7th New Zealand Discourse Conference Massey University, Wellington 3-6 December, 2019
Conference Handbook
Conference Committee
Dr. Tony Fisher, Massey University Dr. Julia De Bres, Massey University Dr. Emily Greenback, Victoria University of Wellington Dr. Shelly Dawson, Victoria University of Wellington Dr. Jesse Pirini, Victoria University of Wellington
About the NZ Discourse Conference
The New Zealand Discourse Conference was initiated by Professor Allan bell and Dr Philippa Smith at the Auckland University of technology in 2007. Over the next decade the conference was hosted by AUT every two years, where it quickly grew in popularity becoming a major event in the international linguistics calendar. In 2017, it was decided that the conference would no longer be tied to a single institution, but would instead be hosted at a different NZ university every two years. Massey in Wellington has the privilege of being the first university after AUT to host the NZ discourse conference.
The conference boasts an impressive array of past plenary speakers, including Margaret Wetherell, Alison Lee (2007), and Alan Bell (2007, 2013), Sigrid Norris (2007, 2017), Rick Iedema, Cynthia Hardey and David Grant (2009), Teun van Dijk and Monica Heller (2011), Cindy Gallios and Adam Jaworsky (2013), Ruth Wodak, Bob Hodge and Donal Matheson (2015), Michael Bamberg, David Barton and Theo van Leeuwen (2017). In 2019 we are delighted to host plenary talks by Paul Baker, Brian W. King and Janet Holmes – all of whom address the conference for the first time.
In 2021, the New Zealand Discourse Conference continues its journey south to be hosted by Canterbury University in Christchurch.
Overview Tuesday 3rd December Time Location Event 1330 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Registration 1430 See programme Workshops 1700 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Drinks Reception
Wednesday 4th December Time Location Event 0830 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Registration 0900 Conference opens: welcome and introductions 0930 Room1 Plenary Talk: Paul Baker. Using corpus approaches to examine health communication 1030 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Morning tea 1100 See programme parallel conference talks 1230 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Lunch 1330 See programme Parallel conference talks 1500 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Afternoon tea 1530 see programme Parallel conference talks
Thursday 5th December Time Location Event 0930 See programme Parallel conference talks 1100 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Morning tea 1130 Room 1 Plenary Talk: Brian W. King. Lacunas and Vistas: Sexuality, Sex and Gender in New Zealand Discourse Research 1230 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Lunch 1330 Trip: Te Papa and Wellington waterfront 1900 The Hop garden Conference Dinner 131 Pirie Street, Mount Victoria
Friday 6th December Time Location Event 0900 See programme Parallel conference talks 1030 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Morning tea 1100 See programme Parallel conference talks 1230 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Lunch 1330 Room 1 Plenary Talk: Janet Holmes. Contesting the culture order in New Zealand workplaces 1430 Room 1 Close
Plenary Speakers
Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington.
Keynote: Contesting the culture order in New Zealand workplaces
In New Zealand, Pākehā (European) ways of doing things (the New Zealand culture order) are the norm, taken-for-granted and rarely questioned or even noted unless someone “breaks the rules”. For minority group members, however, including the indigenous Māori people, Pākehā norms are ever-present reminders of their non-dominant position. In the Māori workplace contexts that we have researched, awareness of these norms is particularly apparent and often attracts explicit comment. This paper explores the insights that such comments provide about the attitudes of some Māori employees to the hegemonic influence of Pākehā in workplace interaction, as well as some indications of seeds of change.
Workshop: Unconscious Bias in Workplace Discourse
This workshop will give participants the opportunity to examine a range of excerpts of workplace talk and website written material for unconscious bias. Members of the Language in the Workplace Project team will be contributing to the discussion groups. Participants are welcome to bring along an excerpt of their own for discussion if they wish.
Brian W. King, University of Hong Kong
Keynote: Lacunas and Vistas: Sexuality, Sex and Gender in New Zealand Discourse Research
For a number of years now, I have been analysing discourse in New Zealand at the macro, meso and micro levels, querying what discourse analysis might reveal about sexuality, sex, and gender, particularly at the potential rupturing points of binaries (i.e. female/male, woman/man, masculine/feminine, straight/gay). Queer Linguistics has been the primary field informing these efforts, aligning with this field’s aim to use a discourse analytical ‘zoom lens’ while exploring the normative authority and institutional practices associated with sexuality. I have also embraced its aim of ‘picking at the knots’ of tensions between global vs. local voices that might be expressing such normative authority in everyday life. While undertaking various projects it has become obvious to me that there are several very broad lacunas in New Zealand discourse research on sexuality, sex, and gender, but these omissions reveal vistas of timely research that can now be undertaken, without delay, across the numerous analytical traditions represented at this conference.
Using data collected in different field sites (i.e. formal sexuality education classrooms, informal sexuality education gatherings, and activist discussion groups), and drawing on my published analyses of conversational data, I will outline four main topics for which a great deal of further attention is overdue. These are (a) heteronormativity at the intersection of sexuality, gender and ethnicity, (b) Hip Hop Nation Language in multiple spheres of use, (c) sexual embodiment and discourse, and (d) communicating sex variation. By exploring the actions of research participants in New Zealand, and their enactment of norms across a wide range of social settings, researchers working in Discourse Studies in its broadest definition stand to make a lasting contribution through
our immanent and socio-diagnostic critiques. Finally, the proposed research has the potential to produce implications that cut to the core of some of the most burning current human rights issues of our times, with potential impact from local communities to the United Nations.
Workshop: Finding Ideologies in Talk about Talk
This workshop will focus on analysis of data in order to explore metalanguage, or metapragmatic discourse (i.e. talk about talk) for evidence of language ideologies and more. Novices and more experienced analysts will be encouraged to work together on analysis. Excerpts from research interviews will be provided, but should participants have relevant data of their own, they are encouraged to bring it.
Paul Baker, Lancaster University
Keynote: Using corpus approaches to examine health communication
Corpus approaches have been applied to research in such diverse fields as anthropology (Nolte et al., 2018), geography (Gregory et al., 2015), history (McEnery and Baker, 2016), literature (Biber, 2011) and translation studies (Laviosa, 2002), although have not been embraced as readily by scholars working in health communication. Cortes (2015: 51) suggests that this relates to ethical and practical concerns in building large spoken corpora, although not all forms of health communication involve speech. This talk describes work carried out at the CASS (Corpus Approaches to Social Science) research centre at Lancaster University, detailing two case studies around health communication which have gainfully employed corpus techniques like collocation and keywords to examine evaluation and argumentation.
The first examines 29 million words of patient feedback posted online about the National Health Service (England) and describes how a corpus approach was able to answer questions set by members of the NHS Insight team, as well as provide answers to questions that emerged in a more organic way (Baker et al 2019). The study was able to identify what patients actually meant when they ranked their experience on a scale of 1-5, and why certain types of staff consistently received extremely good or bad feedback.
The second case study involves an examination of 36 million words of British newspaper articles that refer to obesity, focussing on how obese people are represented and the different ways that the press attempt to account for rising rates of obesity. The talk also considers some of the practical issues around using corpus approaches to engage in research impact.
References
Baker, P., Brookes, G. and Evans, C. (2019) The Language of Patient Feedback: A corpus linguistic study of online health communication. London: Routledge.
Biber, D. (2011) Corpus linguistics and the study of literature: Back to the future? Scientific Study of Literature 1(1): 15-23.
Cortes, V. (2015) Using corpus-based analytical methods to study patient talk. Inn M. Anton and E. Goering (eds). Understanding Patients’ Voices. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 51-70.
Gregory I., Cooper D., Hardie A., and Rayson P. (2015). “Spatializing and analysing digital texts: Corpora, GIS and places” in Bodenhamer D., Corrigan J. and Harris T. (eds.) Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, pp. 150-178.
Laviosa, S. (2002) Corpus-based translation studies: Theory, findings, applications. New York: Rodopi.
McEnery, A. M. and Baker, H. (2016) Corpus Linguistics and 17th century prostitution: computational linguistics and history. London: Bloomsbury.
Nolte, I. (2018) Inter-religious relations in Yorubaland, Nigeria: corpus methods and anthropological survey data. Corpora 13(1): 27-64.
Workshop: Using Corpus Linguistics to investigate representations and variation.
This workshop aims to show participants how to use corpus linguistics methods in order to identify representations and speaker variation. Participants need to bring an internet-enabled laptop (not smartphone) with them. In the first half of the session we will use the British National Corpus in order to explore representations of refugees through the use of collocation and concordancing. The second half involves the spoken section of the 2014 BNC in order to investigate language variation through comparisons of speaker gender, age and social class.
Abstracts
Hasan Alalamay
Politeness in Arabic context: An Observational Analysis of Social Interaction between Hosts, Guests, and Audiences in TV Shows
The current study investigated greetings and responses in the context of Saudi Arabian television shows. The uniqueness of the study lies not in the status of the participants but in the interaction between the hosts, guests and audience, and the level of formality with which they approached the communicative act. Through observations and transcription, the researcher employed a descriptive and analytical approach based on the frequency of occurrence method used by Behnam and Amizadeh (2011). The primary aim was to determine the significance of reiterated formulaic greetings and responses. Due to the difficulty of accounting for telephone callers, the observational method focused mostly on verbal utterances when exploring compliments and politeness.
The guests on the television shows were senior and respected religious scholars. The religious and cultural etiquettes of Saudi Arabia provided the participants, hosts, and guests with a wide range of greetings and responses to use to meet their face needs. The Brown and Levinson Theory (1987) was then tested with reference to positive face needs. Negative face needs were less evident in the data. Arab Muslims in general tend to be very courteous and polite to their religious scholars. The major findings of this study show that Saudi Arabians are particularly formal and traditional in their choice of language and greetings when interacting with their religious scholars, albeit to varying degrees. As in politics, the more eminent a religious scholar is in his community the more careful his interlocutors are with their language and social interactions.
The data collected for this study consisted of transcribed linguistic utterances comprising greetings and responses from the parties involved in the conversation. These parties were the hosts, guests and the audience (callers). The data was classified under the following headings: Introduction, Formulaic Greetings, Less Formal Greetings, Formal Responses to Greetings, and Less Formal Responses to Greetings. Each of these coded headings was then classified according to its frequency during the interaction. For the purposes of this study, the category ‘Introduction’ includes the callers’ introduction to their question or topic. Although the focus of the analysis was on greetings, the researcher considered it appropriate to include introductions as they are conducted within similarly formulaic parameters, albeit without the traditional or religious content of greetings.
References
Allami, H. & Nekouzadeh, M. (2011). Congratulation and positive politeness strategies in Iranian context. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 1(11), 1607-1613. Behnam, B., & Amizadeh, N. (2011). A comparative study of the compliments and compliment responses between English and Persian TV interviews. The South East Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 17(1), 65-78.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emery, P.G. (2000). Greeting, congratulating and commiserating in Omani Arabic. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 13(2),198-217. Holmes, J. (2013). Women, men and politeness. Routledge.
Ilkka Arminen
Power in the management meetings
Decisions concerning future courses of action related to the organization and the persons involved are done in management meetings (Aggerholm & Asmuss 2016; Holmes et al. 2007). Conversation analysts have mainly remained extremely cautious about making any claims concerning the exercise of power given the risk of reifying the analysis from observable details of interaction to a priori interpretations of the work of power structures (Raclaw & Ford 2015). We aim at addressing power in interaction in the management meetings by focusing on the deviations from canonical meeting sequences, in which the deviating party appears to manoeuvre in a tactical or strategic way to influence the ongoing decision-making process. Our data was collected in 2009-2010 as part of a research project on the domestication of university and public research organization (PRO) reforms in Finland. We gained access to videotaped meetings of a university executive board and two PRO executive teams. We investigate multimodal meeting activities, applying the principles of ethnomethodology (EM), multimodal conversation analysis (CA) and ethnography. Through multimodal conversation analysis, we explore the emergence of social actions through participants’ oriented-to achievement of the use of multiple semiotic resources (Arminen 2017). Drawing on a combination of methods, we are committed to the detailed study of social practices, through which meeting interaction is carried out. Through the analysis of involvement in decision-making, we address power as a consequential aspect of the ongoing courses of interaction (Hutchby 1996).
References Aggerholm, H. K., & Asmuß, B. (2016). A practice perspective on strategic communication: The discursive legitimization of managerial decisions. Journal of Communication Management, 20(3), 195-214. Arminen, I. (2017). Institutional interaction: Studies of talk at work. Routledge. Holmes, J., Schnurr, S. & Marra, M. (2007). Leadership and communication: discursive evidence of a workplace culture change. Discourse and communication, 1 (4), 433 – 451. Hutchby, I. (1996) Power in discourse: the case of arguments on a British talk radio show. Discourse & Society, Vol. 7(4), 481-487. Raclaw, J., & Ford, C. E. (2015). Meetings as Interactional Achievements. In The Cambridge handbook of meeting science. Cambridge University Press.
Robert Bianchi
Let us make him in our image: discursive constructions of “God” and “Lord” in the Abrahamic Religions
The words “God” and “Lord” are conventionally considered to refer to the same divine being in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and more recently, the Baha'i Faith. This paper calls into question this assumption. Coupling corpus linguistics (CL) with discourse analysis (DA) (McEnery & Baker, 2015), this paper contrasts five iconic scriptural texts in the Abrahamic tradition in terms of their specific references to “God” and “Lord,” and related deictic pronouns. The texts for analysis are the Books of Genesis and Luke in the King James Bible (Oosting, 2016), the Surah of Al-Baqara (the Cow) in Yousef Ali's translation of the Qur’an (Al Ghamdi, 2015), the Book of Alma in the Book of Mormon, and Baha’u’llah's Most Holy Book aka the Kitab-i-Aqdas. Methodologically, the research takes a synoptic comparative approach, using AntConc and WordSmith corpus software to identify all instances of the words “God,”“Lord” and related pronouns such as “He/Him/His,” “We/Us/Our,” “I/Me/My” within these texts, followed by concordance, cluster, and collocational analyses in order to identify salient similarities and differences between these texts. Next, the analysis delineates the contrasting “figured worlds” (see Gee, 2010) created in each of these texts, which result from differences in their respective discursive constructions of divinity . The paper concludes with a discussion of potential reasons for these differences in terms of strategic intertextuality (cf. Pregill, 2007).
References
Al Ghamdi, S. A. (2015). Critical and Comparative Evaluation of the English Translations of the Near- Synonymous Divine Names in the Quran. University of Leeds, Gee, J. P. (2010). How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit: Routledge. McEnery, A., & Baker, P. (2015). Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating discourse and corpora: Springer. Oosting, R. (2016). 11 Computer-Assisted Analysis of Old Testament Texts: The Contribution of the wivu to Old Testament Scholarship. In The Present State of Old Testament Studies in the Low Countries (pp. 192- 209): Brill. Pregill, M. E. (2007). The Hebrew Bible and the Quran: the problem of the Jewish ‘influence’on Islam. Religion Compass, 1(6), 643-659.
Cedar Brown
They Identify Themself: Language Practices Around Nonbinary Pronouns
Despite growing awareness and use of nonbinary pronouns such as singular they, there currently exists little analysis of this pronoun usage and associated practices within linguistics. These practices, emergent from trans activism, encourage people to share the pronouns they wish others to use when referring to them.
This study focuses specifically on a practice of giving pronouns in introduction circles at events. It is comprised of field research done between September 2018 and March 2019 in Washington D.C., USA, and Melbourne, Australia. It analyses (1) events that begin with pronoun introduction rounds; (2) narratives about and metacommentary on these events; and (3) the way narrative and metacommentary are employed in interview settings in stance taking and identity construction. It follows from previous research with trans speakers which has shown speakers able to construct nonbinary and nonnormative gender identities through employing linguistic and semiotic resources, such as grammatical gender systems (Bershtling, 2014), the voice (Zimman, 2017), and gender categories (Corwin, 2017). It discusses how within pronoun circles, contradictory ideologies and behaviours emerge regarding linguistic agency, validation, and safety. While this practice can act as a resource for trans people to discursively construct a nonnormative gender identity, it can also put pressure on them to misgender or out themselves, with an explicit assertion of gendered pronouns at times undermining the nuanced and moment-to-moment control people have over gendered performance and identity.
This study adds to emergent work with nonbinary people, challenging assumptions of binary gender that are pervasive in sociolinguistics as well as in society more generally. Additionally, it complicates prominent discourses from socially progressive spaces about the ubiquitous virtue of pronoun rounds, by giving voice to complex and nuanced perspectives.
References
Bershtling, O. (2014). “Speech Creates a Kind of Commitment”: Queering Hebrew. In Queer Excursions. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937295.003.0003 Corwin, A. I. (2017). Emerging genders: semiotic agency and the performance of gender among genderqueer individuals. Gender & Language, 11(2), 255–277. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.27552 Zimman, L. (2017). Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s/. Language in Society, 46(03), 339–370. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000070
Ian Bruce
Influencing Education in New Zealand through Business Think Tank Advocacy: Creating Discourses of Deficit
Think tanks funded by business organizations often aim to influence the public policy, laws and institutions of a society in ways favourable to commercial organisations by using various types of media communication. This paper reports a critical discourse analysis of public communications of The New Zealand Initiative (NZI), a business-funded think tank whose ideological orientation may be described as neoliberal, and whose publicly declared aims are to influence public policy and the outcome of the 2020 national election. Specifically the study examines NZI publications that report so-called ‘research’ and advocate change to education, one of six policy areas addressed by this organization. The purpose of the study was twofold: to identify the textual and discursive means used to undertake this advocacy, and to uncover the types of ideologically-driven change being promoted.
Employing a critical discourse approach, this study undertook a genre analysis of 12 published reports of the NZI disseminated from 2014 to 2019, each of which advocates change to some aspect of the New Zealand education system. Drawing upon Bhatia’s (2010, 2016) theory of interdiscursivity and framed by the genre model of Bruce (2008), the study involved a manual analysis of the 12 reports on issues relating to education. The genre analysis found case-building through ostensibly reporting ‘research’ via a hybrid genre that displayed elements of academic research reports, business cases and opinion journalism and included extensive use of lower-level features characteristic of argumentation, such as certain types of coherence relation and metadiscourse device. The thematic findings of the study relating to neoliberal change advocacy argue for education as a service: linked to national economic productivity, organised around managerialism, requiring hierarchical layers of management, employing a teacher knowledge base centred on technique (for the delivery of commodified instruction) and based on marketization – consumer choice-driven provision. This study illustrates the perennial need for scrutiny of the discursive use (and manipulation) of language by powerful advocacy groups attempting to influence, to their advantage, the ethos and functions of public institutions.
References
Bhatia, V. K. (2010). Interdiscursivity in professional communication. Discourse & Communication,4(1), 32-50. Bhatia, V. K. (2016). Critical genre analysis: Investigating interdiscursive performance in professional practice. Routledge. Bruce, I. (2008). Academic writing and genre: A systematic analysis. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ciara Chester Cronin
Public interpretations of the New Zealand Government’s 2019 Wellbeing Budget through social media chains of discourse
The extent to which the public understands political policy is crucial to a well-informed democracy. Yet, as all forms of modern media streamline the flow of information, scholarly discussion that tracks public policy and political discourse remains concerningly scarce, particularly from the policy’s recipient’s level (Soroka & Wlezien, 2018). This paper therefore investigates the communication, interpretation and understanding of the New Zealand Government’s 2019 Wellbeing Budget, a policy that has been touted as offering a “more rounded measure of success” (New Zealand Government, 2019). The research conducts a multimodal investigation into policy-based discourse, comparing the policy itself against discourse from politicians, media and Twitter users, all responding to the Budget to understand how interpretation of the policy shifts throughout the chain of communication. Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995) provides the framework for inquiry while Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978, 1994) provides insight into the corpora collected. By exploring the corpora’s linguistic and textual cues, the research is able to identify and analyse sub-topics of discussion from Twitter users and compare such findings against analysis from the alternate sources of discourse. This process of investigation, albeit linguistically-based, allows the research to remain entirely apolitical whilst tracking and deciphering the policy’s transference. The goal is to find out which source of corpora the social media data bares greater similarity to, in order to reveal whether the policy’s objectives filtered down the hierarchical chain of communication as is required in a well-functioning democracy.
References
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold. New Zealand Government. (2019). Budget Policy Statement. New Zealand: Wellington. Retrieved from https://treasury.govt.nz/publications/budget-policy-statement/budget-policy-statement-2019 Soroka, S & Wlezien, C. (2010). Degrees of Democracy. Politics, Public Opinion and Policy, 75(1), 192-195.
Johan Christensson
‘I’m a teacher and you’re my pupils’: Interactional role shift as communicative project in student teachers’ oral presentations
Swedish student teachers are expected to cope with several different institutional and professional practices when moving through the academic landscape, hence, they have to learn to navigate rather complex and hybrid activity types in the process of identifying with their future profession as teachers. Considering this, the present study is interested in how student teachers shift between institutional and professional roles during oral presentations in the beginning of their teacher education. More specifically, focus is directed on the interactional phenomenon of role shift, which theoretically is conceptualised as a communicative project (Linell 2010) in this study, thus highlighting the dialogical nature between the actions produced by the presenting student teachers and other social actors. The general aim is to shed light on how student teachers perform role shifts between the role of student teacher and the role of teacher, in the academic institutional setting of a rhetoric class.
The main body of data consists of 21 video recorded oral presentations of student teachers taking part in a rhetoric class. Furthermore, observational field notes and instructional texts used by the students is part of the data. Prior to the presentations, student teachers have the opportunity to engage in role-play by performing their presentations in the role of teacher, and the analytical focus is directed on the expected role shift between student teacher and teacher occurring when the student teachers start their presentation. The method for analysis is Linell’s (2010) CAT analysis, combined with relevant concepts from Mediated discourse analysis (Scollon 2001).
The results show that role shift seems to be a process consisting of several chained higher-level actions (Norris 2011), and the actual chaining of these actions is facilitated by the use of different multimodal contextualisation cues. The affordances and constraints of the institutional framing in which the student teachers are performing their presentations is mainly visible through resemiotisations (Scollon & Scollon 2004) of instructional texts. Consequently, these texts become important actors that are involved in the student teachers role shift process.
References
Linell, P. (2010). Communicative activity types as organisations in discourse and discourses in organisations. In: Tanskanen, S.-K., Helasvuo, M.-L., Johansson, M., Raitaniemi, M. (Eds.), Discourses in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company Norris, S. (2011). Identity in (Inter)action. Introducing Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated Discourse. The nexus of practice. New York: Routledge. Scollon, R. & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus Analysis. Discourse and the Emerging Internet. New York: Routledge.
Shannon Couper
Building the body as a site of pleasure: Contributions from embodied sociolinguistics
In the ongoing combat against entrenched rape culture, sociolinguistic investigations of the language of consent are more necessary than ever. Communicating and recognising a ‘no’ also requires the ability to do the same for an enthusiastic “YES”. Affirmative consent advocates for a culture that values genuine female sexual pleasure. This focus is potentially more destabilizing and contestive than focusing on sexual violation because it directly challenges hetero-patriarchal culture’s hostility toward women’s agency (Bakare-Yusuf 2013: 36). There is no inevitability to the sexual danger script when we channel the political power of pleasure.
In this paper I argue that the lens of embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz & Hall 2016, King 2016) offers insight into the discursive construction of sexual embodiment (Jackson & Scott 2007) and gendered subjectivity. Sexual experiential embodiment entails reflexively constructed understandings of sexual pleasure and desire through attention to discursive bodies (Coupland & Gwyn 2003). Employing intersectionality allows for the queering of normative sexual practices and disrupts normative gender discourses by centering agentive feminist voices. I focus on conversations in intimate female friendships that serve as identity construction sites, characterised by agency and interdependent self-authorship. This data is particularly rich given the challenges of navigating various discourses in the pursuit of self-definition. I will show how centering young women’s intersectional voices in an embodied sociolinguistic approach can afford a contribution to empowering sexual scripts. I demonstrate the value in harnessing the linguistic negotiation of pleasure as politically powerful.
References Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi 2013. Thinking with pleasure. In Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall and Kate Hawkins (eds) Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure. London & New York: Zed Books. 28–41. Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall 2016. Embodied sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates. UC Santa Barbara: 172-197. Coupland, Justine and Richard Gwyn 2003. Discourse, the Body, and Identity. United States, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, Stevi, and Sue Scott 2007. Faking like a woman? Towards an interpretive theorization of sexual pleasure. Body & Society 13(2): 95-116. King, Brian 2016. Becoming the intelligible other: Speaking intersex bodies against the grain. Critical Discourse Studies 13(4): 359-378.
Michelle De jong
‘Some people are just inherently lazy’: Discourses of health, moralism and identity among 20 young South African adults.
Lebesco (2011) warns against constructing the pursuit of good health as a moral initiative, arguing that ‘health also becomes a sharp political stick with which much harm is ultimately done’ (p.78). This paper aims to explore moralised constructions of health and how these discourses function both in relation to identity constitution and to a broader reproduction of a neoliberal status quo. This paper is based on a qualitative research project which explored the ways in which a small group (20) of young South African adults constructed health and identity. This study was grounded in a social constructionist theoretical framework. Data was collected using in-depth, semi- structured interviews and was analysed using Carla Willig’s (2008) method of Foucauldian discourse analysis. The discourses employed by participants to express their understandings and experiences of health were often underpinned by a strong sense of moralism. Health and illness were constructed in relation to a biblically influenced disapproval of gluttony and sloth, a neoliberal preference for self-sufficiency and autonomy, and the stigmatising of dependency. Despite the strong moralism surrounding health, biomedical and mathematical languages were used to situate discourses of health outside of the moral context. For example, discussions of weight, BMI, waist circumference and blood pressure and cholesterol measures were all used to discuss and define whether or not someone is healthy. This 'biomedical-gloss' (Ritenbaugh 1982) both legitimated and obscured some of the power dynamics and regulatory functions of discourses of health. This paper will unpack the ways in which these discourses are used to constitute ‘acceptable’ identities and the links between class, morality and health. We present the argument these constructions of what it means to be a ‘good, healthy citizen’ make feeling secure or confident within oneself especially challenging and have the potential to revictimise those who have already been victimised, thereby compounding their suffering.
References
Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). The wellness syndrome. Cambridge: Polity.
Lebesco, K. (2011). Neoliberalism, public health, and the moral perils of fatness. Critical Public Health, 21(2), 153– 164.
Skrabanek, P. (1994). The death of humane medicine and the rise of coercive healthism. Suffolk: Social Affairs Unit.
Valentine, G., & Harris, C. (2014). Strivers vs skivers: Class prejudice and the demonisation of dependency in everyday life. Geoforum, 53, 84–92.
Willig, C. (2008). Introducing qualitative research in psychology: adventures in theory and method (2nd ed.). Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.
Angela Desmarais “Knitting is Manly as Fuck”: Online Discourses about Men who Knit.
While knitting is commonly seen as a ‘feminine’ craft, a great number of men have taken up this practice in recent times in spite of the negative connotations. These men who knit integrate their identity as knitters with that of being men, resulting in alternative masculinities that often fall back on features of hegemonic masculinity (Kelly, 2014).
The ways in which people talk about and position themselves in their discourse provides opportunities to analyse how their identities are constructed (Bamberg, 2004). This study examines online discourse surrounding men who knit in order to explore the ways in which they perform their identities and genders online. The study also looks at the ways in which men who knit are perceived by other knitters both online and in real life while resisting a master narrative of gender stereotyping.
Data was sourced from Reddit’s r/knitting community through searching for key words such as man, men, male(s), guy(s), dude(s), and manly. In total, 42 threads containing 1312 comments were chosen for analysis, which was guided by Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional approach to critical discourse analysis in order to not only describe the text itself but also interpret and examine the comments' social and cultural context.
The preliminary results of this research revealed themes such as the comparison between experiences of men who knit and those of women who work in technology, declarations of the sexual attractiveness of men who knit to resist assumptions of femininity, education of the knitting community in the origins of knitting and its male- dominated past, and performance of hypermasculinity through humour - suggesting that the pre-existing sociocultural master narratives that impact on the performance of identity and gender are being challenged by the r/knitting community.
References Bamberg, M. (2004). We are young, responsible, and male. Human Development, 47(6), 331-53. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change (Vol. 10). Cambridge: Polity press. Kelly, M. (2014). Knitting as a feminist project? Women's Studies International Forum 44, 133-144.
Susan Ehrlich
Indexing African-American Masculinity in Trial Discourse
In the aftermath of the 2013 trial in which George Zimmerman, a white man, was prosecuted for, and subsequently acquitted of, the murder of Trayvon Martin, an African American man, Rickford and King (2016: 949) argue that it was African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that was ‘on trial’ in this case, and that linguists must assume some responsibility for ‘dispelling fictions and prejudices against vernacular speech.’ In this paper, I am also interested in the social evaluation of AAVE in a U.S. courtroom; however, my argument is that a focus on ‘language and linguistics’ may not go far enough in investigations of linguistic differentiation and social hierarchies.
This paper considers intertextual practices in an American rape trial, Maouloud Baby v. the State of Maryland, a trial in which both the accused and the complainant were African American. The prosecuting lawyer spent a considerable amount of the cross-examination of the accused engaged in an intertextual exercise—he quoted extensively from a written transcript of the accused’s police interrogation, animating the accused’s utterances from the interrogation, many of which contained linguistic features of AAVE. Indeed, a significant part of the prosecutor’s efforts to undermine the credibility of the accused involved the lawyer drawing attention to, and discursively foregrounding, the accused’s use of AAVE. However, the complainant in this case was also a speaker of AAVE (and used many of the same features as the accused), raising the question of how her use of AAVE may have been insulated from the discriminatory discursive work of the prosecuting lawyer. I suggest that an approach to non-standard varieties which investigates how social meanings, and, specifically, ‘figures of personhood’ (Agha 2005: 39) come to be linked to a set of linguistic features is better able to explain these data. That is, to understand the prosecution’s strategic invocation of AAVE in this trial is to understand the social meanings of AAVE and its indexical connections to a particular stereotypical understanding of African American masculinity (e.g., violent, hypersexual, criminal) which is particularly prejudicial to an accused in the context of a rape trial.
References
Agha, A. (2005) ‘Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15: 38-59. Rickford, J. & S. King (2016) ‘Language and Linguistics on Trial.’ Language 92: 948-988.
Ben Fenton-Smith Argumentum ad populum in the discourse of Pauline Hanson
This paper’s focus is the deployment of a time-honoured rhetorical technique in contemporary populist discourse: the argumentum ad populum (Corbett & Connors, 1999; Heinrichs, 2007). Variously known as the “argument to the people”, the “appeal to the majority/masses”, the “consensus fallacy” and the “appeal to common belief”, it is a persuasive technique that naturally befits populist and nationalist discourses that have a primary aim of mobilising “the people” behind an idea, ideology, decision or action. The paper commences with an accessible definition of the argumentum ad populum and describes its place within the rhetorical tradition. The paper then focusses on the use of such arguments by the Australian far right leader Pauline Hanson, who currently sits in the Federal Parliament as the leader of Australia’s main ultra-conservative One Nation Party. The data set consists of an archive of Hanson’s key political speeches over a twenty-year period. It will be argued that some of Hanson’s popular appeals are based on a peculiarly Australian worldview, informed by that country’s complex relationship to its European (British) past and multicultural present, as well as the ‘othering’ of Aboriginal Australians, Asian Australians, and Islamic Australians.
References Corbett, E., & Connors, R. (1999). Classical rhetoric for the modern student. New York: Oxford University Press.
Heinrichs, J. (2007). Thank you for arguing. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Vicki Forbes
The problematisation of “safety” in residential aged care in New Zealand
In 2001, the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act was enacted with its overall aim to “provide a legislative basis for a more effective safety regime for hospitals, rest homes, and homes for people with disabilities” (Te Heuheu, 1998, p. 14395). Since its inception, concerns about safety in residential aged care (RAC) facilities continue, resulting in a performance audit by the Auditor-General in 2009 to review the effectiveness of the auditing process in evaluating rest homes against the mandated standards (Provost, 2009). However, complaints about safety in RAC facilities remain and in 2018 the Associate Minister of Health commented further review of the Standards and auditing process was in progress (Dreaver, 2018).
Using Carol Bacchi’s framework “What’s the problem represented to be?” (Bacchi, 2009, 2015), this paper aims to examine how “safety” in RAC facilities has been constituted and measured by governing bodies through an interrogation of the discourse associated with “safety” in RAC facilities. Texts used will be Hansards, the Act and its associated Standards, reviews, reports, and complaints. Furthermore, presuppositions as to which form of “safety” has been created will be uncovered and the implications of this on the process of governing RAC facilities and for the older persons and RAC facility workers who are governed. In concluding the paper presents how discourses about safety are constituted through debates about staffing levels, funding and unregulated workers in the aged care system.
References
Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What's the problem represented to be? NSW, Australia: Pearson Australia. Bacchi, C. (2015). Problematizations in alcohol policy: WHO's "Alcohol Problems". Contemporary Drug Problems, 42(2), 130-147. doi:10.1177/0091450915576116 Dreaver, C. (2018). Rest home industry 'understaffed, under-trained and often appalling'. RNZ. Retrieved from https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/365008/rest-home-industry-understaffed-under-trained-and- often-appalling Provost, L. (2009). Effectiveness of arrangements to check the standard of services provided by rest homes. Retrieved from Wellington: Te Heuheu, G. (1998). Health and Disability Services (Safety) Bill: Second Reading. New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 321, 14395-14409.
Sami Hamdi
Ideological Discourse Position toward Foreign Concepts in Arabic
Communication and interaction between languages and cultures are likely to result in the transfer of new concepts (also known as lexical borrowing) thought to be motivated mainly by lexical need or prestige and, in both cases, the resulting meanings in the recipient language are similar if not identical to the ones in the source language. However, some concepts/words develop different meanings in real language use influenced by language users’ ideological stance. The present study approached the different ideologically loaded connotations of foreign concepts as more language users’ task emphasizing their role in meaning construction. Three English foreign concepts in Arabic (agenda, liberal, lobby) were studied in naturally occurring language where some of their meanings fall under the domain of sociopolitics which is a fertile site to express ideological attitude. Data were collected from corpora using corpus linguistics methods to generate statistically significant co-occurrence patterns between foreign concepts as key words and collocations. Van Dijk’s (2014, 2016b, 2016a) sociocognitive approach to CDA was used subsequently as an analytical framework to investigate the ideological embeddings of foreign concepts as they relate to collocates at the discourse level. The findings showed that foreign concepts in Arabic were characterized by negative associations and motivated by religious, political and linguistic ideological stances often implied in the connotations of real language use. Two major themes of these ideologies were the relationship with the West and local sociopolitics among Arabs as individuals and homogenous groups. Ideological influence was also reproduced in Arabic dictionaries where some foreign words or their meanings were absent or excluded though used in formal settings. The connection between dictionary making and learning as influenced by dominant ideology was also explored.
References Van Dijk, T. A. (2014). Discourse-Cognition-Society: Current State and Prospects of the Socio-Cognitive Approach to Discourse. In Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap (Ed.), Contemporary Studies in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 121–146).
Van Dijk, T. A. (2016). Sociocognitive discourse studies. In J. Richardson & J. Flowerdew (Eds.), Routledge handbook of discourse analysis. London.
Timothy Hassall
Preference structure of request sequences: What about role-play?
This paper examines the sequential organization of role-played request sequences. It does so by analyzing role- plays of a complex scenario enacted in Indonesian between native speaker dyads and native speaker—L2 learner dyads, using Conversation Analytic techniques. These role-played request sequences often violate a norm for preference structure whereby, in many circumstances, interactants cooperatively treat a request as a dispreferred action (e.g. Schegloff, 2007). The potential requester projects a request by means of preliminary moves and the recipient responds with an offer, obviating the need for an on-record request to be performed. In the present study, the recipient often visibly resisted making offers, thereby steering the interaction towards the performance of an on-record request. On other occasions it was the potential requester who steered the interaction towards the performance of an on-record request, by using strategies (prosodic and syntactic) to ‘hold the floor’ during his or her preliminary moves and thereby prevent the recipient from making a pre-emptive offer.
I argue that those interactants were partly designing their contributions for an external third-party audience: the researcher. Although they were not told that requesting was a focus of the study, they knew that they were providing a sample of language for research purposes, and they regarded an on-record request as a desirable element for that sample to contain. This is consistent with findings by Stokoe (2013). She found that police officers in role-played interviews conducted for purposes of ongoing training performed certain actions more elaborately and explicitly than officers did in real life, thereby designing those actions to be “interactionally visible” to a third-party audience; namely, an assessor (2013: 165). These findings have strong methodological implications for pragmatics research especially. Role-play is greatly favored by researchers of L2 pragmatics as a way to obtain data (Taguchi & Roever, 2017), and is often used by researchers of cross-cultural pragmatics as well (Felix-Brasdefer, 2018). The present study highlights the need for critical, ongoing scrutiny of role-played interactions—including their enactment of preference structure—to reveal precisely in what ways they do and do not resemble natural conversation.
References
Felix Brasdefer, Cesar, 2018. Roleplay. In: Andreas Jucker, Klaus Schneider and Wolfram Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics. Series: Handbooks of Pragmatics, vol. 10. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp. 305- 334. Schegloff, Emanuel, 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversational Analysis, Volume 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Stokoe, Elizabeth, 2013. The (in)authenticity of simulated talk: comparing role-played and actual interaction and the implications for communication training. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 46(2), 165- 185. Taguchi, Naoko, Roever, Carsten, 2017. Second Language Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Maria Herke Pain, Passion and Desire in Student Reflections: An exploration of a student literacy corpus
Our department offers three faculty specific first year Academic Communication courses, covering the broad areas of business and economics, science, and social sciences and the humanities. As convenors of these academic communication courses, we are interested in setting up good practices and development of the students’ ability to communicate in both professional and academic contexts over the course of their degrees. It is these concerns that motivated the development of the Literacy at XX corpus project. Once complete, this corpus will enable us to explore our students’ communication development along a number of dimensions, with the collection beginning as students enter the Academic Communication courses in first year and then continuing as students progress through their degrees. We are confident our explorations will yield many insights which we can apply to the development of teaching resources, ultimately leading to an improved student experience.
We recently introduced reflective writing tasks into the AC courses, primarily as a means of gauging and assessing our students’ attitude to their learning, According to Brick, Wilson, Wong and Herke (2018), one function of a reflective text is a means of expressing “your thoughts and reactions to some aspect of your learning”. Focusing on the reflective texts in our corpus, we will attempt to gain insights into student attitudes by identifying lexicogrammatical realisations of pain, passion and desire.
Extending his corpus exploration of expressions of pain beyond identification of lexical occurrences to grammatical realisations, Halliday (1998) applied a two-pronged approach to his research. Such an approach combines quantitative analysis using a concordancing tool with manual qualitative analysis guided by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The value of this approach is further discussed by Matthiessen (2003) and has been successfully applied in the development of commercial applications (eg Herke-Couchman, 2006). Using SysConc, a concordancing tool developed at Macquarie University (Wu, 2000) that enables identification of systemic feature sets, our research will outline frequencies of expression as well as the lexicogrammatical realisations of the semantic notions of pain, passion and desire in student reflective writing.
References Brick, J., Wilson, N., Wong, D., &. Herke, M. 2018. Academic Success: A student’s guide to studying at university. Macmillan, UK. Halliday, M. A. K. 1998. On the grammar of pain. Functions of Language, 5(1), pp. 1- 32. Herke-Couchman, M. 2006. SFL, Corpus and the Consumer: An Exploration of Theoretical and Technological Potential. Macquarie University: Ph.D. thesis. Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 2003. Frequency Profiles of some basic grammatical systems: an interim report. Unpublished manuscript. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney. Wu, C. 2000. Modelling Linguistic Resources:A Systemic Functional Approach. Macquarie University: Ph.D. thesis.
Susan Hoadley
The construction of knowledge in sustainability marketing through the narrative of research
This paper reports on research into the ways that “sustainability marketing” is constructed through discourse as an interdisciplinary area of knowledge. Increasingly, sustainability encapsulates economic, social and environmental sustainability and as a result, sustainability education has increasingly become the responsibility business schools (Bridges & Wilhelm 2008). In the marketing literature, sustainability has been a key theme of research since the 1970s, particularly in relation to environmentally sustainable products, services and experiences, as well as for understanding behavioural change in relation to sustainability practices (Frisk & Larson 2011). After mapping the emarging (inter)disciplinary context of sustainability marketing, the paper explores social and discoursive practices (Fairclough 1992) of key types of sustainability marketing discourse, based on the various research streams identifed by McDonagh and Prothero (2014) and providing specific examples. This review of the sustainability literature is followed by the analysis of the structure and language of a sustainability marketing research article (which was co-authored by presenters) informed by a framework developed by Dreyfus et al. (2016). The analysis demonstates how sustainability marketing knowedge is construed through a research narrative, in which the researchers adopt stances in relation to different forms of evidence and position stakeholders through representations of these stakeholders and their beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviours. The aim of the research is to make the discursive practices used in the construction of sustainability marketing knowledge visible, thereby allowing for the critique of this knowledge as systems of social practices and beliefs.
References
Bridges, CM & Wilhelm, WB 2008, ‘Going beyond green: the “why and how” of integrating sustainability into the marketing curriculum’, Journal of Marketing Education, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 33–46. Dreyfus, S, Humphrey, S, Mahboob, A & Martin, JR 2016, Genre pedagogy in higher education: the SLATE project x, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. Fairclough, N 1992, Discourse and social change, Polity Press, Cambridge. Frisk, E & Larson, KL 2011, ‘Educating for sustainability: competencies and practices for transformative action’, Journal of Sustainability Education, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–20. McDonagh, P & Prothero, A 2014, ‘Sustainability marketing research: past, present and future’, Journal of Marketing Management, vol. 30, no. 11–12, pp. 1186–1219, retrieved from
George Horvath
New Zealand First Immigration Discourse Deconstructed
The paper is a discursive deconstruction of the New Zealand First official policy on immigration in the period of November 2016 – March 2017, prior to the general election of 2017. By disclosing the New Zealand First discourse strategies in the process of framing this topic, it attempts to address several questions related to the discourse of immigration, namely: How is the New Zealand First immigration discourse constructed and deployed, how are the ‘enemies’ created, named and contained, how is the stereotyping language of othering by New Zealand First framed and neutralized into euphemism and how is the new model of national identity as part of a strictly defined and exclusionary ethos linguistically built? As far as the methodological considerations are concerned, the New Zealand First position on immigration is researched from a discursive point of view, it is deconstructed, its coherence, cohesion and internal logic questioned and analysed. In the attempt to deconstruct the New Zealand First policy on immigration, this paper employs the discourse analytical approach and the idea of floating signifiers that provide a possibility to change the meaning in different discourses. The discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is applied, utilising the language of description to interpret the empirical data (Torfing, 1999). Laclau and Mouffe challenge the structuralist theory and Saussure’s claim that meaning is produced through relational difference and through the interplay of signs, arguing that discourses gain identities by their relational difference to other discourses and that signs are fixed to a particular application only through dominant discourses (Laclau and Moufffe, 1985). This paper goes beyond the critical approach and reaches the New Zealand First immigration discourse from the outside by challenging its inside.
References: Laclau, E. – Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Torfing, J. (1999). New Theories of Discourse – Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
Carl Jon Way Ng
Governing (through) affect: Affective governmentality in skills education policy communication
The neoliberalization of politics and governance, as part of a broader neoliberalization of society, has reconfigured citizens as self-interested customers and consumers in a political ‘marketplace’, engendering state-citizenry relations premised on (quasi-)market-oriented, transactional norms and values. This has led to the privileging of relationality and presentation over rationality and substance in political engagement and communication (Shah, McLeod, Friedland & Nelson, 2007; Benoit & Holbert, 2010). In order to obtain ‘buy-in’ for the government and its agenda and programmes, political actors perform affective work to present themselves and their policy programmes as relatable and empathetic. At the same time, support for the government and its agenda is contingent on citizen-consumers forming social relations and emotional connections with and around state actors and their policies – and therefore contingent on stimulating such affective engagements and investments. Affect is therefore strategically cultivated and managed in the interest of governing and mobilizing citizen-consumers (Slaby & von Scheve, 2019).
This paper examines such mobilizations and dynamics of affect by way of a case study centred on Singapore’s national skills education policy and its communication. Adopting a multimodal discourse-analytic approach, the study examines a data set that includes policy speeches, an Internet website, YouTube clips and advertisements to investigate the affective-semiotic repertoire deployed in the policy communication discourse as well as the affective subjectivities valorized in the process. It is argued that such communication attempts to connect with the socio-emotional needs, desires, aspirations and, to a lesser extent, fears of citizen-consumers, presenting the policy as an avenue for individual achievement and the actualization of one’s potential, and to a lesser extent, avoidance of disadvantage and failure. In doing so, the affectivized, aspirational-inspirational discourse helps to constitute an affective governmentality that represents affective dispositions, and more significantly the self- regulation and -instrumentalization of one’s affective dispositions, as central to individual success, in the process drawing attention away from the broader structural problems and extractive demands of the prevailing neoliberal economic system of which the policy is part.
References
Benoit, W.L., & Holbert, R.L. (2010). Political communication. In C.R. Berger, M.E. Roloff & D.R. Roskos-Ewoldsen (Eds.), The Handbook of Communication Science (pp. 437-452). London: SAGE.
Shah, D.V., McLeod, D.M., Friedland, L., & Nelson, M.R. (2007). The politics of consumption/ The consumption of politics. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 611, 6-15.
Slaby, J, & von Scheve, C. (2019). Introduction: affective societies – key concepts. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective Societies (pp. 1-24). London: Routledge
Cher Leng Lee Code-switching Across Generations: the case of Singapore Mandarin Singapore is a multiracial, multicultural island nation with a population consisting three quarters of ethnic Chinese. This paper examines the phenomenon of code-switching between the younger generation and their parents, and grandparents, focusing on the English, Chinese dialects and Malay elements present in this variety of spoken Mandarin. The aim is to understand how and why code-switching takes place within speakers of the same generation and across generations in Singapore Mandarin conversations. The data is taken from university students who have recorded their conversations with their parents, grandparents, siblings and friends. This paper adopts the methodology of conversation analysis. The conversations are transcribed and analyzed according to the languages used among the conversations carried out across generations and with speakers of the same generation. There are three generations involved in this study: The university students in their 20s, their parents in their 50s- 60s, and grandparents in their 70s-80s. Many of the older generation in their 70s still speak southern Chinese dialects such as Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese as well as Bazaar Malay (which was a lingua franca with Hokkien). Their spoken Mandarin consists of code-switching with these Chinese dialects. The middle generation in their 50s is the generation that is able to communicate both with the older generation and younger generation in the various languages. Their spoken Mandarin consists of English, dialects, and even some Malay. The younger generation in their 20s can hardly understand or speak these dialects as a result of the Speak Mandarin Campaign which launched in 1979 to replace all dialects with Mandarin. As such, the younger generation’s spoken Mandarin consists mainly of English code-switched elements. This paper argues that code-switching takes place mainly due to convenience to fill in the gaps when the younger generation do not know the Mandarin equivalent of the words in certain domains given the changes in language policies in the nation. In this case, it is not necessarily a choice of code but rather filling the gaps with the language that they know out of necessity. The paper will also discuss what code-switching in the parents’ and grandparents’ conversations entails.
References Lee, Cher Leng. 2003. Motivations of code-switching in multi-lingual Singapore”. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 31(1): 145-176. Li, Wei. 1994. Three generations, two languages, one family. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Li, Wei ed. 2016. Multilingualism in the Chinese Diaspora Worldwide. New York: Routledge.
Lin Li Chinese discourse markers in informal conversation
This paper provides an analysis of the characteristics of Chinese discourse markers in informal conversations, with special regard to the frequency and function of them. Discourse markers can facilitate the processing and comprehension of the text (Aijmer, 2002), while also adding to discourse coherence (Schiffrin, 1987). A growing number of scholars have placed special emphasis on the significance of Chinese discourse markers in interaction (e.g. Tsai & Chu, 2017). However, a corpus-linguistic approach is still unusual in the study of Chinese discourse markers. The spoken data has been used in the previous research has generally been small and biased. In addition, limited research has provided relatively explicit criteria to delimit boundaries of Chinese discourse markers, which has inevitably resulted in difficulties to distinguish their use as discourse markers from other words.
To get a better understanding of how Chinese discourse markers are used in naturally occurring speech, the present study builds a corpus which consists of over 200,000 words of transcribed content to investigate their frequency and function. It first briefly addresses the identification of Chinese discourse markers, then a frequency list of markers is generated. Following this is a discussion of the function of the top 3 most frequent discourse markers. The present study is expected to provide empirical pedagogical applications for Chinese teaching and learning. The frequency list togethers with the functional analysis of markers not only tell Chinese teachers and learners of Chinese the most important markers they should concentrate on in classrooms, but also show learners how to use them more appropriately in everyday conversation. Moreover, the combination of corpus analysis and qualitative analysis can offer a high degree of reliability and validity to the study of discourse markers in spoken Chinese.
References Aijmer, K. (2002). English discourse particles: Evidence from a corpus. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsai, P.-S., & Chu, W.-H. (2017). The use of discourse markers among Mandarin Chinese teachers, and Chinese as a second language and Chinese as a foreign language learners. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 638-665.
Kerrilee Lockyer
Australian wine brands in international contexts: The construction of place in employee narratives
Wine is typically branded by region, and marketing campaigns are based around where and when the wine is made. This is the case in Australia, where brands are ‘origin branded’ (Alonso & Northcote, 2009), drawing on features of the landscape, local history and stories of the vineyard to create the brand. Allied to this emphasis on place, brand success depends on the way employees communicate brands to customers (de Chernatony, McDonald et al. 2011). Despite the importance of this communication, there has been little research on how ‘brand place’ is linguistically constructed in wine marketing, and none from an employee perspective. This chapter will explore the construction of brand place through narratives used by employees in their routine work for a multinational wine distributor. Informed by Sarangi and Roberts (1999) recommendations for ‘practical relevance’, and drawing on principles of linguistic ethnography, the data was collected over a period of six months across four sites: in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The data included ethnographic observations of routine office and company practices, interviews with 36 employees, and relevant marketing materials. The analysis involved theme-oriented discourse analysis (Roberts and Sarangi 2005) with a focus on narrative analysis (Georgakopoulou 2007, Riessman 2008). Drawing on illustrative samples of analysed data, this chapter presents narrative as a central part of employees’ communicative expertise needed to construct brand place in wine marketing.
References: Alonso, A. D., & Northcote, J. (2009). Wine, history, landscape: Origin branding in Western Australia. British Food Journal, 111(11), 1248-1259. doi:10.1108/00070700911001068 Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing company. Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles, Sage Publications. Roberts, C. and S. Sarangi (2005). "Theme-oriented discourse analysis of medical encounters." Medical Education 39: 632-640. Sarangi, S. and C. Roberts (1999). The Dynamics of Interactional and Institutional Orders in Work Related Settings. Talk, work and institutional order: Discourse in medical, mediation and management settings. S. Sarangi and C. Roberts. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter: 1-43.
Meredith Marra
Storytelling as an expression of culture: Constructing identity in the New Zealand workplace
Storytelling is an under-recognised but ubiquitous feature of professional talk through which we construct various aspects of our identity, including our ethnic identity. Cultural orientation(s) can be indicated in the structure of our narratives, the content of our stories, or the strategies we use to index our ‘selves’ within this particular discourse activity. Using illustrative excerpts of talk collected in workplaces that self-identify as Māori organisations (because of their Māori-oriented kaupapa and a commitment to promoting Māori values) we will provide evidence of effective communicators making use of the affordances of storytelling to bring together potentially competing identities and to negotiate complex cultural contexts. The balancing of these identities highlights the hierarchical positioning of majority and minority cultures. Recognising growing diversity in workplaces requires us to question dominant ideologies that impact upon our interactions. Hegemonies encapsulated in the ‘culture order’ (Holmes 2018), the ‘gender order’ (Connell 1987) and organisational hierarchies are always overtly or covertly relevant as systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people's interpretations of what is considered appropriate. As the analysis will demonstrate, the challenge of enacting an acceptable identity that differs from “the norm” can be far from straightforward. Exploring successful identity construction as expressed through narratives offers the potential to identify strategies to counter negative societal perspectives as well as unhelpful social categories. Drawing on audio and video recordings collected in Wellington workplaces, we explore the insights that can be gained from examining the stories people tell in naturally-occurring workplace interaction and the identities they co-construct and negotiate with others. We also make use of narratives elicited in interviews about workplace practices to consider the influence of the discourse genre on the identities being negotiated and to allow us to access participants’ own understandings of the culture order within which they are operating.
References
Holmes, Janet 2018. Negotiating the culture order in New Zealand workplaces. Language in Society 47 (10): 33- 56. Connell, R.W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford University Press.
Sky Marsen Talking about privacy: Data security breaches and discourses of crisis
Organizational crises affect the management of organizations, employees and stakeholders, and the society in which organizations operate (Fearn-Banks, 2016; Gilpin & Murphy, 2008). This project investigates texts produced by organizations after crises related to digital data breaches. It follows an eclectic approach informed by discourse analysis, narrative theory and crisis communication theory. The presentation analyzes the external communication strategies of companies in different industries, which have experienced significant breaches of privacy. In particular, the project focuses on and compares written documents produced by two companies, Equifax and Marriot Hotels, after their data breach crises in 2017 and 2018 respectively. The presentation will describe results analysing discourse strategies employed in the companies’ press releases, annual reports, company statements and social media items. In addition to discourse analysis, the presentation examines the narrative structure of the texts to identify the positioning of different agents. The conflicting narratives produced during a crisis reflect the interests and worldviews of different individuals and groups, and provide a rich source of data for the study of persuasion and (mis)communication (Fenton & Langley, 2011; Heath, 2004; Marsen, 2014).
The research on which the presentation is based aims to answer these questions: 1. How do organizational narratives configure and represent the crisis? In other words, how are agents, their intentions and actions constructed in texts produced by the organization after a crisis? 2. What are some prominent discourse strategies employed by the companies and how can these be seen as responses to social concern and criticism? 3. How does the story of the crisis map onto the story of the organization? In other words, in what ways does the representation of the crisis in organizational texts match (or not) the ‘brand image’ of the company in the wider society as this image has developed through company reputation and mission statements?
References
Fearn-Banks, K. (2016). Crisis communications: A casebook approach. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fenton, C., & Langley, A. (2011). Strategy as practice and the narrative turn. Organization Studies, 32(9), pp. 1171–1196. Gilpin, D. R., & Murphy, P. J. (2008). Crisis management in a complex world. New York: Oxford University Press. Heath, R. L. (2004). Telling a story: A narrative approach to communication during crisis. D. P. Millar & R. L. Heath (Eds.). Responding to crisis: A rhetorical approach to crisis communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 167-186. Marsen, S. (2014). Lock the doors: Toward a narrative-semiotic approach to organizational crisis. Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 28 (3), pp. 301 - 326.
Nelly Martin-Anatias Instagram: An alternative space for Indonesians to reinforce the “normative” gender ideologies and to promote sexism
Post the New Order era (1965-1998), Indonesia as a nation has granted space for many Indonesians to celebrate what freedom is. When Suharto, the second and dictatorial president, resigned from office in 1998, it marked the end of the authoritarian era or famously called as the Reformasi (reformed) era. During the Reformasi era, many Indonesians have actively celebrated the freedom of speech that includes scrutinising others’ personal lives, scrutinising others’ religious belief, dictating others’ choice of attire, one’s marriage life, among others (see Davies, 2018; Martin-Anatias, 2018c; Platt et al, 2018). This current study is taking a cue from a number of recent studies discussing how many Indonesians have manipulated their rights to correct other Indonesians’ personal lives post the authoritarian era (Davies, 2018; Martin-Anatias, 2018c; Platt et al, 2018) and how they have utilised Facebook to redefine their Muslimness, subsequently their Indonesianness, and others’ (Savitri-Hartono, 2018). Viewing the discourse from the perspective of a critical feminist (cf. Lazar 2007, 2014, 2017), I am looking at how many Indonesians manipulate their religious ideologies and their seemingly homogenous national identity understanding to blame and shame other individuals, and simultaneously promote both covert and overt sexism on Instagram. I collected the dataset from early September 2016 to late January 2017. Gathering the data from the public Instagram accounts, I used the help of a hashtag, e.g., #pelakor (perebut laki orang, literally translated as “(a woman) who steals someone else’s husband/man” or the ‘other woman’) to see how many Indonesian internet citizens (netizens) have collectively re-constructed the idea of a “good” woman and simultaneously glorified masculinism (cf. Zappavigna 2011, 2012). I employed a textual and interpretive analysis as my methodological approach and qualitatively analysed the discourse (see Lee, 2012; Martin-Anatias 2018a, 2018b). The findings show that many Indonesian netizens manipulate Instagram as a key space to re-create their imagined communities and to transgress others’ personal space in order to correct others’ ‘non-normative’ behaviour, to reinforce their “normative” gender ideologies, to impose their monolithic understanding of Indonesianess, and to promote sexism.
References Davies, S.G. (2018). Skins of morality: Bio-borders, ephemeral citizenship and policing women in Indonesia. Asian Studies Review, 42(1): 69-88. Lazar, M. M. (2007). Politicizing gender in discourse: Feminist critical discourse analysis as political perspective and praxis. In M. M. Lazar (Ed.), Feminist critical discourse analysis: Gender, power and ideology in discourse (pp.1-28). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ______. (2014). Feminist critical discourse analysis: Relevance for current gender and language research. In S. Erlich, M. Meyerhoff, & J. Holmes (Eds.), The handbook of language, gender, and sexuality (2nd edition, pp. 180-199). Malden, M.A, USA: Wiley Blackwell. ______. (2017). Homonationalist discourse as a politics of pragmatic resistance in Singapore’s Pink Dot movement: Towards a southern praxis. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(3): 420-441.
Lee, J.S. (2012). Please teach me English: English and metalinguistic discourse in South Korean film. In J. S. Lee, & A. Moody (Eds.), English in Asian popular culture (pp. 127-150). Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Martin-Anatias, N. (2018a). Bahasa gado-gado: English in Indonesian popular texts. World Englishes, 37(2): 340-55. ______. (2018b). Language selection in the Indonesian novel: Bahasa gado-gado in expressions of love. South East Asia Research, 26(4): 347-66. ______. (2018c). On being a “good” Indonesian woman: An autoethnography. Humanity & Society, 1-28. Platt, M., Davies, S.G., & Bennett, L.R. (2018). Contestations of gender, sexuality and morality in contemporary Indonesia. Asian Studies Review, 42(1): 1-15. Savitri, H. H. (2018). Virtually (Im)moral: Pious Indonesian Muslim women’s use of Facebook. Asian Studies Review, 42(1): 39-52. Zappavigna, M. (2011). Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media & Society, 13(5): 788-806. ______. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and Social Media, Continuum Discourse Series. London, U.K: Continuum.
Donald Matheson
Tracking discourses of hate speech in Stuff comments
Speech expressing and inciting hate is prevalent in comments spaces in social media, news sites and discussion fora. This kind of public speech has become a focus of concern as societies grapple with extreme prejudice and political violence and online platforms come under pressure to moderate the talk they host. This requires, among other initiatives, computational approaches. However, the textual markers of hate speech are very difficult to pin down, given the emphasis in definitions on authorial intention and on the extent to which speech incites hatred in others, as well as the different social thresholds for different kinds of speech in a particular society. Computational approaches often filter and flag potentially hateful material using syntactic and semantic content approaches, sometimes in combination with metadata about accounts, using those patterns as approximate markers of hate. This paper takes a discourse-specific approach by seeking to identify the different semantic and syntactic markers of two majors discourses of hate speech, racialised and religion-focused hate. The hope is to provide greater specificity of the phenomenon within Aotearoa New Zealand public discourse so that automated moderation and filtering tools may be better understood, with the possibility also of developing locally specific moderation tools. Five years of comments on the Stuff news site are analysed using concordance software and Miró-Llinares’ taxonomy of hate speech (Miró-Llinares, Moneva and Esteve 2018) to develop a local body of data on hate speech.
References
Miró-Llinares, F., Moneva, A. and Esteve, M. (2018) Hate is in the air! But where? Introducing an algorithm to detect hate speech in digital microenvironments. Crime Science, 7(1), p.15.
Tony McEnery
The UK, Europe and the path to Brexit - the long view: Europe in sixty years of British newspaper data
When the UK voted to exit the European Union in 2016 many tried to understand the event. Opinion polls, the analysis of voting patterns, studies of the press in the run up the vote, the role of social media and machine learning all came to prominence as people and organizations tried to understand what was an unexpected outcome for many.
In the research presented in this paper we approached Brexit with a different mindset: Brexit was not the result of one or two months of campaigning. Brexit needs to be understood in the long term. Only by doing so can we begin to answer questions such as ‘How did the UK vote for Brexit when no major political party in the UK has ever campaigned to leave the EU?’, ‘How and why did attitudes to the EU change in the UK between it voting to stay in the EU in the 1975 and voting to leave in 2016?’ and ‘What were the key events over time that led to Brexit?’.
We approach questions such as these in two ways. We will start by summarising what researchers in academic disciplines such as History and Politics say have been the major arguments for and against staying in the EU over time. We will follow that up by a study of one newspaper, from the 1960s to the present – The Times. We have access to all of the machine readable copies of the newspaper – over three billion words were published by it in this period alone. Using techniques pioneered by linguists to look at and start to comprehend discourse in data on this scale using computers, we will explore the totality of this data to look at how attitudes to the EU shifted over time and link those to historical events. In doing so we will also reflect on the claims made by the smaller scale, qualitative research, undertaken by Historians, Linguists and Political Science researchers while gaining a deeper understanding of the drivers of Brexit.
Matilda Neyland
Pink lingerie and ‘natural’ sex: Orientalist anxieties in New Zealand media constructions of migrant sex workers
This paper applies Orientalist theory to findings from an investigation into discursive constructions of migrant sex workers in New Zealand media. Sex workers comprise one of the most marginalised and stigmatised groups in society; historically framed as diseased, immoral criminals, or more recently as victims of abuse and exploitation. New Zealand is one of only two jurisdictions worldwide with a decriminalised sex industry, a system shown to reduce harm and improve workers’ rights. However, people in the country on temporary visas are still prohibited through immigration law from doing sex work, and face deportation if found to be involved in the industry.
Within a framework of critical discourse studies, the study used corpus linguistic methods in combination with the discourse-historical approach to analyse a corpus of 532 news articles relating to sex work, collected over a recent period of 26 months. The findings indicated migrant sex workers are constructed as Other in a number of ways: sexually deviant; dangerous to children and communities; as tax criminals taking jobs from local sex workers; or as passive victims of trafficking and abuse. Articles routinely provide titillating sexual details, creating an image of the Asian sex worker as at once vulnerable and threatening, and allowing the reader to simultaneously desire and condemn her.
With this ambivalence emerging strongly throughout the data, in this paper I draw on Orientalist theory as a useful frame for the analysis of texts produced by a powerful Western society about a non-White Other. Using concepts afforded by Orientalism – described by Said (2003:3) as ‘a Western style for dominating [the Orient] … by making statements about it, authorizing views on it’ – I argue that the media’s representations of migrant sex workers reveal more about New Zealand society than they do migrant sex workers themselves. Particularly, the ambivalent attitude evident in the discourse points to dual cultural anxieties around both sex work and immigration.
References Said, Edward (2003[1978]). Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Visnja Pavacic Takac
On Methodological and Acquisitional Issues in Analysing Coherence in Non-native and Native Written Discourse
Communicatively competent non-native language users should be able to use their knowledge of language elements to form accurate and articulate written texts. However, this ability seems to be among those difficult to acquire, since it is largely language- and culture-specific. Most communicative competence models (cf. Canale 1983, Bachman & Palmer 2010) incorporate this ability into the notion of discourse competence which includes knowledge about cohesion and coherence. Previous relevant studies of non-native written discourse predominantly analysed aspects of cohesion – which can probably be attributed to the fact that cohesion is seemingly easier to operationalise – but coherence remains understudied, mostly because it has been inconsistently defined and conceptualised by text linguists and, consequently, applied linguists. Motivated by insufficient knowledge about ways of achieving coherence and factors that influence (in)coherence in non-native written discourse, this study aims at describing and comparing coherence dimensions in texts created by non- native users of English and compare them with coherence dimensions in texts they wrote in their first language as well as in those written by native speakers of English.
Despite a number of existent methods of coherence analysis, our research aim warranted development of an appropriate method that considers distinctive features of non-native discourse (e.g. less coherent parts and coherence breaks). Subsequently, the Non-Native Text Coherence Analysis (NN-TCA) was designed building on the methods by Daneš (1970) and Lutamatti 1978). NN-TCA generates quantitative data on the number of t-units, topics, types of progressions, and coherence breaks thus allowing for statistical analysis and cross-sample comparisons. We analysed 30 argumentative essays written by non-native users of English, their essays in their first language and 30 essays written by English native speakers.
The results point to differences among participants' texts in terms of types and numbers of progressions that might emanate from various conceptualisations of coherence in the two languages and cultures. Problems in achieving coherence prominent in non-native discourse can be explained by non-native writers' lack of awareness of what constitutes a coherent text in the target language. Also, non-native writers rely heavily on cohesive devices in establishing coherence. Methodological as well as acquisitional implications are discussed.
References Bachman, L. F. & Palmer, A. S. (2010) Language Assessment in Practice. Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press. Canale, M. (1983). From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. In J.C. Richards & R.W. Schmidt (Eds.). Language and Communication. London: Longman, 2-27. Daneš, František (1970). Zur linguistischen Analyse der Textstruktur. Folia Linguistica 4, 72–78. Lautamatti, Lisa (1987). Observations on the development of the topic of simplified discourse. In U.Connor & R. B. Kaplan (Eds.). Writing across Languages: Analysis of L2 Texts. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 87-114.
Katherine Reid
Discursive therapeutic stance and positioning: Agentic discourses that support the co-production of children’s knowledge in therapeutic interaction with children and their caregivers
Therapeutic interaction with children occurs within the context of dominant discourses of childhood, mental health and therapy. Discourse not only represents the therapeutic interaction with children and their caregivers, but discourse constitutes the social practices and resources therapists employ when communicating with children and their caregivers (Fairclough, 1992). This study investigates how children who experience mental health concerns are identified and positioned in discursive therapeutic interactions and how this supports the co-production of their knowledge regarding their mental health experiences. Discursive therapy is informed by social constructionist theory, including Solution-focused brief therapy, Collaborative therapy and Narrative Therapy. Fairclough’s CDA method and key analytical tools (including discourse, genres and styles) will be utilised to analyse multiple sources of data (Fairclough, 2003).
Excerpts from discursive therapy literature are analysed to identify reoccurring discourses that seek to shape therapeutic practice. Key findings from these excerpts highlight ‘collaborative’ and ‘co-inquiry’ therapeutic stances. Transcripts of actual therapy interactions with children and caregivers are also analysed, paying specific attention to how participants in this social event are positioned in the sequence of talk. In this context, language (including images, verbal, written and body movements) is understood as a form of social practice (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). The aim is to see if and how practice literature discourses and styles are ‘re-contextualised’ (Bernstein, 2004) in therapeutic interaction. The current research makes visible social practices used in discursive therapies to identify if they enable the achievement of children’s agency and if so, how this is achieved. Consequently, this research analyses both the broader macro discourses that constitute the therapeutic interaction, and the micro features of the interactions that texture and generate discourses. This research is significant because it makes visible the relationship between the social practices espoused in practice literature and how they are “appropriated by” therapists and “relocated in the [therapy] context” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 222). The research findings seek to enhance therapeutic practice development with children and caregivers in a mental health context.
References Bernstein, B. (2004). The structuring of pedagogic discourse (Vol. 4). London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis In T. A. Van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction London: Sage.
Jeanne Rolin-Lanziti
The differential effects of task design on the organization of interactional feedback in a French beginner classroom
Researchers usually classify classroom discourse within institutional talk in view of its formality in comparison to ordinary conversation (Drew and Heritage, 1992). This paper will discuss the discursive features of one kind of classroom talk, that in which participants (teacher and students) engage in the specific activity of correction or feedback. The goal is to show that a key contextual factor of the instructional setting, namely the design of the task that students are completing in the classroom, shapes the organization of interactional feedback. The paper suggests that this variable has not been taken into account in research on feedback in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Nassaji, 2016). To demonstrate the relevance of task design, the paper presents and examines sequences of interactional feedback extracted from an audio-recorded transcript of a French beginner class at tertiary level. In the sequences, the students are completing two tasks, which have different characteristics. The first one is an ‘input’ task asking students to listen to an audio document and to complete unfinished sentences, whereas the other is an ‘output’ task that instructs students to write a recipe in groups, then to present the recipe to the whole class (Ellis, 2003). The analysis of the sequences with the Conversation Analysis method (Schegloff, 2007) results in the identification of divergences across tasks in the organization of the social actions embodied in the interactions that the participants jointly perform in order to achieve correction. In the interactions generated by the input task, the teacher allocates turns, selects linguistic items for correction and corrects errors. In contrast, the output task creates instructional contexts where students, involved in planning and presenting the recipe, actively draw the attention of peers and teacher to formal items that they choose in order to construct a linguistically accurate text.
References
Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (1992). Analyzing talk at work: an introduction. In P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds.) Talk at work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nassaji, H. (2016). Anniversary article, Interactional feedback in second language teaching and learning: A synthesis and analysis of current research. Language Teaching Research, 20(4): 535-562.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brian Rugen
Functions of yume in the multimodal representation of emotion in a Japanese baseball film trailer
Film trailers hold a central position within a film’s promotional practices, signaling a film’s main genre with its reconfigured and reordered narrative elements, within a structure clearly bound by length. In addition, as part of its promotional practices, film trailers are crucial sites of emotional attachment for viewers (Johnston, Vollans, & Greene, 2016). Despite their influence, film trailers have received relatively little attention in the field of discourse studies. This presentation aims to address this lack with a multimodal analysis of the film trailer for the Japanese baseball film "Rookies"—the highest grossing Japanese sports film ever. Indeed, sport is regarded as a domain with significant emotional impact on people's lives, and this is certainly true in Japan, where scholars have described organized sports as highly dramatic and filled with intense emotion (Kelly, 2011).
This presentation draws on a semiotic framework for the multimodal representation of emotion in film (Feng & O'Halloran, 2013). The framework theorizes how emotion is communicated through combinations of visual, verbal, and aural resources involving three stages: a) an eliciting condition; b) a feeling state; and, c) an emotive expression. The analysis in this presentation will pay special attention to the repeated multimodal depictions of the Japanese concept of yume (dream)—a ubiquitous concept in Japanese popular culture—and the role of these depictions in realizing emotive meaning.
I conclude by arguing that the purposeful design of these emotions within the trailer's story is successful in optimizing engagement with viewers, as the narrative events related to the eliciting conditions of emotion are anchored in a broader discourse regarding the pursuit and fulfilment of dreams by way of a commitment to familiar Japanese values of seishin (spirit, discipline), konjo (guts, fighting spirit), and gaman (endurance, perseverance).
References Feng, D., & O’Halloran, K. L. (2013). The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches. Semiotica, 197, 79-100.
Johnston, K. M., Vollans, E., & Greene, F. L. (2016). Watching the trailer: Researching the film trailer audience. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 13(2), 56-85.
Kelly, W. W. (2011). The sportscape of contemporary Japan. In V. Bestor, T. C. Bestor, & A. Yamagata (Eds.), Routledge handbook of Japanese culture and society (pp. 251-262). New York: NY: Routledge.
Neda Salahshour
Topoi, premises and conclusions: The deconstruction of argumentative strategies in the discursive construction of immigrants in New Zealand
New Zealand is often perceived as one of the most diverse countries in terms of its population, with “more ethnicities in New Zealand than there are countries in the world” (Statistics New Zealand, 2013). According to the 2013 census, 39% of people who live in Auckland, New Zealand’s most migrant-populated city, were born overseas. In such a setting, the issue of social harmony becomes important. Media institutions hold power and therefore their representations play a significant role in how migrants are perceived and whether they are embraced and welcomed or resisted. It is for this reason that media discourse deserves attention. This study reports on the discursive construction of immigrants in newspaper articles published during 2007 and 2008 in a prominent daily newspaper in Auckland, New Zealand's most migrant populated city. Given that the Global Financial Crisis began to make its presence felt in 2008, this study also sought to investigate expected discrepancies in the representation of migrants during economically challenging times. A series of extensive data sampling methods, which includes a compilation of a corpus, are utilized to reduce the chances of cherry picking. Through adopting a discourse- historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) to critical discourse analysis, this paper analyzes the journalists use of argumentative strategies to argue for the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants in/from New Zealand. By carefully deconstructing the arguments used, the analysis illustrates the range of topoi (Kienpointner, 1992) utilized and indicates that the discursive construction of migrants and immigration relies heavily on the use of topos of consequence, topos of numbers, topos of cost, and topos of authority.
References
Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2009). The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 87–121). London: SAGE.
Kienpointner, M. (1992). Alltagslogik: Struktur und funktion von argumentationsmustern. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
Statistics New Zealand (2013). New Zealand has more ethnicities than the world has countries. Retrieved from http://archive.stats.govt.nz/Census/2013-census/data-tables/totals-by-topic-mr1.aspx.
Helene Schmolz
Cohesion in online news: A multimodal discourse analysis of migration in English-language newspapers
Since Halliday & Hasan, cohesion has been much researched and in the recent past, it has become an issue in multimodality as well. For the relation of text and images, Bateman’s book in 2014 is noteworthy, for example. On the other hand, there is research that focuses more on the media, and the interpretation of discourse, including images (e.g. Bednarek & Caple 2012). The present paper aims at investigating text-image links in online newspaper articles. It will do so on a corpus of online news articles about migration from the year 2016. The term migration is understood broadly, and covers various forms of movements, including refugees and asylum-seekers. The corpus consists of news articles from Great Britain (The Guardian), the USA (USA today) and Australia (Sydney Morning Herald). It amounts to more than half a million words. The corpus is analysed in various ways:
1. Empirically by counting terms used for migrating people, including their collocations. We will also examine the frequency of the occurrence of specific regions and countries, and religious terms, for instance. 2. Visual elements are analysed, specifically images that occur in the article. Here, discourse analytic methods are used (e.g. according to Machin & Mayr). 3. Relations between text and images are investigated. They draw on the findings of the two previous steps. We analyse the cohesion between text and images, difficulties and contradictions, and the consequences it has for the representation of migrants.
In sum, we will show that cohesion plays an important role in the interpretation of multimodal discourse. As will become clear, migration is represented differently by textual and visual forms, and text-image relations are therefore important means to fully understand news discourse and the way we interpret events.
References
Bateman, John (2014), Text and Image. A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide, London – New York: Routledge. Bednarek, Monika & Helen Caple (2012), News Discourse, London: Continuum (or their newer book from 2017: The Discourrse of News Values). Caple, Helen (2013), Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Halliday, Michael & Ruqaiya Hasan (1976), Cohesion in English, English Language Series, 9. Machin, David & Andrea Mayr (2012), How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis. A Multimodal Introduction, Los Angeles et al.: SAGE.
Corinne Seals
Utilising the chronotope to make sense of friends becoming enemies during the Ukrainian war
The war between Ukraine and Russia on Ukrainian soil has been ongoing since 2014 and still continues. In discursively and cognitively making sense of the events of the war, Ukrainians are “talking into being” their realities, both in terms of space and time. The concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1992 [1981]) allows for a socioculturally contextualised discursive merging of space and time, and it is a useful construct in particular for understanding how those in transnational communities simultaneously connect with multiple places and times (Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain, 2013). Through the discursive connection with the Ukrainian war chronotope, Ukrainians both in Ukraine and in the diaspora are able to share in the collective experiences of being affected by the war. This current presentation examines how Ukrainians utilise chronotopes to discursively construct a shared experience and shared collective identity as Ukrainian during the war
The data for this presentation come from 38 semi-structured interviews that I conducted between 2014 and 2016 with Ukrainians in Ukraine, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. All interviews were transcribed, thematically coded, and subjected to interactional sociolinguistic discourse analysis with an added critical lens.
This presentation focusses specifically on the discursive and cognitive negotiation within the interviews that involves describing the linear progression that marked individuals as “those who used to be friends but who then became enemies”. Effectively, this progression allows participants to quickly and simply access a narrative of tragic betrayal and loss, that of the “friend become enemy”. By discursively invoking an implied timeline (“then” to “now”), the interviewees are also able to imply that these events happened alongside the development of the war, the timelines therein paralleling each other. This time and space construction indexes stories of the war by placing the timelines alongside each other, while also personalising the experience by referencing people the interviewees personally know. Thus, personal narratives draw upon the chronotope of the Ukrainian war, bringing the individual stories together into a more powerful collective experience, and allowing the participants to reflect on the shared Ukrainian experience in opposition to the “other”.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1992 [1981]). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Liebscher, G., & Dailey-O'Cain, J. (2013). Language, space, and identity in migration. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paul Seedhouse
The Discourse of the IELTS Speaking Test: Interactional Design and Practice in a Global Context
The IELTS Speaking Test (one component of IELTS) is used worldwide to assess whether a candidate has the ability to communicate effectively on programmes in English-speaking Universities. This paper reports on the findings of 3 British Council/ IELTS-funded projects into aspects of the interactional organisation of the IELTS Speaking Test.
A brief description is provided of the 3 corpora developed, made up of 257 audio recordings and transcriptions of 11-14 minute speaking tests from around the world. I briefly explain what happens in the 3 parts of the Speaking Test and how performance is assessed. Adopting a Conversation Analysis perspective, findings are presented on the organisation of turn-taking, sequence, repair, and topic development in relation to the institutional goal. Interactional design (Taylor, 2011) is compared with interactional practice in terms of what is observable in the data.
I then provide examples of application, namely how analysis of data can inform test design and examiner training, looking at topic disjunction and recipient design in particular. I also report on two studies of how features of candidate discourse relate to scores allocated to candidates. I consider the universal problem: to what extent can oral performance in one variety of discourse predict future performance in another variety of discourse?
Finally, I discuss the relationship between design and practice: how do the interactional design of the test and the interactional evidence of what actually happens in practice relate to each other?
The study provides a unique dual perspective on the evaluation of spoken discourse in that it combines a detailed portrayal of the design of a face-to-face speaking test with its actual implementation in interactional terms. Using many empirical extracts of interaction from authentic IELTS Speaking Tests, the study illustrates how the interaction is organised in relation to the institutional aim of ensuring valid assessment. The paper is based on my 2018 monograph on this subject.
References
Taylor, L (Ed) (2011) Examining Speaking: Research and Practice in Assessing Second Language Speaking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dmitris Serafis
Unveiling racist portrayals of migrant and refugee populations in Italian media discourse: A corpus- assisted, argumentative perspective to critical discourse analysis.
The present paper aims at studying: (a) migrants and refugees’ representations in Italian mainstream press; and (b) argumentative inferences, implicitly sustained in these discursive representations. It does so, in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe (see Krzyzanowski et al. 2018). Our study is informed by the agenda of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see Wodak & Meyer 2016). Within this framework, we examine the representation of social agency (Van Leeuwen 2008), realized in editorials of four mainstream Italian newspapers with different background (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Giornale, La Stampa), throughout a time span of the two years (2016-2017), when the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ mainly emerged in Italy. Our data analysis is assisted by the corpus tool AntConc, which allows us to retrieve meaningful collocations, concordances, and keywords. Additionally, we seek to analyze the inferences realized in migrants and refugees’ discursive representations, in order to comprehend and uncover their underlying argumentative dynamics. To that end, we employ the tools of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) (Rigotti & Greco 2019). Our findings are twofold. On one hand, we found that despite newspapers different backgrounds, intertextual links are established, recontextualizing and thus disseminating (Fairclough 2003: Ch. 3) dominant racist discourses in the Italian/European public sphere. On the other hand, these discourses display argumentative structures that attempt to justify racist standpoints against migrant and refugee populations.
References Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Krżyzanowski, M., Triandafyllidou, A. & Wodak, R. (Eds.). (2018). The mediatisation and politicisation of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe [Special issue]. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1-2). Rigotti, E. & Greco, S. (2019). Inference in argumentation: A topics-based approach to argument schemes. Cham: Springer. Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford: University Press. Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2016). Methods of critical discourse studies. Los Angeles: Sage, 3rd edn.
Dmitris Serafis
Evaluation in Satirical and Non-Satirical Newspaper Headlines
A number of corpus assisted discourse analysis studies (CADS) have demonstrated how creative language use such as humour and verbal irony exploits linguistic patterns, such as collocations, to achieve their communicative purpose (e.g., Goatly, 2017; Skalicky, 2018). Based on theoretical perspectives such as Lexical Priming, (Hoey, 2005), which posit that creative meaning is the result of purposeful deviations from expected language patterns, these studies demonstrate how creative language may employ a discourse strategy of reversing expected evaluations a language user has associated with particular linguistic patterns (Partington, 2007; Partington, Duguid, & Taylor, 2013).
The purpose of this study is to extend the current work in this area to a larger corpus of humorous satirical headlines. While satirical headlines have been investigated in the past using similar methods (Skalicky, 2018), only a very small corpus of headlines was used. As such, the current study employs a relatively large corpus of satirical and non-satirical headlines. Specifically, a total of 10,000 satirical headlines were extracted from the Onion website. Using CADS (Partington et al., 2013), the headlines were examined for linguistic patterns related to evaluation by searching for adjectival and adverbial modifiers.
The analysis highlighted one particularly noteworthy pattern of evaluation in the use of verbs related to being impressed or disappointed. This pattern was typified in the form of verb + by, such as the headlines “PERSONAL TRAINER IMPRESSED BY MAN’S IMPROVED EXCUSES” and “FAMILY EMBARRASSED BY WAY SON DIED”. These satirical headlines subvert expected evaluations in that fictional entities are impressed by disappinting things and disappointed by things unworthy of disappointment. A comparison of these patterns against a corpus of over 1 million non-satirical news headlines suggests that these same verb + by combinations are used qualitatively differently in non-satirical news (e.g., “HEWITT IMPRESSED BY NEXT WAVE OF AUSSIE TALENT”), in that these patterns follow typical expectations of evaluation. These results thus provide additional support for the application of Lexical Priming and CADS techniques to the study of creative language while also replicating the presence of a particular discourse strategy in creative language use (i.e., reversal of evaluation).
References Goatly, A. (2017). Lexical priming in humorous discourse. European Journal of Humour Research, 5(1), 52–68. Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical priming: A new theory of words and language. London; New York: Routledge. Partington, A. (2007). Irony and reversal of evaluation. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(9), 1547–1569. Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). John Benjamins Publishing. Skalicky, S. (2018). Lexical priming in humorous satirical newspaper headlines. Humor - International Journal of Humor Research, 31(4), 583–602.
Carolyn Simmons
Abstract: Discourses at play for occupational therapy supervision in the healthcare context
The paper will outline a current Critical Discourse Study investigating the question: “What discourses are at play that impact the supervision relationship and process for occupational therapists in the Aotearoa/New Zealand healthcare context?”
Professional supervision has been an integral part of occupational therapy as a process for personal and professional development for almost four decades (Campbell, 1982/3; OTBNZ, 2015). With the introduction of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003 (MOH, 2017), the Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand (OTBNZ) became accountable for safeguarding the public from ‘risk of harm’ from occupational therapists; implementing mechanisms to ensure practitioner competence and fitness to practise. One such mechanism requires all practitioners receive supervision; deemed critical to continuing competence (OTBNZ, 2014). As a result, a shift in the use of supervision as a regulatory/monitoring mechanism to ensure safe practice was imposed (even superimposed) on pre-existing occupational therapists’ understandings of supervision as a process for personal and professional development (Schlemmer, 2006); bringing different supervision discourses into play and potential tensions within discursive and social practice for supervisors and supervisees and the supervision relationship and process. Questions arise relating to different interpretations of this mechanism, such as:
What type of supervision is implied by the legislative requirements? What discourses (communications) frame and shape supervision within this context? What areas of confusion/tension exists between supervisees and supervisors when it comes to the supervision relationship and process?
Applying Fairclough’s (2010) three-dimensional analysis, I am looking to examine real-world examples of language in use to critically analyse occupational therapy public domain supervision-related official texts such as: -. identification of linguistic and discursive features in the texts that function to construct supervision as an important professional activity and mandatory component in the regulation of occupational therapists; the broader real-world views about supervision and occupational therapy, and the role this plays within the healthcare system; preliminary findings from my research about the OTBNZ legislated authority over the supervision relationship and process; recommendations that highlight areas of attention that enable a more comprehensive and equal understanding between supervisors and supervisees when receiving (and providing) supervision.
References
Campbell, J. Supervision – An integral part of dynamic occupational therapy practice. Journal of New Zealand Association of Occupational Therapy, 33(2); 15-17.
Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis. The critical study of language (2nd ed.). Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited.
Ministry of Health. (2017). Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act. Reprint. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Health.
Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand. (2014). Supervision requirements for occupational therapists. Wellington, New Zealand: Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand.
Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand. (2015). Code of ethics for occupational therapists. Wellington, New Zealand: Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand.
Schlemmer, J. (2006). OTBNZ Paper. Supervision for Occupational Therapists in the context of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003. Wellington, New Zealand: Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand
Philippa Smith
“What will you give to racism?” –
A discursive analysis of parody as a social corrective
The “Give Nothing to Racism” video, produced by the New Zealand Human Rights Commission as part of an anti- racism campaign in 2017, parodied a charity advertisement seeking donations. This paper examines how satire works at a discursive level in this video designed with the objective of using humour as a “social corrective” (Avner, 1988) by instructing New Zealanders on how not to be racist. A critical discourse analysis of the video is conducted using a three dimensional framework of text, discourse practice and socio-cultural practice (Fairclough, 2016). Multimodal conceptions (Kress, 2010) are also incorporated as part of the analytical framework focusing on visual and audible elements used to create meaning. Attention is paid in particular to the video presenter Taika Waititi – the then New Zealander of the Year - and his use of narrative, voice, gesture and clothing, as well as the subjective framing of the video and incorporation of classical music. The structural and pragmatic elements of satire and parody are examined to demonstrate how they work as aggressive functions of humour that in the first instance entertain the audience, but in the second instance bring it to the realization of the seriousness of the subject of casual racism in New Zealand society. Findings suggest that Waititi’s sincere and direct address to the audience in seeking donations (of nothing) for a good cause, the featuring of FAQRs (“frequently asked questions about racism”) to draw attention to the idiosyncrasies of subtle racism that exist in society, and the satirizing of charitable paraphernalia such as printed t-shirts with catch phrases, serve to work as aggressive functions of humour within the parody (Simpson, 2003). In considering the video within an historical context of New Zealand race relations and increasing multiculturalism in the last 40 years, I conclude by arguing that the strong emphasis of New Zealand national identity in the video features as an important discursive thread to suggest the collective responsibility of the nation in the fight against casual racism.
References
Avner, Z. (1988). Humor as a Social Corrective. In Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum Behrens, L. and Rosen, L. (eds.) Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1988. 356-60. Fairclough, N. (2016). A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse studies in social research. In Wodak, R. & Meyer, M. (eds.) Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. London, UK: Sage Publications. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (2003). On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Anastasia Stavridou
Exploring the collaborative construction of emergent leadership in sports: a case study of a basketball team
Understanding the way in which leaders in a sports team communicate is vital to the success of the team. However, there is very little sociolinguistic research that focuses on language use in sports (Wilson, 2009). While most studies link sports with social issues such as gender and racial identity, the emergent nature of leadership still remains under-researched. Indeed, the concept of leadership has been associated to teamwork; nonetheless, most sociolinguistic studies focus on ratified leaders and only a few explore the way leaders emerge in actual workplaces with no assigned leader (Choi and Schnurr, 2014). As such, the current study challenges those theories which take for granted leadership as an innate charisma of an individual. By contrast, following Wilson’s (2017, p.150) assumption that leaders in loosely hierarchical organisations, like sports teams, often display leader-like discourse before they’re institutionally acknowledged as leaders, it intends to explore a largely under-researched context, namely a ‘leaderless’ basketball team. Therefore, a range of individuals is empowered to emerge as leaders, and consequently, leadership performance is considered not only as a distributed process, but also as an emergent, co-constructed and negotiated process within an organisation (Wilson, 2017, p.149).
The study will employ qualitative methods, and Interactional Sociolinguistics is the framework employed in the current study, as is often used in studies of leadership discourse (Vine et al., 2008; Wilson, 2017). This framework is particularly useful to unfold the underlying interference of meaning due to the contextual information and the analytic tools it provides (Gumperz, 2001, p.215; Vine et al., 2008; Wilson, 2017, p.147-148). It is therefore understood that it offers the analytic tools to pinpoint and interpret the discursive processes leaders emerge, while allowing the link between micro-level observations with macro-level concepts of leadership and teamwork.
Based on the benefits and the valuable insights that the socio-cultural context offers, data are collected from observations, interviews and video recordings conducted with the team players. Moreover, data may derive from social media applications that the team members regularly use, such as Messenger, in order to gain a wider perspective on emergent leadership.
References Choi, S., & Schnurr, S. (2014). Exploring distributed leadership: Solving disagreements and negotiating consensus in a ‘leaderless’ team. Discourse Studies, 16(1), 3-24. Gumperz, J. J. (2001). Interactional Sociolinguistics: A personal perspective. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 215-228). Malden, Massachusetts, USA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Vine, B., Holmes, J., Marra, M., & Pfeifer, D. (2008). Exploring co-leadership talk through interactional sociolinguistics. Leadership, 4(3), 339-360. Wilson, N. (2009). The discourse of deputies: Communicating co-leadership in a rugby club. Te Reo, 52, 73-98. Wilson, N. (2017). Developing distributed leadership: Leadership emergence in a sporting context. In C. Ilie, & S. Schnurr (eds.), Challenging Leadership Stereotypes through Discourse (pp. 147-170). Springer Nature: Singapore Pte Ltd.
Hang Su
Do women (still) apologise more than men? A local grammar based socio-pragmatic investigation into the sex differences of apologies and their diachronic changes in spoken British English
This paper, drawing on data taken from the newly released Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al 2017), presents a local grammar based socio-pragmatic investigation into the sex differences of apologies and their diachronic changes in spoken British English. Local grammar, as discussed in previous studies (e.g. Hunston & Su 2019; Su 2017; Su & Wei 2018), is an approach to linguistic analysis and explanation which seeks to account for one pragmatic act or function only. One advantage of local grammar analysis is that it captures both lexicogrammatical and pragmatic regularities of language in use and as such offers a (perhaps more reliable) way to quantify speech act realisations (Su in press 2020). This suggests that local grammars can be useful for contrastive and/or diachronic speech act analysis, as will be demonstrated in the present study. The investigation, on the one hand, offers compelling evidence to support the observation made in previous studies that women used to apologise more than men did and, on the other hand, shows that the situation has changed, that men nowadays apologise more than women. The diachronic change might be attributed to feminism, especially the continuing attempt to combat social or sexual inequalities, which in turn suggests that social changes do have pragmatic effects on discourse practice. It is concluded that future research can employ the local grammar approach to investigate other speech acts across time, communities or contexts, which can further help to explore the association between social changes, pragmatic effects, and language in use.
References
Su, Hang. (2017). Local grammars of speech acts: An exploratory study. Journal of Pragmatics 111, 72–83.
Su, Hang. (in press 2020). Local grammars and diachronic speech act analysis: A case study of apology in the history of American English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21(1).
Love, Robbie, et al. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22(3), 319–344.
Hunston, Susan. & Hang Su. (2019). Patterns, constructions and local grammar: A case study of ‘evaluation’. Applied Linguistics 40(4), 567–593.
Jo Taylor
Discourse analysis of YouTube comments on ex-Christian deconversion narrative videos. With the rise of personalised, creator-controlled social media platforms such as YouTube, the unprecedented capability to spread information, interact with others, and potentially effect social and political change, seems to be in the hands of anyone with an electronic device connected to the internet (Tuesner, 2010). This popular discourse challenges the dominant discourses disseminated through political and religious institutions, and mainstream media (van Dijk, 2014). This research aims to: (i) deepen understanding of the relationship between dominant (political and institutional) and popular (amateur, user-created) discourse, and (ii) contribute to the growing body of online discourse analysis, particularly around strongly-held beliefs. The study takes a qualitative, multi-layered approach to the data in order to better understand the way groups situate themselves within dominant discourses, and how they interact within ideological groups, as well as with others who on the “opposing side”. Data is taken from religious (theist; primarily Christian) and anti-religious or non-religious discourse in comments sections of deconversion videos narratives – personal stories of leaving a faith-based belief system and identifying as a non-believer – on social media platform YouTube. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to situate the data within dominant discourses on religion, in a global, western, context (Fairclough, 2013). Al-Azami (2016) uses CDA and linguistic text analysis to analyse anonymous comments made on the online versions of mainstream British media articles about Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as well as face-to-face responses from focus group participants who identified with one of these three religions, or as non-religious (Al-Azami, 2016). Al-Azami draws on Hall’s (1980) model of encoding and decoding in media texts to provide a more detailed linguistic analysis, and to categorise the responses of the focus group participants: dominant-hegemonic position; negotiated code or position, and; oppositional code (Al- Azami, 2016, p. 109–110). This model is used for the analysis of the YouTube comments in the current study, to code both the responses to the message presented in the video, and to other comments in threaded discussions, in the context of the popular discourse.
References
Al-Azami, Salman. 2016. Religion in the media: A linguistic analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fairclough, Norman. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edition. Oxon/New York: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 128–138. London: Hutchinson.
Teusner, Paul Emerson. 2010. Emerging church bloggers in Australia: Prophets, priests and rulers in God’s virtual world. Doctoral thesis. RMIT University, Melbourne. van Dijk, Teun. 2014. Discourse and knowledge: A Sociocognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chien-Ju Ting
Whose language is it anyway? The discursive construction of language ownership and responsibility for Indigenous language revitalisation
Taiwan has 16 officially recognised indigenous languages and all of them are classified as endangered(Bradley, 2010; Li, 2008). The Taiwanese government has put in efforts to help revitalise the languages since the 90s, but the results have been unfruitful. Unpacking the possible ramification of how ownership of language and the responsibility of language revitalisations is perceived and how this may impact on language revitalisation, this study uses the Dialectical Relational Approach (DRA) (Fairclough, 2003, 2010, 2016)of CDS to examine how the speakers negotiate their language ownership, which eventually leads to the question on who is responsible for language revitalisation. The data of this study comes from semi-structured interviews with 11 Indigenous participants (speakers) in Taiwan. The analysis looks at how the speakers position themselves and other social actors (the society and the government) and how discourse strategies (i.e. argumentation) were used to construct language ownership and language revitalisation responsibilities. The findings suggest that, when deciding who can ‘do’ language revitalisation, only those who are deemed ‘legitimate’ by the speakers have the power to act. However, the speakers view the non-speakers as ‘potential speakers’ and thus non-speakers were also assigned language revitalisation responsibility. That is to say, by encouraging the non-speakers to become (non-native) speakers via language acquisition, the language ownership is shared. Using a DRA approach, this study shows the complexity of how the speakers negotiate language ownership and how this impacts on language revitalisation efforts.
Reference :
Bradley, D. (2010). South-East Asia, Southern China and Taiwan (China). In C. Moseley (Ed.), Atlas of the world’s languages in danger of disappearing. (3rd ed., pp. 64-73.). Paris, France: UNESCO. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. London, England: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (2nd ed.). London: Routledge Fairclough, N. (2016). A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse studies (3 ed., pp. 86-108). London: Sage. Li, P. J. (2008). The great diversity of Formosan languages. Academia Sinica., 9(3), 523-546.
Caitlin van Hoffen
Analysing metaphor and membership categorization of health and the body in the construction of political identities on Urban Dictionary
As web 2.0 took off in the early 2000s, so did Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced online dictionary with little to no regard for objectivity and a partiality for initiating controversial conversation. Urban Dictionary’s lack of rules and prioritised privacy has created a goldmine of uncensored opinion and hate just waiting to be analysed. Given the breadth and depth of Urban Dictionary data that has not yet undergone critical analysis, this study endeavoured to use that data to answer the question what would people say if given the opportunity to describe the political opposition (the ‘other’) with no censorship and complete anonymity? A corpus of Urban Dictionary definitions of the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ was built manually and then analysed using Pennebaker et al.’s Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015) software to sort the tokens into psycholinguistic categories (2015). As the category biological processes (body, ingestion, sexual and health words) scored highly in comparison to the reference corpora, it was chosen to explore further. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis was then performed, drawing on Sacks’ (1972, 1992) membership categorization analysis and Chatertis-Black’s (2004) and Cameron’s (2010) metaphor analysis methods. The results showed that supporters of the Democratic party used proportionately more health and body words in general, and also used more metaphors than the Republican supporters, who tended more towards membership categorization than metaphor. Secondly, It was found that there were distinct differences between each party’s use of metaphor and categorization towards the opposition, but although the majority of the discourses aligned with the ideologies of the definition writer’s political party of choice, there were oppressive discourses of health and disability in both ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ definitions.
References
Cameron, L., & Maslen, R. (2010). Metaphor analysis : research practice in applied linguistics, social sciences and the humanities. London, England: Equinox. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05020a&AN =aut.b11706259&site=eds-live Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05020a&AN =aut.b10996825&site=eds-live Pennebaker, J.W., Boyd, R.L., Jordan, K., & Blackburn, K. (2015). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin. DOI: 10.15781/T29G6Z Sacks, H. (1972.) On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of communication, pp. 325-345. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Sacks, H. (1992.) Lectures on conversation. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Ping-Hsuan Wang
“Why bother smuggling in marriage for the homosexuals”: Stance, framing, and the construction of reality in Facebook comments about Taiwan’s same-sex marriage bills
This study proposes a framework that integrates stance-taking (Du Bois, 2007) and framing (Goffman, 1974) to elucidate how Facebook commenters argue over two same-sex marriage (SSM) bills in Taiwan and thereby jointly construct divergent political realities. To query the true-versus-false dichotomy of (mis)information when opposing groups accuse each other of being misinformed, this paper adopts the social constructionist approach to factual accounts (Potter, 1996) to show the constructed nature of facts. It considers social media not as a one- to-many outlet of information, but a many-to-many platform for reality construction in computer-mediated communication (following Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015). After the 2017 constitutional interpretation paved the way for legalizing SSM in Taiwan, the 2018 referendum outcomes indicated resistance (7.6 million dissenting votes). Anti-SSM organizations have used the outcomes to deter legislation by appealing to people against the government’s SSM bill and drafting a bill that restricts marriage rights. To examine the debate, I anayze comments that reply to Facebook posts by one such organization that have the most responses and reactions (marked by Facebook as Most Relevant), showing the conflicting stances between pro- and anti-SSM commenters. Through stance-taking, which involves evaluating the bills, positioning vis-à-vis the government, and aligning or disaligning with each other, commenters upgrade some claims while discounting others by referencing certain information, including the definition of marriage and the effect of the referendum. The (dis)alignments connect theorizing on stance and frame by facilitating commenters’ team performances (Goffman, 1959), i.e., cooperative interactions that project varying definitions of the situation, or competing “frames,” within which events are given different meanings: the government’s bill is criticized as undemocratic for dismissing public opinion in the referendum, and the anti-SSM bill as contradictory for violating constitutional interpretation and misunderstanding lawmaking techniques. This analysis emphasizes participants’ agentive roles in shaping public discourse, thereby complementing the common top-down approach that views misinformation as manipulating the masses. Taken-for-granted concepts like marriage are negotiated. The discourse analysis of public comments illustrates reality as constituted by debates over facts in the digital age, thereby highlighting how political participation through online commenting is used to (re)frame issues.
References
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139-182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
Herring, S., & Androutsopoulos, J. (2015). Computer-mediated discourse 2.0. In D. Tannen, H. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 127-151). Malden, Mass: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Potter, J. (1996). Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric and social construction . London: Sage Publications.
Hideo Watanabe
Title: Evaluations in online newspaper editorials on the international dispute in the East China Sea
This paper explores evaluative linguistic resources used in online English newspaper editorials on the topic of disputed islands between China and Japan published in the two countries. This dispute has raised tensions between China and Japan for more than a decade and may, some argue, lead to military conflict (see Manicom, 2014). Among several types of newspaper reports, newspaper editorials shape public opinion by aiming to persuade readers of particular points of view. This paper aims to identify how evaluative linguistic resources in English construct views towards the dispute in the East China Sea between China and Japan in editorials in the two countries. To do this, a corpus of fifty editorials published between 2012 and 2016 was compiled from the Chinese newspapers, China Daily and Global Times, and the Japanese newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, the Japan Times, Japan News, and The Mainichi. In the process of data collection, the corpus tool, ProtAnt (see Anthony & Baker, 2015), is used to find representative texts in a corpus to be manually examined. With this process, a corpus of 50 editorials was compiled for the study. In order to investigate evaluative resources in the editorials, this paper draws on an appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005). Findings in this paper are discussed in relation to previous research on commentary writing in newspapers and contextual information related to the dispute.
References Anthony, L., & Baker, P. (2015). ProtAnt: A tool for analysing the prototypicality of texts. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20(3), 273-292. Manicom, J. (2014). Bridging troubled waters: China, Japan, and maritime order in the East China Sea. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Susan Whitbread
Corpus-assisted discourse analysis of opposition to GMOs in food and agriculture
The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food and agriculture is one of many issues that people argue about and take sides on publicly. Such oppositional discourse is generally analysed within a broader framework of politeness/impoliteness scholarship (Graham, 2017; Jeffries 2010).
Increasingly, web 2.0 (the interactive web) provides new ways of interacting and arguing online. Although analysis of GM discourse is not a new topic (Cook, 2004; Doolin, 2007), the relatively recent arrival of sophisticated gene editing tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 and gene drives—together with renewed government policy and regulatory interest—provides a timely opportunity to take a fresh look at the linguistic resources and strategies people bring to online discourse and debate.
To ensure an objective approach to data selection and analysis I have undertaken a corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Mautner, 2015) of online submissions to a number of Australian government reviews and inquiries into gene technologies, which have been taking place since early 2016. Submissions were downloaded and compiled into a purpose-built corpus in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al, 2014) and analysed against a global English web reference corpus (enTenTen15) in Sketch Engine. Frequency, concordance, keyword and collocation analyses were undertaken and selected texts were examined to ascertain their argumentative structures and resources.
Early results suggest that although an individual submission may not be overtly argumentative in nature, there is linguistic evidence to link back to well-established public controversies around GM.
References
Cook, G. (2004). Genetically modified language (Kindle edition). Abingdon: Routledge Doolin, B. (2007). Biotechnology discourse. Discourse Studies 9(1) pp.5-8. doi:10.1177/146144560707210 Graham, S.L. (2017) Politeness and impoliteness. In C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media, pp. 459–491. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton Jeffries, L. (2010). Opposition in discourse. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P. and Suchomel, V. (2014) The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On. Lexicography, 1. pp7-36. https://www.sketchengine.eu/wp- content/uploads/TheSketchEngine2014.pdf Mautner, G. (2015) Checks and balances: how corpus linguistics can contribute to CDA. In Wodak, R. & Meyer M. (eds) Methods of critical discourse studies (3rd edition). Los Angeles: Sage
Qingxin Xu
The presentation of self via evaluative language
This presentation reports on a study of patterns of stance-taking and evaluative style in confrontational interactions. It integrates a social semiotic view of language (e.g. Halliday, 1978), a performative view of self (e.g. Goffman, 1956), and an international view of identity work (e.g. Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). It seeks to discover if patterns in particular evaluative meaning-making choices are likely to be indexical of recognised, recurrent identity and/or persona types.
This presentation will investigate the variations in the speakers’ use of the resources for evaluative meaning making in family conflict resolution reality television programs broadcast in mainland China. These programs feature real family members currently involved in conflict (for example, contemplating divorce) who outline their concerns and/or grievances in front of a panel of family relations experts. The presentation will take three episodes of such programs as the data source, all about a similar conflict issue: wayward spouse. The programs provide for spoken language data consisting of complaints and confrontations between the family members, feedback and advice provided by panel members, and comments from online viewers. This special discourse type is rich in evaluative meaning making, identity construction and negotiation, and participants affiliation.
Drawing on the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), this presentation will investigate the evaluative language deployed by each speaker in the dataset. The analysis will mainly focus on the variation in the speakers’ use of the resources for evaluative meaning making (their evaluative styles) which could be interpreted in terms of some notion of “discursive” persona. It will also attend to the recurrences in the speakers’ use of evaluative language which might correlate with features traditionally associated with social identity – e.g. gender, marital status, age, and generation. Accordingly, the presentation will discuss if it is possible to interpret any such recurrent evaluative styles as indicating there were certain conventionalised ways of “presenting self” in such contexts – i.e. culturally recurrent styles for verbally enacting “personhood” in such contexts of family dispute.
Reference:
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as a Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. University Park Press. Martin, J., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave.
Yanli Zou
First Person Pronouns in Chinese EFL Writers’ Academic Discourse: Phraseology, Discourse Function and Writer identity
There is a substantial tradition of research that uses investigations of the first person pronouns (FPPs) I and we in academic discourse to cast light both on the interaction between writer and the imagined reader and on the self-representation of the writer (e.g. Ivanič 1998; Kuo 1999; Harwood 2007). Classroom instruction in ESL/EFL contexts, however, tends to neglect teaching these uses in favour of achieving objectivity in academic discourse by avoiding personal pronouns (Hyland 2002).
Based on a self-built learner corpus (456 graduation dissertations written by Chinese EFL learners, 419,341,3 tokens in total), this paper reports research that explores the phraseology and pragmatic functions of the two first person pronouns, ‘I’, ‘We’, and the verbs collocating with them. This study classifies the verbs and uses this classification to propose a set of functions associated with the two pronouns. A total of 3459 phrases comprising a pronoun and a verb are investigated. It is found that the phrases comprising ‘I’, ‘We’ and the verbs collocating with them are used for the following four textual functions: organizing text, reporting research, interpreting research and construing the knowledge community. It is identified that these discourse functions are mostly presented by seven phrasal types:
1. I + base form verb e.g. I think 2. I + -ed form verb e.g. I found 3. we + ability modal + verb e.g. we can see 4. (as) we (all) know (that) 5. I / we + volition modal + base form verb e.g. I will explain 6. I / we + have + -en form verb e.g. we have discussed 7. we + obligation modal + verb e.g. we must learn
Three writer identities proposed in this study are: Self as Reporter, Self as Text Organiser and Self as Evaluator. A correlation between the identified discourse functions and writer identities is observed in this study. This observation helps to pinpoint writer identity presented by the FPPs through the phraseology and their corresponding discourse functions. The findings of this study may provide some new insights into the teaching and learning of academic writing in EAP classrooms.
References Harwood, N. (2007). Political scientists on the functions of personal pronouns in their writing: An interview-based study of ‘I’ and ‘We’. Text & Talk. 27(1): 27-54. Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics. 34 (8): 1091-1112. Kuo. C.-H. (1999). The use of personal pronouns: Role relationships in scientific journal articles. English for Specific Purposes. 18(2): 121-138.
Ivanić, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.