Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-06-08DOI: 10.1515/text-2020-0223
A. Chan
{"title":"The use of animal classifiers as a stance negotiation strategy in Cantonese interactional discourse","authors":"A. Chan","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0223","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study adopts the idea of ‘stance triangle’ and ‘double dialogicality’ and examines the use of animal classifiers for human referents in the stance negotiation process in Cantonese. Drawing on the data from a Corpus of Mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong Cantonese, this study explores how participants deploy two animal classifiers (i.e., tiu4, a classifier for fish, and zek3, a classifier for animal) to express their negative stance towards another person. The present study specifically analyzes three examples where the relationships between the stance subjects (SS1-SSn) and stance objects (O) are different: O is present in the interaction in one instance, and absent in the other two instances. My analysis suggests that upon the display of negative stance towards O by the original stance subject, other stance subjects can deny the ‘joint attention’ to avoid establishing any alignment link with the original stance taker as a way of negotiating their stance. I propose an extended model of ‘stance triangle’ which better captures the fluidity and dialogicality in the stance negotiation process.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42157347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1515/text-2021-0128
Pietro Manzella
{"title":"Metaphor(s) of the platform economy in the trade union discourse","authors":"Pietro Manzella","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0128","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43592885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-05-30DOI: 10.1515/text-2021-0032
Yang Yuhong
{"title":"Participatory viewers’ engagement with the dual translation problem on the danmu interface: a social semiotic case study","authors":"Yang Yuhong","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article looks at participatory viewers’ engagement with foreign language video contents facilitated by the danmu interface on a video-sharing website in China. Using the video of the Chinese athlete Sun Yang’s public hearing hosted on Bilibili as a case study, this article investigates Bilbili users’ danmu-based translational efforts and their engagement with the translation problem inherent in the hearing through multimodal discourse analysis, with supportive analysis of individual users’ danmu footprints from a diachronic perspective. Danmu-based viewer activities are approached from the social semiotic perspective and situated in the distribution stratum of the communicative practice of video sharing, with a view to understand participatory viewers’ meaning making processes in their consumption of videos on the danmu interface. The findings show a manifest willingness from participatory viewers to engage with the dual translation problem specific to this case, who submit different kinds of translational inputs onto the video frame in response to the untranslated video and articulate translation-related discourses as prompted by the inherent translation problem in the video. This study contributes to social semiotic discourse analysis of danmu-mediated communication as well as to non-professional translation studies through a focus on novel translation practices emergent in the Chinese context of participatory viewing.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48146622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-05-26DOI: 10.1515/text-2021-0036
J. House, D. Kádár, Fengguang Liu, Yulong Song
{"title":"Aggression in diplomatic notes – a pragmatic analysis of a Chinese-American conflict in times of colonisation","authors":"J. House, D. Kádár, Fengguang Liu, Yulong Song","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study examines veiled aggression in diplomatic language use from the point of view of speech acts. More specifically, we examine how the speech act of ‘Tell’ is used to realise aggression in a small corpus of diplomatic notes written between February and May 1844, exchanged between a US American and a Chinese diplomat. Tell, by default, presents a ‘neutral’ informative illocution. However, in contexts of diplomatic conflicts, particularly when a threat is made, realising Tell often helps the aggressor to deliver menacing messages under a veneer of civility. Tell is also often intertwined with other speech acts through which aggression is realised, such as Request and Complain. By modelling the aggressive function of Tell in the ritual genre of diplomatic notes, this paper fills a knowledge gap by studying aggression in a setting in which aggression operates within the boundaries of the ritual frame of a diplomatic genre.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41530634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-05-19DOI: 10.1515/text-2022-0040
D. Ponton, Małgorzata Sokół
{"title":"Environmental issues in the Anthropocene: ecolinguistic perspectives across media and genres","authors":"D. Ponton, Małgorzata Sokół","doi":"10.1515/text-2022-0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44470161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-04-28DOI: 10.1515/text-2020-0187
Hideo Watanabe
{"title":"The discursive construction of a conflict: a case of disputed islands in the East China Sea","authors":"Hideo Watanabe","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0187","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article aims to identify how Chinese and Japanese online English-language newspaper editorials construct their arguments about a group of disputed islands – the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, and the Senkaku Islands in Japanese – from a linguistic perspective. Newspapers in the two countries have played an important role in appealing not just to domestic readers, but also to international readers on this issue. A corpus of 50 editorials published between 2012 and 2016 was compiled from the English-medium Chinese and Japanese newspapers. The article examines evaluative language in the editorials, using an APPRAISAL framework developed within systemic functional linguistics. This project also adopts corpus techniques for selecting the samples. The findings show that the two corpora frequently used negative evaluations towards the opposite country. The two corpora, however, differed in the varieties of evaluations in the editorials. By exploring the discursive construction of the editorials in relation to contextual information, the analytical focus is on the way the discursive resources contribute to realising the ideologies behind the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands dispute. The findings contribute to our understanding of the way conflicting views can be constructed with the use of linguistic resources in the context of online English-medium news media.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44838498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-04-25DOI: 10.1515/text-2020-0208
S. Brokensha, T. Conradie, W. Greyling
{"title":"“I did not know that there were problems”: government officials’ blame avoidance strategies in the Life Esidimeni Arbitration Hearings","authors":"S. Brokensha, T. Conradie, W. Greyling","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0208","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The travesty of the Life Esidimeni project in South Africa, which claimed the lives of 144 mental health users at psychiatric facilities in Gauteng between 2016 and 2017, is multifaceted. One facet involves strategies of blame avoidance designed to escape liability for the deaths that were expressed by the former Member of the Executive Council for Health and other public health officials during the Life Esidimeni Arbitration Hearings. These hearings were broadcast on state television between October 2017 and 2018, and eight samples from the hearings were analysed for specific blame avoidance strategies. Following the principles of qualitative discourse analysis, this paper extends research on blame avoidance behaviour in the public administration and policy domain, exploring three key officials’ micro- and macro-level choices of blame avoidance in the context of the arbitration hearings to develop a more comprehensive account of these strategies. A public hearing is a discourse setting that is reactionary in nature, and our findings on the micro-level, a neglected dimension of research on blame avoidance behaviour, extend our understanding of these behaviours. We propose that at least two continua for blame avoidance are relevant in this setting.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42958513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-04-20DOI: 10.1515/text-2020-0148
J. Mlynář
{"title":"Lifting the pen and the gaze: embodied recruitment in collaborative writing","authors":"J. Mlynář","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0148","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates sequences of collaborative writing that are part of classroom interaction in student dyads and triads working with a digital device and a paper worksheet. In analyzing instances from a corpus of 18 h of video recordings made in five high-school classrooms through an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, I focus on two embodied practices which do the work of recruiting assistance during the course of inscribing: lifting the pen and lifting the gaze. These practices are viewed as ordinary digressions from the basic posture of the writing body. I demonstrate that lifting the pen as a recruitment practice can be done as a brief stopping of the pen in its movement, as wrist rotation, or as hand elevation. Lifting the gaze can have varying temporal properties and occur synchronously with hand-on-face gestures. I conclude that collaborative writing underlines the indeterminacy of bodily practices as either recruitments, requests or contributions to joint courses of action. I also suggest that the identified practices may be further investigated as components of the specific speech-exchange system inherent to the activity of writing together.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41724128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-04-18DOI: 10.1515/text-2020-0169
Innhwa Park
{"title":"The chair’s use of address terms in workplace meetings","authors":"Innhwa Park","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0169","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This conversation analytic study investigates the chair’s practice of addressing participants in multiparty meeting interaction. Paying close attention to the participants’ verbal and embodied actions, I examine 12 h and 30 min of video-recorded faculty meetings in a U.S. school district. I focus on how the meeting chair uses terms of address (e.g., first name, occupational title) during the meetings. The analyses show that when the chair uses an address term, she not only establishes a recipient, but also invokes and makes her institutional identity relevant as a meeting chair. In particular, the chair uses an address term while carrying out actions such as 1) opening or closing a topic, 2) managing the floor for different speakers, and 3) conducting relational work (e.g., welcoming a new member). The findings show that the address terms facilitate the chair’s actions that promote progressivity – between and within (a) topic(s) in the meeting agenda – and foster social solidarity by displaying affect toward individual participants. This study contributes to research on address terms and their functions, as well as to meeting interaction, particularly with regard to chairing practices.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46472305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Text & TalkPub Date : 2022-04-07DOI: 10.1515/text-2020-0139
Fenghua Chen, Xueyu Wang
{"title":"“Oops! I can’t express this in English!”: managing epistemic challenges by Chinese EFL peer tutors in writing tutorials","authors":"Fenghua Chen, Xueyu Wang","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0139","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study focuses on Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) peer tutors’ discursive behavior to manage epistemic challenges in writing tutorials at a local university in China’s Mainland. Based on approximately 24 h of audio-recorded interactions involving eight tutorial groups over six weeks, we searched different types of epistemic challenges to Chinese EFL peer tutors and explored how they managed them discursively. Our findings, in adopting a CA (Conversational Analysis) approach, show that Chinese EFL peer tutors mainly experience two types of epistemic challenges – the language proficiency-based challenges and the resistance-based challenges. They construct different identities to cope with these challenges – EFL learners, careless but competent tutors, and authoritative and trustworthy experts. These practices are realized through valuable pragma-linguistic devices, including advising and assessing speech acts, deontic modality, self-mocking expressions, imperative and assertive tones, narrative discourse, and smiley voice and laughter. These findings highlight the need for writing center instructors to follow tutor training guides suitable for EFL peer tutors instead of following a universal training recipe.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41860976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}