Siegal (e.g. 1991, Siegal & Peterson, 1994) has long argued that data from conversations with young children in experimental settings must be treated with caution. If the child does not understand and share the experimenter's purpose he or she may provide irrelevant responses ± irrelevant, that is, to the scientific endeavour of determining what the child knows. This is a valid methodological p...

Abstract Against the backdrop of societal differentiation literacy, paper investigates spelling variation in digital written communication beyond binary paradigm standard and nonstandard. To this end, proposes a formal classification variants then focuses on socio-communicative functions these usage. Theoretically grounded notions register social indexicality , discusses how are metapragmatical...

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...

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...