Lying and Politeness

Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Indirectness in the age of globalization: A social network analysis

Indirectness has traditionally been viewed as commensurate with politeness and attributed to the speaker’s wish to avoid imposition and/or otherwise strategically manipulate the addressee. Despite these theoretical predictions, a number of studies have documented the solidarity-building and identity-constituting functions of indirectness. Bringing these studies together, Terkourafi 2014 proposed an expanded view of the functions of indirect speech, which crucially emphasizes the role of the addressee and the importance of network ties. This article focuses on what happens when such network ties become loosened, as a result of processes of urbanization and globalization. Drawing on examples from African American English and Chinese, it is argued that these processes produce a need for increased explicitness, which drives speakers (and listeners) away from indirectness. This claim is further supported diachronically, by changes in British English politeness that coincide with the rise of the individual Self. These empirical findings have implications for im/politeness theorizing and theory-building more generally, calling attention to how the socio-historical context of our research necessarily influences the theories we end up building.Language Use in Past and Presen

Editorial: “Quo Vadis, Pragmatics?”

The special issue on “Quo Vadis, Pragmatics?” is the result of a lively discussion among members of the editorial board of the Journal of Pragmatics triggered by the most recent revision of the journal's scope statement. The 11 contributions that make up this special issue cover a rich suite of themes, from the identity of the field to issues of multimodality, interdisciplinarity and ethics, taking in non-propositional, Gricean, historical, and discursive perspectives along the way. We are grateful to the contributors to this special issue who responded to our call and hope the result will stimulate further discussion about the present state of the field and its future development.Language Use in Past and Presen

What if…? Imagining non-Western perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice

To date, pragmatic theory and practice have largely drawn on theories and models based on observations of communicative practices in the West and tacitly treated as culturally neutral, while patterns of language use in non-Western communities have been used as testing grounds for Western usage rules and their assumed motivations. We see this practice as contrary to calls for cognitive justice and as hampering progress toward the development of inclusive and truly universally valid theories of pragmatics. We illustrate these points by discussing four themes which have been tested in non-Western languages: speech acts, conversational implicatures, (im)politeness, and Conversation Analysis. We then move on to the domain of research ethics and find that, here too, practices tend to reflect Western values, prioritizing Western notions of ethics and what is important to people and ultimately falling short of serving the needs both of the communities where the data are collected, and of the researchers themselves. We conclude with recommending three steps we can all take to make pragmatics a more inclusive discipline, respecting and reflecting patterns of language-in-use irrespective of where they are located geographically.Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Uncivil Twitter: A sociopragmatic analysis

Language Use in Past and Presen

The sound of street corner society: UK grime music as ethnography

This article explores the ways in which popular music can be linked to ethnography. While there is a tradition of connecting popular music with sociology, this article posits a further resonance that is not so much theoretical as methodological. The article suggests that forms of contemporary popular music parallel key facets of ethnography, not simply in terms of sociological analysis, but with regard to popular music as an ethnographic resource, as ‘data’, and as the reflexive expression of Paul Willis’ conception of the ‘ethnographic imagination’; and the article argues that contemporary British hip-hop in the form of ‘grime’ is a potent exemplar. This is due to the resolutely cultural, spatial nature of grime music: a factor that marks out grime as a distinctive musical genre and a distinctive ethnographic form, as it is an experientially rooted music about urban locations, made from within those urban locations

Coming to grips with variation in sociocultural interpretations: methodological considerations

Empirically capturing sociocultural interpretations—situated interpretations of linguistic expressions shared among members of a group—can be difficult for two reasons: First, the interpretations themselves cannot be directly observed and, second, the contexts that enable these interpretations cannot be defined independently of them. Yet, the reality of such interpretations attested in piece after piece of empirical research calls for an explanation. This article outlines a bottom-up methodology that seeks to extract context-sensitive definitions of, on one hand, sociocultural interpretations and, on the other hand, the context variables that covary with them, from the data itself. Uptake-based definitions of sociocultural interpretations are empirically verifiable and include speaker, context, and addressee contributions to the bringing about of a certain sociocultural interpretation. Dynamic definitions of macro-social variables (gender, age, class, ethnicity, region, etc.) can emerge by gradually abstracting over the minimal contexts that are found to enable particular sociocultural interpretations. The article outlines with examples how this methodology can be applied to spoken conversational data, as well as some of its limitations.Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Inference and implicature

This chapter covers the notions of inference and implicature from a broad pragmatic and sociopragmatic perspective. Starting from the fact that inference has wide applicability also in psychology and logic, while implicature is limited only to pragmatics, it opens by drawing three distinctions: (1) between inference in a broad and in a narrow sense, (2) between inference and implicature and (3) between inference and implicature as both product and process. It then discusses processes of implicature generation within Gricean and post-Gricean accounts. While the general position taken is that 'speakers implicate, hearers infer', this position is also problematized by drawing on sociopragmatics research that challenges the notion of the speaker’s intention and explores how (else) meaning can be generated.Language Use in Past and Presen

Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field

This short article takes up the question: How do we derive meaning from others' utterances? Within linguistic pragmatics, a first reply to this question was provided by Grice's account of non-natural meaning and his theory of conversational implicature. However, the question Grice was addressing was slightly different, namely: How do speakers mean? To account for how we derive meaning from others' utterances, we need to look beyond non-natural meaning and beyond implicature. To do this, I first distinguish between broad and narrow inference and subsequently between (narrow) inference and implicature. I then consider four limitations of an intention-based approach to linguistic meaning: a) empirically, speaker intentions cannot be observed directly; b) formally, languages offer speakers tools to increase or decrease their accountability for implicated meanings; c) cross-culturally, speakers' intentions are variably heeded as a source of meaning; d) socially, aspects of a speaker's utterance that are not communicative can still trigger inferences. I conclude that a speaker's utterance can encode, implicate, or simply ‘give off’ meanings and that theories of meaning should account for all these types of meaning, since they are all occasioned by the speaker's use of language.Language Use in Past and Presen

Language and belonging

Inaugural lecture by Prof.dr. M. Terkourafi on the acceptance of her position as professor of Sociolinguistics at the Universiteit Leiden on Friday April 20, 2018Language Use in Past and Presen