Contrastivity and comparability: pragmatic variation across pluricentric varieties

Author(s):  
Anne Barron

Abstract The recent pragmatic turn in the study of pluricentric varieties marks a shift in analytical focus, with increasingly more research contrasting the conventions of language use and interaction across pluricentric varieties. This turn demands new data types and new methods of analysis which uphold the principles of contrastivity and comparability. Addressing this basic requirement for the case of cross-varietal speech act analyses, the present article examines the contextual factors to be considered in the choice of data types and the potential definition and usability of a pragmatic variable in speech act analyses across data types. These considerations are applied to a cross-varietal analysis of responses to thanks in direction-giving exchanges across English in Canada, England and Ireland. The study highlights the frequent necessity of a multi-faceted definition of the pragmatic variable. In addition, challenges of contextual equivalence which emerge in the course of the analysis highlight a basic need for research to regularly re-examine the linguistic context and the definition of the pragmatic variable and to potentially redefine the variable during the analytical process. The contrastive analysis reveals a more extensive use of routinised responses to thanks in the Canadian English data relative to the Irish English and English English data. A more complex closing, with more continuations and confirmation checks, is shown to characterise the Irish English data, a finding which is suggested to potentially relate to a strong orientation towards hospitality in the Irish context.

SUHUF ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-342
Author(s):  
Fathur Rosyid

Abstrak Kata Kunci: Pragamtik, Tindak Tutur, Implikatur, Kisah Sayyidah Maryam   Kisah Sayyidah Maryam dalam al-Qur’a>n merupakan salah-satu kisah yang menarik dikaji dengan pendekatan pragmatik. Hal ini disebabkan, secara tekstual, beliau adalah publik figur yang fenomenal, bahkan mengalahkan status sosial perempuan lainnya, sehingga namanya terdokumentasikan dalam satu surat khusus yang populer dengan sebutan ”Surat Maryam”. Kecuali itu, kisah tersebut juga termasuk kisah yang kaya dengan nuansa konteks. Sementara posisi ilmu prgamatik sendiri  merupakan disiplin keilmuan yang mengkaji satuan bahasa dari sudut pandang relasi antara konteks linguistik yang bersifat diadik dan konteks non-linguistik yang bersifat triadik. Penelitian ini hendak mengungkap dua hal; Pertama, apa yang dimaksud pragmatika al-Qur’a>n?. Kedua, bagaimana bentuk aplikasi pragmatik tindak tutur dan implikatur terhadap fragmentasi kisah kelahiran Sayyidah Maryam dalam al-Qur’an?. Tujuan kedua pertanyaan tersebut untuk memahami konsep prgamtika al-Qur’an, juga untuk mengungkap bentuk tindak tutur dan implikatur fragmentasi kisah kelahiran Sayyidah Maryam. Penelitian ini menghasilkan kesimpulan; Pertama, pragmatika al-Qur’an adalah suatu disiplin ilmu yang mengkaji al-Qur’a>n dari sudut pandang relasi antara konteks kebahasaan dengan konteks non-kebahasaan. Kedua, tindak tutur fragmentasi kisah kelahiran Sayyidah Maryam yang terdapat dalam Qs. A<li ‘Imra>n (03): 36, lokusinya berupa kalimat informatif, sementara illokusinya merupakan bentuk kalimat asertif yang bermakna mengeluh. Adapun implikaturnya sebagai pelajaran, bahwa jika segala sesuatu telah dipasrahkan sama Allah swt. maka tidak pantas mencari kesalahan atas peraturan yang telah ditetapkan-Nya.               Abstract Keywords: Pragamtik, Speech Acts, implicatures, Story of Sayyidah Maryam   The story of Sayyidah Maryam in the al-Qur'a>n is one-on-one interesting stories studied with a pragmatic approach. This is due, textually, he is a public figure who is phenomenal, even beating out other women's social status, so the name is documented in a special letter that is popularly known as "Surah Maryam". Except that, the story also included a story rich with nuances of context. While the position pragamatic science itself is a scientific discipline that examines unit of language from the perspective of the relationship between linguistic context that is both dyadic and non-linguistic context that is triadic. This research seeks to reveal two things; First, what is meant pragmatic al-Qur'a>n?. Second, how the application form pragmatics of speech acts and implicatures to fragmentation birth story of Sayyidah Maryam in the al-Qur'a>n?. The second purpose of these questions to understand the concept pragamtic al-Qur'a>n, as well as to reveal the shape of speech acts and implicatures fragmentation of the birth story of Sayyidah Maryam. This research resulted in the conclusion; First, the pragmatics of the al-Qur’a>n is a discipline that examines al-Qur'a>n from the viewpoint of the relationship between linguistic context with non-linguistic context. Second, the speech act fragmentation birth story of Sayyidah Maryam contained in Qs. A<li 'Imra>n (03): 36, locutionary acts be informative sentence, while illocutionary acts an assertive form meaningful sentences complaining. The implicature as a lesson, that if everything was handled the same God, it is inappropriate to find fault with the regulations set his.


Author(s):  
Lisa Schlegl ◽  
Sali A. Tagliamonte

AbstractIn this study, we target the speech act of direction-giving using variationist sociolinguistic methods within a corpus of vernacular speech from six Ontario communities. Not only do we find social and geographical correlates to linguistic choices in direction-giving, but we also establish the influence of the physical layout of the community/place in question. Direction-giving in the urban center of Toronto (Southern Ontario) contrasts with five Northern Ontario communities. Northerners use more relative directions, while Torontonians use more cardinal directions, landmarks, and proper street names – for example, Go east on Bloor to the Manulife Centre. We also find that specific lexical choices (e.g., Take a right vs. Make a right) distinguish direction-givers in Northern Ontario from those in Toronto. These differences identify direction-giving as an ideal site for sociolinguistic and dialectological investigation and corroborate previous findings documenting regional variation in Canadian English.


Synthese ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neri Marsili

AbstractNot every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric commitment is analysed in terms of two normative components: ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’. The resulting definition of lying draws all the desired distinctions, providing an intensionally adequate analysis of the concept of lying.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (24) ◽  
pp. 9461
Author(s):  
Aurora Savino ◽  
Paolo Provero ◽  
Valeria Poli

Biological systems respond to perturbations through the rewiring of molecular interactions, organised in gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Among these, the increasingly high availability of transcriptomic data makes gene co-expression networks the most exploited ones. Differential co-expression networks are useful tools to identify changes in response to an external perturbation, such as mutations predisposing to cancer development, and leading to changes in the activity of gene expression regulators or signalling. They can help explain the robustness of cancer cells to perturbations and identify promising candidates for targeted therapy, moreover providing higher specificity with respect to standard co-expression methods. Here, we comprehensively review the literature about the methods developed to assess differential co-expression and their applications to cancer biology. Via the comparison of normal and diseased conditions and of different tumour stages, studies based on these methods led to the definition of pathways involved in gene network reorganisation upon oncogenes’ mutations and tumour progression, often converging on immune system signalling. A relevant implementation still lagging behind is the integration of different data types, which would greatly improve network interpretability. Most importantly, performance and predictivity evaluation of the large variety of mathematical models proposed would urgently require experimental validations and systematic comparisons. We believe that future work on differential gene co-expression networks, complemented with additional omics data and experimentally tested, will considerably improve our insights into the biology of tumours.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 717-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID DWAN

Intellectual historians often invoke “romanticism” to account for the origins and conceptual shape of nationalism. In an Irish context, however, this approach has yielded false genealogies of influence and an impaired political understanding. Cast through a “romantic” prism, nationalism is divorced from its conditions of intelligibility, becoming unhelpfully isolated from questions about sovereignty, democratic legitimacy and the nature of modern citizenship. Thus all too often the irrationality that is made part of the definition of “romantic nationalism” is a function of the way that it is interpreted.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Cuneyt Demir ◽  
Mehmet Takkac

<p>Awareness of language or language competency has greatly changed from the focus of language itself as form and structure to language use as pragmatics. Accordingly, it is widely accepted that different cultures structure discourse in different ways. Moreover, studies have shown that this holds for discourse genres traditionally considered as highly standardized in their rituals and formulas. Taking inspiration from such studies, this paper employs a corpus-based approach to examine variations of the apology and thanking strategies used in English and Italian. First the apology itself as a form of social action is closely analyzed and then thanking. This study also pays special attention on analyzing and contrasting apology and thanking strategies in American English and in Italian in terms of Marion Owen’s remedial strategies (Owen, 1983), and Olshtain &amp; Cohen’s semantic formulas in the apology speech act set (Olshtain &amp; Cohen, 1983). The purpose of the study is not only to compare apology and thanking speech acts but to also learn their contextual use. The findings suggest that the status and role of the situation affect the speakers’ choice of apology and thanking strategies, and semantic formulas are of great importance.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gessiane Picanço

Mundurukú, a Tupian language of Brazil, exhibits two opposite scenarios. On one extreme, there is Mundurukú do Pará, the language of daily communication in the Mundurukú Indigenous Land, with fluent speakers found across all generations and still acquired by children as a mother tongue. On the other extreme, there is Mundurukú do Amazonas, formerly spoken in the Kwatá-Laranjal Indigenous Land, but whose inhabitants have shifted to Portuguese. A group of Mundurukú students from Amazonas decided to initiate a process of language revitalisation as a way to strengthen the community's ethnic and cultural identity. This paper reports the initial stages of language planning, and includes future actions to promote language use in the homes and communities, assessement of language proficiency, and definition of educational programs to teach Mundurukú in local schools.


2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-192
Author(s):  
Rita Akele Twumasi

Death is part of human existence. When a person hears the news of someone’s death, it is very common for that person to express their feelings about it. This feeling is in the form of condolences which express the speaker’s sorrow, and condolences fall into the category of speech act. Semantically, condolences have a social meaning which refers to language use. Identities are created in relationships with others, and condolences are major platforms for the construction of identities, in that, existing relationships are, clearly, manifested in the messages that sympathizers expressed. Using a qualitative approach, the study analyzed twenty condolence messages which were purposely sampled from condolence messages posted in the portals of International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), when one of its members passed away. The analysis of the data revealed two main identity types enacted for the deceased: role identity and Social Identity. The major Role identity enacted, metaphorically, was Father while the least role was Achiever. Second, identity as an International Figure was dominant with the Social roles, but Good Personality was used less frequently. The present study adds to studies in identity construction, in general, and studies in condolence messages, in specific.


2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (7) ◽  
pp. 761-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. I. Prokhorov ◽  
V. I. Dontsov ◽  
Vyacheslav N. Krutko ◽  
T. M. Khodykina

The widespread formation of unfavorable environmental, the swiftness of modern life with large information and psycho-emotional loads and extremely natural and climatic cataclysms, as well as harmful addictions and wrong way of life of modern human, lead to the development of stress and disruption of the mechanisms of adaptation of the human body and its accelerated wear. This stimulates the development of research on the creation of new methods of integrated assessment of health and quantitative assessment of the aging processes of the body systems and the whole body, as well as the possibilities of new methods of risk assessment of climatic and environmentally related pathological and age-related diseases. The aim of the work was to consider the methodology of quantitative assessment of individual health and the rate of aging of the human body on the basis of the system index of Biological age (BA); description of its essence and structure, requirements for tests - biomarkers of aging used as the index of BA, definition of possibilities and scope of application of the BA method in modern practice of Biomedicine. The use of modern methods of scientific analysis - a systematic approach to the analysis of the processes of human aging and determine its quantitative side - the value of BA, allows a reasonable approach to the choice of the number of BM, to take into account their information content and precision, and the cost of diagnostics and availability for different users, to take into account the specific objectives of the researcher. The use of the index-partial BA allows individual approaching the choice of biomarkers and create personalized panels for the definition of BA programs for the prevention of aging in personalized preventive medicine. The complexity of the content and calculation of indices of BA requires automation and the use of methods of modern computer science and computer calculations and programs. For this purpose, we have created special computer software for diagnosing aging by calculating the BA indices with the possibility of choosing BM and automatic calculation of indicators and conclusions.


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