Abstract Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N -resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.
Abstract Metadiscourse has been a major focus of research over the last twenty-five years, attracting methodological approaches from the areas of textual pragmatics and discourse studies, many of which are supported by corpus linguistics. A major challenge in corpus-based discourse studies, however, is subjectivity, which may affect their quality and undermine their methodological rigor. To reduce subjectivity and guarantee consistency, assessing reliability of coding is essential. This study advocates combining quantitative with qualitative approaches to reliability. We argue that this mixed-method approach will provide a better assessment of reliability. To this aim, this methodological synthesis surveyed research covering empirical corpus-based studies on metadiscourse published in indexed and peer-reviewed journals. One major finding is that most studies did not report conducting any reliability measure. Issues in reliability accounts were also identified for those that did. Another major finding is a pervasive lack of transparency and comprehensiveness in reliability reports. Recommendations for enhancing reliability are listed.
This study conducts a comparative analysis on the use of multimodal interactional metadiscourse by U.S. and Chinese companies on Twitter. Six hundred tweets generated by twelve U.S. and Chinese online retailing, technology, energy, and automobile companies were analyzed. The results indicate that corporate tweets are highly interpersonal in nature, rich in interactional metadiscourse. Attitude markers, self-mentions, and a series of engagement markers are particularly prominent. Various non-textual devices, such as pictures, videos, @-mentions, hashtags (#), and hyperlinks, are co-deployed with textual elements to construct interpersonal meanings. Overall U.S. companies used more engagement markers, while Chinese companies employed more stance markers, with other salient differences observed in different subcategories. These variances can be attributed to various sociocultural and contextual factors. The study contributes to the still scarce research on multimodal metadiscourse in online business discourse and uncovers the influence of sociocultural and contextual factors on the use of interpersonal resources in digital business genres.
Research on parliamentary debates has often called unauthorised turns 'interruptions', emphasising their conflictual and monological nature. Our study aimed to examine their pragmatic functions and interactional nature, and to reflect on the terminology commonly used. Drawing upon data from the Finnish Eduskunta, French Assembl & eacute;e nationale, and German Bundestag, we applied conversation analysis to the sequential analysis of these turns, while considering restrictions related to written transcripts. To highlight the non-interruptive and dialogical character of these unauthorised utterances, we propose labelling them unofficial turns. In our analysis, we demonstrate that these unofficial turns carry both affiliative and disaffiliative functions, which also contribute to the management of interpersonal relations. As a result, our study challenges the monological view of unofficial turns and highlights their co-constructional nature.
This study examines the question types, witness responses, and Gricean maxim violations in Filipino and English courtrooms and analyzes how language mediates legal power and evidentiary control. Both languages employ open-ended questions in direct examination and closed-ended ones in cross-examination. Filipino transcripts exhibit five hybrid question forms absent in English, reflecting heightened institutional asymmetry, especially in courts with no interpreters. These structures exacerbate power asymmetry between the witness and interrogator. Witness responses include clarification, compliance, and two newly identified types: complete and incomplete. The maxim of quantity is most frequently violated in both languages through open-ended questions, leading to overinformative responses. Violations of manner, relevance, and quality reflect cognitive strain and institutional pressure. Findings call for a forensic pragmatics lens to examine how courtroom discourse operates under institutional constraints and attest that the courtroom is not a neutral vehicle for truth but a discursive battleground that reflects linguistic asymmetries and institutional power.
Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N-resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.
This study investigates the conceptual semantics of the English verb speak, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to semantic analysis. The analysis is corpus-assisted, relying mainly on two corpora: one very large (enTenTen21, more than fifty-two billion words), the other small and purpose-built (about 500 'speak' sentences from twelve recent novels). Using the traditional "definitional" criterion for polysemy, the analysis recognises four senses of English speak, which form a polysemic web or network of meanings and usages. A range of supporting lexicogrammatical evidence is adduced, such as the proposed polysemic meanings having distinctive morphosyntactic properties, collocational profiles, and associated derivatives and phraseology. The paper also raises an ethnoaxiological question for linguistics as a discipline: To what extent has the discourse of mainstream Western linguistics been guided or shaped by an Anglo-English metapragmatic model of speaking, whereby "saying" is framed as individual, purposeful, contentful, and oral/aural?
Student injury incidents serve as institutional nexuses where health emergencies intersect with peer conflicts, requiring teachers to negotiate the competing demands of medical immediacy and moral culpability. Drawing on conversation analysis of audio-recorded student incident calls between teachers and parents, this study investigates how teachers navigate these challenging scenarios through the systematic management of agency and urgency. Analysis reveals two distinct yet interrelated patterns in teachers' reporting practices. First, teachers treat agency (injurer) and urgency (injured student) as discrete components linked to responsibility attribution; they systematically background both elements when reporting to injured students' parents while foregrounding them in communications with injurers' parents. Second, the initial attenuation of urgency, while serving to mitigate conflict, necessitates subsequent upgrades to secure immediate involvement from injured students' parents. These findings illuminate how teachers' institutional practices systematically prioritize conflict mediation over medical urgency.
This paper explores whether denial strategies can rebuild public trust, using evidence from a hospital's statement regarding cancer incidents in its laboratory. A discourse analysis of the hospital's statement reveals that explicit and implicit denial strategies are used to rebuild public trust. Specifically, the hospital uses explicit denial to refute the identity or severity of the affected individuals. Besides, the hospital uses implicit denial to construct a trustworthy image of ability, transparency, and benevolence, thereby addressing public concerns. Further experimental studies indicate that neither explicit nor implicit denial alone is sufficient to rebuild trust. Instead, a combination of both strategies is essential for effectively rebuilding trust. Based on these findings, this paper offers suggestions for rebuilding public trust.
This study examines the pragmatic-rhetorical functions of turn-initial Hebrew ki 'because'-clauses in readers' comments on politicians' Facebook posts. An analysis of 100 ki-clauses, responding to either politicians' posts or comments by other commenters, reveals that they provide explanations and justifications for claims and positions regarding a particular action, general conduct or way of thinking of the previous speaker, or a third party. It is argued that such explanations serve to either support or challenge others' positions, both sincerely and ironically, in accordance with the corpus's dual nature as both a platform for uniting political camps and a battleground for opposing camps. When affiliative, ki-clauses justify the previous speakers, at times by ironically justifying third parties, making them a shared target. Conversely, when disaffiliative, ki-clauses expose the absurdity underlying the position of the previous speaker, often ridiculing them through ironic echoing.
This study investigates advice-giving during Chinese New Year family celebrations when older relatives tend to provide unsolicited advice for younger family members. First, we consider New Year advice featured in social media recordings through the lens of interaction ritual, using a corpus of TikTok videos. Second, we investigate how older and younger evaluators assess behaviours in such mediatised events. We found that the behaviour of older family members has typical ritual features: it is conventionalised in a frame, it unfolds according to conventionalised topics, it triggers self-display and it enhances rapport between older participants. This analysis has also shown that young participants never explicitly accept the advice of their elders. The results of the second step showed that all evaluators assessed the behaviour of older participants as acceptable. However, when it comes to the behaviour of younger participants, older evaluators mostly found it unacceptable, whereas young evaluators endorsed it.
Sacks and Schegloff (1979; Schegloff 1996) identify a preference for recognitional references to persons over non-recognitional forms of references. Furthermore, they identify as a subsidiary preference that, among recognitional forms, personal names are preferred over recognitional descriptors. However, as Sacks and Schegloff indicate, these preferences in no way limit the use of names to conclusively recognizable persons, nor do they even inhibit references to persons by name when recognition is not at all practicable. In this report, we first describe those practices that manage (and thereby exhibit) levels of confidence regarding the recognizability of personal names. We then examine several environments in which personal names are employed in introducing persons as previously unknown to recipients, and we describe one family of practices for doing so. Finally, we identify storytelling as a principal environment in which personal names are used, and we describe where unknown persons are introduced by storytellers.
This study investigates the placement, form, and function of appreciation in the closing of online discussion forums. The data comprise ten discussion forums from two Chinese platforms, QQ and WeChat. Drawing on Conversation Analysis (CA) and the notion of “paired actions,” the study identifies three loci of appreciation: pre-announcement (pre-A), on-announcement (on-A), and post-announcement (post-A). Pre-A appreciation serves as possible pre-closings for the impending closure of the forum. On-A appreciation functions as part of the first-pair-part (FPP) to facilitate the closure. Post-A appreciation serves as the second-pair-part (SPP) to finalize the closure. As interruptions are common in the forums, expressing appreciation becomes an important strategy for the moderator and participants to manage collaboratively these interruptions to ensure the discussion will end smoothly and coherently. These findings have implications for the use of appreciation in the closing of various interactions and for applying CA to online communication.
This paper presents a study examining the pragmatic strategies employed by Zeng Guofan in his renowned family letters to craft qici ((sic)(sic), 'salutation'), as well as the potential relationship between social hierarchies and the specific wording used in these opening phrases. The study reveals that, across 1,449 letters containing salutations, Zeng Guofan deployed seven distinct patterns of salutation. Significant differences were observed in his use of third-person address terms, ticheng yu ((sic)(sic)(sic), 'elevated address terms'), verbs, self-address terms, and expressions of good wishes and well-being, depending on the recipient of the letter. These variations suggest clear metapragmatic efforts to maintain respect and deference in his communications, providing evidence that certain patterns of polite salutations were shaped by the perceived social status between the addresser and the addressee in ancient China.
This study investigates the pragmatic functions of custom WhatsApp stickers, with a particular focus on those integrating images and text. Building on prior research, the study develops a classification scheme that highlights three core dimensions: the sender's intention, the sticker-centred act of communication, and the audience's interpretation of its meaning. The analysis is based on a corpus of 598 user-generated stickers from Spanish WhatsApp conversations, comprising 496 multimodal and 102 text-only stickers. The analysis reveals that stickers predominantly serve to clarify or emphasise the sender's intention (56.9%), including self-representation, social status, group identity, and humour. A second set of functions is related to the sticker's role in the act of communication (24.67%), such as substituting text, conveying emotion, and mimicking nonverbal behaviour. Lastly, stickers play a part in audience inference (18.41%), helping to soften, challenge, or elucidate messages, thereby enhancing overall message clarity.
Linguistic expressions of negation have been investigated from various perspectives: sociolinguistic variation, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. However, this linguistic phenomenon has received little attention in discourse studies. This corpus-pragmatic case study presents a systematic analysis of the use and functions of NOT-negation in oppositional discourse, specifically in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Methodologically, it combines a variationist approach and corpus-based discourse analysis. The findings, analyzed through the lens of audience design, reveal that Coates’s use of NOT-negation contributes to a conversational style of writing which can be interpreted as a strategy to maintain a dialogical flow of discourse.
Research on self-disclosure is well-established in psychology and communication studies; however, unprompted self-disclosure as an action in conversation has not received as much attention. First encounters are often marked by social uncertainty, and self-disclosure plays a crucial role in facilitating conversation. Using a qualitative approach informed by insights from pragmatics and Conversation Analysis, and complemented by an analysis of frequencies of acts performed in conversation, this study analyzed video conference recordings of twenty-two dyads of unacquainted international postgraduate students in Malaysian universities. This paper describes how interlocutors use unprompted self-disclosure as interactional strategy in first encounters, focusing on the patterns of self-disclosure that emerge and the functions they serve. The findings extend understanding of how interactants navigate epistemic territories to achieve interactional goals in initial conversations, where knowledge about one another is limited.
Drawing on an indexical approach, this study explores practices and evaluations of translanguaging across Japanese and English in two datasets, one of audiorecorded naturally occurring meetings among Japanese employees at a global corporation and another of online commentary about translanguaging practices. It focuses on the relationship between linguistic normativities and indexical meanings. By analyzing the translanguaging practices of Japanese corporate employees and lay people's evaluations of such practices in metapragmatic discourse, the study demonstrates how people's orientations to different linguistic norms give rise to distinct indexical meanings, forming different indexical fields for translanguaging accordingly. This study also illustrates how a dominant linguistic ideology can impact individual assessments of translanguaging, and how mediatized representations are entangled with linguistic norms in the indexical process. The findings suggest the importance of paying close attention to the different levels or aspects of the centering authorities to which people ultimately orient in discourse.
This article develops a pragmatic model for the analysis of emotion in socio-cultural contexts and applies it to the study of the messages written on David Bowie's mural/memorial in London. The data consists of 584 messages written and drawn on the mural between February and December 2016, after the artist's death. The model allows for the analysis of the semiotic resources used for the expression of emotive pragmatic acts and their intensification. Results show that all the messages contain emotive pragmatic acts, which include the expression of emotions such as love and missing, the expression of good wishes, blessing, thanking, praise, commitment to remembrance and tribute. Emotive pragmatic acts are expressed mostly verbally but also visually. Emotion is more frequently expressed covertly by figurative means and evoking positive connotations. Emotion is intensified by recurrent lexical (hyperbole) and non-lexical (orthographic, grammatical) means.
The article systematically examines metaphor-motivated zeugmatic constructions in web-based promotional tourism discourse, drawing on texts from the official destination websites of Georgia, the UK, and the USA. Employing a mixed-method research design, which combines quantitative data inspection and qualitative discourse analysis, the study identifies formal, functional, and positional peculiarities of zeugmas in the analysed material. These findings corroborate, enrich, and challenge prevailing assumptions in contemporary scholarly literature on zeugma and metaphor (Lanham 1991; Steen 2016; Tartakovsky and Shen 2023). The paper highlights that metaphor-motivated zeugmas represent another form of deliberate metaphor, thereby broadening the scope of its manifestation patterns. Furthermore, the study reveals that such zeugmas are often strategically used at key points in promotional texts to frame and emphasise essential messages. These insights may provide valuable guidance for marketers in developing comprehensible, impactful, and emotionally resonant promotional content, which is essential in cross-cultural contexts of tourism promotion.
