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 .

Abstract The concept of conversational implicature was introduced by the philosopher Paul Grice to draw attention to instances where speakers imply, hint, or suggest things in addition to what has been said. Grice's theory of conversational implicature is not only considered foundational in the field of pragmatics, it has also been adopted more widely in range of other related fields, including in anthropology and communication, legal studies, natural language processing, and second language learning and teaching. However, more in‐depth consideration of the various limitations surrounding Grice's theory of conversational implicature, and the alternative approaches to implicature that have been developed in its place, is arguably necessary in order to better contextualize its applications to other fields of research.

Swearing involves the use of words interpreted as obscene, derogatory, or offensive, and so can have a significant societal impact in the digital world. While it is widely acknowledged that the functions of swearing vary according to who is doing it and in what context, other dimensions of variability in online swearing remain to be fully explored. This article argues that we need to move beyond purely distributional text analytics of inferred social variables in analyzing online swearing if we are to systematically examine the social impacts of swearing in born-digital data. Using computational text analysis and network analysis methods, three large datasets representing snapshots of English Twitter/X communication in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are examined through four interrelated research questions: (1) Do rates of vulgarity differ significantly across these three English-speaking regions and across different times of day? (2) To what extent do users employ non-standard orthographic and typographic variations to obscure vulgar expressions? (3) How does vulgarity correlate with users' positions within social networks, specifically their network integration and follower counts? (4) What patterns emerge when these dimensions of variability are examined together? Findings demonstrate that while it remains important to examine who swears online, it is also critical to examine other dimensions of variability, including where, when, how, and with whom swear words are used. The implications of extending our understanding of these different dimensions of variability in born-digital data for studies of online swearing and the data-intensive humanities more generally are also discussed.

Abstract Inference and implicature are central to pragmatic theories of meaning and communication. An implicature is a type of speaker meaning that goes beyond what is literally said, while inference refers to the processes by which we reason from evidence to consequences, as well as the products of those reasoning processes. The relationship between inference and implicature has long been debated in the field. The focus was traditionally on deductive, inductive, and abductive forms of inference. However, there has been a shift more recently to more contextually situated accounts of inference and implicature. This has resulted in acknowledgement that there are a much wider range of different types of inference underpinning implicatures than previously thought. There have also increasingly been calls for empirically testable procedural models of inference and implicature that are grounded in real‐world, interactional data to be developed.

In this paper we extend the discussion about reproducibility in corpus linguistics from quantitative to qualitative corpus-based approaches and argue that concerns about reproducibility can be addressed in interpretive research paradigms like corpus pragmatics. We first suggest that in interpretive research traditions, transparency is more important than reproducibility. We then argue that interpretive research can be made more transparent and accessible by using notebooks to share analytical procedures. We support these claims through a case study in which we analyse responses to information-seeking utterance-final or questions in spoken Australian English data. We use a qualitative, discourse analytic approach to systematically examine examples of these utterances from selected corpora. We show how corpus linguistic research can draw on existing infrastructures and tools for ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and replicability of interpretive analyses of the pragmatic functions of linguistic tokens in situated contexts.

A frequent response to someone taking offence in response to conversational humour is to claim the utterances in question were 'not serious', 'taken out of context', or that any offence taken was 'unintended'. Yet in some instances such claims are construed as inadequate or irrelevant. In this paper we consider why that is the case. Building on a detailed analysis of incidents in which ostensibly joking utterances are construed as offensive, we propose that offence is a fundamentally scalar phenomenon: not simply in the sense of the joking in question being open to evaluation as more or less offensive, but with respect to the morally ordered scope of that offence. The degree to which perceived offences become impervious to claims that any offence caused or taken was 'unintended' is a function of the scope of the spatiotemporal scales invoked through the joking itself and subsequent responses to it.

This introduction to the special issue Reproducibility, Replicability, and Robustness in Corpus Linguistics calls for more transparent and robust research practices in the field. It situates the discussion within the broader replication crisis in the life and social sciences and explores its relevance for corpus linguistics. The article identifies key areas for improvement — data management, workflows, and reporting — and showcases tools and principles such as FAIR/CARE, version control, reproducible notebooks, and open repositories. It highlights how corpus linguistics can build on open science infrastructures to enhance methodological rigor. Practical challenges, including data sensitivity and skill gaps, are addressed with actionable strategies. The issue brings together contributions that clarify core terminology, test the robustness of established methods, and suggest concrete ways forward. Together, these articles offer conceptual and practical guidance for making corpus linguistic research more open, verifiable, and aligned with broader scientific standards.

It is commonly assumed that the openings of first encounters are highly scripted, allowing for little variation. Building on the work of Kecskes on the sociocognitive approach to intercultural pragmatics, it is argued in this paper that in intercultural settings the openings of first encounters are inevitably negotiated by participants in situ in the course of those openings. This is because in intercultural settings participants do not necessarily know whose interactional routines they can or should be implementing: should they be following the interactional routines of L1, L2 or something between? Drawing from an analysis of the openings of first encounters between Australian L1 speakers of English with Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese L2 speakers of English, the ways in which co-participants negotiate the occurrence of different possible components of those openings, as well as how participants go about negotiating specific components within these openings, specifically greetings and introductions, is highlighted. It is concluded that in intercultural first encounters there is less reliance on prior experience and core common ground and greater reliance on the actual situated context and emergent common ground.

Abstract Talking about or reporting troubles to others can make a range of different responses relevant, including a remedy or offer of assistance. However, one practical question facing interactants is what their moral responsibilities with respect to responding to those troubles are. This chapter focuses on cases where the troubles being reported are also hearable as complaints, and how moral responsibility for remedying those troubles-complaints is negotiated in telephone-mediated and copresent institutional encounters between Saudi and Australian coparticipants. It is proposed that negotiating moral responsibilities concerns questions about both who is culpable for those troubles (moral responsibility as culpability), and who is responsible for remedying those troubles (moral responsibility as remediability). The analysis of these encounters shows that the negotiation of culpability for the troubles-complaint is done in ways that eschew imputations of blame being directed at either the troubles-teller or troubles-recipient, but nevertheless holds the latter responsible for remedying those troubles.

Abstract Questions of morality are not new in research on language and social interaction, but have received increasing attention as part of the broader moral turn in the humanities and social sciences. The aim of this chapter is to provide an introduction to research on how morality unfolds and gets practically done in discourse, and the implications of this for the empirical analysis and theorization of morality. After providing a brief overview of the moral turn in studies of discourse and interaction, the chapter highlights some of the key findings that have emerged from these various strands of research. It then outlines some of the key conceptual foundations for the study of morality in discourse. This is followed by an overview of the four parts of this volume and each of the contributions therein, in which attention is drawn to the ways in which morality is approached in these essays.

Parliamentary discourse is highly regulated, leading to an almost blanket avoidance of explicit vulgarity or overtly offensive language. Yet it is nevertheless replete with examples in which the language used by members is construed as 'unparliamentary'. This study examines the occurrence of 'unparliamentary' as a metapragmatic label across the entire corpus of the Australian Federal Hansard from 1901 to 2024, and probes how it can be used to implement specific metapragmatic acts (i.e. doing something through labelling talk as 'unparliamentary'), as well as how it can also become an object of metapragmatic discourse (i.e. a topic of debate in its own right). In so doing we explore how the boundaries of offensive, objectionable or otherwise disorderly language use in parliamentary discourse are established, maintained, contested, as well as change and evolve overtime. As the Australian Federal Hansard constitutes a relatively large corpus of more than 900 million tokens, the study draws in a dialogic and iterative manner from both computational and interpretive methods of analysis. This dialogic form of analysis indicates that what is encompassed by the notion of 'unparliamentary' is broader and more complex than what is prescribed in the Standing Orders and associated codes of practice of the Australian Federal Parliament. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Sometimes we face material or practical troubles that require assistance from others to be resolved. While assistance can be mobilized through requests for assistance, it can also be mobilized through complaints. However, while L2 requests have been the object of numerous studies, there has been very little work examining how complaints can be used by L2 speakers to mobilize assistance. In this article, we examine how troubles-complaints are used by Saudi L2 speakers of English as a method by which to mobilize assistance. It is suggested that mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints provides for the negotiation of the material and moral contingencies associated with any such assistance. It is also suggested that the mobilization of requests through complaints is preferred over requests for assistance when the nature of assistance and who will provide it needs to be negotiated. Leading with requests for assistance in such cases thus occasions interactional misalignment. We conclude that the learning and teaching of pragmatic competence needs to go beyond traditional sets of speech acts such as requests.

Incidents of online public shaming commonly start when a record of conduct that is perceived as transgressive by either one of the parties to that interaction or a third party observer is posted, in the form of a narrative description, photograph, audio/video-recording, screenshot, and so on to an online platform, followed by viral amplification of that online public denunciation post through sharing by others within and across platforms. Building on an analysis of 26 incidents of online public denunciations of public incivilities it is argued, in this paper, that public denunciations essentially involve inviting networked audiences to denounce entextualized moments of conduct, which are recontextualized as not only morally transgressive, but as also warranting public condemnation. It is proposed that the procedure by which online public denunciations are accomplished is thus recursive, as it not only involves the ascription of action to prior conduct of the target in question that construes that prior conduct as transgressive, but the embedding of the ascription of that complainable action within a public denunciation that invites condemnation of that ascribed action. However, since social media platforms allow for the re-entextualization and subsequent recontextualization of prior posts through which public condemnation has been invited, online public denunciations are themselves inevitably open to recursive recontextualization. It is concluded that online public denunciation is thus an inherently recursive form of social practice.

We must begin by explaining the "20 years" in the title of this special issue.It is, after all, only 19 years since the very first issue of this journal in 2005.We might seem to be jumping the gun somewhat.In fact, the 20 years refers to something different, the lapse of time between the 14th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS14) in 2002 and 24th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS24) in 2022.Both of these conferences were held at Ghent University in Belgium.At the first of them, a colloquium on, "First-order and second-order politeness: The dispute over modelling politeness" (convened by Richard Watts, Gino Eelen and Jim O'Driscoll) created a significant impact, helping to set the tone for (im)politeness studies in the 21st century.In view of the fact that most of the contributors to that 2002 colloquium are still active in the field, and inspired by this return to Ghent, it seemed only right and proper to convene a "20-years-on" colloquium at SS24 with the aim of considering the current state of affairs in the field, especially developments since that time.Accordingly, we did so.Many of the 2002 "veterans" participated, as well as many other prominent researchers.In fact, we received so many fine contributions that, in order to comply with the scheduling restrictions imposed by the conference organisers, we ended up with two nominally separate colloquia.As far as we were concerned, though, they were part of the same event.This special issue contains nine selected contributions that emerged from both parts of that event.An additional inspiration was the SS24 theme of Inside and Beyond Binaries.This theme was intended to be meaningful for all branches of sociolinguistics, but it resonates especially clearly in our field, calling to mind several major (apparent) dichotomies.One of these, the distinction between first-order ("commonsense") and second-order ("scientific") perspectives, was the headline of the 2002 colloquium and

Inference is central to pragmatic theories of meaning and communication, but most studies of inference to date have been undertaken in adjacent fields rather than in pragmatics. The aim of this special issue is to bring together pragmatic perspectives on inference in order to further our understanding of the role that inference - as both a product and a process - plays in pragmatic models of communication. This aim is realised through a set of six papers that collectively address key questions arising when we go beyond the traditional focus in pragmatics on inferences by the hearer about the speaker's intended meaning. These articles draw from a range of different methodological and theoretical standpoints to examine the inferential, interactional, and developmental processes that underpin different types of pragmatic inference. It is concluded that more sophisticated theoretical accounts of pragmatic inference are needed to account for the wide range of inferential phenomena that can be empirically observed in communication.