"Women's language" is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge in contemporary Japan. In this article, I examine the genealogy of Japanese women's language by locating its emergence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when state formation, capitalist accumulation, industrialization, and radical class reconfiguration were taking off. I show how par...

It is axiomatic in the study of pragmatics that speakers must make choices from a myriad of variants in phonology, morphology and syntax ‘‘on the fly’’ during the course of interaction. However, the specific psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms that both prompt these choices have largely been taken for granted. Theoretical approaches to this problem in the past have focused on lingui...

Abstract Metapragmatic comments are crucial in lawyers’ attempts at managing legal advice communication with asylum seekers. Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, this paper aims to demonstrate how/when/why textual features which tell interactants how interpret ongoing speech used context lawyer-client field immigration law. The data analysis reveals l...

This study investigates the communicative practices in English and German online discussion fora as exemplified by two thematically related sample threads. Combining first- second-order approaches to (im-)politeness, paper focuses on question of how participants use intergroup rudeness a means in- outgroup construction examines is metapragmatically negotiated discussions unfold. The results sho...