Grounded in the cognitive approach to speech act theory, whereby the boundaries between speech act categories are perceived as fuzzy, resulting in their directness/ indirectness being viewed as a matter of degree, the paper investigates the ambiguity of indirect speech acts found in the discourse of customer testimonials. The analysis is based on a corpus of 150 customer testimonials published on the home pages of 7 retailing companies offering their products online. The study reveals some interesting patterns in the persuasive/promotional use of (often ambiguous) micro speech acts contributing to the realisation of the macro-act of praising. It then attempts to rationalise customer testimonials as acts of boasting performed by organisations using customer quotes as word-of-mouth tools.

Many performing artists in the interwar period in Poland assumed stage names, which were considered a tool of promoting one’s image, but also served other functions, such as the concealment of identity. Over two hundred such pseudonyms — together with the respective artists’ birth names — have been collected and analysed in the article. Approximately in the case of half of them was the original given name retained, and only the surname underwent a change. The comparison of the assumed names with the real ones shows that many names were shortened, and/or made to sound foreign or exotic. Minority surnames — Jewish/German, Russian, Ukrainian — were frequently made to sound Polish, while the Polish ones were foreignised (to make them look English, Italian, French) or vaguely exoticised.