Swear words are highly colloquial expressions that have the capacity to signal the speaker's affective states, i.e., to display the speaker's feelings with respect to a certain stimulus. For this reason, swear words are often called 'expressives'. Which linguistic mechanisms allow swear words display affective states, and, more importantly, how can such 'affective content' be characterized in a theory of meaning? Even though research on expressive meaning has produced models that integrate the affective aspects of swear words in a compositional (...) framework, there is extensive evidence that swear words cannot be assigned a single or stable affective interpretation across contexts. For example, even though expletive adjectives (e.g., 'damn'), particularistic insults (e.g., 'bastard') and slurs (e.g., 'wop') typically express (and elicit) negatively valenced affective states, they can also be interpreted positively in some contexts. Thus, inspired in recent developments in formal sociolinguistics, I propose an 'indexical' approach to affective meaning. Under this approach, an affective expression is associated with a set of affective qualities, anyone of which may emerge at a given context depending on the interpreter's prior assumptions about the speaker's affective states and/or relation with the target of the swear word. To define this set, also called 'indexical field', I will use the dimensions pleasure, arousal and dominance, standardly employed in cognitive psychology to characterize and measure affective episodes. In this dissertation, thus, the affective meaning of an expression is given by the set of affective states it typically conveys within a linguistic community, but its interpretation at a given context is established by taking into account the interpreter's prior assumptions about the speaker's affective states and/or attitudes with respect to the target of the affective expression. (shrink)

In Cognitive Gadgets, Heyes seeks to unite evolutionary psychology with cultural evolutionary theory. Although we applaud this unifying effort, we find it falls short of considering how culture itself evolves to produce indigenous psychologies fitted to particular environments. We focus on mentalizing and autobiographical memory as examples of how socialization practices embedded within culture build cognitive adaptations.

We examine two connectionist networks—a fractal learning neural network (FLNN) and a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN)—that are trained to process center-embedded symbol sequences. Previous work provides evidence that connectionist networks trained on infinite-state languages tend to form fractal encodings. Most such work focuses on simple counting recursion cases (e.g., anbn), which are not comparable to the complex recursive patterns seen in natural language syntax. Here, we consider exponential state growth cases (including mirror recursion), describe a new training scheme that seems (...) to facilitate learning, and note that the connectionist learning of these cases has a continuous metamorphosis property that looks very different from what is achievable with symbolic encodings. We identify a property—ragged progressive generalization—which helps make this difference clearer. We suggest two conclusions. First, the fractal analysis of these more complex learning cases reveals the possibility of comparing connectionist networks and symbolic models of grammatical structure in a principled way—this helps remove the black box character of connectionist networks and indicates how the theory they support is different from symbolic approaches. Second, the findings indicate the value of future, linked mathematical and empirical work on these models—something that is more possible now than it was 10 years ago. (shrink)

The psychiatric interview plays a critical role in clinical assessment and therapy. Problems with assessment reliability and validity that were apparent in nosological and diagnostic discrepancies plagued the field of psychiatry historically. Technical approaches including structured interviews were developed to address these problems. Although these approaches decreased diagnostic variance, they focused narrowly on eliciting signs and symptoms conforming to previously agreed diagnostic categories, necessarily restricting the range and richness of experiences and narratives that are elicited. This restriction inhibits the utility (...) of assessment in furthering the interpersonal rapport and exploration that is essential to the task of therapy. The author reviews critiques of technical approaches to psychiatric assessment and highlights critical, often unexamined, epistemological assumptions and questions. In light of these critiques, he proposes a phenomenological approach to psychiatric assessment focused on narratives that situate particular experiences in the broader life context. In this approach the assessor functions as a participant observer, relying on the same empathic skills that inform effective therapy. It is argued that without over turning the advances in assessment reliability gained through technical approaches to the psychiatric interview, a phenomenological approach can illuminate, enrich, and broaden psychiatric assessment, increasing its effectiveness in psychopathological understanding and in therapy. (shrink)

If public self-expression is a crucial feature of democracy, how might it work on the democratic – or at least, mass – medium par excellence, television? Television talk shows often allow ‘ordinary’ participants the opportunity to express themselves, i.e. deploy identities, feelings and opinions, presumably to further their own ends. This article uses speech act theory and Bakhtinian genre theory to analyze the talk on Jan Publiek, a Flemish talk show. This close reading helps to determine how two of the (...) 20 ‘ordinary’ participants co-created shifting and even contradictory identities with other participants, the host, the producers, the conventions of television talk shows and larger discourses such as those of gender and class. In these two cases, the participants seem mostly to fail in employing the medium of Jan Publiekto achieve their stated aims. The authors claim that while discourses may never be completely transparent, their means of functioning can still be better understood. All participants of television – producers, actors, viewers, media scholars – can benefit from the kind of media literacy to which this article contributes. (shrink)

Family research has mostly concentrated on relationships between parents and children or between women and men. On the other hand, feminist studies have explained problems within woman-to-woman relationships deriving from patriarchy. This article focuses on problematic adult woman-to-woman family relationships. More specifically, it discusses two women's ambivalent emotions narrated and experienced in their problematic female family relationships. The authors suggest that feminist studies should take into account culturally dominant narratives interlinking female subjectivity and responsibility over the private sphere. Ambivalence arises (...) in situations where individuals encounter contradictorily structured power hierarchies, i.e. simultaneously trying to follow the rules of kinship order and the desire for agency. (shrink)

Corpus linguistic techniques are increasingly being used by discourse analysts whose interest is in the ‘critical’ issues of inequality and the representation of disadvantaged groups. This paper reports an extension of these approaches, where concordancing was used to analyse a corpus of 144 transcribed oral history interviews in order to explore the issue of constraint on the speakers’ goals and experiences. The analysis is of the expression I couldn't, which is contextualised with reference to research on negation and modality in (...) authentic discourse contexts. This paper explores the ways in which I couldn't is deployed to refer to constraints of three main kinds: physical, structural and cultural. The approach illustrates the advantage of maintaining an analytical distinction between the discursive and the material, so as to explore the interplay between them. (shrink)

This article presents, discusses and analyses data from a Danish empirical study of authentic job interviews. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, as well as other fields, the author explores the relationship between success in job interviews and communicative style. The recontextualization of lifeworld resources is approached through both qualitative and quantitative analyses of spoken language. The author demonstrates that certain communicative styles and recontextualizations formed by a combination of lifeworld and job-related perspectives are more successful in job interviews; (...) on the basis of sociolinguistic evidence, he argues that these styles and recontextualizations are products of general processes of socialization rather than products of formal education. (shrink)

In this article I examine the differences between broadcast political interviews in commercial and public service broadcasters in Spain. The study focuses in particular on political interviews broadcast on ‘morning show’ type programmes. The analysis distinguishes the characteristics that make up the news interview turn-taking system in order to explore the degree to which information and entertainment come together in political interviews broadcast on morning shows. The results show, primarily, that political interviews shown on public service broadcasters’ morning shows adhere (...) to the journalistic standards of neutralism and adversarialness. This is precisely how they strive to make the politician publicly accountable. In political interviews broadcast by commercial broadcasters, however, these rules are followed intermittently. The aim of these interviews appears to be different: to penetrate politicians’ personal sphere with the discernible purpose of entertaining. These differences reflect different interview styles which, in turn, reveal different conceptions of journalism, politics and society. This investigation utilizes the research tools developed in conversation analysis. (shrink)

The theoretical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been somewhat neglected. In this paper, however, I shall discuss narrativity specifically with regard to pictorial objects in order to clarify how pictorial storytelling may be based on the activation of mentally stored action and scene schemas. Approaches from cognitive psychology, such as the work of Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals (...) and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Mandler, Jean Matter. 1984. Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. London/hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Schank, Roger C. 1995. Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, suggest that cognition crucially depends on the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata, that is, narrative structures, which may occur at various levels of abstraction. These schemas incorporate generalized knowledge about event sequences, such as the order in which specific events will take place; causal, enabling, or conventionalized relations between these events, and what kind of events occur in certain action sequences. There also are scene schemas that are characterized by spatial rather than temporal relations. Further kinds of schemas seem also to play a decisive role. Drawing upon considerations from schema and script theory, I will focus on some concrete examples of pictorial narration, more specifically depictions of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, where narrative schema structures become involved and, indeed, the comprehensibility of the pictures as such presuppose mental script representations. (shrink)

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

This paper explores a semiotic notion of body as starting point for bridging biosemiotic with social semiotic theory. The cornerstone of the argument is that the social semiotic criticism of the classic view of meaning as double articulation can support the criticism of language-centrism that lies at the foundation of biosemiotics. Besides the pragmatic epistemological advantages implicit in a theoretical synthesis, I argue that this brings a semiotic contribution to philosophy of mind broadly. Also, it contributes to overcoming the polemic (...) in linguistics between, loosely put, cognitive universalism and cultural relativism. This possibility is revealed by the recent convergence of various semiotic theories towards a criticism of the classic notion of meaning as double articulation. In biosemiotics, the interest to explicate meaning as multiply articulated stems from the construal of Umwelt as relying on the variety of sense perception channels and semiotic systems that a species has at its disposal. Recently, social semiotics developed an unexplored interest for embodiment by starting from the other end, namely the consideration of the modal heterogeneity of meaning. To bridge these notions, I employ the cognitive semantic notion of embodiment and Mittelberg’s cognitive semiotic notion of exbodiment. In light of these, I explore the possible intricacies between the biosemiotic notion of primary modeling system and concepts referring to preconceptual structures for knowledge organization stemming from cognitive linguistics. Further, Mittelberg’s concept of exbodiment allows for a construal of meaning articulation as mediation between the exbodying and embodying directions of mind. (shrink)

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) is a weekly, half-hour long session in the British House of Commons, which gives backbench Members of Parliament (MPs) and the Leader of the Opposition (LO) the opportunity to ask the Prime Minister (PM) questions on any topic relating to the government’s policies and actions. The discourse at PMQs is often described as adversarial (see Bull & Wells 2011) and in this paper I will show how the notion of impoliteness can be applied to both the (...) questions and the answers which make up the session. Through the detailed analysis of six sessions of PMQs I will also demonstrate that PMQs is also a source of polite linguistic behaviour of the sort described in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. Comparisons between Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s speech styles will also be drawn. (shrink)

This article sets out a framework for a language-oriented analysis of sensationalism in news media. Sensationalism is understood here as a discourse strategy of ‘packaging’ information in news headlines in such a way that news items are presented as more interesting, extraordinary and relevant than might be the case. Unlike previous content analyses of sensational coverage, this study demonstrates how sensationalism is instantiated through specific illocutions, semantic macrostructures, narrative formulas, evaluation parameters, and interpersonal and textual devices. Examples are drawn from (...) a corpus of headlines of the ‘most read’ articles in the online outlet of the British mid-market tabloid Daily Mail compiled in early 2012. Sensationalized instances are identified through surveys and focus group discussions and subsequently analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study is located within the context of media scholarship on news values and current trends in journalism. (shrink)

This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race (...) and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies. (shrink)

This article explores and critically evaluates the potential contribution to discourse studies of topic modelling, a group of machine learning methods which have been used with the aim of automatically discovering thematic information in large collections of texts. We critically evaluate the utility of the thematic grouping of texts into ‘topics’ emerging from a large collection of online patient comments about the National Health Service in England. We take two approaches to this, one inspired by methods adopted in existing topic (...) modelling research and the other using more established methods of discourse analysis. In the study, we compare the insights produced by each approach and consider the extent to which the automatically generated topics might be of use to discourse analysts attempting to organise and study sizeable datasets. We found that the topic modelling approach was able to group texts into ‘topics’ that were truly thematically coherent with a mixed degree of success, while the more traditional approach to discourse analysis consistently provided a more nuanced perspective on the data which was ultimately closer to the ‘reality’ of the texts it contains. This study thus highlights issues concerning the use of topic modelling and offers recommendations and caveats to researchers employing such approaches to studying discourse in the future. (shrink)

This article outlines a ‘feminist critical discourse analysis’ at the nexus of critical discourse analysis and feminist studies, with the aim of advancing rich and nuanced analyses of the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining hierarchically gendered social orders. This is especially pertinent in the present time; it is recognized that operations of gender ideology and institutionalized power asymmetries between groups of women and men are complexly intertwined with other social identities and are variable across cultures. (...) Gender ideology and power asymmetries in late modern societies also have become increasingly more subtle and, at the same time, as a result of backlash against feminism, have re-emerged with a new blatancy. The article offers a rationale for highlighting a feminist perspective in CDA, and proposes five key principles for a feminist discourse praxis. In concluding, a brief analysis and discussion of some data on postfeminism is provided, illustrating some of the current concerns in feminist critical discourse analysis. (shrink)

Narrative discourse offers a viable perspective on sociocultural, psychological and professional dimensions of the self. Following Labov's early definition of evaluation, current studies explore linguistic and paralinguistic evaluative devices which participants in discourse use to present and construct their self. Organizing metaphors are a global evaluative device often used in broadcast personal stories to summarize local lexical and syntactic repetition. These metaphors constitute succinct self-portraits which facilitate interpersonal communication in a speech situation which is limited in time, and lacking in (...) kinesic cues and shared knowledge. The present psycholinguistic study further explores the functions of organizing metaphors in addicts' broadcast stories, a narrative subgenre which until now has not been studied. Qualitative data analysis shows that addicts use various evaluative devices and `conspiracies' of devices when they construct their detailed self-portraits. We also identified organizing metaphors which summarized the detailed narrative portrait, and constituted succinct versions of the addicted self. (shrink)

Even the simplest narratives combine multiple strands of information, integrating different characters and their actions by expressing multiple perspectives of events. We examined the emergence of referential shift devices, which indicate changes among these perspectives, in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). Sign languages, like spoken languages, mark referential shift grammatically with a shift in deictic perspective. In addition, sign languages can mark the shift with a point or a movement of the body to a specified spatial location in the three-dimensional space (...) in front of the signer, capitalizing on the spatial affordances of the manual modality. We asked whether the use of space to mark referential shift emerges early in a new sign language by comparing the first two age cohorts of deaf signers of NSL. Eight first-cohort signers and ten second-cohort signers watched video vignettes and described them in NSL. Narratives were coded for lexical (use of words) and spatial (use of signing space) devices. Although the cohorts did not differ significantly in the number of perspectives represented, second-cohort signers used referential shift devices to explicitly mark a shift in perspective in more of their narratives. Furthermore, while there was no significant difference between cohorts in the use of non-spatial, lexical devices, there was a difference in spatial devices, with second-cohort signers using them in significantly more of their narratives. This suggests that spatial devices have only recently increased as systematic markers of referential shift. Spatial referential shift devices may have emerged more slowly because they depend on the establishment of fundamental spatial conventions in the language. While the modality of sign languages can ultimately engender the syntactic use of three-dimensional space, we propose that a language must first develop systematic spatial distinctions before harnessing space for grammatical functions. (shrink)

This paper examines an aspect of the grammar-interaction interface with respect to how participants orient to intra-turn phrasal unit boundaries as a locus that has interactional import for turn and sequence organization in Korean conversation. Phrasal unit boundaries in Korean serve as a space within a turn in which the speaker of the turn in-progress invites the recipient to acknowledge the speaker's point expressed up-to-that-point and collaboratively display his/her understanding thereof. In a sequentially and topically 'ripe' context, such unit boundaries (...) often constitute places where more active participation on the part of the recipient is invited in the form of collaborative completion in which the recipient co-constructs the primary speaker's on-going turn. Phrasal unit boundaries also provide interactional resources which the speaker may exploit to sequentially delete out a problem in talk, e.g., by a sort of tying operation in which a subsequently added phrasal unit ties back to the speaker's previous utterance to the effect that the intervening talk containing a problem is canceled out by way of being shown to have been an interruption of the speaker's turn in-progress. This practice points to an aspect of the way in which the 'agglutinative' grammatical process involving the use of phrasal units shapes interactional patterns as observed in the course of organizing turns/sequences and managing problems in talk. (shrink)

This article criticises David Lewis's attempt to use his philosophical analysis of convention to reconcile the picture of languages as model-theoretic objects and the picture of languages as human social activity.

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. A relatively overlooked means of expressing a stance, however, is through a Noun Complement structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause. This pattern allows a writer to front-load attitude meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation of the proposition which follows. In this article, we explore the (...) frequencies, forms and functions of this structure in a corpus of 160 research articles across eight disciplines totalling 1.7 million words. Developing a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, we show that the structure is not only widely used to express author comment and evaluation, but that it exhibits considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines. (shrink)

In the context of the endangered situation and revitalization of Sámi in a Northern Norwegian local community, this study discusses various aspects of responsibility that are construed and involved in the encounter of a local informant and the researcher in a research interview. The informant uses storytelling as an artful and elaborate means to position himself, to assess his own and other community members’ responsibility for their endangered heritage language, and to involve the researcher in his account. The analysis shows (...) how storytelling operationalizes different social role relations, and how the informant uses the meaning potential of the interview situation as a resource to communicate his view on who are accountable and who should acknowledge their respective responsibilities for Sámi language use and revitalization. (shrink)

This article examines the nature and structure of witness and defendant narrative accounts in the evidential portions of courtroom trials, using the O.J. Simpson, Oklahoma Bombers and Louise Woodward trials as a database. The article proposes a means of distinguishing narrative from non-narrative accounts, using Labov's definition of the `minimal narrative' as a starting point, and puts forward a modified model of narrative structure. A range of narrative structures are explored, and the model is used to analyse a series of (...) representative example narratives taken from the trial data. Different types of narrative fragmentation produced by multiple tellers of the same narrative are also examined, along with the frequent disjunction between `tellers' and `knowers'. Lastly, the article explores the relationship between narrative structures and narrative fragmentation and the discourse strategies used by lawyers in direct and cross-examination. (shrink)

Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in the different media are not the same. Print headlines are mostly contiguous with the story to which they refer. Broadcast headlines, however, are often at some temporal distance from their associated news item. In the print medium every story carries a headline. In broadcast news only some items are headlined. And yet, whereas the linguistic properties of print headlines have been much studied, almost (...) no attention has been given to broadcast headlines. This article uses a corpus of headlines from BBC television news to explore their discursive form and function. It isolates a basic structure of {heading } for television news headlines and delineates a repertoire of patterns through which the structure is realised. In doing so, it suggests that the core function of television news headlines is to engage with the audience by projecting aspects of their news values forward through the programme. (shrink)

For the past thirty years, Critical Discourse Studies has been consolidating as a form of linguistically-oriented, critical social research which is characterized by a deep interest in actual social issues and forms of inequality, such as racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and sexism, both in terms of the asymmetries between participants in discourse events and their unequal capacity to control how texts are produced, distributed and consumed. In parallel, since its coinage in Kimberlé Crenshaw's African American feminist critique of race and sex (...) discrimination, intersectionality has been increasingly taken up on a global scale by scholars and practitioners alike, becoming a major feminist way of conceptualizing the relation between several forms of discrimination and oppression, to be analysed as simultaneous and multiplicative experiences. This Special Issue aims to enquire into the potential convergence between the critical discursive and intersectional approaches as theory, method and practice for the exploration of the crossroads of inequalities and oppression. This may contribute to the development of a critical research framework that enables the acknowledgment of the profound ways in which discursively, institutionally and/or structurally constructed sociocultural categorizations interact and produce different kinds of societal inequalities and unjust social relations. These, in turn, can be analysed in terms of the mutual and intertwined processes of resistance and transformation that arise out of them. Bringing together diverse contributions with a shared critical discursive and intersectional outlook, this Special Issue hopes to offer new theoretical and methodological insights for thinking through diversity in the light of present and future dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and inequality. The six contributions operationalize the intersectional approach as theory, method and/or practice and incorporate it with a CDS perspective, providing a flavour of what a critical and intersectional discursive engagement with different and dynamic identity and power configurations on a global scale can achieve. (shrink)

Existe un tipo particular de usos de términos discriminatorios en el que las emociones negativas típicamente asociadas a él no se hallan de hecho presentes. Aun así, lo incorrecto o inadecuado sigue resonando en esos usos. Este tipo de ``uso distante'' resulta interesante per se, en cuanto fenómeno conversacional rara vez advertido. Sin embargo, también presta apoyo a una aproximación a los términos discriminatorios basada en el concepto sociolingüístico de ``registro'', de la cual se sigue esta relación entre emociones e (...) incorrección. Este trabajo examina algunos tipos de usos distantes y sus rasgos esenciales, y considera cómo el registro sociolingüístico de los términos discriminatorios puede dar cuenta de ellos. (shrink)

Linguistic justice is concerned with the just way of politically regulating linguistic diversity. Today, the linguistic-justice debate may be differentiated into three different domains: interlinguistic justice, intralinguistic justice, and global linguistic justice. Each of these domains has, to a significant extent, attracted different authors and debates, although the normative system underlying them is structurally similar. This introductory piece aims to provide context for our symposium dedicated to linguistic justice and migration by, first, giving an overview of linguistic justice, second, linking (...) linguistic justice to migration, and, finally, providing an overview of the various papers in the symposium, situating them against the background developed in the first two sections. (shrink)

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the (...) idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)

This study examines how Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors linguistically construct favorable selves – that is, selves that they want to present to others – in stories about events where they may feel survivors’ guilt. While discourse analysts started studying Holocaust narratives in the past decade, the field has not yet investigated narratives from Hiroshima survivors, nor has guilt been extensively investigated linguistically. In narrating those episodes where guilt can be attributed, Hiroshima survivors use various prosodic and syntactic devices to maintain (...) their favorable selves by describing their powerlessness in a chaotic situation. Focusing on the telling of the same experience by three different survivors, the analysis reveals that narrators use various linguistic strategies to protect their positions as moral persons. The study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic management of emotion, especially survivors’ guilt. Furthermore, linguistic examination of Hiroshima stories brings a discourse perspective to the study of global tragedies. (shrink)

Building on a view of both narration and argumentation as dynamic concepts, this paper considers ways of assessing the credibility of narrative arguments constructed in empirical examples of conversational discourse. I argue that the key in any such exercise is to pay close attention to both structural and pragmatic details, particularly how conversational storytelling gets embedded in the surrounding discourse and how the way this is discursively accomplished vis-à-vis the narrators’ multilayered audience may be reflective of their argumentative goals.

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating the audience to enhance (...) fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking. (shrink)

The news media form major sources of information to the general public in matters of science and health. And yet journalists and experts differ in what they consider as newsworthy and relevant. This article analyses in detail a current affair interview with a health expert reporting on a new research on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Applying Bamberg’s three-level model for positioning analysis, the interview is searched for the stories that speakers introduce, attend to their embedding in the design of questions (...) and answers and examine how their tellers are positioned therein as knowledgeable regarding ADHD. The narratives identified are shown to enable the adopting and shifting between various expert positions including that of the scientific researcher, the advice-giving expert and the more specific identity of the public health clinician. Shifts between these positions are shown to reflect the claims and counter-claims that the interviewee and interviewers are making and backing. These findings are discussed for their implications regarding the use of narratives in presenting science to media audiences. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

In this paper, I oppose the common assumption that visual descriptions in prose fiction are imageable by virtue of perceptual mimesis. Based on introspection as well as convergent support from cognitive science and other disciplines, I argue that visual description (and the mental imagery it elicits), unlike narrative (and the mental imagery it elicits), often stands in no positive relation to perceptual mimesis because it lacks a structural counterpart in perceptual experience. I present an alternative way of defining the kind (...) of mental imagery elicited by visual descriptions, and propose a number of text variables underlying the imageability or non-imageability of any such description. (shrink)

Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur "nigger" is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act.. Indeed, the very taboo nature of these words makes discussion of them typically prohibited or frowned upon. Although it is true that the utterance of slurs is illegitimate and derogatory in (...) most contexts, sufficient evidence suggests that slurs are not always or exclusively used to derogate. In fact, slurs are frequently picked up and appropriated by the very in-group members that the slur was originally intended to target. This might be done, for instance, as a means for like speakers to strengthen in-group solidarity. So an investigation into the meaning and use of slurs can give us crucial insight into how words can be used with such derogatory impact, and how they can be turned around and appropriated as vehicles of rapport in certain contexts among in-group speakers. In this essay I will argue that slurs are best characterized as being of a mixed descriptive/expressive type. Next, I will review the most influential accounts of slurs offered thus far, explain their shortcomings, then provide a new analysis of slurs and explain in what ways it is superior to others. Finally, I suggest that a family-resemblance conception of category membership can help us achieve a clearer understanding of the various ways in which slurs, for better or worse, are actually put to use in natural language discourse. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the importance of wonder in human flourishing and is orientated towards the dynamics between the two, but with an emphasis on how the former is important for illuminating the latter. It begins with a preliminary sketch of both wonder and human flourishing and subsequently moves on to highlight three aspects of human flourishing: 1) ‘Individuality’, 2) ‘Relations’ and 3) ‘The political’, and why these play to wonderment.

Since the mid-twentieth century, treatments of code switching and associated practices have converged toward understanding linguistic hybridity and diverse sociality amid accelerating globalization of peoples, social groups, and commodified languages. This chapter reviews four traditions of code switching research that suggest divergent theoretical perspectives on language and identity. The first, established in the 1960s within the ethnography of communication, situates code switching as a product of local speech community identities. Research on language and political economy in the 1980s initiated a (...) second tradition, which analyzes language alternation with reference to the contrastive nation-state identities constituted through processes of nationalism. A third tradition, influenced by the discursive turn in the 1990s, views code switching as a resource in urban minority communities for the performance of multicultural and interethnic identities. A fourth tradition, developed since the millennium, focuses on hybrid identities as the social corollary to the language mixing brought about through accelerated globalization. (shrink)