Chapter 7 discusses liminality from a pragmatic point of view. All interactionally complex rituals take the participants through a threshold to some degree, in that the rights and obligations and related conventions of pragmatic behaviour holding for rituals tend to differ from their counterparts in ‘ordinary’ life. Yet, it is relevant to study fully-fledged liminal rituals with a sense of irreversibility. For example, ritual public apologies are liminal in the fully-fledged sense because the person who realises such ritual apologies passes a threshold with no return. Liminal rituals come together with strong metapragmatic awareness: if the moral order and the related frame of the ritual are violated, both the participants and the observers tend to become alerted and engage in intensive metapragmatic reflections. Chapter 7 will present a case study focusing on the liminal rite of workplace dismissal. Such dismissals represent typical liminal rituals in the very sense of the word: they change the life of the recipient and as such they are very meaningful and irreversible. Because of this, perceived ‘errors’ in the realisation of this ritual tends to trigger particularly intensive metapragmatic reflections and evaluations.

The notion of “context” is currently being deployed in Discourse Analysis within approaches that subscribe to its constitutive nature. Rather than being extraneous to talk and text, context is conceptualized as an integral part of discourse, in a mutually constitutive text-context relationship. This chapter will cover key insights from three influential and affiliated ways of analyzing context: context as dynamically and interactionally achieved; context as rooted in metapragmatic awareness; and context as historicized and multidimensional. The chapter will then illustrate how these three key insights manifest themselves in the framework of small stories research. After presenting these three features of context, the chapter will focus on two core issues at the forefront of current concerns, namely ambiguity in delineating “context,” and occurrences where what can be postulated as “relevant context” is not readily retrievable from textual data. Picking up on these issues, we argue that future research will need to address discourses and contexts becoming ever more fragmented, dispersed, and even disintegrated through new communication technologies. In this respect, an analytical focus on metapragmatic awareness may aid the identification of interactionally relevant features of context as well as of the (re)affirmation of participants’ shared meanings.

This final brief stage of the journey invites reflection on the various seminal, ground-breaking ideas and approaches introduced in this journey and on how they can be woven into a ‘postively eclectic’ view of what meaning in language is – a unique view that each reader can develop for themselves with the help of this introduction to ideas and to ways of thinking. It also addresses the role of metasemantics and metapragmatics in posing ‘foundational questions’ about meaning. It concludes with a dicussion of the future of meaning, in the context of some ‘big questions’: constraints on processing information imposed by the human brain, the intelligence–consciousness interface, and, generally, how to comprehend the human take on the world – the human way of comprehending it and organizing and conveying information. In short, it puts the theories and approaches discussed in this journey under the net of our human meaning.

This chapter investigates impoliteness in subliterary texts, namely in bilingual teaching material for learning languages. It takes the Colloquium Harleianum, one of the conversation manuals in the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (second to third century CE) as a corpus. The chapter studies both impoliteness forms and their evaluations from culture-internal speakers. The impoliteness forms, the metalanguage and the metapragmatic comments on the quarrel represented in this corpus are compared with quarrels represented in literary texts, mainly Roman Comedy (second to third century BCE) and the novel (second cetury CE). It relies on metapragmatic comments as the main entry to the emic evaluations of impoliteness forms and of offences present in the corpus. In this way, the chapter provides a diachronic perspective on ancient impoliteness in Latin by taking into account both literary and subliterary evidence. By dealing with teaching manuals, it provides a unique contribution on pragmatic competence for non-native speakers, and it offers insights on the etiquette norms for the elite, which is the perspective that the evidences in the corpus reflect.

Metapragmatic comments, that is, comments that reflect the understandings of speakers or lay observers regarding the ways and aims for which the language is used, are one of the main means of access to native ideas on im/politeness in corpus languages. This chapter analyses the metapragmatic comments on im/politeness that can be identified in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, as a mean to understand the Roman conceptions of im/politeness (that is, the emic perspective of this phenomenon), and the social and moral order underlying those conceptions. This approach facilitates a more detailed and integrated analysis of the speaker’s intentions and/or the interpretation of a particular utterance as polite (or impolite or overpolite) by the addressee, whether or not there are linguistic markers to indicate this intention.

The introduction lays out the major aims of the book.

This chapter deals with the status of meaning-generating processes, taking place in language use, in relation to human cognition. A basic assumption is that reflexive or metalinguistic awareness is one of the original evolutionary prerequisites for the development of human language, and that it plays a central role in all instances of producing and interpreting utterances. The chapter reviews the ways in which metalinguistic activity types and indicators of reflexive awareness have been accounted for in the past. It explores the relevance of the topic for a pragmatic understanding of social interaction, with special attention for cross-linguistic variability (and hence with implications for intercultural communication). Finally, it reflects on methodological problems involved in the study of the phenomena at hand, and perspectives for future research are briefly sketched.

This chapter provides an overview of the concept of “mediatization” and its different applications. It distinguishes “institutional,” “social constructionist” and “linguistic-anthropological” understandings of the concept. After defining and discussing each understanding, the chapter draws attention to how the linguistic-anthropological approach may be employed in discourse-analytical research. Specifically, the approach is argued to be highly amenable with a focus on metapragmatics. Much like a focus on metapragmatics reflects language users’ awareness of language use, mediatization may reflect their understanding of the nature of the communication they are engaged in. After providing several examples, the chapter discusses how discourse-analytic methods may further complement the development of mediatization frameworks. Looking ahead, these developments will need to take into account a surge in multimodal content, the increasingly global reach of communications, and ever-shifting social media potentials.

Researchers in linguistic anthropology and post-variationist sociolinguistics have over recent decades increasingly converged on a shared focus of attention: the unfolding real-time process of communicative activities that involve language – spoken/heard, written, digitally mediated – in concert with the other semiotic affordances that provide participants with the means to presume upon, and to (re)create, the very contexts in which forms of talk take place, with various effects in the here-and-now and beyond. Sociolinguists emerging from the confines of variationism have increasingly abandoned the operationalism and quasi-experimentalism of earlier work in favor of more ethnographically rich accounts that take note of the way that facts about sociophonetic variation not only reflect but also help to constitute identities also made manifest in other ways: through styles of dress, bodily practices, consumption patterns, etc. – a set of facts and interpretations often grouped by sociolinguists under the heading of “style.” Linguistic anthropologists, meanwhile, have been increasingly oriented to the way in which observed variation in language usage resolves itself into verbal (phonological, lexical, etc.) repertoires keyed to the interactional contours of recurring types of situation with recurring types of participant role – termed “registers.” Linguistic anthropologists have also been alert to the ways in which linguistic and semiotic resources that are by degrees regularized and presumed “normal” in some contexts (hence, “enregistered”) are, by that very fact, ripe for creative “recycling” and reuse in other contexts, with different effects. All of these disciplinary and transdisciplinary re-alignments, I argue, result from the introduction of a single centrally important analytic concept: indexicality. Introduced into modern linguistics by Jakobson and developed further by Jakobson’s student Silverstein, the concept of indexicality has enabled the recent co-alignment of erstwhile disciplinary forms of inquiry in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and seems to be the fulcrum for much of the work now emerging at the intersection of these and other fields, including applied linguistics.