Journal of Pragmatics Research

From Identity to Emotion: The Institutional Production of “Being Chinese” in Hong Kong Schooling

Ka Hang Wong — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article analyses how national belonging is constructed in post-2019 Hong Kong education policy through three official documents: the Citizenship and Social Development Curriculum and Assessment Guide (Secondary 4–6) (2021), the Curriculum Framework of National Security Education in Hong Kong (2025), and the Values Education Curriculum Framework (2026). Drawing on a historiographical approach to critical discourse studies, it examines how presupposition and affective evaluation operate as key mechanisms in the normalisation of national identity. The analysis shows that deictic and possessive formulations such as “our country” presuppose students’ inclusion within a Chinese national collective, rendering belonging implicit and taken-for-granted. In parallel, affective lexis associated with pride, obligation, and moral attachment constructs an explicitly evaluative orientation towards the Chinese nation. The article argues that national belonging is produced through a combination of presupposed inclusion and affective alignment. It contributes to scholarship on discourse and education in Hong Kong by extending analysis beyond political speech to curriculum policy, highlighting education as a central site of identity formation in the post-2019 policy landscape.

Managing Emergency Talk with Child Callers: A Conversation Analysis of Operator–Child Dialogues in 911 Calls

Sandina Tasya Aulia, Agwin Degaf, Layli Hamida, Agustinus Hary Setyawan — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Children’s emergency calls are high-risk institutional encounters in which fear, limited communicative ability, and the need for rapid response occur simultaneously, yet the interactional participation of child callers in actual 911 conversations remains underexplored. This article examines how operators and child callers organize emergency talk and how conversational structures support the production of usable information under conditions of emotional pressure. The analysis draws on three selected 911 calls from the True 911 Calls YouTube channel involving callers between 4 and 12 years old. The age range is treated as a descriptive characteristic of the data rather than as a single developmental category; each call is examined as an individual interactional case before recurring patterns are identified across the data. The recordings were transcribed using Jeffersonian conventions and analyzed through Conversation Analysis, focusing on turn-taking, adjacency pairs, sequence organization, preference organization, and repair mechanisms. The findings show that the calls remain institutionally organized despite hesitation, emotional expressions, and incomplete responses. Adjacency pairs are the most prominent pattern, followed by preference organization, turn-taking, repair mechanisms, and sequence organization. These practices enable operators to obtain, clarify, and organize emergency information while accommodating children’s interactionally displayed difficulties. Future research should compare different developmental age groups and combine Conversation Analysis with interactional sociolinguistics to examine broader social and institutional contexts.

How Far from Genocide? The Semiotic Construction of African Foreign Nationals as Existential Threats in South Africa

Peter Junior Tshetu — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

South Africa has experienced recurrent violence against African foreign nationals for more than three decades, while organized anti-migrant movements since 2021 have shifted hostile rhetoric from the political margins to the center of public discourse. This study argues that the language used to describe African foreign nationals constitutes dangerous speech that constructs them as existential threats and creates conditions conducive to collective violence. Drawing on Susan Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Framework (DSF), Saussurean syntagmatic and associative meaning relations, and George Stanton’s staged model of genocide, the study pursues three objectives: to identify the discursive construction of African foreign nationals as existential threats; to determine the prevalence of the five dangerous-speech hallmarks; and to assess South Africa’s position on Stanton’s genocide continuum. The corpus comprises 2,324 social media posts from X and Facebook, together with 214 YouTube news segments relating to the activities of Operation Dudula, the March and March movement, and the MK Party between 2021 and 2026. The findings reveal the presence of all five dangerous-speech hallmarks, with dehumanization emerging as the most frequent (60.8%) and threats to women and children the least frequent (27.6%). These patterns are realized through identifiable linguistic mechanisms, including derogatory labels, metaphors of disease and infestation, criminality modifiers, and expulsive imperatives. The study introduces the Dangerous Speech–Genocide Escalation (DSGE) model, which integrates linguistic analysis with the DSF and Stanton’s framework. Applied to South Africa, the model indicates that the country is not experiencing genocide but has progressed significantly along the pre-genocidal pathway, highlighting the urgent need for preventative intervention.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Analysis of Criticism in COVID-19 Responses: KompasTV vs. CNN YouTube Channels

Hayuning Sekar Damarratri, Ni Wayan Sartini — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

YouTube comment sections have become important platforms for public discourse, especially during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, where users often criticise government policies. Due to the differing cultural orientations of Indonesia (high-context) and the United States (low-context), netizens from each country are expected to use distinct pragmatic strategies when expressing criticism online. However, comparative studies of criticism in social media between Indonesian and American contexts remain limited. This study examines the forms and pragmatic strategies of criticism used by Indonesian netizens on Kompas TV and American netizens on CNN in response to their governments' handling of COVID-19. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyses 200 critical comments (100 from each channel) selected from the ten most engaged posts per account. Comments were classified using Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary speech acts and analysed with Brown & Levinson’s politeness theory to identify strategies for mitigating face-threatening acts. The equivalence method (Sudaryanto, 2015 was used to interpret the linguistic data within broader socio-cultural contexts. The findings are expected to reveal distinct patterns of directness and indirectness between Indonesian and American netizens, reflecting their cultural values. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of criticism in digital communication and cross-cultural pragmatics and offers practical insights for media practitioners and linguists interested in online public discourse.

Exploring the Application of ADDIE Teaching Model in English Learning through a Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Arie Yuandani, I Ketut Suardana, Ni Nyoman Ayu Tri Hidayanti, I Made Juliarta — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The research found that a great number of second-semester students of Pharmacology at Bali Dwipa University have problems with English equitation. The phenomenon triggered the researcher to teach English with the ADDIE teaching model. This research would like to explore the advantages and disadvantages of ADDIE application in English learning at Pharmacology from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. This research uses a qualitative case study to combine SFL and ADDIE theories in English teaching and learning. The research uses fifteen second-semester students of the Pharmacology Program, Bali Dwipa. Year 2025/2026. The research shows that ADDIE has positive impacts for teaching and learning English realized with advantages and disadvantages. From Field point of view, the advantage is that students can practice directly and get training from the teacher. However, the disadvantage can be seen from different language typologies. From tenor point of view, the advantage can be found in the high social interaction between the teacher and the students. From Mode point of view, one of the advantages can be seen from the use of both Indonesian and English. The result of this research gives a positive contribution to teaching and learning and SFL, so teachers can use ADDIE in appropriate subjects. The result of this research is expected to be able to be used as an applied linguistics reference for the following research.

Gendered Metapragmatic Evaluation of Women's Institutional Participation: The Mori Controversy in Japan

Wiwik Retno Handayani — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Women’s institutional participation can become an object of metapragmatic evaluation concerning communicative efficiency, speaking behavior, and appropriateness. This study examines how women’s participation was evaluated and contested in the controversy surrounding Yoshiro Mori’s 2021 remarks about women and institutional meetings in Japan. It asks how participation was evaluated, what norms and gendered social meanings were indexed through these evaluations, and how the evaluative categories were subsequently contested and redirected toward Mori’s own discourse and institutional position. The study employs qualitative sociopragmatic documentary analysis of ten publicly available documents covering 3–24 February 2021, comprising six core and four contextual materials. Metapragmatics provides the primary analytical framework, supported by indexicality and language ideology, while face and repair are used specifically to interpret the apology sequence. The analysis shows how women’s participation was associated with meeting duration, competitive speaking, and a reported orientation toward speaking-time regulation. In contrast, particular women were positively evaluated when their speech was represented as concise, focused, and bounded. This evaluative distinction was subsequently contested through #wakimaenaionna #わきまえない女, after which attention shifted toward Mori’s own discourse and institutional position. The study contributes to sociopragmatics by showing how gendered conditions of legitimate institutional participation can be constructed through successive evaluations and contested through recursive shifts in the object of evaluation. The findings are interpreted within the evidentiary limits of the documentary corpus.