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March 26, 2024
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Linguistics and discourse studies have recently started treating fictional interactions as data worth analyzing in their own right, rather than incomplete representations of naturally occurring conversations. Aligning with advances in research on the use of language in fiction, this study addresses the functions of characters’ conversational practices in fictional works from an interactional perspective. By applying conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to a sitcom series, this study explores how characters’ repair operation, membership categorization, and attribute ascription contribute to the construction and revelation of those characters (i.e., fictional characterization). Three patterns are illustrated: (1) a character engages in implicit categorization to account for trouble after operating repair; (2) a character’s changes of turn design in multiple repair operations show the character’s orientation toward an attribute of the other character; and (3) a character gives up repair operation and shows an orientation toward other characters’ attributes through implying negative assessment of them. The findings suggest that conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are beneficial for research on fictional characterization. This study also discusses the reflexive and mutually constitutive relationship between the interactional participants’ characters and their conversational practices.
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February 15, 2024
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This paper is concerned with an exploration of the structural arrangement of Arabic hard news reporting with reference to a corpus of twenty accident news stories drawn from two leading Middle Eastern news organizations, Aljazeera and Alarabiya. A range of journalistic traditions has been examined with respect to organizational structures used in their hard news reporting texts. Within journalism discourse analysis, the nucleus-satellite structure developed by scholars of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is commonly found in news reporting in English and across various languages. However, news media texts in some cultures, such as Arabic, have not undergone any close scrutiny from a generic perspective. Accordingly, this study attempts to fill such a gap by investigating the genre-related features of the Arabic accident reports, drawing on the insights provided by SFL literature on the news story as a genre. It employs various lines of analysis such as textual deconstruction, timeline, radical editability, and lexical chaining. The findings of these analyses suggest that the Arabic accident news reports are non-chronologically organized operating with the lead-dominated orbital model, and thus generically bearing a close resemblance to the English news reports.
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Open Access
February 13, 2024
Abstract
This paper explores ways in which the strategic use of discursive and generic conventions has the potential to create a non-existent pathology and mislead the public. This case study compares and examines datasets of different genres (newspaper issue reports, online videos, and Wikipedia pages) dealing with a condition considered as an actual illness (Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, SCT), and another (Motivational Deficiency Disorder, MoDeD), invented as a spoof to raise awareness about disease mongering, overdiagnosis, and medicalization. We evince common language strategies that, irrespective of the genre, can be employed in media discourse, both in the name of genuine medical information and in pursuit of more ethically questionable ends. The methodological tools provided by Critical Discourse Analysis are applied to both the authentic and the hoax texts in order to investigate the media representations of SCT and MoDeD, juxtaposing the ways in which both are framed conceptually, defined linguistically, and popularized to lay audiences. The findings indicate the existence of a common repertoire of lexical-phraseological, rhetorical and discursive patterns that typify the popularization of medicalized statuses and combine to increase the persuasiveness and authority of overdiagnosis, ultimately advancing the case for medicalization with the public at large.
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February 1, 2024
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Mandarin Chinese, as the national lingua franca in China, has gained increasing importance in bilingual education in ethnic minority areas in the country. However, little research has explored ethnic minority children’s pragmatic competence. Therefore, this study investigates ethnic Uyghur children’s written pragmatic performance of advice-giving through a brief note in Mandarin and the possible effects of proficiency and gender on their advice-giving. Data were collected from 300 ethnic Uyghur children across three proficiency levels with a balanced gender split. In addition, 100 Han children were also recruited as a comparison group. The advice produced by the children was coded in terms of speech act strategies and supportive moves. The findings showed that the Uyghur children with higher proficiency provided more reasons and fewer affective expressions when giving advice than the two lower proficiency groups, reflecting the performance of the Han children. On the other hand, the results also revealed gender differences in certain advice-giving strategies and supportive moves. The study discusses the findings in relation to national lingua franca and second language pragmatics. Some pedagogical implications for multilingual education in ethnic minority areas are also provided.
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February 1, 2024
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This study investigates the interactional functions and properties of formulation sequences in Chinese criminal courtroom using the methods of Conversation Analysis. The data corpus for this study are audio recordings of five criminal trials heard in China. I show that (i) in response to opaque answers in the prior turn, the examiner tendentiously formulates the prior description to highlight the implication or inferences, for his or her pragmatic purpose; (ii) the examiner clarifies, redevelops the gist, makes something explicit that was previously implicit in the prior turn; or (iii) shifts the focus of the prior turn to make explicit a presumptive and damaging inference, in hostile examination, or to highlight favorable information in cooperative questioning. A key linguistic property of formulations is that they are preceded by turn initial discourse markers, which serves to indicate the examiner’s neutrality and credibility. Moreover, closed polar questions or tag questions in formulations are used by examiners to invite aligning and positive responses.
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Open Access
January 30, 2024
Abstract
Respondents in standardized survey interviews do not always answer closed-ended questions with just a type-conforming answer, such as “yes” or “three.” Instead, they sometimes expand the type-conforming answer or provide a response that does not contain a type-conforming answer. Standardized survey methodology aims to avoid such answers because they are found to cause interviewers to deviate from their script. However, we found that many expanded and non-conforming responses do not lead to intervention by the interviewer and are treated as unproblematic. A Conversation Analytic study of survey interviews, incorporating three different surveys, with recordings available for interviews varying in number between four and 430 interviews, shows that answer attempts can be divided into five types: four turn expansions (serial extras, uncertainty markers, prefaced answers, answers followed by elaborations), and non-conforming answers. Each of these targets a specific aspect of the interview situation. A follow-up quantitative analysis of 610 Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) shows that expanded answers are overwhelmingly accepted by interviewers, while non-conforming answers are in most cases followed by interviewer probing.
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Open Access
January 26, 2024
Abstract
This paper deals with automated football match reports as a common genre of automated journalism. Based on a corpus of automated and human-written reports ( n = 1,302) on the same set of matches and with reference to linguistic concepts of text and textuality, the textual properties of these texts are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis is based on the idea that the task of text generation can be described as the task of automatically selecting cues of textuality such as connectives or signals of thematic relatedness. The results show that automated and human-written texts differ significantly in the use of these cues, particularly in the use of linguistic means for creating evaluation and contrast, and thus allow to trace in detail, how these cues contribute to cohesion, coherence and narrative qualities. Different from computational linguistic approaches focused on optimizing text generation algorithms, this paper proposes to use automated texts, which are to some extent imperfect, as models of textuality that through their imperfection can say something about the nature of texts in general. The paper thus contributes to the field of (mostly communication studies) research on automated journalism in which the texts themselves are rarely investigated.
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January 23, 2024
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Differences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT) – to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The findings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they differed in their use of thematized clauses. More non-finite clauses were found in science writing, and more finite clauses in humanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These findings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary fields of study are recommended.
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Open Access
January 15, 2024
Abstract
This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is ‘doing theory’. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality . London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk.
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December 14, 2023
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This paper introduces a new perspective on analysing courtroom insincerity by focusing on questions asked by lawyers in the Malawi criminal justice system. The study aimed at examining the linguistic tools of tracing insincerity in lawyers’ questions; the varying degrees of insincerity in defence and prosecution lawyers and their rationale for making such choices. The study argues that courtroom setting is a war zone where different parties have divergent goals. Such encounters are much likely to yield higher chances of insincerity, which can be manifested in the questions lawyers ask. The analysis is based on data from four criminal cases, which were collected from the High Court of Malawi. My framework of analysing insincerity in questions examines the prescribed degrees of control that questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness. The findings indicate that, when examining witnesses, prosecutors exercise less insincerity while defence lawyers opt for questions with high insincerity. These imbalances in language use are enshrined in and supported by law in its statutes. The findings of this study have jurisprudential implications, especially in Africa which is internationally less represented in the studies of language and law.
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Open Access
December 8, 2023
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden’s way to handle the crisis was referred to as ‘the Swedish strategy’ and regarded as unconventional. Most studies of the Swedish strategy have focused on politicians’ legitimations, but not on the discursive negotiation in a media context. The objectives of this critical discourse study are to examine how the Swedish strategy was (de)legitimised in Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, during 2020, and what role national discourses played for discursive framings of the Swedish strategy. Using legitimation analysis combined with affect as a discourse analytical concept, we examine 71 newspaper articles. The findings show how a nationalistic framing highlights trust and responsibility as key aspects of the strategy, but also how trust and responsibility are used in delegitimations with additional frames, such as consequences for individuals’ everyday lives, or the frame of an international scientific community. The findings shed new light on the role of national discourses in the initial internal debates about Swedish COVID-19 management, and on the usefulness of an analytical approach that considers an elaborated analysis of different delegitimation strategies and the importance of affect for discourses and (de)legitimations.
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November 27, 2023
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This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress’s key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress’s insistence on the social, as in social semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas in context , how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally.
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Open Access
November 27, 2023
Abstract
Never in modern times has public health communication been so critical yet so fragile. When the first COVID-19 case was detected in Taiwan, Taiwanese health officials readily embedded pandemic detective narratives within public announcements to alert and reassure citizens about the government’s preparedness. Such narratives are subject to revision because of challenges from the press, thereby inviting uncertainty as to who is telling the truth. In this study, I draw on the notions of narrative construction and circulation to analyze video recordings of daily press conferences about COVID-19 in Taiwan and trace how the Taiwanese media covered the island’s first COVID-19 case from diagnosis to recovery. Along the way, pandemic detective narratives were multimodally told, untold, and retold. The health officials’ narrative (re)entextualizations conflicted with those of the press and the person with COVID-19. This conflict stemmed from the different means of narrative construction and circulation that each narrator utilized to make sense of the illness experience. The differences suggest a tension between asserting control and conveying authenticity that intertextually potentiates and debilitates trust.
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Open Access
November 24, 2023
Abstract
This paper argues that classroom role-play can be conceptualised theoretically as an oral genre, as defined within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The work draws on analysis of 15 video-recorded child-led role-plays in which groups of three 4–5 year-old children engage in five different life-like social scenarios. The study is underpinned by SFL register and genre analysis of the children’s interactions, and the findings reveal how the children’s linguistic choices have a direct impact on the dynamically unfolding role-play, and how imaginary scenarios are construed by the instantiation of individual genre stages, some of which serve to regulate the role-play and others that mimic real life social scenarios. The findings suggest that the two different types of stages construe two separate, but interwoven contexts, with the make-believe context often being dependent on the regulative context. The paper offers new insights into the ways in which SFL can reveal nuances in children’s dialogic and dynamic language in play.
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Open Access
November 16, 2023
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This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of ‘affordance’ and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the “potentials and limitations of specific modes”. The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress’s original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker’s lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making.
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Open Access
November 16, 2023
Abstract
In this paper I show how Gunther Kress, throughout his work, struggled with the contradictory poles of intellectual attraction that lead many other thinkers to firmly anchor themselves to fixed positions and safeguard themselves from doubt. I will focus on two issues, the tension between social determination and individual agency, and the tension between ‘critique’ and ‘design’. In his early work, Kress spoke of the individual as socially determined and of linguistic competence as a product of the social structure. Later he began to emphasize individual agency (and the agency of ‘communities’) rather than the power of ideologies and institutions. But the tension between the two continued to be felt throughout his work. Secondly, though Kress was one of the originators of critical discourse analysis, he later distanced himself from it, arguing that critique looks backwards and focuses on power and convention, while design looks forward and focuses on empowerment and innovation. But here too, the issue was never finally settled, and Kress recognized that critique and design are interdependent. Finally, I will describe Kress’s ‘exploratory’ approach to semiotics in which an open attitude to data, dialogue, and the interdependence of text analysis and theory-formation play a fundamental role.
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November 9, 2023
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Tasting sessions are a social activity in which the senses and the sensorial features of the tasted objects are the main focus of the participants, who do not only experience taste but also aim at precisely describing it. For doing that, they use pre-formatted tasting sheets and pre-existing standardized repertoires of descriptors. This paper investigates the relations between bodies and sensations, linguistic expressions and the normativity of lexical repertoires. While the literature has insisted on the sensorial lexicon of diverse languages and its specialization within expert domains, the very way in which the sensing body, language, and the normativity of standardized categories are precisely articulated in tasting practices remains understudied. Using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, this paper demonstrates how participants in training tasting sessions achieve practically, bodily and materially the association between the sample tasted, the sensing body and the use of lexical repertoires. Artefacts and tools like tasting sheets and lexical lists are situatedly mobilized in a way that enhances the senses but also socializes and standardizes them. On the basis of cheese tasting sessions video-recorded during training workshops of professional tasters in Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the paper demonstrates how the normative order of sensing is achieved through the imbrication of the use of tasting sheets within the sensory examination of samples – thus showing how body, materiality, language, and artefacts are normatively constrained, practically managed and bodily aligned in the tasting session.
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September 7, 2023
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The arrival of COVID-19 disrupted the everyday life of the classroom. This interactional sociolinguistic research explores a teacher providing directions to students about COVID-19 safety protocols, delivered on the first three days of the students’ return to the classroom in August 2020 after a multi-month hiatus. Using audio-data collected over multiple hours as part of an ongoing long-term study of classroom interaction in a rural Canadian high school, it examines teacher strategies for delivering directives regarding COVID-19 safety policy, with particular attention to linguistic forms aimed at student compliance during the fraught early days of return. The findings outline strategies of delivering unambiguous directives regarding relatively mundane procedures, as well as strategies of avoidance—indirections—which were framed as negotiation and revoicing. This study explores the tenuous balance of risk and the everyday in the classroom, where the teacher attempts to reset the interactional order in light of new restrictions, new requirements, and new threats.
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September 7, 2023
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Ecological identity involves all aspects of how individuals or collectives identify themselves with nature. This paper aims to examine the discursive construction of corporate ecological identities in corporate sustainability reports in China and evaluate how these identities are legitimated through the lens of ecolinguistic discourse analysis. Our data was drawn from a collection of English-language sustainability reports of Huawei Technologies Corporation (2016–2020). The findings suggest a mix of ecological identities across all texts, among which stewarding nature dominates and it relates to the belief that humans are obligated to steward nature for the sake of sustainability. These ecological identities are discursively legitimized in terms of defining characteristics, social roles, and community memberships. Innovativeness, leadership and ethicalness are legitimated as the corporation’s dominant characteristics which serve as moral identity standards, allowing further legitimation of the social roles and community memberships that the corporation claims. In the case of social roles, green manufacturing depends on green technologies, and both of them point to the instrumentality and rightness of technology in advancing sustainability. These construals uncover the ecological sustainability in the Chinese cultural context, that is, achieving the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. In legitimizing community memberships, hierarchical relationships between the corporation and other participants are revealed.
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August 14, 2023
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We explore the media representation of the involvement of Fenerbahçe, a football club in Türkiye, in the 2011 Turkish Sports Corruption Scandal . Specifically, the study focuses on the discursive construction of Fenerbahçe’s ‘innocence’ and ‘corruption’ through the central arguments of Fenerbahçe’s self-defense and how the newsprint media represents these arguments of innocence in Türkiye. The data consist of the council board speech of the club’s president after his release, the front-page headlines, and the news reports of Turkish daily newspapers featuring the speech. In the study, adopting the critical discourse analysis framework, we discuss that the newspapers either recontextualize the innocence arguments or set them aside to pursue their ideological stances. Besides, our analysis reveals that the newspapers ultimately ignore Fenerbahçe’s arguments about the existence of a secret criminal organization endeavoring to gain control of Fenerbahçe via match-fixing claims and the state via a civil coup .
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February 20, 2023
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A phrase-frame (p-frame) is a multi-word sequence with a one-word variable within the sequence (e.g., it is * to ). P-frames are important components of language production and can demonstrate phraseological patterning. This study examined p-frames retrieved from one learner business emails corpus (1,413 texts based on the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database) and one working professional email corpus (1,145 texts from the Enron email dataset). P-frames were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of their structural characteristics, functional characteristics, and variability. Our results showed that the working professionals and the learners of business English used p-frames differently. The working professionals used p-frames in ways that aligned with written conventions, whereas the learners of business English used p-frames in ways that did not accord well with written conventions. This difference was detected by comparing tendencies in function-word frames and frames for referential function. In addition, p-frames used by the working professionals displayed a higher degree of variability than those by the learners of business English. This study facilitates an understanding of learners’ p-frame use in English for business purposes and suggests that p-frames be incorporated into the teaching and learning of L2 business writing.
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February 10, 2023
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Although the importance of time in political discourse cannot be denied, few recent studies address the representation of time as a factor in election campaigns. This discourse analytical study focuses on the role of time in the campaign literature produced by the nine main parties in the 2019 EU election in the UK, which resulted in a landslide victory for the newly-formed Brexit Party. The corpus consisted of the manifestos or leaflets produced specifically for this election by the nine parties in question, amounting to 57,226 words. The timelines of the different parties are analysed, showing how the parties envisioned different timelines: some capitalized on public frustration by offering immediate satisfaction, while others legitimized their aspirations through timelines that reached across and beyond the uncertainties of the Brexit phase. Representations of linear time, cyclical time and radical rupture are contrasted, and the key significance of time in the populist performance of crisis is discussed.
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Open Access
February 6, 2023
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This paper is a critical appreciation of some of Gunther Kress’s central (social) semiotic notions: i.e., motivation , materiality , rhetorical aptness and semiotic mode versus medium . These will be discussed in relation to four landmark models of sign-making and semiosis by Saussure, Peirce, Bühler and Jakobson. Based on these comments, the paper identifies the persistent difficulties current multimodality research faces in defining mode and in devising linguistically unbiased grammars of non-verbal modes. Finally, the argument is advanced that multimodal genre and discourse interpretation in particular deserve to be re-developed. The paper critiques Kress’s insistence on motivation as a universal principle of sign use and his overemphasis on materiality to the detriment of grammar, while praising his overall (social) semiotic legacy for multimodality research as far-sighted and lastingly influential.
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January 20, 2023
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In Mandarin Chinese, the expression nǐ kànzhe bàn ba can be employed in either ‘you-decide use’ ( you assess and decide by yourself ), whereby the speaker disclaims his/her deontic authority to the recipient in decision-making, or ‘I-claim use’ ( you have to assess and decide cautiously ), whereby he/she claims a higher degree of deontic authority than the recipient when determining a proposed action. Focusing on the ‘I-claim use’ of nǐ kànzhe bàn ba , this study examines how this expression is manipulated by customers to negotiate solutions for their complaints with customer service representatives in Chinese e-shopping platforms. Utilising naturally occurring data from Taobao service encounters spanning about one year, this study employs a discursive approach and finds that this expression fulfills one of a number of pragmatic functions: (1) when there is no mutual agreement on the complaint proposals, the customers deploy it to upgrade their deontic authority to orient to their own unilateral solution and refrain from further negotiations; (2) when expressing a negative evaluation, the customers use it to pre-empt potential complainables that reflect their strong deontic authority; or (3) following non-substantive rectification on the part of the agent, the customers use it to express diluted deontic authority in order to display disaffiliation and solicit more substantive proposals. By analyzing the use of this expression in e-shopping service encounters, our study contributes to understanding how deontic authority is exercised in negotiating solutions to complaints.
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January 20, 2023
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Little is known about typography and its contribution to the meaning-making process in children’s storybooks. This study applied the systematic framework for a distinctive feature analysis of typography to explore the manifestations of typography in 24 recently published Arabic children’s storybooks and outline typography’s ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions as interpreted according to the Arabic sociocultural context. The findings show a pattern of visually manipulated typographic representations in terms of weight, expansion and spacing, curvature, connectivity, orientation, irregularity, and colors . In its ideational function, the typography constructed, reflected, and evoked visual images of real-life representations. In its interpersonal function, the typography communicated educative, social, and cultural messages and values to young readers. In its textual function, the typography supported dramatic atmospheres, matched the tone and rhythm of the story, harmonized with the stories’ themes, reflected the characters’ emotions and thoughts, and highlighted or differentiated incidents, concepts, and characters. The typography was found to be a promising communicative resource in Arabic children’s storybooks.
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January 20, 2023
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Drawing on the notion of voice, this study examines both textual and contextual voices of translated news narratives relating to the 2014 Hong Kong protests. It analyses narrative voices, including those of primary, secondary and tertiary narrators, comparing the original and translated news texts and discusses the socio-cultural context in which these narrative voices are produced. The analysis draws on translated news reports published between 28 September and 16 December 2014 from three media outlets: Reference News , BBC Chinese and New York Times Chinese, together with their source texts from a range of mainstream global media. The findings show how the media outlets employ a complex interplay of narrative voices in their translated news texts and the extent to which the narrative voices of certain groups have been emphasised or suppressed. This sheds light on the shifts in voice within and between media outlets and the contextual factors which might have contributed to them.
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January 20, 2023
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Given the unsettled debate about the role of nativeness and/or expertise in academic writing, we compared the first language (L1)-English expert writers and the Second language (L2)-English (Chinese L1) expert writers with a similar expertise level in the use of stance complement that -clauses. For our analysis, we selected equal numbers of published research articles written by the L1 and the L2 experts in the field of Telecommunications. We found considerable differences between the two groups of writers in terms of frequency, range, and semantic classes of words controlling that -clauses. First, although both the L1 experts and the L2 experts overwhelmingly used verb + that -clauses, they demonstrated relatively different syntactic preferences for stance construction. The L2 experts used more verb + that -clauses than the L1 experts, while the L1 experts utilized more noun + that -clauses. Second, the L2 experts were more likely to express greater certainty towards the claims in that -clauses than the L1 experts. Third, the L2 experts employed a narrower range of words controlling that -clauses than the L1 experts in all the semantic classes. These findings suggest that the nativeness status of academic writers still influences their use of evaluative that -clauses even at an advanced level.
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January 20, 2023
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The present study investigates how car bumper stickers in Jordan are exploited as public texts and spaces to communicate transgressive messages about the self and the other. Using Bakhtin’s notions of the carnival and the carnivalesque, eighty-four ethnographically collected bumper stickers were analyzed. The analysis of data shows that this public form of communication is exploited by Jordanian drivers and car owners as a site of carnivalesque transgression and degradation in three discursive spheres: (i) castigating female materiality, calling into question female attainment of rationality, and stressing ‘female infidelity’; (ii) complaining about one’s suffering, burdens, and cares through a plaintive image of ritual lamentation and self-degradation; and (iii) creating a Bakhtinian ‘reversible world’ that attempts to reverse values, hierarchies, and power relationships, and in which the lowly is valorized, and the social discourse of the community is inverted. Like carnival and the carnivalesque, these bumper stickers provide a licensed space of transgression and degradation and reflect a special type of communication that is impossible in everyday life as such communication constitutes a form of carnivalesque ‘marketplace speech’ that is devoid of the norms of etiquette and decency. The present study contributes to research on transgressive language and popular culture in public spaces.
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Open Access
January 12, 2023
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This paper explores the difficulties of translating Chinese expressions frequently used in communicating governmental policies to the public. In particular, we focus on the expression wenming 文明, a term with manifold meanings and uses, which often ends up being translated into English simply as ‘civilised’. This translational convention is problematic because wenming in Chinese tends to be used in many collocations where the English civilised sounds distinctly alien. In order to systematically investigate this translational problem, we propose a bottom-up tri-partite approach to the study of Chinese policy expressions in general and wenming in particular. This novel mixed-method approach not only allows us to go beyond essentialist generalisations about expressions frequented in Chinese political discourse, but more importantly it allows us to unearth and label practical difficulties faced by translators.
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January 3, 2023
Abstract
The present study explores the linguistic complexity (LC) of public legal information (PLI) texts for young persons by deploying the Hallidayan model of lexical density and grammatical intricacy. It examines how the Australian legal statutes’ grammatical intricacy and lexical density are reformulated into PLI texts to make them more accessible for a specific vulnerable group. The findings reveal that although the PLI texts were claimed to be written in plain language, they trade some types of complexity for others. The paper extends Halliday’s model of complexity by adding lower rank complexes and embedded clause complexes as realisations of intricacy and density. It proposes “embedded intricacy” as a feature of a hybrid of spoken and written language. Furthermore, the study suggests reconsidering how law can be recontextualised for young persons in a more accessible way.
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August 30, 2022
Abstract
Metadiscourse is the commentary on a text made by its producer in the course of speaking or writing, revealing something of how communication involves the personalities, attitudes and assumptions of those who are communicating. It offers a framework for understanding communication as social engagement and helps reveal how writers and speakers consider their audience in creating texts. This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to trace the growing interest in metadiscourse since its early incarnations in the 1980s. To do so we analysed all 431 papers relating to metadiscourse in the core collection of the Web of Science between 1983 and 2020, dividing the corpus into two periods following the massive increase in interest after 2006. We identify which topics have been most prevalent, which authors and publications most influential and which disciplines and journals most active in citing the metadiscourse literature. The findings show the importance of academic and business writing, cross-disciplinary, language and genre studies, and the increasing predominance of an interpersonal model. These findings may be of interest to those working in discourse analysis and the study of social interaction.
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June 1, 2022
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Previous research has shown that trade unions have resorted to a number of rhetorical tools to make their arguments and ensure the voice of their members was heard. In a time in which union membership is declining and many have questioned trade unions’ representation role, the recourse to figurative language – e.g. metaphors – might contribute to getting unions’ messages through, restoring trust among affiliates. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the metaphorical devices employed in trade union discourse, with a view to appreciating the way they are utilised in employee relations and highlighting the values unions intend to promote through these figures of speech. To this end, discourse analysis is carried out on a data corpus consisting of documents issued by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in a given timeframe, in which metaphorical language is employed. The analysis focuses on a specific topic, i.e. platform workers and the protection of their rights. The findings reveal that metaphors are used by trade unions to convey different meanings, which are intended to generate narratives aimed at safeguarding the rights of platform workers.