Not quite sure what happened on Tuesday! Better late than never?

1. This one has been around the social media block several times but it’s still worth a read, The Anglo-EU Translation Guide https://polish2english.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/55551980-anglo-eu-translation-guide1.pdf  Do you hear what I say? Very interesting? Do you almost agree? PDF below.

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2. Frank Heyworth died last month. Frank started work with the British Council, went on to be the Director-General of Eurocentres, co-founded Eaquals, for the last thirty years of his life worked tirelessly with the European Centre for Modern Languages in Graz, and was a good friend. Here’s Sarah Breslin’s interview with him on his (notional) retirement in 2019, in which he shares a great story about inkpots in Ghana!  https://youtu.be/bPw9EmRNTvk And here’s his Eaquals obituary https://www.eaquals.org/2025/01/16/remembering-frank-heyworth/

3. Here’s one from The Conversation, The weird psychology of airports by Steve Taylor from Leeds Beckett University https://theconversation.com/the-weird-psychology-of-airports-248357

Years ago, when I was doing my MA at Lancaster University, we did some work analysing conversations in a car between hitch-hiker and driver, which I think was presented as an example of a ‘pragmeme’ – a situation where the normal rules of conversation were relaxed, given the two participants were unlikely ever to meet again. Someone will know better than me, but I think Steve Taylor’s airport example is also a pragmeme. And forty years on, I still wonder how Chris Candlin obtained reliable data on hitch-hiker driver interactions!

4. Here’s a 2024 article on the topic, Pragmemes revisited: A theoretical framework by Alessandro Capone & Roberto Graci from the University of Messina https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1329291/full#h6

PDF below. This is a sit-down-with-a-cup-of-coffee one; here’s the abstract (and it’s an easier read than the abstract might suggest):

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures.

I wonder if Alessandro Capone is a distant relative of the famous Al?

5. And, finally, here’s a great piece from The New York Times, Read Your Way Through New York City https://tinyurl.com/2nxhjr8e Takes you there, it really does!