Annals of Phlebology

Abstract This study investigated the acquisition of English locative inversion at the syntax-pragmatics interface by Chinese learners, and explored the factors for non-native performance within the framework of the Interface Hypothesis. A picture description test and a context-matching test were administered through an online questionnaire to 300 Chinese learners of English and twenty native speakers of English at a university in China. Follow-up interviews were conducted with thirty Chinese learners. Results showed that (1) compared with English natives, Chinese learners under-produced locative inversion, achieving native-like attainment until the advanced stage; (2) they also displayed a different preference pattern for locative inversion, converging to a native-like pattern by the advanced stage; (3) non-native performance in production was attributed to processing limitations and input frequency, while that in interpretation resulted from underspecification of form-function mapping, input frequency and contexts. The paper offers implications for syntax-pragmatics teaching and proposes future directions for L2 interface studies.

Abstract This case study of twelve videos of Spanish YouTubers explores emotional language within influencer marketing. Special consideration is given to whether hedonic values were prevalent in the emotionally charged evaluations without neglecting the utilitarian values involved. The analysis of this interdisciplinary study reveals that most of the evaluations, the majority of which were directed toward feeling products, were generally positive. Expressions were categorized into different overlapping reasons, reflecting the co-occurrence of both hedonic and utilitarian rational values. Nonetheless, a general correlation can be established between hedonic values and feeling products, and between utilitarian values and thinking products. Furthermore, the YouTubers consistently employed the same linguistic and lexical patterns throughout the observed data, giving the impression of a rather spontaneous way of speaking in these videos. The videos were characterized by a certain amateurism on a discursive level, but with some features of professionalization particularly in the case of thinking products.

Abstract This research studies a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes the macro- and microstructure of their emails and their pragmatic competence. In order to study the features and context adequacy of their communication, a corpus of 135 emails written by fourth-year students was analysed to identify the uses and preferences concerning subject lines and opening and closing moves, and to investigate the uses and functions of strategies related to disagreement in their communication to a faculty member. Our results have reflected the obstacles that the vast majority of students manifest in the use of Spanish when it comes to adequately achieving their communicative purpose in a given context. Data also proved that the emails analysed were inappropriate due to insufficient mitigation, lack of acknowledgement of the imposition involved and lack of status-congruent language.

Abstract The present study explores how text-image cohesion is achieved in a dataset of thirty-seven political ads in the playlist “Why we are voting Biden-Harris,” which is part of the 2020 Biden for President Campaign. A further objective is to analyze how multimodal cohesion contributes to persuasion in political campaign ads. Using methods from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Hasan 1976) and multimodal views of cohesion (Tseng 2013; Bateman 2014), both quantitative and qualitative results are obtained. The quantitative results reveal that most cohesive types are of the lexical type, followed by referential, conjunction, ellipsis, and substitution. Also, the visual and verbal chains outnumber the audio chains and, thus, they are responsible for cohesion in the ads. The qualitative results show that multimodal cohesion is a powerful tool for supporting persuasion in political campaigns by appealing to emotions, a hypothetical future, rationality, voices of expertise, and altruism (Reyes 2011).

Abstract The Gricean GCI-PCI divide has long been questioned in linguistic pragmatics. Taking Chinese méimù in the CCL corpus as the case, the present study proposes the cognition-pragmatics diachronic model to examine Grice’s GCI-PCI divide. It is found that with the frequency of repeated usage increasing over time, PCIs develop into GCIs; these two types of conversational implicatures are not easily divided. Semantic change from PCIs to GCIs is a dynamic process of cognition from individual entrenchment to collective conventionalization. By schematization and categorization, the former gradually builds an individual’s knowledge network with many entrenched PCI nodes, while the latter is reflected as sharing some parts of the individual’s knowledge network in the collective minds, i.e., the community’s knowledge network with some conventionalized GCI nodes, further forming socio-cultural conventions in a speech community. During this process, there is a division of labor between context and conventions. Therefore, the diachronic study sheds new light on the relationship between GCIs and PCIs.

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that subjective elements emerge in the initial position of an utterance, known as the left periphery, whereas intersubjective elements typically emerge in the final position, referred to as the right periphery. However, this functional asymmetry is not invariably maintained. This study advances the argument that the discourse marker well can serve a dual purpose, simultaneously expressing both a speaker’s subjectivity and intersubjectivity at the outset of an utterance, specifically on the left periphery. Essentially, well indexes the speaker’s subjectivity mediated through intersubjectivity. Additionally, the study explores the intricate relationship between intersubjectivity and the textual function of well as a discourse marker. This study reveals that intersubjective functions can contribute to the development of textual functions.

Abstract Social media discourse is characterized by the post-truth phenomenon, in which feelings and personal beliefs appear to exert greater influence on shaping public opinions than truth. In such cases, the truth of news may be blurred and reported events are often reversed along revelations of the facts. Reverse news on social media is, in a sense, a typical instance of post-truth discourse. This study attempts to provide a corpus-based description of attitude appraisal and illocutionary acts in reverse news on social media, with the aim of investigating semantic and pragmatic properties of post-truth discourse. The corpora for this study consist of social media posts in Chinese and English about a defamation lawsuit, which were collected from Weibo and Facebook. The results indicate that the English corpus emphasizes the use of appreciations and judgments with more complex co-occurring relations among three attitudinal domains while the Chinese corpus contains more judgments than appreciations and affects. Meanwhile, both corpora exhibit higher frequencies of assertives and expressives than the other acts, yet the Chinese corpus presents more complicated illocutionary act sequences than the English corpus. After the verdict, the frequencies of both attitude appraisal and illocutionary acts decrease in the Chinese corpus but increase in the English corpus. Based on this, we propose that the development of post-truth discourse may go through three functional stages: starting with expression, progressing to appeal, and ending with representation. The sequence of these stages may vary depending on sociocultural contexts.

Abstract Drawing on Relevance Theory, the paper sketches out a framework that accounts for inference-making in creative multimodal texts, taking advocacy campaign posters as its case study. The analysis shows that in each poster semiotic resources are employed to create a micro-narrative exemplifying actors affected by a sociopolitical problem, whose function is to create assumptions against which a higher-order intention is recognized. The text-internal relevance within the micro-narrative is optimized by combining verbal and visual elements to communicate multimodal explicatures and implicatures. The visual elements are employed to invoke non-propositional effects that activate perceptual mechanisms to maximize emotional attachment with the issue advocated for. These non-propositional effects communicated by visual connotation carriers are essential, rather than extra, elements, contributing to the understanding of the propositional meaning communicated at the text-external level. The analysis shows that an inferential approach to multimodality is indispensable to account for (non)propositional content across different modes.

Abstract The present research aims to uncover cross-linguistic differences (involving British English and Italian), as well as cross-gender differences (men and women) concerning use and preference of strategies and pragmatic modification, in verbal disagreements. The analysis of spontaneous conversations from the Spoken BNC2014 corpus (McEnery et al. 2017), for the English sample, and from the KIParla corpus (Goria and Mauri 2018), for the Italian sample, has brought to light divergences in the realization of disagreements, both at the cross-linguistic and at the cross-gender level. Methodologically speaking, models of analysis used for past empirical studies (Muntigl and Turnbull 1998; Rees-Miller 2000; Johnson 2006; Paramasivam 2007) were drawn from for the annotation and codification of strategies and pragmatic modifiers. Results obtained from quantitative analyses are explained in the light of previous research findings, although the latter are partially disconfirmed and thus call for further future investigations.

Abstract Studies on communication in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) have shown that the immersive qualities of VR — the sense of presence, and a sense of embodiment through increasingly realistic motion tracking and avatars — have an impact on verbal communicative interactions in the new medium. Misunderstandings and moments of linguistic creativity are observable, and many of them revolve around ambivalent locations, doubled ‘bodies’, and issues while coordinating attention, i.e.: they concern deixis. This paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis of deictic terms in verbal interactions in SVR. It demonstrates that the unusual communicative circumstances in immersive VR directly affect a speaker’s origo, the deictic zero-point of orientation in space and time. This paper concludes that the term blended origo may serve as an analytical concept to understand deixis while SVR users communicatively interact in two ‘realities’ simultaneously.

Abstract This paper explores the semantics and pragmatics of the Hebrew word shahid (שהיד). Because this word was borrowed from Arabic, its meaning is compared to that of Arabic shahīd (شهيد) ‘roughly, martyr.’ Using corpus analysis and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method, the meaning of the Hebrew loan word is explicated, and its explication is compared to that of Arabic shahīd. The two explications demonstrate that the differences between the two words are greater than the similarities. Consequently, when Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs use the words interchangeably, intercultural miscommunication is highly likely to occur.

Abstract Using conversation analysis as the research method, this article investigates what participants do with the multiple saying duì duì duì (‘right right right’) when they take divergent positions in Mandarin Chinese conversation. A participant may deploy duì duì duì to claim recalibrating understanding, which indexes a backdown or withdrawal from a previously-taken position. There are two trajectories to make such concessions. One is “Claim X — Concession (duì duì duì) — Claim Y”, with Y taking the co-participant’s perspective into account and duì duì duì serving as a pivot for the new Claim Y. The other is “Claim X — Concession (duì duì duì)”, in which conceding means abandoning. Through these trajectories, participants find out something different and implicate that their prior action is problematic due to not taking something into account, so they concede and change. This article will contribute to both concession and multiple sayings studies.

Abstract A fundamental aspect of psychotherapeutic conversation is the joint work of therapist and patient on articulating something previously hidden or repressed. If the patient refuses to comply with the therapist’s questions or suggestions, such cooperative work is limited. A possible non-cooperative response by the patient is the claim of not-knowing. This study examines conversation analytically, using video recordings of German-speaking outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapies, how patients express two different claims of not-knowing (German ich weiß nicht (‘I don’t know’) and keine Ahnung (‘no idea’)) as a response to a question. The analysis results in four different functions: refusing to answer, indexing difficulties, projecting continuation, and disconfirming, which can only be determined by means of the context and not the structure of ich weiß nicht or keine Ahnung. Some of the outlined functions might be context-specific for (psychodynamic) psychotherapy.

Abstract News discourse comes along with the presumption of newsworthiness, and this also holds for one of its constitutive parts: headlines. This paper adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective to the formatting and discursive function of quotation headlines in the printed British quality press. It addresses (1) the constitutive parts and felicity conditions of quotation; (2) its linguistic formatting as direct, indirect, scare, mixed and mixed type, and its signalling with metadata, and (3) its uptake and (re)contextualisation in the news story. In the data, quotation headlines are signalled linguistically with quotatives and typographically with single quotation marks, colons or empty spaces. Their uptake in the news story is signalled with double typographic quotation marks and supplemented with metadata (participants, local, temporal and discursive coordinates). As for their discursive functions, quotations not only import context into the news discourse, but their mention also implies that some prior, taken-for-granted contextualisation requires re-negotiation.

Abstract Culture can influence how people communicate and the reasons behind linguistic choices. However, the evaluative process has been mostly neglected, particularly in comparative studies. This paper aims to fill this gap. It compares how two sets of participants, Italian and British-English speakers, rated own/others’ performances in roleplays involving different request scenarios and it unpacks how their perceptions of sociopragmatic variables, such as social distance and request’s weight, influenced their evaluation process. Follow-up retrospective interviews were employed and content-analysed, to unpack participants’ evaluations. The results showed cross-cultural differences in importance, interpretation and expectations attached to different variables and underlying values.