Pragamtics

The current study addresses doublespeak in the political field. It
focuses on the language of politicians from pragmatic point of view,
how they use doublespeak in their speeches, their intentions behind
using it and non-adherence of Grice's cooperative principle
and maxims (quality, quantity, relevance, and manner).
The study discusses the origin and use of doublespeak that is extensively
employed to mislead people and distort the reality. Focus
is given to the context which is essential in eliciting what is covered
up by the politicians who manipulate the language to achieve their
cunning goals and speak about the unspeakable. The study shows
doublespeak as a violation case of Grice's maxims. It analyzes some
Obama’s speeches as far as doublespeak is concerned and shows
how his speech almost violates all Grice’s maxims and the purposes
behind using doublespeak such as to deform the reality, to make
the bad look good and vice versa. He sometimes uses doublespeak
in his speeches in an attempt to appear good, embellish his public
face, misrepresent the reality, and evade saying the truth.

Speech acts shape the core of pragmatic competence and their mastery is a prerequisite for successful discourse encounters in an L2. Cross-cultural comparisons, as claimed by Johnstone (2018), are very effective for knowing and acquiring the speech acts. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to compare a limited number of communicative routines in English and Persian within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed by Wierzbicka (1991) and to examine if the words uttered by speakers at the surface level (exterior) would match their thoughts (interior) especially in such routines as compliment, request, and invitation patterns. The participants comprised 21 MA students studying Eng-lish language teaching. The data was obtained by a validated researcher-made questionnaire containing both structured and unstructured items and 10 scenarios on the basis of which the study participants provided comments, appropriate expressions, and responses. For the English routines, the data was obtained from three English plays. The aforementioned communicative routines in Persian were described in terms of their NSM while the metalinguistic components for the English routines were adopted from Wierz-bicka (1991). The results indicated that the NSM provided rich insights into subliminal cross-cultural differences. Since this study makes use of simple cultural scripts (similar to circumlocution) to describe communicative routines in both English and Persian, learners can easily understand differences within the hidden cross-cultural bound interactions. Implications of the study suggest that both EFL teachers and learners can gain more profound insights about the cross-cultural sociopragmatic differences between English and Persian.

There is growing evidence that sleep plays a pivotal role on health, cognition and emotional regulation. However, the interplay between sleep and social cognition remains an uncharted research area. In particular, little is known about the impact of sleep deprivation on sarcasm detection, an ability which, once altered, may hamper everyday social interactions. The aim of this study is to determine whether sleep-deprived participants are as able as sleep-rested participants to adopt another perspective in gauging sarcastic statements. At 9am, after a whole night of sleep (n = 15) or a sleep deprivation night (n = 15), participants had to read the description of an event happening to a group of friends. An ambiguous voi-cemail message left by one of the friends on another's phone was then presented, and participants had to decide whether the recipient would perceive the message as sincere or as sarcastic. Messages were uttered with a neutral intonation and were either: (1) sarcastic from both the participant's and the addressee's perspectives (i.e. both had access to the relevant background knowledge to gauge the message as sarcastic), (2) sarcastic from the participant's but not from the addressee's perspective (i.e. the addressee lacked context knowledge to detect sarcasm) or (3) sincere. A fourth category consisted in messages sarcastic from both the participant's and from the addressee's perspective, uttered with a sarcastic tone. Although sleep-deprived participants were as accurate as sleep-rested participants in interpreting the voice message, they were also slower. Blunted reaction time was not fully explained by generalized cognitive slowing after sleep deprivation; rather, it could reflect a compensatory mechanism supporting normative accuracy level in sarcasm understanding. Introducing prosodic cues compensated for increased processing difficulties in sarcasm detection after sleep deprivation. Our findings support the hypothesis that sleep deprivation might damage the flow of social interactions by slowing perspective-taking processes.

Through this contribution, I pick up on the notion of translation equivalence (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958, Nida 1964, Newmark 1981) and more specifically of pragmatic equivalence (Koller 1979, Baker 1992, House 1997) to coin the label “(im)politeness equivalence” obtained at the speech act level. Since audiovisual texts are the object of the investigation, “(im)politeness equivalence” refers to whether on-screen characters’ polite or impolite speech, when making requests, was distorted in the translation process or, on the contrary, it was successfully reproduced in the target text by dubbing translators. Linguistic politeness and impoliteness play a special role in shaping judgements towards the people we interact with in real life (Spencer-Oatey 2005) and, likewise, they contribute to the characterization of film characters (Culpeper 1998, 83; Mandala 2011, 211). Moving from this assumption, if we bring audiovisual translation into the scene, it becomes clear how maintaining, in the translated film version, the same degree of (im)politeness in characters’ speech is critical if the same type of characterization is to be preserved for target-language viewers. Notwithstanding, securing (im)politeness equivalence can be a daunting task for translators: grammatical and typological differences between language systems can require substantial departures from the original utterance, with the consequence that pragmatic shifts can ensue, especially in speech acts rich in (im)polite import. When it comes to linguistic manipulations of the source language text, translation for dubbing places itself at the forefront, with translators having to obey audiovisual constraints typifying audiovisual translation (Whitman 1992, Herbst 1997). To forestall contingent shifts in the illocutionary force, and consequently in the (im)polite load of a speech act, which are occasioned by linguistic manipulations and are likely to alter the characterization of the same character in the translated film version, translators should resort to compensatory pragmatic strategies. The study focuses on requests in English film dialogue and in dubbing translation into Italian and investigates how their pragmatic force and their (im)polite import, attained through direct/indirect realization strategies and through mitigation/intensification pragmatic modifiers, are successfully maintained in the target language notwithstanding linguistic changes.

Este  artículo  analiza  la  recepción  y  las  reacciones  en  el  debate  político  chileno  ante  la  llamada  “Primavera  de  Praga”,  especialmente  en  el  Congreso  Nacional,  en  agosto  de  1968.  Metodológicamente,  el  estudio  histórico  consulta  fuentes  primarias,  documentos  del Archivo  Histórico  del  Ministerio  de  Relaciones  Exteriores  chileno  y  prensa  de  la  época,  diarios  y  revistas.  Finalmente,  se  evidencian distintas  posiciones  de  los  actores  políticos  locales  ante  los  acontecimientos  de  la  Guerra  Fría  global,  tanto  de  justificación  de  los  hechos  como de crítica a la intervención armada.

There is growing evidence that sleep plays a pivotal role on health, cognition and emotional regulation. However, the interplay between sleep and social cognition remains an uncharted research area. In particular, little is known about the impact of sleep deprivation on sarcasm detection, an ability which, once altered, may hamper everyday social interactions. The aim of this study is to determine whether sleep-deprived participants are as able as sleep-rested participants to adopt another perspective in gauging sarcastic statements. At 9am, after a whole night of sleep (n = 15) or a sleep deprivation night (n = 15), participants had to read the description of an event happening to a group of friends. An ambiguous voi-cemail message left by one of the friends on another's phone was then presented, and participants had to decide whether the recipient would perceive the message as sincere or as sarcastic. Messages were uttered with a neutral intonation and were either: (1) sarcast...

The article proposes a linguistic analysis of the pragmatic component of the dialogical exchange in Plautus’ Pseudolus in order to shed some light on the verbal behavior of the main character. After examining two particularly important scenes of the play (Pseud. 1-132, 415-574) it is stated that the source of the influence of Pseudolus is the illocutionary level of his speech.