Conversation with Carlos Pereda in Mexico: not giving in to the post-truth temptation

There have always been lies and deception. The current peculiarity of this reality is the vague generalized conviction that thought and discourse operate in a vacuum, that there is no world to which they can be compared. However, it is clear that truth continues to matter to us and that the instinct to trust, typical of the social nature of human beings, makes the media's lack of reliability painful. A very pure or "binary" rationality does not offer any answers. A more integral vision of the knowing subject is necessary. This subject would not enter into relation with others if he or she were merely cognizant. Relation implies the mutual recognition, legitimization, and presupposition of goodwill. The climate created by post-truth requires an education for truth, which is not only for the formation of a critical sense, but also in order to learn to trust and believe, which are both deeply human acts

What discourse goals can be accomplished by the use of hyperbole?

Although hyperbole is a ubiquitous means of discourse, its role in interpersonal rhetoric has been examined to a much lesser extent than that of metaphor or irony. This paper investigates what discourse goals can be fulfilled by hyperbole, using conversations from some classic Hungarian films as the data. The reason why film conversations were selected is that the knowledge of the story and the transparency of the characters' intentions make the understanding of communicative motives easy. Besides, the situations in feature films are very similar to spontaneous everyday interactions. Analyses demonstrate that hyperbolic utterances convey the speakers' attitudes, either real or only presented, towards the topic of conversation. According to the social psychological laws of public behaviour, the expression of emotional relation or attitude is mostly subordinated to the speaker's attempt to construct an intended impression on conversational partners. Thus, the use of hyperbole has two main goals: to express emotions and to reach a desired self-presentation

Towards a Pragmatic Taxonomy of Misunderstandings

The increasing emphasis given to the pragmatic perspective in the studies of everyday conversation over the last few decades has uncovered the reality which lies behind everyday conversation: the fact that communication is subject to risk and effort, and that we understand each other through continuous fallible hypotheses about our interlocutor’s intended interpretation. In this study, I address misunderstandings from a pragmatic (mainly relevance-theoretic) approach and analyse the reasons why they occur in face-to-face interaction. The main hypothesis underlying this paper is that all the possible varieties of misunderstanding can be accounted for in the outcome of the combination of three preliminary continua: intentional vs. unintentional; verbal vs. nonverbal; and explicit vs. implicit, which yields a taxonomy of twelve possible cases

“The Heart of Irish-Language Proverbs”: A Linguo- Stylistic Analysis of Explicit Metaphor

Metaphor has featured frequently in attempts to define the proverb (see Taylor 1931, Whiting 1932, Mieder 1985, 1996), and since the advent of modern paremiological scholarship, it has been identified as one of the most salient markers of ‘proverbiality’ (Arora 1984) across a broad spectrum of world languages. Significant language-specific analyses, such as those by Klimenko (1946), Silverman-Weinreich (1981), and Arora (1984) have provided valuable qualitative information on the form and function of metaphor in Russian, Yiddish, and Spanish proverbs respectively. Unfortunately, no academic scholarship has engaged with the subject of metaphor in Irish proverbs. This study builds on international paremiological research on metaphor and provides for the first time a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the form, frequency, and nature of linguistic metaphors in Irish proverbs (1856-1952). Moreover, from the perspective of paremiology, it presents a methodological template and result-set that can be applied cross-linguistically to compare metaphor in the proverbs of other languages

Significado No Pensamento Linguístico

This paper discusses the concept of ‘meaning’ in Linguistics, pointing out the theoretical limits faced by contemporary semantics and pragmatics, concerning the relation between language and context. The aim of the paper is to argue that one approach of american discourse analysis - Bateson’s, Goffman's and Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistics - can contribute to the discussion of the relationship mentioned

Digital Community Storytelling as a sociopolitical Critical Device

Este artículo analiza 40 historias digitales comunitarias basadas en los principios de estudios de discurso crítico basados ​​en corpus (Baker et al., 2008). Las historias se analizan con la intención de probar si pueden clasificarse como ejemplos de historias sociopolíticas digitales. Las historias digitales socio-políticas se describen aquí como una herramienta que los individuos pueden usar para hacer llegar al público opiniones sobre temas que puedan afectar a la democracia (Couldry, 2008), el bienestar social y la estabilidad; y puede servir para facilitar la comunicación, interacción e intercambio de información sobre prácticas sociales conflictivas. Las historias analizadas pueden considerarse ejemplos tímidos del potencial que puede tener la narración digital individual socio-política en la sociedad, ayudando así, al menos potencialmente, a democratizar el intercambio de ideas entre los miembros de nuestra sociedad.This article analyses 40 community digital stories drawing upon the principles of corpus-based critical discourse studies (Baker et al., 2008). The stories are analysed with the intention of testing if they may be classified as examples of socio-political digital stories. Sociopolitical digital stories are described here as a tool that individuals may use in order to bring forward issues that may concern and affect democracy (Couldry, 2008), social welfare and social stability; and may serve to ease the communication, interaction and exchange of information about conflictive social practices. The stories analysed can be considered timid examples of what socio-political individual digital storytelling might do for society, thus helping, at least potentially, to democratise the exchange of ideas between the members of our society

The ironic operation: Revisiting the components of ironic meaning

This paper sheds more light on the way in which irony functions at the semantics/pragmatics interface by teasing apart three components of the ironic operation: the vehicle, the input, and the output. Focusing on the logical relationship between the expressed and the intended meaning of the ironic utterance, several real instantiations of the phenomenon are discussed and it is demonstrated that the vehicle (i.e. the unit of meaning that is used in an ironic way, thus carrying the ironic intent) does not always coincide with the input (i.e. the unit of meaning on which irony operates). The input to the ironic operation is thus shown to be of three kinds: (a) part of the vehicle, (b) triggered by the vehicle, or (c) discourse-dependent. The final discussion highlights the advantages of viewing irony as an operation rather than an act of mention or dissociation from the content of the utterance