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Article published In:
The pragmatics of professional discourse
Edited by Winnie Cheng
[Pragmatics and Society 7:1] 2016
► pp. 105–140

Towards a pragmatic analysis of product discourse

Creative force and metapragmatic performance

| National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

This study addresses Chinese discourse creativity in product discourse within Taiwan’s creative industries. Product discourse not merely introduces creative products but also does it creatively. Based on a corpus of 20 examples, this paper proposes the notion of creative force, a chain of acts contributing to discourse creativity, and argues that five types of acting work together in the design of creativity exemplified in such discourse. They are acts of telling or invoking a story, constructing identity and stance, making multiple meanings, blending, and performing culture. This paper also investigates metapragmatic performance in relation to creative force, i.e., how creative discourse which performs creative force is made possible and acceptable in society. Three metapragmatic aspects are under scrutiny: shared knowledge, metalinguistic awareness, and indexicality. All in all, this study aims to further substantiate our understanding of creativity and discourse in pragmatic and metapragmatic terms.

Keywords: creativity and discourse, creativity in Chinese, creative force, metalinguistic awareness, shared knowledge, indexicality, metapragmatic performance, product discourse
Published online: 7 April 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.7.1.05tse
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