Discourse Studies recent issues

On assessing situations and events in conversation: `extraposition' and its relatives

Couper-Kuhlen, E., Thompson, S. A. — 2008-07-29

Recent research provides strong evidence that the syntacticization of recurrent multi-actional and interactional patterns for accomplishing social actions is quite a general phenomenon. Drawing on a body of audio and video recordings, we consider three pervasive conversational patterns whereby English speakers carry out the assessing of an event or situation, and the interactional contingencies which give rise to these patterns. We propose that one of these patterns (known as `extraposition') can be revealingly understood as having syntacticized to a grammatical and prosodically unified construction as an amalgamation of the other two patterns, which are interactional routines. We suggest that the `extraposition' construction provides a particularly elegant instance of how grammar emerges from the recurrent interactional practices which make up the fabric of our daily lives.

TV talk show therapy as a distinct genre of discourse

Xiaoping Yan, — 2008-07-29

Using therapeutic conversations from a televised talk show as the source data, this article investigates how people solve emotional problems in an institutional setting within a specific social cultural context. In light of the genre framework and the Systemic Functional Linguistics, the investigation considers the TV talk show therapy under examination a distinct genre. The claim is based on the linguistic evidence drawn from the analytical work. As a valid genre the talk show therapy has been characterized with the communicative intentionality to resolve emotional problems and to promote mental health to the public. These components in turn have shaped the generic structures, which become the crucial criteria that constitute a text as a genre. The article proposes that a broader conception of genre framework is an effective research method to describe the textual typologies and interpret the semantic structures of the social interaction in postmodern society.

The pragmatics of Akan greetings

Agyekum, K. — 2008-07-29

This article addresses greetings as one of the most frequent linguistic interactional routines among the Akan of Ghana. The article will look at the functions, situations, and the major forms of Akan greetings. The article will highlight the major functions of greetings such as the creation of social relationship, commitment to one another in social encounters and manifestation of an individual's communicative competence. It discusses the taxonomy of Akan greetings in terms of formality, periods, events and activities. The article further looks at the changes in greetings in the Akan modern society. The article treats greetings within the frameworks of ethnography of communication, politeness and speech act theory within anthropological linguistics.

Highlighted moves within an action: segmented talk in Japanese conversation

Morita, E. — 2008-07-29

Japanese conversational data reveal that Japanese speakers produce, and recipients orient to, smaller units of talk than what the conventional notion of a `turn constructional unit' (TCU) represents. Unlike TCUs, such units may be grammatically, prosodically and pragmatically incomplete and may happen on the sub-phrasal level of discourse, as Japanese conversationalists prosodically break up even a single semantic constituent with the insertion of an interactional particle. In this article, I give numerous examples of how such practices of separating a segment of talk are not random but are precisely embedded in the sequential organization of talk that participants co-create. I argue that such segmentation contributes to the interactional co-construction of a turn so as to highlight specifically a `move' Within the larger action that is implemented by the TCU. Doing so thereby provides opportunities for the participants to deal with local contingency problems without changing the global level of the pragmatic work of the turn.

Membership categorization and professional insanity ascription

Roca-Cuberes, C. — 2008-07-29

This study, based on three years of research and over 40 hours of videotaped interaction in psychiatry, investigates the issue of insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews. Following Sacks's model of membership categorization analysis (MCA), this article analyzes the discursive resources that psychiatrists may draw on to achieve some conclusion regarding their patients' psychopathological status. As it turns out, psychiatrists' invocation of patients' putative membership categories plays a crucial role in the achievement of such a conclusion. I examine some fragments of psychiatric intake interviews (PIIs) and subsequent psychiatric interviews (SPIs). The analysis shows that the process that may lead to insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews basically involves the use of mundane, commonsense reasoning.

Book review: EMANUEL A. SCHEGLOFF, Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, xvi + 300 pp

Arminen, I. — 2008-07-29

Book review: EMANUEL A. SCHEGLOFF, Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, xvi + 300 pp

McHoul, A. — 2008-07-29

Book review: M.A.K. HALLIDAY, Studies in Chinese Language, ed. J. Webster. London and New York: Continuum, 2006

Hui Lai, , Hailong Tian, — 2008-07-29

Book review: HELEN SAUNTSON and SAKIS KYRATZIS (eds), Language, Sexualities & Desires: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007

Zhiying Xin, — 2008-07-29

Stance-taking in Hebrew casual conversation via be'emet (`really, actually, indeed', lit. `in truth')

Maschler, Y., Estlein, R. — 2008-05-29

In this article, we investigate the functional itinerary followed by Hebrew be'emet (`really, actually, indeed', lit. `in truth'), through a close exploration of its synchronic uses in the contemporary spoken language. Since this utterance, derived from the noun 'emet (`truth'), is so profoundly tied in with the speaker's beliefs and attitudes towards his or her discourse, we consider issues of metalanguage, modality, evidentiality, and stance. Be'emet is traditionally classified as `adverb', but in our corpus of naturally occurring Hebrew conversation, only 22 percent of all tokens function in this role. Whereas these tokens function referentially, the great majority of tokens (70%) function in the interpersonal realm of discourse, manifesting properties of discourse markers: 44.5 percent of all tokens function as full-fledged discourse markers (both semantically and structurally, Maschler, 1998) serving mirative (DeLancey, 2001), reprimanding, or negating any doubt roles; 22.5 percent function to ratify a previous stance; and three percent function to latch onto a new topic, requesting its elaboration. An intermediate category (8%) is composed of tokens functioning both referentially and interpersonally, mid-way between an adverb and a discourse marker, in a way that is particularly illuminating for understanding the changes undergone by be'emet as a result of its employment in discourse. The study thus lends support to previous studies of subjectification and intersubjectification in the process of grammaticization of discourse markers (Traugott, 2003; Traugott and Dasher, 2002).

`Prospecting an encounter' as a communicative event

Orr, W. W.F. — 2008-05-29

As basic units of communication recognized by speakers themselves, communicative events have always been assumed to have clearly definable boundaries and characterizable joint activity for content. This, however, is not always the case. In this article, I argue for a communicative event I term ` prospecting an encounter' which typically occurs between shoppers and salespersons in Chinese local markets. `Prospecting' opens in a deliberately ambiguous way and ends when it either develops into a fully ratified encounter or dissolves into mere unfocused interaction or even cessation of co-presence. The joint activity that occurs within its boundaries has an equivocal status as engagement. Close analysis of interactional data reveals how `prospecting' events are jointly accomplished by speakers through the strategic withholding of glances and the extensive use of silence.

Persuasive presuppositions in OECD and EU higher education policy documents

Saarinen, T. — 2008-05-29

The article analyses presuppositions in higher education policy documents of the OECD and the European Union from the point of view of their persuasiveness. Presuppositions set the assumed common ground, which in turn sets the frame of interpretation of texts. However, by presenting something as common ground, presuppositions also shape our views of the reality. Used in this way, presuppositions can be used to present contested views, which would be open to criticism if they were asserted explicitly. The analysis does not evaluate the actual success of persuasion, but rather how policy documents are construed in a persuasive way.

Intertextual aspects of Chinese newspaper commentaries on the events of 9/11

Wei Wang, — 2008-05-29

This article explores intertextual aspects of Chinese newspaper commentaries on the events of 11 September 2001. Newspaper commentaries in China are often a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of comprehensive news reports and opinion articles. Informed by genre theories and discussions of intertextuality in different disciplines, this article examines the micro-genres of the data collected and investigates how the Chinese writers include and use outside sources and how they position themselves as writers in relation to other sources. The analysis reveals that Chinese writers tend to use the explanatory micro-genre often with attributed but unidentified external sources or sources with high status for keeping a distance from these sources in the writing. This suggests that the writers tend to avoid personal authorship and responsibility for what they write. The article also discusses the textual and intertextual features in relation to the roles of the press in the Chinese context.

Comical hypothetical: arguing for a conversational phenomenon

Winchatz, M. R., Kozin, A. — 2008-05-29

This study makes a case for the conversational phenomenon the authors have named the comical hypothetical (CH). The CH becomes discursively co-created during ongoing conversation when one or more speakers depart from the normal turn-taking system and engage in the interactional creation of an imaginary world. Data stem from ethnographic observations as well as from spontaneous recordings of social situations in three different locations. Out of 20 hours of taped conversations, 10 recognizable CH segments were analyzed for the present study. The authors present a macro-structure analysis of the comical hypothetical using Hymes's (1962, 1974) SPEAKING mnemonic, with an emphasis on the act sequence. A second-level micro-analysis uncovers the interactional properties of the CH using a conversation analytic approach. The examination reveals a distinct four-part act sequence of the CH made up of intricate and creative interactional turns. Lastly, the significance and functions of the CH are also discussed.

Participation, procedure and accountability: `you said' speech markers in negotiating reports of ambiguous phenomena

Wooffitt, R., Allistone, S. — 2008-05-29

In this article we study how reported speech markers are used as procedural resources in a laboratory based parapsychology experiment to investigate forms of anomalous communication, such as extrasensory perception. In particular, we focus on how specific activities in a key part of the experiment are mediated by the use of `you said' formulations which project that whatever is said next is a paraphrase or a verbatim report of what the recipient had said earlier. We identify two uses of reported speech markers. First, they are used in utterances that initiate some form of repair, such as correction or clarification. Second, they cluster in sequential locations that mark, after a temporary suspension, the resumption of key activities in the experiment. In this we hope to contribute to the study of the institutional properties of reported speech. We conclude by discussing the ways in which broader cultural understandings of the inferential force of `you said' formulations inform their use in this institutional setting, and reflecting on the significance of these findings for parapsychological investigation of anomalous communication in this setting.

Book review: PURUSHOTTAM G. PATEL, Reading Acquisition in India: Models of Learning and Dyslexia. New Delhi/Los Angeles, CA/London: SAGE, 2004, 172 pp., 5 figures, 9 models, ISBN 0761932208 (US, hbk), 8178293498 (India, hbk)

Sajjadi, S. — 2008-05-29

Book review: MIMI WHITE and JAMES SCHWOCH (eds), Questions of Method in Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, xii + 322 pp., USD 36.95

Aditya Keshari Mishra, — 2008-05-29

Book review: MAURIZIO GOTTI and DAVIDE S. GIANNONI (eds), New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, 301 pp

Murawska, M. — 2008-05-29

`You're still sick!' Framing, footing, and participation in children's medical play

Buchbinder, M. H. — 2008-03-28

Building on foundational work in activity theory and cultural psychology, this article examines children's play to discern how biomedical practices and understandings of illness are negotiated, modeled, and reproduced among children dealing with a parent's cancer. Using discourse analytic methods, I analyze a videotaped playroom interaction involving three preschool-age girls, all of whom have a parent with cancer, and myself. The article employs notions of `frame' and `footing' (Bateson, 1972; Goffman, 1974) to illustrate fantasy and reality as overlapping and embedded frames of experience that organize children's playroom activities in distinctive ways. The shifting alignments and participation structures within the playroom environment illuminate the strategic ways in which children laminate personal experience onto the play frame. Through attention to children's talk and embodied action, I show how children key different interactional frames to expand the realm of epistemological and cognitive resources available to them as they seek cultural understanding.

`Click here': the impact of new media on the encoding of persuasive messages in direct marketing

Cheung, M. — 2008-03-28

With the increasing popularity of the Internet, email marketing has become a convenient and dynamic mode of communication that enables business organizations and personal sellers to promote their products or services at a much lower cost and with a potentially more global reach. This article aims to examine the impact of new media on the encoding of persuasive messages in sales emails as a channel of direct marketing, and the extent to which the use of new media influences the overall interactional or social strategy of credibility enhancement and persuasion in the context of sales promotion. A genre analysis based on a modified move scheme proposed in this study was conducted on 160 sales letters (80 emails and 80 prints) randomly selected from a database of 10,972 sales letters collected from 36 categories of recipients in Hong Kong over a six-month period. Similarities and differences in discourse structures were found across the two corpora, and discussions were made with reference to a conceptual framework titled the Lingual-Belief Interaction Model proposed by the author. The model addresses the role of text, context, and interface in sales email study on the one hand, and the interplay of belief, interaction, and language in persuasive communication on the other. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 specialist and corporate informants in the field of sales promotion communication to verify the results of analysis.

An implicature for um: signaling relative expertise

Lange, P. G. — 2008-03-28

Many scholars characterize um as an involuntary emission that is devoid of meaning. Other scholars classify um as a non-linguistic signal that conveys certain messages or resolves a conversational problem, such as determining next speaker. Um is often assumed to signal `powerless language' because it displays speaker uncertainty. Yet an examination of real-time, written conversation in two online communities shows that participants sometimes use an um to mark an obvious flaw in prior talk. In the examples below, um may be used to mark talk as flawed on the basis of information that is available (although not necessarily known) to both parties. When um becomes associated with marking obvious flaws in prior talk, interlocutors may trade on this meaning and deploy an um to display for themselves a higher position of relative expertise, vis-à-vis their interlocutors, within local micro-social hierarchies of knowledge.

Evidentiality in Chinese newspaper reports: subjectivity/objectivity as a factor

Hsieh, C.-L. — 2008-03-28

This article aims to discover the principle that underlies correlations between choices of evidential qualification and the communicative purposes of Chinese newspaper reportage along the dimension of subjectivity/objectivity. Distributional comparisons of data from the China Times news website reveal a pragmatic distinction between evidential subclasses. Reportatives predominate in politics and business news, where objectivity carries higher weight, while in less objectivity-oriented reports as local news, sensories are of greater frequency. The latter is also prevalent as journalists reflect on a reported event. The level of evidential subjectivity thus varies significantly with the nature of evidence. An evaluation drawn from shared belief tends to be experienced as less subjective than one built upon what is accessible to the journalist alone. This suggests the use of evidentiality as reflective of the stance of the newspaper media.

Research article abstracts in applied linguistics and educational technology: a study of linguistic realizations of rhetorical structure and authorial stance

Phuong Dzung Pho, — 2008-03-28

The abstract found at the beginning of most journal articles has increasingly become an essential part of the article. It tends to be the first part of the article to be read and, to some extent, it `sells' the article. Acquiring the skills of writing an abstract is therefore important to novice writers to enter the discourse community of their discipline. Based on 30 abstracts from three journals, the present study aims at exploring not only the rhetorical moves of abstracts in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology, but also the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance in different abstract moves. The results show that there are three obligatory moves in abstracts in these two disciplines — Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, and Summarizing the results. The results also indicate that a combination of certain linguistic features such as grammatical subjects, verb tense and voice can help distinguish moves in the abstract. The findings of the study have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses for graduate students, especially students from non-English backgrounds.

Gender and sexual identity authentication in language use: the case of chat rooms

Del-Teso-Craviotto, M. — 2008-03-28

In this article, I investigate the linguistic practices by which participants in online dating chats become authentic gendered and sexual beings in the virtual world. This process of authentication validates them as members of a specific gender or sexual group, which is a key prerequisite for engaging in the intricacies of online desire and eroticism. Authentication in this context is necessarily a discursive act because of the absence of visual or aural cues, and it takes place through linguistic strategies such as the age/sex/location schema, descriptions of the self, and screen names. The resulting gender and sexual identities are sketches or stereotypes whose value derives from the acceptance of social and cultural discourses on gender and sexuality that are negotiated in the interactions. Authentication, therefore, is not an external process imposed upon people, but the result of specific social practices.

Book review: PAUL BAKER, Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum Discourse Series, 2006, 198 pp., $62.50 (paperback)

Jeyapal, D. — 2008-03-28

Book review: SALLA KURHILA, Second Language Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006. viii + 257 pp., hardback, {euro}110.00/US$132.00

Castaneda-Pena, H. A. — 2008-03-28

Book review: ASIF AGHA, Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, xvi + 427 pp., $34.99 (pb)/$90 (hb)

Hussein, L. M. — 2008-03-28

Introduction: questioning and affiliation/ disaffiliation in interaction

Steensig, J., Drew, P. — 2008-02-11

Wh-interrogative formats used for questioning and beyond: German warum (why) and wieso (why) and English why

Egbert, M., Voge, M. — 2008-02-11

This article contributes to a critical discussion of how `question' and `questioning' may be defined in terms of form and function by analyzing the interactional usage of two apparently synonymous `question' words, German warum (why) and wieso (why) and their common English translation why. Warum and why are employed for two different interactional achievements. Wieso marks the utterance as an information request. In this respect, it is affiliative. In contrast, warum points to something wrong and is thus complaint implicative. Recipients orient to warum as disaffiliative. A contrastive analysis of German warum and wieso with English why (Clayman and Heritage, 2002a; Koshik, 2003; Schegloff, 1984) shows that why allows for ambiguity, whereas warum and wieso are unambiguous. While there is a core usage of these lexical items, they are also employed differently with an orientation to institutionality. In business meetings, there is a correlation between the occurrence of the complaint-implicative warum and the leadership status of the speaker in the team.

Using niin-interrogative to treat the prior speaker's action as an exaggeration

Halonen, M., Sorjonen, M.-L. — 2008-02-11

This article examines an interrogative construction with which recipients in Finnish interactions treat the co-participant's prior action as having exhibited a stance that was overstated. A key element in the interrogative is the intensifier niin which foregrounds the scalar character of its head word (e.g. niin hirmune `so/that/as terrible') and suggests that the place it points to is too high on the scale. We will show that the niin-interrogative can target something the co-participant explicitly mentioned or only implied, and it can have in its scope either the prior turn or a longer stretch of talk. Niin-interrogatives form one means for indicating that the co-participant's claim departed from some normal way of perceiving social life, and they orient to a moral norm of walking the golden mean. As compared to other ways of dealing with exaggeration, a niin-interrogative allows the recipient to express her disagreeing stance in a fashion that avoids an open conflict.

Questions of accountability: yes--no interrogatives that are unanswerable

Heinemann, T. — 2008-02-11

This article examines one practice for challenging a co-participant, the use of polar interrogatives that are unanswerable. These are questions that are designed to receive a confirming answer of the same polarity as the question, so-called `Same Polarity Questions'. Speakers accomplish this bias by formatting the question in accordance with their state of knowledge. Based on the recipient's prior turns at talk, a speaker can infer what the recipient's stance towards some matter is and use a `Same Polarity Question' to assert this inference and invite the recipient to confirm the stance. However, the sequential context in which these questions are produced means that with a confirming answer the recipient is heard to be in disagreement with the speaker and can subsequently be held accountable for this disagreement. Neither is a disconfirming response a real alternative, because this would contrast with the information provided by the recipient in prior talk. As this information is what leads the speaker to convey a certain belief about the recipient, the recipient is accountable for having misled the speaker. Because both confirming and disconfirming answers are accountable and hence problematic, recipients treat this type of question as unanswerable and instead orient to it as a challenge.

Introducing direct complaints through questions: the interactional achievement of `pre-sequences'?

Monzoni, C. M. — 2008-02-11

This article considers how two different question designs as positive polar questions and wh-questions occurring in different interactional contexts (institutional calls and ordinary face-to-face interactions) set up a sequence in which a direct complaint is produced in third position as the result of an interactional achievement. Positive polar questions are employed to establish immediately a common ground of understandability between caller and call-taker. Wh-questions are used as challenges and speakers subsequently provide explicit grounds for the challenges in third turns, due to the interpretation of the question given by their recipients.

`Did you have permission to smash your neighbour's door?' Silly questions and their answers in police--suspect interrogations

Stokoe, E., Edwards, D. — 2008-02-11

We examine the asking and answering of `silly questions' (SQs) (for example, `might sound a bit silly, but do you know whose window it is?') in British police interviews with suspects, the courses of action SQs initiate, and the institutional contingencies they are designed to manage. We show how SQs are asked at an important juncture toward the ends of interviews, following police officers' formulations of suspects' testimony (e.g. `so you've admitted throwing eggs'). These formulations are confirmed or even collaboratively produced by suspects. We then examine the design of SQs and show how they play a central role in the articulation of suspects' reported `state of mind', and particularly attributing to them criminal intentions constitutive of the offence with which they may be charged. In cases where SQs do not produce unambiguous answers about `state of mind' or intentionality, police officers move toward direct questioning about suspects' intent, thus making explicit the project of SQs in such interviews. Following SQ—Answer sequences, police officers reformulate suspects' testimony, with subtle but crucial differences with regard to suspects' knowledge state and criminal intent. Suspects overwhelmingly align with police officers' formulations of their testimony, and such agreements have the interactional shape of affiliation. Yet SQs may work in ways that are institutionally adversarial with regard to criminal charges, relevant evidence and self-incriminating testimony.

Affiliative and disaffiliative uses of you say x questions

Steensig, J., Larsen, T. — 2008-02-11

This article explores a question format consisting of `you say' plus a version of what the co-participant has said, which is used to ask for confirmation of something said in an earlier sequence. Questions using this you say x format often request not only confirmation but also accounts and can, on occasions, be taken as challenging the interactional balance, that is, be treated as disaffiliative. The article investigates the sequential, prosodic and grammatical conditions for affiliative and disaffiliative uses of you say x questions and discusses the potential institution specificity of the phenomenon. It is found that the clearly disaffiliative you say x questions are parts of dispreferred and disaligning moves, that they have `marked' prosody, that they raise problems, and that they are most often prefaced by `objecting' particles. Affiliative you say x questions are aligning next sequences in environments where the focus is on information delivery. They have `unmarked' prosody and they contribute to getting information on record. You say x questions which call for accounts without being clearly disaffiliative, are also examined. Even though they often raise problematic issues, they are not sequentially disaligning and have less `marked' prosody than the disaffiliative cases.