Consistent with calls by O’Sullivan (1999) and Rogers (1999), we use mass communication theory to help understand what are often thought to be largely interpersonal communication processes. Specifically, we contend that investigating media frames found within metapragmatic discourse of nonverbal events can help organize and reveal more specific meanings that can be given to the cues. To provide...

The trope of the "body politic" is reproduced in a Bengali popular court, or moot, not only through explicit submetaphors of that master metaphor but through a grammatical example of what Peirce called diagrammatic iconism. The iconism of reduplicated verbs with reciprocal meaning became pivotal in the metacommunicative negotiation of the agenda of a rural Bangladeshi moot. Such forms of iconic...

Li Yang, Kansas State University This study explored the effectiveness of a self-access website as a tool to teach expressions of gratitude to learners of Mandarin Chinese. The web-based instruction included explicit instruction on how to express gratitude appropriately in Mandarin and various consciousness-raising exercises/activities. Two groups of learners who differed in their proficiency i...

Repetition is often associated with traditional teaching drills. Yet, it has been documented how repetitions are exploited by learners themselves (Duff, 2000). In a study of immersion classroom conversations, it was found that playful recyclings were recurrent features of young learners’ second language repertoires. Such joking events were identified on the basis of the participants’ displayed ...

Metapragmatic representations of ‘accent’ in Irish English over a 400-year period are examined, identifying the phonological shibboleths that have remained in place as emblems of ‘Irishness’ over the whole period. A textual structure based on direct quotation is shown to have supported a brisk trade in commodified text-artifacts (joke-books, pamphlets, a web site) that present amusing anecdotes...

/ have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply...

This article explores the ways in which Asian American teenagers creatively appropriated two African American slang terms: aite and na mean. While some teens racialized slang as belonging to African Americans, other teens authenticated identities as slang speakers. Through close analysis of slang-inuse and particularly of the metapragmatic discussions such uses inspired, this article examines h...