Published by De Gruyter Mouton

Volume 26 Issue 3

Issue of Text & Talk

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Contents
Journal Overview

June 19, 2006

The effect of position on the discourse scope of adverbials

Peter Crompton

Page range: 245-279

Abstract

This article investigates one of the discourse functions that has been proposed for the variation in English of the position of adverbials within the clause. The view that initial positioning, or ‘thematisation’, of adverbials establishes scope over larger discourse spans (Lowe 1987; Downing 1991) is tested by examining three kinds of adverbial in a corpus of short written expository texts in English: adverbials of location (prepositional phrases and when -clauses), nonfinite purpose clauses, and finite if -clauses. Objective methods are used to measure persistence of adverbial scope and how scope is cancelled. Data on length of scope and position of adverbial are compared to see whether there is evidence of a dependent relation. In most cases, initial adverbials do not appear to establish discourse scope and in some cases noninitial adverbials do appear to establish discourse scope: It is concluded that to establish scope cannot be the function of initial position. Because cancellation only occurs initially half the time, it is also concluded that there is no special relation between initial position and cancellation.

June 19, 2006

The organization of gaze and assessments as resources for stance taking

Pentti Haddington

Page range: 281-328

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on the question of how interactants use the concurrent organizations of assessments and three different gaze patterns as resources for stance taking in everyday conversation. The data come from two recordings of everyday conversation. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to show that stance taking is an intersubjective and collaborative social activity in which interactants, by relying on various linguistic and interactional resources, construct stances based on stances by prior speakers. Second, it suggests that the investigated three gaze patterns play an important role in the stance-taking activity. The data show that although the interrelationship between gaze and assessments is manifold, certain gaze patterns are interdependent with the making of assessments and therefore gaze and assessments can be seen to function together as resources for interactional stance taking. Additionally, these gaze patterns act as resources for the coparticipants in tracing the meanings of coparticipants' stances. However, it is not claimed that these gaze patterns have meanings in themselves or that they would implicate a speaker stance, but rather that together with language, gaze is an important element in interactants' intersubjective stance taking.

June 19, 2006

Communicating affect in news stories: The case of the lead sentence

Esam N Khalil

Page range: 329-349

Abstract

The phenomenon of affect in language has recently received some attention from researchers who have focused primarily on its lexical expression. This article examines syntactic manifestations of affect in the lead sentence of Arabic news stories. It addresses the question of the pragmatic motivation for the occasional occurrence of spatiotemporal structures in text-initial position. Empirical analysis reveals that marking affect is one pragmatic function that the text-initial spatiotemporal structure serves in Arabic news stories. The importance of certain sociopolitical events is a crucial factor. The lead sentence acquires an emotive value or interpretation as it exhibits the writer's affective stance toward reported events. Although spatiotemporal structures are used sparingly in text-initial position, they manifest variation in their composition—a possible indication of varying degrees of emotional involvement or intensity. Illustrative examples of this phenomenon explain implications for the communication of affect.

June 19, 2006

Managing rhetoric in ‘smart’ journalism: Generic and semantic contours

Stephen H Moore

Page range: 351-381

Abstract

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) views genre as being culturally motivated and, therefore, properly theorized at the extralinguistic level of context (Halliday and Hasan 1985; Martin 1992, 1997). Language itself is viewed as consisting of ‘content’ levels of semantics and lexicogrammar that are realized through phonology, graphology, and gestures (Butt et al. 2000: 7). This paper is concerned with linguistic structure in media discourse and argues that a generic structure of newsmagazine reporting can be usefully complemented through penetrating semantics for a corresponding semantic structure. Eighteen texts of approximately 1000 words each, drawn from The Economist magazine's reporting on Cambodia in the 1990s, are analyzed. The generic structure potential (GSP) statement (Halliday and Hasan 1985) is formulated for these texts. Though valuable as a structural blueprint, the GSP does not go far in terms of explaining how the syntagmatic flow of these texts relates to rhetorical structure. However, by turning to a different analytical tool, semantic move networks (Butt 2000), we are able to expose the rough shape of the texts' semantic contour. We see that this contour, instantiated in The Economist 's texts, is suggestive of a kind of semantic signature of ‘smart’ journalism.

October 21, 2009

Questions in legal monologues: Fictive interaction as argumentative strategy in a murder trial

Esther Pascual

Page range: 383-402

Abstract

In the adversarial legal system, talk-in-interaction is extremely fixed and regulated. Such rigidity motivates the emergence of what may be termed ‘fictive interaction’ (Pascual 2002). This constitutes a conceptual channel of communication underlying the observable interaction between participants. Regardless of its overt interactional structure (monologue, dialogue), I assume that Western courtroom communication typically involves an implicit trialogue between (i) the prosecution, (ii) the defense, and (iii) the judge/jury. The focus is on questions in legal monologues, which have barely been studied. Four complex instances of ‘fictive’ questions (and question–answer pairs) from a prosecutor’s closing argument and rebuttal are discussed: (i) a set of expository questions and answers; (ii) a subsequently answered rhetorical question; (iii) a clausal question used as a definition; and (iv) a word-level question characterizing the prosecutor’s own argument. These questions are argued to set up an interactional structure that maps the fictive trialogue underlying the discourse and overall situation of communication they occur in. They also show that fictive interaction can serve as an e¤ective argumentative strategy manifested at the discourse as well as the sentential and intra-sentential levels. This paper is based on fieldwork on a high-profile murder trial I observed in a California court in 2000.

About this journal

Objective
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.

Topics

discourse analysis
applied linguistics
pragmatics
sociolinguistics
corpus linguistics
multimodality
genre analysis
communication
professional practice

Article formats
Full Length Articles, Short Articles, Systematic Literature Reviews, Review Articles, Forum Discussions, Research Notes