Abstract While it is widely accepted that irony can give rise to various kinds of non-propositional effects, it has generally been assumed that irony itself is a propositional phenomenon since it unfolds through some form of conflict between what is said and what is (taken to be) intended. However, recent work indicates that in some cases, although there is no such propositional conflict, the utterances in question are nevertheless treated by users as instances of hiniku (‘irony’, ‘sarcasm’). Examples of what is called ‘non-propositional irony’ abound in Japanese. The aim of this paper is to further explore phenomena of non-propositional irony through an analysis of examples that are metapragmatically labelled as hiniku in Japanese novels. Close analysis of these cases of non-propositional irony demonstrates that they arise primarily due to some form of pragmatic disruption of the ongoing discourse. These pragmatic disruptions arise through violations of social norms, including but not limited to non-conventional use of honorifics, violation of interactional expectations, and the unexpected use of downgrading expressions. It is concluded that hiniku should not be dealt with separately from verbal irony just because it often does not involve propositional conflict. Instead, it is suggested that the theorisation of irony arguably needs to be able to accommodate irony phenomena across a range of different languages, including hiniku .
This study proposes a cross-linguistic framework for analyzing stance markers. The framework links cultural preferences for different intersubjectivity types to the argumentative strength encoded in stance markers, operationalized through the Control Cycle Model, thereby generating testable predictions about the distributional patterns of stance markers in English and Chinese tourism short videos (TSVs). Comparable corpora were compiled from the subtitles of popular TSVs sourced from YouTube and Douyin, and the distributional patterns of epistemic and effective stance markers were analyzed. Our findings indicate that stance markers with moderate to strong argumentative strength are preferred in both English and Chinese TSVs, reflecting the evaluation-oriented and action-guiding nature of TSVs. With respect to cross-linguistic differences, English TSVs favor stance markers with strong argumentative strength, whereas Chinese TSVs tend to rely on markers with moderate argumentative strength. These divergent preferences are shown to reflect culturally distinct orientations toward attitudinal versus responsive intersubjectivity. The study illustrates how this framework can trace cultural differences in stance marker distribution to dimensions of embodied cognition related to epistemic and effective control.
This paper examines how to account for illocutionary force, with particular attention to situations in which speakers and hearers diverge in their attributions of force. Such cases raise the question of whether, and in what sense, a single utterance can have more than one illocutionary force. Standard intentionalist accounts reject this possibility, maintaining that each utterance has one correct force, fixed by the speaker's intention. Interactional approaches, by contrast, make room for plural attributions by locating force in shared conventional procedures and their normative effects. A recent relativist account goes further, arguing that one and the same utterance may legitimately be assigned different illocutionary forces relative to different perspectives. My aim is to critically examine this relativist account and develop a processual-normative alternative. Drawing on conventionalist, interaction-based approaches, I argue that such relativism undermines the intersubjective normativity on which illocutionary force depends. If force is purely perspectival, it remains unclear how illocutionary acts could establish shared structures of rights and obligations that ground their normative efficacy. The processual-normative framework proposed here shows how illocutionary force takes shape through what I call illocutionary trajectories, as participants negotiate, adjust, and stabilize normative effects in interaction. In this way, the framework acknowledges the possibility of plural attributions of illocutionary force while avoiding the difficulties of the relativist account.
Abstract The present study examines how non-native intonation affects the personal traits that native speakers attribute to L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish (whose first language is Swedish). Native Spanish speakers’ judgments are compared to those of Swedish L1 speakers. The evaluated task involves making a restaurant reservation. Results show that Spanish L1 evaluators rate speakers more negatively when assessing non-native speech. A combination of acoustic analysis in terms of prosodic units and pragmatic analysis in terms of speech acts revealed contradictory signals between intended speech acts and acoustic cues in the L2 but not the L1 data. Triangulating these data further shows that a higher proportion of tonal cues misaligned with the corresponding speech acts is associated with an increase in negative traits, such as anger, unpleasantness and arrogance, but only as perceived by the Spanish evaluators. This association is not observed in the Swedish evaluator group, who evaluate their L2-Spanish-speaking countrymen more favourably. The findings suggest that mismatches between tonal cues and intended speech acts play an important role in shaping negative listener evaluations, particularly among the native speakers of Spanish.
This paper discusses three senses of cunt in Anglo-Australian English, showing that what is elsewhere a highly offensive swear word can be used to much different effect in Australia. The first is a pejorative with wider potential for use than is seen in other Englishes. The second, which is used both referentially and descriptively, has a non-pejorative meaning which varies from socially neutral to positive. Additional examples from Irish and Scottish English help illustrate the mechanism behind such variation. The third sense is used as a congenial vocative between men to signify positive social relations. Vocative use is especially unique to Anglo-Australian English linguaculture, and is shown to be rich in culturally significant meaning. Analysis of each sense is conducted using ethnopragmatics and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, with a view to dissecting them in a universally accessible and non-ethnocentric manner, while preserving the components of meaning which make them so unique. Despite their relationships with other, highly offensive meanings of cunt, the semantic contents of these senses are shown to embody values and attitudes which are, in various ways and to various degrees, characteristically (Anglo-)Australian. It is argued that this is especially true for the third sense, the meaning of which differs notably to two other "classic" Australian vocatives: mate and bastard. As a study of culture-specific meanings, this paper reaffirms the need for a unified semantic-pragmatic methodology, which is manifested in the combined techniques of NSM and ethnopragmatic analysis.
Given the growing population of multilinguals in the current transcultural society, understanding the impact of multilingualism on linguistic development has important theoretical and practical implications. This study examined this impact in the area of pragmatics by comparing sequential trilingual and bilingual speakers in their abilities to comprehend implied meaning in their non-dominant language, English. Participants were 73 L1 Chinese speakers studying L2 English in a university in China. Of 73, 37 were studying Spanish as L3 in the university (trilingual group), while the remaining 36 had no L3 in their repertoire (bilingual group). These two groups were equal in their English proficiency and reported amount of daily English use. They completed a listening test (k = 36) assessing comprehension of non-ironic implicature and irony in L2 English. The trilingual group showed significantly better comprehension of irony than the bilingual group, but no group difference was found in the comprehension of non-ironic implicature. A post-hoc interview data revealed that the trilingual group attended to paralinguistic cues (e.g., intonation) more often than the bilingual group when comprehending irony.
Pragmatic markers such as you know play a crucial role in managing discourse and interaction in spoken English, with prosody serving as an important cue to their functional and positional variation. However, previous studies have rarely examined the prosodic realizations of such markers in second language (L2) speech, particularly with regard to the combined effects of position and function on prosodic realization. The present study investigates the prosodic realization of you know in the speech of Chinese learners of English and native English speakers, focusing on how prosodic parameters vary across discourse positions and pragmatic functions. Drawing on two spoken corpora, the study combines acoustic analysis with Factor Analysis of Mixed Data (FAMD) to explore the relationship among prosody, position, and function. The results show that both groups exhibit similar position-function mappings, but with distinct prosodic realizations. Native speakers employ systematic prosodic adjustments, including higher intensity and higher pitch, to manage turns in the turn-initial position. In contrast, Chinese L2 learners demonstrate more variable and thus less consistent prosodic realizations and tend to produce you know with broader and stronger prosodic cues. These patterns suggest that Chinese L2 learners rely on different prosodic mapping strategies, reflecting a developing pragmatic-prosodic competence. The findings highlight the importance of incorporating prosody into L2 pragmatic instruction to help learners achieve more natural and context-sensitive spoken interaction.
This study explores idioms expressing "point of no return" across seven languages, Turkish, English, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, revealing intercultural pragmatic alignment. While idioms converge on signaling irreversibility, they are grounded in culturally distinct cognitive micro-models differing in agency, temporal progression, causality, and evaluative stance. Drawing on cognitive linguistics and the Socio-Cognitive Approach, the analysis argues that irreversibility is organized around a shared experiential macro-model that comprises a developing situation, a critical threshold, and negative consequences, yet is instantiated through culture-specific Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs). A contrastive analysis of nine idioms (grouped into eight analytical categories) uncovers a continuum from agent-driven, dynamically escalating crises, such as "the fat is in the fire", to construals emphasizing passive or resigned finality, as in "les carottes sont cuites" and the 'spilt water' idioms. The findings show that pragmatic interpretation hinges not only on functional overlap but also on temporal congruity and outcome immediacy. When idioms with mismatched event dynamics are treated as interchangeable, interlocutors may derive false explicatures, which may create interactional risks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that idiomatic meaning is shaped by an evaluative stance acting as a "pragmatic engine" that filters interpretation, alongside weak implicatures generating poetic effects. To capture these risks systematically, the study proposes a Matrix of Intersubstitutability, which highlights where contrasts in agency, temporality, and responsibility are likely to generate pragmatic vulnerability. Overall, we frame idiomatic equivalence as an interactional accomplishment rather than a stable semantic property, with direct implications for translation and L2 use as well.
Recent conversation-analytic research on second language acquisition has begun to explore the ways in which L2 speakers develop specific linguistic resources for discourse-organizational purposes. A key challenge in this area is to account for both the developmental trajectory of such resources through quantitative frequency analyses and their interactional complexity when mobilized in context. Addressing these two facets of acquisition requires an integrated methodological approach that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses. This paper examines the developmental trajectory of en fait ('in fact, actually') in L2 French, based on longitudinal data from adult speakers interacting in a conversation circle. The study employs quantitative corpus analysis to track the emergence and increasing use of en fait over time, identifying patterns of frequency change and recurrent lexical environments. This is complemented by conversation analysis, which provides a fine-grained, sequential and multimodal investigation of how en fait is deployed in interaction. The findings show that learners not only increase their use of en fait over time, but also diversify its interactional functions, progressively integrating it into their repertoire of resources for managing the interaction. The findings underscore the importance of integrating sequential and multimodal analysis to fully understand how learners appropriate discourse markers in interaction.
Guilt and shame play a key role in social interactions, guiding how people evaluate and respond to their own actions and those of others. This study examined whether the language used, specifically first language (L1) or second language (L2), influences perceived feelings of guilt and shame, and how these emotions guide the choice of pragmatic apology strategies. The participants were 58 L1 Korean speakers learning Spanish as an L2 and 57 L1 Spanish speakers learning Korean as an L2. All participants completed a Discourse Completion Task consisting of twelve situations in either their L1 or L2 and then rated their anticipated feelings of guilt and shame. The results showed that while formulaic apologies were consistently employed, cross-linguistic differences emerged in how responsibility was expressed. Korean speakers frequently used self-blame in their L1, whereas Spanish speakers prioritised factual admissions in their L1, and both the Korean and Spanish users combined these patterns in their L2. Regarding emotional intensity, no overall main effect for language was observed. However, when apologising to someone of a higher social status, emotional intensity, particularly shame, was increased when using one's L1, suggesting that social norms may evoke a stronger emotional connection to one's L1. Lastly, the only consistent pattern of emotion-strategy associations emerged among Korean speakers, where higher shame predicted the use of explicit strategies in their L1, whereas higher guilt in their L2 predicted a reduced reliance on formulaic apologies. These findings have important implications for theories of bilingual emotion, pragmatic competence, and intercultural communication.
In this study, we examine ostensible aggression in xiangqi, a Chinese chess game played in public spaces. Xiangqi matches are conflictive: onlookers circle the chessboard and often halt the game, arguing with the players. The players tend to argue back and also address each other in a loud voice. Such arguments, however, rarely trigger negative consequences, and it is therefore reasonable to hypothesise that aggression in xiangqi games is ostensible. We rely on a bipartite approach to investigate the ostensible nature of aggression in xiangqi games. First, we analyse a corpus of audio-recorded xiangqi games by interpreting xiangqi as an interaction ritual and focusing on patterns of aggressive behaviour in these games. Our results show that aggression in xiangqi games have typically ostensible characteristics from an etic perspective. We then examine elicited data, representing the results of an assessment task and semi-structured interviews conducted with the participants of the xiangqi games we audio-recorded, in order to investigate whether the participants themselves interpret aggression in xiangqi as ostensible. Our results show that aggression in xiangqi does not trigger face-threat for the participants who have the motivations of entertainment, building a community and enjoying the thrill of argument to engage in ostensibly aggressive behaviour during the games.
The presuppositions of questions have been analyzed in linguistics, logic, and rhetoric, considering their relationship with their triggers, the meaning of a question, and their dialectical effects. From a semantic perspective, presuppositions define the meaning of a question and its type; from a dialectical and rhetorical viewpoint, they serve as instruments for constraining the interlocutor's possible replies and, when not shared, impose new commitments. From a pragmatic perspective, questions' presuppositions are commonly regarded as characterized by a univocal relationship with the interlocutors' common ground: through a question, the speaker takes for granted some contents. However, the pragmatic nature of questions cannot be reduced to a unidirectional act. Rather, the common ground affects the interpretation of a question, and thus its function, meaning, and even its type. This paper intends to show how questions and their (pragmatic) presuppositions are characterized by a complex and dynamic relationship. On the one hand, through questions, the speaker can presume, propose, or impose a common ground. On the other hand, the hearers' commitments can also affect the determination of what is presupposed, and thus the function, meaning, or even type of question. These complex dynamics can be represented through a presumptive approach to interpretation, in which the different pragmatic and semantic factors are conceived as presumptions that can be overcome by stronger ones or contextual evidence.
