Responding to gratitude in elicited oral interaction. A taxonomy of communicative options

This study explores responses to gratitude as expressed in elicited oral interaction (mimetic-pretending open role-plays) produced by native speakers of American English. It first overviews the literature on this topic. It then presents a taxonomy of the head acts and supporting moves of the responses to gratitude instantiated in the corpus under examination, which considers their strategies and formulations. Finally, it reports on their frequency of occurrence and combinatorial options across communicative situations differing in terms of the social distance and power relationships between the interactants. The findings partly confirm what reported in the literature, but partly reveal the flexibility and adaptability of these reacting speech acts to the variable context in which they may be instantiated. On the one hand, the responses to gratitude identified tend to be encoded as simple utterances, and occasionally as complex combinations of head acts and/or supporting moves; also, their head acts show a preference for a small set of strategies and formulation types, while their supporting moves are much more varied in content and form, and thus situation-specific. On the other hand, the frequency of occurrence of the responses to gratitude, their dispersion across situations, and the range of their attested strategies and formulations are not in line with those reported in previous studies. I argue that these partly divergent findings are to be related to the different data collection and categorization procedures adopted, and the different communicative situations considered across studies. Overall, the study suggests that: responses to gratitude are a set of communicative events with fuzzy boundaries, which contains core (i.e. more prototypical) and peripheral (i.e. less prototypical) exemplars; although routinized in function, responses to gratitude are not completely conventionalized in their strategic or surface realizations; alternative research approaches may provide complementary insights into these reacting speech acts; and a higher degree of comparability across studies may be ensured if explicit pragmatic and semantic parameters are adopted in the classification of their shared object of study

Responding to gratitude in elicited oral interaction. A taxonomy of communicative options

Abstract – This study explores responses to gratitude as expressed in elicited oral interaction (mimetic-pretending open role-plays) produced by native speakers of American English. It first overviews the literature on this topic. It then presents a taxonomy of the head acts and supporting moves of the responses to gratitude instantiated in the corpus under examination, which considers their conventions of means (i.e. strategies) and conventions of forms (i.e. formulations). Finally, it reports on their frequency of occurrence and combinatorial options across communicative situations differing in terms of the social distance and power relationships between the interactants. The findings partly confirm what reported in the literature, but partly reveal the flexibility and adaptability of these reacting speech acts to the variable context in which they may be instantiated. On the one hand, the responses to gratitude identified tend to be encoded as simple utterances, and occasionally as complex combinations of head acts and/or supporting moves; also, their head acts show a preference for a small set of strategies and formulation types, while their supporting moves are much more varied in content and form, and thus situation-specific. On the other hand, the frequency of occurrence of the responses to gratitude, their distribution across situations, and the range of their attested strategies and formulations are not in line with those reported in previous studies. I argue that these partly divergent findings are to be related to the different data collection and categorization procedures adopted, and the different communicative situations considered across studies. Overall, the study suggests that: responses to gratitude are a set of communicative events with fuzzy boundaries, which contains core (i.e. more prototypical) and peripheral (i.e. less prototypical) exemplars; although routinized in function, responses to gratitude are not completely conventionalized in their strategic or surface realizations; alternative research approaches may provide complementary insights into these reacting speech acts; and a higher degree of comparability across studies may be ensured if explicit pragmatic and semantic parameters are adopted in the classification of their shared object of study

The Progressive Form of the "be going to" future: a preliminary report

pp.205-22

Pope Francis's Laudato Si': A corpus study of environmental and religious discourse

This paper explores aspects of the lexico-grammar of religiously oriented environmental discourse produced by a leading religious authority, Pope Francis. It examines the most frequent keywords and keyword clusters of the encyclical letter "Laudato Si\u2019" against popularised updates on scientific and technological advances available on the NASA website. The findings show that "Laudato Si\u2019" draws attention both to how people\u2019s behaviour affects the environment and to its relevance to the current political and economic situation. The Letter also calls for a much-needed caring attitude towards the environment, and thus appears to be characterized by the directive communicative function throughout, while presenting a more specific religious slant only in select chapters. The analysis carried out highlights both the topics and the rhetorical goals of the discourse of Pope Francis

"Pride and Prejudice" on the Page and on the Screen: Literary Narrative, Literary Dialogue and Film Dialogue

This study explores the similarities and differences in content between the dialogic and narrative parts in Jane Austen\u2019s Pride and Prejudice, and between the novel\u2019s dialogues and those in its 1940 and 2005 film adaptations. These four datasets were semantically tagged and compared to one another by using qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings show how, in covering conceptual areas largely complementary to those of the narrative, the dialogues in the novel perform various communicative functions. The investigation also points to how dialogues are adapted to the semiotic needs and goals of its film adaptation

"The Literature-Linguistics Interface -- Bridging the Gap Between Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Literary Texts"

presentation of the conference \u201cBridging Gaps,Creating Links. The Qualitative-Quantitative Interface in the Study of Literature\u201d, which took place at the DiSLL (Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies), University of Padua, on June 7-9, 201

Introduction

http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/linguelinguaggi/issue/view/1676Non peer reviewe

Interfacing between Linguists and Literary Scholars: A Conference on Mixed-method Approaches and a First Survey of Italian Collaborative Practices

Report on an informal survey among linguists and literary scholars on the possible intermingling of interests in language and literature studies + selected papers from the conference conference “The Literature-Linguistics Interface: Bridging the Gap Between Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Literary Texts” (Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies, University of Padua, 7-9 June, 2018)

Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’: A corpus study of environmental and religious discourse

This paper explores aspects of the lexico-grammar of religiously oriented environmental discourse produced by a leading religious authority, Pope Francis. It examines the most frequent keywords and keyword clusters of the encyclical letter Laudato Si’ against popularised updates on scientific and technological advances available on the NASA website. The findings show that Laudato Si’ draws attention both to how people’s behaviour affects the environment and to its relevance to the current political and economic situation. The Letter also calls for a much-needed caring attitude towards the environment, and thus appears to be characterized by the directive communicative function throughout, while presenting a more specific religious slant only in select chapters. The analysis carried out highlights both the topics and the rhetorical goals of the discourse of Pope Francis

Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures