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AbstractMany researchers in impoliteness studies have set themselves the task of determining, amongst other things, (i) what linguistic or non-linguistic phenomena can cause offence, and (ii) why people take offence. However, the reality of interaction clearly shows that, on many occasions, there appears to be a marked dissonance between the speaker and hearer in their evaluations of offensive language, even in locally situated interaction. More research is therefore needed to account for and explain why and how the hearer assigns a particularly offensive meaning to an utterance during the course of an interaction. With this aim, and by drawing on insight from what is referred to as "radical contextualism", in this study we discuss the possibility of looking at how interactants can arrive at their own (subjective) evaluations of impoliteness in ways that do not match up with the alleged intentions of the so-called offender. Drawing on a number of exchanges that involve such instances of taking offence, we will argue that the taking of offence should best be viewed as a process over which the hearer has a more active control. Accordingly, the paper contributes to current attempts at explaining the variability involved in the taking of offence.

This study provides an interpretive perspective on the linguistic landscape (LL) of ethnic Persian shops in the city of Sydney, Australia. Photographic data and ethnographic observations demonstrate how linguistic and cultural displays on ethnic Persian shops are organized in different frames which are driven by local symbolic markets. These frames are investigated through an analysis of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn on these ethnic premises. The study also illustrates that the trajectory of the Persian language and its semiotic resources as mediational tools frame the collective identity of the sign producers (social actors) and symbolic and cultural means that are activated in the LL of such ethnic shops. These framing devices promote minority languages, Persian in specific, as valuable resources and commodities in the multicultural context of Sydney, and point to the possible impact of those resources on the local political economy of language. In addition, the findings reinforce the view that patterns of multilingualism are not static and are influenced by a number of factors such as cultural, economic and linguistic resources which individuals and officials use in the public space.

AbstractIt goes without saying that as a pragmatic phenomenon, vagueness has over the past few years been a topic of extensive research. However, a huge gap still exists when it comes to the investigation of how vagueness is expressed across different languages and cultures. In the present study, we have put under scrutiny the pragmatic functions of 'sort of', a vague expression, in Persian conversation with a view to making cross-linguistic comparisons between different languages possible. Besides confirming the fact that the vague item 'sort of' enables interactants to fulfil a wide variety of functions in interactional settings, particularly in face-to-face interactions, the current study reveals that the expression in question can also serve to signal 'a moment of awkwardness' as well as the presence of 'inferable information'. With the former function, 'sort of' signals that the speaker is experiencing a feeling of inconvenience and embarrassment. When used as an inferable information signal, however, 'sort of' indicates that the utterance has been inferred from the previous or current exchange.