This paper investigates accounts justifying the closures of businesses found on public signs in Athens and London during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data for the study was drawn from a corpus of COVID-19-related public signage collected in the two cities during the first lockdown. The accounts used on these signs are analysed as acts of identity and, specifically, as discursive means deployed by the authors of the signs to project themselves and their businesses favourably. It is shown that the accounts used at the micro-level of discourse align to various degrees with the dominant discourses surrounding the pandemic at the macro-level and with the values these discourses draw upon. It is also shown that the accounts are used to reframe the public’s understanding of the closures and to construct identities congruent with the interests of the business owners, ensuring post-pandemic continuity.

Το βιβλίο αυτό αποτελεί μια σύγχρονη εισαγωγή στην Κοινωνιογλωσσολογία, στο επιστημονικό πεδίο της γλωσσολογίας που μελετά τη σχέση της γλώσσας με την κοινωνία και της κοινωνίας με τη γλώσσα, τους ποικίλους τρόπους με τους οποίους διεπιδρούν μεταξύ τους και επηρεάζουν ή προσδιορίζουν η μια την άλλη. Στα δεκαέξι κεφάλαια του τόμου καλύπτονται όλα τα κεντρικά ζητήματα που απασχολούν τη σύγχρονη Κοινωνιογλωσσολογία και αφορούν, μεταξύ άλλων, τη γλωσσική κοινότητα, τη γεωγραφική προέλευση, την κοινωνική τάξη, την εθνότητα, το φύλο, τη σεξουαλικότητα ή την ηλικία των ομιλητών/ομιλητριών, τις πολλαπλές ταυτότητές τους και τη λεκτική αλληλεπίδραση μεταξύ τους αλλά και τις αντιλήψεις τους για τη γλώσσα που χρησιμοποιούν οι ίδιοι και οι άλλοι, τα κειμενικά και πολιτισμικά πλαίσια της επικοινωνίας, τις μεθόδους της Κοινωνιογλωσσολογίας και τους τρόπους παρέμβασής της στα γλωσσικά δρώμενα. Κάθε κεφάλαιο αναφέρεται διεξοδικά σε δεδομένα και σχετικές έρευνες για τα ελληνικά και συνοδεύεται από ερωτήσεις (ασκήσεις και θέματα για συζήτηση) για εμβάθυνση.

The chapter starts by explaining the difference between Pragmatics and Semantics and their complementary roles within the study of meaning in language, explaining the role of context in the determination of utterance meaning. It introduces the basic concepts and research areas of Pragmatics with sections on deixis, presupposition, speech acts and conversational implicatures. These are followed by questions and exercises as well as suggestions for further reading.

This paper provides some new insights into the dual function of expressive speech acts discussed in pragmatic theory as either expressions of genuine emotions or conventionalised acts of courtesy. Drawing on the framework of interpersonal pragmatics, it analyses signs displayed on the doors of closed businesses in Athens and London during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. These closure signs are characterised by a heavy use of relational features, including four expressive speech acts, namely greetings, apologies, thanks and wishes, which form the focus of the analysis. The relational work performed by these speech acts reflects the social changes brought about by the pandemic as well as the business owners’ attempts to retain their customers. The expressive speech acts featured on the signs are evaluated against the norms set out by the genre of closure signs. The comparative angle of the study, on the other hand, links the discussion to norms related to the display of emotions and to the use of conventionalised formulae in the two countries under study, thus revealing culture-specific perspectives on the dual function of expressive speech acts.

This study examines request perspective, the least researched form of mitigation in requesting, while focusing on a type of request characterised by a strong preference for the speaker perspective in English and the hearer perspective in most other languages researched to date. It examines requests produced by 900 speakers from 9 different (inter)language groups: five groups of native speakers (English, German, Greek, Polish and Russian) and four groups of advanced learners of English as a foreign language (German, Greek, Polish and Russian L1s). While the learners used more conventionally indirect forms than the native speakers of the respective L1s, thus showing awareness of this English pragmatic norm, they retained a preference for the hearer perspective. These results suggest a reliance on pragmatic universals as an alternative explanation to pragmatic transfer, also illustrating the need to address less salient pragmatic features in English language teaching.

Η Κυπριανή Κοινή παρουσιάζει δομικές καινοτομίες οι οποίες μπορεί να υποστηριχθεί ότι αποτελούν αποτέλεσμα της μακρόχρονης επαφής της με την Κοινή Νέα Ελληνική (ΚΝΕ), την υψηλή ποικιλία στο διγλωσσικό περιβάλλον της ελληνοκυπριακής γλωσσικής κοινότητας. Μία από αυτές τις καινοτομίες είναι και οι περιφραστικοί συντελικοί χρόνοι, παρακείμενος και υπερσυντέλικος. Σε ό,τι αφορά τον υπερσυντέλικο, στην ΚΝΕ χαρακτιρίζεται κυρίως από την ερμηνεία του προτερόχονου στο παρελθόν, καθώς και από τη χρήση του για αναφορά στο μακρινό παρελθόν. Αντιθέτως, στην Κυπριακή Ελληνική (ΚΕ) ο υπερσυντέλικος εναλλάσσεται ελεύθερα με τον αόριστο (απλό συνοπτικό παρελθοντικό) και μπορεί να επιστρατεύεται για πραγματολογικούς σκοπούς, π.χ. για να τονίσει ένα σημαντικό σημείο σε μια αφήγηση, ενδεχομένως λόγω της σχετικά μεγαλύτερης επισημότητάς του. Σε πρόσφατη έρευνα έχει υποστηριχθεί ότι αυτό αποτελεί αποκλειστική καινοτομία της ΚΕ. Η παρούσα μελέτη επανεξετάζει αυτή την υπόθεση στη βάση της παρατήρησης ότι η ΚΝΕ παρουσιάζει παρόμοιες χρήσεις. Χρησιμοποιώντας αυθόρμητα προφορικά δεδομένα και δεδομένα από ερωτηματολόγια για τον χαρακτηρισμό προτάσεων ως προς τη γραμματικότητά τους ερευνούμε (α) αν η παρατηρούμενη ποικιλότητα καθορίζεται από κοινωνιογλωσσικούς παράγοντες και (β) ποια είναι τα νεοτερικά σημασιολογικά και πραγματολογικά χαρακτηριστικά του υπερσυντέλικου σε κάθε ποικιλία.

The Cypriot Greek koine displays structural innovations, arguably as a result of prolonged contact with Standard Greek (SG), the ‘H’ variety in the diglossic context of the Greek Cypriot speech community. Periphrastic perfect forms are among such innovations. As regards the Past Perfect, in Standard Greek it has the principal reading of past in the past, as well as a remote past use; in contrast, the Cypriot Greek Past Perfect is largely interchangeable with the Aorist (Simple Perfective Past) and it may be deployed for pragmatic purposes, e.g. to mark an important point in a narrative, possibly due to its relative formality. In recent work it was claimed that this innovation is specific to Cypriot Greek. This paper revisits this hypothesis on the basis of the observation that Standard Greek also seems to display partly similar patterns. Using naturalistic data and data from a grammaticality judgement task, we explore (a) whether such variation is sociolinguistically conditioned and (b) what the semantics and pragmatics of the innovative Past Perfect are in each variety.

This paper examines Greek invitations as first pair parts of an adjacency pair within the framework of Conversation Analysis. The focus of our research is on impromptu invitations issued via polar negative-interrogative constructions and the effects this type of con- struction has on the interactional organization of the whole invitation-response sequence. It is suggested that the issuing of the invitation by means of this particular syntactic choice has ramifications for the unfolding of the interaction with respect to sequencing and preference organization. Specifically, it is maintained that impromptu invitations issued by means of polar negative-interrogatives in Greek tend to trigger markedly delayed accep- tances. It is suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon lies in the “cross-cutting” preferences built in the construction when used to make impromptu invitations.

This study investigates developmental patterns in the ability of Greek foreign language learners to make offers. Drawing data from role-plays and retrospective verbal reports it attempts to explore the initial offer strategies and the degree of insistence that learners of three different proficiency levels (lower intermediate, intermediate and advanced) employ when performing offers in different social situations. The results suggest that, although there is a great deal of grammatical and pragma-linguistic development in regard to both initial offer strategies and syntactic modification devices, this does not guarantee concomitant levels of socio-pragmatic development (cf. Bardovi-Harlig 1999).

This study explores the pragmatic awareness of instructed L2 learners of Greek (economic migrants) by examining the extent to which these learners display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical violations. Methodologically, the study is largely based on the Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei (1998) study on pragmatic awareness. However, unlike the former, it does not compare SL and FL learners, but two groups of SL learners with different length of residence in Greece. Hence, it attempts to reach conclusions with respect to the impact of residence on the development of pragmatic awareness. It is shown that both learner groups consistently recognise grammatical violations with greater frequency than pragmatic ones and rate the former as more severe than the latter. It is concluded that for this particular learner sample, length of residence alone is not a sufficient condition for the development of pragmatic awareness. The suggestion is made that this is due at least partly to the special circumstances of the participants, which do not allow for sufficient opportunities for social contact with native speakers. The conclusions have important implications both for the role of the L2 setting in pragmatic development and for language instruction.

This study investigates developmental patterns in the requestive behavior of foreign language learners of Greek. Drawing data from a DCT it attempts to explore the head acts and external/internal modification devices that learners of three different proficiency levels (lower intermediate, intermediate and advanced) employ when performing requests in one formal (+P, +D) and two informal (−P, −D) situations. The results suggest that although several aspects of the learners’ pragmatic competence develop with increasing proficiency, even the advanced learners’ performance lags far behind native speakers in several respects. Furthermore, it is shown that these learners’ behaviors lend considerable support to both the developmental stages of pragmatic competence acknowledged in the relevant literature (0125 and 0005) and to Bialystok's model regarding the acquisition of pragmatic competence. What is more, it lends a great deal of cross-linguistic validity to earlier finding regarding the development of requests in the interlanguage of FL learners.

 

This paper is a study of the way in which native speakers of Modern Greek use deictic categories. Specifically, it provides a theoretical account of the cognitive procedures that motivate the choice of one deictic over its counter-part in a deictic contrast and the pragmatic effects that this particular choice seems to have in terms of the speech situation.