bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mediation Discourse
Authors: Vasilyeva Alena L.
Published: April 2015

Mediation is a form of conflict resolution that aims to help two or more parties resolve their dispute through the help of a third party, that is, a mediator. This article highlights the research on mediation discourse carried out in the tradition of language and social interaction. It focuses on the interactional organization of mediation, the concept of neutrality, mediators' techniques to construct a specific form of interactivity, disputants' contribution to shaping mediation talk, the problem of argument and reasonableness in mediation, and the idea of mediation talk as a social achievement.
Speech Community
Authors: Milburn Trudy
Published: April 2015

Researchers in linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and communication studies use the term
speech communities
to designate a group of people who speak in a distinct style from others. The community is often identified by geographic location and may have common demographic features such as ethnicity, age, or gender. While the term may be most useful to the researcher who designates it, many speech communities have blurred boundaries and undergo constant change. The future of the term speech community is uncertain in the face of dispersed or online communities who may not share more than a common communicative practice.
Emergency Telephone Discourse
Authors: Gerwing Jennifer
Published: April 2015

Emergency telephone discourse involves life‐threatening stakes with severe time constraints. Caller and operator must manage to understand each other under very difficult circumstances: they have no visual access to each other's environment and cannot benefit from visible actions that would facilitate efficient understanding. Furthermore, numerous mismatches in expectations, access to information, knowledge, and expertise potentially obstruct efficient communication. Nonetheless, operators and callers routinely manage to construct a description of the incident that is sufficient for the operator to take action, sending services to where they are needed. Methodologically, analysis of emergency calls requires a detailed understanding of the setting, revealing a set of predictable parameters, in terms of semantics and structure. Analysis of calls demonstrates the collaborative, co‐ordinated nature of dialogue, which has implications as well for how institutional procedures and documentation can influence the discourse.
Interculturality
Authors: Liddicoat Anthony J.
Published: April 2015

Interculturality is a complex concept and is understood in different ways. Contemporary understandings suggest that interculturality needs to be viewed in interpersonal and interactional terms rather than as an encounter between “cultures.” In interaction, interculturality involves the creation and interpretation of meanings between participants who do not share the same linguistic and cultural understandings and this requires participants to engage in processes of intercultural mediation and decentering.
Ideology in Discourse
Authors: Verschueren Jef
Published: April 2015

Ideology is first defined in its everyday sense of commonly held normative beliefs pertaining to areas of social reality. Some of its basic properties are described in relation to their manifestation in discourse. A number of different approaches to ideology in discourse (including critical discourse analysis) are presented. This is followed by an overview of a number of specific domains in relation to which ideology in discourse has been investigated, from the political world, through mass media and identity construction to language ideologies. The article concludes with some brief remarks on methodological challenges and perspectives.
Humor in Discourse
Authors: Attardo Salvatore
Published: April 2015

Three main approaches to humor in discourse will be discussed in this article: (1) the semantic/pragmatic analyses, which seek to identify the necessary and sufficient properties for a text to be potentially humorous and the modalities of distribution of humor within the texts; (2) the conversation and discourse analysis‐based functionalist theories, which see the affiliative and disaffiliative social functions of humor as the primary functions of humor; and, (3) the corpus‐based approaches that supplement the functional analysis with an emphasis on quantitative questions.
Evaluative Language
Authors: Pounds Gabrina
Published: April 2015

In its broadest sense, evaluative language includes any linguistic expressions (written or spoken) that may be perceived as conveying stance or attitude (feelings and views) toward entities and people in the real world, the material presented, and the parties involved in the communicative exchange. It is related to expression of subjectivity and point of view and it has been approached from a number of different perspectives. This article highlights the key properties of evaluative language and traces the development of the concept, from the earliest studies on modality and mood, to the more recent wider discourse perspectives.
Turn‐Taking
Authors: Nishizaka Aug , Hayano Kaoru
Published: April 2015

This article provides an overview of conversation‐analytic studies on the organization of turn‐taking for conversation. This organization generates orderly turn‐taking in which participants talk one at a time without significant overlap or gaps. It consists of three components: the turn‐constructional unit (
TCU
), turn‐allocational techniques, and ordering rules that prioritize the turn‐allocational techniques. Each of these components is discussed using Japanese and English examples. The article also discusses the resources that a given language's syntactic structure makes available for allocating turns and notes several contingencies that result in “violations” of the turn‐taking rules.
Silence
Authors: Covarrubias Patricia O.
Published: April 2015

In western perspectives silence is often treated as a negative, a barren communicative void that should be filled with words. Alternative approaches, however, see silence as a positive and generative interactional space wherein participants produce rich meaning. Omertà and echemythia serve as examples of humans using silence to artfully craft personal, social, and cultural identities in the conduct of their daily lives.
Political Cartoon Discourse
Authors: Marín‐Arrese Juana I.
Published: April 2015

Political cartoon discourse refers to a genre of discourse and communication that combines caricature, humor, and satire in the pictorial representation of public or political figures and/or current sociopolitical events with the evaluative dimension in the expression of the critical stance of the cartoonist. This article traces the historical development of the modern political cartoon, and describes the features of the humor process and the main cognitive mechanisms involved in the interpretation of the cartoon.
Pronoun Functions
Authors: Covarrubias Patricia O.
Published: April 2015

Pronouns of address serve as quintessentially rich phenomena for studying the connection between communication and social life. Across linguistic contexts whether interactants use you, tú, usted, du, or Sie, their very utterance yields fundamental information, not only about the interpersonal relationships of the particular interactants, but also about the possible nature of their interactions. Indeed, pronouns help people shape interpersonal relationships as well as what they might say to one another, and how they might say it.
Emotion and Affect
Authors: Plantin Christian
Published: April 2015

Taking over a vision of emotions that can be traced back to ancient rhetoric, the field of emotion studies, traditionally centered on individual psychology, expands nowadays toward social‐ and language‐oriented approaches. After defining the key terms “emotion,” “feeling,” and “mood,” the following issues are examined: the lexicon and syntax of emotion, and the variety of emotions encodings in different languages and cultures; the communicative function of the so‐called subjective “expression” of emotion; the process of “socialization of emotion”; and the interactional approach to emotion, which considers emotion as a microsocial phenomenon.
Morality in Discourse
Authors: Robles Jessica S.
Published: April 2015

Judgments and norms infuse discourse and interaction; this is what is meant by “morality in discourse.” This article defines a discursive approach to moral concepts, reviews the research history of the topic, considers different perspectives and dimensions, and describes current and developing research on the topic.
Heteroglossia
Authors: Baxter Judith
Published: April 2015

Heteroglossia refers to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of multiple speech practices that operate within a community or social group at any given historical moment. Most communities are characterized by heteroglossia in that they comprise a range of languages, discourses, voices, and viewpoints that continuously compete for authority and power. This article identifies the philosophical background of heteroglossia, its various alternative forms and versions, key related concepts, and examples of research studies that have developed the original concept.
Leadership Discourse
Authors: Baxter Judith
Published: April 2015

Leadership discourse is both a type of discourse and an emerging field of study. The field examines the ways in which senior people construct their identities through interaction in business and professional settings such as meetings, interviews, and conference calls. The study of leadership discourse has moved away from psychological approaches based on charisma and communication skills, and toward social constructionist and discursive perspectives of how leadership is enacted and performed. Focusing principally on spoken interactions, this article explores definitions of leadership and discourse, the relationship between the two concepts, and the theoretical antecedents of the field of study. It also identifies the major methodological approaches used to analyze leadership discourse with examples from the work of scholars deploying each approach. The article concludes with some reflections on future directions for this field.
Face Constituting Theory
Authors: Arundale Robert B.
Published: April 2015

Face Constituting Theory explains how human beings create relationships as they use language in social interaction. Relationships with others are fundamental to human existence, and people create them as they create what is known as “face.” Face Constituting Theory defines face as one's understanding of one's connection with and separation from other people, and it is constituted in everyday interaction as people work conjointly to constitute turns at talk, actions, and meanings. Connecting with and separating from others are the dialectical push and pull that lie at the core of relating to others, hence constituting face in using language lies at the heart of constituting human relationships.
Political Discourse Analysis
Authors: Kampf Zohar
Published: April 2015

Defining political discourse as talk and text produced in regard to concrete political issues (language in politics) or the actual language use of institutional political actors (language of politicians), this article outlines traditionally recognized and newly identified links between language and politics. After clarifying some conceptual ambiguities and elaborating the historical roots of political language research, the article surveys themes, actors, methods, data, and research goals of
PDA
, based on key texts and the latest studies in the field.
Identity Construction
Authors: Taylor Stephanie
Published: April 2015

Theories of identity construction challenge conventional models of the person as a bounded or monadic individual with a fixed or essential identity, assuming instead a fragmented, incomplete social subject. Identities are presumed to be multiple, complex, and situated. All identities are social, including those personal identities which are experienced as unique (“who I am”). The construction of “other” identities is part of the processes through which social divisions and inequalities are established and reinforced. Analyses explore the processes through which identities are constructed, claimed, and performed, and also the intersection of conventional identity categories. Relevant methodological debates include the status of language data, as truth or interpretation, and the relationship of the researcher to participants and talk data, as observer or insider interpreter.
Therapeutic Discourse
Authors: Weiste Elina , Peräkylä Anssi
Published: April 2015

Therapeutic discourse is interaction between professional and client aimed at improving the client's mental health. In psychotherapy, therapeutic discourse is the central activity, as the aim of the therapists is to talk in ways that improve the client's mental health. There are two rather different research traditions that focus on therapeutic discourse.
Psychotherapy process research
describes therapeutic discourse from clinical and psychological perspective, while
conversation analysis
(
CA
) employs concepts and tools of linguistic and social scientific interaction research for the analysis of therapeutic discourse. Both of these traditions will be discussed in this article.
Strategic Maneuvering
Authors: van Eemeren Frans H.
Published: April 2015

Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse consists in reconciling two simultaneous tendencies: aiming for effectiveness and maintaining reasonableness. Analytically, three aspects can be distinguished in every strategic maneuver: making a selection from the available “topical potential,” adapting to “audience demand,” and exploiting “presentational devices.” The communicative activity types in which argumentative discourse takes place determine the institutional preconditions for strategic maneuvering. Next to general (context‐invariant) soundness criteria there are also specific (context‐dependent) soundness criteria for strategic maneuvering, which may vary to some extent according to the communicative activity type. This explains why derailments of strategic maneuvering resulting in fallacies may more easily go unnoticed when they occur in communicative activity types not really familiar to the evaluator.
Pragma‐dialectics
Authors: Garssen Bart
Published: April 2015

This article discusses the pragma‐dialectical approach developed in the Netherlands by van Eemeren and Grootendorst between the 1970s and the late 1990s. After a sketch of the normative pragmatic research carried out in pragma‐dialectics the metatheoretical starting points are discussed. Next, the model for critical discussion is introduced and explained, and a short account of the analysis of argumentative discourse in terms of a critical discussion is given. Finally, the rules for critical discussion associated with the model are introduced together with the fallacies that may occur in argumentative discourse as violations of these rules.
Discourse Strategy
Authors: Sanders Robert E.
Published: April 2015

This article is about diverse work in language and social interaction (
LSI
) whose common interest is in finding the rationale for, or rationality in, details of the
composition
, including the
content
, of
discursive objects
—where a discursive object is a product of situated language use. Much of this work has focused on speaking turns within interactions, but occasionally there has been attention to monologues and texts. The reason for this interest is that the discursive object, composed in that way, in that context, just then, is thereby a means of bringing about something that the agent wants or benefits from. This interest is the main focus of this article on “discourse strategy,” which by definition is an agent's means or method of bringing about a desired result.
Interaction Dilemmas
Authors: Wingard Leah , Denvir Paul
Published: April 2015

Interactional dilemmas are possible when a speaker's multiple goals are in tension. They may arise when a speaker's beliefs about how to enact an identity are in conflict, or when different ideologies in a particular setting point to multiple possible actions. The basic idea that speakers manage multiple desires, goals, or interactional projects is a common theme in the field of communication, and scholars have approached dilemmas in interaction from a variety of perspectives. This article provides an overview of the historical and theoretical background for thinking about dilemmas in interaction and reviews case studies in language and social interaction scholarship in institutional and noninstitutional settings that articulate dilemmas by analyzing the discursive practices that speakers use to manage those dilemmas.
Text and Conversation in Organizing
Authors: Taylor James R.
Published: April 2015

Wittgenstein wrote that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” In this article the “form of life” to be addressed is contemporary organization. Normal language‐learning starts from the lived experience and the role of language in it rather than from mastering a grammar first and then applying it, like in second language courses. Similarly, organizations are first experienced as conversations, and only subsequently translated into textual models or formal organizational theory. Organization, it is proposed, emerges in the interplay of conversation and textual representations of it, as both preceding and following the interaction. In what follows, the organizational implications of seeing communication practice as primary and textual representations of it as secondary are explored.
Sexist Discourse
Authors: McPhillips Rebecca , Speer Susan A.
Published: April 2015

Sexist discourse is “language in use,” either spoken words or written texts, which stereotypes or discriminates against a person or a group of people on the basis of their gender. Early feminist work on gender, sexism, and language began to show a connection between language and the (re)production of sexism. However, much of this work is now considered outdated by researchers because it perpetuated essentialist understandings of sexism as something inherent in particular words and utterances. As the influence of constructionism has grown, researchers across the social sciences and humanities have come to view linguistic meanings as fluid rather than fixed, and as dependent on the social context in which they are embedded. A number of methodological approaches such as critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and conversation analysis are used to show how sexism is (re)produced through discourse in various contexts, either overtly or indirectly.
Tourism Discourse
Authors: Jaworski Adam , Thurlow Crispin
Published: April 2015

Tourism discourse is an area of intense semiotic and symbolic production. This article examines four areas of tourism discourse: (1) the staging of interactions between consumers/tourists and service providers/hosts; (2) the packaging of cultural forms or practices—including languages—as products for tourist consumption; (3) the framing and management of space and place; and (4) the recycling or remediation of tourist practices beyond their immediate contexts of enactment.
Broadcast News Interviews
Authors: Clayman Steven
Published: April 2015

The broadcast news interview is a genre of broadcast talk characterized by a distinctive confluence of participants, subject matter, and interactional form. In a prototypical news interview, the interviewer acts as a professional journalist rather than as a partisan commentator or celebrity entertainer. Interviewees are public officials, experts, or others whose actions or views are newsworthy. The discussion focuses on current events and is “formal” rather than “conversational” in character. This article reviews the discursive and interactional practices characteristic of broadcast news interviews, including the turn‐taking system that organizes such talk, the relevance of the audience, practices of questioning geared to the norms of neutralism and adversarialness, the boundary conditions for such norms, practices of answering associated with responsiveness and resistance, and various interview genres.
Police Interview Discourse
Authors: Rock Frances
Published: April 2015

This article considers police interviews with both suspects and witnesses, in order to build a picture of the state of the art on this interesting and highly influential encounter. These interviews provide a means for police officers to gather information and give a recording of that information in audio, video, written or typed form, for later use in the legal process. After summarizing some of the key characteristics of police interviews from a language and communication perspective, the article identifies some dominant themes in research on police interviews from scholars of language and communication. These are: power and control; textual travel into, through, and out of interviews; the influence of recording technologies; particular linguistic features in interview; the mental state of the perpetrator; the influence of training regimes; and the rights context of police interviews. The article closes by highlighting special classes of witness and suspect and by considering research that intersects with the study of police interviews by language scholars.
Systemic Functional Linguistics
Authors: Webster Jonathan J.
Published: April 2015

M. A. K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistic theory (
SFL
) describes language as a resource for making meaning. What enables this meaning‐making potential of language is grammar, which is characterized by both functional diversity and a stratal organization. Meaning functions more than just to construe the phenomena of experience; it functions also to enact social relationships. This article presents the metafunctional basis of language, including the experiential, logical, interpersonal, and textual aspects of meaning, and concludes with a discussion of
SFL
's commitment to doing “apply‐able” linguistics.
Discourse Style
Authors: Kern Friederike
Published: April 2015

The concept of
discourse styles
refers to meaningful and systematic variation in language use, considered in relation to contextual aspects of its occurrence; the use of this concept arises from the observation that speakers can draw on a wide range of linguistic forms, which they can use as resources to accomplish particular tasks in particular situations. The concept is thus integrated into a pragmatic theory of language use in naturally occurring conversations, which includes the insight that meaning in discourse cannot be reduced to the semantics of words and sentences alone. An attempt is made here to trace the theoretical and methodological changes in the notion of discourse style within the broad framework of interpretive sociolinguistics. The shift from intraspeaker variation to variation as social practice is the most noticeable one, and it leads to more constructionist approaches, which see styles as situational achievements rather than simply as results determined by the social situation.
Illness Talk
Authors: Koenig Christopher J.
Published: April 2015

Illness talk is a genre of talk that refers to both the content and the process of conversation about health, disease, and illness. Illness talk differs from other forms of talk in that it is focused on the experience of health and illness as a locus of social action and activity. Two main areas of scholarship investigate how language is used to construct illness talk: narrative and conversational interaction. Whereas narrative focuses on the experience and meaning of disease and illness, conversational interaction investigates how participants initiate, maintain, and conclude illness talk as a collaboratively organized activity. Both approaches study illness talk across diverse ordinary and institutional settings through the public articulation of the experience of being well and being ill, as communicated through language.
Cooperative Principle
Authors: Mirivel Julien C.
Published: April 2015

The co‐operative principle suggests that everyday speakers naturally adhere to underlying normative principles that guide conversation. According to the principle, people create meaning together, on the basis of being informative, relevant, truthful, and perspicuous. This article explains Paul Grice's co‐operative principle, its core maxims, as well as the concept of conversational implicature.
Compliments
Authors: Pillet‐Shore Danielle
Published: April 2015

A compliment is a speaker's expression of a positive stance toward some referent attributable to her/his addressed recipient. Belonging to a larger class of supportive actions, compliments constitute a key practice through which a participant to an interaction can display explicit approval of another person; thus they can help interlocutors create or maintain social solidarity.
Corporate Discourse
Authors: Mautner Gerlinde
Published: April 2015

Discourse is central to corporate life and involves both internal and external stakeholders. Text and talk not only accompany corporate activity, but often effectively constitute it. Moreover, discourse is implicated in constructing identity and power at the level of the individual employee, within teams and departments, and at the level of the corporation as a whole. Key domains of study include narratives, conversation, and metaphor. The difficulties involved in studying corporate discourse center around access to confidential data, bias toward written genres, and managing tensions between scholars' and practitioners' interests. Some of the challenges to be met in the future are finding effective ways to explore the multimodal nature of discourse data, addressing the Anglo‐American bias of both theories and empirical evidence, linking microevidence to macrointerpretations, and overcoming scholars' reluctance to collaborate across disciplines and to engage in productive dialogue with practitioner communities.
Ethnomethodology
Authors: Mondada Lorenza
Published: April 2015

Ethnomethodology is an intellectual program developed by Harold Garfinkel. After introducing its main concerns and describing how Garfinkel came to create this approach, this article discusses key ethnomethodological notions and makes its research procedures explicit. Then it overviews studies that have used ethnomethodology and closes by identifying commonalities with and differences from conversation analysis.
Discourse Analysis
Authors: Gordon Cynthia
Published: April 2015

“Discourse analysis” refers to a diverse collection of theories and empirical, primarily qualitative methods for investigating linguistic and other communicative practices. It views communication as a collaborative human activity embedded within—and constitutive of—everyday situational, social, and cultural contexts. Approaches to discourse analysis include conversation analysis, the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, and hybrid approaches. These approaches have different disciplinary origins and various specific foci, and together they lend insights into the structures and rich textures of everyday human language and social interaction, including how meanings, relationships, and identities are coconstructed moment by moment in talk; how communicative problems emerge (and can perhaps be circumvented); and how communication is connected to more abstract constructs, such as ideologies and cultural beliefs.
Grounded Practical Theory
Authors: Craig Robert T.
Published: April 2015

Grounded practical theory (GPT) is a metatheoretical and methodological framework for developing normative theories that can inform reflective thinking on communication problems and practices. Informed by the traditions of Aristotelian practical philosophy and American pragmatism,GPTis based on the principles of communication as a practical discipline, according to which an essential purpose of communication studies is to cultivate the practice of communication in society. The conceptual framework ofGPTallows for communicative practices to be reconstructed at three interrelated conceptual levels: the problem level, the technical level, and the philosophical level. The formal research process ofGPTincludes four main elements: framing a practice for study; empirical data collection and qualitative analysis; theoretical reconstruction of the practice according to the three‐level conceptual framework; and formulation of normative theoretical claims concerning the practice. Several examples ofGPTresearch are described, and related theoretical approaches are discussed.
Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Authors: Wierzbicka Anna
Published: April 2015

The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a minilanguage that is believed to correspond to the common core of all languages. It has come to light through wide‐ranging cross‐linguistic investigations pursued over more than three decades. It has a minilexicon of 65 semantic primes or “atoms of meaning” (e.g., “good” and “bad,” “do” and “happen”) and 50 or so universal “semantic molecules” (e.g., “man,” “woman,” and “child”; “fire” and “water”) and a minigrammar. TheNSMsystem was developed primarily as a linguistic theory aimed at identifying the “language of thought” and the shared core of the lexicon and grammar of all natural languages, but it has been shown to have important practical applications in many areas, including cross‐cultural communication and the pursuit of knowledge in the globalized world increasingly dominated by English.
Organizational Discourse Studies
Authors: Robichaud Daniel
Published: April 2015

Organization discourse studies refers to a multidisciplinary domain that looks at the ways in which language and meaning shape organizational phenomena. Organization discourse scholars generally share a process orientation toward the nature of organization—hence their focus on organizing and on the key role that language and practices play in its constitution. Organization discourse refers (1) either to the situated talk and text in organizing or language in use in the daily interactions of organizational members, (2) or to the organizational reality as it is constructed, maintained, reproduced, and even imposed on organizational members through discursive formations recognizable in various domains of practices, professional cultures or organization fields. The most common discourse phenomena investigated in the study of organizations are conversations, narratives, and organizational rhetoric.
Jury Trial Discourse
Authors: Heffer Chris
Published: April 2015

The basic elements of jury trial discourse were evident in ancient Athens but have become woven into the highly complex genre of the modern trial. Rooted in a tension between rules and rhetoric, the modern jury trial consists in a number of well‐established professional genres that vary significantly across jurisdictions. Jury trial discourse is not legal language, but its forms of interaction are distinctive and different from face‐to‐face conversation. The way we categorize discourse affects what we see in the trial and can lead to judgments of normality and abnormality. Central elements in jury trial discourse are narrative and power.
Modality
Authors: Hoye Leo Francis
Published: April 2015

The linguistic study of modality and its related concepts remains of perennial interest. Modality is that enterprise by which we conjure up meaning: our views about the actual and other “possible worlds,” on the one hand, and what we feel others are bound to do or should do in that world, on the other hand. It is arguably the most complex notion in language, precisely because of its centrality to human thought and action. This article seeks to capture and explicate its complexity and significance.
Cultural Persuadables
Authors: Chornet Daniel
Published: April 2015

Cultural persuadables is a perspective on social influence that posits that the range of meanings and actions that are open to influence are bounded by a culture's norms and premises. Outside that range there are (1) actions so strongly prescribed and expected that any persuasive effort would be perceived as unnecessary; (2) and actions so contrary to the culture's norms and premises that any amount of persuasion would be futile. How social actors deploy persuasive resources and their effectiveness is contingent on the appropriate management of face wants, the magnitude of imposition of a persuasive attempt, and the sequential nature of the interaction.
Interpersonal Ideology
Authors: Poutiainen Saila
Published: April 2015

Interpersonal ideology is a system of premises about personhood, relationships, and communication around which people of a speech community formulate lines of action toward others and interpret and evaluate others' action. Interpersonal ideologies are enacted, interpreted, and evaluated in social interaction. Interpersonal ideology emphasizes a cultural perspective; culture, communication, and relating are seen as inherently united. As a construct, interpersonal ideology intersects the areas of interpersonal communication, ethnography of communication, and critical studies.
Critical Discourse Analysis
Authors: van Leeuwen Theo
Published: April 2015

Since its beginnings in the late 1980s, critical discourse analysis has become well established as an approach to the analysis of text and talk that is united, not so much by a common theoretical or methodological approach, but by a common goal of not only describing but also explaining and critically evaluating the crucial role of text and talk in creating, maintaining, and legitimating inequality, injustice, and oppression in society.
Politeness Theory
Authors: Bousfield Derek
Published: April 2015

Politeness theory grew out of the emergent traditions of pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics in the 1970s. It was not, however, until the 1980s and 1990s that research and development of politeness from an academic perspective really blossomed. Linguistic‐politeness researchers are interested in how participants create, maintain, or repair positive social, and hence effective interpersonal relationships within and through linguistic interaction, in a range of sociologically or pragmatically understood settings. This article provides an historical account of politeness theory, showing how each new theoretical formulation led to a critique that, in turn, generated a new family of politeness theorizing.
Discourses of Religion
Authors: Parks Russell M. , Tracy Karen
Published: April 2015

Discourses of religion are forms of social interaction in which a connection to religion is foregrounded. This can be because the setting or particular features of the social interaction has a distinctively religious character. Four types of religious discourse are considered here: rituals, religious styles of speaking, religious language outside religious settings, and religion‐linked public controversy. All types of religious discourse have the function of doing religious identity work, while it is also possible for social interaction itself to be sustained by religious membership.
Speech Codes Theory
Authors: Philipsen Gerry , Hart Tabitha
Published: April 2015

Speech codes theory is an account of communication as a deeply cultured human activity. The theory, and the empirical research on which it is built, demonstrate that the kinds of local knowledge people deploy to talk about—to characterize, interpret, and rationalize—their communicative conduct is indeed local, particular knowledge, and that such knowledge can be discovered and described through systematic inquiry. This article describes the key theoretical commitments of speech codes theory, identifies its six propositions, illustrates research within the tradition, and assesses its purposes.
Narrative
Authors: Ingraham Chris
Published: April 2015

Narrative plays a formidable role in the world. It contributes to sensemaking, identity formation, and the organization of our personal and social experience. For this reason, narrative has been a subject of great interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplinary allegiances. While much has been claimed about narrative and the methods and benefits of its analysis, the work of various structural narratologists, and particularly of the sociolinguist William Labov, remain seminal to the development of this concept. Varieties of narrative analysis emergent from (and increasingly resistant to) these structural and sociolinguistic traditions continue to occupy scholars within the social sciences and humanities alike.
Dialogue
Authors: Black Laura W.
Published: April 2015

Dialogue is understood as a way of communicating that is based on openness, respect, and mutual trust. Some language and social interaction (LSI) scholars conceptualize dialogue in a broad way, which highlights a specific orientation to all discourse and interaction. Others describe dialogue as a particular kind of communication that should occur in situations where interactants have diverse worldviews, or at least very different perspectives on a salient issue. In this normative conceptualization, dialogue offers a way of approaching differences that is not divisive, but instead is ethically oriented toward finding points of connection and building appreciation for other perspectives.LSIresearch has also studied dialogue as a metacommunicative term in ordinary discourse and as a particular kind of speech event with carefully designed interactions and desired interactional outcomes.
Fortune‐Telling Discourse
Authors: Chuang Rueyling
Published: April 2015

Utilizing the ethnography of communication and social psychology as theoretical foundations, this article explores the sociocultural underpinnings of fortune‐telling and its relationship with language and social interaction. It illustrates the extent to which fortune‐telling in various cultures exemplifies a fundamental human quest for answers amid difficult or challenging circumstances. Going beyond the Eurocentric assumption that fortune‐telling is linked to pseudoscience and mysticism, the article considers the roots of fortune‐telling in various cultures and expands on its connection to the notion of speech community, spiritual healing, and social praxis. Finally, fortune‐telling as discourse demonstrates how symbols, signs, and rituals are used in situated speech communities.
Print Media Discourse
Authors: Hout Tom Van , Cotter Colleen
Published: April 2015

Print media discourse can be defined as written language embedded in identifiable genres for mass public consumption across global and local contexts. While print media constitutes any visually represented, two‐dimensional format that conveys a message from one (or more) to many—tiny Tweets to big billboards—the flagship genre is newspaper journalism, which constitutes the narratives of social life across culture and epoch. At the same time, wide‐ranging investigations into print media discourse have yielded important insights into the structure of news texts, political and ideological implications, and the mechanisms of production and consumption. By its nature cross‐disciplinary, print media discourse analysis examines the role of language and visual image, the encoding of stance in languages other than English, and the impact of news sources, professional values, and technologies on the writing process.
Activity Theory
Authors: O'Connor Kevin
Published: April 2015

Activity theory focuses on how culture, history, and social interaction shape individual consciousness and the organization of collective activity. It is concerned with conceiving of human mental functioning and action in ways that go beyond the traditional psychological focus on the individual as the analytic unit. This article discusses the foundations and core concepts of contemporary activity theory in the work of Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and their colleagues and reviews four contemporary theoretical approaches that have built upon this foundational work: third‐generation activity theory; development through participation; situated learning; and mediated action.
Acceptor‐Substituted S,N‐Heteropentacenes of Different Conjugation Length: Structure–Property Relationships and Solar Cell Performance
Authors: Kast Hannelore , Mishra Amaresh , Schulz Gisela L. , Urdanpilleta Marta , Mena‐Osteritz Elena , Bäuerle Peter
Published: April 2015

The synthesis, optoelectronic, and photovoltaic properties of novel acceptor–donor–acceptor (A–D–A) based π‐conjugated functional molecules 1–3, comprising a planar S,N‐heteropentacene as central donor substituted with various terminal acceptor units, such as 1,1‐dicyanovinylene (DCV) and 1‐(1,1‐dicyanomethylene)‐cyclohex‐2‐ene (DCC), are reported. The structural variation of the end groups provides molecules 1–3 with gradually increased π‐conjugation due to a rising number of double bonds, which comes from the DCC unit(s). From optoelectronic investigation, structure–property relationships are deduced and the novel A–D–A heteropentacenes 1–3 are implemented as photoactive donor component in solution‐processed bulk heterojunction solar cells together with [6,6]‐phenyl‐C61‐butyric acid methyl ester as acceptor. The structural variation in the S,N‐heteropentacenes leads to clear trends in the photovoltaic performance and power conversion efficiencies of up to 4.9% are achieved. Furthermore, due to extension of the double bonds a clear trade‐off between the open circuit voltage (V
OC) and the short circuit current density (J
SC) values is observed. The role of additives on the optimization of the nanoscale morphology and device performance is investigated. The findings presented herein demonstrate that depending on the types of materials the additive may have significantly different effects on the active layer morphology and the device performance.
Single‐Step Assembly of Multimodal Imaging Nanocarriers: MRI and Long‐Wavelength Fluorescence Imaging
Authors: Pinkerton Nathalie M. , Gindy Marian E. , Calero‐DdelC Victoria L. , Wolfson Theodore , Pagels Robert F. , Adler Derek , Gao Dayuan , Li Shike , Wang Ruobing , Zevon Margot , Yao Nan , Pacheco Carlos , Therien Michael J. , Rinaldi Carlos , Sinko Patrick J. , Prud'homme Robert K.
Published: April 2015

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)‐ and near‐infrared (NIR)‐active, multimodal composite nanocarriers (CNCs) are prepared using a simple one‐step process, flash nanoprecipitation (FNP). The FNP process allows for the independent control of the hydrodynamic diameter, co‐core excipient and NIR dye loading, and iron oxide–based nanocrystal (IONC) content of the CNCs. In the controlled precipitation process, 10 nm IONCs are encapsulated into poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) stabilized CNCs to make biocompatible T2 contrast agents. By adjusting the formulation, CNC size is tuned between 80 and 360 nm. Holding the CNC size constant at an intensity weighted average diameter of 99 ± 3 nm (PDI width 28 nm), the particle relaxivity varies linearly with encapsulated IONC content ranging from 66 to 533 × 10−3m−1s−1for CNCs formulated with 4–16 wt% IONC. To demonstrate the use of CNCs as in vivo MRI contrast agents, CNCs are surface functionalized with liver‐targeting hydroxyl groups. The CNCs enable the detection of 0.8 mm3non‐small cell lung cancer metastases in mice livers via MRI. Incorporating the hydrophobic, NIR dye tris‐(porphyrinato)zinc(II) into CNCs enables complementary visualization with long‐wavelength fluorescence at 800 nm. In vivo imaging demonstrates the ability of CNCs to act both as MRI and fluorescent imaging agents.
Prevalence of thoracic aortopathy in patients with juvenile Polyposis Syndrome‐Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia due to SMAD4
Authors: Heald Brandie , Rigelsky Christina , Moran Rocio , LaGuardia Lisa , O'Malley Margaret , Burke Carol A. , Zahka Kenneth
Published: April 2015

Hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) is characterized by abnormal vascular structures that may present as epistaxis, telangiectasias, and/or arteriovenous malformations. The genes associated with HHT (ACVRL1, ENG, and SMAD4) are members of the TGFβ pathway. Other syndromes associated with abnormalities in TGFβ signaling include Marfan syndrome, Loeys–Dietz syndrome and related disorders. These disorders have aortic disease as a prominent finding. While there are case reports of patients with HHT and aortopathy (dilatation/aneurysm, dissection, and rupture), this has not been systematically investigated. We conducted a retrospective chart review to determine the prevalence of aortopathy in an HHT cohort. Patients from a single institution were identified who met the Curacao Criteria for a clinical diagnosis of HHT and/or had a mutation in ACVRL1, ENG, or SMAD4 and underwent echocardiogram. Two‐dimensional echocardiograms were reviewed by a single pediatric cardiologist, and data were collected on demographics, genotype, HHT features, aortic root measurements, past medical history, and family history. Z scores and nomograms were utilized to identify abnormal results. Twenty‐six patients from 15 families (one ACVRL1, four ENG, eight SMAD4, and two clinical diagnoses) were included in the analysis. Aortopathy was found in 6/26 (23%) patients; all had SMAD4 mutations. In our cohort, 6/16 (38%) SMAD4 mutation carriers had evidence of aortopathy. These data suggest that aortopathy could be part of the spectrum of SMAD4‐induced HHT manifestations. Routine aortic imaging, including measurements of the aorta, should be considered in patients with SMAD4 mutations to allow for appropriate medical and surgical recommendations. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The diagnostic value of next generation sequencing in familial nonsyndromic congenital heart defects
Authors: Jia Yaojuan , Louw Jacoba J. , Breckpot Jeroen , Callewaert Bert , Barrea Catherine , Sznajer Yves , Gewillig Marc , Souche Erika , Dehaspe Luc , Vermeesch Joris Robert , Lambrechts Diether , Devriendt Koenraad , Corveleyn Anniek
Published: April 2015

To determine the diagnostic value of massive parallel sequencing of a panel of known cardiac genes in familial nonsyndromic congenital heart defects (CHD), targeted sequencing of the coding regions of 57 genes previously implicated in CHD was performed in 36 patients from 13 nonsyndromic CHD families with probable autosomal dominant inheritance. Following variant analysis and Sanger validation, we identified six potential disease causing variants in three genes (MYH6, NOTCH1, and TBX5), which may explain the defects in six families. Several problematic situations were encountered when performing genotype‐phenotype correlations in the families to confirm the causality of these variants.

In conclusion, by screening known CHD‐associated genes in well‐selected nonsyndromic CHD families and cautious variant interpretation, potential causative variants were identified in less than half of the families (6 out of 13; 46%). Variant interpretation remains a major challenge reflecting the complex genetic cause of CHD. 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Scattering theory and thermodynamics of quantum transport
Authors: Gaspard Pierre
Published: April 2015

Scattering theory is complemented by recent results on full counting statistics, the multivariate fluctuation relation for currents, and time asymmetry in temporal disorder characterized by the Connes‐Narnhofer‐Thirring entropy per unit time, in order to establish relationships with the thermodynamics of quantum transport. Fluctuations in the bosonic or fermionic currents flowing across an open system in contact with particle reservoirs are described by their cumulant generating function, which obeys the multivariate fluctuation relation as the consequence of microreversibility. Time asymmetry in temporal disorder is shown to manifest itself out of equilibrium in the difference between a time‐reversed coentropy and the Connes‐Narnhofer‐Thirring entropy per unit time. This difference is shown to be equal to the thermodynamic entropy production for ideal quantum gases of bosons and fermions. The results are illustrated for a two‐terminal circuit.

image