A pragmatic analysis of humour strategies and functions in 'Jenifa's Diary' and 'Professor JohnBull'

Studies on humour in Nigeria have been extensively carried out from the perspectives of stand-up comedy and computer-mediated communication. There is a dearth of scholarly enquiries on humour in situation comedies (sitcoms). This paper investigates humour in the interactions of characters in Jenifa’s Diary and Professor JohnBull, with a view to accounting for the manifestations of humour, the humour strategies deployed and the functions that the humorous utterances serve in the sitcoms. The work is situated in Culpeper’s Impoliteness Theory. Eight excerpts from the sitcoms were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Two discourse functions of amusing and castigating are discovered in the data. The former serves the function of facilitating discourse and changing presumed power and status, while the latter serves the function of maintaining one’s own space and autonomy, and demanding respect. Allusion, parody, retort, tease, banter and putdown are the humour techniques employed in the sitcoms. The study corroborates the claim of earlier studies that humour in every sphere of language use serves certain functions beyond the interactional need to create amusement.

RECURRENT LEXIS AND PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH RESTAURANT REVIEWS: A DATA-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of recurrent vocabulary and phraseologyin written English food discourse. More specifi cally, it focuses on the use and discourse functions of keywords, key multi-word terms and lexical bundles in a specialized corpus comprising 200 professional restaurant reviews that were published in online editions of selected British and American newspapers. The results of the study indicate that the most distinctive lexical feature of the analyzed texts is the frequent mention of ingredients and the limited presence of stance devices. The most frequently mentioned aspects of the referential content also show that what is evaluated is the total experience of eating and dining at a restaurant. These fi ndings contribute to the area of English forSpecific Purposes, off ering pedagogical potential that can be exploited when developing purpose-made teaching materials for students in food-related programs who need to learn the specialized vocabulary of their target profession.

A Comparison of Two Genres: Lexical Bundles in the Discourse of Applied Linguistics

The present article is a corpus-based descriptive/comparative study of lexical bundles (LBs) in two university genres: textbooks (TBs) and research articles (RAs) on applied linguistics. It aims to identify the LBs used in the two genres, compare them on the basis of their functional type and frequency and explore how they are related to genre. To this end, four-word LBs were identified in two corpora drawn from applied linguistics TBs and RAs. The comparative analysis revealed that there are interesting differences between the two genres in terms of discourse functions: the occurrence of LBs in the TBs was lower than in the RAs; attitudinal/modality LBs occurred more frequently in the TBs than in the RAs; epistemic LBs occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; discourse organizers occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; and time, place and text reference LBs occurred almost twice as frequently in the RAs. The findings build on research into the variations of genres in terms of the use and functions of LBs in discipline-specific corpora.

Responsibly Engaged: Ideology and Utopia along the Backpacker Trail

<p>By following the backpacker trail beyond the 'tourist bubble,' travellers invest in the ideals of freedom, engagement, and responsibility. Backpacker discourse foregrounds travellers' freedom to mobility as it constructs the world as 'tourable'; engagement is demonstrated in the search for 'authentic' connections with cultural Others, beyond the reach of globalised capitalism; responsibility is shouldered by yearning to improve the lives of these Others, through capitalist development. While backpackers frequently question the attainability of these ideals, aspiring to them reveals a desire for a world that is open, diverse, and egalitarian. My perspective is framed by Fredric Jameson's reading of the interrelated concepts of ideology and utopia. While backpacker discourse functions ideologically to reify and obscure global inequalities, to entrench free market capitalism, and to limit the imagining of alternatives, it also figures for a utopian world in which such ideology is not necessary. Using this approach, I attempt to undertake critique of backpacker ideology without invalidating its utopian content, while seeking to reveal its limits. Overall, I suggest that late-capitalism subsumes utopian desires for a better way of living by presenting itself as the solution. This leaves backpackers feeling stranded, seeking to escape the ills of capitalism, via capitalism.</p>

Responsibly Engaged: Ideology and Utopia along the Backpacker Trail

<p>By following the backpacker trail beyond the 'tourist bubble,' travellers invest in the ideals of freedom, engagement, and responsibility. Backpacker discourse foregrounds travellers' freedom to mobility as it constructs the world as 'tourable'; engagement is demonstrated in the search for 'authentic' connections with cultural Others, beyond the reach of globalised capitalism; responsibility is shouldered by yearning to improve the lives of these Others, through capitalist development. While backpackers frequently question the attainability of these ideals, aspiring to them reveals a desire for a world that is open, diverse, and egalitarian. My perspective is framed by Fredric Jameson's reading of the interrelated concepts of ideology and utopia. While backpacker discourse functions ideologically to reify and obscure global inequalities, to entrench free market capitalism, and to limit the imagining of alternatives, it also figures for a utopian world in which such ideology is not necessary. Using this approach, I attempt to undertake critique of backpacker ideology without invalidating its utopian content, while seeking to reveal its limits. Overall, I suggest that late-capitalism subsumes utopian desires for a better way of living by presenting itself as the solution. This leaves backpackers feeling stranded, seeking to escape the ills of capitalism, via capitalism.</p>

The Diversity of Classifier Inventory in Mandarin Dialects: A Case Study of Baoding

Our study compares Standard Mandarin (the Beijing dialect used in spoken and written registers) with the Mandarin dialect of Baoding (one of the Mandarin dialects belonging to the Jì-lŭ Mandarin group, Hebei-Shandong). Standard Mandarin and Baoding are geographically and phylogenetically closely related, but they differ in terms of their classifier system, as Standard Mandarin resorts to a wide array of sortal classifiers whereas Baoding only uses one general classifier. We first provide a detailed analysis of the unconventional classifier system in Baoding. Then, we compare the lexical and discourse functions of sortal classifiers in Standard Mandarin and Baoding. We show that Standard Mandarin does present a certain level of convergence with its geographical neighbour Baoding. However, these varieties also display significant divergences, as several lexical and discourse functions typically associated with classifier systems cannot be fulfilled by the only classifier found in Boading.

A preliminary description of mood in Welsh

In this paper we propose a functional account of the Welsh mood system, focussing on responsives in particular. The discourse functions of responsives are interpreted through the concept of negotiation within the systemic functional linguistic framework, which offers a rich model for accounting for both initiations and responses, including possible tracking and challenging moves. By examining the interaction of mood together with specific features of Welsh, e.g. a dominant VSO clause ordering, mood particles, Subject ellipsis and a complex system of negation, we are able to show that Welsh tends to highlight interpersonal meanings in clause initial position. As the first functional description of Welsh, we also set out important directions for future research, based on the findings presented in this paper.

“Bear in mind that”: Enhancing lecture comprehension through signaling importance markers

The present study attempts to propose a taxonomy for the discourse functions of importance markers in English academic lectures and examine their effects on ESL learners’ comprehension of important points in lectures. To this end, a corpus of 160 lecture transcripts from the BASE corpus was analyzed to identify and classify the main functions of words and expressions that mark importance in them. It was found that importance is indicated by the following lecture-specific devices and attributes: 1) student involvements, 2) topic announcers, 3) exam-related markers, 4) discourse clarifiers, 5) hedging markers, and 6) message promoters. A total of 62 Malaysian ESL students (38 females and 24 males) participated in this study and were divided into an experimental group and a control group, both of them of the same size. Through 12 forty-minute sessions of explicit instruction, the participants in the experimental group were instructed the discourse functions of importance markers in university lectures, whereas those in the control group did not receive such instruction. The result of the posttest of comprehension of important points indicated that familiarity with how importance is marked in lectures can boost ESL students’ understanding of main topics. The findings suggest that both novice lecturers and ESL/EFL students may profit from instruction as to how importance is indicated by native speaker lecturers through several lecture-specific discourse functions.

Discourse functions and pitch patterns of the Japanese interactional particle yo in student-professor conversation

Until recently Japanese interactional particles have largely been investigated in various social contexts without paying much attention to intonation. Building on Shimotani (2006) that examined discourse functions and the intonation yo in informal talk among friends, the current study intends to contribute to interactional particle research by analyzing yo in six sets of one-to-one student-professor conversations. The findings demonstrate that the students and professors exhibited different pitch patterns of yo. Students tended to use yo with a falling pitch [+fall] when performing pre-story-telling, and frequently used the n-desu-yo construction. The professor, on the other hand, often used yo [−fall] when providing opinions or advice. These results will be discussed from Ochs’ social constructive discourse approach perspective. The present study concludes that both discourse functions and pitch patterns in interactional particles are important linguistic resources used to construct speakers’ social personae and stance-building. As such, pedagogical implications will be provided.