Band 12, Heft 1

In a partial report on field work conducted among the Hobongan in Indonesia during 2012–2015, I note that the language has very few idiomatic politeness routines (a couple of greetings with which to send people on their travels are notable exceptions). However, the language has many other ways to indicate politeness and impoliteness. One such strategy is lexical items to indicate curses; there are three lexical items that often combine with other terms to form idiomatic curses in the language, which suggests, in comparison to the idiomatic expressions of farewell, that impoliteness is more important than politeness, at least with regard to idiomatic expressions. Another strategy to maintain politeness is to participate in social rituals that can be observed but that do not necessarily co-occur with politeness routines. Although there are incantations, often associated with social rituals, they are too extensive to be considered politeness routines in the usual sense; impoliteness is indicated by a refusal to participate in the rituals. These rituals thus provide a fully pragmatic way to conduct politeness and impoliteness, not requiring stated terms. Perhaps the most common way to indicate politeness is through the use of many euphemisms, including ways to talk to and about people without using their given names (the use of given names is avoided in order to prevent evil spirits from being able to identify individuals); such euphemisms also include terms to avoid speaking directly about bodily functions and sexual activity that are not considered acceptable for polite Hobongan society. It has been noted that although a range of possibilities exist for politeness, including behavioral and pragmatic possibilities (Burdelski 2012; Brown and Levinson 1987), the concepts used in politeness and impoliteness analyses are often fuzzy (Eelen 2014). I suggest a typological approach to this clarification, perhaps ranking the importance of various politeness strategies in the languages of the world. For example, idiomatic politeness routines are ranked highly in English because they involve overlap between both lexical and situational information; by contrast, such idiomatic politeness routines are almost nonexistent in Hobongan, with situational politeness being more available.

From a grammatical point of view, negation is considered a linguistic universal, whereby differences in expression across languages are not necessarily rendered syntactically. The focus of this paper is not, however, on syntactic but rather pragmatic aspects and cultural scripts associated with indirect negation, and limited to the cultures of Saudi Arabia and Japan. Based on linguistic and paralinguistic cues from audio-visual data and ethnographic data collection, a pragmatic comparison between the seemingly contrastive cultures of Japan and Saudi Arabia is carried out. Interestingly, pragmatic aspects of discourse such as “face saving” (shame, honour, and conflict avoidance) present similar strategies in the two languages involved, as related to the functions of refusal and denial.

Humor has long attracted scholarly interest in many academic disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, etc. Among the various types of humor, wúlítóu ‘nonsense’ has greatly influenced Taiwanese’s sense of humor. Based on previous studies on the concept of wúlítóu ‘nonsense’ (e.g., Tan 2000; Jiang 2004; Chueh 2006; Yen 2009; Tao 2010), this study further examines its social-pragmatic functions in Taiwanese verbal interactions, as well as the discourse strategies used to construct it. The methodological approaches used for analysis are informed by conversation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and interactional linguistics. Major findings are: (a) There are three discourse strategies frequently used to construct wúlítóu ‘nonsense’: theatrical performance , fictional episode and dramatic expression/code . (b) Taiwanese’s frequent use of wúlítóu ‘nonsense’ shows not only their playful attitudes towards their life, but also their dealing with the pressures in life with xiǎoquèxìng ‘the pleasure coming from trivial, but exact daily things’.

New conceptualizations of meaning-making stress the importance of the contextual factors and the world knowledge resources alongside the linguistic input. The way in which these factors contribute to the ultimate understanding of messages depends largely on the type of communication involved. In advertising discourse exploitation of extra-linguistic resources seems to be exceptionally high. The present paper reports on a study in which the way the textual and pictorial channels support each other in information processing was investigated. To this end eight press advertisements have been modified in such a way that the texts were separated from the pictures and presented in this way to a group of respondents, who were asked to interpret either the texts or the illustrations alone, only later to be shown the complete versions and asked once again to report on their understanding of the messages in their original versions. In the discussion reference was made to such theoretical conceptualizations as the Dynamic Model of Meaning (Kecskes 2008), the notions of multiplying meaning and traversals (Lemke 1998; 2001; 2005), Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier and Turner 1998; 2002), Resource Integration Principle (Baldry and Thibault 2006), GeM Model (Bateman 2008) and Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 2003).

This paper introduces the importance of prosodic constraints on interpretation in the understanding of the semantic/pragmatic interface and the linguistic marking and lexicalization of pragmatic meanings. It addresses this issue at word and utterance levels, after defining the notions of non-structural prosody and free lexical prosody. At word level, it shows the existence of a prosodic polysemy which lexicalizes into word lexical meanings that include pragmatic orientation, and that prosodic contours/features introduce prosodic comments, typically about the speaker’s position toward what is at stake but also about the hearer’s expected reaction to this position, forcing their description to be polyphonic. Similarly, at utterance level, it is shown that prosodic comments also occur, and moreover that the scope of such comments is often not the “sentential” meaning. The last section is dedicated to the description of the methodology and techniques used in existing programs to allow the automated discrimination of prosodic forms, and a reliable mapping of prosodic forms with interpretations. Because such a process can succeed only by using large oral data bases and considerably improving semantic/pragmatic descriptions, it is finally argued that the study of prosody is to linguistics and pragmatic linguistics what the microscope was for biology.