33.3001, Calls: Pragmatics/Belgium

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3001. Fri Sep 30 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3001, Calls: Pragmatics/Belgium

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Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2022 21:17:23
From: Robert Külpmann [everett at linguistlist.org]
Subject: The speech action of commenting across discourse types

 
Full Title: The speech action of commenting across discourse types 

Date: 09-Jul-2023 - 14-Jul-2023
Location: Brussels, Belgium 
Contact Person: Robert Külpmann
Meeting Email: robert.kuelpmann at uni-mainz.de
Web Site: https://pragmatics.international/page/Brussels2023 

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics 

Call Deadline: 15-Oct-2022 

Meeting Description:

The speech action of commenting across discourse types

Commenting is a kind of verbal behavior that is omnipresent in human
communication. In everyday conversation, we frequently comment on our own and
others’ contributions to discourse, on shared perceptive stimuli, and on all
kinds of situations. With the advent of social media and multimodal
communication channels, it seems that commenting has gained an even more
important role in social interaction. Comments can be made by speakers using a
broad variety of linguistic forms, ranging from graphematic means (e.g., round
brackets) to particular word classes (e.g., particles, connectives, sentence
adverbials) and sentence types (e.g., exclamative sentences), as well as
non-linguistic means such as emojis, gestures, or facial expression. Comments
may also take the form of whole genres, e.g., in legal, academic, or news
discourse (Ehrhard-Macris & Magnus 2021).

Most scholars would agree that by commenting something, a speaker performs a
kind of speech act (e.g., Posner 1972), or, more broadly speaking, speech
action (Sbisà & Turner 2013: 1). Searle (1965: 221) mentions the verb comment,
alongside verbs such as assert, warn, order, and apologize, to illustrate
basic types of illocutionary acts. It is far from clear, though, how the
presumed speech act(ion) of commenting is to be defined. While most speakers
will be able to apply an intuitive, everyday notion of commenting, a common
linguistic definition is lacking. For example, it may seem that a comment in
the form of a declarative sentence such as This was a stupid thing to do is
some kind of representative speech act. However, the evaluative component puts
it close to the class of expressives. Meta-discursive comments, on the other
hand, seem to fall into Austin’s (1962) class of expositives. Other approaches
take comments to be higher-order speech acts (Grice 1989: 362), might treat
them as one of multiple simultaneous functions of interactional turns (cf.
Levinson 2017: 203), or as larger (inter-)actional patterns or communicative
practices (cf. Sbisà & Turner 2013: 5).

This panel aims at bringing together scholars from various pragmatic
frameworks who investigate the speech action of commenting from various
methodological, empirical, and theoretical perspectives and across different
discourse types, media, and languages, in order to shed more light on the
theory and practice of this pervasive, but highly under-researched speech
action. Research questions to be addressed in this panel include:
 
- How can we linguistically define the speech action of commenting?

- Where can comments be positioned between speech acts and speech actions?

- In which kinds of contexts, discourse types, or media do speakers comment on
which kinds of stimuli, and what do speakers communicate by their comments in
these contexts?

- What types of knowledge (general knowledge, text type knowledge, frame
knowledge, common ground etc.) do addressees need to understand comments?

- How is commenting realized linguistically on different levels of
description? Are there particular linguistic indicators of commenting speech
actions?

- How do commenting and the means of its realization differ in written and
spoken language, in the language of proximity and distance, in synchronous,
quasi-synchronous and asynchronous communication, in online and offline
communication, etc.?

- How can we distinguish comments from speech acts such as assessments,
replies, explications, conclusions, criticisms, appraisals etc.?

- What is the functional relationship between single-utterance comments and
larger units (texts, genres) such as commentaries?

- In what ways are comments related to interpersonal phenomena such as humor,
(im-)politeness, or stance-taking?


2nd Call for Papers:

To contribute to this panel, authors should submit an abstract (max. 500 words
excluding references) as PDF to the following E-mail addresses:
robert.kuelpmann at uni-mainz.de
finkbeiner at uni-mainz.de

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2022.

Please note: IPrA membership is required to submit an abstract and present
during the conference.




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