Abstract This study investigates the use of emojis in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) among Colombian and Argentinian learners of German. Recent research demonstrates that emojis serve multiple functions, including expressing reactions to previous statements and modulating the tone of assertions. Beyond the illocutionary domain, where they help articulate speech acts, emojis facilitate discourse by managing conversation openings and closings. They also signify informality in the stylistic domain and guide the social intent of conversations. While these findings are insightful, they primarily reflect interactions among speakers sharing the same first language (L1) and cultural background. The dynamics of emoji use in a second language (L2) and intercultural settings remain underexplored. To address this gap, this study analyzed a corpus of WhatsApp messages exchanged during a virtual interaction between 24 Colombian and Argentinian learners of German. The results reveal that the use of emojis among L2 speakers largely mirrors their use in L1 contexts, suggesting a strong transferability of their pragmatic, discursive, and stylistic functions. Additionally, this study identifies an extra function in the illocutionary domain, where emojis help signal sociality rights and obligations, thereby maintaining positive interpersonal rapport. Furthermore, the performance of national identities emerged as a unique function of emojis in intercultural communication, supporting the idea of a universal component in emoji use. These findings contribute to our understanding of how emojis operate in L2 and intercultural settings, highlighting their role in facilitating effective digital communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The consistent use of emojis by participants from different cultural backgrounds suggests that emojis can act as universal symbols, bridging cultural and linguistic gaps while also allowing for the expression of unique social identities.

Abstract The aim of this paper is to shed light on theories of discourse meaning from the Arabic, namely Sībawayhian, linguistics tradition, that are novel in the contemporary pragmatics space and prompts us to rethink and reshape the Anglo-American, namely Gricean and post-Gricean, lens through which current theories are predominantly defined. The Arabic linguistics tradition was founded by Sībawayhi more than ten centuries ago, yet it is severely underrepresented and under-researched in modern (Western) linguistics. Sībawayhi posited a discourse-oriented, pragmatics-centric, and intuition-driven model of language and communication, providing unique insights into how intentions and conventions figure in meaning representation. Despite his monumental contribution, Sībawayhian theory has hitherto been missing from the present-day field of pragmatics. Instead, pragmatics as a line of study is usually attributed to Grice and subsequent post-Gricean developments, where theory construction has been limited to intra-theoretical analyses and falls short of cross-cultural epistemological perspectives. Many of these analyses are as such reinventions of what can be found in Sībawayhian and post-Sībawayhian pragmatics. And there are many more components of Arabic pragmatic thought that remain to be (re)discovered, with the potential to further current thinking in pragmatics and open a new orientation of contemporary pragmatic study. In this paper, I attempt to address all of the above by closely examining selected sections of Sībawayhi’s monumental al-Kitāb. I particularly introduce two main conceptions Sībawayhi relies on in his theory of meaning – metapragmatic conventions (conventionsmp) and integrative context (contexti) – and investigate their role in shaping major areas of pragmatic theorization, namely syntax, discourse compositionality, and inference.

Abstract In this paper, I question the idea that proper names are merely used to refer to things or individuals. However, I am not going to use predicativism to prove this point. I will somehow look at things from the point of view of scholars like Frege or Kripke. I consider that this idea (that proper names are merely used to refer, at least when they are in argument positions) stems from a view of language that does not throw proper light on contextuality as discussed by Mey, Jacob. 2001. Pragmatics. Oxford: Wiley. From the very beginning, I argue that the issue can be seen in a better light through a theory of language use that considers language games as embedded in a society and a culture. I accept the idea that there are norms for introducing names in society and for using them in an appropriate way. Even if, for most philosophers, referring is the basic function of proper names, I propose that in a number of cases proper names are not essentially used to refer (although it is possible that the name allows a combination of referring and other functions). The referring function of names broadly correlates with the assertive function of the utterance in which the name occurs or with speech acts whose aim is to modify reality and, therefore, persuade, modify, create, promote, destroy, etc. objects or individuals (often referred to with proper names). However, there are other types of speech acts where proper names are not only used to refer, but, instead, to call someone (another case is scolding someone or a dog). Intentions clearly emerge in context. The same utterance may have more than one function, from the illocutionary point of view, but a proper name, as situated in different contexts, may have more than one perlocutionary function. I argue that while the speech act of referring is always a diagonal speech act, the speech act of calling someone (by the use of a proper name) is not a diagonal speech act but a self-sufficient, autonomous, primary speech act. Hence there is a clear difference between referring through an assertion and referring as part of calling, where referring is incorporated into the main speech act as part of the explicit illocutionary force of the speech act. In an assertion, referring is a prerequisite to providing a referent about which a property is asserted. Predication and reference are intertwined. In a speech act other than an assertion, there need not be a predicate, and referring and calling (or some other speech act) are connected. I propose that the learning of the speech act of calling by the use of a name requires certain syntactic considerations, that prima facie contradict Chomsky’s binding theory. I then put forward the view that learning one’s name requires, at some stage, knowledge of the semantics of de se structures.

Abstract In recent years there has been an increased recognition of the need for learners to understand language as social action. However, language learners are often left on their own to develop the ability to adapt to the unanticipated demands of real-world interaction. To encourage this development, attention is turning toward the notion of interactional competence (IC). The present study contributes to efforts to better understand Japanese learners’ IC. Specifically, this study aims to better understand how learners naturally accomplish compliment and consolation speech acts and for what social purposes, including how learners adapt linguistic forms to do acts that go beyond the act most commonly associated with those forms. Conversation analysis of foreign language housing mealtime conversations revealed two core observations. First, based on preempirical descriptions, compliments occur with more frequency than consolations. Compliments also tend to be deployed as the first part of a compliment-response pair, while consolations tend to be deployed as a response to the public exposure of a challenge or a troubling emotional state. Second, when looking instead at how participants use turns that are construed as compliments regardless of linguistic form, we find that compliments are also used to do activities other than what their surface formulation suggests. A discussion of what these results mean for developing deeper understandings of IC in speech acts performed by language learners is provided.

Abstract In multi-lingual workplace interaction involving L2-speakers with different levels of proficiency, L1-speakers can be seen to use self-translation of their own prior contributions as a repair-practice to restore intersubjectivity. This paper shows that self-translations are produced in three environments: (a) in response to repair-initiation by recipients, (b) in response to inadequate or missing responses, (c) after disaffiliative responses in order to elicit a more favorable uptake. Self-translations therefore are not only used to deal with linguistic understanding problems, but can also use linguistic diversity as a resource for dealing with lack of affiliation and alignment. Self-translations are produced by a switch to the addressee’s L1 or to a lingua franca. They are only partial, being restricted to a translation of the core semantic content of the turn to be translated, thus relying heavily on a shared understanding of the pragmatic context and being designed so as to support interactional progression. Data come from video-taped meetings in Finland involving Finnish and Russian L1-speakers and various kinds of professional trainings in Germany involving instructors with German as L1 and refugees with various linguistic backgrounds.

Abstract Mock impoliteness is a social practice typifying the interaction of close friends consisting in the use of rude jokes or utterances that signify the speaker’s intent to show solidarity and intimacy with the interlocutor. Nonetheless, as an impolite load is still carried by such utterances, how targets of mock impoliteness will react to them, namely whether they will find them amusing or outright offensive, may depend on a series of factors. The present research focuses on how Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) face and sociality rights categories, together with gender (male/female) and lingua-culture (British English and Italian) interact to determine the acceptability degree of mock impolite jokes. This cross-cultural and cross-gender perception study, which placed its focus on the hearer’s evaluations, consisted in a rating task administered through an online questionnaire, and revealed that the interaction of the three factors determine the offensiveness versus acceptability of the jokes.

Abstract Ever since Goffman examined “face” in social interaction in 1955, researchers in intercultural and sociocultural pragmatics have employed the concept in many ways, and have developed a number of different positions on what the concept entails and on how to study it. Following Goffman, face is uniformly conceptualized as a phenomenon apparent in everyday interacting, but in focusing on the characteristics of face, researchers have routinely overlooked their conceptualizations of everyday interaction. This article examines twelve current conceptualizations of face, focusing particularly on their conceptualizations of everyday interacting and their implications for examining face, and providing researchers with bases for choosing a conceptualization that will be productive in addressing their research questions regarding face in everyday interacting.

Abstract Theories of utterance meaning in the post-Gricean tradition have typically focused on the main proposition expressed by the speaker that is recovered by the addressee. In this tradition, successful communication rests on the assumption that speakers and addressees come to a shared understanding of these propositions as they are produced in conversation. We now have a wealth of empirical evidence that speakers and addressees need not always converge on the main proposition expressed in order for communication to proceed unhindered: they may share partial understandings of individual utterances, allowing the overarching discourse meaning to unravel as the interaction progresses. In this paper, we propose a novel unit of meaning that accounts for such a dynamic concept that can emerge and develop over several turns at talk. We call it a ‘dynamic functional proposition’. This unit includes not only the linguistic meaning that has been communicated, but also meaning conveyed through non-linguistic sources, as well as aspects of situation captured through what we call ‘filters’, such as interlocutors’ levels of attention, emotions, and other non-representational aspects. These various aspects will have greater or lesser salience for different speakers, hence offering an explanatory tool for how utterance meanings are negotiated, as well as when and why misunderstandings occur. We finish by proposing ways in which such a unit can be formally represented. We do this by motivating different cognitive, social and linguistic parameters that influence it.

Abstract After summarizing linguistic evidence against the thesis that actuality terms are indexical, I examine conceptual and epistemological arguments offered in favor of an indexical analysis. I argue that an indexical semantics provides no explanation of how we know what is actually the case, and no grounds for postulating a contingent a priori. Truth in every context, or in every model, does not imply knowledge of the fact a sentence expresses nor how we know it if we do. Moreover, descriptive analyses also predict that ‘I exist in the actual world’ and instances of ‘p ≡ Actually p’ are true in every context.

Abstract Cancellability – one of the most important tests for implicatures – has been attacked from different perspectives, and its reliability challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. To account for these phenomena, distinct approaches have been advanced aimed at weakening Grice’s cancellability test. However, what do we exactly mean when we claim that an implicature cannot be cancelled? Grice pointed out that implicatures are triggered by a possible conflict with the cooperativeness principle, and for this reason it is always possible to opt out of the observation thereof. This theoretical possibility needs to be distinguished from the practical problem of explaining why some implicatures are intuitively less cancellable than others, or even not cancellable. To address this latter – practical – dimension of cancellability, the reasoning and the presumptive premises involved in drawing an implicature and justifying its cancellation needs to be represented and evaluated. This approach will be shown to provide a possible instrument for evaluating the reasonableness of cancellability and its costs.

Abstract Resemblance between languages could be due to relatedness in terms of etymology. Varieties of the same language or dialects resemble one another in many ways because they are related. The languages within a language family, descendants of a common ancestral language, also resemble one another in some ways. To contemplate resemblance between two languages, one could consider their mutual intelligibility or other kinds of formal similarities. For example, while the Chinese languages are not mutually intelligible, they exhibit very similar grammatical patterns. They are all tonal and share a largely common writing system. This paper, however, proposes another way of appreciating language resemblance. It has been observed in the Singapore context that when two different languages, English and Mandarin, are adopted by a community of speakers as dominant languages, over time, the two languages become nativized and resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and the cultural values they embody. The Singaporean bilingual speakers in question are offspring of people from Southern Chinese culture who, as recent as a few generations ago, spoke neither English nor Mandarin as a dominant language. This paper presents evidence to show how Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin, which are mutually unintelligible, may resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and cultural values.

Abstract While the recognition of context as a dynamic construct is pervasive, the process of selecting context during utterance comprehension in real time remains largely unexamined. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the dynamism of context as part of joke interpretation. We assume a relevance-theoretic definition of context understood as a set of mental representations involved in inferential processes that operate on a propositionally incomplete linguistic form and yield a speaker-intended meaning, consisting of the explicit and implicit import. We also adopt a model of joke comprehension combining the standard notion of incongruity resolution with that of weak communication, positing that when the punchline comes there is a broad array of assumptions that suddenly become manifest to the hearer, as a result of which he experiences an effect of inferential overload. This effect hinges on the ability to obtain access to, or to inferentially construct contextual assumptions that were previously not immediately accessible to the hearer or not represented in their cognitive resources at all. By analysing jokes of various structure (with or without a build-up, one-liners) we explore details of the dynamism of context selection and construction, in which the hearer’s encyclopaedic knowledge is essential. We provide arguments in favour of the view of context as an entity dependent on the hearer’s mental representations, inferential abilities and the universal drive to maximize relevance in utterance comprehension.

Abstract In this article, we address the issue concerning the gestural patterns in expressing surprise and disapproval across various languages and cultures. The results obtained so far point to an interesting, and in a sense rather surprising, uniformity. We consider two types of special questions: counter-expectational questions expressing surprise and surprise-disapproval questions, i.e., sentences expressing surprise with a negative orientation, and adopt an experimental design involving sentence repetition and spontaneous production. We focus on the realization of these sentences in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, which we compare with the results previously obtained for Italian and replicated for Neapolitan, Spanish and German. Our research is based on the Minimalist theoretical framework developed by Chomsky and scholars in the tradition of generative grammar.

Abstract We review some of the most prominent challenges in the semantics and pragmatics of fictional names and propose a pragmatic theory of fictional names whereby understanding a fictional name requires imagining possible contexts of interpretation of the name. Similarly to other pragmatic approaches to fiction and fictional contexts, we maintain that fictional texts require that the interpreter engages in a game of pretense of sort and are, therefore, prescriptions to imagine a state of affairs that is not the real one. In contrast to these approaches, however, we propose that interpreting a fictional text does not require imagining a set of possible state of affairs where the text would be true but, rather, requires imagining a set of possible contexts where the text would be meaningful. In order to apply this framework to fictional names, we adopt a contextual theory of proper names, which we have proposed and defended in previous work.