The present study is an exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development of expressions of gratitude, specifically, gratitude after receiving a favor. Expressing gratitude is a speech act that is taught at an early age and is commonly performed by native speakers of most languages. It is, thus, often assumed that learners can successfully say thank you in the target language. However, studies show that even advanced learners have difficulty adequately expressing gratitude. The objectives of the present study are: (a) to investigate how native speakers of Chinese and native speakers of English express gratitude as defined by length of speech and use of strategies; (b) to examine whether there is evidence of pragmatic development in the speech act behavior of expressions of gratitude among Chinese learners of English with the increase of the length of residence in the United States; and (c) to examine whether there is evidence of pragmatic influence from L1 Chinese in English expressions of gratitude among Chinese learners of English. The data were collected through a discourse completion task questionnaire. Subjects' responses were classified into eight thanking strategies. Descriptive and t-test analyses were conducted to identify the pragmatic differences that distinguished the behavior of the three English learner groups, which varied according to their length of stay in the United States, from that of Chinese and English native speakers. The results show that Chinese and English native speakers have different preferences for thanking strategies in the eight situations. They are significantly different in the length of speech and use of strategies. In addition, there is a positive effect of the length of residence in the United States on English learners' pragmatic development. The results also show evidence of pragmatic influence from L1 Chinese. Moreover, contextual variables, social status, familiarity and imposition, have a significant influence on the length of speech and the use of strategies for all subject groups.

[pt] Os atos de fala na clínica psicanalítica sintetizam a articulação empreendida no presente trabalho entre a vertente pragmática da filosofia da linguagem e a clínica psicanalítica, tendo como pano de fundo a obra freudiana. A teoria austiniana dos atos de fala se contrapõe a toda a filosofia da linguagem que a precedeu, ao afirmar que a linguagem não tem apenas uma função de representação do mundo ou do pensamento, tampouco de descrição ou relato de fatos. Falar é uma forma de agir no mundo e, como toda ação, produz efeitos, mudanças e transformações. Na clínica psicanalítica encontramos um reduto onde se pode perceber na prática e de forma clara esta característica da linguagem humana: nela a fala assume todo seu poder de ato, sendo o modo pelo qual as mudanças se produzem. / [en] With the speech acts in psychoanalytic clinic we summarize our link between the pragmatic point of view on language studies and psychoanalytic clinic, where we use Sigmund Freud s work as background. The Austin s theory of speech acts oppose the whole language philosophy which preceded him, saying that the language s function is not just to represent the world, the thoughts, or to describe facts. To speak is a way to act in the world, and as all acts it has effects, and starts transformations and changes. We can see clearly within psychoanalytic clinic this feature of human language, where the speech take all it s act power, being the way by which changes is made.

Magister Artium - MA / Media representations, embedded in reported media events, play a pivotal role in the propagation of beliefs, ideologies and establishing the status quo. The media events are given coverage by news reports on newsworthy topics, and in this case, politics. In this mini-dissertation, two particular media events, namely the Travel Ban instituted by President Donald Trump, and making Jerusalem the official capital of Israel, were analysed based on the different viewpoints writers portrayed on the same media events. Being contemporary political events related to the current President of America, it was evident that a standard news structure was common and spatial positioning of texts was a noticeable key feature of news report. The use of pronouns as the subject in headlines, including nominalisations, clause embedding and speech acts, clarified implicit and underlying meanings of the text. The linguistic choices made by the writers had a direct link to the text, which propagated Trump’s social and political ideologies positively and negatively based on these choices. The textual construct of four online news reports from four American-based newspapers presented both positive and negative revelations about Trump’s political aims. The stance of writers pronounced subjective views in three of the four the news reports. The contentious issue of Jerusalem proved to be sensitive one, in that the religious sensibilities played a major role in the dispute of Palestinian lands. The linguistic choices most utilised were non-cohesive use of grammar rules as opposed to other texts; linguistic techniques, such as the discourse of exclusion; and the choice of wording, particularly understood within the Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) framework.

La prolifération des données numériques a permis aux communautés de scientifiques et de praticiens de créer de nouvelles technologies basées sur les données pour mieux connaître les utilisateurs finaux et en particulier leur comportement. L’objectif est alors de fournir de meilleurs services et un meilleur support aux personnes dans leur expérience numérique. La majorité de ces technologies créées pour analyser le comportement humain utilisent très souvent des données de logs générées passivement au cours de l’interaction homme-machine. Une particularité de ces traces comportementales est qu’elles sont enregistrées et stockées selon une structure clairement définie. En revanche, les traces générées de manière proactive sont très peu structurées et représentent la grande majorité des données numériques existantes. De plus, les données non structurées se trouvent principalement sous forme de texte. À ce jour, malgré la prédominance des données textuelles et la pertinence des connaissances comportementales dans de nombreux domaines, les textes numériques sont encore insuffisamment étudiés en tant que traces du comportement humain pour révéler automatiquement des connaissances détaillées sur le comportement.L’objectif de recherche de cette thèse est de proposer une méthode indépendante du corpus pour exploiter automatiquement les communications asynchrones en tant que traces de comportement générées de manière proactive afin de découvrir des modèles de processus de conversations,axés sur des intentions de discours et des relations, toutes deux exhaustives et détaillées.Plusieurs contributions originales sont faites. Il y est menée la seule revue systématique existante à ce jour sur la modélisation automatique des conversations asynchrones avec des actes de langage. Une taxonomie des intentions de discours est dérivée de la linguistique pour modéliser la communication asynchrone. Comparée à toutes les taxonomies des travaux connexes,celle proposée est indépendante du corpus, à la fois plus détaillée et exhaustive dans le contexte donné, et son application par des non-experts est prouvée au travers d’expériences approfondies.Une méthode automatique, indépendante du corpus, pour annoter les énoncées de communication asynchrone avec la taxonomie des intentions de discours proposée, est conçue sur la base d’un apprentissage automatique supervisé. Pour cela, deux corpus "ground-truth" validés sont créés et trois groupes de caractéristiques (discours, contenu et conversation) sont conçus pour être utilisés par les classificateurs. En particulier, certaines des caractéristiques du discours sont nouvelles et définies en considérant des moyens linguistiques pour exprimer des intentions de discours,sans s’appuyer sur le contenu explicite du corpus, le domaine ou les spécificités des types de communication asynchrones. Une méthode automatique basée sur la fouille de processus est conçue pour générer des modèles de processus d’intentions de discours interdépendantes à partir de tours de parole, annotés avec plusieurs labels par phrase. Comme la fouille de processus repose sur des logs d’événements structurés et bien définis, un algorithme est proposé pour produire de tels logs d’événements à partir de conversations. Par ailleurs, d’autres solutions pour transformer les conversations annotées avec plusieurs labels par phrase en logs d’événements, ainsi que l’impact des différentes décisions sur les modèles comportementaux en sortie sont analysées afin d’alimenter de futures recherches.Des expériences et des validations qualitatives à la fois en médecine et en analyse conversationnelle montrent que la solution proposée donne des résultats fiables et pertinents. Cependant,des limitations sont également identifiées, elles devront être abordées dans de futurs travaux. / The proliferation of digital data has enabled scientific and practitioner communities to createnew data-driven technologies to learn about user behaviors in order to deliver better services and support to people in their digital experience. The majority of these technologies extensively derive value from data logs passively generated during the human-computer interaction. A particularity of these behavioral traces is that they are structured. However, the pro-actively generated text across Internet is highly unstructured and represents the overwhelming majority of behavioral traces. To date, despite its prevalence and the relevance of behavioral knowledge to many domains, such as recommender systems, cyber-security and social network analysis,the digital text is still insufficiently tackled as traces of human behavior to automatically reveal extensive insights into behavior.The main objective of this thesis is to propose a corpus-independent method to automatically exploit the asynchronous communication as pro-actively generated behavior traces in order to discover process models of conversations, centered on comprehensive speech intentions and relations. The solution is built in three iterations, following a design science approach.Multiple original contributions are made. The only systematic study to date on the automatic modeling of asynchronous communication with speech intentions is conducted. A speech intention taxonomy is derived from linguistics to model the asynchronous communication and, comparedto all taxonomies from the related works, it is corpus-independent, comprehensive—as in both finer-grained and exhaustive in the given context, and its application by non-experts is proven feasible through extensive experiments. A corpus-independent, automatic method to annotate utterances of asynchronous communication with the proposed speech intention taxonomy is designed based on supervised machine learning. For this, validated ground-truth corpora arecreated and groups of features—discourse, content and conversation-related, are engineered to be used by the classifiers. In particular, some of the discourse features are novel and defined by considering linguistic means to express speech intentions, without relying on the corpus explicit content, domain or on specificities of the asynchronous communication types. Then, an automatic method based on process mining is designed to generate process models of interrelated speech intentions from conversation turns, annotated with multiple speech intentions per sentence. As process mining relies on well-defined structured event logs, an algorithm to produce such logs from conversations is proposed. Additionally, an extensive design rationale on how conversations annotated with multiple labels per sentence could be transformed in event logs and what is the impact of different decisions on the output behavioral models is released to support future research. Experiments and qualitative validations in medicine and conversation analysis show that the proposed solution reveals reliable and relevant results, but also limitations are identified,to be addressed in future works.

Yiwen Zhan defends a new account of the pragmatics of assertion, according to which assertions are agents’ performative speech acts of commitment to truth. He explains how such a pragmatic approach can be fitted into Fregean context and account for the force–content relation, non-assertoric contents, context-sensitivity, constitutive norms, belief and the dynamics in discourse, and other related problems.

To gain a better understanding of intercultural communication, it is relevant to study speech acts not only in different languages but also across different language varieties. Seeing as speech act studies are said to have suffered from Anglocentrism there is a necessity to include nonwestern cultures (Wierzbicka, 1985:145). The current study seeks to gain an understanding of the understudied speech act of congratulations in two different varieties of English (American and Indian). In addition, to gain further insights and move away from the aforementioned Anglocentrism, Peninsular Spanish will also be investigated. The questions that have guided this research are: 1) What type of congratulation strategies do the respondents report using? 2) To what extent do the variables of power and social distance seem to influence the congratulation performance? 3) To what extent are there similarities and differences between the respondents with respect to the reported congratulation strategies? To identify the strategies, a modified version of Elwood’s (2004) taxonomy on congratulations was used. Data was gathered through Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) completed by 90 respondents from North America, India and Spain offering congratulations in nine different situations. The results indicated that different strategies are applied by the groups depending on situation and/or variables. For instance, North Americans and Spaniards are more likely to express happiness and Indians are more likely to offer good wishes.

Claims of insufficient knowledge, such as I don’t know or no idea, are observable in a variety of contexts in spoken interaction. This discourse analytic study focuses on how six murder suspects in police interrogations formulate claims of insufficient knowledge and what spoken strategies police officers employ in responding to them. The data consists of audio-recorded transcripts of six police interrogations carried out in English, which resulted in a corpus of 170 115 word tokens, featuring 287 claims of insufficient knowledge in total, with the most frequently used one being I don’t know. Six different strategies of how police officers manage claims of insufficient knowledge were identified. The study also provides examples of the interactional outcome of the strategies utilized. The findings reveal that close-ended questions were deployed twice as much as open-ended questions, even though open-ended questions usually result in more informative responses, which one would expect to be a goal of police interrogations.

The pioneers and settlers of the Oregon Territory were not of one ilk. They came from various places and brought their separate speech patterns with them. This study sought to identify which major North American English dialect was present in the first half of the 20th century in Oregon. Analysis relied on the descriptions for the Southern, Northern, Midlands, and Western dialects. Some dialect features have acoustic measurements attached to their descriptions, and others do not. The analytical process was based on acoustic measurements for vowel classes and individual tokens, as well as global observations about the place of a particular class means within the larger vowel system. Findings indicate weak presence of Southern and Western speech patterns. The Northern and Midlands dialects were present, but they were not advanced. No single dialect predominated. Part of the process attempted to find a dialect diagnosis to help determine a one-step indicator as to which dialect may be present. Observations implied that the front/back relation of /e/ and /o/ is a reliable dialect indicator.

This thesis examines how social distance in terms of different relationships affects the usage of linguistic resources, with a focus on the Spanish region Andalusia. The aim is to investigate how relationships between different interlocutors affect language, and particularly what different strategies of politeness are being used, and how these differ regarding each interlocutor presented. For the investigation, there are two main types of speech acts used: invitation and request. 30 native and residential Andalusians have participated in the investigation and answered a survey concerning several social situations. The results show that indirect types of politeness strategies are in general more produced when the social distance is extensive. Furthermore, the results of the investigation indicate that politeness strategies can also differ between interlocutors that do not reflect an exceeding social distance. The results presented in this thesis contribute to the research field of sociolinguistics with focus on how social distance affect the usage of politeness in the Andalusian region, which will be useful for making comparisons between different regions in the Spanish speaking world.

This thesis is conducted as a descriptive single case study to establish empirical knowledge regarding how securitisation is expressed in discourse by the Swedish policymaking elite, in other words “securitising actors”. The thesis takes an ontological approach of interpretivism with a theoretical approach of securitisation theory. Further, by utilising a methodological approach of an inductive method to empirically analyse 44 collected speeches from Folk och Försvars annual national conference and the annual foreign declaration in order to analyse what prominent themes emerged from the discourse. The analysis was conducted through a discourse analysis by applying two analytically driven questions derived from securitisation theory. This is in order to analyse how securitisation was expressed by the securitising actors, and what motivating factors could be identified for the shift from non-alignment to military-alignment in Swedish foreign and security policy. The result of the analysis indicated that with an ongoing security concern in Sweden’s immediate neighbourhood, securitisation was expressed as focusing on an increased national defence. Along with indicating a conflict of interests in Swedish foreign and security policy through the conflict of ideals and interests by breaking Sweden’s long-term tradition of military non-alignment. By this, this thesis aims to contribute to knowledge and to the overarching literature pertaining to discourse and shifts in Swedish foreign and security policy.