bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epistemic Deixis in Kalapalo
Authors: Basso Ellen B.
Published: February 2015

Speakers of Kalapalo, a Southern Carib language spoken in central Brazil, use a complex set of grammatical particles to reference epistemic judgments. Using data from narratives, hereditary leader’s ritual communication, ritual songs, conversations, and didactic speech, I use deictic and stance concepts to understand the semantics of this system. A focus on discursive practice illustrates how various intersubjective stance processes are foregrounded by epistemic marking. The paper concludes with discussion of issues requiring further research.
The importance of being Irish
Authors: Garland Jennifer N.
Published: February 2015

This paper examines how orientation to cultural identities in an Irish language class in the United States is used to negotiate issues of authenticity and linguistic and cultural authority. The data were recorded in a beginning level Irish language class in Southern Califomia, in which the teacher and all but one student were American. The Irish identity of the remaining student was highly salient to the other students and to the teacher, conferring authenticity and linguistic authority on him. The teacher’s evaluations of the students ascribe authenticity and linguistic authority to the Irish student based on perceptions about his identity, in spite of his rejection of such authority. Thus, even when participants do not claim identity based statuses, they may be imposed by others in a way that is consequential for interaction.
The trouble with tongzhi
Authors: Wong Andrew D.
Published: February 2015

A general address term in Communist China, tongzhi ‘comrade’ was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong to refer to members of sexual minorities. Examining its level of acceptance among non-activist gay and lesbian Hongkongers, this article argues that non-activists’ ideology about sexuality accounts for their rejection of tongzhi and their preference for strategies that leave same-sex desire unspecified. This study demonstrates how the discursive history of a label can both enable and impede its political efficacy. It also sheds light on the internal resistance that representatives of minority groups encounter when introducing new labels for those they supposedly speak for.
A child of necessity
Authors: Daramola Adeyemi
Published: February 2015

Nigeria, which is variously described by some people as ‘a geographical expression’, ‘a unique nation’, ‘the giant of Africa’, ‘the most populous black nation on earth’, among several others, had three distinct governments in the year 1993 alone. Against this background of political instability, numerous discourses which should be of interest and significance to linguists, political scientists, historians, social anthropologists and discourse analysts of various persuasions are examined in this work. Notable is the emergence of the metaphorical use of the word child in the farewell speech of the deposed Head-of-State, Chief Ernest Oladeinde Shonekan, when he spoke of the interim regime as ‘a child of circumstance’ and in the inaugural speech of the then new Head-of-State, General Sani Abacha, as ‘a child of necessity’. These expressions were used not only as part of the reasons for either taking up or rather seizing the mantle of leadership but also as descriptive signals both to the state of the nation and the kind of government that they purported to lead. Using articles in some national newspapers, I attempt in this paper a functional-semiotic discourse analysis of the relevant statements, responses and comments on these national, dramatic, political changes. This paper is therefore an analysis of aspects of the linguistic features of discourses engendered by the diverse problematic, economic, socio-cultural and political events within the Nigerian polity and the political implications for putting in place adequate democratic principles in a developing nation.
Counterfactual conditionals in argumentative legal language in Dutch
Authors: Nivelle Nele
Published: February 2015

Legal argumentation is intended to resolve a difference of opinion between two or more legal parties by determining what are the facts in a case and finding an appropriate legal interpretation for these facts. Some of the discussion moves in legal argumentation take the shape of counterfactual conditionals (CTFs). CTFs are conditionals with an antecedent that is implicated to be false, not corresponding to the facts, and they occur in a number of argumentative contexts and argumentation techniques. This paper gives a structured overview of how such non-fact-based CTFs can contribute to resolving a legal and fact- centered difference of opinion. It does so by presenting a bottom-up corpus-based typology of CTFs in lawyers’ conclusions and in judgments in civil cases heard by Dutch-speaking Belgian courts of law. This typology is based on linguistic and pragmatic factors, such as the status of the facts that are referred to in the antecedent, the nature of the relation between antecedent and consequent, and the relation the CTF bears to the argumentative, situational and legal context.
The implications of studying politeness in Spanish-speaking contexts
Authors: Bravo Diana
Published: February 2015

In the last decades, the studies on politeness have discussed central concepts stemming from Brown and Levinson’s work ([1978] 1987), such asface,threats,mitigationsandstrategies of politeness. One of the problems that the study of politeness presents for the analysis of a situated corpus of speech is that the use of the mentioned notions calls for a socio-cultural perspective. In other words, it is necessary to include extralinguistic factors in the analysis of politeness, as the phenomena is beyond the sphere of linguistics in strict terms. In this paper, I approach the challenge based on other studies that I have already done for different corpora of Spanish. I discuss the problem of using certain concepts (face, threats, mitigations and strategies of politeness) as methodological categories for the interpretation of communicative behaviours in situated interactions. In my analysis, I use categories that incorporate, both theoretically and methodologically,socio-cultural variationin the realisations of politeness. To achieve this, I evaluate thesocial effectthat certain behaviours have in the interpersonal relations under study, so as to, from then on, classify those behaviours in terms of politeness, impoliteness or neutrality. Also, I use the categories of “autonomy” and “affiliation”, void of socio-cultural contents. Finally, I put forward extralinguistic elements in the analysis of corpora of Spanish by making explicit those “socio-cultural premises” that an analyst use to make his or her interpretations.
Politeness and other types of facework
Authors: Hernández-Flores Nieves
Published: February 2015

TV-panel discussions constitute a communicative genre with specific features concerning the situational context, the communicative goals, the roles played by the participants and the acts that are carried out in the interaction. In the Spanish TV-debate Cada día, discourse is characterized as semi-institutional because of having both institutional characteristics – due to its mediatic nature – and conversational characteristics. In the communicative exchanges the social situation of the participants is negotiated by communicative acts, that is, facework is realised. Facework concerns the speakers’ wants of face, both the individual face and the group face. In the present article face is described in cultural terms within the general face wants autonomy and affiliation and in accordance with the roles the speakers assume in interaction. In the analysis of an excerpt from the TV-debate Cada día two types of facework are identified: On the one hand politeness, that is, when an attempted balance between the speaker’s and the addressees’ face is aimed at and, on the other hand, self-facework, which appears when only the speaker’s face is focused on. No samples of the third case of facework, impoliteness, are found in this excerpt. The results of the analysis display the relationship between the communicative purposes of this communicative genre (to inform, to entertain and to convince people of political ideas) and the types of facework (politeness, self-facework) that are identified in the analysed data.
¿qué::? ¿cómo que te vas a casar? congratulations and rapport management
Authors: Garcia Carmen
Published: February 2015

Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2005) rapport management theoretical framework, this article examines Peruvian Spanish-speakers’ behavioral expectations, types of face respected/threatened and interactional wants when congratulating. Analysis shows that participants’ interactional wants were mainly relational; they exhibited a rapport-maintenance orientation using strategies that, although apparently violating the equity principle, relfected their interdependent self-construals (Markus and Kitayama 1991). Along the same lines, participants enhanced their own identity and respectability face, and in doing so, also enhanced the interlocutor’s respectability face by making her the beneficiary of their concern for her. Although gender differences were found, these were not statistically significant.
Oreandomae
Authors: SturtzSreetharan Cindi L.
Published: February 2015

First- and second-person pronouns have been one of the centerpieces of the literature on language and gender differences in Japanese (Shibamoto Smith 2003). Most of our understandings ofreal(empirical) pronominal use comes from investigations of female speakers of standard Japanese. Our understandings of how dialect speakers and/or men use pronominal forms in daily linguistic practice are not well informed. This article undertakes an investigation of Japanese men’s uses of pronominal forms; each participant was born and reared in the Kansai (western) area of Japan and uses a dialect variety of Japanese (Hanshinkan Dialect). Literature which addresses pronominal usage in Japanese indicates that these forms are risky since they always serve to position speaker and hearer in specific ways relative to one another; as such, pronouns are something to be avoided. The findings of this paper indicate that pronouns are used by Japanese men; however the uses are contextually governed and have little to do with delineating speaker from hearer and have more to do with specific conversational goals.
The discursive construction of multiple identities of the Albanian (Arvanitika) speakers of Greece
Authors: Tsitsipis Lukas D.
Published: February 2015

This paper addresses the complex issue of negotiating identity among minority speakers of Albanian in modern Greece as surrounded by and interacting with major societal forces and dominant ideologies stemming from the Greek nation-state. Some of the theoretical questions related to the very concept of identity are also discussed. The major thrust of the paper is focused on a discursive construction of a shifting identity formation on the part of minority community members who often anchor their identities by means of an indexical machinery rather than by explicit propositional self-identification. This means that, even though they frequently label themselves Albanian (Arvanitika) speakers and foreground various kinds of symbolic contrasts to the dominant culture and ethnicity, they also perform an identity by referring to themselves as “we” which allows more room for negotiation and for the blurring of rigid boundaries that are frequently erected around an ethnolinguistic group in our analytical jargon. I argue that this identity management is to be expected in conditions of late modernity in which no schemes, modes of existence, and ideological views are taken for granted, and in which one has to cope with challenges emerging from macro-centers of control. In such a process reflexivity at the local level looms large questioning the inherited understandings of this and related phenomena as easily classifiable sociologically and sociolinguistically.
The sentence-final particles ne and yo in soliloquial Japanese
Authors: Hasegawa Yoko
Published: February 2015

This paper investigates the Japanese sentence-final particles ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy. Because of their pivotal roles in spoken Japanese, these particles have been investigated extensively for decades. However, most previous works have analyzed them solely in terms of communication, invariably assuming the presence of an addressee. In fact, it is not yet widely known that these particles can also occur in soliloquy in which communication with another person is not intended. The present article is the first study to address the significance of ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy and discuss problems associated with hitherto proposed analyses. In order to investigate how communicative and non-communicative intentions influence utterances, an experiment was conducted in which soliloquies of native speakers of Japanese were examined. For ne, this study endorses Takubo and Kinsui’s Discourse Management Model. For yo, Inoue’s account is vindicated.
Negotiating identities through pronouns of address in an immigrant community
Authors: Liebscher Grit , Dailey-O’Cain Jennifer , Müller Mareike , Reichert Tetyana
Published: February 2015

This article investigates forms of address, in particular the T/V distinction in German, in conversational interviews with German-speaking immigrants to English-speaking Canada and their descendants. From among 77 interviews conducted in two urban areas in Canada, we discuss instances of both the interactional use of and metalinguistic comments on forms of address. Our analysis is largely guided by conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. Goodwin & Heritage 1990). Using Clyne, Norrby and Warren’s (2009) model of address as a backdrop, we investigate the construction of group identity and group socialization through the lens of positioning theory (e.g. van Langenhove and Harré 1993; Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher 2009). This combination of analytical tools can explain shifts in both usage of and attitudes toward the T/V distinction that cannot be explained through language attrition arguments alone.
Socializing Heteroglossia among Miskitu children on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua
Authors: Minks Amanda
Published: February 2015

This article adapts Bakhtin’s term “heteroglossia” as a framework for analyzing Miskitu children’s multilingual speech on Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Analysis of naturally occurring speech in this context illustrates the utility of partial competencies and hybridized speech, supporting a view of language not as a bounded system, but as a diverse pool of communicative resources that socialize children into multiple modes of voicing and acting. More broadly, the article examines the relations between language ideologies and language socialization, and the ways that both are articulated within complex histories of cultural interaction and stratified social relations. The article challenges conventional dichotomies of language loss and revitalization by viewing the hybrid linguistic practices that enable children to bridge social and cultural worlds.
“ ‘Schwedis’ he can’t even say Swedish” - subverting and reproducing institutionalized norms for language use in multilingual peer groups
Authors: Evaldsson Ann-Carita , Cekaite Asta
Published: February 2015

The present study explores how minority schoolchildren in multilingual peer group interactions act upon dominant educational and linguistic ideologies as they organize their everyday emerging peer culture. The data draw from ethnographies combined with detailed analysis (CA) of video recordings in two primary monolingual school settings in Sweden. Bakhtin’s processual view of how linguistic norms are used for overcoming the heteroglossia of language is used as a framework for understanding how monolingualism is talked-into-being in multilingual peer groups. As will be demonstrated, the children recurrently participate in corrective practices in which they playfully exploit multiple linguistic resources (syntactic, lexical and phonetic features) and the turn structure of varied activities (conflicts, accusations, insults, classroom discourse) to play with and consolidate a collective critical view of not-knowing correct Swedish. Moreover, they transform faulty talk (repeating structural elements, recycling arguments, using parodic imitations, joint laughter, code-switching) to display their language competence, assert powerful positions and strengthen alliances in the peer group. It is argued that such forms of playful heteroglossic peer group practices are highly ambiguous and paradoxically tend to enforce power hierarchies and values associated with different social languages and codes, thus co-constructing the monolingual ideology.
Malinowski’s last word on the anthropological approach to language
Authors: Young Michael W.
Published: February 2015

This article reproduces an archived and previously unpublished paper by Bronislaw Malinowski entitled “The anthropological approach to language” which he delivered to a meeting of the elite Monday Night Group in the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University in November 1941. The social “context of situation” of Malinowski’s seminar presentation is reconstructed together with a brief consideration of his contribution to linguistic theory. A commentary on his paper refers to Malinowski’s relationship with several of his peers, including discussion of the critical reception given to the second volume of his last monograph on the Trobriand Islands, Coral Gardens and their Magic. Finally, the “biographical context of situation” describes Malinowski’s lethally busy schedule six months before his death, referring to his other public presentations during the months of October and November 1941.
Perceptions of national and regional standards of addressing in Germany and Austria
Authors: Kretzenbacher Heinz L.
Published: February 2015

This article investigates the use of German forms of address in different national and regional varieties of German, as perceived by speakers of those varieties. For particular domains such as the workplace, informants report significant regional and national differences in use not only of pronominal address but also of nominal address and linguistic structures linked to addressing such as greetings. The data also confirm differences in information about and sensitivity for different national varieties between speakers of the dominant and of non-dominant varieties characteristic for asymmetrical pluricentricity.
Framing and collaboration in storytelling events
Authors: Oropeza-Escobar Minerva
Published: February 2015

The collaborative character of discourse has been studied for different activities and linguistic levels. The present article discusses the relevance of this perspective to a better understanding of storytelling events. The focus is on metadiscursive interactions that result from the teller’s difficulty to evoke a word or linguistic form at a certain point of the story. Two different collaborative solutions are identified and analyzed, and its connections to framing and participation framework discussed.
Is dat dog you’re eating?
Authors: Hiramoto Mie
Published: February 2015

This paper explores both racial and socioeconomic classification through language use as a means of membership categorization among locals in Hawai‘i. Analysis of the data focuses on some of the most obvious representations of language ideology, namely, ethnic jokes and local vernacular. Ideological constructions concerning two types of Filipino populations, local Filipinos and immigrant Filipinos, the latter often derisively referred to as “Fresh off the Boat (FOB)” are performed differently in ethnic jokes by local Filipino comedians. Scholars report that the use of mock language often functions as a racialized categorization marker; however, observations on the use of Mock Filipino in this study suggest that the classification as local or immigrant goes beyond race, and that the differences between the two categories of Filipinos observed here are better represented in terms of social status. First generation Filipino immigrants established diaspora communities in Hawai‘i from the plantation time and they slowly merged with other groups in the area. As a result, the immigrants’ children integrated themselves into the local community; at this point, their children considered themselves to be members of this new homeland, newly established locals who no longer belonged to their ancestors’ country. Thus, the local population, though of the same race with the new immigrants, act as racists against people of their own race in the comedy performances.
Detecting contrast patterns in newspaper articles by combining discourse analysis and text mining
Authors: Pollak Senja , Coesemans Roel , Daelemans Walter , Lavrač Nada
Published: February 2015

Text mining aims at constructing classification models and finding interesting patterns in large text collections. This paper investigates the utility of applying these techniques to media analysis, more specifically to support discourse analysis of news reports about the 2007 Kenyan elections and post-election crisis in local (Kenyan) and Western (British and US) newspapers. It illustrates how text mining methods can assist discourse analysis by finding contrast patterns which provide evidence for ideological differences between local and international press coverage. Our experiments indicate that most significant differences pertain to the interpretive frame of the news events: whereas the newspapers from the UK and the US focus on ethnicity in their coverage, the Kenyan press concentrates on sociopolitical aspects.
Length of residence and intensity of interaction
Authors: Bella Spyridoula
Published: February 2015

This paper investigates the external and internal modification devices used by native speakers and advanced learners of Greek, when making requests in formal and informal situations. The data are drawn from a discourse completion test completed by native speakers and learners of two different groups: one with extended length of residence in Greece but limited opportunities for interaction with native speakers and one with more frequent opportunities for interaction but limited length of residence in the target community. On the basis of the results, it is argued that learners with more opportunities for interaction approximate more closely to the native norm with respect to external modification and some aspects of internal modification of requests. Yet, it is shown that other aspects of internal modification remain underdeveloped, irrespective of frequency of contact with native speakers. This highlights the need for pedagogical intervention in order for the learners’ pragmatic development to be promoted.
The interplay of greetings and promises
Authors: Rodríguez Juan Luis
Published: February 2015

This paper addresses the use of greetings and the importance of promises in political speeches performed by Warao and non-Warao indigenous politicians to Warao audiences in the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela. It shows that lack of promises can jeopardize the rhetorical effectiveness of their performance regardless of their use of discursive framings, such as greetings in indigenous languages, and of traditional genres of speech. Promises are important for the Warao because they link political speech with other meaningful events, especially political gift distribution. Promises create trans-semiotic links between events and index the possibility of a continuous relationship with political representatives.
“You don’t seem to know how to work”
Authors: Ho Debbie G.E. , Henry Alex , Alkaff Sharifah N.H.
Published: February 2015

This study aims firstly to compare the complaints of local native-Malay speakers and expatriate native-English speakers in Brunei in terms of move structure and levels of directness combined with the frequency of modality markers; and secondly, it attempts to address the relationship between polite behaviour and its effectiveness in eliciting the appropriate response from the hearer. Data from an oral discourse completion task show interesting similarities and differences in the complaint move structure between the two groups of speakers. Superficially, there appears to be no significant difference between the two sets of complaints in terms of levels of directness, but a detailed analysis shows each group employing different mitigating strategies to minimise the force of a complaint. Furthermore, responses from an acceptability judgement questionnaire indicate that being indirect, and therefore polite, may not be effective in eliciting the appropriate response to a request for action in a complaint speech act.
Building connected discourse in non-native speech
Authors: Lee Yo-An
Published: February 2015

The demand for proficient non-native speakers (NNSs) of English has increased across professional fields in recent years. While speaking skills involve a complex array of factors and constraints, previous studies resorted to unexamined perceptions or intuitive impressions drawn from surface linguistic features. Particularly missing is close analytic descriptions of non-native discourse that is produced in spontaneous contexts. The present study investigates the process by which NNSs of English produce connected discourse as it unfolds in real-time. The ability to produce connected discourse is considered a hallmark of advanced speaking proficiency and this study therefore focuses on tracing the sequential organization of multiple utterances that NNSs produce in spontaneous speech. Following the principles of conversation analysis (CA), the present paper analyzes three sets of excerpts demonstrating the contingent choices that NNSs make in building connected discourse. The findings offer empirical resources for non-native professionals to identify the practicality and generality of connected discourse in real-time speech contexts.
Indexing narrative metalepsis in German conversational story-telling
Authors: Bücker Jörg
Published: February 2015

The purpose of this study is to show that direct speech in narratives introduced by “von wegen” (‘like’) and “nach dem Motto” (‘along the lines of’) can be analyzed as a powerful means to transform a stretch of talk into a massive “stance index” which transcends the boundaries between the narrator’s world and the narrated world in terms of narrative metalepsis. “Von wegen” and “nach dem Motto” are non-canonical reporting frames which are syntactically flexible and semantically facilitate a transformation of direct speech into a “category-animation”. For these reasons, they can be employed spontaneously in spoken talk-in-interaction and make it possible to shape a stretch of direct speech creatively in order to position oneself, other discourse participants and narrated characters as committed or non-committed to what is seen to be a relevant normative point of reference. The way direct speech introduced by “von wegen” and “nach dem Motto” can be used to construct positions in order to evaluate discourse participants and narrated characters can be grasped schematically by means of a slightly revised and extended version of Du Bois’ “stance triangle”.
Speech play and language ideologies in Navajo terminology development
Authors: Peterson Leighton C. , Webster Anthony K.
Published: February 2015

In this article we combine a concern with speech play and language ideologies to investigate contemporary Navajo terminology development. This article presents some recent cases of lexical elaboration in context, and argues that neologisms in Navajo are often fleeting, shifting, or humorous practices that reflect and recreate individual agency, intimate grammars, and local language ideologies. They also reflect an unexpected continuity in what is considered to be a context of rapid language shift. Such practices are one form of resistance to English and should be seen as a sociocultural, rather than purely referential, phenomenon.
In between spectacle and political correctness
Authors: Placencia María Elena , Rodríguez Catalina Fuentes
Published: February 2015

Vamos con todois a mixed-genre entertainment programme transmitted in Ecuador on a national television channel. The segment of the programme that we examine in this paper focuses on gossip and events surrounding local/national celebrities. Talk as entertainment is central to this segment which is structured around a series of ‘news’ stories announced by the presenters and mostly conveyed through (pre-recorded) interviews. Extracts of these interviews are ingeniously presented to create a sense of confrontation between the celebrities concerned. Each news story is then followed-up by informal ‘discussions’ among the show’s 5-6 presenters who take on the role of panellists. WhileVamos con todoincorporates various genres, the running thread throughout the programme is the creation of scandal and the instigation of confrontation. What is of particular interest, however, is that no sooner the scandalous stories are presented, the programme presenters attempt to defuse the scandal and controversy that they contributed to creating. The programme thus results in what viewers familiar with the genre of confrontational talk shows in Spain, for example, may regard as an emasculated equivalent. In this paper we explore linguistic and other mechanisms through which confrontation and scandal are first created and then defused inVamos con todo. We consider the situational, cultural and socio-political context of the programme as possibly playing a part in this disjointedness. The study draws on the literature on television discourse, talk shows and (im)politeness in the media.
Singing and codeswitching in sequence closings
Authors: Frick Maria
Published: February 2015

Turns in interaction that initiate closure of expanded sequences are often summaries, accounts and assessments of the preceding talk. Sometimes these turns are produced by means that can be described as heteroglossic. This paper investigates singing and codeswitching in sequence closures, as well as other accompanying contextualisation cues such as prosodic changes and gestures. The heteroglossic character of these contextualised turns is a means for the speakers to distance themselves from the actions of their turns, and from the ongoing sequential activities. For the recipients this gives a possibility to make interpretations of non-seriousness. The sequences can then be closed with joint affiliative action such as laughter. In cases where the sequences have been expanded because of problems in interaction, singing and codeswitching relieve the tension between participants. On occasion, they also give rise to new topics. This paper is written in a conversation analytic framework, on data collected from everyday face-to-face interaction among Finns living in Estonia.
Legitimization and delegitimization strategies on terrorism
Authors: Hellin Garcia Maria Jose
Published: February 2015

This article examines the role of Building Metaphors in the political discourse of the former Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. More specific, it analyzes how Building Metaphors serve as legitimization and delegitimization strategies used by the Government and its anti-terrorist plight. The corpus of investigation comprises all political speeches on terrorism during Zapatero’s two terms in office (from April 2004 to December 2011). I argue that the use of Building Metaphors is a strategy of Zapatero’s whereby the solid ground of the Government’s anti-terrorist initiative is juxtaposed with terrorism’s lack of foundation. Findings suggest that the following conceptual metaphors are used as framing devices: POLITICS IS BUILDING, POLITICAL ENTITIES ARE BUILDINGS, THE GOVERNMENT IS THE BUILDER, TERRORISM IS THE DESTROYER, DEMOCRACY IS A STANDING BUILDING WITH SOLID FOUNDATIONS, TERRORISM IS A BUILDING WITH NO FOUNDATIONS, DEMOCRATIC VALUES ARE CONNECTORS, and TERRORIST VALUES ARE OBSTRUCTORS.
What’s in a name? Names, national identity, assimilation, and the new racist discourse of Marine Le Pen
Authors: Clifton Jonathan
Published: February 2015

Despite the fact that the link between names, national identity, and the (non)assimilation of immigrants into a host country’s culture is often assumed, little research investigates how this link is discursively achieved as an in situ members’ accomplishment, nor does this research describe what the link between assimilation and naming achieves as social practice. Using membership categorisation analysis (MCA) as a research methodology and transcripts of a televised news interview and subsequent news forum comments as data, this paper investigates how national identity is discursively negotiated in political debate in the public sphere. It thus points out how boundaries are drawn around national identity so as to either exclude or include immigrants with ‘foreign-sounding’ names and so investigates how new racism is achieved, or resisted, in political debate. Findings indicate that new racism is achieved through the functioning of adversarial standard relational pairs (SRPs) which make relevant difference rather than similarity.
Analyzing equivalences in discourse
Authors: D’hondt Sigurd
Published: February 2015

Facing a crucial leap from political philosophy to empirical analysis, the approach to discourse analysis that arose in the aftermath of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and that is currently known as the Essex school of discourse theory (DT), has in recent years repeatedly been accused of suffering from a methodological deficit. This paper examines to what extent membership categorization analysis (MCA), a branch of ethnomethodology that investigates lay actors’ situated descriptions-in-context as practical activity, can play a part in rendering poststructuralist DT notions such as articulation and equivalence analytically tangible in empirically observable discourse. Based on a review of Laclau and Mouffe’s foundational text as well as on Glynos and Howarth’s recent exposition of the framework (2007), it is argued that MCA empirically substantiates many poststructuralist claims about the indeterminacy of signification. However, MCA consistently falters - and willingly so - at the point where DT would articulate emerging equivalences between identity categories as part of a second-order explanatory concept, such as Glynos and Howarth’s notion of political logic. Nevertheless, MCA also contains the kernel of an “endogenous” notion of the political that comes fairly close to DT’s all-pervasive understanding of the concept. To support these arguments, a variety of empirical sources are mobilized, ranging from the transcript of a political talk show, a newspaper report regarding a discrimination case in a dance class, to data drawn from earlier research on the way that minority members are treated by the Belgian criminal justice system.
The distribution and characteristics of Japanese vocatives in business situations
Authors: Kitayama Tamaki
Published: February 2015

This paper aims to analyse the types of Japanese vocatives used in business situations, and demonstrate the characteristics of their distribution with different politeness levels as shown in films on human relationships in large traditional corporations in and around Tokyo. The discussion builds on the theory of “discernment or social indexing politeness” (Hill et al. 1986; Ide 2006; Ide et al. 1986; Kasper 1990; Geyer 2008), and positions that of “strategic or volitional politeness” (ibid.) with the variables of “power” and “distance” proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). In a society of collectivism under a vertical structure with seniority system, people have their ownba(‘place’) (Nakane 2005) where they are expected to choose socially accepted language and behaviour according to whom they address; namely, seniors or juniors, anduchi(‘in-group’) orsoto(‘out-group’) members. The use of vocatives is fixed based primarily upon “power” (age and status) and “distance” (in- or out-group), and is hardly flexible to changes in form in business or private situations. “Power” prevails in addressing in-group members; whereas “distance” determines the choice of vocatives used between out-group people. Within a group, indirect polite forms are used to address superiors, whilst direct familiar forms are chosen when speaking to subordinates, which presents a nonreciprocal use of terms; power downwards and reserve upwards. The intentional individual use of last name+-san(‘Mr./Ms.’) is also argued here as it has dichotomous aspects of politeness; sounding more polite to address a subordinate, and less polite when used with a boss. To out-group members, people tend to choose more of polite forms to each other. These vocative choices reflect the relative position of the Japanese interdependent “self” (Morisaki & Gudykunst 1994; Gudykunst et al. 1996; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin 2009) with “other- and mutual-face” (Ting-Toomey & Oetzel 2002), which follows social norms, striving to meet expectations made by groups it belongs to and identifies itself with.
Direct reported speech as a frame for implicit reflexivity
Authors: Oropeza-Escobar Minerva
Published: February 2015

By articulating the notions of reflexivity and participant roles in the context of direct reported speech, the present study aims to contribute to a better understanding of discourse and interaction in storytelling events. Direct reported speech, I find, counts as a reflexive resource not only because it re-presents other speech, but also because it frames the activity of the metanarrator, as attested by the embedding of overtly reflexive elements (instances of direct reported speech, indirect reported speech and performative verbs) and the display of implicitly reflexive processes such as word search, repair and lexical choice. I arrive at the conclusion that those explicitly reflexive resources -such as metanarrative comments- which involve the momentary suspension of the reporting speech, occur only in extreme cases in which the audience’s understanding of the narrative is in risk from the teller’s perspective. Otherwise, the tendency prevails to keep direct reported speech consistent with the position and point of view of the corresponding figure.The narratives analyzed here were recorded in Spanish among bilingual Totonac-Spanish storytellers from three different villages of the Mexican State of Veracruz.
Teaching oral requests
Authors: Petraki Eleni , Bayes Sarah
Published: February 2015

Research in English language teaching has highlighted the importance of teaching communication skills in the language classroom. Against the backdrop of extensive research in everyday communication, the goal of this research was to explore whether current discourse analytic research is reflected in the lessons and communication examples of five English language teaching textbooks, by using spoken requests as the subject of investigation. The textbooks were evaluated on five criteria deriving from research on politeness, speech act theory and conversation analysis. These included whether and the extent to which the textbooks discussed the cultural appropriateness of requests, discussed the relationship of requests and other contextual factors, explained pre-sequences and re-requests and provided adequate practice activities. This study found that none of the coursebooks covered all of the criteria and that some coursebooks actually had very inadequate lessons. The results of the textbook analysis demonstrate that teachers using these five coursebooks and designers of future coursebooks must improve their lessons on requests by using pragmatics research and authentic examples as a guide.
The effect of study abroad on the pragmatic development of the internal modification of refusals
Authors: Ren Wei
Published: February 2015

Few studies have investigated the internal modification of refusals. This study investigates the effect of participating in a study abroad programme on the pragmatic development of Chinese students’ employment of internal modifiers in their L2 English refusals. 20 Chinese students studying abroad and 20 Chinese students remaining at home participated in the study, and their L2 refusals were examined over the course of one academic year. Data were collected three times by an 8-situation Multimedia Elicitation Task. The results reveal that the two groups showed similar development with regard to the range of internal modification types in their refusals. Furthermore, with respect to the frequency of internal modifications, the results suggest that the differences between the two groups were not significant. However, analyses of the participants’ use of individual internal modifications revealed different developmental patterns in the utilisation of ‘address term’ and ‘downtoner’. These patterns indicate a unique effect of studying abroad on learners’ pragmatic development, at least with respect to the aforementioned pragmatic aspects.
The discursive management of identity in interviews with female former colonials of the Belgian Congo
Authors: Van De Mieroop Dorien , Clifton Jonathan
Published: February 2015

Whilst interviews are often regarded as an essential tool for social science, it has long been recognized that the interviewer has a formative role in the locally situated socio-communicative events that interviews are. Using transcripts of interviews elicited from female former colonials in the Belgian Congo, this article examines the way in which the interviewer, himself a former colonial, manages the construction of meaning and identity in relation to two intricately interwoven issues, namely the position of women and colonial society more generally. Findings demonstrate that the interviewer places the interviewees in a position of interactional subordination which also allows him, despite the threat to the interviewees’ face, to construct women as being superfluous both in 1950s-society in general and more specifically in the storyworld of the Belgian Congo, whilst at the same time he avoids any face threat to the colonial society more generally.
Laughing when nothing’s funny
Authors: Warner-Garcia Shawn
Published: February 2015

Laughter is primarily a social phenomenon and used as a resource for managing social relationships and identities. While it is often unplanned and uncensored, laughter is also strategically produced at particular moments to accomplish particular goals in interaction. In this article, I examine the ways in which laughter – specifically, what I callcoping laughter– is utilized to manage the face-threatening relational aspects of disagreements rather than to deal with the actual content of disputes. The four specific functions of coping laughter that I analyze are (1) face-threat mitigation, (2) face-loss concealment, (3) serious-to-nonserious frame switch, and (4) topic transition facilitation. Which of these functions are accomplished varies depending on several contextual factors, including who initiates the laughter, how other participants respond to the laughter, and the overarching context and participant roles at play in the interaction. I discuss each of these influencing factors and the associated interactional functions of coping laughter in relation to the data I analyze. I argue that coping laughter is an efficient and effective strategy for dealing with the interactional trouble caused by a disagreement without dealing with its content.
Grammar, context and the hearer
Authors: Giomi Riccardo
Published: February 2015

This paper addresses two issues related to the overarching question of how to integrate Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) into a wider theory of verbal interaction (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 1). First, it proposes an addressee-oriented version of the Grammatical Component, presenting a first attempt to develop an FDG account of language comprehension; second, it aims to shed light on the interaction between the Grammatical and Contextual Components of FDG by exploring this crucial aspect of verbal communication from the perspective of the addressee.
Activation and the relation between context and grammar
Authors: García Velasco Daniel
Published: February 2015

Functional Discourse Grammar is characterized as the grammatical component of a wider theory of verbal interaction and is linked to two adjacent components: The Conceptual and the Contextual Components. One general property of these components is that they are not open-ended, but are said to contain only that extra-linguistic information which is relevant for the construction and interpretation of the immediate linguistic expression. In this contribution I explore the relation between context and grammar and I conclude that the FDG’s requirement that the Contextual Component should only contain those features which have a systematic impact on grammar is too strict. In particular, I claim that the Contextual Component is relevant in linguistic usage through speakers’ mental representation of its contents, which could be captured in the Conceptual Component. I further argue that the notions of ‘activation’ and ‘sharedness’ are relevant to understanding the motivation of two syntactic processes, subject raising and extraction from NPs, and should therefore find a place in the model even if they do not always lead to systematic effects. It is finally proposed that these pragmatic dimensions could find their way into the grammar by means of unmarked pragmatic configurations or content frames.
The discourse motivation for split-ergative alignment in Dutch nominalisations (and elsewhere)
Authors: Van de Velde Freek
Published: February 2015

Dutch nominalisations of the type het eten van vlees (‘the eating of meat’) have ergative alignment. The alignment is functionally motivated, in that it is a natural consequence of the flow of discourse. The functional account that is put forward here draws on the notion of Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987) and on the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded discourse (Hopper & Thompson 1980). Support for this account comes from other domains of ergativity in Dutch, such as causativised predicates and participial constructions and from the observation that the alignment in Dutch nominalisations is in fact split-ergative. The present study adduces corpus evidence to corroborate the claims. In the last section, the analysis is cast in a Functional Discourse Grammar model (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), including its hitherto underdescribed Contextual Component.
Humming, whistling, singing, and yelling in Pirahã context and channels of communication in FDG
Authors: O’Neill Gareth
Published: February 2015

This paper addresses the systematic influence of contextual factors on the form of linguistic utterances for the different speech channels of communication in Pirahã within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). It is shown that context plays an important role in the choice of a particular speech channel and the associated phonological or phonetic alteration of the underlying linguistic form. A representational system for the description of contextual factors which interact with the grammar and the influence of these contextual factors upon the grammar in Pirahã is then proposed within and elaborating upon the model of FDG. The implications of the speech channels in Pirahã for FDG and for linguistic theory in general are lastly examined.