Michael Hall’s blog

Backchanel and Japanese Language

2008-04-10T20:17:39Z

The article we read for Thursday was really interesting to me because it is something that I have experienced first-hand. While studying abroad in Japan the use of the subtle grunt, "nn", to signify one's agreement or attention during a conversati...

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Turn-taking; An opinion

2008-04-10T20:11:40Z

In the article that we read for Tuesday the author briefly mentioned the Native American custom of using pauses between turns of taking the floor. These pauses, which I would think would be quite discomforting to most Americans, are something that...

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Ambiguous Implicatures

2008-04-04T14:27:56Z

So thinking about the many different ways implicatures are used brought to mind somewhat of a correlation between them and politeness. More specifically how people tend to use the most ambiguous implied meaning when they have to tell someone somet...

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Implicature

2008-04-04T14:15:02Z

So I am wondering if anyone else has the problems with implied meaning, via texting, that I have encountered. I have a particular friend who does everything in her power not to have a normal phone conversation and insists on texting only. To say t...

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How are you today?

2008-03-28T14:21:02Z

So I am curious to know what you all think about where this saying (how are you today?) would fit within the Politeness Principle. The reason I ask is that this is something that everyone says sometime to someone during their daily activities. But...

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The modesty maxim in Japanese

2008-03-28T14:16:03Z

Reading about this maxim made me think of a funny experience I had when studying abroad in Japan. In Japanese society it is somewhat mandated, through social constructs, that modesty reign supreme when one receives any type of compliment. If someo...

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Classifying speech acts

2008-03-21T16:57:24Z

So when doing the homework for chapter 17 I found something I disagree with concerning classifying speech acts. On the fourth exercise we are asked to classify some lexical items into as many categories to which we seem them belonging. So for "com...

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What is the "weekend"?

2008-03-21T16:43:42Z

So I had an instance yesterday during a conversation where what is understood to be the "weekend" was not the same between me and the person to which I was talking. I was talking to my neighbor and we were discussing the nice weather yesterday and...

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Test question

2008-02-29T16:18:31Z

On the test we had to identify: The adviser keeps tabs on her students (or something like that). I said this was an idiom because you can't modify it as in: keeps many tabs on; nor can you change it as: keeps files on. To me this would make it los...

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Metaphoric Phrases

2008-02-29T16:08:53Z

I was talking with a classmate about the exam and we were discussing Idioms and Metaphors. We've learned that one of the aspects of metaphors is that they translate well into other languages. I am now studying Spanish and have learned some metapho...

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