No abstract

Communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse are two important tasks for political actors who wish to secure relationships and advance models for civic behavior. Our goal in this study is to understand how political actors signal their desire to please addressees and advance political sociability by way of manifesting positive judgment towards others. On the basis of 241 utterances praising and complimenting others’ words and deeds, we identify the topics, patterns, and functions of these speech acts and the processes and struggles they evoke in Israeli public discourse. We conclude by discussing the role of positive evaluations in demarcating the boundaries of proper conduct in political communities and the ways the distinctive logic of politics is integrated with specific cultural speaking styles in influencing how members of the Israeli political community signal their appreciation and affect for other members’ skills, performances, and personalities.

No abstract

This paper proposes a research agenda for studying the building blocks of amicable communication and their role in fostering sociability between states. Against the backdrop of linguistic-pragmatic, international relations, and communication theories, it first theorizes the state as a communicating actor in social interactions and conceptualizes amicable actions and their potential to advance relations in interstate communication. On the basis of 2,180 amicable statements performed by a variety of international actors in a range of communicative contexts, a classification according to variations, intended goals, and prevalence of amicable actions is suggested. The findings show a preference to perform interstate communication through solidarity-oriented and expressive actions. Asserting friendship and thanking were found to be the most popular actions, frequently utilized by international actors in a range of ceremonial contexts. Paying respect and expressions of honor were found to be the most frequent strategy for showing one’s deference to the other’s sovereignty and autonomy. In the conclusions, we argue for the importance of studying the pragmatics of interstate communication and point to factors that need to be confronted in the future in order to answer the overarching question: Under what conditions do amicable actions achieve their ends?

Assuming that states can be perceived as social, intentional, and communicating actors, this paper brings a sociopragmatic perspective to the study of digital diplomacy by contrasting three states that are actively trying to appeal to the international community while maintaining freedom of action: Israel, Russia, and Turkey. We analyze how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of each state uses its Twitter account to interact with other actors in the international arena and manage face. Using quantitative content analysis, we examined 597 tweets in order to map their topics and pragmatic functions. We found that the three MFAs tweeted mostly about interstate cooperation and international matters (52%) and that the dominant function of their tweets was presenting the state's positive face (45%). However, the three accounts differed in their understanding of the digital platform and the interactional strategy they preferred to deploy in pursuing their foreign policy goals. Lastly, we demonstrate that Twitter is seen as a legitimate platform for acting within the international arena, and discuss how the framework of sociopragmatics reveals that although public diplomacy is addressed to foreign publics, its recipients are international actors. Thus, Twitter affords the implementation of a state foreign policy in addressing multiple audiences.