Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal

1-27

Authors: Janet Holmes, Bernadette Vine, and Meredith Marra

Contrastive pragmatics encourages a focus on variation in the ways that different groups enact their distinctive cultural values and norms. In New Zealand, Pākehā (European-based) ways of doing things are the norm, taken-for-granted and rarely questioned or even noted unless someone “breaks the rules”. For minority group members, however, including the indigenous Māori people, Pākehā norms are ever-present reminders of their non-dominant position. In the Māori workplace contexts that we have researched, awareness of these norms is particularly apparent and often attracts explicit comment. This paper explores the insights provided by comments from both Pākehā and Māori about workplace norms in New Zealand and the attitudes of some Māori employees to the hegemonic influence of Pākehā in workplace interaction, as well as providing some indications of seeds of change.

58-81

Authors: Claire Kramsch

Pragmatics has focused predominantly on the locutionary form and illocutionary force of utterances but largely ignored their perlocutionary effects. A shift toward the perlocutionary would require much greater attention being given to the historical and political context in the production and reception of utterances, as well as to interpretation as a performative process. This paper takes as empirical data a press report on the performance of a particular speech act by Donald Trump and its perlocutionary effect both on his addressee and on the readers of the incident as reported in the online versions of the New York Times and Die Zeit. It shows the value of focusing on perlocution for the study of political discourse in these global times. It also shows what pedagogical purchase can be gained by discussing perlocutionary acts and effects in communicative language teaching, rather than focusing exclusively on illocutionary acts.

108-135

Authors: Hilde Hasselgård

This paper investigates the use of clause-initial constituents prefaced by topic-identifying expressions such as in terms of, in the case of and their Norwegian counterparts. The focus is on the nature, frequency and discourse functions of these in a corpus of published academic writing in English and Norwegian and across three disciplines. Such expressions are rather infrequent overall, but medicine uses them the least and linguistics the most in both languages. The functions of the construction can be compared either to those of left dislocation or to other types of clause-initial adverbials depending on the degree of coreference between the theme and some element in the rheme. The pattern with coreference is more common in Norwegian than in English. Generally, topic identifiers are used for announcing explicitly a theme that represents a topic shift or a contrast with the preceding discourse. The study contributes to contrastive pragmatics through its focus on the discourse-pragmatic functions of the expressions under study and the cross-linguistic comparison of this type of information structuring device across different disciplines of academic writing.