PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Panel Coordinator: Fiona MacArthur (Universidad de Extremadura).
Departamento Filología Inglesa. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Avda.
Universidad s/n. 10071 Cáceres.
fionamac@unex.es
-------------------------------------------------María del Carmen Guarddon Anelo, UNED
Título: Watzlawick Revisited: Is Pragmatics in its Infancy at the Outset of the 21st c.?
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: In the late sixties, Watzlawick identified a fundamental problem in relation to
the studies in Pragmatics carried out that far, namely, the absence of works that
considered the interactive aspects of actual communication. Instead, communicative
situations were, and still are, generally presented as simple linear systems. In other
words, the effects of the speaker on the listener are studied without taking into account
how the behavior of the listener will also affect the speaker. In this work, I will examine
an exchange that has traditionally been analyzed as a typical case of how the Maxim of
Quantity can be flouted in order to demonstrate that the actual complexity of
communication is still waiting to be explained from the point of view of Pragmatics. I will
also show that principles that are almost taken as axioms within the field of Pragmatics,
such as Communication is based on cooperation, are in fact fallacies that would not
stand an in-depth analysis of the particular context, including the relationship between
the participants. In the light of the results obtained, a more comprehensive approach to
Pragmatics should be developed so that actual communication does not remain an
alien subject of study.
Key words: Communication, Pragmatics, Complex Systems, Human Interaction.
Eliecer Crespo Fernández, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha Título: Immigration
Metaphors in the British Right-wing Online Press. A Corpus-driven Study
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: As the press can influence our values and social codes to a considerable
extent, it seems necessary to gain an insight into the verbal elements used by
journalists to deal with such a controversial and delicate issue as immigration. With this
in mind, taking Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis as
theoretical paradigms, it is the goal of this paper to analyse the metaphorical language
used to represent immigration and the figure of the immigrant in a sample of news items
excerpted from the leading online newspaper The Daily Telegraph, which is taken as a
representative example of right-wing press in UK. The results obtained provide
evidence for the fact that immigrants are conceptually represented in too much negative
light in the British press consulted. Indeed, conceptual metaphors like IMMIGRATION
IS A NATURAL DISASTER, THE NATION IS A CONTAINER and IMMIGRATION IS A
DISEASE betray a series of ideological codes and values that tend to reproduce and
perp etuate prejudiced attitudes against immigrants, who are conceptually represented
a potential threat to the social stability of the host country and as a burden on
taxpayers.
Keywords: immigration, conceptual metaphor, critical metaphor analysis, dysphemism,
right-wing press, persuasive language.
Mª del Coral Calvo Maturana, Universidad de Granada
Título: Scots voices: Jackie Kay in dialogue with McDiarmid and Burns
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: This article explores the intertextual use of Scots voices in Jackie Kay’s poem,
“From A Drunk Woman Looks At Her Nipple (After MacDiarmid)”, which is included in
the collection: New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Crawford, ed. 2009). Kay’s
poem alludes to numerous sources and different styles of literary and popular Scots: it
is most immediately both a homage to Burns and a parody of MacDiarmid’s ‘A Drunk
Man Looks at the Thistle’. This article analyses the intertextual elements of the poem,
drawing in part on of the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, 1700-1945 (CMSW) whi ch
includes a digital version of the Kilmarnock edition of Robert Burns’ Poems, chiefly in
the Scottish dialect supplemented by an electronic version of MacDiarmid’s poem,
available on the Web. Using the Kilmarnock edition and MacDiarmid’s poem as
reference corpora, we can compare Jackie Kay’s Scots with that of the other two poets.
Kay’s poem was re-contextualised as part of her theatrical piece, ‘The Maw Broon
Monologues’, performed at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, in November 2009, a move
which also aligns it with the Scots of the cartoon family, ‘The Broons’. The article
considers how the different styles of Scots drawn upon contribute to the interpretation of
this highly intertextual performance poem.
Keywords: Jackie Kay, Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Broons’, Literary Scots,
Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945).
María del Pilar Ron Vaz, U. Huelva
Título: Translating Pragmatic Markers: The Case Of Expectation Markers
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: The research presented in this paper represents the first step in an ongoing
project to account for the difficulties of non-native intermediate and advanced writers of
English in the acquisition of pragmatic markers of expectations as evidenced by the
different use they make of these markers in academic writing (Ron Vaz 2011, 2012).
Given that expectation markers are one of the means of marking writer’s stance, their
correct use contribute to the production of coherent well-argumented pieces of writing
and special attention should be paid to how these linguistic units are taught.
Traditionally these items are taught as lexical items and little attention is paid to their
actual disc ursive functions. The question remains whether a translation approach is the
most effective one for this type of structures and whether Spanish students rely on
back-translations of Spanish pragmatic markers in their academic writings. In order to
answer this question the first step, the one this paper presents, is to understand how
these markers are translated from English into Spanish in order to both help delimit their
functions in English and identify the range of expressions that can be used in Spanish
for similar functions. The data has been drawn from the UNESCO Corpus of EnglishGalician-French-Spanish scientific-technical divulgation (3.724.620 words) from the
CLUVI Parallel corpus.
Keywords: expectation markers, translation, corpus, written English, Spanish, UNESCO
----------------------------------------------------------------Carmen Pérez-Llantada Auría, Universidad de Zaragoza
Título: Modelling persuasion in L2 English writing: towards alternative spaces of
linguistic and cultural production
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: In examining the rhetoric of epistemic modality in a contrastive EnglishSpanish corpus, this paper lends evidence of the way the texts written in English by
non-native English scholars tend to adopt the standard Anglophone strategies for
modelling persuasion yet transfer some of the rhetorical practices of their national
language into their L2 English texts—eventually rendering a ‘hybrid’ modelling of
persuasion. In raising discussion on the hybrid nature of ‘alternative academic written
Englishes’ (Mauranen et al, 2010: 647), it is argued here that a pedagogy of academic
writing should provide exposure to the standard Anglophone norms as well as to its
culture-determined variants since the discoursal heterogeneity of those variants
represents alternative spaces of linguistic and cultural production in contemporary
research writing.
Keywords: English Lingua Franca; contrastive rhetoric; academic Englishes;
codification; composition pedagogy
Carmen Gregori Signes y María Alcantud-Díaz, Universitat de València
Título: Formulaic Sequences as Solidarity Markers in the Interaction of Cartoon
Characters
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: This paper analyses the function of formulaic sequences within a corpus of 20
episodes of the series Handy Manny/Manny Manitas in order to critically assess the
potential of the series as language learning material for Spanish children under the age
of nine, to whom the series is addressed. The analysis focuses on how these
expressions are introduced in a predominantly L1 context -mainly through a
combination of code-switching strategies; and analyses their function in the sentence. It
turns out that there is a prevalence of formulaic sequences whose function is to create
and maintain solidarity between the main character ( Handy Manny) and his best friends
(The Tools). The analysis concludes with a positive evaluation of the series as a
learning tool bar a few specific drawbacks, namely, careless pronunciation, minor
pragmatic errors, and insufficient exposure to L2 expressions. Nevertheless, exposure
to formulaic language use at an early age contributes to language learning in general,
and pragmatic development in particular, especially if such formulaic language has a
relevant social function like that of regulating the relationships between the fictional
characters in the series.
Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga, Universidad de Huelva
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: Abstract: English cognate object constructions with punctuation marks
Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga Universidad de Huelva This paper focuses on those
cognate object constructions of the type of He chuckled, a wickedly delicious little
chuckle and Tou Ma smiled; a friend’s strong smile, in which the cognate object is
separated from the verb it complements by means of any type of punctuation mark,
since they have been quite frequently excluded in the literature from the realm of
English cognate object constructions and have received, as a consequence, almost no
attention (cf. Ogata 2000; Höche 2009). I will demonstrate, specifically, that they do
constitute a special type of cognate object construction in English for two main reasons:
first, because of their productivity; and second, because of the important pragmatic
function the punctuation mark serves in them. As regards their frequency of occurrence,
I will show that this particular type of cognate object construction is somehow recurrent
in the corpus-based analysis of the four English verbal classes that Levin (1993)
describes as potentially compatible with cognate objects I have carried out in the British
National Corpus. And as regards the function displayed by the different types of
punctuation marks in them, I will prove that they are pragmatically motivated, serving a
similar function to the one displayed by the different types of modification patterns so
common in the internal structure of cognate objects: basically, to break, or at least to
soften, the redundancy entailed by the adjacent juxtaposition of verb and morphological
cognate, by establishing a pause between both constituents and making, this way, the
construction informatively relevant.
Keywords: cognate object construction, morphological cognate, semantic cognate,
unaccusative verb, unergative verb.
Ana Martínez Insua & Javier Pérez Guerra, Universidad de Vigo
Título: Investigating it-clefts from a Meta-Informative Centering perspective
Propuesta: Comunicación
Abstract: This paper focuses on the it-cleft construction and aims at, first, profiling it
from the perspective adopted in Meta-Informative Centering Theory (hereafter, MIC)
and, second, describing the major tendencies yielded by a diachronic corpus-based
analysis. Special attention is paid to the structure and informative characterisation of itclefts and to their evolution in the history of English.