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International Pragmatics Association https://pragmatics.international

16th International Pragmatics Conference

HONG KONG 9-14 June 2019

ABSTRACTS

16th INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS CONFERENCE

SPECIAL THEME: Pragmatics of the Margins

Conference chair: Winnie CHENG (Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Other Local Site Committee members: Kathleen AHRENS (Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Aditi BHATIA (Associate Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), CHEN Xinren (Assistant Dean, School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, China; President of China Pragmatics Association), Louise CUMMINGS (Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), HO Chung Kwong Victor (Assistant Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Janet HO (Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Lingnan University), Brian KING (Assistant Professor, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong), Hans J. LADEGAARD (Professor & Head, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), LAM Phoenix W. Y. (Assistant Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Carmen LEE (Associate Professor, Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Cynthia F K LEE (Associate Professor, Centre for Applied English Studies, University of Hong Kong), Olga A. ZAYTS (Associate Professor, School of English, The University of Hong Kong), Catherine LAW (Marketing Manager, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Other members of the International Conference Committee: Nana Aba Appiah AMFO (Accra, Ghana), Charles ANTAKI (Loughborough, UK), Frank BRISARD (Antwerp, Belgium), Anita FETZER (Augsburg, Germany), Pilar GARCES-CONEJOS BLITVICH (Charlotte, USA), Hartmut HABERLAND (Roskilde, Denmark), Michael HAUGH (Brisbane, Australia), Janet HOLMES (Wellington, New Zealand), Sachiko IDE (Tokyo, Japan), Cornelia ILIE (Malmö, Sweden), Dennis KURZON (Haifa, Israel), Sophia MARMARIDOU (Athens, Greece), Rosina MARQUEZ-REITER (Guildford, UK), Michael MEEUWIS (Ghent, Belgium), Jacob MEY (Odense, Denmark), Melissa MOYER (Barcelona, Spain), Neal NORRICK (Saarbrücken, Germany), Tsuyoshi ONO (Edmonton, Canada), Salvador PONS BORDERÍA (Valencia, Spain), Catrin RHYS (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Tuija VIRTANEN (Åbo, Finland), John WILSON (Belfast, Northern Ireland)

On-site conference liaison: Amos YUNG (Research Centre for Professional Communication in English; Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

IPrA owes a debt of gratitude to its hosts and sponsors:

Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE)

Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities (HKAH)

John Benjamins Publishing Company

INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS ASSOCIATION (IPrA) https://pragmatics.international

IPrA President: 2018-2023: Stephen Levinson (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) IPrA Secretary General: Jef Verschueren (Linguistics, Antwerp) IPrA Executive Secretary: Ann Verhaert (IPrA Secretariat, Antwerp)

Members of the IPrA Consultation Board (2018-2023):

Nana Aba Appiah Amfo (Accra, Ghana), Charles Antaki (Loughborough, UK), Rukmini Bhaya Nair (New Delhi, India), Barbara Bokus (Warsaw, Poland), Diana Boxer (Gainesvillle, USA), Charles Briggs (Berkeley, USA), Frank Brisard (Antwerp, Belgium), Winnie Cheng (Hong Kong, China), Jenny Cook Gumperz (Santa Barbara, USA), Anita Fetzer (Würzburg, Germany), Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich, Helmut Gruber (Vienna, Austria), Yueguo Gu (Beijing, China), Susanne Günthner (Münster, Germany), Hartmut Haberland (Roskilde, Denmark), Michael Haugh (Brisbane, Australia), Janet Holmes (Wellington, New Zealand), Sachiko Ide (Tokyo, Japan), Cornelia Ilie (Malmö, Sweden), Shoichi Iwasaki (Los Angeles, USA), Ferenc Kiefer (Budapest, Hungary), Helga Kotthoff (Freiburg, Germany), Dennis Kurzon (Haifa, Israel), Stephen Levinson (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Sophia Marmaridou (Athens, Greece), Rosina Marquez Reiter (Surrey,UK),Yael Maschler (Haifa, Israel), Yoshiko Matsumoto (Stanford, USA), Michael Meeuwis (Ghent, Belgium), Jacob Mey (Odense, Denmark), Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester, UK), Melissa Moyer (Barcelona, Spain), Neal Norrick (Saarbrücken, Germany), Tsuyoshi Ono (Edmonton, Canada), Jan-Ola Östman (Helsinki, Finland), Salvador Pons Bordería (Valencia, Spain), Marina Sbisà (Trieste, Italy), Gunter Senft (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Tuija Virtanen (Abo, Finland), John Wilson (Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK)

Editors of Pragmatics (2017 onwards):

Editor-in-chief: Helmut Gruber (University of Vienna) Associate Editors: Frank Brisard (University of Antwerp), Yoko Fujii (Japan Women’s University, Tokyo), Inmaculada García Sánchez (Temple University, Philadelphia), Sophia Marmaridou (University of Athens), Rosina Márquez Reiter (University of Surrey), Catrin S. Rhys (University of Ulster at Jordanstown), Daniel Silva (Federal University of Santa Catarina - UFSC), Elda Weizman (Bar-Ilan University)

CONTENTS Pre-conference session on East Asian Pragmatics Plenary lectures

Panels

Panel contributions

For identification of the panel to which a contribution belongs, please consult the conference program.

Lectures

Posters Index

USER NOTES:

1. This abstracts book only exists in electronic format. To go to the appropriate sections, just click the appropriate bookmark on your pdf-screen.

2. All abstracts within the different sections (except for the pre-conference session) are ordered alphabetically by title.

3. To identify the panel to which a panel contribution belongs, consult the program (online at https://ipra2019.exordo.com until two years after the conference, or in the pdf-version downloadable from https://pragmatics.international).

4. At the end of this book, there is a complete author index. To find the right page for the author you’re looking for, just type the page number from the index in the page navigation pane of your pdf-screen.

5. The abstracts contained in this book are in the form in which they were submitted. Authors were given the opportunity to edit their abstracts themselves. Yet, the end result may still not be fully stisfactory in all cases.

While the conference program went into print on 8 May 2019, this abstracts book was finalized around 14 May. As a result of cancellations, there may be presentations in the program which do not correspond to anything in this abstracts book. Conversely, there may be abstracts here corresponding to presentations which were deleted from the online version closer to the time of the conference. All abstracts are also accessible online through the program at https://ipra2019.exordo.com

Pre-conference session on East Asian Pragmatics

Pre-conference session on East Asian Pragmatics

9:00-9:10 Welcome by organizers Xinren Chen (Nanjing University) and Doreen Wu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

9:10-9:35 For The Pragmatics Society of Japan (PSJ)

Noriko Onodera (Aoyama Gakuin University)

Development of pragmatics in Japan and its contribution to the field

Since the introduction of Western linguistic terminology in the late 18th and 19th centuries, linguistics in Japan has tried to reflect the real state of Japanese. This introduction resulted not only in borrowings but also contributed original conceptualizations to the field of linguistics. For linguistics and pragmatics in East Asia, it is important to present our research not only through national languages such as Japanese, but also in English in order to play a role in the worldwide discussion. East Asia provides more than just ‘raw materials’ to the field.

A review of areas that draw special interests in current pragmatics in Japan will reveal that pragmatics, once called the “pragmatic wastebasket” (Bar-Hillel 1971), has taken full advantage of diverse concepts in a variety of related fields, coming into being as a new and plausible field exploring “on-going language and society.” A brief historical survey of the distribution of target languages in a subfield of pragmatics, historical pragmatics, will also be presented (cf. Onodera 2011).

[Noriko O. Onodera (PhD Georgetown University, 1993) is Professor of Linguistics and Pragmatics at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo. Her research interests center on historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and constructionalization. Recently published books include Rekishi Goyoron no Houhou [Methods in Historical Pragmatics] (2018, co-editor), Hatsuwa no Hajime to Owari [Periphery: Where Pragmatic Meaning is Negotiated] (2017, editor), Periphery – Diachronic and Cross-Linguistic Approaches (Special Issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17(2)(2016, guest-editor).]

9:35-10:00 For The Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Society, Korea (DCLSK)

Seongha Rhee (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

From Pragmatics to Grammar: Recent and Future Research in Grammaticalization

Linguistic structures constantly emerge in micro-steps through a process known as ‘grammaticalization’. This crosslinguistically ubiquitous phenomenon occurs at various levels of grammar through diverse mechanisms. Among such mechanisms are pragmatic inferences as evidenced in a growing number of recent studies. This state of affairs points to the importance of pragmatics research not only on the level of synchronic, real-time language use but also on the level of diachronic, cumulative effect on grammar. This is particularly significant since pragmatics research to date has largely been focusing on the former. This talk presents some select examples of grammaticalization in which pragmatic inferences

played the crucial role and calls attention to the critical roles of pragmatics research in the future endeavor of identifying the forces operating in the emergence of linguistic structures.

[Seongha Rhee is Professor of Linguistics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas, Austin in 1996. He served the Linguistic Society of Korea (president, 2013-2014) and the Discourse and Cognitive Linguistic Society of Korea (president, 2009-2011). He has published book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (2011, OUP), Shared Grammaticalization (2013, Benjamins), etc., and research articles in journals including Journal of Pragmatics and Language Sciences. His primary research interest is to identify cognitive and discursive mechanisms that enable language change from the crosslinguistic and typological perspectives.]

Kyu-Hyun Kim (Kyung Hee University, Seoul)

Conversation Analysis in Korea: A Pragmatic Approach to Language and Social Interaction

Since the publication of Sacks et al. (1974) in Language, conversation analysis (CA) has emerged as a globally-accepted pragmatics methodology, with its impact acutely felt in Korea starting in the 1980s as some linguists turned to CA’s focus on the ‘formal structures’ of social interaction for ‘supplementing’ their linguistic analysis. Levinson’s (1983) Pragmatics, translated by linguists (Lee & Kwon 1992), has contributed to promoting CA as a branch of pragmatics. In 1990s, Korean CA began to be practiced in a more concerted fashion by erstwhile linguists, mostly trained abroad as applied linguists/discourse analysts. In this presentation, some of the notable aspects of this development are examined, pointing out the need to appreciate more fully the rigorous empiricism of the CA’s analytic mentality (as opposed to a reliance on taxonomy and ‘psychologizing’). Calls are also made for a more thorough consideration of the ‘emic’ perspective for researching Korean conversational structures/practices.

[Kyu-hyun Kim is a professor in the Department of Applied English Linguistics & Translation Studies at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. He is a former President of the Discourse & Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea and the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea. Specializing in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, he has been an invited contributor to a number of academic journals and books. His other research interests include discourse-pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and Korean linguistics/language pedagogy.]

10:00-10:25 For Linguistic Society of Taiwan (LST)

Miao Hsia Chang (National Taiwan Normal University) and Marie Meili Yeh (National Tsing Hua University)

Linguistics research in discourse and pragmatics in Taiwan: State of the art

We provide an outline of linguistics research in discourse and pragmatics in Taiwan since the 1980s, focusing mainly on studies published in the last two decades (2000-2019). We conducted the survey by searching authors in the ROC Ministry of Science and Technology database under research fields “Pragmatics” and “Discourse analysis” in the “Linguistics” Discipline. The search yielded publications that can be further distinguished into two major subfields: Linguistics-oriented research and Applied Linguistics research. Areas of the

linguistics studies include discourse analysis of written and spoken discourse, with the latter accounting for a great majority. The topics of interest in pragmatics include Gricean pragmatics, speech acts, politeness principles, relevance theory and cognitive pragmatics; the analysis of spoken discourse focuses on emergent structure and constructions in natural language. The main language investigated is Mandarin, with only a few focusing on other vernaculars/languages in Taiwan such as Taiwanese Southern Min, Hakka and Formosan languages. As for Applied Linguistics studies, the research mainly encompasses move structure, genre analysis, cohesion and coherence, pragmatic markers, discourse forms, speech acts used by L2 learners, especially of English and Japanese, comparative study of L1 and L2, and their application to L2 teaching. Other related studies include critical discourse analysis, medical communication, English/Chinese for Specific Purposes, and pragmatic research in parallel corpus. While discourse and pragmatics research continues to thrive, a few growing trends can be further noted: the predominant use of corpus for data retrieval, the rise of neurolinguistic research in patient-based analysis, and the increasing use of internet-based materials as database for analysis.

[Miao-Hsia Chang is Professor of English and Linguistics at the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University. Her main publications include discourse and pragmatics in Taiwanese and Chinese conversation and academic discourse. She is also interested in the application of discourse analysis and pragmatics to English and Chinese language teaching.

Marie Yeh is professor in the Institute of Taiwan Languages and Language Teaching, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She is a life-time member of Linguistic Society of Taiwan and the editor of Journal of Taiwanese Languages and Literature. Her research interests include cognitive semantics and cognitive pragmatics in Formosan languages]

10:40-11:05 For The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) and The Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics (HAAL)

Winnie Cheng and Doreen Wu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Pragmatics research in Hong Kong: Past and future

The workshop aims to present a critical review of major pragmatics research studies that have been conducted in Hong Kong, including the important developments that have taken place, in the last ten years. It will cover a range of relevant topics, research questions and underpinning pragmatic theories, and more importantly, research methods that have been adopted in the Hong Kong-based pragmatics research reviewed. Drawing on the critical and up-to-date review, the workshop gives insight into potentially valuable and worthwhile pragmatics studies in the context of Hong Kong.

[Winnie Cheng is Adjunct Professor and former Director of Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE), Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include EAP, ESP, writing across the curriculum, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, critical genre analysis, and intercultural communication.

Doreen Wu is associate professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is a life-time member and former treasurer of

Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Her research interests include pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, transculturality and media communication.]

11:05-11:30 For China Pragmatics Association (CPrA)

Xinren Chen (Nanjing University) and Min Li (Jiangsu University)

Pragmatics Research in Mainland China: History and Development

Pragmatics research made its debut in China thanks to Professor HU Zhuanglin’s introductory article of “pragmatics” in 1980, and owed its rapid spread to the publication of HE Ziran’s textbook A Survey of Pragmatics, the first one of its kind in mainland China. Despite a history of near 40 years, its spread and development have rarely been made accessible to international colleagues mainly owing to the enormity of existing literature, lack of appropriate analyzing tools, difficulty in collecting related data, and above all the majority of the research published in Chinese. The inaccessibility has led to only partial or even scant knowledge and underrepresentation of mainland China’s pragmatics research among the international pragmatics academia. Against this backdrop, this report, with the aid of the latest bibliometric tool of CiteSpace 5.3, attempts to present a diachronic description of pragmatics research in mainland China, including the role of China Pragmatics Association (CPrA) in promoting its development. The results of the survey indicate that: (1) pragmatics research in mainland China has increased dramatically since 1997, reached its climax in 2003, and showed a slight decline from the peak in recent years; (2) the research papers have mainly appeared in Foreign Language Research (《外语学刊》), Foreign Languages and Their Teaching (《外语与外语教学》), Modern Foreign Languages (《现代外语》), etc., with HE Ziran, RAN Yongping, CHEN Xinren, XU Shenghuan, XIONG Xueliang, ZHANG Shaojie, etc. as the most productive researchers and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, Nanjing University, Fudan University, and Henan University as the key research institutions; (3) in terms of topic areas, pragmatics research in mainland China mainly introduced the basic subject matter of pragmatics as a field in the first half of 1980s and focused on the speech act theory in the second half; explored conversational implicature in the first half of the 1990s and issues in cognitive pragmatics in the latter half; and addressed corpus pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, Internet pragmatics, etc., with interface studies being the newest highlight, in the new millennium; (4) pragmatics research in mainland China is getting more and more internationalized, with a steady increase of international publications; and (5) pragmatics research in mainland China has benefited greatly from the active promotion of the CPrA, as manifested by its conferences, forums, monograph series projects, journal publicationss, training programs, and various endeavors to boost international exchange and collaboration in recent years.

[Xinren Chen is a professor of English and linguistics in the School of Foreign Studies at Nanjing University, president of China Pragmatics Association and co-editor of East Asian Pragmatics. His primary research interests include pragmatic theories and applications, foreign language education, and language policy and planning. He is author of The Pragmatics of Interactional Overinformativeness (2004), Critical Pragmatic Studies of Public Discourse (2013) and Pragmatics Identity: How to Do Things with Words of Identity (2018), and coauthor of Contemporary Pragmatics (2004), English Grammar in Use (2004), Politeness Theories and Foreign Language Learning (2013), Pragmatics and Foreign

Language Teaching (2013), Linguistic Memetics: Theory and Application (2014), and Politeness Phenomena Across Chinese Genres (2017).

Min Li is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Pragmatics Studies, Jiangsu University. His research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and foreign language education studies.]

11:30-11:45 For the journal East Asian Pragmatics (EAP)

Daniel Kadar (Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Dalian University of Foreign Languages)

East Asian Pragmatics – Collaborative Vistas

East Asian pragmatics is one of the conventionally most significant areas in sociopragmatics, as the number of publications and the number of academics working on East Asian languages indicate. At the same time, the East Asian field has largely remained a ‘testing ground’ for Western pragmatic models: except emancipatory work, such as that of Sachiko Ide and her colleagues in Japan, and Xinren Chen in China more recently, little attempt has been made to develop sociopragmatic models grounded in East Asian academic knowledge. In addition, unfortunately the majority of research has compared East Asian languages with English, in spite of the fact that a much more valid comparison could be made between lingua-cultures such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (but see e.g. the work of Naoko Taguchi and her team as an exception to this trend). In the present talk I argue that – in order to fundamentally increase the citation figures and overall academic impact of the field – researchers working on East Asian language use will need to do more emancipatory and East Asian contrastive work. The best way of doing this is to form research synergies between East Asian teams: we cannot afford working in separate bubbles, i.e. Chinese, Japanese and Korean researchers, as well as foreign academics working on these languages, need to engage in more active collaboration. The journal East Asian Pragmatics, and the recently-launched symposia series associated with the Journal, provide an opportunity to exploiting all these opportunities.

[Daniel Z. Kadar is Qihang Chair Professor and Director of the Centre for Pragmatics Research at the Dalian University of Foreign Languages. He is also Research Professor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. With Xinren Chen he has edited the peer-reviewed academic journal East Asian Pragmatics. Daniel has long standing interest in the contrastive study of Chinese, Japanese and English pragmatics. He is author/editor of 22 volumes published by internationally leading publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press.]

Plenary Lectures


(Im)politeness and reciprocity

Plenary lecture

Prof. Jonathan Culpeper 1

1. Lancaster University

Over the last two or so years, I have been working on the notion of reciprocity, especially in the context of

(im)politeness. A frequent dictum in many religions and legal frameworks, reciprocity has been discussed in

social psychology and sociology in particular, a classic contribution being Gouldner (1960). My definition of

reciprocity combines Gouldner’s suggestion that it is underpinned by “a generalized moral norm […] which de-

fines certain actions and obligations as repayments for benefits received” (1960: 170) with the idea of politeness

a social payment (cf. Werkhofer [1992] 2005: 170-2, 182-7). Reciprocity is simply about maintaining a balance

of social payments. A polite request makes a social credit that can be balanced by polite compliance; an insult

makes a social debit that can be balanced by a counter insult.

Of course, interlocutors do not always comply with reciprocity. Such deviations from reciprocity are of par-

ticular interest because they trigger further inferencing and/or reflect contextual constraints. I will map out

and illustrate a matrix of reciprocity options, plotted according to the interlocutors’ (im)politeness thresholds

and whether they match or not. Matches might involve, for example, the performance of ‘politic’ behaviour or

banter. Mismatches might involve, for example, a strong upshift as a means of seizing the moral high ground,

or a strong downshift as a means of rejecting something and/or somebody.

I will also present a study of reciprocity in the context of requestive exchanges, a study which I have under-

taken with Vittorio Tantucci. We developed a method for modelling pragmatic constraints and relationships. It

involves coding requestive exchanges in corpus data, having substantiated our codings with an informant study,

and then statistically plotting our results drawing on conditional inference trees, random forests (e.g. Taglia-

monte & Baayen 2012) and distinctive collexeme modeling (e.g. Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004). This method aims

at measuring the degrees of attraction amongst (im)polite requestive acts, subsequent (non)reciprocal responses

and the contexts in which they are used.

Gouldner, Alvin W. 1960. The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American SociologicalReview,

25(2): 161–178.

Gries, S. T., & Stefanowitsch, A. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on alter-

nations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics,9(1): 97-129.

Tagliamonte, S. A., & Baayen, R. H. 2012. Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case

study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change,24(2): 135-178.

Werkhofer, Konrad T. [1992] 2005. Traditional and modern views: The social constitution and the power of

politeness. In: Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich (eds.) Politeness in Language: Studies in its

History, Theory and Practice (2nd edn). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 155-99.

2


Amultimodal corpus-based study of pre-speech children,autism and Alzheimer’s disease: Substantiating Morris’ lost

behavioral semiotic pragmatics

Plenary lecture

Prof. Yueguo Gu 1

1. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Charles Morris, the founder of pragmatics, writes: “By ‘pragmatics’ is designated the science of the relation

of signs to their interpreters. […] signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it is a sufficiently accurate

characterization of pragmatics to say that it deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psycho-

logical, biological, and sociologicalphenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.”(Morris, 1951 [1938]: 30;

italics added). The italicized parts, having largely been filtered by linguistics pragmatics under the influence

of analytic philosophy and exclusive concern with linguistic communication, are the focus points this paper

attempts to revive.

This paper, drawing inspirations from the latest development of biosemiotics (see e.g., Uexkull 2010 [1934]), pro-

poses an Umwelt-Innenwelt-Lebenswelt model (3-welt model), as a metalanguage to revive Morris’ lost prag-

matics. Umwelt is a here-and-now living environment constructed by an organism through multi-modalities

and actions at a specific here-and-now behavioral setting. Innenwelt is a mental world built via perception

signs, action schemas, relations, as well as emotional attachments. Lebenswelt is a world primarily constructed

through human natural language.

Infants start with simple, largely undifferentiated Umwelt, whose Innenwelt consists of (1) preferences for hu-

man species and preference for the mother’s speech, (2) perceptual signs derived from multimodal interactions

with the environment, and (3) signs formed by proprioception, and reflexes about its own body (Rochat 2004).

Typically developing infants, as becoming mature, upgrade, by enriching, their Umwelts-Innenwelts steadily,

preparing for the emergence of their Lebenswelts. As for atypically developing infants, e.g., autism spectrum

disorder children, their construction of Umwelts, Innenwelts and Lebenswelts is rather hazardous, and even

described by Bettelheim (1967) as “empty fortress”. Quite revealingly, neurocognitive degenerative patients,

e.g. Alzheimer’s disease patients, undergo some dissection of Umwelts from the corresponding Innenwelts and

Lebenswelts. As a consequence, for instance, some get lost in the current here-and-now Umwelt, unable to be

directed by the going-home action schema in the Innenwelt. Similarly some get entrenched in their Lebenswelt

— murmuring to themselves, at the same time, being unable to find their life objects in the flat, i.e., the here-

and-now Umwelt. All these discussions are not speculative, and are substantiated by audio-video data from our

multimodal corpora for life course studies.

The 3-welt model as a metalanguage enables us to talk about animal behavior, typical and atypical children’s

behavior, typical and atypical behavior of aged people in a unified, consistent, coherent way. This is also one of

Morris’ original objective of semiotics as a unifying science.

References citedBettelheim, Bruno, 1967. The Empty Fortress. New York: The Free Press.

Morris, Charles W., 1951 [1938]. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Morris, Charles W., 1964. Signification and Significance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Rochat, Philippe, 2004. The Infant’s World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Uexkull, Jakob von, 2010 [1934]. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Translated by Joseph D.

O??Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

3


Fancy fence work: Harnessing the affordances of theperiphery

Plenary lecture

Prof. Meredith Marra 1

1. Victoria University of Wellington

For a number of years, the Wellington Language in the Workplace team has been exploring the sociopragmatic

norms and discursive processes involved in boundary crossing, i.e. the ways in which language is used to cross,

or fail to cross, linguistic, social and national borders in daily routines at work. The Community of Practice

(CofP) framework has implicitly underpinned much of the discussion (both in our work and in the field more

generally), including a default assumption that newcomers are willingly on an inbound trajectory from legit-

imate peripheral membership to core membership of a particular community. It is argued that members are

able to signal their status as core members by a variety of means, including through discourse, in order to be

recognised as “one of us”.

Focussing on these transitions we have considered the ways in which CofP boundaries are acknowledged, main-

tained, patrolled and defended in interaction. Membership in a community is a joint achievement that can be

thwarted by uncooperative in-group members. However, our analyses also indicate that some people simply

do not wish to become central members of a group. Their goals are different; they choose to draw on the subtle

power associated with operating at the periphery. Using data collected in a range of different workplaces and

drawing on our analyses of the different strategies used by those who successfully claim peripheral status, I will

challenge analytic and societal expectations that integration is the only desirable goal. By exploring the actions

and enactment of norms of those who remain at the periphery by choice, our long term goal is to identify ways

of empowering and providing alternatives to those who find themselves marginalised by others.

4


Postcolonial pragmatics and the discourses of the margins

Plenary lecture

Prof. Eric Anchimbe 1

1. Universität Bayreuth

For a long time pragmatics as a field of study was dominated mostly by western, monolingual and monocultural

theories and frameworks. This made non-western discourses to be interpretable only through the frames of

these western theories. These discourses occupied only the margins of the linguistic pragmatics enterprise.

Until recently, new frameworks have emerged that seek to approach non-western discourses using theories

designed according to their societal set up. Postcolonial pragmatics is one of them. Its major premise is that

just as colonialism led to the emergence of new varieties of colonial languages (cf. New Englishes, Postcolonial

Englishes, etc.) it also triggered new forms of, and strategies in, social interaction that are peculiar to the mixes

of languages, cultures, peoples, religions, etc. in these locations.

In this talk, I illustrate how the discourses produced in postcolonial societies could be appropriately and suffi-

ciently approached using the postcolonial pragmatics (cf. Janney 2009, Anchimbe & Janney 2011a, b, 2018). The

examples I use are drawn from various postcolonial contexts, and highlight the centrality of analytical compo-

nents like age, gender, sociocultural norms, religion and kinship relations in understanding speakers’ choices

during communication.

References

Anchimbe, Eric A. & Janney, R. W. (eds.) 2011a. Postcolonial Pragmatics. Special issue Journal of Pragmatics43(6):

1451-1539.

Anchimbe, Eric A. & Janney, R. W. 2011b: Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics43(6):

1451-1459.

Anchimbe, Eric A. and Janney, Richard W. 2017. Postcolonial Pragmatics. In: Barron, Anne and Gerard Stehen

(eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. London: Routledge, 105-120.

Janney, Richard W. 2009. Toward a Postcolonial Pragmatics. In: Bruce Fraser, and Ken Turner (eds.). Language

in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey – A Festschrift. Bingley: Emerald, 203-212.

5


The frame-based approach to politeness: rationale and futuredirections

Plenary lecture

Prof. Marina Terkourafi 1

1. Leiden University

In their 1987 preface, Brown and Levinson state that “Grice’s CP…defines an ‘unmarked’ or socially neutral (in-

deed asocial) presumptive framework for communication” (1987:5). Yet, their framework also remains at one

step of remove from actual language use. This is because it fails to acknowledge the different frequencies with

which the strategies realizing each of their politeness super-strategies are used by members of different com-

munities. Brown and Levinson list 15 strategies under positive, 10 under negative, and 15 under the off-record

super-strategy. Of these, corpus-based findings show that only a subset are regularly used in community mem-

bers’ daily dealings, while others much less so. This insight underlies the frame-based approach to politeness,

which I have been developing since the late 1990’s (Terkourafi 1999).

The central insight of the frame-based approach is that lexico-grammatical expressions regularly used to achieve

an illocutionary uptake in a certain situational context are automatically evaluated as polite. Note that, while

the speaker’s face is constituted, the listener’s face may be constituted or threatened (Terkourafi 2008). Either

way, through opting for the most frequently used expression in that context, speakers display their familiarity

with the norms governing a particular interaction, and it is because of this – rather than because it is indirect—

that their behavior is evaluated as polite (in a Politeness2 sense).

The frame-based approach thus decouples politeness from indirectness and substitutes conventionalization

for the latter (Terkourafi 2015). Because conventionalization is a statistical rather than semantic property, a

traditionally ‘direct’ expression (e.g., an imperative utterance type) can also be conventionalized, and hence

polite, relative to a situational context. Politeness thus falls out as a by-product of doing things in an expected

way. Such ‘expected ways’ are shaped by historical, social, and demographic dynamics that only large-scale

analysis can uncover. Individual language users are not privy to these macro-processes and cannot take them

into account each time they use language to get something done. That is why politeness is a matter of habit

more than calculation. And also, why it relates to the same mechanisms that index our identity linguistically –

though an outcome distinct from identity.

Clearly not all our activities are as predictable so as to support the formation of frames. Yet, those frames we are

familiar with provide the platform for adapting our behavior when we are unsure about the norms governing

the current interaction, as can happen in intercultural communication. Accounting for politeness evaluations

in intercultural encounters is one area of expansion for the frame-based approach.

Another is the type of (linguistic) conventions involved. The frame-based approach developed out of the identi-

fication of lexicogrammatical expressions (akin to CxG’s form-function combinations) consistently achieving a

particular illocutionary uptake in a situational context over large amounts of data. However, the longer chunks

of discourse over which illocutionary uptakes are typically negotiated can also involve conventions of content

rather than form. Detailed sequential analysis can help identify such conventions, which may well resemble

CA preference formats. This is another fruitful avenue for future research.

6


The role of pragmatics in the diagnosis of dementia

Plenary lecture

Prof. Louise Cummings 1

1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Dementia is a large and growing public health problem that poses considerable economic and social challenges

to many countries around the world. The emphasis of clinical intervention in dementia is to delay the onset of

severe functional limitations that are associated with poor outcomes and large care costs. However, in order for

this to be possible, clinicians must achieve earlier diagnosis of the condition than is currently the case. I argue

that pragmatic language abilities have the potential to contribute to early diagnosis of the cognitive changes

associated with dementia. These changes are often insidious, and are poorly characterized or overlooked by

clinicians. Pragmatic language impairments are an untapped resource that may hold promise as significant

behavioural markers of early cognitive impairment. As well as the need to achieve earlier diagnosis, clinicians

must increase the accuracy of diagnosis. In order to improve the currently low diagnostic accuracy of many

dementias, clinicians must have reliable clinical descriptions of all dementias, and not simply the most common

dementia associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

In this plenary, I report some preliminary data from a study of English-speaking clients with neurodegener-

ative conditions other than Alzheimer’s disease. The participants in this study had confirmed diagnoses of

Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, multiple sclerosis, progressive supranuclear palsy, and corticobasal

degeneration. Although they all required some level of support and care, they were still living at home with

family members. None of the participants had received a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment or dementia,

and yet their performance in discourse production tasks suggested they were experiencing early disruption of

pragmatic language skills. In many cases, participants had successfully masked these difficulties through their

reliance on others in conversation and by means of natural compensatory adjustments in a small number of

predictable dyads. The pragmatic and discourse anomalies of these participants nearly always existed alongside

well-preserved structural language skills. Implications of this work for the development of pragmatic language

criteria that can supplement current diagnostic systems in dementia are discussed.

7

Panels


(Non-)referentiality’ around the world: how doconversationalists use what their languages mark?

Panel proposal

Prof. Sandra Thompson 1, Prof. Michael Ewing 2, Prof. Ritva Laury 3

1. University of California, 2. University of Melbourne, 3. University of Helsinki

The field of pragmatics has seen much discussion of ‘(non-)referentiality’, starting with philosophers such as

Frege (1892) and Russell (1905), and continuing into the mid-20th century (e.g., Strawson 1950). To our knowl-

edge, all of this research is based on constructed data and all of it is on English. As for scholarship based on data

from everyday talk-in-interaction, there is literature on ‘reference’ and ‘anaphora’ in interaction, how we refer

to persons or things (e.g., with pronouns, ‘zero’, proper names, etc.), how we ‘establish’ reference, reference to

co-present vs. non-present participants, and reference repair (references available on request).

But there has been very little research based on data from talk-in-interaction from any language seeking to

determine the ways in which actual speakers to talk about persons and things as categories in real time, in-

cluding what distinguishes ‘referential’ from ‘non-referential’ , ‘specific’ from ‘non-specific’, or ‘generic’ from

‘non-generic’, and how speakers make use of these distinctions. It is this gap which this panel seeks to address;

we invite presentations that will delve into what role ‘referentiality’ plays ‘on the ground’ for speakers, bring-

ing together researchers working on (non-)referentiality in conversational interaction in a variety of languages

(including Japanese, Finnish, German, Mandarin, Garrwa, Indonesian, Polish, French, Yucatec Mayan, and En-

glish), addressing such questions as:

• What do distinctions around referentiality, specificity, and genericity offer speakers as resources for

joint social action, especially as preliminary research suggests that a majority of noun phrases in con-

versational language have no clear referent?

• To what extent do other aspects of grammar - such as predicates, clause constructions, tense or aspect

- contribute to (non-)referentiality and how it is deployed by speakers? E.g., are there grammatically

‘generic’ clause types expressing habituality?

• How do language users (and we researchers) determine whether a noun phrase (NP) is referential or not?

That is, what interactional evidence do the data reveal to show that interactants attend to referentiality?

• Is referentiality a single binary feature or is it a cluster of features? Is there data to support the idea that

there is no single defining feature, but that the more features of ‘referentiality’ a speaker uses, the more

referential s/he intends it to be?

• Do conversational data reveal that languages differ in the ways in which they mark distinctions between

‘referential’ and ‘non-referential’ NPs? How universal are distinctions that seem to be useful for account-

ing for grammar-in-interaction in one language?

• If ‘referring’ is one of things that distinguishes the word class of nouns from verbs (Hopper/Thompson

1984), what do apparent ‘nouns’ that don’t refer tell us about ‘nouniness’?

• How does referentiality shift during an interaction and what is the motivation for such shifts, including

subtle shifts between ‘referential’ and ‘non-referential’ understandings or ambiguity between them?

We anticipate that this panel will open up discussion among scholars who are working to understand the role

of (non-)referentiality in the talk of people carrying out their daily activities in a range of languages across the

globe.

9


(Re-)Shaping Social Identities in the Japanese Context

Panel proposal

Prof. Andrew Barke 1, Dr. Momoyo Shimazu 1

1. Kansai University

‘Identity’ has been described as something that is actively performed and carried out in social contexts (e.g.

Butler, 1990; Kondo, 1990; Marra & Angouri 2011), involves the “social positioning of self and other” (Bucholtz

& Hall 2005:586), and is continuously and dynamically negotiated (Schnurr & Zayts, 2011).

The purpose of this panel session is to bring together scholars interested in empirically exploring ways in which

social identities in the Japanese context are not only linguistically (re-)constructed in everyday contexts, but

reflexively (re-)shaped by speakers in response to external stimuli such as emotional reactions of other inter-

actants, the stances they assume, and the informational content of the utterances they make. Such adjustments

typically occur in contexts such as workplace training sessions (e.g. Cook 2018) or educational instruction within

the classroom in which socialisation of the individual is a key goal of the interactive event. However, it can also

take place in other situations in which the main aim of the interaction is less saliently linked to changing the

behaviour of particular interactants. For example, Japanese university students engaged in job-hunting activ-

ities may adjust the way in which they linguistically construct their identities as potential employees in job

interviews in response to reactions and responses from interviewers, or L2 speakers of Japanese may attempt

to adjust the way in which they linguistically construct their professional identities in Japanese as a result of

co-worker reactions during work-related discussions.

Contributors to this panel, while sharing a common social constructionist perspective (e.g. Ochs 1993), draw on

and analyse data from a variety of sources including group discussions among job-hunters at various stages of

their job-hunting process, interviews with heritage language learners of Chinese who have spent time studying

abroad in China, and recordings and ethnographic observations of members of Toastmaster Club clubs in Japan,

in order to illuminate the dynamic ways in which individuals reflexively adapt and reshape their identities in

response to various external stimuli in their everyday lives.

References:

Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse studies,

7(4-5), 585-614.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Kondo, D. K. (1990). Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press.

Marra, M. & Angouri J. (2011). Investigating the negotiation of identity: A view from the field of workplace dis-

course. In M. Marra & J. Angouri (Eds.), Constructing identities at work (1-14). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing social identity: a language socialization perspective. Research on Language and

Social Interaction 26 (287-306).

Schnurr, S. & Zayts, O. (2011). Be(com)ing a leader: A case study of co-constructing professional identities at

work. In J. Angouri & M. Marra (Eds.), Constructing identities at work (40-60). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

10


Adaptability in theories of pragmatics

Panel proposal

Prof. Yunlong Qiu 1

1. Northeast Normal University

Language usage of human beings is a continuous process of choice-making. While linguistic forms are chosen,

language users need to adapt to participants and contextual correlates. Such adaptability is reflected on the

dynamic interplay between linguistic forms and context. Understanding Pragmatics (1999), contributed by the

Belgian pragmaticist Jef Verschueren, has served as a starting point for at least some work in pragmatics that

uses the notion of adaptability. In the past 20 years, adaptability has been one of the central issues in pragmatic

studies, explicitly or implicitly, and against the background of a diversity of theoretical positions. But also in

the earlier literature on language its influence was present, often with references to the evolutionary basis of

language. Relevant research has not only been theoretical, but also empirical, with applications varying from

the study of specific structural-functional linguistic phenomena to the study of genre-related issues (including

academic discourse, literature, etc.), translation processes, language learning/teaching strategies, and issues of

discourse in society. This panel is intended to look back into the earlier studies on adaptability in theories of

language (whether or not directly identified as ‘pragmatic’), to reflect upon the merits and demerits of relevant

studies and to seek the further research potential of this concept (especially with an eye to developments in

new media of communication). Briefly, two types of contributions are aimed at: 1. theoretical reflections on

adaptability in theories of language and language use, including accounts of relevant theories/frameworks, the

disputes arising between researchers, and the relations between those theories/frameworks and other linguistic

(especially pragmatic) theories/frameworks; 2. empirical studies relying on a notion of adaptability in accounts

of aspects of language use.

11


Adapted and emergent practices in dialogic text-based CMC

Panel proposal

Dr. Katharina König 1, Dr. Michal Marmorstein 2

1. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 2. Hebrew University Jerusalem

Text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) is embedded in structural and social settings which af-

fect the adaptation and innovation of dialogic practices, both temporal-sequential and interpersonal. In near-

synchronous modes of interaction, such as IR chats, Twitter debates and WhatsApp chats, the dynamics of ‘turn’

construction and ‘turn’ taking is largely shaped by spatial-visual constraints and the technological mediation of

temporality (e.g., ordered uploading of postings, speed of text production, display of time-stamps etc.). Stance-

taking and the contextualization of different activity types are marked by verbal expressions and (ortho)graphic

devices (Petitjean/Morel 2017). Moreover, technological affordances open up new practices of text construction

and meaning-making (e.g., hyperlinking, voice messages). Coordination, intersubjectivity and texturing are

thus facilitated and accomplished by a variety of semiotic resources – some imported from pre-digital modal-

ities, some emergent (Herring 2013) – whose functions are (re)defined through their use, interpretation and

conventionalization in specific digital communities (Jucker/Dürscheid 2012; Tagg 2015). Such resources include

discourse markers, emojis, spelling, punctuation or meta-discourse. The panel sets out to explore the forms and

functions of such resources in different platforms and across socio-linguistic systems, by describing particular

practices and devices and elucidating the emergence of more general conventions. The panel is thus aimed

at contributing to a broader pragmatic typology (Dingemanse et al. 2014) of CMC by addressing the following

questions:

• Do users transfer discourse markers or other verbal(ized) devices from spoken interactions? To what

extent do they adapt their use of these devices to technological affordances? Are there markers which

have emerged as a reaction to these affordances and constraints and which are thus particular to CMC?

• What type of adaptations do written practices and devices undergo when introduced into text-based

CMC? How do they evolve once used in a specific interactional mode?

• Which communicative problems do users solve with practices imported from pre-digital modalities? Do

different formal or functional patterns of use emerge in different postings formats and across various

platforms?

• Do we need new methods or can interactional and CA-oriented concepts be transferred to the analysis

of computer-mediated discourse?

Prof. Dr. Andreas H. Jucker (University of Zürich) will be the discussant for this panel.

Dingemanse, M./Blythe, J./Dirksmeyer, T., 2014. ‘Formats for other-initiation of repair across languages: An

exercise in pragmatic typology’. Studies in Language38(1), 5–43.

Herring, S., 2013. Discourse in web 2.0: Familiar, reconfigured, and emergent. In: D. Tannen/A. Trester (Hg.):

Discourse 2.0. Language and New Media. Washington D.C.: GUP, 1–25.

Jucker, A. H./Dürscheid, C., 2012. ‘The linguistics of keyboard-to-screen communication. A new terminological

framework’. Linguistik Online, 56, 1-26.

Petitjean, C. and Morel, E., 2017. “Hahaha”. Laughter as a resource to manage WhatsApp conversations. In:

Journal of Pragmatics 110, 1–19.

Tagg, C., 2015. Exploring Digital Communication. Language in Action. London: Routledge.

12


Address practices in Italian

Panel proposal

Dr. Agnese Bresin 1

1. La Trobe University

Addressing each other is a complex operation, in which speakers position themselves and their interlocutors in

some form of relationship. With their strong link to the situational context and to the wider cultural context, but

also to basic demographic features of interlocutors, address practices are seen as revealing in terms of perceived

identities and human relations. Moreover, the study of address practices can speak about large scale societal

changes, as well as about developments in relationships between individuals. Address research has produced

a large body of studies from a variety of disciplines and involving various languages. The growing interest in

this area is evident, for instance, from INAR, an International Network of Address Researchers, with its annual

bibliography and regular conferences, and the launch of the dedicated book series Topics in Address Research

by John Benjamins.

The Italian case is of particular interest in this field of study for a number of reasons, including the status and

geographical distribution of “voi” in relation to “tu” and “lei”, the significant diatopic variation expected and the

complex relationship between regional varieties of Italian and the so called “Italian dialects”. Address practices

in Italian have so far received some attention from isolated researchers working in different parts of world, but

there has not been an organised effort in this sense yet.

This panel brings together researchers working on Italian address practices from different perspectives and

provides space for an informed and highly specialised discussion in this field, opening opportunities for future

cooperation.

13


Aggression as (im)politeness on social media

Panel proposal

Prof. Marta Dynel 1, Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute 2

1. University of Łódź, 2. The University of Queensland

Social media platforms (e.g. discussion forums or networking sites) offer fertile ground for different types of

interpersonal communication that includes various relationship-building and relationship-maintaining prac-

tices, as well as verbal aggression, and hence impoliteness (see Locher et al. 2015). Even though verbal practices

and activity types that can be observed on social media are parallel to those outside digital platforms, internet

users’ (partial) anonymity, coupled with the spatial and temporal distance the Internet affords, can be said to

instil a sense of impunity and lack of inhibitions in users. In addition, social media interactants’ expectations

and beliefs of what constitutes (in)appropriate behaviours might be different to offline communication (e.g.

Nishimura 2008, Graham and Hardaker 2017). For instance, social media users can apply at least slightly al-

tered rules to online communication, as a result of which they would be less likely to feel accountable for the

effect they might exert on the target and the third party (Lea et al. 2001). Along the same lines, the frequency

of aggressive communicative practices online may be explained by localised rules of interactional behaviour,

where easily achieved anonymity and lack of face-to-face contact play a central role (see e.g. Bolander 2012).

Fundamentally, those ever more present aggressive behaviours in online environments can occasion evalua-

tions ranging from politeness to impoliteness. All this suggests not only that digital platforms are examples

of specific communities of practice with their broad sets of discursive practices, but also that the interactional

processes in such contexts are as multi-faceted as their offline counterparts are, additionally presenting a range

of intrinsic characteristics subject to pragmatic investigation. Overall, social media not only are a rich source

of natural publically available (im)politeness language data but also give rise to new communicative practices

and new research questions.

This panel is meant to bring together researchers interested in the mechanics and select manifestations of

aggression seen through the lens of (im)politeness. The papers, both theoretical and empirical, address the

(im)politeness of aggression in diverse social media interactions.

References:

Bolander, Brook. 2012. “Disagreements and agreements in personal/diary blogs: A closer look at responsive-

ness.” Journal of Pragmatics 44(12): 1607-1622.

Graham, Sage L. and Claire Hardaker. 2017. “(Im)politeness in Digital Communication.” In Palgrave Handbook

of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Z. Kádár, 785-814. Palgrave.

Lea, Martin, Russell Spears, and Daphne de Groot. 2001. “Knowing me, knowing you: Anonymity effects on

social identity processes within groups.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27(5): 526-537.

Locher, Miriam A., Brook Bolander, and Nicole Höhn. 2015. “Introducing relational work in Facebook and

discussion boards.” Pragmatics 25(1): 1-21.

Nishimura, Yukiko. 2010. “Impoliteness in Japanese BBS interactions: Observations from message exchanges

in two online communities.” Journal of Politeness Research 6(1): 35-55.

14


An apple a day… On the pragmatics of ‘food for health’communication

Panel proposal

Dr. Sylvia Jaworska 1, Prof. Rodney Jones 1

1. University of Reading

In the richer parts of the world, in which many communicable diseases have been eradicated, health is increas-

ingly seen as a matter of individual behaviour and lifestyle choices. Pressure mounts on individuals to achieve

a state of wellness and display it to others through certain ways of behaving and speaking (Jones 2013). The

consequence of this is an increasing medicalisation of many aspects of everyday life. Food and our relationship

with food are prime examples of this trend.

As a source of energy, food is central to human survival. Beyond its biological properties, food and eating are the

most fundamental manifestations of human sociality. We spend a substantial proportion of our everyday life

thinking, buying, preparing, eating, watching and talking about food. As much as being an organic product, food

is a discursive practice and as such involved in the construction and reproduction of social identities (you are

what you eat) Applied linguistics and pragmatics have already contributed a body of research on the language

of food, specifically naming practices of food and eating across cultures. Less attention has been paid to food as

a discursive practice and its role in the larger discursive conglomerate of health.

This panel will bring together researchers interested in food and health communication. It is primarily inter-

ested in exploring the ways in which food is utilised discursively, pragmatically and multimodally to construct

ideas around health, healthy eating and healthy lifestyles and what kind of social identities and practices are

maintained, promoted or undermined in food for health communication.

Specific questions that will be explored:

1) What are the pragmatic means by which we are persuaded about food for health and how does food qua food

talk persuade us?

2) How is food used as a threat or risk to health?

3) How is food for health used to construct communities and relationships (e.g. healthy foodies)?

4) How do food and health discursively intersect in new food trends and diets (e.g. clean eating)?

5) How does food for health construct and reinforce deeply-seated ideologies around social categories (gender,

class, age) and everyday social practices (parenting, work and leisure)?

6) How is authority constructed in food for health communication?

7) How do social media and digital technologies use food and food talk to engage in health communication?

8) How is the materiality and multimodality of food (e.g. health claims on food packaging, menus) strategically

exploited to promote healthy practices?

9) What kinds and to what extent are practices of sociality involved in food for health communication?

Abstract of max. 300 words should be submitted by email to Sylvia Jaworska ([email protected]) by 15

October 2018.

15


Anticipating margins as core competence. Pragmatics anddiscourses in the financial sector.

Panel proposal

Mrs. Marlies Whitehouse 1, Prof. Henrik Rahm 2

1. Zurich University of Applied Sciences, 2. University of Lund

Anticipating margins in order not to be marginalized is a core competence in the financial sector. Forecasting

and pre-empting economic, legal and political changes while staying on the targeted track is vital to survive. This

applies to both short-term and long-term changes. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC),

for example, was based in Hong Kong from 1865 until 1992 when it moved its headquarter to London, shortly

before Hong Kong was returned to China. This move had to be communicated to the stakeholders pragmatically

and determinedly.

Our panel intends to enhance the understanding of such pragma-linguistic aspects of communication in finance

as response to geopolitical changes. In line with the overall theme of the IPrA 2019 Conference, “The Pragmatics

of the Margins”, the panel focuses on the key role of margins and strategies of growth vs. marginalization in

finance. We analyze and discuss how these macro-structural aspects are reflected in linguistic micro-structures

of discourses and text types as well as genres such as CEO letters, earnings calls, financial analysts’ recommen-

dations, corporate announcements, and annual reports.

By doing so, this panel addresses theoretical, methodological and practical challenges of investigating the inter-

textual and interdiscursive dynamics and linguistic strategies at the interface of verbal, visual, and numerical

languages and their macro-structural context. Research frameworks combine innovative research questions

with inter- and transdisciplinary approaches (Palmieri, Perrin, Whitehouse, 2018) that enable researchers to

capture and understand the field’s complexity and dynamics. Methods and methodologies emanate from or are

combined from e.g. text analysis, genre analysis, multimodal genre analysis, critical genre analysis, discourse

analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus analysis and writing research.

We intend to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the pivotal role of margins and marginalization in

the financial sector. Key research questions include which communication strategies the stakeholders use, why

they make their decisions as they do, and how the resulting practices are received in public discourse. By

creating the opportunity for close interdisciplinary dialogue between complementary disciplines, the panel

aims at developing a common agenda of joint research on communication in finance as a key to an economically

shaped world.

16


Bridging the gap: pragmatic perspectives on written languageuse in old and new media

Panel proposal

Dr. Imogen Marcus 1, Dr. Magdalena Leitner 2

1. Edge Hill University, 2. University of Zurich

Language and new media is a rapidly emerging area of pragmatics which considers a number of topics,

including, for example, pragmatic innovations emerging from the affordances and practices of digital com-

munication, interactional phenomena and broader meta-pragmatic issues, such as code choice (Herring et al.

2013: 15). Research suggests that written language use in digital spaces is highly innovative in its forms and

functions, on both a macro-linguistic level, in relation to larger units of discourse such as genre and on a micro

level, in relation to structural features.

Our panel, ‘Bridging the gap’, provides a space in which researchers are encouraged to re-evaluate the assump-

tions and claims of digital communication research. It examines the extent to which digital practices really are

‘new’. Are there precedents to be found in earlier periods? Are there practices that demonstrate continuity

between the pre-digital and the digital age? Are there practices that constitute genuine innovation within digi-

tal spaces? As various scholars have pointed out, innovation and continuity in digital communication practices

need to be more carefully traced and differentiated (e.g. Herring et al. 2013, Fritz and Jucker 2000: 1). Our focus

is on written communication that involves asynchronous interaction between at least two participants, that is,

participants do not have to be logged in simultaneously or be in the same physical space to communicate with

each other. Examples range from letters on paper and letter-like exchanges in print to digital communication,

such as email, instant messaging, text messaging, and the use of text on digital platforms such as Twitter.

Papers will examine different digital and non-digital modes of written communication and discuss various top-

ics, such as the silent orality of digital communication (cf. Soffer 2010), especially how it relates to the residual

manuscript orality of medieval and early modern texts, non-standard language use, the content structure of

messages, forms of discourse representation, and the discursive construction of face and social roles. The panel

brings together speakers working within different historical periods who may not otherwise join in conversa-

tion to promote fresh discussions from a trans-historical perspective.

ReferencesHerring, Susan C., Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen. 2013. (eds.). Pragmatics of Computer-mediated Communica-

tion. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 9). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Fritz, Gerd and Andreas H. Jucker. 2000. Einleitung. In: Gerd Fritz und Andreas H. Jucker (eds.). Kommunika-

tionsformen im Wandel der Zeit: Vom mittelalterlichen Heldenepos zum elektronischen Hypertext. (Beiträge zur

Dialogforschung 21). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1-5.

Soffer, O., 2010. “Silent orality”: toward a conceptualization of the digital oral features in CMC and SMS texts.

Communication Theory, 20(4), 387-404.

17


Bullshit! The Pragmatics of ‘Post-Truth’ Phenomena

Panel proposal

Dr. Chris Heffer 1

1. Cardiff University

‘Post truth,’ a loose term referring broadly to the subordination of facts and expert opinion to emotional appeal,

can encompass a number of pragmatic/discursive phenomena including bullshit (Frankfurt 2005), conspiracism

(Coady 2006), tabloidization (Conboy 2006) and fake news. Although these phenomena have been the object of

academic study in philosophy, political science and journalism, they have been marginalized by linguists and

pragmaticians. Yet these discursive phenomena are essentially violations of Grice’s 2nd submaxim of Quality:

‘Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence’ (Grice 1975). And their violation of the evidence maxim

has the same potential as violations of the sincerity maxim to undermine rational co-operation in society. Bull-

shitters, conspiracy theorists, tabloid hacks and fake news trollers are ‘epistemic free riders’ (Goldberg 2018)

who depend on epistemically responsible agents to keep society functioning while playing fast and loose with

knowledge themselves.

This panel is grounded in a monograph (Heffer forth) in which I argue that both discursive sincerity (sharing the

truth) and epistemic responsibility (caring for the truth) are required to be truthful. In the case of post-truth

phenomena, agents can be ‘epistemically irresponsible’ (where they have not taken sufficient care in estab-

lishing and conveying the facts) and, where there is a moral duty of epistemic care, they can be ‘epistemically

negligent’. In my own paper in the Panel, I shall argue that while bullshitting can be a deliberate discursive

strategy, bullshit can also be the unintentional excrementitious byproduct of a discursive pathology.

Psychologically underpinning ‘post-truth’ pragmatic phenomena such as bullshit is a dogmatic attitude: a failure

to entertain alternative accounts or to question one’s own account. Conference panels are particularly at risk

of being mini echo chambers simply re-affirming what one already broadly believes. For this reason, I kept

the call for participation on this Panel entirely open, not prejudging the type of participants that might want to

engage with it.

Coady, D. (ed.) (2006)Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate.London: Routledge.

Conboy, M. (2006). Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language. London: Routledge.

Frankfurt, H. (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goldberg, S. (2018) To the Best of Our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic Normativity. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Grice, P. (1975). “Logic and conversation”. In Cole, P. Morgan, J. (eds) Syntax and Semantics. 3: Speech Acts. New

York: Academic Press. 41–58.

Heffer, C. (forth) Taken in Trust: Lying, Bullshit and the Analysis of Untruthfulness in Public Discourse.* New York:

Oxford University Press. [*Provisional]

18


Chinese Impoliteness

Panel proposal

Prof. Yongping Ran 1, Prof. Daniel Kadar 2

1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, 2. Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Interpersonal pragmatics includes indispensable research areas of politeness and impoliteness. Interestingly,

since Gu’s (1990) seminal research, Chinese has been on the forefront of politeness research, as a language

through which major ideas, such as the relationship between face and politeness (Mao 1994), can be effectively

tested. In addition, with the global importance of Chinese language and cultures, various pragmatists such as

Kadar (2007) advocated the study of Chinese politeness for its own sake. While Chinese politeness has remained

somewhat underrepresented compared to English, ultimately one can argue that Chinese has been one of the

key languages in politeness research. It is therefore a noteworthy phenomenon that Chinese impoliteness has

received little attention in the field. While a number of scholars such as and Chang et al. (2015) and Kadar et

al. (2013) have addressed Chinese impoliteness-related phenomena, few scholars have studied ‘mainstream’

Chinese impoliteness. This lack might be due to various factors.

This panel aims to fill this knowledge gap, by bringing together contributions to some of the leading experts in

the field of Chinese (im)politeness (and also by involving early-career colleagues via an open call). We hope that

through this endeavour we can not only promote the study of Chinese for its own sake, but also identify key areas

in which the study of Chinese impoliteness can contribute to impoliteness theory, and interpersonal pragmatics

as well. We believe that currently there is a bias in the politeness field: while there have been attempts to bring

East Asian languages to the forefront of politeness theory, to a certain degree languages such as Chinese and

Japanese have operated as ‘testing grounds’ for theories that are either based on Western languages or Western

academic understandings of (im)politeness. We aim to change this bias by delivering a selection of high-quality

research papers, which examine key areas, such as the difference between Chinese and Anglo understandings

of ‘incivility’.

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Co-producing sentences in conversation

Panel proposal

Ms. Mei Fang 1, Dr. Xinyang Xie 2

1. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2. Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s seminal paper on turn-taking (1974) proposed turn-constructional unit (TCU)

as the basic unit for building turns in interaction. This has generated an increasing body of literature which

explore the relation between TCUs as interactional units and syntactic constructions that are usable as TCUS,

and the real-time production of syntactic constructions within and across TCUs and turns (Goodwin 1981; Auer

1992; Schegloff 1996; Ford & Thompson 1996; Ford, Fox & Thompson 1996, 2002; Tanaka 1999; Selting 2000; Luke

2004; Luke and Zhang 2007; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007; Laury and Ono 2014; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018).

This panel invites papers which examine co-production of syntactic units across turns in talk-in-interaction.

It is found in English conversation that a single sentence may be jointly produced by two speakers (Lerner 1989,

1991, 1996). The entry of a second speaker into an on-going turn of the first speaker is furnished by the projection

of a preliminary-component and final-component format based on the first speaker’s sentence-so-far. In such

cases, the second speaker can be seen as completing the sentence begun by the first speaker, displaying his/her

understanding of the linguistic form and interactional function of the sentence-under-construction.

On a different line of inquiry, it has long been observed in spoken Chinese (Chao 1968; Shen 1989) that a speaker

may construct a topic-comment sentence by combining a question-answer adjacency pair as one utterance. Or,

the clauses of a complex sentence may be co-constructed by separate speakers. More recent studies (e.g. Fang

2012) have examined the types of relation between the co-produced clauses of the complex sentences. As an

interesting contrast to the phenomenon studied by Lerner, in the instances analyzed by Fang (2012), a next

speaker, upon a hearably complete turn, produces the next turn which, constructed as a subordinate clause

(often marked by a conjunction), retrospectively makes the first speaker’s turn the main clause, resulting in

a complex sentence across two speaking turns. Such practice is found to facilitate topic continuity in Chinese

conversation.

This panel explores possible ways of co-producing sentences in talk-in-interaction in Chinese and other lan-

guages. It brings together papers which analyze syntactic and prosodic characteristics of jointly produced sen-

tences, and examine possible discourse effects and interactional functions of such co-production across turns.

The panel will contribute to a better understanding of the complex issues involved in organizing and producing

turns in real-time interaction.

The following are those who intend to present a paper at the panel. In view of the current number, we request

3 sessions.

Yini Cai (National Taiwan University)

Di Fang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Mei Fang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Yanmei Gao (Peking University)

Ritva Laury (University of Helsinki)

Xianyin Li (Beijing Language and Culture University)

Yaqiong Liu (Shanghai Maritime University)

K.K. Luke (Nanyang Technological University)

Xinyang Xie (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics)

Yao Yue (University of Xiamen)

Wei Zhang (City University of Hong Kong)

Wenxian Zhang (Peking University)

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Contesting the news: towards a postfoundational medialinguistics

Panel proposal

Ms. Jana Declercq 1, Prof. Geert Jacobs 1, Dr. Astrid Vandendaele 1

1. Ghent University

In the fields of (socio)linguistics, discourse studies and many other social sciences, there is a strong consensus

that we live in a postfoundational world, in which groundings that used to be firm, solid and pervasive have

become more fluid, political and contested. This panel therefore looks at how a postfoundational perspective

on knowledge, ideology and reality is becoming increasingly widespread, not just in academia, but in wide-

ranging institutional settings as well as with the public at large. In particular, we aim to explore what pivotal

role the news media are playing here. In politics, for example, “protest movements and new political practices

are dislocating longheld common sense about how politics work; more people are simultaneously accessing

multiple, contradictory news stories, making the constructedness and ideology of particular knowledge claims

more immediately visible.” (MacGilchrist 2016: 273).

With this panel we are interested in bringing together empirical research on how an awareness of postfounda-

tional thinking has permeated journalism. In particular, we are interested in analyses of how:

• news media professionals engage in critical (self-)reflection on how foundations in society as well as in

their own professional routines (including long-standing key concepts like objectivity, validity, framing,

ideology) have become fluid, dynamic and contingent.

• the critical (self-)reflection referred to in a) impacts on the news media professionals’ practices and on

the news production process (for example in fact-checking, construction of expertise and interaction

with the audience in an age of fake news).

• new professional practices, as identified in b), are reflected in news output (topic and content analysis,

changing roles and identities of legacy media, etc.).

In addition to the convenors, the following scholars will contribute to the panel: Leon Barkho (Jonköping Univer-

sity, Sweden), Charles Briggs (University of California Berkeley, US), Colleen Cotter (Queen Mary University, UK),

Lauri Haapanen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Marcia Macaulay (York University, Canada), Daniel Perrin

and Aleksandra Gnach, (Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland), Thomas Jacobs, Catherine Bouko,

Olivier Standard (Ghent University, Belgium), and Felicitas Macgilchrist (Georg Eckert Institute, Germany).

21


Counterfactuals in Chinese Languages

Panel proposal

Prof. Mingya Liu 1, Dr. Yan Jiang 2

1. Humboldt University of Berlin, 2. University of London

Counterfactuals are a topic key to the understanding of language and thought. In the earlier literature (e.g.

Bloom 1981), it was claimed that Mandarin Chinese lacked grammatical means of counterfactuals and thus

speakers of Mandarin were less capable of counterfactual thinking. This aroused mixed responses in experi-

mental works such as Au (1983/1984) as well as in linguistic works (Wu 1994, Feng and Yi 2006, Jiang 2000/2014,

Jing-Schmidt 2017) that documented Mandarin counterfactual expressions. However, a systemic description

of the distributional, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of these expressions is still lacking. Formal

accounts of the identified counterfactual expressions only focus on a small range of related data (cf. Hsu

2014, Ippolito and Su 2014). Furthermore, most of the studies focus on Mandarin Chinese in comparison to

for example, English – the other Chinese languages and the comparison of them with languages other than

English have been largely neglected, whereas these are crucial in making any claim about cross-linguistic and

cross-cultural differences in counterfactual thinking.

The workshop aims at identifying the form and meaning of counterfactual expressions (e.g. counterfactual

optatives such as “If only I were rich!” in English, counterfactual conditionals – “If I were rich, I would buy an

iPhone.”) in Chinese languages and the formal modeling thereof.

22


Creating and sharing public humour across the media

Panel proposal

Mr. Jan Chovanec 1, Prof. Marta Dynel 2

1. Masaryk University, 2. University of Łódź

Humour is an inseparable part of many communicative situations. Its functions range from being an accessory

to information transmission to an entirely purposeful activity in itself. While many forms of typically conversa-

tional humour are intended to make sense only to the interlocutors present in the communicative act, humour

in the media is, by default, public and much less audience-specific. This holds both for the traditional media

and social media, where a huge amount of user-generated content is circulated, thanks to digital technology

and Web 2.0.

In this panel, we aim to explore the forms and functions of humour in traditional as well as social media, being

interested in how speakers, interlocutors and users design and make sense of humorous messages in public and

semi-public, technology-mediated contexts. The papers will explore diverse issues in the quickly developing

field of pragmatics of humour.

Overall, this panel is meant to offer a platform for linguists studying the pragmatics of select forms of verbal

and multimodal humour in traditional media and on social media. The submissions address these topics from

all manner of pragmatic approaches in order to better understand the specificity of humour in traditional

and social media across a range of genres of mediated communication, including non-humorous televisual

and telecinematic genres, humour in television series and films, conversational humour in social media

interactions, memes and other multimodal humour in the social media.

23


Cross-Cultural Pragmatics on Discursive Practices ofMarginalisation

Panel proposal

Prof. Xinren Chen 1, Prof. Daniel Kadar 2

1. Nanjing University, 2. Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Marginalisation is a social issue that has a negative impact on societies worldwide. As a social-cultural concept,

it has been studied in sociology, in particular in the context of social exclusion and inequality (Razer et al.

2013:1152). With the emergence of discourse analysis, it has also been explored as a discursive practice situated

in public discourses such as news and interviews (e.g. Hartman et al. 1974; van Dijk 1989). Mainly owing to van

Dijk’s influential work (e.g. van Dijk 1989, 1991, 2000, 2012) on how the media discourse represents marginalised

groups, discursive aspects of marginalisation have become widely studied in pragmatics and discourse analysis,

with researchers exploring the discursive marginalization of groups like black people, refugees, immigrants,

and homosexuals in public discourses such as news and interviews. Yet, while existing research on the issue

of marginalization has largely remained an Anglo-domain, inadequate effort has been dedicated to the cross-

cultural/culturally-situated issue.

This panel aims to fill this knowledge-gap, by bringing together a variety of studies that examine the discursive

practices of marginalisation in different language and cultures: along with Anglo-societies, we are interested

in a) the ways in which such practices operate in other societies, and b) the cross-cultural differences between

such practices. Aside from our (cross-)cultural focus, we are interested in various empirical implications of this

theme, in particular the following ones, e.g.:

• Discourse strategies as well as linguistic markers of marginalisation in different socio-cultural contexts;

• Ways of increasing people’s awareness of marginalisation practices in public discourses;

• Methods to uncover the socio-cultural motivations behind (self) marginalisation practices in public dis-

courses.

The panel will focus on discursive aspects of marginalisationin relation to diverse social groups in various gen-

res of public discourses (e.g. news, interviews, political, legal and literary texts, academic papers, as well as talk

shows and online commentaries). In addition, we intend to accommodate contributions with different theoreti-

cal backgrounds, spanning from Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. Fairclough 1995) to Critical Pragmatic Analysis

(e.g. Mey 1993/2001; Chen 2013).

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16th International Pragm

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