Studies in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

Code-Switching in the Conversations Between the Turkish-English Bilingual Children in the Midlands in the UK

Seyit Gok — 2025-08-12

This study investigates code-switching (CS) among Turkish-English bilingual children in the Midlands, UK, examining its functions and implications. It explores how bilingual children use CS pragmatically and socially, as well as factors influencing their language choices. Grounded in bilingualism and CS frameworks, the research aims to enhance understanding of early bilingual communication.
Using a pragmatic analytical approach, the study examines naturally occurring dialogues recorded over three months, comprising approximately ten hours of conversation. Participants include children from Turkish-speaking households attending English-dominant schools, with two focal participants exemplifying diverse bilingual experiences. Analyses focus on intra- and inter-sentential CS and its functional roles.
Findings reveal that CS supports topic management, identity expression, and gap-filling, demonstrating strategic language use to navigate social dynamics and enhance coherence. CS reflects linguistic competence rather than deficiency, challenging negative perceptions.
This research uniquely links bilingual pragmatics and social identity within a migrant community, offering a context-sensitive analysis of children's language use. It highlights the need to view CS as a marker of linguistic sophistication, with implications for understanding bilingual development.
Limitations include a small sample and focus on one community. Future research could explore broader contexts and longitudinal patterns.

Saying 'No' Politely: The Use of Refusal Strategies by Moroccan EFL University Learners

Abdelaziz EL HAMMOUCHI — 2025-08-24

This study investigates the refusal strategies employed by Moroccan EFL university learners across a variety of social situations. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the research draws on data from Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) and Focus Group Interviews (FGIs) to explore how learners refuse requests, offers, invitations, and suggestions. The analysis reveals that indirect strategies are the most frequently used, significantly outnumbering direct and adjunctive strategies across the collected responses. Statistical tests confirm that this preference is consistent across all scenarios. Interview data further reinforce these results, showing that students tend to issue refusals when a situation is beyond their capacity or conflicts with personal or cultural values. Learners often opt for polite, indirect expressions to reduce the risk of face-threatening acts (FTAs) and maintain social harmony. These findings underscore the influence of sociocultural norms on pragmatic behaviour and provide valuable insights into interlanguage pragmatics. The study highlights the importance of integrating pragmatic instruction into EFL curricula to better equip learners with the communicative skills needed for effective interaction in real-life situations.

(Re)Defining heroism: A Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) analysis of a president’s speech

Jhonas Lumanlan — 2025-11-12

From a sociolinguistic perspective, language choice reveals a speaker’s ideologies. One among various sociolinguistic theories that could be relevant to this work is Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL), in which approach it is claimed that language is a resource of meaning situated in certain contexts. This study is an attempt at making use of such framework, aided by qualitative content analysis, to surface the ideologies of heroism in Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s 2023 National Heroes’ day speech. The researchers thematically analyzed the speech manuscript into a total of 6 themes: Heroes as historically significant figures; heroes of the past as part of the Filipino identity; breaking free from the traditional definitions of a hero; heroes as today’s ordinary men and women being products of their circumstances; that anyone can be a hero in their own way; and stories and recognition of everyday, modern and ordinary heroism. The 3 major process types, along with the other 3 minor types, were used to identify the extracts: Material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential processes. The significance of this work lies in its role in filling in the gaps in the academic literature surrounding the use of SFL as an approach in emerging conceptions from texts of sociopolitical relevance. Ultimately, this paper also brings to fore the relevance of semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics as tools towards making sense of national and local consciousness, conceptions, and experiences.

Negotiating Peace in Land and Maritime Border Agreements

Usman Bello — 2026-01-05

Border agreement documents are usually the end product of satisfactory negotiation between two or more parties. Thus, the written documents are technical representations of the resolutions of negotiation. They, therefore, must not only articulate these resolutions, but must do so in balanced and fair expressions. This paper examines how peace is negotiated in land and maritime border agreements through the register analysis of the documents. Being a Peace Linguistic study, the research draws insights from Halliday’s register analysis as well as Spencer Oatey’s (2000, 2008) rapport management theory in establishing how peace is achieved in border agreements through careful and deliberate choice of expressions. Data is drawn from four international boundary agreements. Common register in the documents is classified and analysed with respect to its peace significance in the exercise. Findings show that register of border agreements is defined by words of positive relationship, signifying rapport enhancement or repair. In the spirit of ensuring lasting resolution, the expressions of geospatial description of the contentious areas in such documents specify the true or negotiated border lines between parties. The study concludes that an effective border agreement document is a function of a register that repairs or elevates the rapport between parties in conflict.