bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reanalysis of contrastive -wa in Japanese
Authors: Yamaguchi Toshiko
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the behavior of contrastive –wa in Japanese written discourse. While supporting its local nature (Clancy and Downing 1987), the paper argues, based on a survey of newspapers, that localness alone is not sufficient to understand the nature of contrast. It proposes that the use of contrastive –wa is motivated by how the writer perceives the world, or what Chafe (1994) calls ‘conscious experience’. We propose literal opposition, evaluation, association, and conflict as its main components. In the final part, the paper relates the results to the recent study on Contrastive Topic (Lee 1999, 2000, 2003), stating that the CT-approach is still unable to account for the entire range of phenomena discovered. The paper suggests that the discrepancies arise because of the fact that natural data integrates the writer’s context-specific intentions, to which priority is not given in formalistic approaches.
Cognitive efficiency
Authors: Kang’ethe-Iraki Frederick
Published: February 2015

Sheng is a variety of Kiswahili that is spoken by young persons, especially from the economically challenged neighbourhoods of Nairobi. The emergence and pervasiveness of the idiom can be explained by cognitive as well as social parameters. Confronted with several languages in Nairobi, a young mind is likely to weave a compromise idiom from the linguistic inputs available. This might be an explanation for the emergence of Sheng. Once acquired, the language could now be used to include or exclude. This discussion attempts to provide an overview of the linguistic structure of Sheng and hypothesize on reasons for its emergence.
Styles and stereotypes
Authors: Bucholtz Mary
Published: February 2015

The article examines how two Laotian American teenage girls in a multiracial California high school take divergent pathways through two contrasting stereotypes of Southeast Asian Americans: The model–minority nerd and the dangerous gangster. The two girls, both first-generation immigrants, each draw on contrasting linguistic and youth-cultural practices to align themselves to some degree with one of these stereotypes while distancing themselves from the other. The absence of an ethnically marked variety of Asian American English does not prevent the construction of Asian American identities; instead, speakers make use of locally available linguistic resources in their everyday speech practices, including African American Vernacular English and youth slang, to produce linguistic and cultural styles that position them partly inside and partly outside of the school’s binary black/white racial ideology. The article argues that linguistic resources need not be distinctive either between or within ethnic groups in order to produce social identities.
The discursive emergence of the cultural actor
Authors: Urciuoli Bonnie
Published: February 2015

This commentary compares and discusses the ways that discourse analyses by He, Kang and Lo, this volume, demonstrate the indexical, contingent, complex and ongoing nature of cultural process, manifest at the micro-level of ordinary interaction.
Leadership and managing conflict in meetings
Authors: Holmes Janet , Marra Meredith
Published: February 2015

There is extensive literature describing the characteristics of a good leader in the area of organisational communication and business management. However, the research tends to be based on secondary, survey or reported data, typically interviews and questionnaires. Moreover, the predominant image of a “good” leader tends to be a charismatic, inspirational, decisive, authoritative, ‘hero’. The Language in the Workplace database provides a large corpus of authentic spoken interaction which allows examination of how effective leaders behave in a wide range of face-to-face interactions at work, and identifies a diverse range of leadership styles.

The analysis reveals that effective leaders select from a range of strategies available to challenge, contest or disagree with others, paying careful attention to complex contextual factors, including the type of interaction, the kind of community of practice or workplace culture in which they are operating, and the relative seriousness of the issue involved. The analysis identifies four distinct strategies which leaders use to deal with potential conflict. These strategies lie along a continuum from least to most confrontational: Conflict avoidance; diversion; resolution through negotiation; and resolution by authority. The findings suggest that good leaders “manage” conflict: i.e. they choose strategies which address both their transactional and relational goals in order to achieve a desirable outcome.
Regulation of behavior and attention in Estonian, Finnish, and Swedish peer interaction
Authors: De Geer Boel , Tulviste Tiia , Mizera Luule
Published: February 2015

The aim of this study is to compare the regulatory speech used by Estonian, Finnish, and Swedish kindergarten children. 62 dyads with children of 3-6 years were videotaped during play. All regulatory speech was coded according to play situation (game play or free play), focus of regulation (behavior or attention), addressee (peer or both), sentence form, pragmatic form, and outcome (response). The results confirm earlier studies and show a more symmetrical interaction in the Swedish group (S) than in the Estonian (E) and Finnish (F) groups. E and F were found to be more controlling than S, both in behavior and in attention regulation. Further, E and F were more direct in regulation, using imperatives as orders and preventing utterances, rather than declaratives or questions, which were most frequent in the S data. Although the outcomes of peer regulation were mainly compliance in all groups, S more often negotiated regulation. E and F were more often silent following regulation.
Laughter in Bill Clinton’s My life (2004) interviews
Authors: O’Connell Daniel C. , Kowal Sabine
Published: February 2015

Two types of laughter of Bill Clinton and his interviewers – as an overlay of words spoken laughingly and laughter of the ha-ha sort - were investigated. The corpus consisted of 13 media interviews, all of which took place after the publication of his book My life (2004). Bill Clinton’s laughter was found to be dominantly an overlay of words spoken laughingly, whereas his interviewers’ laughter was dominantly of the ha-ha sort. In general, ha-ha laughter occurred as interruption or back channeling 30 % of the time and hence did not necessarily punctuate speech during pauses at the end of phrases and sentences as claimed by Provine (1993). Analyses of the topics laughed about indicated that Bill Clinton laughed mainly about his personal problems and his personal life, whereas his interviewers laughed mainly about politics and Clinton’s book. Accordingly, Bill Clinton’s laughter in these interviews was peculiarly monological and self-absorbed: It was generally not shared with the interviewers, either simultaneously or successively, in a genuinely contagious and dialogical fashion. Laughter did not follow upon “banal comments,” as Provine (2004: 215) has claimed, nor reflect either the “nonseriousness” claimed by Chafe (2003a, b) or the uncensored spontaneity noted by Provine (2004: 216). Instead, laughter reflected in every instance the personal perspectives of both Bill Clinton and his interviewers and was used, especially by Clinton, as a deliberate, sophisticated, and rhetorical device.
“You are not allowed to pull someone’s tail!” a cross-cultural comparison of socio-moral comments in Estonian and Swedish peer interaction
Authors: De Geer Boel , Tulviste Tiia
Published: February 2015

The study compared the spontaneous use of verbal comments on socio-moral behavior in 20 Estonian and 22 Swedish kindergarten peer dyads during free play situations. All comments on Moral and Social- conventional rules were coded according to Piotrowski’s (1997) model, as well as according to outcomes (agreement, rejection, negotiation or silence). We found that Swedish children were more active in making socio-moral comments than the Estonian children, by commenting more on rules of Rights, Harm to others and Miscellaneous conventional rules. Both the Estonian and the Swedish children made more comments referring to social-conventional than to moral rules. As to outcomes, agreement was the most frequent type in the Swedish data, whereas silence dominated in the Estonian group. Also, the Estonian children rejected both moral and social-conventional rules more often than the Swedish children. Previous research in family dinner conversations in Estonia and Sweden has suggested a more egalitarian interaction pattern in the Swedish homes as well as daycare institutions and schools than in the Estonian equivalents (De Geer et al. 2002; Tulviste et al. 2002). A high amount of comments on socio-moral behavior, particularly comments on rights and harm to others, can be claimed to a further support for this claim.
A relevance theoretic analysis of Not that sentences
Authors: Delahunty Gerald P.
Published: February 2015

Not that sentences (NTSs), like the one in the title, have been little studied. This paper, based on a corpus of authentic instances of the form, provides the first thorough examination of the interpretations assigned to NTSs in context and an account for those interpretations. The brief version of the account is that the NTS structure encodes procedural instructions to the effect that NTSs are to be interpreted as the rejection of conclusions derived from contextual assumptions.
Turn-taking in Japanese television interviews
Authors: Tanaka Lidia
Published: February 2015

Despite interviewers having a wide range of strategies to elicit talk, English language interviewers overwhelmingly use syntactic questions. In contrast, most turns in Japanese semi-formal television interviews end in non-interrogative forms, and other methods are used to achieve smooth turn yielding. This study looks at the interviewers’ turns and examines how interviewees recognize turn-yielding. It argues that interviewers prefer using interviewing strategies other than canonical question forms to avoid any possible FTA (face threatening act).
Vocatives
Authors: Axelson Elizabeth
Published: February 2015

This paper takes a critical interactional sociolinguistic approach to examine the construction of interculturality (e.g., Nishizaka 1995; Mori 2003) through the use of vocatives in the discourse of a multi-cultural graduate student project group at a large American university. Interviews and descriptive information contextualize the analysis to demonstrate that the use of vocatives achieves a tight linking of inclusion but also inequality in the group talk that involves the Japanese member. The group’s vocatives show a shared interest in bringing the Japanese member into the interaction, but they also construct unequal rights to the floor. They contribute to an interculturality of subordination and an artificial sense of intimacy, characteristics consistent with the institutional setting of the group and attitudes members held about each other. In this environment, the status quo of power identities and a deficit view of the Japanese member goes largely uncontested and limits the ability of American members to learn from their Japanese partner.
Constructing membership in the in-group
Authors: Higgins Christina
Published: February 2015

This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists co-construct their identities as members of the same culture by producing talk that aligns them with several shared membership categories (Sacks 1972, 1979, 1992). The speakers propose and subsequently reaffirm, resist, or transform the categories ‘Westernized’ and ‘ethnically marked’ in order to align or realign themselves as co-members of the same group of white collar workers. In the first excerpt, the participants critique Tanzanian youth who dress like rap singers, providing turn-by-turn slots for co-affiliation, thereby establishing an intercultural difference between themselves and their fellow Tanzanians who adopt Western ways uncritically. In this excerpt, the participants employ interculturality for affiliative positioning by drawing a boundary between themselves and those Tanzanians whom they identify as ‘outsiders’ through their talk. The disjunction between the two groups is accomplished through codeswitching, shared humor, and pronoun usage. The second excerpt demonstrates how the recently-established shared insider identity is re-analyzed by the group when one of the participants in the office is constructed as uncooperative, and his ethnicity is named as the source of his inability to work with his colleagues in a suitable manner. Thus, his status as an ‘outsider’ becomes made real through explicit categorization of him as a non-member due to the interculturality of ethnic difference. This participant resists the ethnification (Day 1998) he receives, however, and through this resistance, he succeeds in reintegrating himself into the group. This reintegration is accomplished through affiliative language structures including codeswitching, teasing, and the nomination of new shared categories by the ethnified participant. My analysis provides further documentation that interculturality is a continuously dynamic production of identities-in-practice (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), rather than a consequence of fixed social characteristics.
Reconstructing the participants’ treatments of ‘interculturality’
Authors: Mori Junko
Published: February 2015

This commentary reviews the five studies of intercultural communication in this special issue by comparing the nature of data analyzed and analytical procedures adopted. The data span from Africa, Asia, to North America, where different cultural, national, or ethnic groups were engaged in different types of social activities; their diversity illustrates how the participants’ ascription of, and resistance towards, their cultural, national, or ethnic identities reflect unique features of the sociohistorical contexts and the nature of their activities. In order to investigate such distinct treatments of interculturality, the researchers seek an analytical lens in the frameworks of ‘interactional sociolinguistics’ (Goffman 1974, 1981; Gumperz 1982, 1992) and ‘membership categorization analysis’ (Sacks 1972, 1992). The metamethodological reflection considers the selection of focal phenomena as well as the use of ethnographic information and the researchers’ own membership knowledge in the process of interpretation, and addresses the issues concerning how to attain an “emic” perspective of cultural difference and sameness.
Sentence-initialAndandButin academic writing
Authors: Bell David M.
Published: February 2015

Prescriptivists have long proscribed sentence-initialAnd(SIA), and sentence-initialBut(SIB). However, SIA and SIB are increasingly used in newspapers and style guides have softened strictures against their use. Moreover, SIA and SIB are amongst the most frequently occurring sentence-initial connectives within their respective semantic groups of additives and contrastives. Given their use despite prohibitions, this paper examines the patterns of occurrence and function of SIA and SIB in academic writing. The data come from 1 million words of academic prose: 11 journals representing science, social science, and humanities. The data confirm the findings of Biber et al. (1999) that while coordinatorandis more frequent in academic prose thanbut, SIA is much less frequent than SIB. The data also reveal a marked difference between low SIA and SIB occurrences in scientific writing and much higher occurrences in social science and humanities. Plus, SIA is the preferred additive connective compared withmoreover,furthermore, andin addition, etc., and SIB is the second most preferred contrastive connective afterhowever. SIA and SIB in academic writing function in three very similar ways: (i) to mark off a discourse unit by indicating the last item on a list, (ii) to indicate the development of an argument, and (iii) to indicate a discontinuity or shift with a previous discourse unit. Whereas the most common function of SIA is that of indicating the last item on a list, the most common use of SIB is in the development of arguments. SIA and SIB perform special functions that the alternatives of asyndetic or “zero” coordination, the use of similar discourse markers:moreover,furthermore,in addition,andhowever,respectively, or intrasentential coordination cannot perform. These special functions are derived from their particular semantic meanings, their role as coordinating conjunctions, and their reduced phonological prominence. These features allow SIA and SIB to preface a wider range of lexico-grammatical units such as interrogatives, stance adverbs and other discourse connectives and to create a tighter form of cohesion. It is these special features of cohesion rather than a move to colloquiality which are held to explain the occurrence of SIA and SIB in academic writing.
Exercising politeness
Authors: Ferenčík Milan
Published: February 2015

The paper seeks to demonstrate that, first, over the course of interaction in the radio phone-in events, participants display orientation to various aspects of their co-participants´ identities, second, since membership categories emerge and are developed at various sequentially relevant times, membership categorisation processes are closely tied with the event´s sequential organisation, and, third, categorisation bears on politeness aspects of interaction as the participation in the public ´arena´ causes participants´ faces to be constantly at stake. The methodological underpinnings of the paper represent the approaches of Membership Categorisation Analysis and the model of politeness based on the conceptualisation of face. The data are drawn from the corpus of Nočné dialógy (´Night Dialogues´) radio phone-ins broadcast on the Slovak public radio over the period of 1995-2004. The paper further attempts to demonstrate that participants are engaged in category work which sequentially unfolds in the course of the production of phone-in calls. Participants´ progressive involvement in talk is closely linked with the construction of ´layers´ of their categorial identities. The membership category of ´location´ represents the minimum agreed-upon canon of callers´ call-relevant identities. As the category is universally applicable, it bears the least face-threatening potential, for which reason it is used explicitely. In contrast, strategies of non-explicit categorisation, i.e. invoking categories through category-relevant predicates, apply to those topic-relevant categories which carry a significant face-threating ´load´ (e.g. ´family status´, ´political affiliation´, etc.). In summary, sequential organisation and category work are seen as being closely intertwined, with the latter also being employed as a positive and negative politeness strategy.
Meaning potentials and the interaction between lexis and contexts
Authors: Norén Kerstin , Linell Per
Published: February 2015

This article is a contribution to a theory of lexical semantics and situated sense-making which aims at explaining how meaning is constituted in and across contexts, in a dialogical interplay between lexical resources and aspects of situations. We propose that the semantics of words or grammatical constructions are not just abstract schemas, to be filled in by pragmatic enrichment in situated uses. Nor are words associated with simple lists of different usages. Instead, we propose a theory ofmeaning potentials. The basic assumptions of such a theory are that linguistic resources provide language users with semantic resources to understand, say and mean specific things in particular usage events, and that this always involves an interplay with contextual factors. The study reported here is an exercise in empirical pragmatics, using authentic data from language use. We explore the meaning potential of the Swedish adjectiveny‘new’ by examining its interplay with a specific grammatical construction,x-och-x(‘x-and-x’: in English roughly ‘x, it depends on what you mean by x’).X-och-xis a conventionalised and (largely) conversational practice, by which language users activate and negotiate parts of the meaning potential of a wordx, such asny, in order to establish a local situated meaning of it. In doing so, they exploit their knowledge of what x can mean, performing what can be seen as users´ semantic analyses in authentic communicative interaction. Our study can also be read as a contribution to Construction Grammar, attempting to develop a more dynamic, interactional interpretation of this theory than has previously been put forward in the literature.
Discourse, authority and mediation in an ethnographic encounter in Eastern Mexico
Authors: Oropeza-Escobar Minerva
Published: February 2015

Although the discursive construction of authority has been largely investigated for different kinds of interaction and settings, studies concerned with authority in ethnographic encounters are scarce. In the present article, I demonstrate that in this kind of encounters the mediational character of the interactants’ roles and the transcendence of the co-constructed text with respect to the current event play a crucial role in the construction of authority through discourse. My data consist of two events in 1990 recorded as part of a research project on beliefs and ritual practices among the Totonac population in Eastern Mexico, as well as the corresponding field notes. While my focus is on the linguistic and discursive resources used in the recorded sessions, I demonstrate that a well-founded account also involves a previous event, in which the methodological tools and interactional dynamics were negotiated, as well as a rehearsal previous to each recording session proposed by my consultant as a means to ensure the relevance of the information and the appropriateness of its delivery.
Why are increments such elusive objects? An afterthought
Authors: Auer Peter
Published: February 2015

It is argued that the type of unit expansions called ‘increments’ by Schegloff 1996 is too narrowly focused on English. While the structure of English makes it particularly suited for this kind of expansion, a typologically more satisfactory approach to unit expansion runs into problems if it remains on the syntactic plane alone. A full typology will have to take into account, not only prosody and semantics, but also action structure and pragmatics at large.
Conciseness, an outsider’s perspective and a smooth intonation contour
Authors: Jansen Frank
Published: February 2015

It is the desk editor’s task to revise the press releases presented to the newspaper in order to get news stories that are fit to print. What does that mean: Revise? This question is answered by a corpus study of appositions in press releases and the news stories that are based on them. The analysis is carried out in two directions. In the ‘forward’ analysis, the question is how appositions in source texts are dealt with by desk editors. In the ‘backward’ analysis, the origins are traced in the news stories. It is shown that appositions are revised quite often. From the revision data we may infer a number of motives for editorial interventions. Newspaper editors are more inclined than writers of press releases to favor concise sentences with a smooth, uninterrupted intonation contour and with a neutral outsider’s perspective.
Sigain interaction
Authors: Christodoulidou Maria
Published: February 2015

This study is an investigation of a conventionalized ironic marker in spontaneous Cypriot-Greek conversations. Specifically it examines the lexical itemsiga, which translates variously as “like hell”, “yeah right”, “big deal”. For the analysis ofsiga, this study will rely on the insights offered by recent work on the interface of grammar and interaction (cf. Ochs, Schegloff and Thomson 1996) in order to analyze the interactional role ofsigain the positions where it occurs, by taking into consideration its sequential placement and its position in the turn. Another issue that will be discussed throughout this study is that although there are various translations ofsiga, its investigation with respect to the positions in which it occurs in a turn reveals that the interactional role ofsigais much more complex than a dictionary definition of its meaning suggests. This study will suggest that investigations of irony in context can provide useful insights into the study of verbal communication in general.
The use of listener responses in Mandarin Chinese and Australian English conversations
Authors: Xudong Deng
Published: February 2015

In recent cross-cultural studies of pragmatics, we have witnessed a rise in interest in the comparative study of phenomena beyond the level of single and decontextualised utterances encompassing those on the level of speech events such as casual conversations. The underlying premise for such studies is that different cultural groups may have different rules for participation in and interpretation of conversation X that conflicts related to these rules are a major source of cross-cultural miscommunication. This study examines the use of listener responses by Chinese speakers in Chinese Mandarin conversations and by Australians in Australian English conversations. Following X prior framework by Clancy et al. (1996), the study examines similarities and differences in the use of listener responses by these two groups of people in terms of frequency of use, types of listener responses, and the positions of listener responses with respect to transition relevance place. Results show that Australian and Chinese speakers do exhibit quite different conversational styles as evidenced in their use of listener responses. Specifically, while Australians use more listener responses, use a higher percentage of lexical expressions as their listener responses and tend to place their listener responses at a possible completion point, Chinese speakers use fewer listener responses, favour the use of paralinguistic vocalic forms as their listener responses and tend to place their listener responses during a turn. These findings may suggest a culture specific way of turn taking and of what it means to be polite in conversational behaviour.
Psychics and the ‘other side’
Authors: Mason Marianne
Published: February 2015

This article provides a discourse analysis of a large corpus of televised psychic readings. The goal of this study is to uncover the relationship between the linguistic structure of psychic readings and the psychics’ linguistic agenda. The findings of this study suggest that the psychics’ engage in linguistic tactics that allow them to negotiate and extract specific information from their subjects. The discourse structure of psychic readings facilitates deception, since the subjects, rather than the psychics, are the actual source of subject-specific information in a reading.
Perceptions of (Im)politeness in Venezuelan Spanish
Authors: Bolívar Adriana
Published: February 2015

In this paper I shall use a test of social habits in order to unveil the different types of interactions and meanings observable in it: First, the interactions represented in hypothetical situations which reflect the expectations of a group of speakers concerning what they believe it is appropriate to say in particular situations, that is, mainly “politic behavior”; second, the interaction between participants (informants) and researchers as seen in the responses given to opinion questions, which reinforce and expand the perceptions of “politic behavior” and politeness; and third, evaluations that bring out the links with the “real” world in the wider Venezuelan social context.
A matter of politeness? A contrastive study of phatic talk in teenage conversation
Authors: Stenström Anna-Brita , Jørgensen Annette Myre
Published: February 2015

This corpus-based article explores London and Madrid teenagers’ use of phatic expressions as a politeness device in their everyday conversations. The starting-point for the study is Leech’s ‘Phatic Maxim’, which he suggests as a supplement to the four maxims making up Grice’s Cooperative Principle. The purport of the maxim is to avoid silence by keeping talking, which may involve anything from loose formulaic talk to connectors and the use of taboo words, all of which are phatic devices with a strong bonding effect. The teenage talk studied here is largely void of the formulaic expressions that characterize conversational openings and closings in adult speakers’ casual encounters. Both groups are frequent users of turn-final appealers which trigger turn-initial uptakes and of reaction signals realized by interjections and taboo words, all with a strongly bonding effect. Boys in particular are not only allowed but even expected to use taboo language as a sign of camaraderie and a means to reinforce the phatic strength of an exchange. In both corpora, there is ample use of fillers that help the speaker to hold the turn, and hedges, which often act as fillers in addition to helping the speaker avoid self-commitment. And whereas the Spanish teenagers use certain vocatives as a purely conversational resource to establish and maintain contact, the English teenagers insert ‘unsolicited’ minimal feedback signals (for example, realized by mhm or mm) which encourage the current speaker to go on speaking.
Conversational silence and face in two sociocultural contexts
Authors: Contreras Fernández Josefa
Published: February 2015

This article aims to examine the relation between conversational silence and face and to identify communicative behaviour related to silence in Spanish and German. To this end, I will first briefly explain the concepts of conversation, culture and silence, as well as the concept of face. Second, I will analyse verbal and non-verbal activities of silence in transactional and colloquial conversations in Spanish and German conversation. Perceptions and conceptions of conversational silence rely on the situational context and, especially, on the face of each speech community. Therefore, depending on the social context and the characteristics of face in each culture, silence is considered as forming part of conversation.
Autonomy orientation in Estonian and Swedish family interactions
Authors: Tulviste Tiia , De Geer Boel
Published: February 2015

This paper compares the tendency to express autonomy in 20 Estonian, 20 Swedish, and 20 Swedish Estonian middle-class families with preadolescent children during videotaped family mealtimes. The results indicate that compared to the Swedish participants, participants from both Estonian samples expressed autonomy less frequently. Being talkative does not always mean expressing more autonomy. The Swedish preadolescents who were the most talkative and whose mothers were talking less, were more likely to express their personal needs, opinions and preferences.
Possible reasons of cultural variability in autonomy orientation are discussed.
Language, discourse and identities
Authors: Georgakopoulou Alexandra , Lytra Vally
Published: February 2015

Since the early 90s, Greece has witnessed an unprecedented population movement: Members of indigenous linguistic minorities have moved from the periphery to urban centres and large numbers of people have moved to Greece, primarily from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This “flow of bodies” (Appadurai 1990) has disrupted the country’s monolingual and monocultural image (even if, in historical terms, this was in itself a construction) and in its place an awareness and sensibility of a multilingual and multicultural society has emerged.
Global issues and local findings from Greek contexts
Authors: Androutsopoulos Jannis K.
Published: February 2015

Any glo bally circulating piece of research that flags up a particular national-language context as its centre of attention is bound to raise a twofold expectation in this day and age: To discuss a specific state of affairs in a particular language/society, and to use this as a case in point to cast light on wider theoretical, methodological or empirical issues. The contributions to this issue take their cue from recent sociolinguistics and discourse studies to address aspects of Greek language and discourse, culture and identity in Greece, Cyprus, and the Greek diaspora. In reflecting on the preceding four papers, I shall be asking what they tell us as about Greek and Greekness, whether this Greekness is made relevant as discursive process or interpretive motif, and also how these Greek cases may contribute to our understanding of wider processes of language, society, identity and communication technologies.
Code-switching ‘in site’ for fantasizing identities
Authors: Georgakopoulou Alexandra , Finnis Katerina
Published: February 2015

Sociolinguistic studies of ‘minority languages’ and bilingualism have increasingly moved away from a singular emphasis on issues of ethnicity that poses direct links between the use of a language and an ethnic or cultural identity towards exploring the construction of identities that are not firmly located in category-bound descriptions. In this paper, we draw on these latest insights to account for processes of identity construction in a bilingual (in Greek Cypriot and English) youth organization group based in North London. Our main data consist of the audio-recorded interactional data from a socialization outing after one of the group’s meeting but we also bring in insights from the group’s ethnographic study and a larger study of the North London Cypriot community that involved interviews and questionnaires. In the close analysis of our main data, we note a conventional association between the ‘London Greek Cypriot’ (henceforth LGC) variety that is switched to from English as the main interactional frame and a set of genres (in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to social practices) that are produced and taken up as humorous discourse: These include narrative jokes, ritual insults, hypothetical scenarios, and metalinguistic instances of mock Cypriot. We will suggest that the use of LGC demonstrates a relationship of ambivalence, a “partly ours partly theirs” status, with the participants carving out a different, third space for themselves that transcends macro-social categories (e.g. the Cypriots, the Greek-Cypriot community). At the same time, we will show how the discursive process of choosing language from a bi- or multi- lingual repertoire does not only create identities in the sense of socially and culturally derived positions but also identities (sic (dis)-identifications) in the sense of desiring and fantasizing personas.
Evaluation of politeness
Authors: Fukushima Saeko
Published: February 2015

This study investigates evaluation of attentiveness by British and Japanese university students. Attentiveness (kikubari) (defined as a demonstrator’s preemptive response to a beneficiary’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations) is demonstrated without being requested and it is one of the important politeness strategies. A questionnaire including six attentiveness situations was distributed to 74 British and 138 Japanese participants, who were asked to evaluate the attentiveness situations on a five-point Likert scale and to state the reasons for their evaluation. The Likert-scale evaluations were analyzed using a three-way ANOVA and subsequently, the reasons for evaluations were analyzed qualitatively. It was anticipated that the Japanese would evaluate attentiveness more positively than the British, as attentiveness has been important in Japanese culture. The results, however, did not necessarily confirm this. That is, there were significant differences between British and Japanese participants in four situations, the British participants having evaluated attentiveness more positively than the Japanese participants in two situations and the reverse being the case in two other situations.
EXMARaLDA – creating, analysing and sharing spoken language corpora for pragmatic research
Authors: Schmidt Thomas , Wörner Kai
Published: February 2015

This paper presents EXMARaLDA, a system for the computer-assisted creation and analysis of spoken language corpora. The first part contains some general observations about technological and methodological requirements for doing corpus-based pragmatics. The second part explains the system’s architecture and gives an overview of its most important software components – a transcription editor, a corpus management tool and a corpus query tool. The last part presents some corpora which have been or are currently being compiled with the help of EXMARaLDA.
Noun phrase conjunction in Akan
Authors: Amfo Nana Aba Appiah
Published: February 2015

Noun phrase conjunction in Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa) is performed by placing a connective between two noun phrases, but there is some variation in the forms used in the major dialects. In the Twi dialects the connective is ne, but Fante speakers may use nye or na depending on whether a comitative or a coordinative interpretation is intended. This paper focuses on the historical origins of the noun phrase connective n(y)e in Akan. It suggests that Akan patterns with other sub-saharan African languages such as Ewe, Ga, Yoruba and Hausa, which have noun phrase connectives originating from comitative verbs. This suggestion is based on the morpho-semantics of these connectives. In addition, the paper demonstrates that the origin of the connective n(y)e could be further traced to an equative copula in the language. This conclusion is based on syntactic and semantic evidence available in the language and strengthened by the cross-linguistic tendency for copula verbs to develop into noun phrase connectives in a number of unrelated languages.
Eskimo language and Eskimo song in Alaska
Authors: Ikuta Hiroko
Published: February 2015

Across Alaska, the popularity of indigenous forms of dance has risen, particularly in indigenous communities in which English dominates the heritage languages and Native youth have become monolingual English speakers. Some indigenous people say that Native dance accompanied by indigenous song is a way of preserving their endangered languages. With two case studies from Alaskan Eskimo communities, Yupiget on St. Lawrence Island and Iñupiat in Barrow, this article explores how use of endangered languages among Alaskan Eskimos is related to the activity of performing Eskimo dance. I suggest that practice of Eskimo dancing and singing that local people value as an important linguistic resource can be considered as a de-globalised sociolinguistic phenomenon, a process of performance and localisation in which people construct a particular linguistic repertoire withdrawn from globalisable circulation in multilingualism.
Perspective and politeness in Finnish Requests
Authors: Peterson Elizabeth
Published: February 2015

This study makes use of elicited request speech act data in Finnish to view variability of personal perspective and T/V forms across a variety of situations. The speakers exhibited a great deal of congruency when they were scripted as addressing someone familiar, being in a position of equal or higher status than the interlocutor, and when the request was considered a low imposition. In such situations, speakers tended to use a second person perspective, with informal T/V forms. The Finnish T-forms were found to be the default form, showing up in half of the request utterances. The Finnish V-forms showed up in only 10 percent of the requests. A variationist analysis using Varbrul complemented the main findings, but was found to not be a reliable tool for elicited pragmatic data, using sociopragmatic factors as independent variables.
Enregistering the voices of discursive figures of authority in Antonero children’s socio-dramatic play
Authors: Reynolds Jennifer F.
Published: February 2015

This study examines how boys from San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala develop their own perspective about what it means to be moral human beings in the world via discursive practices that contrast enregistered voices within an emergent performance genre that simultaneously doubles as socio-dramatic play-frame. This emergent genre exhibits both mimesis and alterity; children have appropriated a popular adult genre, within which their participation, originally, was highly circumscribed. In their own productions, however, they occupy the main character roles and enact re-accented “voices” of king and kin in highly competitive, proselytizing discourse. The resulting performance is a subversion of the social order where ‘the challenge’ of good defeating evil is undone, reflecting a child-centric critical stance. To wit, the boys refuse to be convinced by the authority of an overly patriarchal-colonial moral order. I build upon Sawyers’ (1995) model of play-as-improvisation to develop a synthetic framework in analyzing indigenous children’s play and childhood(s). The approach I espouse draws upon ethnographically informed studies of peer talk-in-interaction, verbal art as performance, and semiotic functionalism to examine how children “do heteroglossia” in and out-of-play frames of interaction as they construct selves capable of confronting the social order.
Examining the rhetorical structure and discursive features of letters of leniency as a genre
Authors: Mason Marianne
Published: February 2015

This paper presents a genre analysis of 73 letters of leniency, which were obtained in two United States federal district courthouses. The primary objective of this type of genre is to persuade a judge to be lenient during the sentencing of a defendant, such as by reducing or commuting the defendant’s sentence. This paper examines how writers of this genre structure their letters and use discursive features, in particular linguistically-realized politeness and appeals to the judges’ faith, to make a request for leniency. The findings of this study show that the rhetorical and discursive features of letters of leniency follow the conventions of the court, which demands the observance of the judge’s face through the use of politeness. This study also shows how the notion of faith is exploited in this type of genre to make a persuasive request or, more often, to follow-up a request (post-request) for leniency.
School administrators’ discursive positioning in talk about deviant high school students
Authors: Seunarinesingh Krishna
Published: February 2015

This paper presents the analysis of two school administrators’ discourse whereby they relate their experiences with deviant high school students. Analysis of interview data revealed that interviewees positioned themselves as caring and inclusive educators, who understood deviant students’ circumstances. They positioned students as victims of overwhelmingly negative environments, and portrayed school as a warm and welcoming space. Through this positioning strategy, they accounted for decisions not to suspend deviant students from school. The findings suggest that the administrators equated performance of caring identity with professional competence, which is a desirable membership category in educational discourses.
Introduction reframing framing
Authors: Park Joseph Sung-Yul , Takanashi Hiroko
Published: February 2015

This special issue revisits the notion of framing based on several recent developments in the fields of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology, particularly the current interest in the notions of stance, style, metalinguistics and language ideology. In doing so, the contributions highlight the importance of framing not only in the management of micro-level interactional practices but also in the reproduction of cultural ideologies and social relations.
Inferentials in spoken English
Authors: Calude Andreea S. , Delahunty Gerald P.
Published: February 2015

Although there is a growing body of research on inferential sentences (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 1990, 1995, 2001, Koops 2007, Pusch 2006), most of this research has been on their forms and functions in written discourse. This has left a gap with regards to their range of structural properties and allowed disagreement over their analysis to linger without a conclusive resolution. Most accounts regard the inferential as a type ofit-cleft(Declerck 1992, Delahunty 2001, Huddleston and Pullum 2002, Lambrecht 2001), while a few view it as an instance of extraposition (Collins 1991, Schmid 2009). More recently, Pusch’s work in Romance languages proposes the inferential is used as a discourse marker (2006, forthcoming). Based on a corpus study of examples from spoken New Zealand English, the current paper provides a detailed analysis of the formal and discoursal properties of several sub-types of inferentials (positive, negative,as ifandlikeinferentials). We show that despite their apparent formal differences from the prototypical cleft, inferentials are nevertheless best analysed as a type of cleft, though this requires a minor reinterpretation of “cleft construction.” We show how similar the contextualized interpretations of clefts and inferentials are and how these are a function of their lexis and syntax.
Ordering burgers, reordering relations
Authors: Hoffmann-Dilloway Erika
Published: February 2015

This article analyzes gestural interactions between hearing and d/Deaf Nepalis to argue that local understandings of the consequences of these engagements make visible ways of ideologizing gesture that may be obscured by the gestural typologies widely used by scholars. In Nepal, d/Deafness is associated with ritual pollution that can be shared across persons. Consequently, the use of gesture in a communicative interaction can both presuppose the presence of a polluted d/Deaf body and creatively index the transmission of that pollution to a hearing interlocutor. By the same token, gesturally engaging with Deaf persons can index “modern” rejection of belief in ritual pollution on the part of the hearing participant. While many scholarly typologies of gesture focus on form and decontextualized reference, the pragmatic effects of gesture derived from and contributing to differently positioned personhoods are more significant in local ideologies in Nepal.
The construction of emotional involvement in everyday German narratives – interactive uses of ‘dense constructions’
Authors: Günthner Susanne
Published: February 2015

This paper investigates ways in which participants in everyday German narratives construct emotions as social phenomena; i.e. in particular, how they organize and communicate emotional involvement. I will argue that contextualizing emotions and affects permeates various levels of linguistic and interactional structures – even grammar: Participants in everyday German storytelling use specific syntactic patterns as resources for indexing affective stances and making past events interpretable and emotionally accessible to their co-participants. The analysis concentrates on particular syntactic resources (such as averbal constructions, infinite constructions, minimal syntactic phrases etc.) used to contextualize affect and emotion. Instead of treating these ‘dense constructions’ (e.g. averbal constructions “I:CH (.) mit meinen sachen rAuf, […] ICH (-) wieder rUnter,”;‘me (.) with my stuff upstairs, […] me (-) down again,’) as elliptic structures and conceptualizing them as incomplete or reduced sentence patterns, this study explores the specific forms and functions of ‘dense constructions’ in interactive usage. I will argue that ‘dense constructions’ – even though they do not follow the rules of the grammar of Standard German – represent conventionalized patterns participants use to fulfil various communicative tasks in specific communicative genres. In producing such ‘fragmentary gestalts’, conversationalists index sudden, reflex-like actions, and thus, stage dramatic, emotionally loaded events for their co-participants to “re-experience” (Goffman 1974/1986: 506).