This paper reports on an examination of the actions that Spanish epistemic agents perform in order to question, challenge, undermine and/or destroy the epistemic personhood of an informer on Twitter, recently been renamed ‘X’. Relying on a corpus of reactions to information about sanitary… read more
In an interactive context like service encounters, humour becomes essential because of the positive feelings that it generates. These contribute to an amicable ambiance and tighten bonds of union. Hence, humour greatly impacts customer satisfaction, revisit intention and, ultimately, customer… read more
Ad hoc concept construction is regarded as a case of free pragmatic enrichment, so it is presented as a non-linguistically mandated process that is automatically accomplished during mutual parallel adjustment. Recent research suggests that this lexical pragmatic process may be marked and steered… read more
In relevance-theoretic pragmatics the lower-level or first-order explicature is a propositional form resulting from a series of inferential developments of the logical form. It amounts to the message the speaker communicates explicitly. The higher-level or second-order explicature is a… read more
Expressive adjectives or expressive expletives have been argued to voice the speaker’s attitude towards the referent of the noun with which they co-occur, even though the attitude may be felt to be expressed about the referent of another sentential constituent or the state of affairs… read more
This paper adopts a relevance-theoretic perspective to analyse how chirigotas – one of the types of bands in Cádiz carnival – exploit a series of verbal and visual comic elements in order to create or reinforce local identity: (i) the names of the bands, (ii) their attire, (iii) gestures and… read more
For communicated contents to be accepted by the audience, they have to pass the filters of epistemic vigilance mechanisms, which check the credibility and reliability of communicators and the information provided. Communicators may lack adequate evidence about the information they dispense. One of… read more
The category of insults comprises disparaging qualifying terms, derogatory epithets, racial/ethnic slurs and participle-like expletives. All of them channel speakers’ (negative) psychological states, so they are considered expressives. Despite the enormous interest that they have aroused,… read more