«¿Y si empezamos por arriba a la derecha?» The Functioning of Proposals in Task-Oriented Dialogues in Spanish and Italian

Within the field of Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, the analysis on the working of the linguistic act of proposing in Spanish and Italian hasn’t attracted enough attention if compared to other acts such as, among others, requests, invitations, refusals and compliments. In this study we approach this topic starting from the hypothesis that two languages that are perceived to be close from a cultural perspective should activate similar pragmatic strategies when proposing something. Through the analysis of 16 pragmatically oriented conversations we will see that, along the lines of previous studies, Italian and Spanish speakers activate slightly different strategies when formulating a proposal despite the starting point.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics on Lexical Cohesion in President Obama’s and President Buhari’s Inaugural Speeches

Numerous studies have revealed how Lexical Cohesion supported the fulfilment of political leaders’ persuasion intention in their rhetoric. The purpose of this study was to cross-culturally explore President Obama’s and President Buhari’s Inaugural Speeches to examine the impact of culture on the persuasive functions of Lexical Cohesion in their rhetoric. Therefore, while drawing on Pragmatics, the study adopted a qualitative discourse analysis approach, utilised an eclectic framework of Lexical Cohesion based on Hoey (1991), Martin (1992) and Eggins (2004) to analyse Obama’s and Buhari’s first inaugural speeches. The findings indicate, on one hand, that although Obama deployed more categories and more frequencies of Lexical Cohesion than Buhari did, ‘Repetition’ (50%) was the most dominant source of Lexical Cohesion in each of the two speeches. Moreover, the most reiterated item in the two speeches were personal pronouns, where Obama mostly repeated the pronoun ‘we’, which had inclusive function, and Buhari mostly repeated ‘I’ and the exclusive ‘we’. On the other hand, the findings suggest that Obama utilised Lexical Cohesion mainly for ‘emotional appeals’, ‘audience involvement’, and ‘credibility-building strategies’; while Buhari used Lexical Cohesion for ‘emphasizing his (and his team’s) personal commitment’, ‘building his credibility’, and ‘demonizing past administrations’. Finally, in the light of these findings, the study has drawn two major conclusions: (1) that on the preponderance of repetition of personal pronouns in both the two speeches, the findings suggest that the generic conventions of the use of personalised English in the inaugural address outweigh any culture-specific discourse practices of the two communities; (2) that Obama’s strategies of emotional appeals and audience involvement that enabled him to ‘speak along with his audience’, which contrast with Buhari’s strategies of emphasizing personal commitment and audience-exclusive tone that made him to ‘speak alone’, seem to have rendered Obama’s speech more interactional and more audience-engaging than Buhari’s speech.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

This book provides a cutting-edge introduction to cross-cultural pragmatics, a field encompassing the study of language use across linguacultures. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics is relevant for a variety of fields, such as pragmatics, applied linguistics, language learning and teaching, translation, intercultural communication and sociolinguistics. Written by two leading scholars in the field, this book offers an accessible overview of cross-cultural pragmatics, by providing insights into the theory and practice of systematically comparing language use in different cultural contexts. The authors provide a ground-breaking, language-anchored, strictly empirical and replicable framework applicable for the study of different datatypes and situations. The framework is illustrated with case studies drawn from a variety of linguacultures, such as English, Chinese, Japanese and German. In these case studies, the reader is provided with contrastive analyses of language use in important contexts such as globalised business, politics and classrooms. This book is essential reading for both academics and students.

Compliment responses in Hong Kong: an application of Leech’s pragmatics of politeness

This paper focusses on compliment responses in the context of group undergraduate student projects, in a university in Hong Kong. It applies Geoffrey Leech’s model of politeness. Although less well known than some other politeness models, it has proved relatively popular in studies of compliment responses, which are often said to involve a clash between the Maxim of Agreement (achieved by agreeing with the complimenter) and the Maxim of Modesty (achieved by mitigating the compliment, thereby disagreeing with the complimenter). This study deploys Leech’s most recent work on politeness in the study of compliment responses. Using an innovative variant of the discourse completion task adapted to WhatsApp to collect text messages and metapragmatic comments from undergraduate students in Hong Kong on their messages, it reveals that acceptance strategies are overwhelmingly the most frequent type. This finding adds to the small body of work on compliment responses in Hong Kong cultures, and, more generally, to cross-cultural pragmatics studies on compliment responses. However, the interpretation of this result needs to attend to the detail. The key specific acceptance strategy in our data is the expression of gratitude, and this, we argue, is best accounted for through the Maxim of Obligation, a maxim proposed in Leech’s more recent work.

Audience Agency in Social Performance

Cultural pragmatics is a fruitful analytic tradition in sociology. However, theoretical use of this six-element model has largely focused on actors. Despite fusion’s definition as a product made between actor, audience, and text, the audience has been treated as a passive abstraction. Further, there is no methodical way to parse out the performative actions of the actor from those of the audience in a way that reveals the substantive similarities and differences that comprise fusion or de-fusion. This article seeks a solution via a rigorous theorization of the audience in cultural pragmatics, and argues that they are the sole arbiters of performative outcome. In their arbitration, audiences become performers themselves; they perform fusion or de-fusion in dialogic relation back to the actor, and to other audience members around them. With illustrations from US Senator Bernie Sanders’ political rise over the last decade, this process is visualized with a new analytic tool – arcs of fusion – so as to better trace varying trajectories of performative outcome.

A Pragmatic-Based Approach to Translation: Mi Dai?/Dammi! And Дай! In the Parallel Russian-Italian Corpus

This essay focusses on how the knowledge of cross-cultural pragmatics can provide a theoretical background for the translation practice, especially in the search for equivalent functions. This study concentrates on the Russian and the Italian languages and on the speech act of requesting, in that not only is request amongst the most frequent speech acts, but also it is realised in different ways in the two target languages. In particular, whereas imperative is a common strategy used in Russian requests, its presence is restricted to informal bilateral requests in the Italian-speaking contexts. In order to investigate how the imperative is distributed in requests translated from Russian into Italian and vice versa, and whether such translations are appropriate from a pragmatic perspective, in our study we have analysed the occurrences of the imperative request “give (me)!” in Russian (дай!) and Italian (dammi!) in the parallel Russian-Italian corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language.

TINDAK TUTUR EKSPRESIF DALAM TALKSHOW “SARAH SECHAN” DAN “THE ELLEN DEGENERES SHOW”: KAJIAN PRAGMATIK LINTAS BUDAYA

Language really helps human to express and share their life especially on media; language is becoming the tool to attract the listeners’ or audiences’ attention. This study focused on the use of expressive speech acts used by the talk show hosts of “Sarah Sechan” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” (two different hosts from Indonesia and from America). The research aimed to identify the similarity and the difference of expressive speech acts used by both hosts with the same topic through cross-cultural pragmatics point of view. The research used a qualitative descriptive method. The result showed that the host of Sarah Sechan talk show is considered friendlier due to the fact that the host used expressive speect acts and praised the guest more often than the host of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Systemic genre-and-style relations in the english-language student academic essay: paradigmatics, sintagmatics, epidigmatics

This work is focused on the problem of genre specificity within the English language academic discourse of today. The goal of the research is to reveal and analyze system relations regularly and steadily showing themselves within one definite genre of the student essay, their significance and role in the official university communicative space. The abovesaid relations can be found at both the structural level, i.e. in the special text arrangement of essays, and at the conceptual level of the genre. The basic investigation methods are: interpretation and classification of the material; linguistic observation and description; componential analysis of dictionary definitions; comparison and contrasting; linguistic, functional and stylistic, genre analysis of the text; context and discourse analysis; argumentative illustration tool. The practical value can be viewed as a possibility to apply the investigation results in teaching; e.g. during the courses of English, language culture studies, linguadidactics, cross-cultural pragmatics. The authors conclude that student essay text demonstrate closely interweaving paradigmatic, syntagmatic and epidigmatic links. Paradigmatics is represented by semantic and conceptual categories of systemity, integrity, cohesion and closeness. Discourse syntagmatic categories are characterized by linguosemantic consistency, linearity, remoteness, parallelism. Epidigmatic systemity can be traced as the availability of derivative words.

The dynamic specificity of interlingual interference within the context of virtual space: towards the theoretical framework of the phenomenon (by the example of political discourse)

This paper deals with the problem of interference within the context of language convergence in virtual space. The study aims to analyze in detail the role of virtual space communication as a new favorable environment for interferential processes not just on the structural level, on the conceptual level too, since deviation from language norms as a serving instrument in terms of formation of the linguistic picture of the world results in changing the way one conceptualizes reality. The major research methods are contrastive analysis and conceptual analysis. The practical significance of the research is determined by the fact that its results can be used in the educational process, for example, when teaching various courses in intercultural communication, political psychology, sociology, cultural and contact linguistics, (foreign) language teaching, cross-cultural pragmatics, etc. The authors come to a conclusion that significant modifications on the conceptual level occur due to language contacts intensification and because of a stable interference pattern in speech and affect communicants’ behavior. This in turn leads to conceptual transformation in language and, as a result, in the way of thinking. The most significant manifestation of this phenomenon can be seen in the political life of the society.