Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
Working within the relevance-theoretic paradigm (Sperber & Wilson 1995 [1986]), complemented with the cognitive linguistic approach (Johnson 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980), the paper proposes that politeness is an optional metarepresentation of an “interpersonal attitude” (Haugh 2007:91) that concerns the domain of intentionality. The paper first add...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
The present paper analyzes the influence of gender and culture on speech act performance. Although culture as a factor shaping gender roles can be regarded as being implicitly addressed by the growing number of speech act studies analyzing gender differences in various languages, results from such studies are difficult to compare. This study examin...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
This study explores how middle-class Quiteños respond to certain convivial directives among family and friends that they are unable or unwilling to comply with. It examines some of the strategies which Quiteños employ to deal with the tensions that can arise from two conflicting forces: social pressure and individual wants. Close ties among family ...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
This paper presents a detailed, analytical review of two prominent accounts of off-record indirect speech – Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory (1978/1987) and Pinker and colleagues' Strategic Speaker approach (Pinker 2007; Pinker et al. 2008; Lee and Pinker 2010). We begin by outlining both accounts, aiming to disentangle the theories by explor...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
Listenership (consisting of backchannel feedback) and its effect on intercultural communication were investigated in 30 dyadic conversations in English between Japanese and American participants. The findings of this study demonstrate several differences in how members of each culture used backchannels in terms of frequency, variability, placement,...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
While the dynamics of dialectal codeswitching in the Arabic-speaking context has been the center of much discussion and research, only a few studies have examined the role of socio-pragmatic factors in the code choices of Arabic speakers in everyday interactions. Using Bourdieu's (1977) social capital theory as a general framework, this study exami...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
In this paper, I focus on insinuation as a communicative strategy whereby a speaker intends to make an addressee believe p, but does not want to be held accountable for communicating p. In its micro- or macro-textual format, and in its various degrees of nastiness, insinuation, I claim, is a complex process that presupposes the mind's capability to...
