates the use of emojis in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) among Colombian and Argentinian learners of German. Recent research demonstrates that emojis serve multiple functions, including expressing reactions to previous statements and modulating the tone of assertions. Beyond the illocutionary domain, where they help articulate speech acts, emojis facilitate discourse by managing conversation openings and closings. They also signify informality in the stylistic domain and guide the social intent of conversations. While these findings are insightful, they primarily reflect interactions among speakers sharing the same first language (L1) and cultural background. The dynamics of emoji use in a second language (L2) and intercultural settings remain underexplored. To address this gap, this study analyzed a corpus of WhatsApp messages exchanged during a virtual interaction between 24 Colombian and Argentinian learners of German. The results reveal that the use of emojis among L2 speakers largely mirrors their use in L1 contexts, suggesting a strong transferability of their pragmatic, discursive, and stylistic functions. Additionally, this study identifies an extra function in the illocutionary domain, where emojis help signal sociality rights and obligations, thereby maintaining positive interpersonal rapport. Furthermore, the performance of national identities emerged as a unique function of emojis in intercultural communication, supporting the idea of a universal component in emoji use. These findings contribute to our understanding of how emojis operate in L2 and intercultural settings, highlighting their role in facilitating effective digital communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The consistent use of emojis by participants from different cultural backgrounds suggests that emojis can act as universal symbols, bridging cultural and linguistic gaps while also allowing for the expression of unique social identities.

In this paper, I question the idea that proper names are merely used to refer to things or individuals. However, I am not going to use predicativism to prove this point. I will somehow look at things from the point of view of scholars like Frege or Kripke. I consider that this idea (that proper names are merely used to refer, at least when they are in argument positions) stems from a view of language that does not throw proper light on contextuality as discussed by Mey, Jacob. 2001. Pragmatics . Oxford: Wiley. From the very beginning, I argue that the issue can be seen in a better light through a theory of language use that considers language games as embedded in a society and a culture. I accept the idea that there are norms for introducing names in society and for using them in an appropriate way. Even if, for most philosophers, referring is the basic function of proper names, I propose that in a number of cases proper names are not essentially used to refer (although it is possible that the name allows a combination of referring and other functions). The referring function of names broadly correlates with the assertive function of the utterance in which the name occurs or with speech acts whose aim is to modify reality and, therefore, persuade, modify, create, promote, destroy, etc. objects or individuals (often referred to with proper names). However, there are other types of speech acts where proper names are not only used to refer, but, instead, to call someone (another case is scolding someone or a dog). Intentions clearly emerge in context. The same utterance may have more than one function, from the illocutionary point of view, but a proper name, as situated in different contexts, may have more than one perlocutionary function. I argue that while the speech act of referring is always a diagonal speech act, the speech act of calling someone (by the use of a proper name) is not a diagonal speech act but a self-sufficient, autonomous, primary speech act. Hence there is a clear difference between referring through an assertion and referring as part of calling, where referring is incorporated into the main speech act as part of the explicit illocutionary force of the speech act. In an assertion, referring is a prerequisite to providing a referent about which a property is asserted. Predication and reference are intertwined. In a speech act other than an assertion, there need not be a predicate, and referring and calling (or some other speech act) are connected. I propose that the learning of the speech act of calling by the use of a name requires certain syntactic considerations, that prima facie contradict Chomsky’s binding theory. I then put forward the view that learning one’s name requires, at some stage, knowledge of the semantics of de se structures.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on theories of discourse meaning from the Arabic, namely Sībawayhian, linguistics tradition, that are novel in the contemporary pragmatics space and prompts us to rethink and reshape the Anglo-American, namely Gricean and post-Gricean, lens through which current theories are predominantly defined. The Arabic linguistics tradition was founded by Sībawayhi more than ten centuries ago, yet it is severely underrepresented and under-researched in modern (Western) linguistics. Sībawayhi posited a discourse-oriented, pragmatics-centric, and intuition-driven model of language and communication, providing unique insights into how intentions and conventions figure in meaning representation. Despite his monumental contribution, Sībawayhian theory has hitherto been missing from the present-day field of pragmatics. Instead, pragmatics as a line of study is usually attributed to Grice and subsequent post-Gricean developments, where theory construction has been limited to intra-theoretical analyses and falls short of cross-cultural epistemological perspectives. Many of these analyses are as such reinventions of what can be found in Sībawayhian and post-Sībawayhian pragmatics. And there are many more components of Arabic pragmatic thought that remain to be (re)discovered, with the potential to further current thinking in pragmatics and open a new orientation of contemporary pragmatic study. In this paper, I attempt to address all of the above by closely examining selected sections of Sībawayhi’s monumental al-Kitāb . I particularly introduce two main conceptions Sībawayhi relies on in his theory of meaning – metapragmatic conventions (conventions mp ) and integrative context (context i ) – and investigate their role in shaping major areas of pragmatic theorization, namely syntax, discourse compositionality, and inference.