Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-12-05DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.006
John E. Joseph
{"title":"Schizolinguistics, from Tuczek's Analyse einer Katatonikersprache (1921) to Wolfson's Le Schizo et les langues (1970)","authors":"John E. Joseph","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Attempts to diagnose schizophrenia have been grounded in theories concerning what linguistic deviance reveals about mental function. Tuczek's patient ‘Frau M.’ was institutionalized for using a language which mixed German and French elements. The psychiatrist Goldstein cherry-picked her utterances to support his advocacy of frontal lobotomy. Louis Wolfson was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy for his intolerance of hearing or seeing English, his mother tongue. His book lays out his phonetic and translinguistic strategies for converting English utterances into other languages. The evidence provided by these cases of schizolinguistics are significant for present-day understanding of the psychology and philosophy of language.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"106 ","pages":"Pages 13-29"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145693284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-12-16DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.12.001
Hasan Shaikh
{"title":"Discursive strategies of stigmatization: The case of Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir in news media","authors":"Hasan Shaikh","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.12.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.12.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS) is a major ideological force in Bangladesh, making its media portrayal a constant battleground. Thus, in contested political landscapes, media do more than reporting, they construct, categorize, and cultivate public consciousness. This study claims that political smear campaigns are not merely inadvertent errors of journalism but conscious productions sculpted through subtle discursive strategies. Applying the Discourse-Historical Approach, this paper analyzes how <em>The Daily Star</em> framed ICS from February 2015 to December 2024. As outcomes, the ICS is on constant framing with terms of criminalization and militancy, and it is stripped of political legitimacy. Second, the legacy of 1971 is recycled strategically by assigning collective guilt to contemporary members, on the basis of which previous atrocities can get incorporated as historical exclusions. Third, these framings are replicated in law, educational, and policing institutions, pumping institutionalized discrimination. Fourth, the salience of framing intensifies during political instability, in synchronization with state repression and framing popular assent to coercive action. Finally, the discourse creates an intergenerational stigma that forever excludes Islamist-leaning youth from political participation. These dynamics illustrate that this outlet acts not as a passive informer but as a discursive agent of the state, scripting enemies and narrowing civic space. Therefore, this study challenges our understanding of power dynamics in Bangladesh's illiberal democracy and offers discourse analysis a critical lens for analyzing how ideological threats are managed through media-led erasure.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"106 ","pages":"Pages 40-49"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145798487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-09-25DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.003
Pramod Rathor, Sansuma Brahma
{"title":"Typology of case-marking in Brajbhāshā","authors":"Pramod Rathor, Sansuma Brahma","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study analyses case marking patterns in the Jādobāti variety of Brajbhāshā, an Indo-Aryan language. Ergative marking in Jādobāti depends on perfective aspect and subject prominence. Transitive subjects in perfective aspect take ergative case, while intransitive subjects do so when prominent. Light verb transitivity also affects ergativity. Non-nominative subjects appear with experiencer interpretations, taking dative, instrumental, genitive, or locative case. Differential object marking is driven by animacy, definiteness, specificity, and prominence. In non-perfective aspects, human objects are marked obligatorily if definite, while animate objects are marked optionally. In perfective contexts, object marking reflects prominence. Topic-positioned objects may be marked for economy and interpretation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 120-136"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145159038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-10-16DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.001
Georgios Samaras
{"title":"Mnemonic normalisation in the visual politics of the German far-right","authors":"Georgios Samaras","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Drawing on fieldwork in Munich and Karlsruhe during the February 2025 federal election, this article examines how the Alternative for Germany (AfD) deploys street-level visuals to reshape collective memory and mainstream exclusionary politics. Using visual ethnography and social semiotics, it analyses posters, billboards and handouts in situ, attending to composition, salience, modality and text–image anchorage. The article advances mnemonic normalisation to describe the progressive erosion of the constraining force of Germany's post-war guilt through selective reframing of the past. Across motifs of reclaimed freedom, leadership personification, “free speech”, secure borders and remigration, minimalist design, spatial saturation and dog-whistle cues recalibrate what is publicly sayable. Comparative analysis shows that local reception differed—defacement and counter-messaging were common in Munich, while distribution practices intensified in Karlsruhe—yet the core effect converged: embedding claims about who may speak, belong and remain within everyday urban space. The study demonstrates how the far-right can recast remembrance as an obstacle to national renewal, legitimising exclusion and deportability through ordinary design and repeated public display.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 181-193"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145333207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-11-12DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.004
Nina Markl
{"title":"Defining language and managing its use: Language technology as language management","authors":"Nina Markl","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Language technologies such as voice user interfaces, large language models and machine translation tools are embedded in an ever-growing range of digital devices and services used by millions of people every day in contexts as diverse as schools, homes, hospitals, and offices. In this paper, I argue that the way these technologies are used by and used on language workers and other members of language communities can be understood as a type of <em>language management</em>. As social scientists of technology have long pointed out, all technologies are shaped by and expressive of ideologies. In the case of language technologies, some of these are ideologies about language(s) and their speakers. Rather than simply (or only) functioning as linguistic interfaces facilitating interaction between people, language technologies reinforce linguistic ideologies, and contribute to the ideological construction of particular languages and their communities, as well as more abstract notions of ‘language’ and its value and purpose. They are furthermore often directly deployed to manage language work(ers) through surveillance, and partial automation. Understanding the ways in which language technologies reproduce, mediate and shape linguistic behaviours and beliefs as part of “algorithmic language management” allows us to connect them to both the broader sociotechnical and political project of artificial intelligence, and the scholarship on language policy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 245-258"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145525374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-10-09DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.011
Katariina Harjunpää , Beatrice Szczepek Reed
{"title":"Investigating sound patterns in interspecies interaction","authors":"Katariina Harjunpää , Beatrice Szczepek Reed","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The humanities and social sciences are currently experiencing an “animal turn”, where new research perspectives on communicative resources have begun to flourish, and where new theoretical insights have helped language research situate itself in broader more-than-human debates. In this growing field, perspectives are being developed on the role of language for the way organisms are intertwined with their environments. This Special Issue focuses on vocal communication specifically. Vocal conduct in human-animal interactions is still under-explored, despite it being one of the core modalities for the joint enactment of the human-nonhuman relationship. The contributions to this Special Issue grasp the opportunity for a renewed and rigorous exploration of sound-based interaction between humans and animals, including the diversity of auditory resources used. In this introduction, we trace the research leading up to this point and provide an overview of individual contributions to the Special Issue.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 153-160"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-09-17DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.004
Song Hee Park
{"title":"Achieving activity transitions in dental consultations: Managing interprofessional collaboration and patient cooperation during the transition to dental examination","authors":"Song Hee Park","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study uses conversation analysis to examine how dentists, nurses, and patients collaboratively accomplish the transition into dental examination. Using video-recorded consultations from a dental clinic in Korea, this study shows that transitions are accomplished either through verbal announcements or tacitly, without them. In transitions involving announcements, dental professionals announce their exam-relevant actions, which elicit the nurse's assistance or the patient's cooperation. Tacit transitions rely primarily on participants' monitoring of one another's embodied actions and use of instruments, without announcements. In both types of transition, participants follow routine steps by drawing on procedural knowledge while managing contingencies through multimodal resources. This study advances our understanding of the triadic nature of dental consultations, multimodal social interaction, and inter-professional collaboration in healthcare.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 52-67"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145106507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-10-17DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.012
LaReina Hingson, Lillian Malay
{"title":"“And I know that’s not how ‘tm’ works; but in podcasting, it does”: The trademark sign ‘tm’ and mark identification in spotify speech","authors":"LaReina Hingson, Lillian Malay","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Legal language is judiciously protected by the legal community, yet when those same terms are publicly available for use, language change affects the use and meaning of those same terms. In the case of trademarks, those marks can ‘go generic’ and lose their legal efficacy. Here, we examine the use of the trademark sign, TM, for its use in spoken discourse. We find that the highly productive nature of speech allows several linguistic changes to occur, including noun-to-verb conversion, novel negation, and repetition of the mark and sign. These changes, rather than straining the legal intent of the sign, retain the core meaning association with trademark law--those of ownership, branding, and legitimacy. Prosody cues were not determinative of mark identification in isolation but contributed to the overall ability to identify the mark.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 194-208"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145333209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-09-22DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.006
Zihe Wang
{"title":"“Searching on the internet guarantees you a cancer diagnosis”: An analysis of Chinese anxiety forum discourse","authors":"Zihe Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Language and discourse are central to understanding anxiety disorders, yet research on Chinese-language anxiety discourse is scarce, where socio-cultural norms may shape communication. This study analyzes anxiety discourse on a Chinese online forum by employing topic modeling, topic's text contribution analysis, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Ten topics are identified, with “Psychotherapy,” “Health Anxieties and Medical Examinations,” and “Academic-Family Pressures” most prominent. Key findings show that users actively engage in peer support communication by normalizing anxiety and emphasizing psychotherapy. But their health anxieties are intensified by online searches and interactions with doctors. They also show distinct communication needs with family, friends, and teachers. The study highlights how discourse reflects and shapes anxiety experiences, offering insights for patients, healthcare professionals, and the public.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 106-119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145109174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language & CommunicationPub Date : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-09-17DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.005
Ran Liao , Brian Hok-Shing Chan
{"title":"“Graffiti” on protective gear in China's Covidscape: Mediated actions, affective regimes and resemiotization","authors":"Ran Liao , Brian Hok-Shing Chan","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.langcom.2025.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>During the COVID-19 lockdown in China, frontline healthcare workers handwrote their names on protective gear for identification, often accompanied with slogans and images. Based on a dataset of 306 photographs, this research investigates the social actions performed through these “graffiti”, analyzing how they construct affective regimes and resemiotize the protective gear and healthcare workers. Five social actions are identified, namely, boosting public morale and social cohesion, enhancing the health workers’ own morale, envisioning the future, engaging in community celebrations, and, lastly, expressing love and longing. The affective regimes constructed include solidarity, pride and empathy, which mitigate tensions due to the unequal power relationship between healthcare workers and the public. The graffiti transforms the protective gear from a symbol of alienation and power inequality to one affording communication and friendship; it also turns the healthcare workers from symbols of health threats and power to peers and relatable individuals. Specific to the China context, these graffiti prominently reflect collectivist thinking, contrasting with individualized expressions in Covidscape elsewhere or other types of graffiti discourse. Moreover, metaphors of WAR and WINTER are always used to frame the COVID-19 crisis.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"105 ","pages":"Pages 37-51"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145106509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}