bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Weapons of mass destruction
Authors: Rudd Philip W.
Published: February 2015

The polemics of political rhetoric encourage the implementation of presupposed referents as though they were assumed and shared.
This paper examines the presupposed referents employed by the White House, concerning the urgency of invading Iraq, and countered
by the political left. Details indicate that the White House was endeavoring to build an undeniable argument for invasion.
Consequently, they had to employ definite noun phrases as first mentions of previously unshared referents in order to achieve the
hidden didactic goal of pre-empting counter arguments. The Democrats, the liberals, and the media had to endeavor to overcome such
presuppositions and explain that addressees neither shared nor identified the assumed referents. Appeals to fear and
epistemological assessment are also examined. Insights from the analysis suggest that, given the conducive political temperament
of the country prior to the November 2002 mid-term elections, forestalling argumentation by implementing definite noun phrases as
if they were previously shared referents is highly efficacious.
Metalinguistic activity, humor and social competence in classroom discourse
Authors: Poveda David
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the role that humor plays during an episode of classroom interaction. Using concepts derived from the ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics, it analyzes activity during a metalinguistic event in a kindergarten classroom and argues that verbal humor, in itself a form of metalinguistic activity, plays a crucial role in the modulation of children’s face demands. The analysis also shows how humor is the result of the shared history of participants. The findings highlight the importance of considering emergent and improvised goals during classroom discourse that go beyond the prescribed curriculum.
Recurrence marking in Akan
Authors: Amfo Nana Aba Appiah
Published: February 2015

The linguistic phenomenon of recurrence is identified in two aspects; either as a repetition of an action or a restoration to a former state. This paper examines two lexical items, an auxiliary verb san and an adverb (e)bio, which encode this phenomenon in Akan. The recurrence marker san is claimed to be the output of a grammaticalization process which has as its historical input a phonologically identical lexical verb with a restorative meaning. Even though the recurrence marker san is diachronically associated with restoration, its use gives rise to either a restorative or a repetitive assumption, in the form of an implicated premise. This assumption forms part of the context within which the utterance containing san is interpreted. Thus its function coincides with that of (e)bio, except for one particular use of the latter, associated with its occurrence at utterance-initial position. The almost identical functions of these two markers reveal the close conceptual relationship between recurrence of the repetitive and of the restorative type.
Genre conventions, speaker identities, and creativity
Authors: Dickel Dunn Cynthia
Published: February 2015

Recent approaches to genre as discourse practice have examined how genres as “orienting frameworks” allow speakers to creatively adapt conventional forms to specific situational contexts. This article analyzes congratulatory speeches at Japanese wedding receptions to show how the interaction of conventionalization and creative contextualization varies across both different parts of the wedding speech and different categories of wedding speakers. The analysis demonstrates how the wedding speech genre provides speakers with a spectrum of performance possibilities which are systematically linked to different speaking roles and social identities.
Singing gender
Authors: Pagliai Valentina , Bocast Brooke S.
Published: February 2015

In this article, we explore the presentation and contestation of discourses of womanhood in verbal art performance. In Tuscan-Italian Contrasto verbal duels the artists, both males and females, may impersonate female characters as they exchange insults between each other. In doing so, they deploy multiple discourses of womanhood to demonstrate their wit and verbal artistry. As a consequence, they often subvert and contest “appropriate” female behavior as well as ideas of morality, which might be connected to those behaviors. This highlights the manipulability of discourses of womanhood to obtain particular goals. We analyze Contrasti performances where characters of mother-in-law and daughter-in- law are impersonated. We further argue that the contraposition of different discourses on stage increases the fluidity of gender as a category. In this sense poetic performances are revealed as a loci where perceptions of established gender roles and the connected moral order might be negotiated or destabilized.
Pragmatics, cognition and asymmetrically acquired evidentials
Authors: Ifantidou Elly
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the development of a variety of evidential lexical items in Modern Greek from a longitudinal perspective involving 4;6 – 11;7 year olds. The main question to be addressed concerns parallel or asynchronous order of acquisition: Does the ability to use evidentials emerge for all items under investigation synchronically or does such an ability emerge earlier on for certain items while later for others? If the latter holds, how can this developmental lag be explained? An answer to these questions will draw on the pragmatic-cognitive abilities engaged by different types of evidential markers, and in particular, on the complexity of metarepresentations (Sperber 1994; Wilson 2000, 2005) different evidential markers rely on in order to be used by young children.
Regulatory talk and politeness at the family dinner table
Authors: Brumark Åsa
Published: February 2015

This study examined the use of regulatory talk at dinnertime in twenty Swedish families with children between the ages of four and seventeen years. The aim of the study was to explore activity regulation in the light of contextual factors, such as the age of the participating children, the number of participants and the different kinds of conversational contexts. Regulatory talk extracted from twenty videotaped dinner conversations was transcribed, coded and analysed within the framework of theories about the impact of context on control acts, indirect speech and politeness.

Regulatory utterances, about 7 % of all utterances produced by all family members, were mostly formulated as direct requests and about 15 % of them were mitigated, softening the impact of coerciveness. Indirect regulators occurred, however, in nearly one half of the cases whereas hints were rather uncommon. Age of the children, as well as activity and conversational context had an obvious impact on the way regulatory utterances were performed. Most instrumental regulators (related to the dinner routine) were direct (somewhat more than 60 %) and most non-instrumental regulators were indirect (nearly 60 %). Furthermore, the intended goal i.e. what action was required from the addressee seemed to affect the use of regulators: Regulation at the dinner table mostly concerned nonverbal actions and requests for objects and was related to the main activity.

Compared with the American and Israeli groups in Blum-Kulka’s study (1997), the Swedish parents together tended to be more indirect but less mitigating. However, in instrumental contexts i.e. when regulating routine actions relating to the meal, most parental regulators were direct (60 %) whereas about 75 % of the utterances were indirect in non-instrumental contexts. A comparison of these findings with the data from Blum-Kulka (1997) and with other similar intercultural studies leads to the conclusion that situational factors, such as family structure, conversational genres and communicative goals, might have more impact on regulatory talk than socio-cultural background.
Evaluating discursive relations in Brazilians’advice-giving
Authors: Chaves Marinho Janice Helena
Published: February 2015

This paper investigates how some participants of a reality show, which featured on Brazilian television from January to April, 2004, produce and interpret discourse relationships. It will focus on the discursive relations among textual segments as well as on the pragmatic bonds between these segments and implicit information, all of which often signaled by linguistic elements, such as discourse markers. These linguistic elements contribute to the co-construction of text meaning since they point to a specific meaning relation among whatever potential meanings conveyed by the discourse content. This paper will also consider different discourse dimensions (syntactic, semantic and discursive) in order to investigate the properties of such linguistic elements and their function in the production of advisive speech acts.
Implications of translational shifts in interpreter-mediated texts
Authors: Monacelli Claudia
Published: February 2015

The aim of this study is to examine the nature and extent of translational shifts in interpreter-mediated texts. 10 professional interpreters with 11-30 years experience participated in the study. A corpus of 10 source texts (full-length speeches) and 10 target texts (interpreter-mediated versions) recorded during international conferences is analyzed. Shifts in the following linguistic phenomena are assessed: Personal reference, agency, mood and modality, threats to face. Our findings reveal a significant trend of distancing, de-personalization and the mitigation of illocutionary force.
Analysis of appropriateness in a speech act of request in L2 English
Authors: Taguchi Naoko
Published: February 2015

Fifty-nine Japanese college students of English at two different proficiency levels were evaluated for their ability to produce a speech act of request in a spoken role play task. Learners’ production was analyzed quantitatively by rating performance on a six-point scale for overall appropriateness, as well as qualitatively by identifying the directness levels of the linguistic expressions used to produce requests. Results revealed a significant L2 proficiency influence on overall appropriateness, but only a marginal difference in the types of linguistic expressions used between the two proficiency groups. Moreover, grammatical and discourse control encoded in the rating scale seemed to have affected the quality of speech acts.
The co-construction of whiteness in an MC battle
Authors: Cutler Cecelia A.
Published: February 2015

Within hip-hop, MC (Master of Cermonies) battles are one of the most visible and potentially humiliating venues for demonstrating one’s verbal skill. Competitors face each other in front of an audience. Each has a minute to “diss” his or her opponent against a backdrop of rhythms produced by a DJ. Each participant’s performance generally consists of “freestyle” or spontaneously generated rhymes designed to belittle some aspect of the opponent’s appearance, rhyming style or place of origin, and ritual insults directed at his or her mother, sister, or crew. Opponents show good will by embracing afterwards. Ultimately the audience decides who wins by applauding louder for one opponent than the other at the end of the battle. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1974, 1981), I will analyze clips from a televised MC battle in which the winning contestant was a White teenager from the Midwest called “Eyedea.” I will show how Eyedea and his successive African American opponents, “R.K.” and “Shells”, participate in the co-construction of his Whiteness. Eyedea marks himself linguistically as White by overemphasizing his pronunciation of /r/ and by carefully avoiding Black ingroup forms of address like “nigga” (c.f. Smitherman 1994). R.K. and Shells construct Eyedea’s Whiteness largely in discursive ways – by pointing out his resemblance to White actors, and alluding to television shows with White cultural references. Socially constructed racial boundaries must be acknowledged in these types of performances because Whiteness (despite the visibility of White rappers like Eminem) is still marked against the backdrop of normative Blackness in hip-hop (Boyd 2002). In a counter-hegemonic reversal of Du Boisian double-consciousness hip-hop obliges White participants to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. Hip-hop effectively subverts dominant discourses of race and language requiring MC battle participants to acknowledge and ratify this covert hierarchy.
Oral genres of humor
Authors: Kotthoff Helga
Published: February 2015

The article discusses humorous conversational activities ((e.g. jokes, teasing, joint fantasizing) in the context of genre theory. The high degree of creativity, emergent construction and artistry typical of humor call for a flexible concept of genre which makes sense of modifications and transgressions in communicative processes. Some forms of conversational humor are generic, for example, standardized jokes, joint fantasizing or teasing. Other forms exploit our knowledge of serious genres and activity types (thereby relying on it): e.g. humorous stories about problems, humorous gossiping or counseling. Here the keying is done from the start in such a way that a serious mode of understanding is undermined. Generic boundaries are often transgressed and hybridized in joking; new sub-types arise, such as absurd meta-jokes which violate the well-known expectation of a punch-line or other features of the genre. Nevertheless, the realizations of these genres are related only by a sort of family resemblance. The concept of intertextuality plays another important role in analyzing oral genres of humor. Genre knowledge is also employed when the speakers violate expected patterns in such a way that further information is located precisely in the violation. The article shows humorous co-construction as an emergent phenomenon, which plays with genre knowledge.
“Moral irony”
Authors: Shoaps Robin
Published: February 2015

This paper presents an ethnographically sensitive account of a family of modal constructions in Sakapultek, a Mayan language spoken in highland Guatemala. The constructions in question share many characteristics with those that have been analyzed as ironic in English and are dubbed “moral irony,” due both to their similarities to irony in other languages and to their primary interactional function. The morphosyntactic composition and semiotic processes involved in moral irony are described and the proposed account of these semiotic properties makes use of Goffman’s distinction between author, animator and principal as dimensions of the speaker role. The indexical properties of moral irony are demonstrated and it is argued that they play a greater role in determining ironic meaning than speaker intentions. Using extended examples from naturally-occurring talk, the paper also demonstrates how irony functions in evaluative stance-taking in Sakapultek. Such examples illustrate both the relatively presupposing and entailing aspects of moral irony’s indexical meaning. Moral irony is argued to be modal in that it projects hypothetical or unreal possible worlds and ironic in that it indirectly and negatively evaluates the stances of an imagined principal. Finally, on the ethnographic level, moral irony is examined in light of what it reveals about Sakapultek notions of moral personhood.
How to read Austin
Authors: Sbisà Marina
Published: February 2015

The goal of this paper is a reassessment of the contributions provided by John L. Austin’s book “How to Do Things with Words” to pragmatics. It discusses some assumptions belonging to the received reading of the volume, as regards its aim and structure, the conceptions of illocution and of perlocution, and the alleged exclusion of “non-seriousness”. Against the received reading, it is argued that “How to Do Things with Words” is structured as a proof by contradiction of the claim that all speech should be considered as action, that in illocution a major role is played by the conventionality of effects, that perlocution presupposes a conception of action as responsibility, and that Austin had reasons not to deal with “non-seriousness” in detail, albeit recognizing the issue as relevant to the study of the uses of language. In the conclusions, the tenets attributed to Austin are neither crtiticized nor defended, but an attempt is made to say what are their implications for research into language use and for philosophy.
‘Incrementing’ in conversation. A comparison of practices in English, German and Japanese
Authors: Couper-Kuhlen Elizabeth , Ono Tsuyoshi
Published: February 2015

This cross-linguistic study focuses on ways in which conversationalists speak beyond a point of possible turn completion in conversation, specifically on turn extensions which are grammatically dependent, backward-looking and extend the prior action. It argues that further distinctions can be made in terms of whether the extension is prosodically integrated with the prior unit, its host, (Non-add-on) or not, and in terms of whether it repairs some part of the host (Replacement) or not. Added-on, non-repairing extensions are further distinguished in terms of whether they are grammatically fitted to the end of the host (Glue-ons) or not (Insertables). A preliminary survey of TCU continuation in English, German and Japanese conversation reveals a number of significant differences with respect to frequency and range of extension type. English is at one extreme in preferring Glue-ons over Non-Add-ons and Insertables, whereas Japanese is at the other extreme in preferring Non-add-ons and Insertables over Glue-ons. German occupies an intermediary position but is on the whole more like Japanese. The preference for Glue-ons vs. Insertables appears to reflect a language’s tendency towards syntactic left- vs. right headedness. In conclusion the study argues for a classification of ‘increment’ types which goes beyond the English-based Glue-on, attributes a central role to prosodic delivery and adopts a usage-based understanding of word order.
Retrospective turn continuations in Mandarin Chinese conversation
Authors: Luke Kang-kwong , Zhang Wei
Published: February 2015

How the status of further talk past the point of a turn’s possible completion should be described, and what functions different kinds of turn continuation might serve – these are questions that have engaged many scholars since Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s turn-taking model (1974). In this paper, a general scheme is proposed with which one can tease out four interlocking strands in analyzing different kinds of turn continuation: Syntactic continuity vs. discontinuity, main vs. subordinate intonation, retrospective vs. prospective orientation, and information focus vs. non-focus. These parameters combine to form different configurations and interact in interesting ways, accounting for different kinds of turn continuation. The scheme is tested on, and illustrated with, a body of naturally occurring conversational data in Chinese.
Sequential organization of post-predicate elements in Korean conversation
Authors: Kim Kyu-hyun
Published: February 2015

In this paper, various interactional features of turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation as realized in Korean conversation through post-predicate elements are analyzed from a conversation-analytic perspective. Formulated as increments, post-predicate elements serve as re-completers by expanding the host TCU after it has reached a possible point of completion, which is explicitly marked by the utterance-final verb predicate. In many contexts of TCU continuation, the host TCU tends to be allusively constructed (e.g., in the form of a verb predicate with unexpressed arguments) and saliently indexical of the speaker’s affective stance, and post-predicate elements, mostly taking the form of ‘insertables’, elaborate the host TCU. TCU continuation is often realized when the action of the allusive host TCU is ‘disjunctively’ executed, with the interactional import of being potentially interruptive of the current talk-in-progress. Such an intrusive deployment of the host TCU, which is implicated in the practice of foregrounding the speaker’s collusively motivated responsive stance (e.g., in a confirmation request), is demonstrably oriented to by the speaker, who produces a post-predicate element as a methodic way of mitigating the disjunctive initiation of the prior action. The recipient also orients himself/herself to the potentially topic-derailing import associated with such a disjunctive initiation of action by way of initiating repair and/or promptly resuming his/her talk. As such, the production of a post-predicate element itself, mostly as an insertable that is grammatically and semantically related to the host, may not be directly attributed to interactional contingencies per se; it is often sequentially occasioned by practices geared towards enlivening the sequence being wrapped up, initiating or continuing an assessment sequence by way of highlighting the speaker’s evaluative stance turn-initially, or building the current turn on the prior turn through turn-tying operations. The interactional feature of post-predicate elements ‘re-doing the completion point as a transition-relevance place’ is partially manifested in the way the prosodic contour of the final or whole component of the host TCU is repeated and matched by that of the post-predicate elements.
Increments in Navajo conversation
Authors: Field Margaret
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the use of increments (Schegloff 1996, Ford et al. 2002) in naturally occurring Navajo discourse (conversation.) Navajo is a polysynthetic verb-final language belonging to the Athabascan family, spoken in the American Southwest. It finds that Navajo increments, specifically “glue-ons” (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono this volume) appear in the form of temporal or locative adverbial phrases as well as unattached NPs, as is the case in English and other languages. However, Navajo increments do not appear to serve two functions suggested by Ford et al.(2002) for increments in English: “pursuing uptake” in the case of lack of recipiency, and the indexing of a “stance display” toward the speaker’s own previous utterance. This is not surprising given other cultural differences in Athabaskan interaction which revolve around a value on individual autonomy, with important consequences for language use.
A community text pattern in the European commission press release? A generic and genetic view
Authors: Lindholm Maria
Published: February 2015

This contribution is concerned with press releases from the European Commission and national ministries. Political press releases may serve other purposes than those issued by business organisations, and they are also a fairly unexplored field in press release research, which this study sets out to remedy. The linguistic dimension of EU communication is also a neglected field of study, and this paper is aimed at introducing the linguistic dimension of the European Commission communication as a field of study worthy of closer examination. Within a genre-based analytical framework, the present paper aims at examining to what extent we can identify a unique community text pattern in European Commission press releases. I propose a macrostructural text analysis in which I compare a number of press releases issued by the European Commission with national equivalents from French and Swedish ministries. In particular, I will focus on three recurrent and characteristic text features of the European Commission press release, viz. theintroduction, thequotationand theintertextual references. It is shown that the way they are designed in the European Commission press release is quite special and that this can be explained with reference to the communicative situation of the European Commission. In doing so, I will be drawing on ethnographic data that I gathered from fieldwork at the European Commission.<<<It will be suggested that the results from this study can be extrapolated to the study of press releases in general. That is, press release research may benefit from the genre-based methodological approach chosen here, since, indeed, the press release is a situated practice whose understanding depends on a comprehensive study of the communicative situations it functions within.
Editing and genre conflict
Authors: Pander Maat Henk
Published: February 2015

Although corporate press releases are ‘preformulated’ to fit some of the conventions of journalistic reports, their style at times seems quite different from the one favoured by journalists. That is, there appear to exist stylistic conflicts between the press release genre and the press report genre. This study investigates the nature of these conflicts by means of a corpus analysis of the reworking strategies employed by journalists that actually use press releases to compose press reports.

Roughly, two orientations can be discerned behind the journalistic transformations of release copy: Readability and neutrality. In order to improve readability, journalists create shorter and less complex sentences, use everyday words, replace numbers and symbols by words, and insert short bits of background information. In order to preserve neutrality, they remove company and product names, tone down or remove positive statements, and introduce the company as source for statements they do not want to be responsible for. Some transformations are more complex in that they are carried out in both directions: For instance, the company name may be removed as the subject in a press report sentence, but in other cases it may be introduced in the press report. These two-way operations are shown to be sensitive to different orientations at the same time. For instance, removing company names from the subject position may help preserve neutrality, while introducing it may personalize the text and hence improve readability.

In the discussion, the genre conflict between press releases and press reports is analyzed in terms of the incompatibility of the stylistic constraints both genres need to satisfy. Some of the incompatibilities derive from differences in the communicative purposes characteristic of the two genres, while others probably have to do with the specific organizational context that co-determines the style of press releases.
Co-constructing identities in speeches
Authors: Van De Mieroop Dorien
Published: February 2015

This paper investigates the way speakers construct their identities as representatives of their companies (institutional identity construction) in relation to the way they “project” an identity onto their audiences. The audience is “altercasted” (Weinstein and Deutschberger 1963) in the role of potential buyer of a product, thus evoking the standardized relational pair (Sacks 1972) of seller/buyer. The speaker then presents his company in the complementary role of seller of a product and as such a link is established between the identities of the speaker’s company and the audience. This discursive co-construction of identities is crucial for the way both identities receive meaning. The two cases that are discussed here on the one hand show similarities in the general pattern of the two identity constructions and the way they are interwoven with one another, but on the other hand also demonstrate that there are many unique and diverging ways of constructing and linking these identities.
Influence of situational factors on the codification and interpretation of impoliteness
Authors: Albelda Marco Marta
Published: February 2015

By analysing the influence of situational factors, this paper aims to determine if all face-threatening acts indeed have an impolite effect. Two types of peninsular Spanish speech corpora (formal and informal) were examined, each with different situational features. The theoretical maxims applied to this study are based on Briz (2004), who distinguishes between codified (im)politeness and an interpreted (im)politeness. The initial findings reveal that the features of the communicative situation may neutralise the codified impoliteness in certain speech acts. These features include the relation of solidarity between the interlocutors, the subject or topic of the speech, the purpose and the social and common proximity among the speakers, among other things. Such features seem to influence to some extent the interpretation of those acts that conventionally could be considered as impolite. Thus, contrary to the principles generally accepted in Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness (1987), the findings of this analysis indicate that certain situational factors may, on occasion, lead the speakers to be less concerned about minimizing face offences even though this lack of concern does not actually involve damage to the other.
Speaking like Asian immigrants
Authors: Chun Elaine W.
Published: February 2015

This article explores the relationship between immigrant and non-immigrant Asian American youth identities and the use of language to manage this relationship. Focusing on everyday interactions at a high school in Texas, the analysis examines how fluent English-speaking Korean and Filipino American students draw on linguistic resources associated with Asian immigrants, thus attending to generational identity, an important, though often oversimplified, social dimension in transnational contexts. According to the present analysis, salient generational differences may exist between Asian American youth, yet their linguistic practices complicate simple binaries of opposition. Specifically, this article focuses on how fluent English-speaking students both accommodate toward and mock Asian immigrant speech and notes that these ostensibly divergent practices exhibit linguistic overlap. It is argued that the convergences and divergences of these practices can be productively examined by distinguishing between the levels of frame and ideology, thus explaining how speakers interpret Asian immigrant revoicings as accommodation, mocking, or, in some cases, an ambiguous linguistic act that hovers in between.
“She’s hungarious so she’s Mexican but she’s most likely Indian”
Authors: Lee Jung-Eun Janie
Published: February 2015

Schools in California have become increasingly diverse and the demographic composition of school populations has become heterogeneous in the language, nationality, and ethnicity of students. Using ethnographic and interactional analysis, the present article examines how California youth employ a variety of concepts associated with ethnicity to classify themselves and others. For youth who have peers from multiple national, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, the criteria of citizenship, national origin, language, and phenotype are negotiated interactionally for ethnic labeling. The article further suggests that ethnicity is not a simple category, but rather a concept that youth in a multiethnic context actively construct and co-construct with the help of associated notions. Finally, it is demonstrated that ethnic labeling in interviews may be a dispreferred practice for some interviewees due to its potential connection with racism and discrimination.
Transforming the label of ‘whore’
Authors: Skapoulli Elena
Published: February 2015

This article examines how gender ideologies linked to global processes such as migration and the spread of youth popular culture pose certain challenges for teenage girls who live in patriarchal social contexts. Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data at a multiethnic middle school in Cyprus, the article focuses on the ways in which language practices mediate this experience and the possibilities that language envelops in the process of gender identity formation in globalizing times. At the intersection of contradictory ideologies ranging from the school’s religious gender discourse, which promotes modesty and chastity, to the predominant media discourse of femininity, which highlights female sexuality, girls’ gender identity claims become fraught with moral implications. In the local peer culture, girls are placed on a fabricated and culturally widespread “virgin-whore” continuum along which different cultural groups – which are often equated with ethnic groups – are evaluated. Paradoxically, girls who embrace sexual freedom (either in practice or rhetorically) may in fact exercise agency and become empowered precisely because of early adolescents’ fascination with sexuality. These girls draw largely on the dominant discourse of femininity abundantly marketed by global media and the pop culture. They thus manage to explore alternative ideas about agency and gender in a locally rebellious manner that defies the traditionalist female roles that school and church promote.
Translocal style communities
Authors: Alim H. Samy
Published: February 2015

This article addresses issues that lie at the intersection of debates about language, Hip Hop Culture, and globalization. Critically synthesizing a wide range of recent work on Hip Hop and foregrounding issues of youth agency as evidenced by Hip Hop youth’s metalinguistic theorizing, the article presents an empirical account of youth as cultural theorists. Hip Hop youth are both participants and theorists of their participation in the many translocal style communities that constitute the Global Hip Hop Nation. Highlighting youth agency, the article demonstrates that youth are engaging in the agentive act of theorizing the changes in the contemporary world as they attempt to locate themselves at the intersection of the local and the global. The article concludes by calling for a linguistic anthropology of globalization characterized by ethnographic explorations of and a theoretical focus on popular culture, music, and mass-mediated language as central to an anthropological understanding of linguistic processes in a global era.
Youthful concerns
Authors: Roth-Gordon Jennifer , Woronov T.E.
Published: February 2015

This commentary explores the links between language, modernity, and young people’s movement – within nations and across borders. Given the scope and pace of globalization and transnational migration, this movement has created a good deal of local and national anxiety over how youth are negotiating their rights to belong – in schools, in cities, and in nation-states. The commentary addresses how youth must be understood as specifically modern subjects, in Foucault’s sense of the term, including how they both utilize and trouble the binary categories associated with modernity, the ways that modern young subjects are constructed through discourses of sexuality, and the ways that young people are disciplined in specific social spaces. In addition to the possibility of hybridity and invention suggested by the juxtaposition of family and peer cultural traditions, the commentary asks how new youth styles also involve the disciplining of youthful bodies by institutions, family members, and peers.
Discourse as communicative action
Authors: Lee-Wong Song Mei
Published: February 2015

Qiye wenhua/’enterprise culture’ has emerged as a new paradigm in China’s economic reforms. Hailed as China’s new ‘culture’ it featured in an interview with certain executives of non-state owned enterprises. In the examination of this discourse, the concept of ‘communicative action’ (Habermas, 1998) is adopted as an analytical tool. The main contention in this exploratory examination is that there is speaker intent to justify China’s model of socialist market economy. This justification is mainly reflected in the semantic content of the discourse, which stresses what is ‘unique’ and ‘characteristic’ in China’s economic reforms. The rationale for this contention rests primarily on the argument that given the context of skepticism and criticisms leveled at the Chinese model, and the fact that the speakers themselves are key players in the new market economy, it would be likely that in a public discourse of this nature there would be grounds for attempts at legitimizing the Chinese economic model.
Justification
Authors: Macário Lopes Ana Cristina
Published: February 2015

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse formal and functional aspects of constructions based on a Justification (or Claim-Argument) coherence relation, explicitly marked by a connective. The prototype of this construction is an utterance like Está gente em casa, porquer as luzes estão acesas [“ There is somebody at home, because the lights are on”]. The empirical data are collected from an on-line corpus of contemporary written Portuguese (CETEMPúblico).
Following Sanders et al.(2001), I assume the distinction between semantic and pragmatic coherence relations in text representation: Semantic relations connect the situations of the sociophysical world described by the propositional content of the related textual segments; pragmatic relations involve the illocutionary domain, i.e., the relation concerns the speech act status of the segments. Justification relation is a pragmatic relation and I argue that it requires simultaneously a sequence of speech acts and an inference process. In fact, Justification relations occur typically in argumentative contexts, and argumentation, according to van Eemeren & Grotendorst (1984), is a compound illocution, consisting of at least two functionally distinct statements: A main assertion corresponding to the claim being made and a subordinate assertion, which counts as an attempt by the speaker to justify his claim, convincing the listner of its acceptability. The claim being made in prototypical Justification constructions (p, because q) is an assumption, not a fact; it corresponds to a conclusion drawn by the speaker, supported by the premise expressed in the second clause and warranted by a generic implicit premise.
The account presented in this paper contests Sweetser’s (1990) distinction between epistemic causal conjunctions and speech act causal conjunctions: The act of concluding may be speaker-internal, but since it is asserted and then justified, it is not possible to dissociate the epistemic and the illocutionary domains within the field of argumentative texts.
Lexical choices of gender identity in Greek genres
Authors: Goutsos Dionysis , Fragaki Georgia
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the role of the lexical pairs άνδρας/άντρας ‘man’ vs. γυναίκα ‘woman’ and αγόρι ‘boy’ vs. κορίτσι ‘girl’ in the construction of gender identity. We use corpus methodology to study the frequency, meanings and collocations of the noun pairs in five different genres of Greek, namely news and opinion articles from newspapers, and general interest, male and female magazines (2,4 million words in total). Our findings point to a fundamental asymmetry in the treatment of the two genders. Furthermore, genre and audience design are found to be prominent in gender construction: In general, male identity is viewed in similar ways in all genres, whereas female identity is constructed in a less uniform way, since texts addressed to women significantly diverge from other genres. Thus, lexical choices are affected by the positioning of the text producer as a member of an in-group, especially in genres in which gender is foregrounded.
Graphemic representation of text-messaging
Authors: Spilioti Tereza
Published: February 2015

The aim of this study is to investigate the choice of alphabetical encoding in Greek text-messaging (or Short Message Service, SMS). The analysis will be based on a corpus of 447 text-messages exchanged among participants who belong to the age group of ‘youth’ (15-25 years old) and live in Athens (Greece). The data analysis will show that the standard practice of writing with Greek characters represents the norm in Greek SMS. The script norm will be discussed in relation to the medium’s technological affordances and the participants’ stance towards new media. The analysis will then focus on non-standard graphemic choices, such as the use of both, Greek and Roman, alphabets in the encoding of single messages. It will be demonstrated that such marked choices are employed as a means of indexing the participants’ affiliation with global popular cultures and enhancing expressivity in a medium of reduced paralinguistic cues.
Entextualizing vernacular forms in a Maniat village
Authors: Giaxoglou Korina
Published: February 2015

Language ideology as a field of inquiry (Woolard et al. 1998: 3) involves, among others, the critical analysis of inequalities manifest in discursive and textual practices. This paper deals with folklore practices and language ideologies related to the project for the collection and publication of oral traditions in 1930s Greece. The institutionalization of this project relied heavily on G.Chatzidakis (1890-1923), Professor of Linguistics and N.G. Politis (1852-1921), Professor of Comparative Mythology at the University of Athens whose works arguably created an orthodox model of folklore text-making. Instead, though, of focusing on the orthodox metadiscourse or practices of these two central figures to the project, I will turn to their localization by a philologist engaged in the collection of vernacular forms in a Maniat village (Southern Peloponnese). The turn to local practices seeks to uncover features of orthopraxy (Blommaert 2003), that is adaptations which although guided by the orthodox model at the surface level, can be related to acts of identity, expressing resistance to hegemonic ideologies, revealing inequality in the distribution of resources or in gate-keeping restrictions.The analysis draws on the personal archives of I. Strilakos from the period 1930-35, which include three notebooks and a manuscript collection of Maniat lament verbal art. The approach of the archives is based on the examination of Strilakos’ entextualization practices, a term that refers to the way that textual ‘shape’ is given to extracted stretches of discourse (see Bauman and Briggs 1990). The systematic examination of local folklore entextualization practices sheds light on the mediated ways in which ‘authentic’ voices become indexes of nationally subsumed regional identities.
Constructing academic hierarchies
Authors: Lytra Vally
Published: February 2015

In this paper I look at how through the use of teasing as a socially recurrent activity the members of a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic peer group (comprised of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children of Roma heritage) make particular identity ascriptions and displays salient and position themselves and others in particular ways in peer talk during break-time in an Athens primary school. Taking as a point of departure that identities are produced relationally, through systems of opposition (Barth 1969), the paper deals with how members of this school-based peer group exploit teasing as a versatile discursive device to construct one particular peer as a “poor” pupil and themselves by extension as “good” pupils in talk-in-interaction. The focus on the situated and relational construction of identity makes visible how children position themselves with regard to others in order to construct academic hierarchies. At the same time, it brings to the fore how through such positionings children may reproduce but also challenge powerful institutional discourses of academic success and failure in circulation in the classroom by negotiating identity options closer to their peer concerns. These processes of identity construction demonstrate how social selves are produced in interaction through contestation and collaboration and how identities may be simultaneously chosen and imposed through language use.
Compliments and responses during Chinese New Year celebrations in Singapore
Authors: Lee Cher Leng
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the act of complimenting and responding to compliments among Singapore Chinese. To this end, I explored naturally occurring compliment exchanges during the Chinese New Year (CNY) period. These exchanges are not only gender-sensitive, but age- and generation-sensitive as well. The CNY celebrations are governed by certain conventions, exchanging compliments being one of them. The conventional setting helps us understand the functions of compliments and the nature of their responses better, thus avoiding overgeneralizations. Compliments and their responses in the CNY context appear to play an important mainly phatic role. This study suggests that (a) married females pay and receive most compliments and (b) the most common compliment topic centers on their children’s academic achievement and potential career success rather than appearance (Holmes 1988) or possessions (Herbert 1991). In addition, most responses are of the non-acceptance type with downgrading, which is in line with findings from other researchers (see, e.g., Gu 1990; Chen 1993). A survey carried out on these non-acceptance responses shows that informants understand them as being largely conventional and formalistic rather than literal in nature, probably due to the conventional setting. This speech event of compliments and their responses is a mirror of cultural values (Manes 1983), revealing that the Chinese-speaking community of Singapore places high importance on children’s socio-economic success and practices conventional humility.
Between language policy and linguistic reality
Authors: Vandekerckhove Reinhild , De Houwer Annick , Remael Aline
Published: February 2015

This paper focuses on a relatively new and much discussed phenomenon on Flemish television: The practice of intralingual subtitling of Dutch, i.e. Dutch subtitling of native speakers of (varieties of) Dutch. Our study investigates the linguistic determinants of intralingual subtitling and subsequently confronts actual subtitling practice with viewer needs. The analyses reveal a striking inconsistency between intralingual subtitling practice in fiction versus non-fiction programs. This appears to be symptomatic of a tension between the official language policy in Flanders and present day linguistic reality. As such, subtitling practice subtly reflects the existence of shifting linguistic norms in Flanders.
Letting go of the past in Spanish therapeutic discourse
Authors: Flores-Ferrán Nydia
Published: February 2015

This article presents an exploration of several linguistic and discursive variables as they relate to behavior change obtained from psychotherapeutic motivational interviews. These interviews were conducted with native Spanish speakers, a relatively under investigated language minority group in the US with regard to this type of discourse. Using a linguistic framework, the study examines the tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) of Spanish verbs, the semantic verb type, such as desire, ability, readiness, reasons, need and commitment (DARN-C), and the context in which the verbs were produced in [+/- conflict] in narratives. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, the study shows how shifts in verb tenses, the production of DARN-C semantic verb types, and speakers’ utterances implicitly involve an expression of change. Based on Grimshaw’s (1990) and Labov and Fanshel’s (1977) tenets regarding conflict talk in which they note that conflict involves speech acts such as defenses, retreats and challenges, and Brenneis (1996) who maintains that the contents of conflict narratives are intertwined with the “narrator, audience, purposes and expectations” (p. 42), the study shows how the presence of conflict-related narratives decreases between interviews. Namely, participants decrease the use of utterances that recount past events and events containing conflict and move in the direction of speaking about future events and less conflict as their sessions progressed.