The present study sets out to examine the realisation of the speech act of expressing sympathy in Persian, which, notwithstanding its significant communicative role, has not received the attention it deserves. More precisely, drawing on data collected through open role-plays and retrospective interviews, and using rapport management theory (Spencer-Oatey 2005), this study is an attempt to scrutinise Persian speakers’ sympathy expressions in a situation exhibit-ing solidarity between the interlocutors. Results show that by employing 12 distinct strategies, Persian speakers respect behavioural expectations through expressing involvement, empathy and respect in the context of sympa-thising. Also, they respect and mostly enhance their own and the interlocutor’s identity and respectability face. In addition, their interactional goals are strongly relational.
It goes without saying that as a pragmatic phenomenon, vagueness has over the past few years been a topic of extensive research. However, a huge gap still exists when it comes to the investigation of how vagueness is expressed across different languages and cultures. In the present study, we have put under scrutiny the pragmatic functions of ‘sort of’, a vague expression, in Persian conversation with a view to making cross-linguistic comparisons between different languages possible. Besides confirming the fact that the vague item ‘sort of’ enables interactants to fulfil a wide variety of functions in interactional settings, particularly in face-to-face interactions, the current study reveals that the expression in question can also serve to signal ‘a moment of awkwardness’ as well as the presence of ‘inferable information’. With the former function, ‘sort of’ signals that the speaker is experiencing a feeling of inconvenience and embarrassment. When used as an inferable information signal, however, ‘sort of’ indicates that the utterance has been inferred from the previous or current exchange.
In this paper, we examine conversational humour in intercultural initial interactions, in which participants not only do not know each other, but also come from different cultural backgrounds, through the lens of epistemics. Our analysis examines episodes of conversational humour identified in the Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations (ViMELF) corpus (ViMELF 2018). The analysis focuses on the design of these humour episodes, the negotiation of shared knowledge prior to and during these episodes, and responses to humour bids. Results indicate that whether and how an attempt at humour is responded to reflects the epistemic stance/status of participants in that conversation. When the speaker assumes K- status for the recipient or there is no local negotiation of relevant knowledge, the laughable is generally disattended. On the other hand, when K+ status is assumed for the recipient or the laughable is based on locally co-constructed shared knowledge and/or knowledge is negotiated, the humour episode is expanded upon by the recipient. We conclude that the role of epistemics needs to be more explicitly attended to in the theorisation of humour more broadly.
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