It is commonly assumed that teasing is restricted to encounters among intimates or close acquaintances. As a result of examining initial interactions among speakers of English, however, this article shows that teasing also occurs between persons who are becoming acquainted. Analysis reveals that tease sequences unfold across three actions that constitute the tease as an invitation to intimacy: a teasable action on the part of the target, the tease proper and a moment of interactionally generated affiliation. Given teasing is one (...) way of criticising another, it constitutes a potential breach of tact or interactional propriety. In initial interactions, however, participants can construe this potential impropriety as an invitation to intimacy, as it involves the proposal of a shared ironic stance that may be either accepted or declined by the target of the tease. (shrink)

It is generally assumed in pragmatics that face is essentially a “socially attributed aspect of self”, and that politeness is one kind of facework, alongside other forms of facework such as impoliteness, mock impoliteness, mock politeness, self politeness and so on. In this paper, the assumed necessary link between face and im/politeness is questioned. Drawing from emic studies of face and im/politeness, it is argued that face and im/politeness should be studied, in the first instance, as distinct objects of study (...) in their own right. It is also suggested that drawing from a wider range of emic conceptualisations of face and im/politeness opens up aspects of interpersonal phenomena that have been relatively neglected in pragmatics to date, namely, the importance of relationships as well as the sets of expectancies that underpin evaluations of im/politeness, as distinct areas for theorisation and analysis. It is concluded that while the Goffmanian face paradigm has proven very productive in pragmatics, drawing from various other emic understandings affords further hitherto relatively under-explored analytical opportunities in the study of interpersonal phenomena. (shrink)

Public discourse about the COVID-19 that appears on Twitter and other social media platforms provides useful insights into public concerns and responses to the pandemic. However, acknowledging that public discourse around COVID-19 is multi-faceted and evolves over time poses both analytical and ontological challenges. Studies that use text-mining approaches to analyse responses to major events commonly treat public discourse on social media as an undifferentiated whole, without systematically examining the extent to which that discourse consists of distinct sub-discourses or which (...) phases characterize its development. They also confound structured behavioural data with unstructured user-generated data in their sampling methods. The present study aims to demonstrate how one might go about addressing both of these sets of challenges by combining corpus linguistic methods with a data-driven text-mining approach to gain a better understanding of how the public discourse around COVID-19 developed over time and what topics combine to form this discourse in the Australian Twittersphere over a period of nearly four months. By combining text mining and corpus linguistics, this study exemplifies how both approaches can complement each other productively. (shrink)