Abstract This study explores a gay couple’s display of affective stances as they construct what is futsuu (normal/usual/ordinary) and what is not regarding their sexuality and marriage in varying contexts they describe. The couple relocated from Japan to France, where they married in 2023. Compared to France, Japan is a highly heteronormative society, where same-sex marriage is banned (institutional homophobia) and homophobic behaviour (societal homophobia) is not uncommon. Applying multimodal conversation analysis ( CA ) and membership categorisation analysis ( MCA ) to conversational data from the couple, this study demonstrates how societal and institutional homophobia contribute to shaping affective stances by contrasting the speakers’ construction of futsuu in Japan and France. They display a range of affective stances that indicate a continuing orientation to heteronormativity, but also some resistance to homophobia. Theoretically, the study contributes to the conceptualization of the notion of norms by showing the context-dependent variability of what is considered normal.

Abstract This study investigates the fictive use of kinship terms in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, based on a self-reported online survey of native speakers. The findings reveal distinct patterns shaped by culturally specific conceptualisation of relationality. Chinese respondents reported the most frequent use of fictive kinship terms, particularly towards senior addressees. Korean participants exhibited a more complex pattern, prioritising sensitivity to kinship over age considerations. Japanese respondents reported minimal use of fictive kinship terms, reflecting a strong family/non-family boundary. By reviewing relevant literature and analysing survey responses in depth, this study explores the intricate relationships between language, culture, and societal values in these three East Asian societies. It sheds light on how language reflects and reinforces social structures, kinship ideologies, and interpersonal dynamics in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese societies.

Abstract The current study examines the mobilisation of social ideologies surrounding men’s gendered behaviour within discourse around men’s intimate hair removal in Japan (known as VIO datsumō), contrasting the language of advertisements promoting a new concept of kaigo datsumō (hair removal for assisting late-in-life caregivers) to men against online discussions of men’s VIO datsumō on the popular Japanese forum Girls Channel. While both data sets show some embrace of new ways of doing masculinity in Japan, frequent clashes between the two are found between distinct traditional images of Japanese heteronormative behaviour for men. As a result, advertising discourse around a so-called “new” practice is found to serve more as stimulation for discussion over gender norms rather than a place where progressive ideologies of gender and sexuality clash with more traditional ones, with the primary disagreements between the two data sets relating to which traditional ideologies of masculinity take precedence over others.

Abstract This study explores discourse restructuring in English-Chinese legal translation, focusing on the translation shift to Chinese-specific topic chain clauses. Using data from a parallel English-Chinese legal corpus, this research reveals that the shift from English “subject-prominent” clause combining to Chinese topic chaining is influenced by the textual status of the English grammatical subject. Parameters for determining textual status include semantic animacy, discourse saliency and position within the schematic structure of the genre. The more marked the English grammatical subject is according to these parameters, the higher its textual status, the more likely it is to be translated into Chinese as topic chaining clauses into sentence. The study argues that topic chain translation accounts for universal translation shifts, including explicitation, implicitation, and reference tracking shifts. It proposes that topic chain translation is the “hybridization” strategy adopted by translators to preserve the specific legal coherence of the source text while aligning with the linguistic and communicative norms of the target language. This makes translation shifts predictable. Viewing “translation as legal action” emphasizes the recreation of meaning, considering extra-linguistic factors relevant to the genre-specific discourse community. Topic chain translation offers a practical approach to achieving equivalent communicative purposes in the target genre, thereby facilitating the “text translation” of morphologically structured languages like English into Chinese, which is characterized by a freer word order. The corpus and empirical findings of this study can inform the teaching of legal translation and the development of algorithms in machine translation to assist in generating or annotating appropriate clause combining structures. The study also calls for further investigations into discourse restructuring in legal translation, particularly at the intersection of language contrasts, legislative contexts, and genre conventions, where the effective recreation of international legal reasoning occurs.

Abstract Violence against Women in Politics has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of research of global relevance (Esposito and Zollo 2021). The present paper aims to contribute to this field, adopting a linguistically-anchored, doubly contrastive angle to the study of gender-based online aggression. Borrowing our conceptual tools from feminist pragmatics (Christie, 2000), language aggression and impoliteness research (Bou-Franch, 2014; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvitch, 2014; Culpeper, 2011) and inspired by insights from Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018), we explore how Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking Twitter users target two female politicians positioned at opposite ends of the political spectrum: the Spanish left-wing former MP, Irene Montero and the Greek right-wing MP, Niki Kerameus. The results reveal that, despite the opposing social values and ideological positionings reflected in the tweets examined, misogynistic abuse anchored in sexist representations of women emerges as a salient shared strategy in both Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking datasets.

Email Pragmatics and Second Language Learners, edited by Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis, Milica Savic, and Nicola Halenko, consists of nine chapters authored by well-known scholars in the field of second language (L2) pragmatics and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). After two decades with numerous studies focusing on email communication, this volume provides very insightful studies and thoughts for both future teaching and research practices in the field. Nowadays, writing emails to people from different social and cultural backgrounds has become a common activity among people around the world. However, as the editors claim in the introductory chapter, knowing how to write pragmatically appropriate emails is not an easy task for L2 learners, especially if textbooks or course curricula do not devote enough time to teaching how to carry out such a daily activity in the current societies. In addition to this difficulty, many factors may also interfere in the process of choosing what is most appropriate when emailing others, such as first language (L1) transfer or age generation gaps, among others. Altogether, emailing might become a challenging task not only when interacting with native speakers (NSs), but also with multilingual speakers (as in the case of English as a Lingua Franca or as an International Language). The chapters of the volume are organized into two main sections. Part I, Email literacy and pragmatic development, consists of four chapters which aim to understand the difficulties that learners may encounter in staff-students interactions through emails. Part II (with five chapters), Relational practices in email communication, examines the importance of how contextual, social and cultural variables affect the pragmatic appropriateness in email performance. Chapter 1, Reformulation on Chinese EFL learners' email literacy, authored by Yuan-shan Chen and Chin-Ting Liu, aims to investigate the effects of