Intense mobility of people and languages driven by tourism, which propels "cultural transformation of places" (Urry, 1995:2) across the world, is manifested in their linguistic landscapes through varying regimes of multilingualism. Linguistic landscapes, which render themselves for "visual consumption" (Urry, 2005), emerge from the sedimentation and synchronization of diachronic semiotic processes which index current societal developments. The recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a noticeable impact on linguistic landscapes globally through the emergence of a noticeable and coherent layer of pandemic regulatory signage. In a longitudinal study covering the period between the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020 to its decline in August 2022, we trace the implementation of regulatory measures in a highly frequented tourist region in Slovakia whereby the actors involved in the tourist industry implemented the official pandemic legislature aimed at preventing the spread of the disease. Our overall goal is to explore the management of "pandemic regulatory discourse", i.e., how producers of regulatory signage manage multimodal resources to convey their authority and stance towards regulations, to legitimize regulatory measures, and to ensure compliance with them. The study is grounded in the theoretical-methodological approaches of ethnographic linguistic landscape studies, geosemiotics, sociolinguistics of globalization, sociopragmatics, and language management theory.

As Covid-19 made its way to the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020, Kiwis took to Twitter to share their experiences and opinions regarding both the virus and government responses. In this paper, we examine a corpus of 1001 tweets to see just how Twitter users utilize different linguistic and politeness strategies when sharing directives conveying stance toward government Covid-19 measures. While there has been research into the use of directives in spoken and written language, there has been little exploration of how directives are used in the language of Social Media. Often considered difficult to classify even in more traditional language genres, Twitter corpora pose additional challenges. We propose a strategy to identify and classify directives using syntactic and pragmatic features, and use this strategy to identify linguistic patterns of both in relation to stance toward government Covid-19 measures. While we find that the most prototypical directive within our corpus is largely consistent with previous definitions, we also find that tweeters exhibit a striking amount of variation in directive strategy, emphasizing the need for a nuanced approach to directive identification and classification. We further note trends in the directive strategies utilized by tweeters expressing different stances toward government measures.

This paper examines confessions of Covid-19 breaches in two radio phone-ins. The programmes hosted invited experts who were recruited at certain moments in the show to comment on the (in)direct experiences of lockdown compliance or breaches reported by the callers. The analysis focuses on the social actions the participants are seen to be carrying out and orienting to through talk such confessions and disclosures of minor unlawful behaviour in public. A set of features of confessions were found depending on whether personal circumstances could be said to warrant the breaches and the recipients align or not with the warrantability of the breaches. Callers who disclosed their breaches at the first available opportunity, presented them as primarily warranted by a long-term health condition and displayed full awareness of doing confessing. Both early confessions and those that appear later in the narration were carefully crafted. They were mitigated to minimize the seriousness of the transgression and reduce the actor's accountability. The positional nuances of the participants as they share their stories, coupled with their assessment of self- and other behaviour, shines a light on their orientations to, and interactional management of, the moral accountability of behaviour in public spaces during the pandemic.

In this paper, blunt slogans used in China's health campaign against coronavirus are closely examined and the public's conflicting comments on them are analyzed. These slogans, due to their extreme effectiveness in making the public comply with the health preventive measures suggested by the government, are called or "hardcore" slogans by the Chinese people. Containing harsh and taboo language, they convey threats of death and disease, insults or negative evaluation, and harsh demands. Despite their impolite nature, "hardcore" slogans have received significantly more positive judgment than negative judgment, especially when they made their debut in rural areas in Henan, an agricultural province in China. Criticism towards these blunt slogans then gradually increased after their initial appearance. Plausible factors contributing to the change of judgment are analyzed. The public's conflicting judgment regarding the impoliteness of the slogans may be related to the public's different positioning across time and space. This study shows that impoliteness is a practice situated not only in discourse, genres, and institutions, but also in social, cultural, and political contexts. More attention should be paid to impoliteness in special social configurations (e.g., rural areas) and social emergencies, which not only contextualize a discourse event but also define it.

The UK government instruction to stay at home exemplifies how governments do things by saying things in a crisis. The force of the government slogan was amplified by its intertextual circulation in wider public discourse to produce an alignment between the duty of government to protect citizens, the spiritual mission of the Church and the public information role of the press. By analysing the rhetorical and sequential structure of promotional discourse with recourse to speech act, narrative and routine theory, we show how its authors concurrently use cognitive and empathetic interpellations to induce subjectivation, configuring pending accounts which not only involve recipients in scripts for restoring order ( programming constructions) but also implicate them in restorative storylines ( … … mimetic constructions). The result is to overlay on the official inducement new voices of hope, conditioned by participation in a collaborative community, naturalising compliance.

This study explores the emotional impact of contextually-relevant source texts (STs) and their influence on student translators' behavior. During the first weeks of the Spanish COVID-19 lockdown, an experimental study was carried out in which 69 Spanish translation students were instructed to translate two English STs with different evaluative attitudes (i.e. optimistic vs. pessimistic) toward the COVID-19 crisis. The study explored whether the different optimistic vs pessimistic framing of the crisis would influence the students' use of translation strategies (h1), their levels of anxiety (h2) and their levels of affect (h3) after both reading and translating the STs. Results revealed statistically significant differences between the two translation strategies analyzed (i.e. emphasis and attenuation), with more emphasizing strategies than attenuating ones, regardless of the group. Moreover, a significant effect of the interaction between text and group was also reported, which indicated an overall stronger inclination to alter -either mitigating or emphasizing- evaluative language in the pessimistic text. A significant increase in participants' levels of anxiety and negative affect was also found after the pessimistic framing as compared to the optimistic one. Data also pointed to differences between reading and translating in terms of the participant's anxiety levels, with statistically significant higher anxiety scores after reading than translating.

According to both professional journalists and news users, news should be While a great deal of research that treats relevance as co-constructed starts from the text of news stories, this paper asks how explicitly construct the (ir)relevance of particular news reports, taking a language-centered lens to open-ended survey responses. This paper makes a methodological argument in favor of a language-centered approach to open-ended survey data. Given the ubiquity of online surveys in many social science disciplines, the present paper provides an example of how this approach can deepen our understanding of survey responses. We find that news users construct relevance at varying scales, using a number of linguistic strategies of self-reference. Those who said they found the story they saw relevant used pronouns with a different distribution than those who did not, and these differences exceeded chance. In general, those who referred to themselves as members of larger collectivities were more likely to say they found a news story relevant, suggesting that relevance is discursively constructed in part through practices of self-reference.

Latency in video-mediated interaction can frustrate smooth turn-taking: it may cause participants to perceive silence at points where talk should occur, it may cause them to talk in overlap, and it impedes their ability to return to one-speaker-at-a-time. Whilst potentially frustrating for participants, this makes video-mediated interaction a perspicuous setting for the study of social interaction: it is an environment that nurtures the occurrence of turn-taking problems. For this paper, we conducted secondary analysis of 25 video consultations recorded for heart failure, (antenatal) diabetes, and cancer services in the UK. By comparing video recordings of the patient's and clinician's side of the call, we provide a detailed analysis of how latency interferes with the turn-taking system, how participants understand problems, and how they address them. We conclude that in our data latency unnoticed until it becomes problematic: participants act as if they share the same reality.

An important recent innovation in Construction Grammar (CxG) has been to assume the existence of a general underspecified construction underlying two or more alternating constructions, which themselves are considered to be formally and functionally related of the general construction. Despite this novel proposal, the meaning side of the general construction has either been neglected or couched in a single-layered view of meaning that does not adequately distinguish semantics from pragmatics. Building on state-of-the-art developments at the semantics-pragmatics interface, this article proposes an account whereby the distinction between the meaning of the general construction and the meaning of the allostructions aligns with the distinction between encoded (semantic) and inferred (pragmatic) meaning. We argue in favor of an allostructional account for two grammatical alternations which have previously been treated as an epiphenomenon of two underlying independent constructions: the German ditransitive alternation and the English genitive alternation. While demonstrating the fruitfulness of an allostructional analysis for these two new cases, we also provide critical observations about the wider applicability of allostructional analyses. In particular, we argue that an allostructional analysis proves to be trivial for Lambrechtian 'allosentences'.

Interlocutors hold one another accountable for knowing certain information about themselves (their roles, activities, and memories) and for keeping track of information in the current conversational exchange. When speakers have trouble with this expectation, they themselves work to repair the breach, often doing a memory search, or when unsuccessful they provide an account (e.g. "I don't remember"). Memory searches (like word searches) are observable, interactional accomplishments. Speakers disengage with their interlocutors (look away), produce hesitation markers, take repeated pauses, engage in pre-positioned and post-positioned repairs, make epistemic assessments, and on finding an answer, re-engage with their interlocutors (look back). For their part, interlocutors comply with the search by not interrupting and continuing to yield the floor. At progressively severe stages of Alzheimer's disease, individuals exhibit increasingly labored memory searches that often trail off into non-answers, until at the latest stages, they eschew the search and (almost smoothly) provide either grammatically appropriate but wrong and improbable answers give answers to previous questions on now closed topics. With data from the clinical administration of a disease staging instrument (Clinical Dementia Rating) this article examines the inexorable loss of epistemic responsibility as a key discursive dynamic in the progression of the disease.

In this paper we focus on how participants in peer review interactions use laughter as a resource as they publicly report divergence of evaluative positions, divergence that is typical in the give and take of joint grant evaluation. Using the framework of conversation analysis, we examine the infusion of laughter and multimodal laugh-relevant practices into sequences of talk in meetings of grant reviewers deliberating on the evaluation and scoring of high-level scientific grant applications. We focus on a recurrent sequence in these meetings, what we call the , in which the assigned reviewers first announce the preliminary scores they have assigned to the grant. We demonstrate that such sequences are routine sites for the use of laugh practices to navigate the initial moments in which divergence of opinion is made explicit. In the context of meetings convened for the purposes of peer review, laughter thus serves as a valuable resource for managing the socially delicate but institutionally required reporting of divergence and disagreement that is endemic to meetings where these types of evaluative tasks are a focal activity.

Receiving accurate and timely advice about extreme weather events can impact a person's likelihood to survive, cope with and minimise exposure. Advice-giving seems to be a common interpersonal strategy in weather commentaries in many Chinese newspapers, yet research into weather advice-giving is greatly lacking. This study investigated whether the discourse of advice-giving in newspaper weather commentaries differed depending on the newspaper source and/or on the weather reported. We focused on two popular metropolitan newspapers: and . Forty texts from each source were chosen (20 for ordinary weather and 20 for extreme weather). Results showed that the advice given stems from a vast reservoir of advice themes, and we found clear differences depending on weather, with significantly more advice given during extreme events. We also found that , in general, provided more advice in their weather commentaries. Finally, writers who were prone to take an authoritative stance tended to increase their use of imperatives and "high-status" vocatives during extreme weather, whereas those who positioned themselves "with" their readers also used more imperatives, but did not change their vocative preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the micro-interactional co-construction of power within Spanish language concordant medical consultations in California involving a third party family member. Findings indicate the third party instigates code-switching to English on the part of medical providers, a language that the patient does not understand, rendering the patient a non-participant in the medical consultation. In these consultations involving a third party family member, monolingual Spanish-speaking patients are stripped of control in ways that are similar to other powerless groups in medical consultations. Implications include the need to further examine how micro-level interactions reproduce societal ideologies and shape policy on the ground.

Speakers of English and Tamil differ widely in which relational roles they overtly express with a verb. This study provides new information about how speakers of these languages differ in their descriptions of the same scenes and how explicit mention of roles and other scene elements vary with the properties of the scenes themselves. Specifically, we find that English speakers, who in normal speech rely more on explicit mention of verb arguments, in fact appear to be more affected by the pragmatic manipulations used in this study than Tamil speakers. Additionally, although the mention of scene items increases with development in both languages, Tamil-speaking children mention fewer items than do English-speaking children, showing that the children know the structure of the language to which they are exposed.

This paper investigates the variation between null and overt subject pronouns in Catalan, a null subject language. We account for this variation in game-theoretical terms: that is, we analyze the distribution of both overt and null pronouns as a result of the strategic interaction between participants in a communicative exchange.First, we examine the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH), as put forward by Carminati (2002). This hypothesis proposes that null and overt pronouns have different biases: null pronouns prefer antecedents in subject positions, while overt pronouns prefer antecedents in non-subject positions. Carminati (2002) tested the PAH for Italian in a variety of intrasentential contexts. In this paper, we show experimentally that the PAH also holds for Catalan even in across-sentence contexts. In the second place, we also show how the PAH can be naturally redefined as a game of partial information, in which speaker and hearer are trying to communicate. This redefinition does not just translate the PAH into a different notation, but it extends the PAH into a model that makes more accurate predictions, since it can account also for the cases in which the biases predicted by the PAH are not obeyed.

In this paper, we describe the crucial role that suppression plays in many aspects of language comprehension. We define suppression as a general, cognitive mechanism, the purpose of which is to attenuate the interference caused by the activation of extraneous, unnecessary, or inappropriate information. We illustrate the crucial role that suppression plays in general comprehension by reviewing numerous experiments. These experiments demonstrate that suppression attenuates interference during lexical access (how word meanings are 'accessed'), anaphoric reference (how referents for anaphors, like pronouns, are computed), cataphoric reference (how concepts that are marked by devices, such as spoken stress, gain a privileged status), syntactic parsing (how grammatical forms of sentences are decoded), and individual differences in (adult) language comprehension skill. We also review research that suggests that suppression plays a crucial role in the understanding of figurative language, in particular, metaphors, idioms, and proverbs.