Chapter 4 examines social protocols in public discourse, representing the realm of ‘overly’ ordinary language use. The term ‘public discourse’ means both monologues and dialogues that take place in public, often through mediatised events or written (online) pieces which are available for, or even addressed to, members of the public. ‘Social protocols’ describe forms of language use associated with ‘politeness’ in public discourse specifically, where ‘politeness’ in the interpersonal sense is hardly needed, i.e., such forms at first sight may seem to be entirely ‘superfluous’ if not ‘redundant’. Because if this, while social protocols and mediatised public aggression (studied in Chapter 3) may appear to have little in common at first sight, interestingly both of them have an ‘unreasonable’ element. This sense of unreasonableness however dissolves once one looks at such forms of language use through the ritual perspective. As a case study, Chapter 4 examines the ritual conventions of social protocols in a corpus of Chinese public announcements made in the wake of a major social crisis.

This chapter sketches out some ways translation aids the circulation of crime fiction across cultures and literary systems, with examples from the early twentieth century and from more recent times. The importance of setting and ‘local colour’ is examined as a key factor in the popularity of certain writers and traditions across international borders, as are editorial and publishing decisions relating to such paratextual elements as titles, cover images and blurbs. One historical example comes from Mondadori’s series of gialli, which was enormously successful in Italy from the 1930s on and which included many translated texts. These works went on to influence local writers, resulting in the importation and adaptation of certain subgenres and tropes. A case study of translations into English of the enormously successful Montalbano novels of Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri provides the opportunity to investigate the kinds of choices translators and publishers make in preparing a text for a new audience and market. The analysis looks at the translation of dialect and non-standard language, culture-specific political and historical content and the value of translators’ notes.

Propelled by the third wave of variationist sociolinguistics, the present work argues that pragmatic and variationist inquiry are mutually enriching and fundamentally united. Relying on both traditions, I develop a general principle of language use and interpretation – briefly: utterances are evaluated according to not only their own semiotic character but also what sets them apart from that of alternative utterances that appear to offer a favorable mix of costs and benefits in context. I demonstrate that these principles underlie a wide range of phenomena observed in third-wave and pragmatics literature, with particular focus on two cases of social meaning rooted in semantically based inferences: (i) John McCain’s reference to Barack Obama as ‘that one’ in a 2008 US presidential debate; and (ii) the tendency for phrases of the form the Xs (e.g. the Democrats) to depict the referents as a bloc separate from the speaker in a way that bare plurals (e.g Democrats) do not (Acton 2019). As I will show, the perspective developed in this work makes principled predictions and leads us to expect to find complex and varied interactions across and within multiple dimensions of meaning.