Search results for "Subject"
showing 10 items of 25013 documents
What is an indirect speech act?
2019
Abstract The notion of an indirect speech act is at the very heart of cognitive pragmatics, yet, after nearly 50 years of orthodox (Searlean) speech act theory, it remains largely unclear how this notion can be explicated in a proper way. In recent years, two debates about indirect speech acts have stood out. First, a debate about the Searlean idea that indirect speech acts constitute a simultaneous realization of a secondary and a primary act. Second, a debate about the reasons for the use of indirect speech acts, in particular about whether this reason is to be seen in strategic advantages and/or observation of politeness demands. In these debates, the original pragmatic conception of sen…
Towards multilingual competence: examining beliefs and agency in first year university students’ language learner biographies
2021
As working life across the world is increasingly multilingual, multicultural and multidisciplinary, higher education language teaching is faced with a challenge of how to prepare students for it. Many universities have recently developed multilingual pedagogies but central to their success is learners’ perceptions of these practices. To fill this gap, this article explores first year university students’ language learner biographies to gain insight into how learners construct their linguistic realities. The biographies were studied with discourse analytical methods to examine the participants’ beliefs about language learning and their sense of agency in it. The results reveal that participa…
Prosodic modulation as a mark to express pragmatic values: The case of mitigation in Spanish
2021
Abstract One of the functions of prosody in discourse is to convey pragmatic values that add up to the core semantic meaning of spoken units or segments. Regarding mitigation, Caffi (1999: 890) specifically discusses “the very important prosodic and kinesic means of mitigation, such as changes in pitch prominence, rhythm, speech rate, as well as eye-contact, gaze, gaze aversion, smile, particular postures, etc.” In this paper, I focus on some prosodic factors such as pitch, intensity, duration and speech rate that can be used in European Spanish, in combination with pragmatic meanings. The first aim is to establish a theoretical deliberation on prosody as a clear marker to convey pragmatic …
À la recherche du lexique de la gestion hôtelière : de la magdalena de Proust a la WebQuest
2020
This paper describes the creation and design of a series of activities aimed at learning the hotel management lexicon in French within a professional context. The tool used to frame these activities is the WebQuest, based on the principles of socioconstructivism and focused on promoting learning by discovery, among other aims. Accordingly, the action research methodology and after the Webquest implementation with a group of university students taking the French for Specific Purposes subject in a professional context, the study results are presented. Finally, the following conclusions derived from the results obtained allow: (1) to verify the adequacy and effectiveness of the tool created, …
Attributional and relational influence of numerals in S’ncamtho metaphors
2020
AbstractYouth varieties in Africa such as S’ncamtho, the Ndebele-based youth variety in Zimbabwe, and urban vernaculars interact with urban and modern experiences which offer them new materials and experiences to base their metaphors on compared to older metaphors in the base languages. This paper explores the use of numeral qualities and associations in the conceptualisation and orthographic representation of S’ncamtho metaphors. S’ncamtho is popular with urban youth and this makes social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS and Instagram key in the performance of the youth variety, a performance that includes the creation, use and contraction of metaphors. Numerals off…
The language of recovery
2020
Abstract The present study attempts to make a comparative analysis of two Spanish and American political speeches, which belong to two different debate traditions, in terms of the metaphors used. For that purpose, we analyze the Economy sections of the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and in the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. The present study aims at answering the following research questions: What metaphors do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in the American and Spanish political speeches to convince their audiences of America’s and Spain’s economic victory? What are the similarities and differences between the representations depicted by metaphor use in th…
The look of writing in reading. Graphetic empathy in making and perceiving graphic traces
2021
This article presents preliminary considerations and results from a research project designed to investigate the relation between (i) gestures, (ii) graphic traces and (iii) perceptions. More specifically, the project aims to test the hypothesis that graphic traces, including handwriting, can set up graphetic empathy between writers and readers of traces across long temporal and spatial distances. Insofar as a graphic trace is lawfully related to the gesture by which it came into being, the trace itself will hold information about the gesture, which may resonate with the sensorimotor system of a perceiver as if they themselves performed the gesture. If this is in fact so, it will have impor…
On the participatory agency of texts: Using institutional forms in performance appraisal interviews
2020
Abstract Drawing on studies of the performative effects and agency of texts in organizations, the paper investigates how the agency of texts figures through their participatory status in interaction. The empirical data for the study consist of video-recorded performance appraisal interviews in a Finnish public organization in which the interaction relies heavily on an appraisal form. The data are analyzed through a sequential analysis that draws on multimodal conversation analysis and ethnographic knowledge. The analysis shows that the human participants orient to three different acts that are inscribed in the textual document: 1) presenting demands for the participants; 2) offering topics …
Incivility in online news and Twitter: effects on attitudes toward scientific topics when reading in a second language
2021
Due to the participatory nature of Web 2.0, polite communication on social media and news sites can stand side by side with uncivil comments. Research on online incivility has been conducted with users reading in their mother tongues (L1), while the potential effects of incivility in a second language (L2) have been largely under- explored. This paper analyzes the effects of uncivil comments written in an L2 on attitudes around emerging technologies. Accordingly, study 1 replicates and extends a previous experiment on the effects of incivility to online news on risk perceptions of nanotechnology (Anderson et al., 2014), by adding an ‘L2 condition’ (uncivil comments written in an L2). Then, …
Researching Identity and L2 Pragmatics in Digital Stories: A Relational Account.
2020
This study explores college EFL learners' construction of identity through the analysis of their pragmatic choices in digital stories, in which they narrated their relationship with another person they had helped in the past. More specifically, such choices were examined following Relational Dialectics Theory in learners' enactments of "connection" with and "autonomy" from this person. A specific view of identity in language education, the notion of "relational work" in (im)politeness research, and a social semiotic framework were also employed in data analysis. Learners' pragmatic choices ranged from the selection of the topic of their narratives according to types of social bonds, to the …