This study examines modality as a resource for moral positioning in 215 digitised Friday sermon infographics published on Instagram by Brunei Darussalam’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. Drawing on the Corpus of Brunei English (CoBE) and employing Palmer’s (2001) tripartite framework of deontic, epistemic, and dynamic modality, we analyse 500 modal verb tokens extracted via Sketch Engine and coded for pragmatic function. The findings reveal a ‘soft deontic’ profile: epistemic modality dominates (63.4
A growing body of research has highlighted the dynamic role of discourse markers in Arabic linguistics. However, some Arabic dialects, including Libyan Arabic, remain underexplored. To address this gap, the present study investigates the discourse and pragmatic functions of the Libyan Arabic discourse marker ba:hi, commonly interpreted as ‘okay.’ Adopting a qualitative research design, the study examines occurrences of ba:hi in naturally occurring conversational settings. The findings show that baːhi consistently marks acknowledgement, uptake, and interactional progression across sequences involving agreement, politeness, discourse transition, and face management. These more specific readings arise from the surrounding co-text, sequential position, prosody, and speaker stance rather than being encoded by baːhi itself. These findings underscore the pragmatic flexibility of Arabic discourse markers, and advance research on Arabic pragmaticalisation.
This study examines how confession, denial, remorse, and responsibility-management stances are represented and evaluated in Saudi theft judgments. The corpus comprises all 59 judgments formally classified under theft in two consecutive official Saudi Ministry of Justice collections: 27 from 1434H (Vol. 25) and 32 from 1435H (Vol. 12). Source audit identified 123 direct defendant-attributed stance episodes, manually coded for seven defendant-side features and six categories of judicial uptake. Reliability was assessed on 25 episodes (20.3
Views on queer identities and the underlying ideologies are articulated in newspaper opinion sections. Despite growing scholarship on sexuality and gender identity in Africa, comparative linguistic and discursive analyses of LGBTQ+ representation in African media remain scarce. While South Africa is often celebrated for its progressive constitutional protections of sexual minorities, and Nigeria for its restrictive legal and religious stance, little is known about how public opinions around LGBTQ+ identities converge or diverge in both contexts. This study addresses this gap by examining how opinion articles in selected Nigerian (The Punch and Vanguard) and South African (Mail Guardian and The Sowetan) newspapers, published between 2014 and 2024, a decade marked by heightened debates on gender identity, same-sex relations, and queer visibility across the continent, represent LGBTQ+ identities and issues. Using a corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, the study employs SketchEngine to compile and analyse two country-specific corpora of opinion articles. Keyword analysis was employed to identify salient lexical items and recurring semantic clusters that signal ideological positioning regarding LGBTQ+ identities and issues. Subsequent qualitative interpretation draws on Fairclough’s socio-semiotic approach to unpack how lexical strategies structure the representation of queer subjects. The findings indicate striking contrasts between the two media contexts. Nigerian opinion articles predominantly frame LGBTQ+ identities through discourses of moral panic, criminalisation, and religious deviance, often linking queerness to social disorder and immorality. In contrast, South African opinion discourse foregrounds rights, visibility, and advocacy, while also revealing tensions where appeals to equality coexist with residual tropes of violence and pathology. The study concludes that lexical and discursive choices serve as ideological tools through which individuals either sustain or contest national and cultural imaginaries of sexuality and gender identity.
The rise in the use of du coup in spoken French in France has been confirmed by scientific research. This study has a two-fold objective: to find out if the rise in the use of du coup in France is true for other francophone contexts, namely Benin, and thereby compare its use in these two varieties of French. The second objective is to examine the use of du coup by French learners from Ghana who participated in an immersion programme in France and Benin. A comparative corpus (24,098 words) of oral interactions in pairs between 50 speakers of French in their respective groups (Benin, France, Ghana) was constituted and analysed using a corpus-driven approach. The statistical analysis of the study found the use of du coup by the French statistically significant as compared to French learners (p = 0.003) and Beninese (p = 0.033). Du coup is absent in the immersion student’s data and has a low frequency in the Beninese corpus. A qualitative study shows bon replaces certain functions of du coup primarily in Beninese and Benin immersion student’s corpus. The use of bon by Beninese and Benin immersion students corroborates research concerning a high use of bon in Francophone Africa particularly Mali. It could also signal a possible acquisition by Benin immersion students. However, statistically speaking, its use is not significant. The widespread use of du coup in French spoken in France does not seem to have affected other contexts outside France, at least in our corpus.
This article analyzes the experiences of secondary-level students using Facebook to learn English informally in rural Nepal, which previous studies have not extensively discussed. This study is based on a qualitative interpretative research paradigm. We have collected data by conducting semi-structured interviews with participants and observing their Facebook walls. Findings suggest that Facebook informally supports secondary-level students in improving English language skills by promoting collaborative learning, developing multimedia engagement, and encouraging social interaction. Additionally, findings highlight that secondary-level students enhance their English language skills by engaging with multimedia resources by utilizing Facebook’s interlinked websites and several media, including video, audio, and reading materials on their Facebook walls. Conversely, some secondary-level students experience distractions from unnecessary resources and materials that appear on their Facebook walls, which affect their concentration on their studies and collaborative engagement with their peers and friends. The study’s findings suggest to educational policymakers, educators, parents, and concerned authorities that secondary-level students need guidance and monitoring when using social media, particularly Facebook, to protect them from potential risks and threats of using Facebook. This study further highlights that Facebook can be a significant tool for learning English informally, as well as it can be supportive for students’ formal learning of English by enhancing their performance and learning English in their schools.
This study employs a mixed-methods, corpus-based approach to analyze the complex linguistic and discursive dynamics surrounding a series of bomb threats in a Philippine University between November 2024 and November 2025. A specialized, multilingual corpus of 15,782 words was compiled from official institutional statements, anonymous perpetrator messages, and community social media reactions. Quantitative analysis, including normalized frequency distributions, collocation analysis, and statistical significance testing (Chi-square), reveals distinct linguistic patterns across these three discourse domains. These patterns are interpreted through qualitative methods, including Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), pragmatic analysis of speech acts, and multimodal analysis. The findings demonstrate that the word “bomb” functioned as a contested linguistic symbol with a tripartite meaning. The institution deployed a discourse of legalistic deterrence and administrative normalization . Perpetrators weaponized the term as a tool for political provocation, explicitly linking it to the Marcos family and accusations of institutional complicity. The community’s response, tracked diachronically, evolved from acute trauma and fear to weary resignation and cynical dismissal. This paper triangulates quantitative and qualitative data to deconstruct the competing narratives, offering a robust model for analyzing crisis communication in a politically charged, digital-first environment.
This study provides the first corpus-pragmatic analysis of online grooming in Spanish that systematically examines both groomers’ and children’s discourse, with a specific focus on the pragmatics of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material (CSEAM) solicitation. Drawing on a dataset of 70 authentic groomer–child chatlogs shared by Spanish law enforcement, we combine quantitative corpus methods with fine-grained qualitative analysis of pragmatic features. We first compare the discourse of groomers and children through word frequency, dispersion and collocational patterns, identifying substantial overlaps in the communicative environment but clear divergences in behavioural orientation. We then analyse the initial CSEAM solicitation in each chatlog, examining request realisation and associated facework. Over half of initial requests were produced within the first five conversational turns, and directness—particularly imperatives—emerged as the predominant head-act strategy. However, directness was embedded within dense layers of strategic facework: politeness outnumbered impoliteness in both head acts and support moves. When impoliteness occurred in groomer requests for CSEAM, it sought to induce a sense of indebtedness in the child. The study highlights how CSEAM requests serve distinct pragmatic functions that manipulatively reframe illegal acts as relational exchanges. The study also offers novel insights into Spanish-language grooming and calls for larger, more diverse datasets and multimodal, cross-linguistic research to strengthen theoretical understanding and inform detection technologies and safeguarding interventions.
This study investigated the regional variation in the use of tag questions between Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese, using the daily conversations collected from native speakers. The results showed that both varieties had a general preference for declarative anchors and turn-final tag questions. Many tag forms were also shared by the two varieties. Nevertheless, compared to Mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese used tag questions less frequently and showed a stronger preference for V-not-V tags. With regard to pragmatic functions, tag questions were most frequently used as information-seeking questions in both varieties. However, punctuational tag questions were more common in Taiwan Chinese than in Mainland Chinese. These findings broaden the understanding of the regional features of tag questions across varieties of Chinese.
We analyze variation and change in the use of the polyfunctional discourse marker bueno 'well' in a corpus of more than 500 Spanish theater plays dated between 1968 and 2020. We hypothesize that playwrights specifically use bueno to make explicit reference to mental states of the characters, which may otherwise be hard to infer by the actors and the audience. To examine this hypothesis, we focus on the role of stage directions. Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than n = 2800 tokens of bueno, we first demonstrate that bueno is more likely to be prefaced with a stage direction when expressing hedged disagreement than topic management functions. We argue that this difference is due to the fact that in contrast to topic management functions, the actors and audience need a model of the mental states of the characters in the plays to identify hedged disagreement. Second, our analysis demonstrates a consolidation of the hedged disagreement function of bueno in the theater plays over time, both in terms of overall probability of use with that function and a decrease in the reliance of stage directions for meaning construction. We propose that in Spanish theater texts, bueno has become a marker of conflict interaction in the sense of Glenn (2019).
This article aims to provide a corpus-based study on Arabic nominalization as form of pragmatic actions in digital discourse, utilizing posts from X (formerly Twitter). This study examines how nominalization functions pragmatically to shape meaning, frame discourse, and reflect sociocultural and political ideologies. These themes were found to be productive in sociocultural, political, and identity-related discourses resulting in 5705 nominals in a period spanning over 5 months. The corpus was compiled using Python 3.11.9 targeting only public pages, and every possible action was taken to maintain adherence to X.com’s terms of use, and to safeguard X.com pages’ privacy, coming up with 9 nominalization patterns such as تفاعُل, تفعُّل, مفعلة, فعالة, and فَعْلة. Findings reveal that nominalization frequently encapsulates various sociocultural and political stances constructing several pragmatic themes: Arab identity and nationalism, uncertainty about the future, State-people divide, nostalgia for the past, and hope for a better tomorrow. The study concludes that Arabic nominalization serves not only as a linguistic resource, but also as a powerful discursive/pragmatic strategy in Arabic social media, enabling users to package ideas persuasively and frame social realities.
Our understanding of directives is derived from extensive theoretical and empirical work conducted in pragmatics and related disciplines. However, this predominantly draws on spoken discourse and small-sized or elicited datasets. To study directive use, our study drew upon representations of a genre labelled ‘guidance’—a one-million-word corpus of documents prepared and published by the UK Government communicating preventive actions relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. We used established corpus methods to identify novel ways of performing directives in relation to existing taxonomies and the unique context set by the pandemic—a situation where the government, on the basis of emerging science and emergency legislation, both suggested and imposed protective actions that impacted on most aspects of daily life at population level. We identified directives by exploring the co-texts of the lexical verbs used in the corpus, sampled using keyness as a measure of prominence. Our taxonomy of directives integrated an eclectic range of forms and strategies, showing guidance to be a hybrid genre, combining legal discourse with risk and health communication. The detection of directives permitted reflection on the different combinations of forms and actions in the context of health communication and highlighted the challenges and opportunities related to identifying directives at scale in a corpus.
Corpus pragmatics faces ongoing challenges in quantitatively studying context-dependent categories like humor, given their subjectivity and the need for costly inter-rater reliability checks. Recent advances in LLMs offer a potential way to streamline these processes for pragmatic annotation tasks. This paper investigates that potential through an analysis of Italian political discourse on X, focusing on humorous tweets and their discursive functions (Attardo, 2020). We compare the performance of GPT-4o, LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct, and a novice annotator against that of an expert annotator. For the detection of humor, both models reached high agreement with the expert annotator (in particular, GPT-4o: Cohen’s k = 0.75; AC1 = 0.87). Instead, agreement dropped for the classification of humor functions (GPT-4o: Cohen’s k = 0.37; AC1 = 0.70). Qualitative results suggest that the models rely heavily on lexical cues rather than demonstrating deeper pragmatic competence. These findings indicate that while LLMs can provide useful assistance in the initial stages of large-scale annotation, they remain limited in capturing the nuanced and context-dependent nature of pragmatic functions.
This study examines how AI-driven concordance analysis can identify syntactic patterns in aviation emergency communication, with the goal of informing ICAO-aligned training materials. Routine aviation exchanges follow standard phraseology, but emergencies demand flexible, context-specific language. Miscommunication in such situations can compromise safety. Corpus linguistics and speech act theory provide complementary frameworks for understanding how pilots and air traffic controllers use language in crises. A specialized 14,000-word corpus of 83 authentic transcripts of related emergencies was compiled. #LancsBox V6.0 retrieved concordance lines, and ChatGPT generated lexical bundles, which were compared with manual extractions using the Jaccard Similarity Index. Lexical bundles were analyzed for syntactic patterns and communicative functions using Austin's and Searle's speech act models. The AI and manually generated bundle lists showed 91.7% similarity, confirming high reliability of AI assisted corpus analysis. Key syntactic features included imperatives, modal verbs, elliptical forms, and technical noun phrases, serving functions such as alerting, requesting, and instructing. Speech act analysis highlighted their operational significance. AI assisted corpus analysis effectively uncovers authentic linguistic patterns in aviation emergencies, enabling the design of scenario-based, ICAO-aligned training. Future work should expand to other emergency types, integrate multimodal data, and pilot-test materials to validate pedagogical impact.
This article argues that disinformation in colonial contexts operates as epistemic and symbolic violence – an ideological camouflage and truth re-making that obscures power asymmetries, systemic inequality, and atrocities, distorts moral frameworks, and legitimises authoritarian or colonial power structures. While extensive research exists on the circulation of disinformation, little is known about the discursive pragmatic and evaluative strategies through which counter-voices resist such discourse. This article addresses this gap by examining how four pro-Palestinian Jewish organisations – Jewish Voice for Peace, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, and Jewish Council Australia – construct counter-narratives that challenge dominant ‘settler colonial’ framings of the Palestinian struggle while fostering trans-communal ‘communities of truth’ and pro-Palestinian moral bonds. Drawing on a purposive sample of web-based and Instagram texts (Feb 2024–June 2025), the study begins with a corpus-assisted macroscopic analysis to identify salient lexical patterns, followed by close textual analysis using a combined Critical and Positive Discourse Analysis (CDA/PDA) approach. A key focus is the discursive pragmatic functioning of evaluative language: how attitudinal meanings (e.g., “just,” “dehumanisation,” “love”), axiologically charged technical terms (e.g., “freedom,” “genocide,” “occupation,” “settler colonialism”) and iconised referents (e.g., “Israeli apartheid wall”) perform interpersonal, affiliative, and counter-framing work. Results show that these discourse resources operate as pragmatic tools for moral orientation, stance-taking, and identity realignment. Across the dataset, organisations act as ‘alternative Jewish movements,’ mobilising convergence and divergence bond clusters that reposition Jewish identity around justice, co-resistance, systemic compassion, and the grievability of all life. The findings demonstrate how evaluative patterns, combined with pragmatic analyses of bonding and positioning, reveal the discursive mechanisms through which digital activism enacts moral resistance and disrupts hegemonic state narratives.
