Institutional Discourse in Cross-Cultural Contexts

Ronald Geluykens & Bettina Kraft (eds.)
University of Oldenburg, University of Southampton

While the fields of Institutional Discourse Analysis and Cross-Cultural Pragmatics are now two well established, and rapidly growing, subdisciplines within pragmatics, the cross-section between these two areas remains underexplored. The current book attempts to explore this interdisciplinary dimension, by presenting a collection of papers dealing with cross-cultural aspects of institutional interaction, approached from a variety of methodological perspectives (such as ethnomethodology, speech act theory, and systemic-functional grammar).

Two areas of institutional interaction are explored in detail. The first is classroom interaction, where the focus is mainly on the question how foreign language learners can improve their communicative competence in a formal teaching environment. Phenomena investigated here include intonation, phatic talk, speech act realisations, and the issue of autonomous language learning. The second context is that of professional interaction in the narrow sense, which incorporates both business and academic discourse, and which includes both written (e.g. business letters) and spoken (e.g. conferencing, service encounters) modes of communication.

Given that this collection has institutional (or professional) discourse as its main focus, it is an ideal companion volume to the earlier ‘Discourse in Professional Contexts’ (edited by R. Geluykens and K. Pelsmaekers, 1999) collection published in the same series.

Contents:

PART I: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

1. The Cross-Cultural Dimension of Institutional Discourse
Ronald Geluykens and Bettina Kraft

2. Taking a Multiple Analysis Approach to Discourse
Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen

3. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Definition and Methodology
Ronald Geluykens

PART II: CLASSROOM INTERACTION

4. Phatic Talk in Learner – Native Speaker Interaction
Bernhard Bielick

5. Modifying Requests in the EFL Classroom:
A Focus on Instructional Effects
Maria Pilar Safont Jordà

6. Classroom Procedures and the Development of Pragmatic Competence
Lienhard Legenhausen

7. What does the Tonic Say in Pre-School Teacher Talk in the EFL Classroom? An Acoustic-Based Analysis of Tonicity
Silvia Riesco Bernier & Jesús Romero Trillo

PART III: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

8. Requesting in Native and Non-Native Business Letters
Ronald Geluykens

9. Deductive and Inductive Methods in the Teaching of Business Pragmatics: Not an ‘either/or’!
Anna Trosborg and Philip Shaw

10. Complaint Sequences in Cross-Cultural Service Encounters
Bettina Kraft & Ronald Geluykens

PART IV: ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

11. Spoken Academic Discourse: A Critical Review
Holger Limberg & Ronald Geluykens

12. Lexical Density and Grammatical Intricacy in Conferencing
Eija Ventola

ISBN 9783895867750. 280pp. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 14. 2008.

Discourse and Enterprise

Communication, Business, Management and other Professional Fields

Fernando Ramallo, Anxo M. Lorenzo & Xoán Paulo Rodríguez-Yáñez (eds.)
Universidade Vigo, Galicia, Spain

This book is a collection of new approaches to the study of communication in business and other professional fields. The chapters are all related to the role of discourse —spoken and written language— produced in different domains. The contributions offers a multidisciplinary approach to this topic and therefore provides a number of representative perspectives to the different theoretical and methodological traditions that characterise this subject from the experiences of different people in different parts of the world.



The variety in the articles gives a broad-based approach to the main objectives of this book, applying several representative theoretical and methodological views on the different traditions in this subject matter. Firstly, our aim was to highlight the variety of discourse genres, i.e., business letters, academic tests, advertising, e-mails and online communication, short reports, office conversations, job interviews, press discourse, press releases, city tour guides, pedagogical texts, customer-server conversation, etc. And secondly, to emphasize the presence of a broad variety of theoretical approaches, i.e., systemic-functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, ethnography, pragmatics, conversation analysis and cognitive linguistics.

This book targets the university public and/or specialists in the university arena, and is also of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of linguistics, communications, marketing, microeconomics, advertising, etc. As far as university courses are concerned, this book is aimed at graduate and postgraduate students, teachers and researchers, for degrees covering communications, linguistics, modern languages, journalism, economics, management, etc.

ISBN 3895868788 . 312pp. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 15. 2006.

Perspectives on language use and pragmatics

A volume in memory of Sorin Stati

Alessandro Capone, ed.
Università degli Studi di Palermo

This volume is written in memory of Sorin Stati. The authors of this volume mainly deal with perspectives on language use and pragmatics. Each of them has his/her own approach, so the volume should not be taken as representing a single school of thought. Of course, the ideas expressed in all of the articles are reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s position which privileged meaning as use. We use language to do many things, to give and to obtain, to persuade and to order, to interact and create human bonds. Words and sentences acquire meaning in context, thus a decontextualized approach must be delegitimized. What the authors in this collection do is to place emphasis on the power of context and cotext to create meaning through myriad relations among the constituents of sentences, and among utterances themselves, which are arranged in discourse following an argumentative logic.

According to the authors, utterances are embedded in social situations and in culture, and it is the linguist’s task to uncover the complex and subtle mechanisms through which our words acquire their meanings in contexts and have powerful effects on people, from getting them to do simple things to deeply affecting their minds and behavior.

Linguistics, as is evinced from this book, is all about human beings who are brought up in society, live with one another and transmit their cultural heritage to others. Linguistics is inextricably connected with culture, as, without culture, there would no longer be human beings, but only monsters able to manipulate other human beings at their will. Culture, society and language cannot exist in separation from one another.

This book is also about argumentation. Through language you can exercise persuasion over other human beings. This was a topic that fascinated Stati in the last years of his life. He was probably aware that many of the evils of society are due to bad habits, such as the inability to discuss things properly in dialogue, to exercise persuasion, and readiness to resort to power, authority and, ultimately, to force. A society in which the affability of dialogue and persuasion is missing cannot but conceal a deep malaise. Human beings, after all, must be free agents, and must be able to choose and act according to their choices and free will. Only through persuasion can free will be exercised. When you resort to authority or force, you deprive human beings of their freedom, creating resentment or, at most, mechanical adhesion. But we do not want human beings to be machines, we want them to be what they were originally intended for by God: free individuals who can choose and act according to their best judgments.

Table of contents

Introduction

Henriette Walter, Sorin Stati, l'homme et le savant

Jeanne Martinet, Sorin Stati et la SILF (Société Internationale de Linguistique Fonctionnelle)

Milena Srpová, La variété culturelle dans la traduction et ses traitements linguistiques

Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, Linguistic criteria for judging composition and division fallacies

Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Pour une approche transphrastique des actes de langage

Marcelo Dascal, Types of Polemics and Types of Polemical Moves

Fabio Paglieri, Cristiano Castelfranchi, In parsimony we trust: non-cooperative roots of linguistic cooperation

Cornelia Ilie, Ideologically biased definitions as institutionally legitimating arguments

Alessandro Capone, On Pragmemes again. Dealing with death

Alessandro Capone, Pragmemes revisited (conflicts and power within the class)

Dorota Zielinska, Prepositions and explicature from the perspective of the selective mode of language use in the quantized c-field (SMLU) approach

Maria Helena Araújo Carreira La désignation de la personne en portugais : le point de vue de la proxémique verbale

Jacques Moeschler, Is pragmatics of discourse possible?

Daniela Pirazzini, Concessivity on the argumentative level of reported discourse

Bernard Pottier, À propos des relations sémantiques interlexicales

Michael Metzeltin, Larissa A. Drechsler, How much can we expect of the study of semantics if we accept the indefinable nature of meaning?

Franco Lo Piparo, Gramsci and Wittgenstein. An intriguing connection

Henriette Walter, Face à la mondialisation, le français et les langues règionales en France

Harro Stammerjohann, Vom unauffälligen Sprechen. Explication de texte

Jacob L. Mey, Discours prononcé à l’occasion de la promotion à ‘Docteur Honoris Causa’, Université de Bucharest, le 10 octobre 2006

Jackie Schön, De l’inégalité dans les échanges langagiers avec exemples en français

ISBN 9783929075724. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 16. 332pp. 2010.

STUDIES IN SLANG AND SLOGANS

Sola Babatunde, Akin Odebunmi, Akin Adetunji, Mahfouz Adedimeji (eds.)
University of Ilorin , University of Ibadan, Emmanuel Alayande College of Education, Oyo, University of Ibadan

Studies in Slang and Slogans, with contributions from Nigeria, America, France, Poland and Indonesia, addresses the nature, form and function of the slangy items and slogans engaged in politics, computer-mediated communication, sports, the military, students’ informal interactions, transportation, advertising and general human interactions. The book centrally examines how human social-political experiences and encounters with digital technology constrain the choice of slang and slogans favoured in the focused domains, the varieties of these slang and slogans, and the impact of these on human socio-cognitive processes in society. Studies in Slang and Slogans, therefore, should be of great interest to general readers, scholars from diverse areas of academic concerns, politicians, internet users, students, government officials and advertisers.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Notes on Contributors

Chapter One: Politics and American Slang
Leonard R.N. Ashley

Chapter Two: Axis of Evil: A Pragmatic Consideration
Adam Bednarek

Chapter Three: Slang, Sexual Organ and Metaphor in Nigerian English
Akin Odebunmi

Chapter Four: Indonesian Slang in Internet
Chatting Howard Manns

Chapter Five: Slang, Naming and Nigerian Supporters of English Premiership
Akin Adetunji

Chapter Six: Slang and the Nigerian Army
Bola Shakirat Ijaiya

Chapter Seven: Students’ Slang in the University of Ilorin
Sola Babatunde & Ayotunde S. Folorunsho

Chapter Eight: Students’ Slang on Internet Fraud
’Wale Oni & O.J. Oke

Chapter Nine: Slang in Text Messaging Amongst Nigerian University Students
Ononye Chuka & Romanus Aboh

Chapter Ten: Slang Among Nigerian University Students: Forms and Types
M.A. Aremu

Chapter Eleven: Kegites’ Slang in a Nigerian University
Adeniyi Osunbade & Adeolu Adeniji

Chapter Twelve: Slogan and Anti-slogan Practices: A Confrontation on Public Space and Advertising in Parisian Subway
Kenza Cherkaoui Messin & Natalia La Valle

Chapter Thirteen: Sociological and Historical Contexts of Number Plate Sloganeering in Nigeria
Mahfouz Adedimeji

Chapter Fourteen: The Politics and Pragmatics of Slogans on Nigerian Vehicle Number Plates
S.A. Aladeyomi & K.K. Olaniyan

Chapter Fifteen: Slogan and Sloganising in Nigerian Political and Religious Discourses
M.A. Alo

Chapter Sixteen: Language and Style in Political Slogans
Ayo Osisanwo

Chapter Seventeen: A Pragmatic Analysis of Political Slogans: A Case of Governor Gbenga Daniel of Ogun state, Nigeria
Toyin Makinde & Sola Odeneye

Chapter Eighteen: Political Slogans in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People
Amaka Ezeife & Ebuka Igwebuike

ISBN 9783929075717. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 18. 200pp. 2009.

the tongue between

Swahili & English in Tanzanian parliamentary discourse

Charles Bwenge
University of Florida

the tongue between attempts to untangle a communicative puzzle pertaining to a mixed code that has become a variety of choice within an institutionalized diglossic policy prescribing a choice between two officially recognized languages. Tanzanian national parliament (the Bunge) presents a perfect communicative site for illustrating this phenomenon. While the Bunge’s parliamentary proceedings language policy has persistently remained ‘Swahili or English’, the actual communicative interactions have persistently been dominated by the alternation between a ‘standard’ form and a ‘mixed’ form of Swahili, respectively referred to here as standard Swahili (SS) and elite Swahili (ES).

Drawing on the language use as a social act[ion] perspective, the book makes two major claims: first, ES is a distinct variety in its own right and second, its persistent occurrence in the Bunge’s discourse is both pragmatically and symbolically motivated – thus manifesting as a site where the society’s linguistic culture is clearly articulated and represented alongside demonstrating a communicative innovation and dynamics, but also highly contested trend. In this regard, historical and synchronic analysis is considered essential for a better understanding of the phenomenon. This book provides insightful clues for scholars and students in language policy, language mixing, identity construction, and political discourse in an African setting.

Charles Bwenge is an Assistant Professor of African sociolinguistics at the University of Florida. He earned his PhD from the University of Virginia. His research focuses on institutional communicative interactions particularly in political and commercial advertisement discourses in the Swahili-speaking east African region. His most recent published articles include “Language choice in Dar-es-Salaam’s billboards (a chapter in Fiona Mc Laughlin, ed. 2009. The languages of urban Africa. London) and “Codeswitching in Tanzanian parliamentary discourse: a communicative innovation” (Issues in Political Discourse Analysis, Vol. 2(1).

ISBN 9783895862366. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 19. 110pp. 2010.

Politeness in Institutional Discourse

Face-Threatening Acts in Native and Nonnative English Business Letters

Ronald Geluykens
University of Oldenburg

This volume reports on a large-scale quantitative investigation into a variety of face-threatening acts in authentic institutional discourse. The contrastive analysis is based on a substantial corpus of 600 native English, interlanguage (Dutch-English) and native Dutch business letters. In all, over 2,000 tokens of face-threatening acts are analyzed, covering a wide range of face threats (such as requesting, promising, offering, inviting, warning, apologizing, wishing, thanking, and confirming).

The analysis, which employs Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model, focuses on a number of distinct but related research questions, such as:

-Pragmatic Variation: How are face-threatening acts realized in written business discourse? In particular, to what extent do writers use lexical, syntactic and textual resources to mark (im)politeness?

-Interlanguage Variation: To what extent do native and interlanguage English realizations differ? Can such differences, partly or completely, be attributed to pragmatic transfer from the interlanguage users’ L1 (in this case Dutch)?

-Cross-Cultural Variation: To what extent do English and Dutch realizations differ, and what repercussions does this have in terms of politeness?

The book attempts to bridge the gap between three fields: politeness research, institutional discourse studies, and cross-cultural pragmatics (see also the Geluykens & Kraft 2008 volume in this series). It should thus be of interest not just to researchers working in the field of linguistic (im)politeness, but also to all those interested in institutional discourse in general, and business writing in particular, and last but not least to practitioners in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics.

ISBN 9783862880478. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 20. 288pp. 2011.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Cross-Cultural Communication

Adam Bednarek (ed.)
University of Lodz

Today, communication frequently takes place between individuals and institutions representing different national and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, technical development has issued advances in online communication increasing multidimensional forms of information transfer. This has resulted in a vast body of theoretical discussion on the relation between language, culture and discourse, within the realm of empirical research on intercultural encounters. The volume is a collection of papers written by scholars from Poland, Taiwan, Germany and the Netherlands who have agreed to bring their perspectives into ever changing field of communication studies. The purpose of the work is to present discourse functional and pragmatic analysis of social communication, with reference to translation, social science, corpus and cognitive linguistics, working with both traditional and new media data.

Contents:

Barbara Lewandowska Tomaszczyk (Lodz International Studies Academy, University of Lodz): Blurring the boundaries: A Model of Online Computer-Mediated Communication Activities (OCA)

Louis Wei-lun Lu and Lily I-wen Su (National Taiwan University): Antonymous polysemy: The case of –shang in Mandarin

Jerzy Tomaszczyk (Lodz Academy of International Studies): Repetition of conceptual content/reformulation and lexical borrowing

Łukasz Bogucki (Lodz International Studies Academy, University of Lodz): Taking Stock in Audiovisual Translation

Adam Bednarek (Lodz International Studies Academy, University of Lodz): Localization and Translation in Cross Cultural Environments: Issues of Website Localization

Elżbieta Jendrych (Kozminski University): Do Companies Need Routine in Business Communication?

Halina Wisniewska (Kozminski University): Written business discourse in lingua franca: a pedagogical perspective

Tatiana Szczygłowska (ATH Bielsko-Biała, Poland): The persuasive nature of letters to the editor: The case of deontic attitudinal meanings expressed by Polish and English writers

Dorota Biadala (Universität Heidelberg): Die Korpuslinguistik und der Sprachgebrauch in einer theoretischen Betrachtung unter Berücksichtigung der Kernbegriffe einer Diskursanalyse

Agata Blichewicz (Radboud Univeristy, The Netherlands): Pragmatic functions of the ‘purse hand’ shape in everyday Greek discourse

Anna Pałczyńska (University of Lodz, Poland): Generic Usage of Nouns and Pronouns in Selected English, German and Polish EU Documents

ISBN 9783862882762. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 21. 158pp. 2012.

Dialogue: State of the Art. Studies in Memory of Sorin Stati

Sibilla Cantarini
University of Verona

This is the second volume dedicated to the memory of Sorin Stati, who passed away a few years ago, and constitutes a further homage to the great linguist by the association he founded, the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (I.A.D.A.), and his former colleagues. This collection provides an overview of the topical issues, new directions and latest findings in dialogue analysis, and shares with the reader the state of the art of the theoretical discussion and empirical research into dialogue. It will also provide inspiration for new lines of research, as dialogue analysis is still today an expanding field. The articles in the collection are the fruits of different theoretical approaches to dialogue analysis, and have implications in a range of fields of application. Some stem from traditional lines of dialogue analysis research, for example, theoretical approaches based on the speech act or argumentation theory, while others are clearly the product of new lines of research, in keeping with the desires of the founder of the I.A.D.A..

Sibilla Cantarini is Associate Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Verona, author of numerous journal articles and editor of two collections on dialogue. Her research interests include the syntax-semantics interface, comparative syntax and semantics, morphology, lexicology, lexicography, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and argumentation theory.

Table of contents

Introduction

Paths to dialogue
Franz Hundsnurscher

Scientific dialogue in interactive digital media
Gerd Fritz

Responsibility as a dialogic concept: a case study of political interviews
Anita Fetzer

Constructed dialogue as a means of manipulation
Světla Čmejrková & Jana Hoffmannová

TV interviews and political satire
Francesca Cabasino

Political apologies by heads of state in diplomatic conflicts: between sincerity and political cynicism
Adriana Bolívar

Dialogic orientation. Case study: how far can media discourse go?
Liana Pop

Infatti in translations between German and Italian: strategies in film dialogues from the FORLIXT multimedia corpus
Marcello Soffritti & Christine Heiss

Translatability into the German language of some attenuated uses of the Italian negation non
Sibilla Cantarini

The Gestalt approach to dialogues: an integrated model of analysis
Andrzej Zuczkowski & Ilaria Riccioni

To say or not to say? On explicitness of communication
Valerij Dem’jankov

Dialogues on safety and security: creating trust in human-technology-interaction
Annely Rothkegel

Dialogic dimensions of self-advocacy in unequal power relations: students with reading disabilities as a case in point
Elda Weizman & Lea Kozminsky

Thank you for smoking. Thank you for arguing
Adelino Cattani

The Italian epistemic modal adverb forse: from semantics to argumentation
Andrea Rocci & Gergana Zlatkova

Locus a causa finali
Eddo Rigotti

Dialogue rules for argumentation
Frans H. van Eemeren & Bart Garssen

Towards a dialectic of tolerance
Marcelo Dascal

ISBN 9783862883691 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 22. 308pp. 2013.

Directives in Young Peer Groups. A Contrastive Study of Reality TV

Hanna Pułaczewska
Academy of International Studies/ Wyższa Szkoła Studiów Międzynarodowych

Directives in Young Peer Groups is a research monograph -- a corpus study analysing contrastively the linguistic realisation of directive speech acts in Polish, German and British English in young peer groups. It was completed as a Habilitationsschrift in General and Comparative Linguistics with Focus on English Language, and revised afterwards by adding a review of newer literature. It has also been abbreviated by leaving aside some methodological considerations, two chapters and about 80 statistical tables.

The corpus under study comes from the reality T.V. series Big Brother, produced according to the same scenario in all three languages under study: British English, Polish and German. It includes program editions produced between 2001 and 2004, two for each language. The subject of the analysis are contrasts in the interactional styles in directive activities of Polish, British English and German speakers in their respective in-groups. The analysis was based on videotaped and transcribed material comprising complete sequence of from 12, 14 and 22 hours of recorded interaction for Polish, German and English respectively, and additional scenes selected from 90, 60 and 90 hours respectively of the recorded programme.

The analysis is guided by the notion of linguistic politeness, but it is not limited to it. Data comparison consists of:

A statistical comparison of tendencies, comparing interlingually the linguistic forms of directives, as well as their dependence on the type of directive and the type of participants;

· A qualitative in-depth analysis of language-specific tendencies uncovered by the statistical comparison, using methods and concepts from the study of politeness, spoken language analysis, interpretative sociolinguistics, and stylistics.

ISBN 9783862883318. LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 23. 370pp. 33 tables, 18 figures. 2012.

La Pragmatique Linguistique : théories, débats, exemples

Adriana Costăchescu
Université de Craiova

Le livre La Pragmatique linguistique : théories, débats, exemples se propose, d’abord, de fournir au lecteur les notions fondamentales de la pragmatique linguistique contemporaine, expliquées et richement illustrées par un grand nombre d’exemples, étant ainsi une lecture utile pour les étudiants en lettres.

Les divers phénomènes linguistiques étudiés par la pragmatique ont attiré d’abord l’attention des philosophes du langage et des logiciens et seulement ensuite ils ont suscité l’intérêt des linguistes. Par voie de conséquence, presque tous les concepts de la discipline se trouvent au centre de longs débats intéressant non seulement la linguistique, mais aussi les sciences de communication et de la conceptualisation en général, des investigations se trouvant dans l’interface de plusieurs disciplines - philosophie, logique, psychologique, sémantique, sciences cognitivistes, intelligence artificielle, etc. Chaque chapitre présente l’évolution de la réflexion sur la classe de phénomènes présentés et l’état actuel des discussions et des controverses, aspect qui est intéressant pour les doctorants et les chercheurs des domaines impliqués.

Le livre discute la manière dans laquelle les divers phénomènes linguistiques se manifestent en français - la deixis, l’implicature conversationnelle, la présupposition, les actes de langage.

Professeur de linguistique française à l’Université de Craiova (Roumanie), l’auteur a publié des études dans le domaine de la sémantique et de pragmatique du français (A Montague Grammar for Romanian and French, Cours de pragmatique linguistique, La prédication spatiale en français), une partie des articles s’occupant aussi de mettre en parallèle le français avec d’autres langues romanes – l’italien et le roumain.

Table de matières

1. Introduction
2. Référence, deixis, anaphore
3. Les déictiques de la personne
4. Les déictiques spatiaux
5. Les déictiques temporels
6. Les tiroirs grammaticaux : valeurs déictiques, aspectuelles, anaphoriques et modales
7. L’implicature conversationnelle
8. La Présupposition
9. Les Actes de langage
10. La pragmatique cognitive et les actes de langage

ISBN 9783862884308 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 24. 360pp. 2013.