Volume 28, Issue 6

This article deals with imperative constant polarity tag questions (henceforth imperative CPTQs) such as Leave me alone, will you and Let's have another, shall we . We propose a typology of imperative CPTQs on the basis of a systematic study of data, correlating their distinct formal properties with different contextualized uses. Further developing McGregor's (1997) general approach to tag questions, we argue that the main subtypes of imperative CPTQs can be classified in terms of two interpersonal functions: illocutionary force and conduciveness. These two interpersonal dimensions form continua ranging from speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented meanings. The classification in terms of illocutionary force subsumes speaker-oriented command and request, speaker- and hearer-oriented proposal for joint action, and hearer-oriented advice and invitation/offer. The corresponding conduciveness cline involves mainly ‘softening’ at the speaker-oriented end, where the speaker's desire predominates, and ‘insisting’ at the hearer-oriented end, which focuses on the benefits to the hearer.

Linguists, and other analysts of discourse, regularly make appeal to affectual states in determining the meaning of utterances. We examine two kinds of sequence that occur in everyday conversation. The first involves one participant making an explicit lexical formulation of a co-participant's affectual state (e.g., ‘you sound happy’, ‘don't sound so depressed’). The second involves responses to ‘positive informings’ and ‘negative informings’. Through consideration of sequential organization, participant orientation, and phonetic detail, we suggest that the attribution of analytic categories of affect is problematic. We argue that phonetic characteristics which might be thought to be associated with affect may better be accounted for with reference to the management of particular sequential-interactional tasks. The finding that stance does not inhere in any single turn at talk or any single linguistic aspect leads us to suggest that future investigations into stance and affect will need to pay attention simultaneously to matters of both linguistic-phonetic and sequential organization.

The use of evaluation resources has proven to be an especially difficult area in English for Academic Purposes. Our aim is to propose a methodological framework for identifying recurrent differences in the use of evaluation resources in academic texts across English and other languages. We argue that for comparisons to be meaningful, studies of independent but comparable successful texts should contrast propositions that are similar in terms of their pragmatic or discourse function. We narrow the focus of the proposal down to the academic book review genre in one particular academic discipline and argue for the contrast of propositions functioning as critical acts on similar things, the academic books under review. We reason that for fruitful comparisons it would be necessary to distinguish between evaluation resources occurring on the propositional, metadiscoursal, and rhetorical planes. We discuss the types of evaluation resources that occur on these three planes in a corpus of twenty recent literary academic book reviews in English. We conclude that applying this framework to the quantitative analysis of comparable texts and propositions across languages would help to establish the extent to which the use of evaluation resources varies as a function of the language in a useful way.

In this article, I examine teasing in the laughter-talk of two transcribed spoken corpora of press briefings held at the White House, one from the Democrat and one from the Republican administrations. Categorizations are developed, firstly, of types and functions of teases and, secondly, of types and functions of responses to teases, as produced by both the podium and the assembled press. Important implications for face/(im)politeness theory become apparent. Speakers appear to have two different kinds of face, competence and affective. The problem for any given individual is that the two types of face work are frequently incompatible. Bolstering the one type of face may well diminish the other, and careful considerations are necessary when indulging in teasing of others (or indeed oneself) and in calibrating how to respond to being teased. The article is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS).