THE LECTURER-STUDENT CONVERSATIONAL STRUCTURE IN PRAGMATICS LEARNING INTERACTION

This study aims to describe the structure of the lecturer-student conversation in the interaction of Pragmatics Class. This type of research is descriptive qualitative. The technique of data collection is done by recording and note-taking techniques. The data analysis technique is carried out by heuristic techniques. The results of the study show that the interaction of the lecturer and the students in Pragmatics Class have conversational structures: 1) turn taking of speech that occurs because of the opportunity to speak, 2) pauses (long and short) that occur due to the absence of feedback in the form of speech and speakers feel hesitant in conveying the message. 3) Overlaps that occur due to speech or the use of the same lingual element, 4) backchannels that occur because there is understanding and acceptance or approval of the speech, and 5) adjunct pairs that occur because of greetings, questions, and requests. This indicates that the process of the lecturer-students interaction runs well. The students feel enthusiastic for responding the lecturer’s questions.

A functional discourse approach to the particle ἀτάρ in Classical Greek

Taking into consideration both discourse structure and the pragmatics of contrast, this paper draws on Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) to provide a comprehensive and unified account of ἀτάρ in Classical Greek. In classical Greek drama, the particle ἀτάρ designates two main types of contrast. In its most common usage, it marks a discourse contrast, a boundary in conversational structure, such as the beginning of a new exchange or adjacency pair. More specifically, ἀτάρ can signal a change of addressee; the introduction of a new topic or new visual focus; or an abrupt thematic discontinuity such as an interruption. Moreover, ἀτάρ can also mark denial of expectation, especially when preceded by a preparatory μέν. When expressing counterexpectation, the particle instructs the addressee to process the next discourse segment in such a way as to contradict or eliminate some piece of information possibly inferred from the preceding segment. Very similarly, the classical prose of Herodotus, Plato and Xenophon shows analogous usages of ἀτάρ, namely, as a boundary between larger portions of discourse with or without thematic discontinuity, or as a marker of denial of expectation between acts and moves.

THE STYLISTIC FUNCTIONS OF REPEATED VERB UNITS IN A SEPARATE TEXT

The article is devoted to the complex study of functional features of verbs and verb lexical-semantic repetitionsin poetic texts M. Bazhan and I. Drach. Advantages of linguopoetic approach, which gives possibility to define, how linguistic unit is included by the author in the process of word-artistic creative work, provides creation of aesthetic effect, structural and semantic integrity of the text is substantiated in the thesis. Linguistic and stylistic approach doesn’t give us comprehensive answers to the question about notional, structural and communicative organization of the text, that is why today they become a prerogative of linguo-poetics and linguistics of text. Taking into account new directions, approaches in modern linguistic science in the last decades, such key concepts as “text”, “poetic text” were specified; advantages of communicative functional approach to its study were specified; constant features of text and text categories were specified; style, idiostyle, idiolect concept was defined. At determining the poetic text, we proceed from the fact that this is a special semiotic system, which has its own laws of formation of self-organization. Decoding the poetic text takes into consideration apertception moments of each word in the works of writer, who, staying within the limits of national-language picture of the world, creates a unique linguistic world according to his world view, his own psychology, philosophy. Let us motivate the use of idiostyle concept, closely connected with the author’s image, which we understand as a “word- conversational structure”, which permeates all work and leads to comprehensive study of literary text. Linguostylistic verb potential as lexicogrammatical word class, which has detailed system of personal-methodical and kindtime morphological forms was analyzed in the work; figurative and expressive features of verbal categories of manner, time, kind and person were tracked in the poetic texts of M. Bazhan and I. Drach; certain writers’ priorities in use of one or another verbal form were revealed. An important means of actualization of poetic content, dynamization of descriptive world, which assists the reader to focus attention on one or another reality, actions, feelings, and provides a link between the parts of the text, is repetition. Decoding of the poetic texts of M. Bazhan and I. Drach provided considering different apperception moments of verbal repetition.

Towards New Standards? Interaction Patterns of German Political Journalists in the Twittersphere

Research has provided few findings on the patterns of communication and interaction between political and media actors in social media and how these interactions have evolved. The present study analyzes how journalists registered in the German Federal Press Conference interact with members of the German Bundestag (member of parliament) on Twitter and what type of content they exchange with each other. Based on two time periods (2016, 2020), the communicative practices and the patterns of interactions are examined. New insights into the conversational structure are generated through a combination of content and network analysis. The results indicate a trend in the use of Twitter among the actors as a political opinion medium. While the dissemination of opinions among politicians remains stable, journalists use Twitter interactions more to express a subjective and critical view and less for news coverage over time. Furthermore, the analysis notes that journalists generally comment in negative terms on the parties, except for the Greens. To some extent, the results indicate that the usual journalistic norms of objectivity and balance do not apply for interactions in the Twittersphere. To evaluate whether this pattern also applies to other countries, more comparative investigations in the domain of media–politics interactions on Twitter are needed.

Language over time

This paper demonstrates how the tools of Interactional Linguistics can be applied to the study of change in language use. It examines the particle OKAY as used in everyday American English interaction at two different points in time, the 1960s and the 1990s/early 2000s. The focus is on the remarkable increase of OKAY as a response in epistemically driven sequences. Three uses of epistemic OKAY are identified in the newer data, one of which is unattested in the older data: OKAY in response to information that has no implications for the recipient’s agenda or expressed beliefs. This novel use of OKAY appears in the newer data where OH would have occurred earlier, although OH is still attested with displays of affect such as surprise and empathy. The study concludes by arguing for an examination of ‘possibility spaces’, the set of options for filling a given sequential slot in conversational structure, at different points in time as a means for identifying changes in language use.

The Structure of Tweets about Vaccine Safety Between Health Organizations, Experts and the Public: Analyzing Risk Communication Conversations

This paper considers how health education organizations in the World Health Organization's Vaccine Safety Network (VSN) use Twitter to communicate about vaccines with the public, and whether they answer questions and engage in conversations. Almost no research in public health, to our knowledge, has explored conversational structure on social media among posts sent by different accounts. Starting with 1,017,176 tweets by relevant users, we constructed two corpuses of multi-tweet conversations. The first was 1,814 conversations that included VSN members directly, while the second was 2,283 conversations mentioning vaccines or vaccine denialism. The tweets and user metadata was then analyzed using an adaptation of Rhetorical Structure Theory. In the studied data, VSN members tweeted 12,677 times within conversations, compared to their 37,587 lone tweets. Their conversations were shorter than those in the comparison corpus (P < 0.0001), and they were involved in fewer multilogues (P < 0.0001). We also see that while there is diversity among organizations, most were tied to the pre-social-media broadcast model. In the future, they should try to converse more, rather than tweet more, and embrace best-practices in risk-communication.

Other-repetition in conversation across languages: Bringing prosody into pragmatic typology

In this article, I introduce the aims and scope of a project examining other-repetition in natural conversation. This introduction provides the conceptual and methodological background for the five language-specific studies contained in this special issue, focussing on other-repetition in English, Finnish, French, Italian, and Swedish. Other-repetition is a recurrent conversational phenomenon in which a speaker repeats all or part of what another speaker has just said, typically in the next turn. Our project focusses particularly on other-repetitions that problematise what is being repeated and typically solicit a response. Previous research has shown that such repetitions can accomplish a range of conversational actions. But how do speakers of different languages distinguish these actions? In addressing this question, we put at centre stage the resources of prosody—the nonlexical acoustic-auditory features of speech—and bring its systematic analysis into the growing field of pragmatic typology—the comparative study of language use and conversational structure. (Repetition, conversation, prosody, pragmatics, typology)*

Repeating responses as a conversational affordance for linguistic transmission

Given that face-to-face interaction is an important locus for linguistic transmission (Enfield 2008: 297), it is argued in this paper that conversational structure must provide affordances (Gibson 1979) for transmitting linguistic items. The paper focuses on repeats where an interactant (partially) repeats their interlocutor’s preceding utterance. Repeats are argued to provide affordances for the transmission of innovative and conservative linguistic items by forcing interactants to repeat linguistic material uttered by another person, facilitating production by exploiting priming effects. Moreover, repeats leave room for modification and thereby for actively resisting transmission. In this way, repeats unite the competing forces (Tantucci et al. 2018) of automaticity and creativity. To support this claim, this paper investigates the use of Spanish insertions and alternative variants in utterance-repeat pairs in Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia) conversations. The findings are compatible with a holistic view of language where all linguistic levels are interconnected (Beckner et al. 2009).