I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of…

This paper attempts a pragmatic analysis of the interplay between social contexts of power and sociolinguistic device of aggravation strategies concerning dialogic discourses in Vikram Seth's novel "A Suitable Boy (ASB) (1993)." The paper attempts to validate that aggravation strategies have been an integral part of human discourse. It…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

This paper offers an instructional unit on the response token "achja" in everyday German conversation. The paper first provides a description of "achja" and its distinctive prosodic features based on empirical research in conversation analysis. The goal of the paper is to provide instructors of German with information and…

In this interview, Vijay Bhatia freely reflects on his personal experiences, perceptions, and views about the development of Genre Analysis in the early eighties towards Critical Genre Analysis today. He offers his impressions about how professionals construct, interpret, use and often exploit generic resources in their everyday practice to meet…

This interview was conducted with Professor Keith Allan with the aim of providing a brief but informative summary of the state of the art of pragmatics. In providing answers to the interview questions, Professor Allan begins with a definition of pragmatics as it is practiced today, i.e., the study of the meanings of utterances with attention to…

The paper looks at the communicative aspect of tropes and the use to which mass media discourse puts it. Necessity to study tropes in discourse boils down to the fact that metaphoric patterns prove to be effective in helping language users be cooperative in communication. Attention to the pragmatics of tropes functioning in mass media discourse as…

In this essay, I offer William James's notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think…

This article attempts to highlight the importance of theoretical linguistics and empirical cognitive linguistics studies for the practical teaching of Spanish as a second language. Looking at the domain of subject pronominal use as an example, I endeavor to show how formal linguistics can be useful to language instructors. This is a significant…

Professional discourse in education has been the focus of research conducted mostly with teachers and professional practitioners, but the work of students in the built environment has largely been ignored. This article presents an analysis of students' visual discourse in the final professional year of a landscape architecture course in Brisbane,…

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power, to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as…

This article builds on Norton and Toohey's (2001) critique of good language learner (GLL) research to illustrate how college students in an advanced Spanish conversation course drew on particular ideologies of language and foreign language learning to construct and negotiate their classroom identities. I argue that these ideologies were implicated…

An analysis of authentic or genuine interactions among Cameroon English speakers reveals that conversational routines in this variety of English differ a good deal from those obtained in other varieties of English, non-native varieties of English inclusive, and more specifically in native varieties of English. This paper looks at "thanking…

Presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the topic of discourse markers and, using the concepts of denial and contrast, with modifications, examines markers of contrast in English and Spanish. The article shows that the markers in each language correspond very closely in what they signal about the interpretation of the utterances of which they are a part. (Nine references)…