Volume 9, Issue 1

Speakers of jokes are aware of the human cognitively rooted relevance-seeking inferential procedure (Sperber and Wilson 1995) and predict (i.e. metarepresent) the interlocutor’s steps leading to a valid interpretation of the utterance(s) in the joke. Specifically, speakers can predict (a) the accessibility to certain information which builds up a proper scenario for understanding the joke (make-sense frame), (b) the inferential steps taken to turn the words uttered into contextualized meaningful propositions (utterance interpretation), and (c) the awareness of cultural stereotypes regarding professions, nationalities, connoted places, sex roles, etc. (cultural frame). This inferred information (a-c) is exploited to generate humorous effects. In previous research (Yus forthcoming), the Intersecting Circles Model was proposed. It comprises seven types of jokes depending on whether the joke only relies on one of (a-c) or on combinations of them, which entails analyzing the extent to which (a-c) play or do not play a role in the generation of humorous effects. In this paper, 1000 jokes are analyzed and fitted into a type or combinations of (a-c). Several interesting humor-generating patterns are also isolated inside the seven preliminary joke types covered by the Model.

This paper explores the pragmatic routines that occur in clause 2 chaining. It demonstrates that the tense-aspect dependency markers in Toposa texts not only combine chained clauses with an initial clause, but also guide the audience to understand information in texts as foregrounded. The understanding of which information is foregrounded is achieved through pragmatic routines that cut the comprehension process short because of frequently encountered inferential processes occurring in repeatedly accessed contextual environments. The pragmatic routines are explained as part of the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic. It will also be shown how these routines apply to narratives, and procedural texts.

The article reports on some preliminary findings of an ongoing research initiative investigating the pragmatics of daily interaction, cross-culturally and trans-nationally. Phase one of the initiative looks into the specifics of how cultural differences impact on cultural values, social categories and, ultimately, communicative styles, focusing initially on address forms (Larina et al. 2011). More specifically, the article looks into the current status of the ideology-based address form comrade , its pragma-semantic profile and rules governing its usage in post-Communist Eastern-European societies, looking primarily into selected instances of public communication and media language in modern-day Serbia. Having identified and contextualised key usage patterns of the ideology-based forms of address clustering around the title comrade (in Serbian: drug , m. and drugarica , f.) and the set of options associated with it, the article concludes by suggesting future parameters of research.

This study examined the opening and closing sequences of requestive e–mails written by 66 native English speaking (NES) students and 34 Iranian (NNES) students sent to a faculty member in an American university. Three hundred requestive e–mails from NES students and NNES students sent to a professor were collected over six semesters and were analyzed for the cultural and social variation that exists in e–mail communication. Students’ choices of opening and closing strategies were examined with respect to different interpersonal styles of politeness (solidarity vs. deference). Quantitative and qualitative findings revealed that solidarity and deference towards the professor were expressed differently in the e–mails of NES students and NNES students.

This study examines the conflict strategies used in the highly adversarial and popular Arabic-language talk show broadcasted weekly on Al-Jazeera satellite channel, known as Al-Ittijah Al-Mu’aakis 'The Opposite Direction'. The study identifies the conflict strategies and verbal conflict expressions and approaches them in the light of Interactional Sociolinguistics. The analysis of three episodes debating three different topics shows that disputants used several types of strategies including "impoliteness", "aggravated impoliteness", topic restriction, lengthy holding of the floor, and sarcasm. The speakers' bald-on-record expressions of disagreement are expected as a result of the controversial and polemical nature of the show, which creates fierce competition between the two guests to present their arguments in an aggressive way.

Starting from the basic premises of Schank's (1998) notion of indexing in story telling and the representational approach of language (Saeed 1996, 2003), this paper investigates whether fairy tales create initial indexes for children, that may (not) be re-indexed later in adult life, by reshaping their pre-existing experiences. More specifically, it focuses on the way fairy tales present several concepts already familiar to children, and whether this representation matches children’s pre-existing experiences. The data collected comes from several of Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and consists of a corpus of 62839 word tokens. The fairy tales included were thematically related to general areas of everyday experience: femininity, blackness, whiteness, day, night, being young, ageing . The following semantically contradictory lexical pairs (listed with their text frequency) were examined in the expanded concordance, in relation to their collocations and semantic associations: ( 143) old - (58) young, (134) woman - (71) maiden, (116) day - (40) night, (63) white - (83) black. These were then compared with an adults’ and a children’s dictionary to check whether the collocations, semantic associations of the selected words as portrayed in the data, matched the societally accepted meanings found in dictionaries. The comparison indicated that, although the connotative meanings were included in the majority of denotative meanings that make up words' definitions in the adult dictionary examined, only five of them matched the connotative meanings of the words examined in the data. On the other hand, the way the above concepts/words were presented in the children’s dictionary, was very simple, probably reflecting children’s experiences. It seems, thus, that the concepts - at least some of them - presented in the fairy tales examined, do not “officially” relate to children's but to adults' experiences, functioning as an index that re-shapes children’s pre-existing concepts.