Societal Pragmatics

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.

The role of context in meaning explication in any interaction cannot be overemphasized because through it, the true pragmatic meanings of form and intentional use of language are generated. Thus, existing studies have focused their attention on the importance of context in revealing various intentional uses of language, but they have neglected intentions that are not overtly stated, especially in literary discourse. This work therefore, examines how language is used to interactively construct fraud in various discursive contexts and the various strategies employed to negotiate goals in Wole Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero's Metamorphosis. The study adopts a combination of Levinson's notion of Activity types and Sarangi's concept of Discourse types, it also benefits from Arundale's Face Consitituting Theory. The data, sourced from selected conversations in the texts, were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Two types of contexts characterize Wole Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero's Metamorphosis, namely, conflict and leadership. Three types of conflicts-goal-motivated, space/ambition-motivated and debt-motivated conflicts also characterize context of conflict. Deflection through distraction and mendacity, impersonation, double crossing; Invocation of physical and spiritual reality through blackmailing, racial sentiment, persuasion and prediction as well discursive manipulation are the goals negotiation strategies used in the identified contexts. The paper concludes that the understanding of different discursive contexts of fraud and their various strategies reveal how language is used to interactively construct fraud.

The category of insults comprises disparaging qualifying terms, derogatory epithets, racial/ethnic slurs and participle-like expletives. All of them channel speakers' (negative) psychological states, so they are considered expressives. Despite the enormous interest that they have aroused, research has not duly addressed whether all types of insults communicate in the same manner, partake of the same nature and make a similar contribution to communication. This paper ventures some answers from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Relying on the showing-saying continuum and on the conceptual-procedural distinction, it argues that some insults merely show speaker meaning, others encode some conceptual load enabling them to communicate by saying and others communicate by an admixture of both. It also contends that some insults encode conceptual content and processing instructions, but others encode instructions alone. Their output, however, is complex, as it may trigger lexical-pragmatic processes adjusting the encoded conceptual load or psychological-state representations.

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THESIS: BACHELOR'S DEGREE IN LINGUISTICS
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The object of my thesis is the origin of Human Language, more specifically I analyze this topic in a cognitive, pragmatic & neuroscientific analysis. My thesis is based on scientific discoveries. The quoted researchers, neuroscientists, psychologists, & philosophers are my cultural patrimony. (Italian)

Ogni società, lungo le diverse epoche, è sempre stata contraddistinta da una caratteristica identitaria, che spesso, grazie anche alla volontà e necessità di procedere con un processo di semplificazione ed etichettatura, ha finito per identificarla. Quella contemporanea presenta sicuramente un livello di complessità che richiede obbligatoriamente un'analisi da molteplici e differenti prospettive, per cui risulta impossibile e fuorviante una definizione univoca e onnicomprensiva. Tuttavia, lo scopo di questo breve scritto è evidenziare un suo tratto peculiare, che, seppur non può certamente definirla in modo esaustivo, risulta comunque fondamentale per esplicitare e rendere consapevole una dinamica che certamente le appartiene.

Indirect reporting is a complicated language game which is influenced by social, philosophical and linguistic idiosyncrasies (for example, issues such as power relations, sense and reference, evidentials, opacity, etc.). Invariably, there has been some controversy over how much freedom the indirect reporter is permitted when reporting original utterances. In this regard, some authors (e.g. Capone, 2018) support pragmatic opacity where a certain degree of flexibility and variability is warranted depending on the context of the utterance. In this study, we analyse Persian and English sentences to demonstrate how, in indirect reporting, reporters can manipulate the original utterances. Previous research (e.g. Nodoushan, 2018) has revealed that Persian reported speech does not allow linguistic manipulation. This study attempts to show that Persian reporters, just like English speakers, are able to indicate their divergence from the original utterances in indirect reporting. The metalanguage comments in the Persian indirect reports highlighted situations where reporters monitored (i.e. self-regulated) themselves by changing the verbs of saying (e.g. 'said', 'claimed', etc.), assessing the appropriateness of the discourse and communicating uncertainty. We also discuss a number of examples where there was disagreement in the Persian indirect reports (the original speakers did not accept the report to be genuine) because the practice of samesaying (similarity of content) was not being strictly adhered to. We conclude that indirect reports allow for several forms of manipulation for different purposes, whereby the reporter can make use of syntactic strategies to monitor the discourse (i.e. manipulating the original utterance). Moreover, reports can sometimes be influenced by interpreted information (which may be incorrect) which can cast doubt on fair paraphrasing and the practice of samesaying.