This article is concerned with the history of "yours sincerely," a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of…

It is a well-known fact that advice-giving practices may differ from culture to culture. While some societies such as British culture refrain from giving advice, others such as Turkish may prefer to give advice perceiving it as an indication of solidarity. Thus, precautions for preventing this nature of advice is taken by language itself in a…

Bilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure--identificational focus--which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills…

We examine metonymy at psycho- and neurolinguistic levels, seeking to adjudicate between two possible processing implementations (one- vs. two-mechanism). We compare highly conventionalized "systematic metonymy" (producer-for-product: "All freshmen read 'O'Connell'") to lesser-conventionalized "circumstantial…

Students' preferences are being shaped by what they view in advertisements. Hence, this study examined the occurrence of code-switching in Philippine TV advertisements. Particularly, it analyzed syntactic patterns of code-switching, pragmatic/discourse functions and motivations present in the code-switched ads aired from the country's giant TV…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1 learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written discourse completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective. The data demonstrate learners' overuse of zero marking…

This study examines verbal behavior in student-teacher talk and alignment of perceptions of communication effectiveness. Heightened awareness of conversational patterns is more productive in the learning environment than the rote use of discourse markers.

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

Singapore's annual Speak Mandarin Campaign has been largely successful in shifting the language patterns of its Chinese citizens from Chinese dialects to Mandarin in all sectors. However, there has been a notable exception: the effort to have Chinese Singaporeans give their children Mandarin names, rather than dialect ones. In this paper, we…

The paper reviews research on the pragmatic language skills of language impaired and learning disabled students. Discourse skills are analyzed in terms of communicative intentions, presupposition, social organization of discourse, and context. Narrative skills are examined according to narrative structure, scripts, text cohesion, and audience…

The phenomena of overlapping talk is examined. In numerous types of conversational exchanges, people briefly acknowledge the utterance that overlapped their own and then recycle an overlapped utterance and/or introduce a new topic. Three types of objects are illustrated and discussed: an acknowledgment token, an assessment, and a commentary. (four…

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted…

In Sundanese, a western Austronesian language, speech levels allow the speaker to establish social identity through talk alone, using multiple linguistic forms with very different pragmatic meanings. These words are deference and demeanor indexicals, as in the French formal versus informal second person. It is argued that although they do exist,…