TY - JOUR

T1 - Illocutional concurrences

T2 - The case of evaluative speech acts and face-work in spoken Mandarin and American English

AU - Tantucci, Vittorio

AU - Wang, Aiqing

N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Pragmatics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Pragmatics, 138, 2018 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2018.09.014

PY - 2018/12

Y1 - 2018/12

N2 - This paper proposes a novel usage-based approach to modal and illocutionary analysis. As a case study, it provides a holistic picture of the interplay between evaluations and face-work (i.a. Goffman 1967) as they occur in the Spoken Callhome corpora of Mandarin and American English. We plotted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al. 2006) to gather what we call language-specific illocutional concurrences (IC). IC encompass converging factors at various levels of verbal experience that contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and culturally situated speech acts or pragmemes (i.a. Mey 2001; Author 2016a). From this study will emerge that Mandarin evaluations tend to include a higher number of instances of propositional face-work, viz. cases where the speaker overtly addresses the hearer as the target of his/her evaluation. Similarly, Mandarin evaluations show higher illocutional complexity, in the sense of having a more diverse pool of overtly coded dimensions that speakers account for whilst making evaluations. Finally, Mandarin evaluations also show a stronger tendency to overtly account for harmonious rapport-maintenance (i.a. Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008) and intersubjectivity (i.a. Traugott & Dasher 2002; Traugott 2010).

AB - This paper proposes a novel usage-based approach to modal and illocutionary analysis. As a case study, it provides a holistic picture of the interplay between evaluations and face-work (i.a. Goffman 1967) as they occur in the Spoken Callhome corpora of Mandarin and American English. We plotted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al. 2006) to gather what we call language-specific illocutional concurrences (IC). IC encompass converging factors at various levels of verbal experience that contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and culturally situated speech acts or pragmemes (i.a. Mey 2001; Author 2016a). From this study will emerge that Mandarin evaluations tend to include a higher number of instances of propositional face-work, viz. cases where the speaker overtly addresses the hearer as the target of his/her evaluation. Similarly, Mandarin evaluations show higher illocutional complexity, in the sense of having a more diverse pool of overtly coded dimensions that speakers account for whilst making evaluations. Finally, Mandarin evaluations also show a stronger tendency to overtly account for harmonious rapport-maintenance (i.a. Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008) and intersubjectivity (i.a. Traugott & Dasher 2002; Traugott 2010).

KW - corpus linguistics

KW - intercultural pragmatics

KW - speech acts

KW - Chinese

KW - machine learning

KW - cognitive linguistics

KW - intersubjectivity

U2 - 10.1016/j.pragma.2018.09.014

DO - 10.1016/j.pragma.2018.09.014

M3 - Journal article

VL - 138

SP - 60

EP - 76

JO - Journal of Pragmatics

JF - Journal of Pragmatics

SN - 0378-2166

ER -