Pronominal deixis power to shape political discourse: A corpus analysis of English and Arabic speeches
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”, stated Orwell (1946,... Read More
Pragmatics of illnesses in colloquial Jordanian Arabic: What matters and what does not!
This presentation investigates the linguistic expressions of a number of illnesses in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Drawing on naturally occurring data, we supply evidence that illnesses... Read More
The dilemma of mother tongue among Algerians
In Algeria, while Arabic serves as the official language, the colloquial Algerian dialect, known as Algerian Darija, is used in daily communication (Harrat et al.,2016).... Read More
An ethnographically grounded approach to speech act research: The case of responses to thanks in Namibian English
Speech act research in Variational Pragmatics has a long tradition in eliciting data via Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaires and analyzing the resulting data based... Read More
The multilingual pragmatics of Cameroon English
African Englishes have been studied widely in terms of structural phenonema, such as pronunciation, lexis, and syntax. Pragmatic aspects, however, have hitherto been largely neglected... Read More
Rethinking politeness: Using silence and laughter to create common ground
Misunderstanding is unavoidable in communication due to interlocutors’ restricted access to similarities, conventions, standards, and norms. Naturally, interlocutors would change pathways to prevent the predicted... Read More
“Scammer watch, eke mbo”: The pragmatics of decoding language of street children in southwestern Nigeria
The phenomenon of street children is a complex global issue, but their population and experiences in Third World countries are a cause for concern and... Read More
Understanding online discourse pathologisation: Mapping the terrain and proposing a research agenda
Pathologisation is a notion from social epistemology. It refers to the portrayal of an individual or group as irrational or illogical in the eyes of... Read More
The ‘Paradox of Voting’ from the perspective of rational communication
Given the central role of voting in popular elections to the practice of democracy, it is crucial to understand the motivations behind voters’ electoral choices.... Read More
Reference interpretation in Spanish and Italian: from adult monolinguals to bilingual children
Reference interpretation and production are complex tasks involving linguistic and cognitive abilities, such as the representation of referents in discourse, the mastering of language-specific constraints... Read More