Volume 28, Issue 4

Televideo cybersex provides a unique example of the ways meanings are instantiated, identities constructed, and relationships negotiated across different semiotic modes. This article explores the role of verbal messages in these multimodal exchanges, examining the specific interactional functions they perform. Text, it is argued, plays a rather unique role in this particular kind of interaction. Unlike ordinary face-to-face conversation, in which the body (posture, gestures, gaze) usually plays more of an ancillary role, in televideo cybersex, the bodily performance is primary, with verbal messages functioning to contextualize physical actions. Text is used to help increase the sense of ‘presence’ participants feel, to regulate the rhythm of the unfolding interaction, to help manage the orderly exchange of information, and to create narrative frames within which bodily displays can be interpreted and made coherent.

Five years apart, Hariman (1995) and Fairclough (2000) produced major theoretical statements about political language and style. Their work grew out of different intellectual traditions and took on different subject matters. Hariman, drawing on the textual criticism model of American rhetorical studies, defined style as a cultural repertoire of persuasive techniques that can work across texts, media, institutions, and other modes of communication. He analyzed four major styles—realist, republican, courtly, and bureaucratic—that have had significant literary exposition and political effect. Fairclough, writing from the tradition of critical discourse analysis, focused more narrowly on the political style of Tony Blair and New Labour, and studied whether New Labour represented an emergent new language distinct from older instantiations of Labour Party rhetoric. Important for this analysis is Fairclough's distinction between political style and genre, which motivated a methodology combining theoretical analysis and corpus analysis. We show how the same combination of methods can illuminate Hariman's theory, particularly in respect to the problem its theoretical sophistication presents for application through close reading of individual texts. The corpus study validates or refines many of Hariman's central claims, and provides one model for better coordination of two important programs of research on political discourse.

In this article, I take the view that it is through local management of talk that knowledge and competence can be modified, and it is through longitudinal participation in the same speech exchange system that further efficiency can be achieved in the next local management of talk. Thus, a longitudinal understanding needs to be situated in local moments, and the interpretation of local moments is inadequate as an account of the participants' perspectives without taking into consideration their longitudinal experience. Given that this line of research has not been much explored within conversation analysis (CA), the current study attempts to look at sequence organization as both a local and longitudinal interactional accomplishment. The data come from a larger long-term study of interactional competence development among novice pharmacists in the United States, and include 21 naturally occurring patient consultations performed by one pharmacy intern. Conversation analysis of her interaction with patients over the course of two months reveals how she changed with respect to (a) the ordering of actions, (b) the organization of openings and advice sequences, and (c) the transitioning from one action to the next. The article concludes with implications for CA and research on workplace socialization.

In this article, I first propose a methodology for the analysis of closing arguments in criminal trials, an understudied linguistic genre, that can be used to expose how lawyers take the same defendant, victim, and evidence and linguistically create opposing discursive representations of the case. Using the theoretical insights of Van Leeuwen (2002), Halliday (1994), and Huckin (2002), I critically examine how the main social actors are referred to, how the processes or actions those actors took part in are referenced, and what topics are included and silenced by each side to see how lawyers are systematically creating different representations of reality. Using the analysis of the arguments presented in a sexual abuse case, I show that the lawyers in this particular case are constructing different models of the case not by contradicting each other but through their control of what is included in their argument and how the social actors and their actions are depicted.