Abstract This paper investigates so-called pleonastic conditionals (PCs) in Present Day English, e.g. If you have to, to or When duty calls, calls. PCs are rhetorical statements which the antecedent and consequent formally semantically identical. The construction is characterized by stylistic reduplication semantic redundancy. It exactly this tautological nature has a considerable effect on dis...

Abstract In response to negative yes–no questions (e.g., Doesn’t she like cats? ), typical English answers ( Yes, does / No, doesn’t ) peculiarly vary from those in Mandarin ). What are the processing consequences of these markedly different conventionalized linguistic responses achieve same communicative goals? And if and speakers process differently, what extent change Mandarin–English sequen...

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that the outcome of a vocal nonverbal attempt at persuasion can be affected by the participants' skills in nonverbal communication. Subjects' vocal sending or vocal decoding abilities were pretested. Senders and decoders were agents and recipients, respectively, of social influence in a field experiment in which social influence took the form o...