The employment of reporting verbs in academic writing can explicitly situate previous studies into the current research, reflect diverse degrees of alignment and appraisal toward the literature, and implicitly indicate a writer's stance and private intentions. This study investigates the deployment of reporting verbs in the conclusion section of research articles in applied linguistics and sociology. Based on Hyland's (2002) taxonomy, the denotation and evaluation categories and functions of reporting verbs in the conclusion section of 270 research articles were examined. The results show that the use of discourse acts verbs is the most predominant and that writers strongly rely on positive evaluation, both in applied linguistics and sociology. Additionally, 12 types of functions of reporting verbs in the conclusion section of research articles were identified. The findings suggest that the choice of reporting verbs depends not only on the disciplinary nature but also on the specific section of research articles to achieve different communicative purposes and private intentions. This study helps novice writers enhance their awareness concerning the appropriate application of reporting verbs in academic writing.

The growing interest in identity and language, coupled with increased interest in the relation between identity, language and education, has resulted in a rich amount of work that has informed education, identity and language. To keep abreast of the developments in identity research, the authors propose the research on prisoners’ identity changing from structuralism on identity as a set of generically inherent characteristics to social constructionist perspectives on identity as fluid and emerging in interaction. From the social constructionist perspective on identity, the prisoner’s multi-scalarity of identity is identified through the negotiation from penitentiary discourse indicating that the prisoners inhabit various identities in accordance with the discourses and discursive varieties that they are using, which requires us to alter the lens of seeing prisoners as having a single and stable identity of “Prisoner”. Prisoners’ fluid identity transformed from the legally fixed “prisoner” to the socially acceptable “people”, between which there is prisoners’ multi-scalarity of fluid identity, plays an important role in prisoners’ rehabilitation and socialisation. The successful identity transformation from “prisoner” to “people” means the efficient rehabilitating process of the prison for prisoners. The process of identity circulation has pedagogical implications for prisoner education.

Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this study considers excerpts from Japanese spontaneous conversation in which the intensity of evaluation is modified through self-repair operations. It demonstrates that the modification is utilised as an interactional resource. The analysis reveals that the intensity of evaluation is modified to achieve two interactional outcomes: to disambiguate or amplify the speaker’s evaluative stance toward the referent and to display the speaker’s orientation to the lack of direct epistemic access or strong commitment to the position. The findings are discussed to explore the possibility that the public process of modifying the intensity of evaluation may itself be an interactional resource with which to display the speaker’s dual orientations. The paper further considers the possible crosslinguistic relevance of the findings.

Traditional izakayas (“pubs”) are spaces where people socially consume food and alcohol. Although ubiquitous in Japan, izakayas are slowly disappearing due to changing economic factors. Researchers have begun to document the sociolinguistic activities in these spaces; however, further examination of interactants’ behaviours is needed. Thus, in this study, we sociopragmatically investigated the progressivity of initial service encounters that routinely occur within the drama series Shin’ya Shokud? (“Midnight Diner”) from macro, meso, and micro perspectives. Specifically, we examined how interactants enter the establishment and perform direct requests and how interpersonal talk progresses. Results show that interactants perform service encounters in routine-like ways, using a variety of polite and casual expressions. Overall, the study highlights the formulaic nature of these izakaya performances, which are not typically observable in other contexts. Furthermore, the study supports previous research that shows how transactional and interpersonal talk are imbued in some service encounter contexts.

This study explores the employment of disclaimers as metapragmatic devices in online interpersonal interaction on a Chinese social networking site, Weibo. Previous studies discussed meta-negation disclaimers and meta-prohibition disclaimers. This study establishes a new type of disclaimer: meta-condition disclaimers. It examines the forms and functions of the three types of disclaimers. Prior studies explained disclaimers as either prospective moves or retrospective moves. This study further introduces disclaimers as conjunctive moves, which bridge the speaker’s ongoing communicative behaviour. Also, it investigates the communicative purposes of using disclaimers, revealing that disclaimers are mainly employed by Chinese netizens to convey criticism. Furthermore, this research probes into the underlying cultural factors of employing disclaimers. It uncovers certain values ingrained in Chinese culture, such as ren (kindheartedness), yi (righteousness) and li (politeness). The study contributes to a global understanding of disclaimers and could provide some insights into online rapport management.

The aim of the present study is to explore how Chinese terms of address are conventionally used in the speech acts of apology and request from a contrastive pragmatic angle. The study fills an important knowledge gap, considering that little attention has been paid to the use of address terms in the performance of speech acts. The research presented has the following bipartite structure. First, a multiple-choice Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) was administered to a group of young learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFLLs) and a comparable group of Chinese native speakers (NSs). The DCT results reveal that Chinese NSs use address terms significantly more frequently in realising apologies and requests compared to the Hungarian CFLLs. Following the DCT, an online survey was conducted with Chinese linguacultural insiders on the use of address terms in apologies and requests. The findings from the online survey affirm that Chinese address terms serve pragmatic functions beyond mere attention-getters in the performance of speech acts. These findings not only identify the use of address terms as a prominent pragmatic feature in the speech acts performance in Chinese, but also hold strong implications for CFL education in fostering learners’ pragmatic competence.

Toward a Motivation Model of PragmaticsRong Chen (2022)De Gruyter

Pragmatics: The BasicsBilly Clark (2022)Routledge Press

Chapter 4 reviews all locally published pragmatic research on Korean up to 2020, with regard to those core pragmatic topics including speech act, deixis, Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis, discourse markers and grammaticalization, and face and (im)politeness. The last section of the chapter, “Other topics of interest”, is intended as a space to allow for a brief introduction of some topics unique or indigenous to Korean.