This study explored Saudi football fans' name-calling practices when expressing their affective stances in the YouTube comment section. It analysed how name-calling was employed to index fans' team (dis)affiliation, position towards the stance object and their (dis)alignment with other interactants in these comments. It further examined the linguistic creativity in fans' name-calling practices, in particular pattern re-forming forms. To do this task, a small corpus of 2646 YouTube comments was compiled, taken from three clips of the popular Saudi TV show Action with Waleed. The collected data were analysed to identify different forms of creativity in name-calling, such as the creative metaphoric invention/t'ahlu:bi:/(seaweed). Additionally, following a discursive approach, excerpts of fans' interactions were qualitatively analysed to investigate name-calling as a situated act and how (dis)affiliation, positioning, and (dis)alignment emerge dynamically through the thread of replies. The findings highlight that creative name-calling in Saudi football fans' interactions appears to serve different functions, such as asserting superiority, creating distance through 'us vs them' discourse, and providing a source of pleasure. One of the key concerns in sport discourse, particularly in Saudi football, is sport fanaticism, which can be reflected in fans' name-calling practices, thus highlighting the fine line between humour, teasing and provocation in competitive discourse. (c) 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
The rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) into multilingual digital environments has raised specific questions about contextual appropriateness, sociopragmatic calibration, and interactional adaptation across culturally situated norms. While benchmarks have evaluated LLM performance across dozens of languages, these assessments remain confined to classification tasks and are not designed to assess productive sociopragmatic competence in underrepresented ecologies such as Indonesian. This study compares speech act production between three flagship LLMs (GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 3 Pro) and 150 Indonesian native speakers. Data were elicited using a 16-scenario Discourse Completion Task spanning requests, refusals, complaints, and apologies across varied power (+/-P) and distance (+/-D) configurations. Responses were coded using an adapted Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) framework and digital-pragmatic categories capturing emoji, phatic markers, colloquial particles, and code-mixing characteristic of Indonesian online discourse. Results indicate that while all three LLMs produced grammatically well-formed and strategically recognisable speech acts, significant divergences emerged in face-work calibration, scalar modification, and text-based digital-pragmatic signalling. All models systematically preferred negative politeness strategies and used basa-basi (phatic communion), colloquial particles, code-mixing, and emoji less frequently, while deploying honorifics with less contextual specificity than human responses. Claude Opus 4.1 exhibited the most conservative profile, while Gemini 3 Pro showed the greatest contextual sensitivity, though all remained distinct from the Indonesian native-speaker comparison group. These findings provide an early production-based empirical comparison of LLM pragmatic alignment in Indonesian digital interaction, contributing to computational sociopragmatics with implications for AI safety, cross-cultural NLP evaluation, and sociopragmatically aware language technologies.
This research explored Chinese and Thai (im)politeness in intercultural workplace communication (IWC) from an emancipatory approach from a cross-cultural perspective. Four impoliteness acts that occurred among one Chinese and two Thai people in IWC were used to explore Chinese and Thai (im)politeness. The aims were to investigate whether there was a significant difference concerning the perceptions of the four impoliteness acts with regard to different nationalities and hierarchies, as well as to explore the metapragmatic evaluations related to Chinese and Thai (im)politeness in IWC. Two hundred participants, 100 Chinese and 100 Thai, were involved in this research. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were used for the statistical tests, Likert-scale questionnaires, and metapragmatic evaluations. The statistical test results showed that there was a significant interaction between the effects of nationality and hierarchy in three of the four impoliteness acts. Likert-scale questionnaires and metapragmatic evaluations elicited different viewpoints from the Chinese and the Thai participants. Based on the results, six commonalities in Chinese and Thai (im)politeness in IWC were found, while four differences were also identified. Both the Chinese and the Thai (im)politeness in IWC encompassed respect, fairness, being considerate, and having a “true heart” for politeness. Mutual respect and equality were two important components in Chinese (im)politeness. By contrast, Thai politeness was governed by the ostensible harmony in social interactions.
