Ł ! "#! # $ Ł ź ' () - . % & *+,+ / #- "# ź Conference Organizers Chair of Pragmatics, University of Łódź Prof. Piotr Cap strus_pl@yahoo.com (Conference Head) Dr. Iwona Witczak"Plisiecka iw.plisiecka@gmail.com (Intercultural Communication and Speech Actions Session – Head) Dr. Monika Kopytowska Dr. Marta Dynel Book of Abstracts compiled and edited by Iwona Witczak$Plisiecka & Monika Kopytowska Language editor: John Crust Łódź 2010 Contents by Authors PLENARY SPEAKERS: JENS ALLWOOD ...................................................................................... 7 ANITA FETZER ........................................................................................ 8 ROBERT M. HARNISH ............................................................................. 9 KATARZYNA M. JASZCZOŁT ................................................................ 10 JEF VERSCHUEREN ............................................................................... 12 MAGDALENA ANIOŁ ............................................................................. 13 IRINA ARGÜELLES ÁLVAREZ.................................................................... 15 JOANNA BOBIN ........................................................................................ 16 INNOCENT CHILUWA ............................................................................ 17 MICHAEL CHIOU................................................................................... 18 AGNIESZKA CYLUK ................................................................................. 19 ANNA DANIELEWICZ"BETZ .................................................................. 20 GURKAN DOGAN ..................................................................................... 21 MARTA DYNEL ...................................................................................... 23 NURIA DEL CAMPO .................................................................................. 25 MARIA ECONOMIDOU"KOGETSIDIS ..................................................... 27 FEDERICO FARINI ................................................................................. 28 BRUCE FRASER ..................................................................................... 29 LORI FREDERICS ..................................................................................... 30 MICHAL GORAL, ADÁN MARTÍN & JUANI GUERRA ................................... 31 MAGDALENA GÓRNA ............................................................................ 33 GU YUEGUO .......................................................................................... 34 YASMIN H. HANNOUNA......................................................................... 36 AZIRAH HASHIM, & GERHARD LEITNER,............................................ 37 ÁGNES HERCZEG"DELI ........................................................................ 38 MILADA HIRSCHOVA ............................................................................ 39 MARIA JODŁOWIEC .............................................................................. 40 MEHMET KANIK ................................................................................... 41 BEATA KARPIŃSKA"MUSIAŁ ................................................................ 42 LÁSZLÓ IMRE KOMLÓSI ....................................................................... 43 MONIKA KOPYTOWSKA........................................................................ 46 DENNIS KURZON ................................................................................... 47 MARIA IVANA LORENZETTI ................................................................. 48 MARTIN MACURA & ELENA CIPRIANOVA........................................... 50 RADHIKA MAMIDI ................................................................................ 51 MICHEL MEEUWIS ................................................................................ 52 IAMZE MIRAZANASHVILI ..................................................................... 53 GABRIELA MISSIKOVA ......................................................................... 55 KATARZYNA MOLEK"KOZAKOWSKA, ................................................. 57 HADAR NETZ & RON KUZAR ............................................................... 58 MANUEL PADILLA CRUZ ...................................................................... 60 CHRISTINE PAUL................................................................................... 62 AGNIESZKA PAWŁOWSKA .................................................................... 63 JAROSLAV PEREGRIN ........................................................................... 64 MARILYN PLUMLEE .............................................................................. 65 CHRISTIAN PLUNZE .............................................................................. 66 TEODORA POPESCU .............................................................................. 67 NADINE RENTEL ................................................................................... 68 TIMOTHY RINEY ................................................................................... 69 KATARZYNA SANETRA ......................................................................... 70 DANIEL J. SAX ....................................................................................... 71 ANITA SCHRIM ...................................................................................... 72 GUNTER SENFT ..................................................................................... 73 DANICA ŠKARA ..................................................................................... 74 KATARZYNA SZNYCER ......................................................................... 75 MARINA TERKOURAFI .......................................................................... 76 NADINE THIELEMANN .......................................................................... 78 YULIYA VOROTNIKOVA ........................................................................ 79 ANNA WIECZOREK ............................................................................... 80 IWONA WITCZAK"PLISIECKA............................................................... 81 YANG LIANGPING ................................................................................. 83 IGOR Ž. ŽAGAR ...................................................................................... 85 JÖRG ZINKEN & EVA OGIERMANN ...................................................... 86 Abstracts compiled and edited by Iwona Witczak$Plisiecka & Monika Kopytowska Plenary – Intercultural Communication and Speech Actions Jens Allwood SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of Gothenburg jens@ling.gu.se Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication The talk gives an overview of some of the issues to be found in the intersection between studies of pragmatics and intercultural communication. The issues to be dealt with are within the two broad areas of $ interpretation, understanding and intercultural communication $ communicative action, dialog, social activity and intercultural communication In my discussion, I will pay attention to the tension between the universal and the particular as well as the tension between the absolute and the relative. Plenary Anita Fetzer University of Wuerzburg e$mail: anita.fetzer@uni$wuerzburg.de Discourse connectives as speech acts? The question whether a stretch of discourse is primarily pragmatic or semantic has been examined thoroughly for the unit of sentence in Austin’s analysis of constative and performative (Austin 1976). He concluded that ordinary$language sentences are neither true nor false but rather are used to perform speech acts. But is that conclusion also valid for the extended frame of discourse, i.e. is discourse functionally equivalent to a macro speech act composed of concatenated, sequentially organized micro speech acts, whose type of connectedness may be specified further by the overt realization of a discourse connective? Moreover, are discourse connectives functionally equivalent to communicative action? This talk argues for discourse connectives to be assigned the status of a particularized speech act, comprising force and (more or less) content. The argumentation is based on (1) the semantics and pragmatics of discourse connectives, (2) Sbisà’s conceptualization of speech$acts$in$discourse, which are conceived of as “attempts” along the lines of Austin’s notion of uptake and its consequences (Sbisà 1991), and (3) Austin’s conception of expositives (Austin 1976), which “are used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references” (1976:161). Discourse connectives fulfill a somewhat similar function, informing the addressee how a particular piece of discourse is to be taken, how it is related to adjacent discourse units, and what intersubjective positioning the speaker is taking. References Austin, J.L. 1976. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parret, H. & Verschueren, J. (eds.) 1991. (On) Searle on Conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sbisà, M. 1991. Speech acts, effects and responses. In: H. Parret & J. Verschueren (eds.): (On) Searle on Conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 101$111. Plenary – Intercultural Communication and Speech Actions Robert M. Harnish University of Arizona, US harnish@u.arizona.edu Speaking in Fragments We all speak in fragments, maybe not all the time, but more of the time than perhaps we think. Stainton (2006) has argued that this fact has interesting philosophical consequences; Barton (1990) and Merchant (2004) have argued that this fact has far$ reaching linguistic consequences. Despite this, the only systematic study of fragment interpretation is Barton’s “implicature” approach, and the only alternative has been Stainton’s briefer “representational$pragmatic” approach. Harnish (2009) argues that neither Barton’s nor Stainton’s approaches were adequate and that traditional “speech act” theory could help throw light on fragment interpretation. Harnish (2010) began such a project within the general framework of Bach and Harnish (1979). But a number of issues were left for subsequent work. In this presentation I will rehearse the problem of fragments, review the weaknesses of previous theories and outline an alternative speech act approach. Finally, I will take up a selection of questions left open by this work, as well as recent proposals by Hall (2009). References: Bach, K. and R. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, MIT Press. Barton, E. 1990. Nonsentential Constituents, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hall, A. 2009. “Subsentential Utterances, Ellipsis, and Pragmatic Enrichment” Pragmatics and Cognition 17(2): 222$250. Harnish, R. 2009. “The Problem of Fragments”, Pragmatics and Cognition, 17(2): 251$282. Harnish, R. 2010. “Fragments and Speech Acts”. In Iwona Witczak$Plisiecka (ed.), Pragmatic Perspectives in Language and Linguistics: Vol. I: Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies, Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Merchant, J. 2004. “Fragments and Ellipsis” Linguistics and Philosophy 27(6): 661$ 738. Stainton, R. 2006. Words and Thoughts: Subsentences, Ellipsis, and the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plenary Katarzyna M. Jaszczołt University of Cambridge kmj21@cam.ac.uk Grice Revisited: Primary Meaning and Cancellability Among the criteria Grice proposed for identifying conversational implicatures, cancellability is unquestionably the most celebrated one and the one that is often used as the main, obvious test for classifying speaker’s meaning as implicit. Cancellability comprises two separate tests: explicit cancellability in the current context and contextual cancellability in a putative context (Grice 1989: 39$40). The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate that, in spite of the recent criticism (Weiner 2006; Blome$Tillmann 2008), Grice’s cancellability test remains a reliable and effective criterion. I argue here that, in order to refute these objections, instead of viewing these two tests as a conjunction, they should be viewed disjunctively as categorically different tests. The second objective is to employ cancellability for the discussion and delimitation of the primary and secondary meanings vis$à$vis the what is said/implicated distinction. The test is implemented in the current paradigm of contextualism (Recanati 2005), including its arguably most radical variety of Default Semantics (DS) which models primary meaning understood as the main, most salient meaning in so$called merger representations Σ (Jaszczolt 2005, 2009a, 2010). The primary/secondary meaning distinction is construed as orthogonal to that between the explicit and the implicit content. Primary meanings do not obey the so$called Syntactic Direction in that they do not have to constitute developments of the logical form of the sentence – in agreement with experimental findings to the effect that c. 60$70 per cent of human communication in various tested cultures is conveyed via strong implicatures functioning as main intended meanings (e.g. Pitts 2005; Sysoeva 2010). For example, on standard contextualist accounts (e.g. Carston 1988, 2002; Recanati 1989, 2004), (2) constitutes the explicit content of (1). (1) Everybody is going to Egypt this spring. (2) Everybody from among the speaker’s close acquaintances is going to Egypt this spring. By rejecting the syntactic constraint, however, DS is able to model a more intuitively plausible (3) as the primary utterance meaning (and the truth$conditional content understood in the contextualist sense of truth$conditional pragmatics). (3) Egypt is a popular holiday destination among the speaker’s close acquaintances this spring. Cancellability is used as a criterion for these two distinctions and is assessed separately for the domains of primary and secondary meanings, as well as for what is said and what is implicated. The role of the criterion in these two distinctions is assessed in a range of examples that pertain to the combinations of the following scenarios. Type (i): explicit meanings that are/are not cancelled, and are/are not followed by the cancellation of implicatures; type (ii): primary meanings which are explicit/implicit, are/are not cancelled, and are/are not followed by the cancellation of secondary (explicit/implicit) meanings. It is concluded that while explicit and implicit meanings pertaining to the presented scenarios both allow for relatively unrestricted cancellability, primary meanings are entrenched, and so are secondary meanings, when they follow such entrenched primary meanings. The same concerns implicatures which follow entrenched explicit content in that explicit content which goes through uncancelled becomes, so to speak, primary meaning of the cognitively$based classification of type (ii). The conclusions of the paper are then twofold: firstly, Grice’s criterion of cancellability is defended by means of the proposed amendment of weakening it to the form of a disjunctive test, and secondly, it is demonstrated that the criterion provides an argument in favor of the cognitively based distinction between primary and secondary meanings while it does not discriminate between the relative intentional strengths of explicit and implicit content. A fortiori, there does not appear to be any cognitive basis to the syntactic direction principle adhered to by contextualists who use it to delimit what is said. Select references: Blome$Tillmann, M. 2008. “Conversational implicature and eh cancellability test”. Analysis 68: 156$160. Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jaszczolt, K. M. 2005. Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaszczolt, K. M. 2009a. “Default Semantics”. In: B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 215$246. Jaszczolt, K.M. 2009b. “Cancelability and the primary/secondary meaning distinction”. Interlanguage Pragmatics 6. 259$289. Jaszczolt, K.M. 2010. “Default Semantics”. In: ‘B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 193$221. Pitts, A. 2005. “Assessing the evidence for intuitions about what is said”. Unpublished paper, University of Cambridge. Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sysoeva, A. 2010. Understanding Primary Meaning: A Study with Reference to Requests in Russian and English. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. Weiner, M. 2006. “Are all conversational implicatures cancellable?” Analysis 66, 127$ 130. Plenary Jef Verschueren IPrA Research Center, University of Antwerp jef.verschueren@ua.ac.be Markers of implicitness: A pragmatic paradox? This paper starts from the observations that (i) all language use inevitably combines explicit and implicit meaning, and (ii) all languages have structural means at their disposal to mark implicit meaning. These fundamental design features of language (in use) seem to create a kind of pragmatic paradox: if one can talk about ‘markers of implicitness’ (a cover term for all the traditional presupposition$ and implication$carrying constructions as well as implicature$ generating strategies), are we then still dealing with implicitness? Using examples from actual discourse, it will be shown (i) that absolute implicitness does not exist (at least, to the extent that it does, we cannot say anything about it as linguists); (ii) that explicitness and implicitness are therefore not absolute opposites; (iii) that the degree of explicitness of markers of implicitness (or ‘triggers’ for inferential processes leading to an understanding of non$explicitly$stated meaning) is quite variable. The paper is conceived as the formulation of a research agenda for investigating this phenomenon in such a way that even cross$linguistic and cross$cultural comparisons become feasible, with applicability for ideology$oriented pragmatic discourse analysis. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Magdalena Anioł Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland maniol@ifa.amu.edu.pl Sociocultural aspects of L2 pragmalinguistic variation: Requesting and apologising by Polish and Spanish EFL learners A great deal of cross$cultural misunderstanding can be put down to pragmatic failure. Inability to draw correct inferences or to appropriately weigh the illocutionary force of an utterance in a foreign language may lead to various communicative problems. Depending on the context these may range from less serious misinterpretations or blunders to highly consequential ones such as the reinforcement of cultural stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes. Understanding the mechanism behind learners’ pragmatic choices and making them aware of the cross$cultural variation of pragmatic rules is thus essential for effective communication in English as a lingua franca. The present study is devoted to the analysis of rules governing pragmatic transfer on the example of requests and apologies produced by Polish and Spanish learners of EFL. The choice of American, Polish and Spanish respondents was partially determined by the fact that these three linguacultures differ to a considerable extent as far as values, attitudes and communicative styles are concerned. What singles out the present study is the fact at the analytical level it integrates the classical linguistic framework of Speech Act Theory (Searle 1979) with a thorough examination of sociocultural factors determining learners’ linguistic behaviour. Consequently, data elicitation method integrates highly interactional role$enactments (Trosborg 1996) with questionnaires providing sociocultural assessments. It has been evidenced (Wierzbicka 1985, Takahashi 2000, Spencer$Oatey 2000, Félix$Brasdefer 2003) that the perception of the different aspects comprising the context is highly culture specific, which is why the influence of learners’ linguistic and cultural background is so significant in the interpretation of interlanguage empirical data (Kasper 2002). Accordingly, as the present study exemplifies, only by integrating the pragmalinguistic and sociocultural perspective it is possible to provide an adequate explanatory framework for the phenomena observed. Bibliography: Félix$Brasdefer, J. César. 2003. “Declining an invitation: A cross$cultural study of pragmatic strategies in American English and Latin American Spanish”. Multilingua 22: 225$255. Kasper, Gabriele – Kenneth R. Rose. 2002. “Pragmatic development in a second language”. Language Learning 52, suppl 1 Searle, John R. 1979a. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spencer$Oatey, Helen. 2000. Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures. London: Continuum Takahashi, Satomi. 2000. “Transfer in interlanguage pragmatics: New research agenda”, Studies in Languages and Cultures 11: 109$128. Trosborg, Anna. 1996. Interlanguage pragmatics: Requests, complaints and apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1985. “Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English”. Journal of Pragmatics 9, 2$3: 145$178. Session: General Irina Argüelles Álvarez EUIT de Telecomunicación (UPM) Madrid, Spain irina@euitt.upm.es Pragmatic Awareness in the classroom with Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein This paper is dedicated to the revision of a lesson centred in discourse and pragmatic awareness which has been recently taught (November, 2009) within an International Athens Programme Course in the Escuela de Telecomunicación Campus Sur – Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Within this course entitled “Natural Language, Engineering and the Internet”, the first 15 minutes of the film Young Frankenstein by Bill Wilder were used to raise the students awareness of the many discursive and pragmatic aspects involved in interpreting natural language and therefore, as a starting point to further thinking about the difficulties that engineers dealing with natural language processing may have in order to succeed in giving the computer all this information that lies beyond the actual word or sentence. In this international students context where most of them were high proficient in English and, strictly speaking, we would be speaking here of discursive and pragmatic consciousness raising in the sense of ‘noticing’ something new about the language (Schmidt, 1990: 132) or in this particular case about the effects or interpretation of language in a given context. There must be a methodology underlying the process of awareness$raising which as in Wright and Bolitho (1993: 298) is here seen as a gradual means for students to become more sensitive to linguistic aspects other than vocabulary and grammar. Thus, the lesson plan and the activities presented during the course had looked forward to engaging students in more complex open ended approach to the language. In the final evaluation of the course on the part of the students, the activities presented with the film were highly praised because they were considered an “innovative”, “different”, “challenging”, “entertaining” way of exploring the use of language which in turn and following with their commentaries, led them to the discovery of “new dimensions of language never ‘noticed’ before”. References Schmidt, R.W. 1990. “The role of consciousness in second language learning”. Applied Linguistics, 11/2. Wright, T. and R. Bolitho 1993. “Language awareness: a missing link in language teacher education?” ELT Journal, 47/4. Session: General Joanna Bobin Państwowa WyŜsza Szkoła Zawodowa w Gorzowie Wlkp., Poland joanna.bobin@gmail.com ‘All right, Papa. I’m a bum. Anything you like, so long as it stops the argument.’ On face, identity and the dynamics of conflict talk The presentation will be concerned with the analysis of intergenerational conflict within the framework of face, with considerable emphasis on the mental context of interaction. The approach to face adopted here is in relation to value constructs: the relative importance of a person’s values determines their judgment of their self$attributes, some of which are more face sensitive than others (Spencer$ Oatey 2007). This view of face subsumes the traditional concept of face as wants, and can be considered on an individual as well as interpersonal level. It depends heavily on the external context of interaction: social and discoursal roles, activity type, power relations, rights, obligations, time and place, etc. However, all mental processes are embedded in their contexts as well. The operation of the internal (mental) context, perceived as a system of cognitive, affective and conative contexts, may account for those behaviors and utterances which lead to conflict (Kopytko 2002). The cognitive context of conflict talk participants will be related to the differences in perception and evaluation of face sensitivities; the affective context, connected with emotions and personality features, will help explain threats to hearer’s self$esteem and positive self$image; and the conative context, constituting the participant’s motivations and goals, may point to speaker intention behind the choice of particular face sensitivities. The mental context is a dynamic phenomenon, and as such, it contributes to the developmental course of conflict talk. The presentation will attempt to identify prevalent patterns in face attacks in conflictive episodes between fathers and sons, presented in modern American drama. The analysis of the mental context will likely facilitate the classification of those face$related strategies which trigger, escalate and terminate conflict talk. References Bousfield, D. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kopytko, R. 2002. The Mental Aspects of Pragmatic Theory: an Integrative View. Poznań: Motivex. Mandala, S. 2007. Twentieth Century Drama as Ordinary Talk: Speaking Between the Lines. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company. Spencer$Oatey, H. 2007. Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics 39. Session: General Innocent Chiluwa Universität Freiburg, Germany & Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria robineber@gmail.com The Positive of Side of Confrontation: A Look at the Nigerian Press A number of studies on pragmatic politeness have drawn extensively on oral interactional data. However, Myers (1989), though identifying problems associated with written texts i.e. that of lack of definite addressees for published texts and the difficulty of defining relevant cultural practices, demonstrates in his study of politeness in scientific writing that politeness strategies are prevalent in written discourse. Similarly, in “Linguistic politeness in professional prose,” Hagge and Kostelnick (1989) show how written letters by some accounting firms apply the use of negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interaction situations. Thus substantiating the Brown and Levinson claim that politeness is a linguistic universal, the study shows that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Significantly in his “When Politeness is Fatal: Technical Communication and the Challenger Accident,” Moore (1992) argues that traditional forms of politeness sometimes can actually be dangerous, especially those recommended by Brown and Levinson. Moore blames the challenger accident on improper application/interpretation of politeness strategies and argues that it is right to be direct if not outright impolite, if that would avert a national disaster. The present paper will further argue that confrontational media news headlines against corruption and political power abuse has its positive dimension, taking the case of Nigeria as an example. The study aims at demonstrating how confrontation which implies impoliteness by a deliberate use of some face$threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987) mediates socio$political and economic crises and are used as a protest strategy against injustice. Data comprise some selected news reports of three popular Nigerian news magazines, namely, Tell, The News and Newswatch published between 1995 and 2002 – a period considered as the most difficult period in Nigeria’s socio$political history. This period marked the height of military dictatorship and the emergence of democratic government in Nigeria. Data will be analyzed within the framework of critical discourse analysis along with the popular politeness theory to show that confrontation in media discourse in Nigeria has to violate some traditional politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson in order to challenge political power abuse and corruption in government. Session: General Michael Chiou Irinis Athineas 11, 11473, Athens, Greece mchiou1234@gmail.com Performing anaphora in Modern Greek: A neo"Gricean pragmatic analysis So far, the study of NP$anaphora in Modern Greek has been examined within the framework of generative grammar. This is mainly due to the fact that Modern Greek is considered to be a configurational language (in contrast to discourse oriented languages such as Chinese, Japanese, etc). As a consequence, the description and explanation of NP$anaphora have been based on purely syntactic criteria. Nevertheless, there are prima facie reasons to support that the apparent grammatical relations which restrict NP$anaphora resolution in Modern Greek have inherently pragmatic foundations. As it is shown in Chiou (2007), anaphora involves intrasentential as well as discourse patterns which cannot be accounted for in purely syntactic terms. What is more, due to the semantic generality of anaphoric expressions, anaphora resolution is based upon inferences to the best interpretation. The core proposal, which I put forward, is that NP$anaphora in Modern Greek can be described and explained more adequately and elegantly largely in terms of a pragmatic inferential apparatus which will consider the language user’s knowledge of the range of options available in the grammar, and of the systematic use or avoidance of particular linguistic expressions on particular occasions. The pragmatic apparatus which I will employ for the purpose of the present paper is the neo$Gricean pragmatic apparatus as developed in Levinson (1987, 1991, 2000) and Huang (2000, 2007). References Chiou, M. 2007 (MS). NP8anaphora in Modern Greek: A neo8Gricean pragmatic approach. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Reading. Huang, Y. 2000. Anaphora: A Cross Linguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huang, Y. 2007. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, S. C. 1987. Pragmatics and the grammar of Anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics 23: 379$434. Levinson, S. C. 1991. Pragmatic Reduction of Pragmatic Conditions Revisited. Journal of Linguistics 27: 107$161. Levinson, S. C., 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Session: Intecultural Communication and Speech Actions Agnieszka Cyluk University of Warsaw, Poland acyluk@uw.edu.pl Social functions of thanking expressions The aim of the presentation is to discuss the social functions of thanking expressions. The notion of the social functions of expressive illocutionary acts was proposed by Norrick (1978). According to Norrick (1978), the effect which the speaker wishes to cause by means of performing such acts should be discussed in terms of its social function. The main focus of my presentation is on the speech act of thanking. I demonstrate that thank you and thanks are not limited only to expressing gratitude, but serve to fulfill some other roles in a society as well. For example, thank you and thanks may signal the end of a telephone conversation, or different stages in service encounters (at the shop, on a bus, at the restaurant). Additionally, thanking expressions may function to dismiss someone’s services, or to imply irony, sarcasm, and brusqueness. The claims about the social functions of thanking expressions are supported with real$life conversational data taken from the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The range of interactions includes: work, doing the shopping, visiting friends and family, eating dinner, having tea, relaxing and a variety of other situational contexts. 472 conversations have been searched for instances of thanking expressions. For each instance, an attempt was made at identifying the functions that thank you and thanks perform. References: British National Corpus XML Edition 2007 Norrick, Neal. R. 1978. “Expressive illocutionary acts.” Journal of Pragmatics 2: 277$291. Session: General Anna Danielewicz"Betz Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia adanielewicz_betz@yahoo.com Othering of non"Arab foreigners in Saudi Arabia: A pragmatic perspective Beginning with philosophical, anthropological and literary roots of the terms “others” and “othering” this paper looks into “othering” of foreigners, especially non$Muslim Westerners and women, in the cultural context of Saudi Arabia. “Othering” is interpreted as a process or a rhetorical device in which one group is seen as “us” and another group as “them”. In this case “us” refers to expatriates, primarily English$speaking Westerners, or Westerners of the same nationality, mostly occupying “white$collar” positions, as contrasted with “them”, i.e. Muslim$ Saudis or other Arabs (especially men); as well as non$Westerners, such as Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos (predominantly in “blue$collar” positions). There exists a diverse ethnic situation in Saudi Arabia, where about 23% of the population is made up of foreign nationals. “Othering” is analysed in terms of religion (cf. Zuckermann 2006), cultural dimensions (such as collectivist vs. individualist cultures), private vs. public manners, friends vs. strangers, as well as from the perspective of differences in face management strategies employed in cross$cultural encounters (cf. e.g. Ting$Toomey 2005) and culturally conditioned perception of (im)politeness (cf. e.g. Watts 2003, Culpeper 1996, or Locher and Bousfield 2008). “Others”, such as Western women, are depicted as inherently “different” (cf. e.g. Foucault 1990, Butler 1990). The author considers in particular terms of address and a number of representative speech acts – such as invitations, compliments, confrontations and apologies – with the aim of illustrating the point that some speech acts and their illocutionary and perlocutionary forces vary considerably, depending whether the addressee is a (Saudi) Arab or a foreigner. In the first part of the paper general observations are made; in the second part the author presents qualitative data obtained from her respondents (via interviews and questionnaire surveys) and discusses the results from the perspective of politeness theory (cf. Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987, or Watts 2003) and speech act theory (cf. Searle 1969, Austin 1975, Searle & Vanderveken 1985). Session: General Gurkan Dogan Çankaya University gurkandogan@cankaya.edu.tr Literary Translation, Stylistic Equivalence and Ad Hoc Concept Construction: A Relevance"Theoretic Approach The paper is a relevance$theoretic attempt to account for the inevitable loss of meaning that initially pertains to the translator’s interpretation of ‘what is meant’ in a literary text by the author. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) claims that utterance interpretation takes place through three successive stages: the language module handles any linguistic input automatically to yield a range of logical forms. Next, such logical forms are developed into complete propositions via decoding and pragmatic inferencing. On this second stage the hearer is expected to accomplish inferential tasks such as disambiguation, reference assignment and enrichment. Finally, the new information is deductively contextualized with the old information to yield strong/weak implicatures. As for enrichment, Carston (2002) argues that concepts should be enriched until they are able to represent complete propositions and this can be done via narrowing, broadening, and metaphorical extension (i.e. online concept construction). Regarding the first two strategies, the interpreter is supposed to retrieve relevant information that is already available in her memory. In contrast, metaphorical extension needs creating completely new sets of meaning during the very interpretive process: (1) He ordered fish in the restaurant (whale* / trout) narrowing (2) He has a square face (square* / squarish) broadening (3) She is an ocean. (deep, wide, limitless self, etc.) metaphorical extension When translating a metaphorical concept, a two$phase problem challenges any translator: first she should interpret the given metaphor herself via online concept construction and then she should provide the readers with an ‘equivalent’ metaphor so that they can accomplish their own metaphorical extension that results in weak implicatures. Given that most poetic effects are triggered by weak implicatures, the success of a translator can only be judged upon her ability to initiate ‘similar’ weak implicatures that she already arrived at during her own interpretation (Boase$Beier, J. 2004; Xiumei, X. 2006). In this sense, the translator’s task is not simply to translate a concept but to design an inferential path for the readers leading them to weak implicatures that are triggered by the given concept. The claim above will be tested on three different translations of Sonnet 66 by Shakespeare into Turkish to refer to a number of stylistic peculiarities with special reference to cost and effect relationships. References: Boase$Beier, J. 2004. “Saying what someone else meant: style, relevance and translation” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 14: 2, 276$287. Carston, R. 2002. “Metaphor, ad hoc concepts and word meaning – more questions than answers”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 14, 83$105. Sperber, D. And D. Wilson. 1986/95. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell: Oxford. Xiumei, X. 2006. “Style is the relationship: A relevance$theoretic approach to the translator's style.” Babel 52/4: 334–348. Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2007. “A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and Ad Hoc Concepts.” In: N. Burton$Roberts (ed.). Pragmatics. London: Palgrave: 230$259. Session: General Marta Dynel University of Łódź Marta.dynel@yahoo.com The pragmatics of impoliteness in film polylogues: House, M.D. as a case in point Rather than concentrate primarily on the speaker’s intentionality (cf. Culpeper 1997, Culpeper et al. 2003), recent developments of the impoliteness theory place emphasis on its interactional nature. An act of (intentional) impoliteness is viewed as rendered verbally by the speaker and understood by the hearer, prototypically (albeit not always) in accordance with the speaker’s intent (see e.g. Bousfield 2008, Bousfield and Locher 2008). The interactive nature of impoliteness is also the focal point of the relational view of (im)politeness (Locher and Watts 2005, 2008). As conceptualised by its original proponents, an intentionally produced act of impoliteness carries face$threat towards the addressee attacked. However, the theory of impoliteness does not allow for multiple hearers, failing to explain interpretations of a face$threatening act as made by hearers who are not directly affected by an FTA. The emergent question is the impact an impoliteness act has on a party, whether the addressee, the third party or the overhearer, whose face is not directly threatened. Although a listener may recognise the nature of an FTA, it will not be of immediate relevance to his/her own face. A distinct problem is that of mock impoliteness, which frequently entails the knowledge of the interlocutors’ personal common ground. Yet another query addressed in the presentation pertains to viewers’ perception of FTAs in film discourse. It will be argued that viewers constitute a distinct hearer category, i.e. recipients (Dynel 2010, in press). A postulate will be propounded that, as intended by the collective sender, recipients regard impoliteness as being humorous and entertaining (cf. Culpeper 2005), distancing themselves from the parties disparaged. The presentation is illustrated with impoliteness acts produced by House, M.D., the eponymous character of a popular TV series widely appreciated for his bad$ temperedness and verbal aggression prevalent in his utterances, which are captured by the concept of impoliteness. On ‘Revolutionary Road’: A proposal for extending the Gricean model of communication to cover multiple hearers. The Gricean model of communication (Grice 1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]), premised on the Cooperative Principle and the subordinate maxims, is unquestionably the cornerstone of linguistic pragmatics. In a nutshell, this framework is grounded in the tenet that the rational speaker intentionally communicates (literally or implicitly) meanings to the hearer. Albeit focused primarily on the speaker’s perspective and the notion of the speaker meaning, Grice’s theory may be viewed as subscribing to the canonical dyadic model, which assumes that meanings are produced by the sender (speaker or writer) and interpreted by the receiver (hearer or reader). However, as evidenced by any empirical conversational data, human communication tends to be much more complex, transcending the dyadic model. Several authors have observed the need to distinguish more participant (speaker and/or hearer) roles (Hymes 1972, 1974; Goffman 1981a[1976], 1981b[1979], 1981c; Bell 1984, 1991; Levinson 1988; Clark and Carlson 1982; Schober and Clark 1989; Clark and Schaefer 1987, 1992; Clark 1996; Dynel 2009). The primary objective of the presentation is to advocate a classification of hearer types and to propose an extension, admittedly unprecedented, of the Gricean framework by conceptualising the rational speaker as conveying meanings to multiple ratified and unratified hearers/listeners (addressee, third party, overhearer and eavesdropper). It will simultaneously be argued that one utterance may carry many a speaker meaning directed to respective hearers. The examples illustrating postulated theses derive from Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Nuria del Campo Universidad de La Rioja ndcm85@gmail.com Profile/active zone discrepancy in illocutionary meaning construction Following Langacker’s (1987; 1999) argumentation, every concept can be profiled against a number of base concepts, which puts the concept profiled in due interpretative perspective (e.g. the concept finger can be profiled against the domain and hand, and hand in the domain of arm). The profile of a concept is the entity, situation or event that is denoted by the linguistic expression and which is construed differently depending on the nature of its base. Every profiled concept has also an active zone, which may coincide with all or part of the designatum; in the latter case, Langacker contends there is profile/active zone discrepancy. Profile/active zone discrepancy underlies metonymic thinking (Langacker, 2009). Thus, in She broke the window, the profiled concept is the window, generally understood as a framed opening in a wall, but the active zone is the window pane. The whole, which is the profile, stands for its most salient part, the pane, which is its active zone. In this presentation, we argue that illocutionary interpretation is not only metonymic, as argued by Panther and Thornburg (1998, 2004), but also a matter of profile/active zone discrepancy where the base is the Cost$Benefit ICM formulated by Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi (2007). For instance, begging and requesting are understood against the same background – that we have to do our best to satisfy other people’s needs – but begging stresses the submissiveness component while requesting does not. Compare: (a) Bring him home. (b) Bring him home, please. (c) Oh, bring him home, please, please, bring him home! The profile in (a) is an order, and the active zone is the authority element involved in the imperative mood. In (b) the profile is a request, and the active zone is the speaker’s appealing to the addressee’s willingness. In (c) the profile is the act of begging, and it links up with the part of the scenario that relates to the speaker’s eagerness to obtain what he wants. Occasionally, a linguistic expression is polysemous from an illocutionary perspective: (d) Behave or you’ll get in trouble. Sentence (d) can be understood as a warning or a threat depending on which is the active zone. We will consider this example a warning if the active zone relates to the potential danger to which the addressee is exposed. But it will be interpreted as a threat if the active zone corresponds to the speaker’s intention to cause trouble to the addressee in order to make him behave. This example shows profile/active zone discrepancy, as many cases of lexical structure. But here the active zone determines the kind of profile that we have, which is a characteristic phenomenon of constructional polysemy, but not of lexical polysemy. The reason is to be found in the entrenchment process that creates an interpretative shortcut between the expression and its meaning. This presentation investigates constructional polysemy in detail by examining profile/active zone discrepancy in a number of illocutionary constructions corresponding to directive speech acts. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Maria Economidou"Kogetsidis University of Nicosia, Cyprus kogetsidis.m@unic.ac.cy Greek Cypriot learners of English and interlanguage request modification Little research has so far been conducted on beginner/lower intermediate EFL learners in relation to their interlanguage request modification. In addition, no studies have so far been carried out on the case of Greek Cypriot learners of English and their request performance. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the internal and external modification of requests performed by beginner/lower intermediate Greek Cypriot EFL learners (n=14) studying at a major university in Cyprus. It compares the learners’ oral requests with requests performed by a group of American native speakers (n=16) studying at the same university. The data were collected by means of interactive oral role play and involved five socially different situations: (a) asking from a professor to borrow a book, (b) asking for a lift from a professor, (c) asking a friend for the lecture notes, (d) asking for the menu from a waiter, and (e) ordering food at a restaurant. The dimensions examined were internal and external modification, and request. Preliminary results have indicated that the learners employed far less internal modification as compared to the native speakers and opted primarily for zero marking and for external modification though the use of grounders. While the native speakers relied extensively on consultative devices in order to internally soften their requests (e.g. ‘if possible’, ‘if you don’t mind’, etc.) and on a combination of internal and external modifiers, the learners rarely did so. This result might lend support to previous findings which indicated that internal modification is acquired later on in L2 as compared to external modification as adding phrasal/lexical downgraders increases the complexity of pragmalinguistic structure. Session: General Federico Farini University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy federico.farini@unimore.it Notes on the pragmatics of education: Functions and limits of questions conveying assertions in primary schools’ instructional activities With this presentation, we intend to explore how children attending primary schools process the pragmatic information of questions in instructional activities. Our data corpus consists of 66 hours of videotaped educational interactions in 4th and 5th year groups in Italian primary schools (children’s age: 9$11). We focus on the most common type of educators’ questions in our data, that is, yes/no questions used as “reversed polarity questions” (RPQs) to convey an assertion of the opposite polarity to that of the grammatical form of the question. In our data, educators use RPQs to produce “candidate answers” (Pomerantz, 1988; Arminen, 2005), giving to children not only the sense of what the recipient considers important but also what the anticipated answer might be. We have data$based evidences that children are attentive to the multiple levels of utterance interpretation, recognizing when yes/no questions are used by educators to convey their expectations (Raymond, 2006; Margutti, 2006). Interpreting yes/no questions as RPQs only when appropriate, children show pragmatic knowledge, as this interpretation is not dependent on the design of the question alone, but on the actions which the questions are being used to perform (Ochs, Schegloff & Thompson, 1996; Koshik, 2002) and on the displayed knowledge state or epistemic strength from which the questions are asked (Heritage & Raymond, 2005, 2006). We will show in detail how the interpretation of yes/no questions as RPQs is interactionally accomplished. Our analysis shows the complexity of the relation between procedural effort and the respective communicative effect of this type of questions. On the one hand, RPQs represent a relevant resource for educators to assist children’s cognitive performance; on the other hand, RPQs are contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1992) which foreground and make salient in the interaction educators’ intentions, scopes and motives. Understanding what educators expect them to do and learn, children can avoid it, or even cut across it (Luhmann & Schorr, 1979). Session: General Bruce Fraser Boston University, US bfraser@bu.edu The Inferential Class of Discourse Markers in English There are three major class of discourse markers (DMs) in English: Contrastive (e.g., but, instead, on the other hand); Elaborative (e.g., and, furthermore, in addition) and Inferential (e.g., so, thus, as a result), and within each, several subclasses. This paper will focus on the Inferential Class of DMs, (IDMs), which contains at least after all, as a consequence, as a result, because, since, consequently, for, hence, in order that, so, so as, so that, that’s why, then, therefore, thus. These DMs can be divided into three subclasses: (1) Implicational, (2) Telic, and (3) Explanatory, as illustrated below. (1) I was required to work overtime. So I quit. (2) Sit up, so (that) I can see you. (3) He wrote the letter because he was angry at her. For each subclass, I will provide the syntactic and semantics condition on their occurrence. Then I will examine the sequences of IDMs showing that only specific combinations are acceptable, (4) John was hungry. So, as a result, he ate a sandwich. (5) John was hungry. *So, thus, he ate a sandwich. and the composite meaning depends on what IDMs are involved. Session: General Lori Frederics American University in Cairo, Egypt lfredricks@aucegypt.edu Discourse Strategies Used in English as a Foreign Language Reading Clubs This study examines how Tajikistani students’ views and experiences are manifested through their discourse in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) reading clubs. The research, conducted in two schools in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, explores the types of discourse strategies used in small group discussions on literature. Participants include intermediate to advanced EFL learners from diverse backgrounds including Tajiks, Uzbeks, Russians, and Ukrainians. The five clubs were offered through a literacy program that encouraged readers to choose from a variety of genres and to read and discuss these shared texts. The main research question is: How are students’ social, political, cultural, and historical perspectives revealed as they interact in an EFL setting? Data collection tools include audio$ taped club discussions and student interviews. Members initiated dialogue in various ways including: prompting discussions and debates as a positive activity, challenging changing and hidden reading preferences, acting as critics of texts and authors, and initiating debates that revealed existing group tensions. In addition, the members used humor as a strategy for both positive as well as negative purposes. The use of humor to share opinions and experiences can appear aggressive but also strengthen group rapport (Norrick, 2003). Instances of negative humor include using humor to discuss and reinforce stereotypes. Positive uses include attempts to lighten the mood after discussing serious social issues, particularly those related to their own social and political circumstances, and establishing or affirming group solidarity. In educational settings, this type of shared enjoyment of humor can be a sign of trusting relationships (Cazden, 2001). The presenter will share examples of each strategy with explanations of how the strategies resulted from and influenced group dynamics. Further, the presenter will discuss implications for future discourse$based research in EFL programs and other educational settings. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Michal Goral, Adán Martín & Juani Guerra University of Las Palmas De Gran Canaria, Spain mgoral@cognitivecanary.eu Cognitive architecture of the concept dehumanization: New vision of a social progress for the 21st century What would happen if we realized that a main aim of human activities in a culture (in a language expression in art, religion, philosophy) is approaching to eliminate an essential human element? Apparently the process of dehumanization is hardly possible to be completed due to permanent presence of the human nature of an agent. That linguistic paradox is a main goal of this paper, dedicated to a cognitive linguistic analysis of the notion of dehumanization performed by a Spanish modernist philosopher. By cognitive architecture we mean some lexicalization which reflects the conceptual level of human nature, as presented in a book of Jose Ortega y Gasset entitled La deshumanización del arte (The dehumanization of the art). This seminal book heavily influenced some Angloamerican Modernist poetics of impersonality, mostly T.S.Eliot. The Ortegian man is an individual agent acting in an external world. Due to his sensorimotor base, he is able to grasp out and further conceptualize external information, being still under an organic sensation (fears, desires and pleasures). The worldview constructed internally by man is always metaphorizing the external world. In the light of the above, we will examine the density of the dehumanization process taking into account the framework of Idealized Cognitive Models (conceptual metaphor, metonymy, image schemas) as well as further elaborations of the theory (e.g. blends). The very concept of dehumanization will be a complex example of a blend. All ICMs construct one metaphorized process, where a dialectical conflict within a social domain results in social progress (a metaphorical conflict between individual agent and society described by a metonymical relation within two subdomains). Art as a cultural phenomenon with its proper metaphorical language operates as a source domain which is able to describe the very social nature of a particular human being (target domain). The dehumanization process takes place in the source domain. Disproportion within two subdomains causes a conflict where the contestators (youths) intend to take over the power of the establishment (the old generations). Being a minority, the young artists are seeking for the dehumanization of their artful expressions through a formalization of their poetic language. The proposed paper is more than an attempt to reinterpret a libertarian thought of a Spanish philosopher. We believe that future application of the presented ideas will help to understand general phenomena of a culture, e.g. the Western World seems to undergo a permanent process of re$evaluation of values leading to a conceptual metaphor in the form of a cultural catastrophe. Thus we consider Dehumanization as an eternal social desire with no hope to be fulfilled. References: Churchland, P. 2002. Brain8Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ortega y Gasset, J. 2007. La deshumanización del arte y otros ensayos de estética. Madrid: Austral. Turner, M. (ed.) 2006. The Artful Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books. Damasio, A. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens. Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. San Diego: Harvest. Session: General Magdalena Górna Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland magdalena.gorna@gmail.com The Pragmatics and the Theory of Culture – do they need each other? The linguistic phenomena like deixis, pressupostions, Gricean and post$Gricean concepts of implicature, conversational structure as well as further research in speech act theory have dominated interests of the present$day philosophy of language. All those fields share some basic assumptions, derived mainly from Austin and Wittgenstein. They analyze acts of linguistic communication in some specific situation and consider the intentions of its participants as well as its social context. The social context is often perceived as one of the crucial conditions of successful communication. Nevertheless this notion is not scrutinized in details and therefore it is hard to find out how the pragmatics actually understands it. Various concepts describe the social context in various ways, for example as a “common background” (Robert Stalnaker’s concept of pragmatic presupposition), “conventions/conventional rules” (Austin$Searle speech act theory), “common background knowledge” (Relevance Theory), “automatic interpretations” (Levinson’s theory of generalized conversational implicature) and so on. In my opinion all the terminological mess could be brought to order by involving the theory of culture. First, the theory of culture can explain the relations between the social patterns and individual behavior (what is crucial for the performative aspects of language). Further, it provides a tool of describing the source of the knowledge, which seems to be natural or even automatic, so it makes the communication more effective. From another point of view, theory of culture refers to the semantics that is shared among a certain group of people. That is the way the pragmatic perspective could also raise its effectiveness by delivering some instruments for explaining individual communication acts, which depend on their situational context. Session: General Gu Yueguo The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Yueguo.gu@gmail.com Politeness as Lived Experience It seems to be generally agreed, thanks to Ehlich’s forceful arguments (Ehlich, 2005: 73), that it is helpful to maintain the distinctions between (1) the politeness phenomenon, (2) the concept of politeness, and (3) the conceptualisation of politeness. The politeness phenomenon is understood as a historical process that naturally emerges and evolves side by side with humans’ social$cultural development. It is assumed to be universal. The concept of politeness, however, is language$specific and historically dynamic. The conceptualization of politeness, on the other hand, involves consciously deep reflections on what politeness is, and how it functions in a given culture. The first two roughly correspond with what Watts (2003: 9) calls the first$order of politeness, while the last with his second$ order politeness (2003: 30). The conceptualization of politeness, or the second$order of politeness, has been predominantly Gricean and rationality$based, which is clearly seen in both Brown and Levinson’s (1978) conceptualization of Model Person and Leech’s Politeness Principle (1983). This paper proposes a scheme of conceptualizing politeness as lived experience. It is based on the fact that politeness or impoliteness in real$life situations is first and foremost a lived experience, which is here$and$now, personal, emotional, as well as rational. Following Oakeshott (2002 [1933]: 9), experience is understood as “the concrete whole which analysis divides into ‘experiencing’ and ‘what is experienced’. As emphasized by Oakeshott, experiencing and what is experienced cannot be separated. “The character of what is experienced is, in the strictest sense, correlative to the manner in which it is experienced.” This paper will examine the experiencing of politeness or impoliteness from both sides of experiencing, and what is experienced. It is held that it is conceptually “superfluous” but methodologically helpful to adopt both sides. Three types of politeness or impoliteness experience are differentiated: (1) naturally multimodal experience (or taste$by$tongue type), (2) vicarious experience (or taste$by$eye type), and (3) Written Word$based experience (or taste$by$comprehension type) (about the three types of experience see Gu 2009). This paper will focus on the first, and the other two will only be touched upon in passing. Politeness as lived experience is first and foremost emotional experience (emotion used in the sense as discussed in Damasio 1999: 41$53). It is involuntary, particularly in the case of experiencing impoliteness. It is also an experience of feeling pleased, happy, or hurt. Following Damasio, we distinguish emotional experience of politeness or impoliteness from the experiential feeling of politeness or impoliteness. The former is here$and$now, outward$directed, and publically observable, based on cues such as facial expression, attention, eye contact, body posture, gesture, dressing, verbal message, etc. The latter, on the other hand, is inwardly directed, definitively involves consciousness, and affects the experiencing self beyond the immediate here$and$now. Emotional experience of politeness or impoliteness can be more intense than feeling experience of politeness or Session: General impoliteness, but it won’t last as long as the latter. Drawing evidence from neuroscience, Damasio points out that emotion and rationality are not, as traditionally assumed, to be incompatible. Rather, the two are inseparable in real life: “emotion probably assists reasoning, especially when it comes to personal and social matters involving risk and conflict.” (Damasio, 1999: 41). Brown and Levinson’s rational Model Person, in the present analysis, will become emotional$plus$rational. The Gricean inference$making of politeness meaning is artificially made complicated, since politeness as lived experience of the first type can be immediate, bypassing the rational reasoning process. References Brown, P. and S. Levinson. 1978. “Universals of language usage: politeness phenomena”. In E. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56$324. Damasio, A. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens. London: William Heinemann. Ehlich, K. 2005. “On the historicity of politeness”. In R. J. Watts, S. Ide and K. Ehlich (eds.), 71$107. Gu, Y. 2009. “Four$borne discourses: Towards language as an ancient city of history”. In LI Wei & V. Cook (eds.), Contemporary Applied Linguistics, Vol. 2: Language for the Real World. London: Continuum, 98–121. Leech, G. N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Oakeshott, M. 2002 [1933]. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, R. J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge University Press. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Yasmin H. Hannouna CHSS, UAE University, UAE pink64flower@yahoo.com Lexical Incongruity in the Translation of American Political Speeches into Arabic: Between Bush and Obama From a wide variety of translation problems, some issues related to emotiveness, lexical non$equivalence and cultural expressions are dealt with in this paper. The text type reflecting all these problems is that of political speeches. It has been observed that an Arab translator translating certain lexical items from English into Arabic should take into consideration the emotive aspect of the text. In addition, the translation of certain expressions looks incongruent despite strenuous efforts that would be exerted by translators. Further, in most cases, translators fail to convey their connotative meanings and they manage only to convey the denotative meanings The paper endeavors to investigate the extent to which it is possible to handle the translation of emotive political lexical items which have only partial or no equivalents in the target language in terms of componential analysis as a procedure of translation (Newmark 1981:20 and 1988:115). Two professional translators participate in translating the sample texts extracted from some political speeches delivered by the American Presidents G. Bush and B. Obama for the highly emotive expressions expected to be loaded in such texts. The sample texts are randomly selected from up$to$date online sources .The procedure of the study is entirely based on the analysis and comparison of two suggested translations of each sample text. The results are expected to show that Arabic political items are charged with high emotive meanings. Further, a translator should be culturally and linguistically competent in languages to produce effective and adequate translations. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Azirah Hashim, & Gerhard Leitner, University of Malaya, Malaysia, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany azirahhashim@yahoo.com & gerhard.leitner@fu$berlin.de English in contact in Malaysia: An investigation of knowledge and awareness of contact outcomes The development of English in the wider region of today’s Malaysia cannot be disassociated from contact with other languages. There are three broad and overlapping periods. The first one precedes British involvement and is due to the period of exploration and Portuguese and Dutch economic exploitation and marginal colonization. Geographically it is wider than the region referred. It owes a lot to the use of Malay in Indonesia and beyond and typically expressions entered into general British or American English. The second period covers the British colonial period up to independence in 1958, when, after some fluctuation, Singapore and Malaysia split. Contact from then on was different, with Chinese dialects being more important in Singapore than in Malaysia. The third period covers independence and, above all, the more recent decade, when Malaysia experienced a growth of Islamic involvement; in terms of contact, it meant the rise of Arabic words. Contact is, and has always been, bi$ or multilateral. As contact expressions made their way into English, so did English impact on other languages. We focus on the impact on English and ask these questions: Whether and to what extent are older loan expressions (still) ‘known’ in Malaysia and used? To what extent are very recent loans ‘known’, and to what extent can loans count as overarching, cross$ethnic features in multi$ethnic and multi$lingual Malaysian English (MalE)? As an aside, we ask if such loans endanger the comprehensibility of MalE regionally and worldwide. Questions like these fall into the domain of contact linguistics, lexicography, empirical semantics, and the tension between international or global pulls versus local and regional ones that operate on English. In approaching such questions we use an empirical method. There has been a fair amount of research into contact in Malaysia but our approach is less about the history than about awareness, knowledge and use. With contact dating back to the 15th century and involving many different languages such as Malay, a range of Chinese and Indian dialects and languages, we have had to be selective. We went for a range of older and current loans, leaving out loans that we assumed to be well known or plainly archaic. We preferred examples of expressions where there was a level of doubt on currency and others that might stratify ethnic varieties. Particularly interesting were recent and largely unstudied expressions from Arabic, as they may point to a new phenomenon, i.e. an impact from a particular domain into the public domain. We have complemented our study by looking at the press in several Islamic countries, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia. Our paper will highlight the broad community knowledge of loan expressions. It will give a new angle to studies that focus on lexical outcomes of contact. The study is, at the present moment, in progress and we will present our unpublished findings at the conference. Session: General Ágnes Herczeg"Deli Eszterházy Károly College Eger, Hungary agnes@ektf.hu ‘Implicature"laden’ elicitations in talk radio shows: The interactive mental context The term implicature8laden has been borrowed from Robyn Carston, and it is used here to refer to a common strategy of hosts of radio programmes by which they elicit information from their interlocutors. The paper takes a relevance theoretical approach to how the speaker’s implied meaning is interpreted by the hearer as an elicitation for response in a specific type of natural conversations: talk radio shows on BBC Radio. My goal is to discover what constituents of the context are accessible for the hearer to make valid inferences with relatively little processing effort about speaker meaning. Apart from the most obvious factors of the context – such as the specific genre, the purpose of the communicative event and the roles of the participants in the speech situation – the focus of investigation will be on linguistic evidence. Setting out from linguistically revealed meanings I will be concerned with the cognitive basis of discourse processes which indicate pragmatically motivated schemas. On a relevance theoretical account a proposal will be made as to how “context selection” occurs in the hearer’s mind when the speaker makes a Hypothetical act. It will be demonstrated how a hypothetical utterance communicates the ‘possibly true’ or the ‘necessarily true’ with its non$fact modality through inherently irrealis verbs, attitudinal or illocutionary adverbials or evaluative expressions, and how such an act evokes the recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. Some discourse patterns will be identified which are supposed to exist in the interlocutors’ mind as shared knowledge, and which are supposed to move the train of discourse. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Milada Hirschova Technical University in Liberec, Czech Republic Milada.Hirschova@seznam.cz Speakers´ chances or Is there a way to ensure required (intended) interpretation of an utterance? In an inferential model of communication, the “indirectness” is the most prominent feature of all utterances (when seen as speech acts) since there is no predictable (default) link between the form and the meaning of an utterance. The interpretation of both (really or seemingly) explicit and non$explicit utterances (speech acts) as well as of those which are non$stereotypical and/or non$explicit intentionally includes a) the interpretation of “what is said” (explicature) and b) of “what is meant” (implicature – in all its varieties). Since the fulfillment of a speaker’s communicative intention depends on the addressee’s comprehension of the utterance meaning and his/her recognition of the speaker’s illocutionary point the speaker needs to seek ways (means of expression) supporting the correct (intended) interpretation of his/her utterance. Among other issues, the speaker needs to bear in mind potential misunderstandings, i.e. to plan how to avoid undesirable inferences deductible from his/her utterance. The level of potential misunderstanding awareness depends on the discourse (e.g., spontaneous interpersonal conversation vs. media interview vs. prepared public speech) and on the actual communicative situation, especially on the definition of the addressee/a target group. The use of remedial strategies (corrections, additional subsidiary illocutions, explanations or, as an ultimate means of expression, admissions of misformulation) is more frequent in spontaneous speech; in well$prepared speeches or written papers, the use of similar strategies is rare or intentional (as a part of addressee$oriented persuasive activity). Also, anticipation of an addressee’s potential inferences offers a space for manipulative practices in communication. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Maria Jodłowiec Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland maria.jodlowiec@uj.edu.pl Utterance interpretation and Intentionality The cornerstone of the Gricean (1968, 1969, 1989) model of meaning is the assumption that understanding what is being communicated by an utterance necessarily involves recognizing the speaker’s intentions in producing it. This kind of “intentional theory of communication” (Roberts 2004) seems to be predominant in modern pragmalinguistic analyses. Within this paradigm, Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/95, 1987, 1997, Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004) relevance theory postulates that conveying meaning in ostensive communication involves two types of intention: the informative intention and the communicative intention. The informative intention is simply “the intention to inform the audience of something” (Wilson & Sperber 2004: 611), while the communicative intention is defined as the intention to inform the audience that the communicator has the intention to inform them about something, so it is by definition a second order intention. This means that on this model it is an intrinsic characteristic of an utterance that, as Wedgwood (2007: 650) puts it, it “conveys the fact that the speaker intends to communicate thereby.” What is the nature of the two types of intentions as postulated on the relevance theoretic model? Why is it essential to postulate both? What kind of heuristics do interpreters follow in recovering the speaker intended meaning? The major goal of the paper is to explore these issues and show how they are dealt with in the leading pragmalinguistic theories. Selected references: Grice, H. P. 1968. “Utterer’s meaning, sentence meaning and word meaning”. Foundations of Language, 4: 225–242. —. “Utterer’s meaning and intention”. Philosophical Review, 78: 147–177. —. 1989. Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roberts, C. 2004. “Context in dynamic interpretation”. In: L. Horn and G. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford: Blackwell. 197–220. Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell. —. 1997. “The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 9: 1–20. —. 2002. “Pragmatics, modularity and mind–reading”. Mind and Language 17: 3– 23. —. 2005. “Pragmatics”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistic, 17: 353–388. Wedgwood, D. 2007. “Shared assumptions: Semantic minimalism and Relevance Theory”. Journal of Linguistics, 43 (3): 647–681. Wilson, D. & D. Sperber. 2002. “Truthfulness and relevance”. Mind, 111: 583–632. —. 2004. “Relevance theory”. In: L. Horn and G. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford: Blackwell. 607–632. Session: General Mehmet Kanik Istanbul University, Turkey mehmetkanik@gmail.com The Effect of Content Instruction in L2 on L1 Pragmatics This study investigates whether content instruction in English has an impact on first language pragmatics. In this study a discourse completion test with eight request situations in Turkish was given to three groups of Turkish students enrolled in undergraduate programs in a faculty of education in Turkey. One group of students received most of their education in English. The other two groups were randomly formed from three programs where the medium of instruction was Turkish. Their responses were coded into strategies in the categories of head act, supportive move and downgrader. The length of requests and number of strategies used in each category were also coded. Data were analyzed using chi$square test and one$way ANOVA. The results revealed significant differences in head acts in one situation and in downgraders in two situations. Significant differences were observed more in the make$up of the requests than in strategy categories. The groups significantly differed in the length of their requests in three situations. They also significantly differed in the number of strategies in four situations. An interesting finding is that the differences in the make$up of the situations were only observed in situations with high imposition. This shows that instruction in the foreign language has an impact on sociopragmatic interpretation in the native language. Overall, the results reveal that instruction in a foreign language has an impact on first language pragmatic use. Therefore, programs where the medium of instruction is English should be carefully critiqued. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Beata Karpińska"Musiał University of Gdansk, Poland lingbet@ug.gda.pl Philosophy – Metalinguistic Awareness – Competence: A toolkit for intercultural understanding The perspectives of E. Levinas and M. Byram in the subject of intercultural pedagogy The objective of the article is to analyze the issue of intercultural competence in foreign language didactics from the wide perspectives of the Philosophy of Dialogue and Metalinguistic Awareness. My aim is to highlight the intricate interdependencies between three areas of human sciences – philosophy, linguistics and intercultural pedagogy – in order to discuss their importance for successful foreign language didactics. The order of my argumentation will be the following. I will start off with the philosophy of E. Levinas as the ground for thinking of understanding in terms of postmodern fragmentation of the social and cultural world. This social phenomenon necessitates being tolerant and open to the Other, whom it is hard to understand in the sense of total acculturation – acquiring its axiological values. Next, Levinas’s concepts of relation, subjective autonomy and sensitivity to the Other will be related to the three key$concepts of intercultural competence as defined by M. Byram: knowledge, skills and attitude. I will make an attempt to draw the line of common theoretical interpretation possible to apply to these three pairs of categories. Finally, having established their theoretical and philosophical base, I will refer to practice: each category shall be connected to the particular examples of metalanguage and areas of academic linguistics, which have in my opinion the potential to realize the theoretical assumptions in educational settings of academia. The switch to practical methodology has one purpose: to exemplify why Metalinguistic Awareness (its meaning will be differentiated from that of Language Awareness, Linguistic Awareness or Knowledge about Language) is so indispensable a tool for developing intercultural competence and understanding, both of them required from foreign language teachers today. Session:General László Imre Komlósi University of Pécs, Hungary komlosi@btk.pte.hu Contextualizing Context: Ontologies for Situations, Pragmatic Knowledge and Contexts The title is a conscious reference to Kent Bach’s witty formulation of “Putting Context in Context” (Bach 2004: 36). The paper intends to challenge the widely$ accepted views according to which (i) it is straightforward to separate semantic content from pragmatic meaning based on the contribution of pragmatic knowledge or (ii) it is legitimate to claim that all linguistic meanings are context$bound, therefore their full meanings are pragmatically determined. The paper takes these positions to be extreme, untenable in view of linguistic evidence, and misleading for a sound methodology of pragmatics. The paper proposes a survey of some relevant domains of linguistic pragmatics in which the conceptualization of situations and contexts play a decisive role in natural language processing and language use. It is claimed further that we need to acknowledge different types of ontologies to be able to delineate linguistic meaning, pragmatic meaning, contextual meaning and speaker meaning. A. The context of linguistic meaning: “There is no such thing as pragmatic meaning, at least nothing that is commensurate with linguistic meaning. There is what the sentence means and what the speaker means in uttering it” (Bach 2004, 27). The paper scrutinizes Bach’s classical semantics$pragmatics distinction by critically analyzing Bach’s fundamental claim: “The reason there is a gap and a clear$cut one at that is that semantics and pragmatics have distinct subject matters, sentences and utterances, respectively.” It is argued that “sentence meaning” is both part of grammar (as Bach emphasizes it) and also a consequence of the architecture of the mental lexicon, the latter being subject to mental operations of meaning construction, meaning extension and meaning integration. On such considerations, Bach’s arguments for “muddling the gap” (ambiguities), “fudging the gap” (semantic incompleteness), “missing the gap” (faulty intuitions and semantic illusions) and “bridging the gap” are to be revisited. B. The context of co8text, context, context of situation and context of culture. A distinction is drawn between the linguistic environment (co$text), the immediate physical, temporal, spatial, social environment in which verbal exchanges take place, the totality of extra$linguistic features having relevance to a communicative act (context of situation) and the totality of social relations having relevance to a communicative act (context of culture). Ontological commitments are analyzed with reference to “types of realities”. C. The context of interactional socio8linguistics: Interactional sociolinguistics studies how language users create meaning via interaction while involving cross$ cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing. Contextualization is a central notion denoting the process of assigning meaning, either linguistic or as a means of interpreting the environment within which an expression or action is executed (Levinson 2003). Contextualization broadens the understanding of culture to include social, political, and economic phenomena. Culture is understood in a dynamic and flexible way and is seen not as closed and self$contained, but as open and able to be enriched by an encounter with other cultures and movements (Strauss and Quinn 1997), based on the transactional model of mind with “cultural psychology” as a decisive context (Jerome Bruner 1990). D. The context of the self in cognition and culture: social information processing is strongly influenced by the person either primarily defining his or her self as an autonomous entity (independent self$construal) or as related to other people (interdependent self$construal). The notion of social cognition is examined in which the encoding, storage, retrieval and processing of information relating to conspecifics or members of the same species take place. Social cognition has its roots in social psychology which attempts “to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others” (Allport 1985: 3). It studies the individual within a social or cultural context and focuses on how people perceive and interpret information they generate themselves (intrapersonal) and from others (interpersonal) (Sternberg, 1994). Further, cognitive dissonance$theory, self$ perception theory, face$work theory, mental$state attribution theory (intentionality) are brought to bear the understanding of the pragmatics of the self. E. The context of Web experience: what makes our online experiences truly meaningful? The Semantic Web has raised high hopes by aspiring to have a computational power of NLP that approximates human language in searching and finding results with syntactic exactness. The intelligent personal agents, however, are not only able to process structured data but can make them fully actualized during on$line processing. With the rise of the social Web (also referred to as the pragmatic Web), meaningful and relevant experiences are realized with the help of the context of our identities and social graph. This web$created context has become the pragmatics of our online identities (Hannover and Kühnen, 2004). The pragmatic Web is a highly$ relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data, which impacts individual user experience and opens up entirely new opportunities by transforming information value to economic value. The vision of the pragmatic Web is to bring it about that my Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me through layered contextual social data based on my identity. We need to empower individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter$operability. The social Web experience ultimately is that of a highly$ personalized, dynamic, relevant and re$mixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration in a virtual social net. Hypotheses and results It is assumed that much of the information about situations, events, acts, social relations, etc., will be conceptualized (type meanings) and contextualized (token meanings) in the individual minds. It is hypothesized that intrapersonal and interpersonal information is kept separate on the basis of ontological hierarchies concerning contexts and contextualizations. Session: General References: Allport, A. 1985. “The historical background of social psychology”. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.). Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 1, 3rd ed.), 1$46. New York: Random House. Bach, K. 2004. “Minding the Gap”. In: C. Bianchi (ed.). The Semantics8Pragmatics Distinction. CSLI Publications, Stanford: Stanford University, 27$43. Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hannover, B. & U. Kühnen. 2004. “Culture, context, and cognition: The Semantic Procedural Interface model of the self”. European Review of Social Psychology 15: 297$333. Levinson, S. C. 2003. “Contextualizing ‘contextualization cues’”. In: S.L. Eerdmans, C.L. Prevignano & P.J. Thibault (eds): Language and interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 31$99. Sternberg, R. 1994. In search of the human mind. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Strauss, C. & N. Quinn. 1997. A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Session:Intercultural Communication and Speech Actions Monika Kopytowska University of Łódź, Poland mkopytowska@poczta.onet.pl Al"Jazeera English – mediating Palestinian experience Written as a response to the need for a cognitive pluralism in discourse studies, the study proposes a new integrated approach towards the news discourse, combining pragmatic and cognitive linguistic perspectives with the insights from semiotics and mass communication studies. The approach, drawing its inspiration from Chilton’s (2004) and Cap’s (2006, 2008) models of proximization, differs substantially from these political$discourse oriented models in that it links proximization to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product with its verbal and visual dimension. As far as the latter is concerned, framing, metaphor and metonymy are discussed as the key element of the proximization mechanism mediating human experience (Thompson 1990, Buonanno and Radice 2008) and linked to visual techniques including close$ups, zooming$in, or carefully chosen camera angles (cf. Zhou 2005). The data analyzed comes from the Al$Jazeera English news coverage of the conflict in Gaza. It has been frequently pointed out that without this coverage Palestinian voices from the Gaza would not reverberate so powerfully in Western consciousness, and disturbing reports would not “create pictures”, to use Lippmann’s term, of the oppressed in our minds. On the other hand, the highly visual and shocking coverage, presenting the conflict in terms of personal dramas, has been criticized for sweeping generalizations and bias, and thus distracting the audiences from the underlying causes of the reported issues and making them “over$stimulated and bored all at once” (Moeller 1999: 8–9). Rather than evaluating the ideological aspects of this process, the present paper examines the mechanism allowing for the mediation of experience and identification with the plight of the victims, which is central to media influence on the cognitive$affective attitudes of individuals (and thus for “Al$Jazeera effect”, cf. Bahador 2007, Cassara and Lengel 2004), namely proximization, defined here as reducing the temporal, spatial, axiological and emotional distance between the reality presented in the news and media audiences. Selected bibliography: Bahador, B. 2007. CNN Effect in Action: how the news media pushed the West toward war in Kosovo. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cap, P. 2006. Legitimization in Political Discourse: A Cross8Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Chilton, P. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Moeller, S. D. 1999. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. London: Routledge. Robinson, P. 2005. “The CNN effect revisited”. Critical studies in media communication 22(4): 344$349. Session: General Dennis Kurzon University of Haifa,Israel kurzon@research.haifa.ac.il A Model of Silence in Social Interaction: Two Problematic Issues I have proposed a model of silence in social interaction in the form of a typology of silence. In this model there are three types of silence: conversational, textual and situational. In the original typology (Kurzon 2007), a fourth type – thematic – was also included; this silence relates to an addresser who is speaking but does not relate to a topic or theme which s/he would be expected to talk about (“silent about”). Since this type of silence differs from the other three in that the addresser is not silent in the sense that s/he is not speaking – the silence cannot be timed unlike the other cases, and since “silent about” seems to be an expression possible in some languages but not in others (Kurzon 2009), thematic silence has been removed from the model. This is the first issue to be discussed. Secondly, the distinction between conversational silence, on the one hand, and textual and situational silence, on the other, seems to be based on the criterion of informality vs. formality. However, it will be argued that whereas textual and situational silence may occur in more formal contexts, formality may also be found in cases of conversational silence. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Maria Ivana Lorenzetti University of Verona, Italy mariaivana.lorenzetti@univr.it When Political Journalism meets Satire: A Compared Analysis on the Coverage of Sex Scandals in Italy and in the Anglo"Saxon World This contribution presents a comparative analysis of the discursive and rhetorical strategies employed by mass media in different linguistic and political environments in the coverage of two scandals about both the private and public life of two politicians, i.e. the Berlusconi$“escorts” affair in 2009 in Italy and the Clinton$Lewinsky affair in 1998. Modern politics is largely mediated and experienced by most citizens through the filter of the press (McNair 2000) and the accounts of political reality thus provided are in turn complex constructions embodying the communicative work of both journalistic codes and practices, and politicians (Lakoff 1996, Starkey 2007, Schlesinger 1991). Newspapers, blogs or even TV programs in which entertainment is mixed with news, often recur to satire as a tool to challenge – and change – the ways in which we see our society, our media and ourselves (Carlson 2007). The role played by political media, especially television news programs and newspapers, in shaping public opinion has grown dramatically in recent years, leading to strongly opposing wars of words between media of different political orientation and to unmitigated criticism towards the opposing party or candidate, also through the use of sensational headlines, ridiculizing nicknames (Travaglio 2008, Serra 2009) and parody, both in Italy and abroad (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Relying on both the frameworks of Text Complexity (Merlini Barbaresi 2003) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, Van Djick 2006), this work highlights changing trends in editorials and news reporting style in dealing with these controversial themes, relying on a corpus of articles from (both printed and on$line) Italian, British and American newspapers, and on newer information channels, such as journalists’ Internet blogs. References Carlson M. 2007. “Blogs and Journalistic Authority” Journalism Studies 8/2: 264$ 279. Fairclough N. 1995. Media Discourse, London, Arnold. Hallin D. & P. Mancini. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lakoff G. 1996. Moral Politics. What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press. McNair B. 2000. Journalism and Democracy: An Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere, London, Routledge. Merlini Barbaresi L. 2003. “Towards a Theory of Text Complexity” in L. Merlini Barbaresi (ed.) Complexity in Language and Text, 23$66. Pisa, Edizioni PLUS. Session: General Schlesinger P. 1991. “Media, the Political Order and National Identity”. Media Culture & Society, 13: 297$308. Serra M. 2009. “L’Amaca”, Repubblica. Starkey G. 2007. Balance and Bias in Journalism: Representation, Regulation and Democracy, London: Palgrave. Travaglio M. 2008. Per Chi Suona la Banana. Il Suicidio dell’ Unione Brancaleone e l’ Eterno Ritorno di Al Tappone, Milano: Garzanti. Van Dijk, T. 2006. “Discourse and Manipulation”, Discourse in Society XVII/2: 359$383. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Martin Macura & Elena Ciprianova Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia martin.macura@columbus.sk , eciprianova@ukf.sk Metaphoric collocations in administrative and legal texts and their translation into Slovak Administrative and legal texts are a prevailing text type in modern communication. From the viewpoint of lexis, style and workout, they heavily rely on settled conventions and stereotypes with their respective pragmatic functions. Such conventions and stereotypes can be also traced on the lexical (and morphological) level. The present paper will focus on the analysis of collocations in administrative and legal texts written in English and their translation into Slovak. The analysis will be made on the Acquis Communautaire parallel bilingual corpus containing up to one million aligned sentences and on ICE corpus (tagged and parsed, monolingual). It will be focusing on the occurrence of collocations, their prevailing morphological structure, relative fixedness, lexical meaning and metaphoricity, translation into Slovak and pragmatic effect in the original and target language. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Radhika Mamidi Prince Sultan University, KSA radhika41@gmail.com The world goes round by Gricean maxims… It is language that unites people; it is language that divides people. It is humour that draws people closer and it is cynicism that sets them apart. In this paper, we will demonstrate how the implicatures arising by violating the maxims proposed by Grice (1975), in a multi$cultural environment, bring in harmony (by laughter) or discord (by sarcasm). The motivation for our paper comes from observations of everyday communication among colleagues of differing cultural backgrounds and the effect of incorrect interpretation of the speaker’s intention on the relationships. For example, a speaker’s sense of humour generated by violation of Gricean maxims with the intention of empathizing with the hearer may make the hearer think that the speaker is being sarcastic as seen in the following excerpt illustrating pragmatic incompetence: A: Hello Dr L! How are you? L: I am fine. (pause) So many exams to correct and with invigilation duties (pause), my daughters are down with flu (pause), and my landlord wants us to move as the whole building will be pulled down to make a mall. A: Perfect timing for that! L: No, no. It is not. I am so stressed. You cannot imagine. A: I meant… L: I am getting late. See you later. (Here L feels A is being sarcastic and rude and attempts to criticise her inefficiency) We propose a quantitative and qualitative analysis of cooperative principles obeyed, flouted, or violated by both students and faculty members of a particular university in Saudi Arabia. Our methodology follows three steps. Firstly, the research includes face$to$face interviews and filling out survey forms by participants after reading out real conversations. Secondly, the participants are required to watch videos and read the scripts of at least three episodes of “Friends” and then take a second survey. The survey requires them to identify the maxim violated. Our aim is to determine whether the respondents can actually grasp the humour generated by violation of Gricean maxims in “Friends”. We intend to get some insight into the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s violation. Thirdly, we will compare the strategies adopted by Saudi students with those of other Saudis. In our earlier work, we have observed that in Saudi culture, in most contexts, violating the maxims of cooperation actually means cooperation. (Danielewicz$Betz and Mamidi, 2009). Session: General Michel Meeuwis Ghent University, Belgium Michael.Meeuwis@ugent.be Exophoric and endophoric uses of demonstratives in Lingála: Issues of referentiality, text deixis, and grammaticalisation The Bantu language Lingála has an adnominal demonstrative, yangó, used for endophora only. The two other adnominal demonstratives in Lingála are proximal óyo and distal wâná. In addition to exophoric deixis, óyo and wâná are also used endophorically. The discourse$pragmatic differences between yangó on the one hand, and, on the other, endophoric usage types of óyo and especially wâná remain unaccounted for in the literature, and so are, a fortiori, the implications for pragmatic theory. An analysis of spoken Lingála corpora allows us to draw the following descriptive and pragmatic$theoretical conclusions: Yangó is restricted to coreferential anaphora. wâná is used (i) for coreferential anaphora in cases where the antecedent is more distant (referent less highly activated); (ii) for a range of noncoreferential anaphora and other opaque$referential usage types (abstract anaphora; associative or “bridging” anaphora; metonymic anaphora; recognitional or “memory” deixis; etc); (iii) when wâná is used with highly activated referents, a reading along (ii) is generated by implicature. In sum, wâná invites the hearer ‘to make an effort’ (Diessel 2003; Auer 1984). Yangó is excluded from use for pure text deixis. Related languages have cognates of yangó used for both endophora and exophora, suggesting earlier stages in yangó's grammaticalization (Greenberg 1978; Lehmann 1982). Lingála puts into perspective the claim that there is no clear borderline between coreferential and non$coreferential anaphora (e.g. Apothéloz & Reichler 1999). References: Apothéloz, D. & M.$J. Reichler$Béguelin. 1999. “Interpretations and functions of demonstrative NPs in indirect anaphora”, Journal of Pragmatics 31: 363$97. Auer, P. 1984, “Referential problems in conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics 8: 627$48. Diesel, H. 1999, Demonstratives, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Diessel, H. 2003, “Demonstratives in language use and grammar”. SMSS. Session: General Iamze Mirazanashvili Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia mirazanashvili@yahoo.co.uk The Peculiarities of Realization of Language Functions in Presidential Speeches As modern life gets more concerned with political issues interest in political discourse escalates among people including linguists. Special attention is paid to the language ploys of politicians, especially of presidents used to influence people and get the desired reaction from them. The aim of this research was to study one of the pragmatic aspects of the presidential speeches, in particular, the public speeches of two presidents, George W. Bush and Micheil Saakashvili (six speeches of each president), delivered to various audiences in different environments and at different times. The paper covers six functions of language according to Roman Jakobson’s referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual and poetic functions and their representation in the presidential speeches. Having researched the selected material the following conclusions have been drawn: a) The referential function is realized through factual information supported with statistics which serves to make a presidential speech persuasive and trustworthy; b) Realization of the emotive function is done on different levels of language through usage of lexical units, collocations, phrases, simple and complex constructions and sentences having a stylistic value in which the emotions and feelings of an addresser are expressed. Closing expressions, exemplified in the prayer$cum$blessing formula, are essential and inseparable parts of the presidential speeches. Having positive connotations and being loaded with the emotions of the speaker they elicit positive responses in gatherings of the faithful. c) In the presidential speeches conative function is realized via a) rhetorical questions with three types of question structures which seek to obtain increased involvement by the addressee, b) appeals which are further classified into three groups according to their structure and c) subtle directives using modal constructions having a strong call to duty or obligation but tempered with a soft element of persuasion; d) The phatic function is realized in the very first lines of presidential speeches with the expressions like “my dear citizens/brothers and sisters”, which aim to create a conducive atmosphere at the very beginning of the address. Again, polite phrases of greeting and thanks are often used by the presidents. These are further classified in the research according to the structure. Person deixis is one more means of expressing the phatic function. In the studied speeches of the presidents the use of the first person plural is 3.6 times higher than that of the first person singular. Both inclusive WE ( = president plus other(s) plus addressee = president plus audience plus all) and exclusive WE (= president plus other(s) minus addressee = president plus government) are used in the presidential speeches. The familial exhortation reflects the presidents’ intention to make listeners a part of an event or action. e) The metalingual function is expressed by the metalanguage of the presidents and selection of the level of officiality expressed through registers which differs due to certain extralinguistic factors; f) The presidents’ speeches demonstrate the poetic function in action. Lexical, syntactical and phonetic expressive means and stylistic devices are freely employed by the presidents. The speeches are sometimes salutary examples of not only the poetical but of all six functions of language seeking to deliver factual information and to invoke primal feelings and attitudes in the assembled gathering. Session: General Gabriela Missikova UCP Nitra, Slovakia & Tomas Bata University Zlin, Czech Republic gabimissik@yahoo.com Pragmatic Approaches to Literary Translation The suggested paper explores the ways how particular concepts of pragmatics are applicable in the translation of literary texts. More precisely, it focuses on particular aspects of translation analysis where pragmatic awareness enhances a better understanding of the source text (ST) by the translator and thus provides them with better chances to produce (semantically, stylistically and pragmatically) the relevant target text (TT). Viewing the translator as a reader of the ST with a specific purpose in mind, the paper primarily focuses on the ways the readers understand explicit and implicit meanings, how they decode implicatures and make inferences, and how they observe the maxims of the Cooperative Principle (CP). The main working methods are conversational and translational analyses of utterances and communicative situations in general. The empirical research is based on a selection of literary texts whose original and translated versions have provided parallel English/Slovak text samples of satisfactory length. The purpose of conversational analysis is to recognise conversational strategies employed by the characters in the analysed novels, focusing on their (non)observance of the CP maxims as signalled by specific usages of hedging expressions and intensifiers. As a result of the presented analyses, various effects of (non)observance of the CP maxims and distinctive functions of maxim hedges in the ST and TT are identified and their relevance for translation strategies discussed. References Clark, B. 2009. “’The Place Near The Thing Where We Went That Time’: An Inferential Approach to Pragmatic Stylistics”. In: Topics in Linguistics. Interface Between Pragmatics and Other Linguistic Disciplines. Vol. 3, 4$11, Nitra: FF UKF. Cruse, D. A. 2000. Meaning in Language. An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grice, H. P. 1975. “Logic and conversation”. In: Syntax and semantics Vol. 3: Speech Acts. Vol. 3., 41$58, New York: Academic Press. Grundy, P. 2000. Doing Pragmatics. London: Arnold. Hickey, L. (ed.) The Pragmatics of Translation. Topics in translation 12. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Malmkjaer, K. 1998. “Cooperation and literary translation”. In: Hickey, L. (ed.) The Pragmatics of Translation. Topics in translation 12. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Miššíková, G. 2009. “Pragmatic Dimensions in Literary Text: A Comparative Perspective”. In: O. Dontcheva$Navratilova and Povolná, R. (eds.) Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse. Newcastle upon Tyme: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. 2006. “Pragmatics”. In: F. Jackson and M. Smith (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford: OUP. Thomas, J. 1995. Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman. Yule, G. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Session: General Katarzyna Molek"Kozakowska, Opole University, Poland molekk@uni.opole.pl Discursive territorialization in politics: A critical pragma" linguistic analysis of European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek’s inaugural speeches According to Macgregor Wise (2008: 11), a territory is “an area of influence one has.” We tend too mark our territories with real and symbolic signs that change the spaces around us. Sometimes we first need to deterritorialize that space by removing the signs imprinted there by others in order to reterritorialize it in our own fashion, as is the case with redecorating a newly bought house. That is why some cultural territories tend to be rather ephemeral configurations of physical and symbolic means of expression of our diverse identities, ideologies and affiliations, whereas others seem to persist through our traditions or memories, our habitus (Bourdieu, 1990). Political institutions can also be thought of as symbolic territories. One performs politics through constant attempts to appropriate public space. One asserts political influence by marking the political arena with one’s physical and symbolic presence, by voicing one’s opinions and advancing one’s agenda, by installing a network of unique signs that have wider resonance in the public space (cf. Wodak, 2009).Yet, the discursive dimension of territorialization in politics seems to have been relatively under$researched so far. The purpose of this presentation is to review some discursive strategies used to territorialize public space by the newly elected President of European Parliament Jerzy Buzek. By examining a corpus of his inaugural speeches (over 7000 words), I will try to identify salient rhetorical devices, such as historical and national references, forms of address, as well as metaphors, topoi and argumentative schemata Buzek has used in order to symbolically imprint the presidential office with his public persona. The analysis will be informed by general methodological frameworks of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Selected references: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In other words: Essays towards reflexive sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Macgregor Wise, J. 2008. Cultural globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Wodak, Ruth. 2009. The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Session: General Hadar Netz & Ron Kuzar Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel & University of Haifa hadar.netz@gmail.com, kuzar@research.ac.il Iconicity between Interactional Atmosphere and Markedness in Spoken Hebrew: The More Heated, The More Marked We would like to present a study of the discourse functions of possessive sentences in spoken Hebrew. In this study we show that there is an iconic relation between markedness and the level of speaker involvement in the discourse. Relaxed atmosphere coincides with unmarked sentence structure, whereas heated atmosphere with marked. The study is based on corpora of naturally occurring speech, and is conducted within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis. Previous studies of possessive sentences in Hebrew have focused mainly on grammatical issues (e.g. Berman 1978; Coffin and Bolozky 2005; Glinert 1989; Hankin 1994; Ziv 1976). These studies have not addressed the field of discourse functions, nor have they used naturally occurring speech. The current study fills this gap. The possessive sentence in Hebrew has several alternative linearizations. The unmarked case is predicate initial, and the ‘possessor’ is pronominal. Deviations from this structure create markedness. Among the marked variants, the most frequently used form is possessive left$dislocation. We present data from three corpora of spoken Israeli Hebrew. These data indicate that marked possessive sentences in Hebrew are typically used in cases of agitated and argumentative discourse. This finding is similar to findings of studies of marked constructions in other languages. For example, Duranti and Ochs (1979: 404) have shown that in Italian, Left Dislocation is used as a floor8seeking device, and Netz and Kuzar (2007: 329) have argued that in English, LD is used for hedged disagreement. In the current study, we present minimal pairs: possessive sentences with very similar propositions, one marked and the other unmarked. In these pairs, marked structure correlates with high speaker involvement and agitated discourse, whereas unmarked structure correlates with a more relaxed interactional atmosphere. References Berman, R.A. 1978. Modern Hebrew Structure. Tel$Aviv: University Publishing Projects. Coffin, E.A. & Sh. Bolozky. 2005. A Reference Grammar of Modern Hebrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, A. & E. Ochs. 1979. “Left dislocation in Italian conversation”. Syntax and Semantics 12, Discourse and Syntax, Talmy Givón (ed.), 377–416. New$York: Academic Press. Glinert, L. 1989. The Grammar of Modern Hebrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hankin, R. 1994. “Yeš gam et ze” [yeš also ACC this]. Balshanut Ivrit [Hebrew Linguistics] 38: 41–54. Session: General Netz, H & R. Kuzar. 2007. “Three marked theme constructions in spoken English”. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 305–335. Ziv, Y. 1976. “n the reanalysis of grammatical terms in Hebrew possessive constructions” Studies in Modern Hebrew. Syntax and Semantics, Peter Cole (ed.), 129–152. Amsterdam$New$York$Oxford: Oxford University Press. Session: General Manuel Padilla Cruz Universidad de Sevilla, Spain mpadillacruz@us.es Interjections, Underdeterminacy and Enrichment Interjections are fairly underdeterminate, as they can convey a wide array of feelings, senses and contents (e.g. Eco 1968; Ameka 1992; 2006; Calvo Pérez 1996; López Bobo 2002; Cueto Vallverdú and López Bobo 2003; Buridant 2006; Światkowska 2006). Yet, on many occasions they are used in overt communication with a very precise informative intention. The question that then arises is how hearers can infer speakers’ informative intention and overcome the underterminacy of interjections. Some linguists have argued that, although interjectional utterances do not have a surface syntactic structure, they amount to phrases (Bres 1995; Wilmet 1997; Światkowska 2006). In their view, interjections would have underlying propositional schemas with syntactic arguments, which would determine their understanding (Wierzbicka 1991, 1992; Wilkins 1992, 1995; Vassileva 1994; Vázquez Veiga and Alonso Ramos 2004). Based on recent relevance$theoretic research on subsentential utterances (e.g. Hall 2009), this presentation will suggest that it is not necessary to postulate the existence of such schemas. On the contrary, hearers can pragmatically enrich interjections in order to infer the speaker’s informative intention by exploiting some of their features and relying on contextual information. On the one hand, interjections encode procedures that enable them to point to specific extralinguistic information necessary for their understanding (Wharton 2003, 2009; Padilla Cruz 2009a, 2009b, in press). Some interjections may even encode some schematic conceptual material that would restrict their meaning potential (Padilla Cruz 2009b). On the other hand, contextual information may make some candidate meanings highly salient (e.g. Wilkins 1992). On the grounds of information pointed, concepts activated and contextual assumptions manifest to hearers, they may make attributions about the speakers’ beliefs and/or desires when interpreting interjections, a task at which they will succeed if they engage in joint attention with the speaker (Yazbek and D’Entremont 2006; Kidwell and Zimmerman 2007; Assimakopoulos 2008). References Ameka, F. 1992. “Interjections: the universal yet neglected part of speech”. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 101$118. Ameka, F. 2006. “Interjections”. In Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier: 743$746. Assimakopoulos, S. 2008. Logical Structure and Relevance. The University of Edinburgh, Ph.D. dissertation. Bres, J. 1995. “Interjections/Cris/Injures”. Faits de Langues 6: 81$91. Buridant, D. 2006. “L’interjection: jeux et enjeux”. Langages 161: 3$9. Calvo Pérez, J. 1996. “¡¡Interjecciones!!”. In Panorama de la investigación lingüística a l’Estat espagnol. Actes del I Congrés de lingüística general, III, Session: General edited by E. Serra et al. Valencia: Universitat de València, 85$98. Cueto Vallverdú, N. and M. J. López Bobo. 2003. La interjección. Semántica y pragmática. Madrid: Arco Libros. Eco, U. 1968. La estructura ausente. Barcelona: Lumen. Hall, A. 2009. “Subsentential utterances, ellipsis, and pragmatic enrichment”. Pragmatics and Cognition 17/2: 222$250. Kidwell, M. and D. H. Zimmerman. 2007. “Joint attention as action”. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 592$611. López Bobo, M. J. 2002. La interjección. Aspectos gramaticales. Madrid: Arco Libros. Padilla Cruz, M. 2009a. “Towards an alternative relevance$theoretic approach to interjections”. International Review of Pragmatics 1/1: 182$206. Padilla Cruz, M. 2009b. “Might interjections encode concepts? More questions than answers”. Łodź Papers in Pragmatics 5/2. Padilla Cruz, M. 2010. “What do interjections contribute to communication and how are they interpreted? A cognitive$pragmatic account”. In Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies (Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics. Vol. I), edited by I. Witczak$Plisiecka, pp. 39$68. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Światkowska, M. 2006. “L’interjection: entre deixis et anaphore”. Langages 161: 47$56. Vassileva, Albena. 1994. “Vers un traitement modal de l’interjection: traduction de la modalité injonctive par les interjections en français”. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 23/1: 103$110. Vázquez Veiga, Nancy and Margarita Alonso Ramos. 2004. “Tratamiento lexicográfico de la interjección ¡ojo! en un diccionario de marcadores del español”. Verba 31: 399$430. Wharton, T. 2003. “Interjection, language, and the ‘showing/saying’ continuum”. Pragmatics and Cognition 11: 39$91. Wharton, T. 2009. Pragmatics and Non8verbal Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, A. 1991. Cross8Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, A. 1992. “The semantics of interjection”. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 159$192. Wilkins, D. P. 1992. “Interjections as deictics”. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 119$158. Wilkins, D. P. 1995. “Expanding the traditional category of deictic elements: interjection as deictics”. In Deixis in Narrative. A Cognitive Science Perspective, edited by J. Duchan, J. Bruder and L. A. Hewitt. Hillsdale, NJ: LEA: 359$386. Wilmet, M. 1997. Grammaire critique du français. Louvain$la$Neuve: Duculot. Yazbek, A. and B. D’Entremont. 2006. “A longitudinal investigation of the still$ face effect at 6 months and joint attention at 12 months”. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 24: 589$601. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Christine Paul Free University Berlin, Germany christinepaul2002@yahoo.de Verbalizing Inferences about Prior Utterances Much of the theoretical work of inference processes dealing with semantic underdeterminacy has been focused on the question of how to explain inference processes based on the Gricean definition of what is said vs. what is implicated, redefining and focusing either on the communicative principle (most famously by Horn 2007, Levinson 2000, Sperber & Wilson 1996) or on further inference processes on the explicit level or on the question to what extent the processes are linguistically (Stanley 2007) or contextually driven (Carston 2002, Recananti 2004). According to the Relevance theory framework, hypothesis formation and hypothesis confirmation is one of the key tasks of utterance comprehension (Sperber&Wilson, 1996:68), analyzed mainly as a personal inference process of the hearer in order to make up the speaker’s intention. The cooperative process of inference drawing and confirming has received some attention focusing mainly on syntactic structures and turn taking (Lerner 2002; 2004), but not on the different inference processes involved. I explore the relation between two communicative devices which verbalize inference processes of prior turns in spoken German conversations. Coproductions (utterance completions or expansions by a second speaker) and questions regarding prior utterances seem to have contrastive communicative functions (signalling understanding/misunderstanding; turn taking). Nevertheless, both expression types can focus on different implicit details of prior turns and thus represent parts of the hearer’s inference processes. Empirical data show how these expressions enable the speaker to gradually verbalize different strengths of assumption about details of the previous turn. The communicative function of both expression types depend not only on the interrogative features, but on the type of inference process and the contextually provided elements as well. These expression types are not a dichotomy, but a continuum. Session: General Agnieszka Pawłowska University of Warsaw, Poland agnieszkaxpawlowska@gmail.com Mental Model in the Speaker’s Mind with elements of a functional"pragmatic approach This methodological$critical paper aims to present the model of events the speaker builds in his mind to properly organize political beliefs in the discourse production. It starts with a brief explanation of the idea of mental model that has prevailed in cognitive psychology since the early 1980s (van Dijk & Kintsch 1983, Garnham 1987). Van Dijk (1990) formulates a much broader approach to the notion which is used as an interface between socially shared political cognitions namely group knowledge beliefs, underlying ideologies, norms and values. Buhler (1990), Ehlich (1991, 1995) and later Sauer (2002) present a speech action model of events from the functional$pragmatic approach that incorporates the recepient’s mental activities and adopts procedures as orientation devices between the fields of the inner structure of language. Both models enable the speaker to include in the discourse information that is assumed to be appropriate in a certain social situation and to reflect his current vision of the presented events. Their mechanisms will be demonstrated in the analysis of a confirmation speech delivered by the Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on America’s counterterrorist activities. Session: General Jaroslav Peregrin Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic & University of Hradec Králové jarda@peregrin.cz Normative Dimension of Discourse Nobody would deny that discourse may interact with normative relationships among people, relationships such as obligations or entitlements. However, in this article I explore the idea that normativity might be more crucial for language than it prima facie seems. The idea is that it is a certain kind of normativity that is constitutive of the distinctively human mind (aka reason) that founds our concepts and that hence infiltrates the semantics of our language. If this is true, then normativity is not only an accidental element of some of our speech acts, but rather their essential ingredient. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Marilyn Plumlee Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea mariplum@yahoo.com Facing Up To and Dealing With Impoliteness Moves in Two Cultures This paper examines cross$cultural differences in the organization of verbal interactions by demonstrating how speakers in an Asian society and in a Western society differ in their resolution of face threats when conflicting norms of interaction collide. A discourse analytic approach is used to analyze interactions between guests and hosts on Korean and American celebrity talk shows in segments which contain breaches in the norms of politeness. When a breach occurs, Korean participants tend to immediately mitigate their face$threatening moves. Anglo$ Americans are much less likely to engage in threat$mitigating politeness moves. While Koreans and Anglo$Americans thus appear to follow quite different standards, interactants in both cultures demonstrate awareness of both a strategic, entertainment$oriented norm as well as a societal ideology governing their actions. The celebrity talk show data is supplemented by analysis of face$to$face verbal interactions between Korean and North American adults which contain face$ threatening moves. The prevalent norm in these intercultural dyads is mitigation of face$threatening actions, yet dominant cultural norms tend to prevail. Both the inter$cultural lay examples and the celebrity cross$cultural examples demonstrate that ideologies of interaction play at least as significant a role in speakers’ structuring of verbal interactions as the strategically$motivated, threat$ mitigating or face$enhancing politeness moves proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). The study posits a two$tier analysis of politeness moves: an ideological tier (based on societal norms of politeness) and a strategic tier (based on context$ specific requirements) and invite other scholars to reexamine the explanatory power of the dominant politeness theory in light of the culture$specific data presented here. Session: General Christian Plunze Goethe$Universität Frankfurt, Germany plunze@lingua.uni$frankfurt.de On Assertions about Fictions It seems that someone can assert something that is true by uttering ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’. How is that possible, if Sherlock Holmes does not exist? One popular answer, given by many authors who endorse an irrealism with respect to fictive entities, is that the assertion made by ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ is really an assertion about a certain fictional work: Someone who utters ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ asserts merely that according to fiction F Sherlock Holmes is a detective (but not that Sherlock Holmes is a detective). And this assertion can be true even if there are no fictive entities. In contrast, the uttered sentence is false (or at least not true), since it entails that Sherlock Holmes exists, which is false. In my talk I will argue against such a non8reductive version of a paraphrase theory by putting forward the following equivalence thesis: Asserting that Sherlock Holmes is a detective is equivalent to asserting that according to fiction F Sherlock Holmes is a detective. One may wonder how that could be, since it is obvious, that, for example, asserting that Barack Obama will visit Afghanistan is not equivalent to asserting that according to the New York Times Barack Obama will visit Afghanistan. However, in the first part of my talk I will argue that the impression that the equivalence$thesis is false rests on the assumption that there is no crucial difference between the operators ‘According to fiction F’ and ‘According to non$fiction G’. But this assumption is false or so I will argue. I will begin by pointing out some of these differences. My focal point will be on utterances of (1) and (2): (1) ‘According to the New York Times Barack Obama will visit Afghanistan, but this is not true.’ (2) ‘According to A Study in Scarlet Sherlock Holmes is a detective, but this is not true.’ Why is an utterance of (2) – in contrast to an utterance of (1) – a defective or infelicitous assertion? It seems obvious that this difference has to be explained with reference to the differences between fictional and non–fictional stories or works. In the second part of my talk I will explore some of these differences and try to justify and explain on this basis the equivalence thesis. Session: General Teodora Popescu University of Alba Iulia, Romania teo_popescu@hotmail.com Interdialogic mapping of the Romanian political blogosphere The aim of this paper is to undertake an analysis of the Romanian political blogosphere and to demonstrate that the concepts of intra$dialogism (dialogue between dialogues within a community sharing common cultural, social and linguistic values) and inter$dialogism (dialogue between communities – in this case with differing ideologies) may be applied to computer$mediated communication. The analytical framework draws on both Bakhtin’s dialogism (Bakhtin, 1979) and on Kristeva’s intertextuality theory (Kristeva, 1986). For the purposes of the present paper I have investigated the blogs of four major political leaders, concentrating on the way in which different ideas or incidents are reflected in the bloggers’ posts and the ensuing exchanges between the interactants. The timeframe covered is 31 October 2008 – 29 November 2008, coinciding with the period of parliamentary elections for the next four$year legislature. Adrian Năstase, the first blogger on the Romanian blogospace, formerly an extremely potent politician, lost the presidential elections in 2004 in favour of the current president, Traian Băsescu. The battle was fierce and the victory only came after the second scrutiny, the difference being almost unnoticeable. The failure was allegedly assigned to the politician’s lack of popularity with common people. Ion Iliescu, the former president of Romania, one of the founding fathers of the Romanian post$revolutionary state and founding member of the Social Democrat Party, is probably the most communicative blogger on the Romanian political cyberspace. Elena Udrea, former presidential counsellor (Traian Basescu’ presidency), member of PD$L (Democrat$Liberal Party), a controversial political figure, and involved in several media scandals, has her own website, which also features a highly$trafficked blog. Tudor Chiuariu, former Minister of Justice (April$December 2007), member of the National Liberal Party, and a young and promising politician is the latest to create a video$blog with improved features. My analysis focuses on the interactional patterns within one particular blog (between the blogger and the posters on the one hand, and on the other, between the bloggers themselves), as well as between the four blogs mentioned above. One of the typical intertextual devices used is the reference recurrently made to some politically$oriented discourse that may also function as exemplification within the argumentation of the blogger. Nastase’s post entry on 31 October reads: “Red Boris”, anticipating the idea in his text that the recently$elected Conservatory Mayor of London is in fact of social ($democrat) orientation. This example is only one instance in which reference is made to the semantic/ideological load of a frame dialogue. In the paper I will outline a sample of the inter$ and intradialogic mapping of the Romanian political blogosphere. Session: General Nadine Rentel Maître de langues du DAAD à l'Université Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV) rentel@hotmail.com Standardization vs. culture"specific characteristics in mass media: A Cross"cultural pragmatic analysis of French and German magazine advertising The field of mass media comprises different domains, for example messages on the TV, on the radio, in print media or on the internet. The present study puts the focus on the language of advertising, realized in print magazines. Advertising messages can be found in everyday life, and due to the communication of values and emotions, they are closely related to intercultural matters. A comparison between advertisements for the same product in different countries seems relevant for different reasons, for example for people working in communication agencies creating international advertising campaigns. The intercultural approach in the context of an analysis of messages in the media starts from the hypothesis that every form of communication is culture$ bound and reflects certain norms and traditions of a speech community. The central question in the present analysis is whether it is possible to base an advertising campaign on the same (“standardized”) concept in France and in Germany or whether one should take into account culture$specific preferences. We presume that advertising messages are adapted to a language and/or a culture, and we try to answer two selected questions in detail: On which level of the advertisement do we find intercultural differences (the headline, the body copy, the visual elements, etc.) Which formal and stylistic means (for example forms of addressing the reader) are characteristic for the German and the French campaigns? Do they mention culture$specific contents and values? Can they really be referred to as “typically German/French”, that is, do they only appear either in the French or in the German examples? The analysis is based on a corpus of 20 magazine advertisements for cars that were published in 2009 in German and French general$interest magazines. Session: General Timothy Riney International Christian University (ICU), Japan riney@icu.ac.jp Repairing Tales from Japan: Changes Over Time in Personal Narratives At two different times, Time 1 and Time 2, sixteen participants (11 Japanese and 5 Americans) were asked to respond in English to this prompt: “Tell me about one of the most exciting or dangerous moments of your life.” All participants were about 20 years old and in Japan when all stories were told. The Japanese (average TOEFL score: 500), responded during their first year and fourth year of college, which involved an interval of 42 months. The Americans (all native speakers of English from California) responded earlier (Time 1) and a few months later (Time 2) during their one$year Japanese study$abroad program. The focus of this presentation is on the topical and structural differences between the Japanese and American narratives in English, and on what changes, if any, occurred in the speakers’ repairing of their narratives between Time 1 and Time 2. The questions to be answered by this paper are the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What are the topics and structures of the 32 stories? How many repairs per speaker per story, and per minute, are there? What gets repaired? How and when does it get repaired? What is the consequence of the repair for the speaker and listener? Two additional questions are considered: 1. To what extent is the Japanese repairing of the stories, individually, and as a group, the same or different at Time 1, and at Time 2 $ 42 months later? 2. To what degree are answers to the all questions above related to previous listener assessments of these same 16 speakers and 32 stories with regard to (a) “accent,” (b) word recognition, and (c) overall story comprehension. Session: General Katarzyna Sanetra Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City sinatra2@gmail.com The notion of face and the specific contents of its positive and negative counterparts in the Mexican and Polish culture: A comparative study of linguistic realizations of language politeness in Polish and Mexican Spanish in the context of a medical encounter. The present study derives from the considerations of face as proposed by Erving Goffman (1967) and elaborated by Brown and Levinson (1987) in their theory of language politeness. What is questioned in this paper is the idea of the universality of the contents of the positive and negative face as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). The present investigation arises as an intent of a contribution to the discussion about the universality of the face, already being held by such investigators as Matsumoto (1988), Duranti (1992), Ide (1989), Nwoye (1989, 1992), Mao (1994), Bravo (1999), Spencer$ Oatey (2000, 2007), Scollon and Scollon (2001). In this project the primary objective is to identify and describe the main characteristics of the linguistic realizations of the language politeness in Polish and Mexican Spanish in a specific discourse genre, a medical encounter. Subsequently, this investigation analyzes the findings related to the linguistic realizations of politeness in terms of their relation with the contents of the positive and negative face in Polish and Mexican Spanish as proposed by Brown and Levinson. It is then suggested that the contents of these two categories are not suitable for the two cultures, for it is necessary to propose specific contents of the positive and negative face for the two cultures studied. The proposals of this paper are tentative as the range of the investigation is limited (it is only concerned with the context of a medical encounter). Nevertheless, it is a contribution to the discussion about the existence of universals in the explanation of the differences in the ways of expressing language politeness by language users belonging to different cultures. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Daniel J. Sax University of Warsaw, Poland sax.dan@gmail.com Predictability and pragmatically"informed processing: Non"final sentence stress in English and Polish This paper looks at the pragmatic function of the position of sentence stress in English and Polish, taking some steps towards formalizing the treatment of non$ final stress in English outlined by Sperber and Wilson (1995) within a relevance$ theoretic framework. It expands upon the “pro$active focus” approach to stress and predictability of Breheny (1996, 1998) to suggest a pragmatic distinction between “strong”/”weak” predictability. This distinction is couched in terms of the relevance8theoretic processing heuristic (Sperber and Wilson 2004), seen as guiding pragmatically$informed processing at the sub$utterance level. More broadly, these ideas seek to lend further weight to what is widely known as the “highlighting” approach to sentence stress, going back to Bolinger (1972) – against which Ladd (1996) levels various types of cross$linguistic data. This presentation will therefore strive to outline, by looking at various examples of sentences with non$final stress (narrow focus, thetic, relative infinitive, counter$ presuppositional) in English and Polish, how the tradition of the “highlighting” approach to sentence stress may indeed stand up to cross$linguistic scrutiny when expanded to account for the pragmatic mechanism underlying stronger/weaker predictability (and in this case, when the impact of freer word order in Polish is likewise taken into account). References Bowlinger, D. 1972. “Accent is predictable (if you're a mind$reader)”. Language 48 Breheny, R. 1996. “Pro$active focus”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 8 —. 1998. “Interface economy and focus”. In V. Rouchota & A. H. Jucker, eds, Current issues in relevance theory, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 105$139. Ladd, D.R. 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2004. Relevance Theory. In: G. Ward & L. Horn (eds.) Handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607$632. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Anita Schrim University of Szeged, Hungary schirmanita@gmail.com How discourse markers are born: The examples of Hungarian hát, tényleg and szóval In my talk I will show the roles of Hungarian discourse markers hát, tényleg and szóval in discourse organizing with the help of the analysed corpus collected from talk shows, parliamentary discussions and internet resources. Discourse markers are such particles that have no effect on truth conditions of sentences, do not influence the propositional content but have emotional and expressive functions (Jucker 1993). My aim is to show that the markers I investigate are in different stages of becoming a discourse marker. The particle hát has gone through the typical phases of grammaticalization. First it expressed locative relation, then it expressed time relation, then logical relation and, thus, its discourse function has come forth. In the case of the elements tényleg and szóval semantical bleaching is noticeable, but the recognition of their discourse functions are more problematic than that of hát. Through examples from the collected corpus, I show what their different behaviour originates from and why language users appraise their grammaticalized use differently. Further, I also show what speaker attitudes enriched the meaning of the particles, and what can aid to recognize their discourse functions. Results show that the particles hát, tényleg and szóval in questions can transform the questions into statements, and subsequently show the different opinions of the speaker. They occur mainly in rhetorical and debating questions, and their roles can be connected with face work. References Jucker, A. H. 1993: The discourse marker well: A relevance$theoretical account, Journal of Pragmatics 19: 435–52. Session: General Gunter Senft MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands gunter.senft@mpi.nl The Trobriand Islanders' ideology of competition and cooperation in the make – an anthropological"linguistic case study in the times of globalization Competition is one of the most typical and characteristic features of the Trobriand Islanders’ culture and society. It permeates all areas of the Trobriand Islanders’ life. However, in the dialectics of Trobriand society, competition is always based on cooperation between competitors and their supporters. This paper documents and analyzes a speech in which a man in his late thirties transmits his version of the Trobriand ideology of competition and cooperation to a group of schoolchildren in the village centre of Tauwema on Kaile’una Island. The speech documents this ideology in the make; moreover, it also reveals that this ideology is already influenced by radiations of present processes of globalization, radiations which by now have reached villages as remote as Tauwema. Session: General Danica Škara University of Split, Croatia dskara@ffst.hr The Euro"Ship and its Crew: Toward a Metaphorical Reconceptualization of the EU Political changes in Europe in recent decades have created a new and unfamiliar political and linguistic landscape. In a period of rapid growth of science and technology, globalization processes, integration and disintegration processes, a new meta$language appears, based on new metaphors. The main focus of this research is to develop a discourse analysis framework for addressing conceptual metaphors and new mental images of the EU. On reviewing the major databases of the European integration, several conceptual domains on which most of the EU discourse relies have been identified: space, movement/process, building/house, family, person/body. The results of the analysis show that body metaphors are among the most typical metaphorical mappings used in the data. At the same time, in the candidate countries (e.g. Croatia) the alternative schemas emerge. This paper provides a contrastive overview over the dominant metaphors of Euro$ debates. It highlights the characteristic differences of the EU’s ‘image’ within and outside the EU. Session: General Katarzyna Sznycer Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland karam11@wp.pl Manipulative discourse in Desperate Housewives The primary focus of the presentation is placed on the discursive structuring of manipulation. The presentation is part of a larger, scientific endeavour aiming to present descriptive and explanatory accounts of manipulation as a global, pragmatic act. The underlying aim is the proposal of a model of manipulation facilitating its identification, comprehension, analysis and counteraction. The analytical apparatus derives from the field of pragmatics complemented with critical discourse analysis (CDA) and multimodal analysis. More specifically, the analysis draws upon Fairclough’s relational version of CDA positing the dialectical relations between linguistic and semiotic elements within discourse. The motive for the adoption of the CDA framework is its focus on power, which is intrinsically linked to the problem of manipulation. The examination exploits a variety of analytical tools in order to gain insight into the mechanism of manipulation. Manipulation as a pragmatic phenomenon has not been investigated in a systematic way. The sparse accounts of manipulation either fail to determine its modus operandi, which leads to problems with the identification of the phenomenon or its differentiation from persuasion, propaganda and deception or account for it in a one$dimensional, partial way (Van Dijk 2006, Louis de Saussure 2005, Fairclough 1989). Overall, the problem of manipulative discourse remains an unsolved puzzle. The material selected for the purpose of the analysis is a popular American TV show Desperate Housewives. The distinctive feature of the series is its atypical and multi$level construction of gendered identities and discourses. Significantly, the series provides multiple examples of manipulative discourse. Manipulation in the selected, multi$semiotic texts is investigated from two main perspectives, which may be qualified as internal and external. The former refers to the mechanism of manipulation in discourse, namely the structure and function of manipulation in interactions. The latter zooms in on the potentially manipulative processes behind the construction of discourses and identities in texts. Session: General Marina Terkourafi University of Illinois at Urbana$Champaign mt217@illinois.edu Why (im)politeness is not a matter of intention recognition In the 1987 Introduction to the re$issue of their 1978 essay, Brown and Levinson state that “politeness has to be communicated, and the absence of communicated politeness may, ceteris paribus, be taken as absence of the polite attitude” (1987: 5). Moreover, the authors espouse a Gricean model of communication, at the heart of which lies the recognition by the hearer of the speaker’s intention (1987: 7). Reiterating this point, Brown (1995: 169) notes: “Politeness inheres not in forms, but in the attribution of polite intentions, and linguistic forms are only part of the evidence interlocutors use to assess utterances and infer polite intentions. […] [Interlocutors] must continuously work at inferring each other’s intentions, including whether or not politeness is intended.” However, an opposing view has also been defended, namely that politeness is attributed quite independently of the recognition by the hearer of the speaker’s intention, i.e. that politeness is a perlocutionary effect of the speaker’s utterance which is “totally in the hands (or ears) of the hearer” (Fraser & Nolen 1981: 96). The purpose of this talk is twofold: first, to provide evidence for the view that (im)politeness – understood as all behavior that impacts face – is a perlocutionary effect of the speaker’s utterance, and, second, to investigate the role of the speaker’s intention, if any, in attributions of (im)politeness. The reason why (im)politeness cannot be a matter of recognition of the speaker’s intention tout court is that (im)polite intentions do not have the tripartite format of reflexive intentions as envisaged by Grice (1989: 92): Gricean r$intentions consist in the speaker intending that the hearer hold a belief about the speaker’s beliefs, whereas an (im)polite intention consists in the hearer holding a belief about the speaker herself. As such, (im)polite intentions cannot be directly recognized – or, for that matter, communicated. They can nevertheless motivate the selection of an appropriate vehicle for the speaker’s (im)politeness, an utterance that, to the best of the speaker’s knowledge, the hearer may evaluate as (im)polite – and, on the basis of this evaluation, arrive at the further belief that the speaker herself is (im)polite, in which (im)politeness as a perlocutionary effect of the speaker’s utterance consists. Once more, this evaluation is done on the basis of a background evaluative belief that does not itself have the format of an r$intention – but rather looks something like ‘(IM)POLITE (utterance U, context C)’ – that the speaker holds and which may also be held by the hearer prior to, and quite independently of, the speaker’s uttering any particular utterance. However, when the hearer does not already hold such an evaluative belief with respect to which to evaluate the import of the speaker’s utterance – this will be the case when the speaker uses an expression which, to the hearer’s experience, is not conventionalized relative to the context of utterance – he may seek recourse to the speaker’s (im)polite intention and try to decipher this on the basis of body language, background knowledge and other circumstantial evidence. In this last case, recognition of the speaker’s (im)polite intention will be pivotal to evaluating Session: General the speaker’s utterance and arriving at the further belief that the speaker herself is (im)polite, the perlocutionary effect of the speaker’s utterance that itself constitutes (im)politeness. Moreover, each successful – i.e. uncontested – recognition of the speaker’s (im)polite intention will serve as a precedent for future interpretations, giving the hearer grounds to form a new evaluative belief that ‘(IM)POLITE (utterance U, context C)’. While not directly involved in attributions of (im)politeness as such, the speaker’s (im)polite intention thus plays an important ‘supporting’ role in helping the hearer arrive at a situated evaluation of the speaker’s utterance in case of non$ conventionalized expressions, and at forming new evaluative beliefs about the (im)politeness import of particular expressions in context, and as such should not be summarily dismissed. References Brown, P. 1995. “Politeness strategies and the attribution of intentions: the case of Tzeltal irony”. In: Goody, E. (ed.) Social intelligence and interaction: expressions and implications of the social bias in human intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 153$174. Brown, P. & S.C. Levinson. 1987 [1978]. Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted from: Goody, E. (ed.) Questions and politeness: strategies in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 56$324. Grice, H.P. 1989 [1969]. “Utterer’s meaning and intentions”. In: Grice, H.P. (1989) Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 86$116. Reprinted from: The Philosophical Review 78, 147$177. Session: General Nadine Thielemann Universität Potsdam, Germany nthielem@uni$potsdam.de Anecdotes as accounts in Russian broadcast interviews and panel discussions The telling of an anecdote is a prominent Russian speech genre (Šmeleva/Šmelev 2002) that is not only common in private conversation but also in broadcast interviews and panel discussions, which serve as data for the given analysis. Interviewers and interviewees use anecdotes mainly as accounts (Heritage 1988, Antaki 1994). Several features of anecdotes qualify them for this usage: As a sort of retold narrative anecdotes obtain a specific epistemological status because they comprise collective knowledge and experience (cf. Ong 1981) that is accepted and hard to challenge within the speech community. Furthermore many anecdotes are inherently argumentative (cf. Kuße 2004). They embody topoi that can be functionalized in the argumentation at hand such as induction, illustration or analogy (cf. Kienpointner 1992). Finally the teller of an anecdote lends his resp. her voice to the community who authors the anecdote. The teller of an anecdote changes the footing (Goffman 1992) of his resp. her utterance. So interviewers can realize offensive questions or challenges by anecdote thereby preserving their institutionally required neutrality (cf. Clayman 1992). The paper presents different usages of anecdotes in Russian broadcast interviews and panel discussions and interprets them as a feature of a culture$ specific persuasive style (cf. Johnstone 1989) strongly relying on the persuasive power of the collectively authored narrative, stressing the argumentative value of analogy and appreciating the coping capacity of wit and humor. References Antaki, Ch. 1994. Explaining and Arguing: The Social Organization of Accounts. London. Clayman, S. 1992. “Footing in the achievement of neutrality: the case of news interviews discourse”. In: Drew, P./Heritage, J. (eds.): Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge, 163$198. Goffman, E. 1992. Forms of Talk. Oxford. Heritage, J. 1988. “Explanations as accounts: a conversation analytic perspective”. In: Antaki, Ch. (ed.): Analyzing Everyday Explanation. A Casebook of Methods. London, 127$144. Johnstone, B. 1989. “Linguistic strategies and cultural styles for persuasive discourse”. In: S. Ting$Toomey & F. Korzenny (eds.): Language, Communication, and Culture: Current Directions. Newbury Park, 139$159. Kienpointner, M. 1992. Alltagslogik. Struktur und Funktion von Argumentationsmustern. Stuttgart Bad Canstatt. Kuße, H. 2004. Metadiskursive Argumentation: Linguistische Untersuchungen zum russischen philosophischen Diskurs von Lomonosov bis Losev. München. (=Sagners Slavistische Sammlung; 28) Ong, W. 1981. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London New York. Šmeleva, E.A./Šmelev, A.D. (2002): Russkij anekdot kak rečevoj žanr. Moskva. Session: General Yuliya Vorotnikova D.I. Mendeleev State Social Pedagogical Academy in Tobolsk, Russia vorotnikova$tgpi@yandex.ru Pragmatics of Barack Obama’s inaugural address The paper is devoted to the analysis of pragmatic context of the inaugural address of the new U.S. President, Barack Obama. According to many linguists, e.g. C. Campbell, C. Jamieson, R. Joslyn or E. I. Sheigal, an inaugural address is considered to be a kind of ritual discourse which is more phatic than informative, but nobody has mentioned that an inaugural address may be a powerful means of influence. Before President Harry S. Truman and his followers, American presidents pronounced their inaugural addresses as a sacred oath to the nation for their personal decisions and actions, taking all the responsibility for themselves. But starting with Truman ‘WE’ substituted the personal ‘I’ and thus substituted personal responsibility for the responsibility of those who had elected the president. As a manipulative means, Obama introduces connotative lexemes: extremely negative words are used while describing America’s problems (like crisis) and extremely positive words – while underlining the role of a new power in the future of the nation. Obama’s inaugural address is also rich in metaphors and false presuppositions which are used to state the greatness of the American nation and its superiority compared to the rest of the world. One more manipulative device is his usage of names associated with a certain informational and emotional frame. These associations help to ‘tune’ audiences’ reception of the message. Among positive names Obama introduced “Founding Fathers” and “God”, evidently referring to them in order to confirm the rightness of the actions and decisions to be taken, as well as “Iraq”, “Afghanistan”, “fascism and communism” as anti$American points which the country will be in conflict with. Thus, the inaugural address of a new American president has become a manifest of his uniqueness for the sake of his country by the means of false statements which in the context of such a great event such as an inauguration is accepted by the recipients as being true. Session: General Anna Wieczorek University of Łódź, Poland aewww@yahoo.com Switching Perspectives: On Construing Discursive Representation of Reality in Political Discourse The aim of this presentation is to approach the notion of speech/thought representation (cf. Vandelanotte 2004) from the pragma$cognitive perspective. The use of direct and indirect representation in political discourse allows the speaker to construe the speech situation from a perspective different than her/his own. The speaker normally occupies the focal position in relation to other discourse entities in a particular speech situation, and thus presents discourse events from her/his point of view, however, on some occasions she/he allows other “voices.” It is the distinction between the Speaker and the Sayer that provides means of capturing the phenomenon in question: the Speaker construes the actual/present speech situation presenting events from her/his own perspective, while in the represented speech situation the Speaker represents the words of the Sayer, i.e. the original speaker of the represented speech situation. Assuming the existence of the Sayer’s consciousness separate from the Speaker’s consciousness, it is clear that the Sayer’s perspective is independent of the Speaker’s perspective. The Speaker may employ a series of shifts occurring in spatio$temporal and axiological dimensions of the actual speech situation, leading either to a full switch or to an apparent switch to the Sayer’s perspective. In both cases, the distance between the Speaker and a particular discourse entity may be reduced or increased to indicate its inclusionary or exclusionary status, as well as to include the entity in or exclude it from the “us” group. The corpus used in the present study comprises 35 Barack Obama’s pre$ election speeches delivered between 10th February 2007, the announcement of his candidacy for the U.S. presidency of the US, and 4th November 2008, the day of the election. References Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2004. “Deixis and grounding in speech and thought representation.” Journal of Pragmatics 36: 489$520. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Iwona Witczak"Plisiecka University of Lodz, Poland wipiw@uni.lodz.pl The notion of convention in speech act theory The aim of the paper is to critically discuss the contentious concept of convention as it has been applied in speech act theory over the years and understood vis$à$vis norms and rules in linguistic and social contexts. The discussion concentrates on Austin’s (1962/1975) presentation of ‘convention’ as operative on the locutionary and illocutionary levels in contrast to perlocution, which is naturally non$conventional. As documented in Austin’s lectures, in his model illocutionary acts necessarily involve conventional effects which are distinct from the speech act’s perlocutionary effects. Illocutionary conventional effects are discussed in relation to uptake, generally understood as recognition of speaker’s intention, and the ongoing linguistic$ philosophical debate concerning the role of intention vis$à$vis convention in the architecture of speech acts. This debate, whose origin is usually associated with Peter Strawson’s 1964 article, has motivated exclusion of the so$called non$ communicative (‘conventional’) speech acts from linguistic analysis altogether (e.g. Bach & Harnish 1979, cf. Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995: 243ff., Marmor 2009 for ‘legal’ data). It is argued that some of the (apparent) clashes between different models of speech act theory, as well as some of the dissenting voices, are motivated by a terminological confusion rather than true theoretical commitments, a terminological confusion which when explained should contribute to achieving a better (and non$ trivial) understanding of the (speech act theoretic) notion of convention in illocutionary acts and language in general. Selected references: Austin, J. L. 1960. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1962/1975 2nd ed. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bach, K. & R. M. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, New York, London. Doerge, F. C. 2006. Illocutionary Acts. Austin’s Account and What Searle Made Out of It. PhD Thesis published online, Tübingen: University of Tübingen, Germany. http://w210.ub.uni$tuebingen.de/dbt/volltexte/2006/2273/ Korta, K. & J. Perry. 2007. “How to say things with words”. In John Searle's Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind, edited by Savas L. Tsohatzidis, 169$189. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marmor, A. 2009. Social Conventions: From language to law. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Millikan, R. G. 1998. “Language conventions made simple”. Journal of Philosophy 95: 161$180. —. 2005. “Proper function and convention in speech acts.” In Language: A Biological Model, 139$165. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sbisà, M. 2007. “How to read Austin”. Pragmatics 17: 461$473. —. 2009. “Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics. Special Issue on Speech Actions, edited by Iwona Witczak$Plisiecka & Maciej Witek. 5.1: 33$52. Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1979. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawson, P. F. 1964. “Intention and convention in speech acts.” Philosophical Review 73: 439$460. Witczak$Plisiecka, I. 2001. Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of Speech Acts in English Legal Texts, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lodz, Poland. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Yang Liangping Beihang University, Beijing, China karen0402@sina.com Compliment Responses in Interlanguage Pragmatic Development of Chinese Teenagers This paper presents the results of a cross$sectional study of the pragmatic development among three groups of Chinese teenagers when responding to compliments. We design the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) to elicit compliment response (CR) in both English and Chinese mandarin. We wish to find out whether there is evidence of 1) interlanguage development; 2) effect of social parameters; and 3) influence from Chinese, in choice of CR strategies of Chinese teenagers. This study adds to the small, but growing body of research on inerlanguage pragmatic development. The participants in this study are from 3 levels: Junior High Two (L$1), Senior High Two (L$2), and second year in college (L$3), all in Beijing, with the approximate average age for each group being 14, 17, and 20 respectively, and the number of participants for each level 25. The 6 scenarios to elicit CR are selected in such a way that the addressed hearers are in 2 different social status relative to the speaker: status equal [=], and hearer$dominant [HD]. Another contextual factor – compliment topic type – is also incorporated in the scenarios. The approaches adopted to analyze the data are frequency analysis and Chi$ square analysis. To determine whether there is a developmental pattern in the interlanguage pragmatic competence, the researchers examine the distribution of CR strategies across three groups. The study also looks into CR strategies used by teenagers of a specific level in different scenarios, to find out if participants exhibit sensitivity to contextual variables. Finally, an examination of distribution of Chinese CR strategies across three groups is conducted, to see if the differences are as evident as those in the English data. The study provides evidence of 1) patterns of interlanguage pragmatic development; 2) learners’ awareness of cultural difference in pragmatic performance; and 3) effect of contextual factors on pragmatic performance. References Herbert, R. 1989. “The ethnography of English compliments and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch”. In W. Oleksy (ed.), Contrastive pragmatics, 3$35. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Loh, T. 1993. “Responses to compliments across cultures: A comparative study of British and Hong Kong Chinese” (Research Report No. 30). Hong Kong: Department of English, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong. Pomerantz, A. 1978. “Compliment responses: Notes on the cooperation of multiple constraints”. In J. Schenkein (ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction, 79$112. New York: Academic Press. Rose, K. R. 2000. “An exploratory cross$sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development”. In Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27$67. London: Cambridge University Press. Ye, L. 1995. “Complimenting in Mandarin Chinese”. In G. Kasper (ed.), Pragmatics of Chinese as a native and target language (Tech. Rep. No. 5), 207$295. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Session: Intercultural Communication & Speech Actions Igor Ž. Žagar Educational Research Institute & University of Maribor, Slovenia igor.zzagar@gmail.com Performativity as a Problem: From Logic to Linguistics Almost all verbs in Slovenian have two aspectually different forms, a perfective (or aorist) and an imperfective one. But in institutional settings or settings strongly marked with social hierarchy only the second one, i.e. the imperfective form is used by Slovenian speakers in performative sense. Why is that? And what, in fact, have we said if we used the imperfective verb in “performative circumstances”? No doubt we may be in the process of accomplishing an act. But at the same time, we have also indicated that this act has not been accomplished (yet): as long as we are only promising (IF), we have not promised anything, and if we are not promising (IF), we cannot take anything as having been promised. The question therefore arises: how to accomplish an act of promise (or any other performative act) in Slovenian? That dilemma may seem more than artificial at first sight, but it was very much alive among Slovenian linguists at the end of the XIX. century. And it was that very dilemma – how to use aspects in Slovenian – that gave rise to the foundations of performativity in Slovenian, half a century before Austin! In this paper the author tries to shed some light on this controversy, and proposes a delocutive hypothesis as a solution for the performative dilemma this controversy unveiled. As an introduction – and in view of comparison with the Slovenian “invention” of performativity – the origins and reasons of Austin’s primary (performative/constative distinction) theory will be tackled, namely Prichard’s “moral philosophy” and Austin’s dissatisfaction with European “classical” logic. Session: Intercultural Communication and Speech Actions Jörg Zinken & Eva Ogiermann University of Portsmouth, UK joerg.zinken@port.ac.uk Grammatical resources and action affordances: Polish trzeba (‘one has to’) in first position The paper presents a conversation analytic study which investigated the role of grammatical resources in the organization of social action. We demonstrate that a grammatical structure that is specific to Polish (and Slavonic languages more broadly) is employed by speakers to bring about a type of action that does not have its equivalent in English$mediated interaction. In Polish, the necessity of an action can be claimed with a modal verb that cannot be marked for person: trzeba (roughly: ‘one has to’). We have analysed turn$constructional units (TCUs) of the form ‘trzeba x’ (‘one has to do x’) and their sequential placement in the context of dealing with household work. Such TCUs occur frequently in our data: approximately nine hours of video recordings of Polish family interactions (preparing meals, mealtime, playing with children). Interactional characteristics of ‘trzeba x’ TCUs in first position include the following: 1) Whereas person$marked claims of necessity (‘musimy x’, ‘we have to do x’) are used to bring up some household work in the interaction, ‘trzeba x’ TCUs initiate dealing with the work: wherever possible, they are responded to by carrying out the relevant action. 2) Other than directives, ‘trzeba x’ turns are not directed at any particular other; a recipient is determined locally. 3) While other forms of initiating household work, such as yes/no interrogatives (‘do you fancy going to Ikea today?’) occasionally meet with resistance, ‘trzeba x’ TCUs, in our data, never receive resistance. This makes evident the skillful recipient design of these TCUs. The study contributes to work on the role of grammatical resources in the organization of multimodal action, and to the growing body of conversation analytic work on languages other than English (e.g. Lerner and Takagi 1999). References Lerner, G. H. & T. Takagi. 1999. “On the place of linguistic resources in the organization of talk$in$interaction: A co$investigation of English and Japanese grammatical practices”. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(1): 49$75.