‘I just said It, I didn’t mean anything:’ Culture and Pragmatic Inference in Interpersonal Communication

Socio-cultural practices and the economy of expression, which generally characterise human communication, significantly widen the gap between linguistic meaning and speaker’s meaning. What the hearer does is to construct hypotheses about the speaker’s meaning based on contextual and background assumptions and the general principles that speakers are supposed to observe in normal circumstances (Kecskés, 2009, p.106).Drawing examples from spoken data selected from interpersonal interactions and analysed within the relevance-theoretic framework of inferential pragmatics, this paper demonstrates how cultural considerations function as inputs to the cognitive process, and how the human capacity for inference is crucially important in interpersonal communication

Linguistic Impoliteness and Interpersonal Positioning in Nigerian Online Political Forum

Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions to others (stance) and signal how they wish to relate with other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected with the extent to which impoliteness is expressed in discourse and the resources and strategies employed. This study investigates interactional positioning and impoliteness in two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum and Gistmania. The findings show that bald-on-record and negative impoliteness were predominant in the discussions. The common linguistic expressions of impoliteness were name-calling, vulgarism, cursing, dismissal and sarcasm. Participants also used questions, directives and reader pronouns you and your for face attacks and heightening of the effect of impolite expressions. Self-mentions and attitude markers, especially cognitive verbs, were used to convey feelings and attitudes towards other participants within and outside the discussion. The study concludes that impoliteness thrives in political debates online because of the uninhibited context, which gives freedom to participants to deliberately inject invective language in order to set the emotional temperature in the discussion and cause disaffection among the participants and the group they represent.Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions to others (stance) and signal how they wish to relate with other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected with the extent to which impoliteness is expressed in discourse and the resources and strategies employed. This study investigates interactional positioning and impoliteness in two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum and Gistmania. The findings show that bald-on-record and negative impoliteness were predominant in the discussions. The common linguistic expressions of impoliteness were name-calling, vulgarism, cursing, dismissal and sarcasm. Participants also used questions, directives and reader pronouns you and your for face attacks and heightening of the effect of impolite expressions. Self-mentions and attitude markers, especially cognitive verbs, were used to convey feelings and attitudes towards other participants within and outside the discussion. The study concludes that impoliteness thrives in political debates online because of the uninhibited context, which gives freedom to participants to deliberately inject invective language in order to set the emotional temperature in the discussion and cause disaffection among the participants and the group they represent

‘I just said It, I didn’t mean anything:’ Culture and Pragmatic Inference in Interpersonal Communication

Socio-cultural practices and the economy of expression, which generally characterise human communication, significantly widen the gap between linguistic meaning and speaker’s meaning. What the hearer does is to construct hypotheses about the speaker’s meaning based on contextual and background assumptions and the general principles that speakers are supposed to observe in normal circumstances (Kecskés, 2009, p.106).Drawing examples from spoken data selected from interpersonal interactions and analysed within the relevance-theoretic framework of inferential pragmatics, this paper demonstrates how cultural considerations function as inputs to the cognitive process, and how the human capacity for inference is crucially important in interpersonal communication