Volume 22, Issue 4

This study investigates the ecopragmatic roles of insect lexicons in Penginyongan parikan , a traditional rhymed couplet from the Banyumas region of Central Java, Indonesia. Drawing on Capone’s concept of pragmeme and Wong’s triple articulation framework, parikan is examined as a culturally situated speech act where linguistic form, meaning, culture, and ecology intersect. Using qualitative participant observation across 16 rural villages, 128 speakers contributed examples of parikan containing insect references. Analysis integrates speech act theory, ecopragmatics, and ethnolinguistic perspectives. Findings reveal that insect lexicons serve ten illocutionary functions – including stating, asserting, lamenting, and flirting – while embedding ecological knowledge and social norms. Insects such as kinjeng (dragonfly), buli (cicada), ampal (beetle), and coro (cockroach) operate across three interconnected levels: ecological (species traits and environmental context), cultural-symbolic (moral values, social etiquette), and linguistic-aesthetic (rhyme, rhythm, mnemonic appeal). These eco-pragmemes enable indirect communication that preserves social harmony, aligns with Javanese tata krama (politeness), and sustains environmental literacy. The study shows how parikan transforms everyday ecological references into culturally intelligible metaphors, facilitating emotional expression, social negotiation, and moral instruction without direct confrontation. By preserving insect nomenclature in poetic discourse, Banyumas communities maintain an oral archive of ecological observation, despite environmental change and lexical attrition. This work contributes to pragmatics by expanding the typology of pragmemes to include environmental encoding, and to ecolinguistics by demonstrating how poetic tradition functions as a medium for ecological knowledge transmission and cultural resilience.

The encounter between Christianity and the Gbe people of the Gulf of Guinea dates back to the middle of the 17th century, with the translation of Doctrina Christina into Aladagbe (Benin). In the encounters of Christian missionaries in their evangelization with the Ewe (Gbe group), both interlocutors have sought to make meaning through language and practices. However, there was a systematic attempt to separate Christian concepts and understandings from the local cultural concepts and treat the latter as demonic. In the process of inculturation of Christianity (in Africa), many such distinctions are contested. One such contested issue is the parallel between “ancestors” and “saints” in Christian thought. In this paper I undertake an ethnopragamtic and conceptual analysis of the Ewe term for ancestors, and compare it to the concept of saints. I conclude by advocating that conceptual analysis of the religious terms across cultures should be done as a prerequisite to inculturation.

This paper examines the crucial role of culture in the construction and negotiation of justice within Nigerian alternative dispute resolution settings, which serve as popular sites for dispute resolution. Existing studies have previously focused on the construction of identity, linguistic parameters, and contextual features in adjudicative discourses, neglecting the construction of justice and the significant role that cultural norms play in the negotiation process. This study directly addresses this lacuna by exploring the categories of cultural orientation and values through the analytical frameworks of interpersonal pragmatics and the functionalist theory of culture. Data were gathered from 20 purposively recorded hearing sessions and 30 documented cases spanning 2010 to 2017 across three dispute resolution centres in Southwestern Nigeria. The findings demonstrate that both regulatory and restorative cultural orientations distinctly characterise adjudicative encounters in Nigeria. These orientations are characterised by cultural values such as patience, tolerance, fatherhood, submission, traditional marriage rites, and male supremacy. The study concludes that culture plays a significant role in shaping the construction of justice and actively restoring societal peace.

Using the socio-cognitive approach (SCA), this study examines mistranslations in English translations of Chinese classical poetry. First, this paper redefines the concept of mistranslation and classifies it into three types: formal, semantic, and cultural mistranslations. Next, this study introduces the socio-cognitive framework for mistranslation research, which incorporates social and individual traits in the translation process. Based on this framework, the paper argues that the fundamental cause of mistranslation originates from translators’ egocentrism, which manifests in three key aspects: miscomprehension of prior context, failure to construct common ground, and deviated prioritization of salience. This study helps to expand the intercultural pragmatics research paradigm and offers a new perspective for mistranslation studies.

In this paper, I discuss expressions such as ‘Dad’, ‘Mum’, ‘Grandpa’, etc., which are called ‘quasi-proper names’. These expressions can be used both to refer to a thing or person in an assertion in which a predicate is assigned to the referent expressed by the quasi-proper-name and to call somebody in particular (John!). In so far as they are indexical expressions, they are even more directly referential than proper names and guarantee discourse continuity to a greater extent than proper names (even if this appears to some to be controversial). To understand the working of quasi-proper names, I introduce a semantic rule that transforms nouns or definite descriptions into proper names and quasi-proper names, making the conceptual elements present in those expressions inactive and introducing a direct route from the proper name to the referent. Such a rule is synchronic, although it has diachronic consequences. Quasi-proper names can stimulate a debate about the function and role of proper names across cultures. I consider a number of expressions similar to quasi-proper names and I add the class of quasi-quasi-proper names (cases in which a term similar to a quasi-proper name can be used in vocatives but not in a subject-predicate structure, or, vice-versa, it can be used in a subject-predicate structure but not for vocatives).