Volume 29, Issue 4

This article explores how language ideologies about monolingualism and bilingualism are reproduced and challenged by the media in a Southwestern border community in the United States. We investigate the particular ways in which these language ideologies are constructed and reconstructed through lexicogrammatical and discursive choices that evaluate and position languages and their users. Through an appraisal analysis (Martin and White, The language of evaluation: The appraisal framework in English, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) of local newspaper articles, we show how competing language ideologies are negotiated in discourse through a configuration of linguistic resources including: concession, modality, and polarity. These discursive configurations construct different evaluations of languages and their users; monolingual ideologies are associated to individual responsibility, whereas multilingual/bilingual ideologies are associated to social responsibility. The article points to the ways in which the print media in this community reproduces the dominant monolingual English-only ideology at the same time it opens up spaces for multilingual language ideologies.

The current study presents the results of a discourse analysis research on the problem–solution pattern of textual organization (henceforth, the PS pattern) in a sample of English written newspaper editorials and op-eds. My main goal is to characterize the linguistic realization of the PS pattern in written opinion journalism and to describe its textual variations. The PS pattern is analyzed here as part of a wider framework, Tirkkonen-Condit's (Argumentative text structure and translation, Univ. Tyväskylä, 1985) method of textual description, specifically designed to outline the global structure of argumentative texts. The application of Tirkkonen-Condit's method involves the dissection of texts into PS sequences and communicative acts. Both the PS sequences and the individualized communicative acts are assigned an illocutionary value and are analyzed in terms of the rhetorical relations holding between them. Findings reveal that the texts analyzed are complex networks of functionally arranged and interrelated PS sequences whose unmarked order can be purposely subverted with emphatic aims. In addition, an illocutionary and rhetorical analysis of each one of the PS textual components reveals different ways of addressing the reader in editorials and op-eds.

This article aims to contribute to the study of professional discourse by focusing on the role of written texts in complex communication processes. It also aims to contribute to the field of social semiotics by problematizing the concept of grammatical metaphor, framing it multimodally and interactionally. The case in focus is a risk analysis meeting which is characterized by explicit definitions of goals and methods: the objective of risk analysis is to identify and evaluate potential risks that might threaten a project. However, the activity also has other goals, such as finding common ground and developing a joint perspective in the project group. Managing these divergent agendas is possible given the technique developed and the tools used: small pieces of paper, pens, a whiteboard, whiteboard markers, and oral conversation. In the choice of resources for different purposes, materiality is crucial. Because of the affordances of the small notes and the thick ink marker, the individual risks are thingified at an early stage, while oral conversation is used for problematization and negotiation. In the minutes, the construal of risks as things is preserved and contributes to the reification and thus technification of similar meanings in the social practice of the organization.

This study asserts that empowerment, as a type of social or psychological transformation/change, can be evidenced within interaction. Using conversation analysis and its orientation to describing practical actions and activities in interaction, this study examines sequences in which a caller to a peer-run warm line expresses hesitancy and/or uncertainty regarding adoption of a self-generated remedy to one's ongoing troubles. A prototypical sequential pattern emerges, with call takers subsequently encouraging callers to do this reported action/remedy, and callers verbally committing, without hesitancy or uncertainty, to doing this action. In a few instances, a negotiation ensues, concerning adoption of a version of the prior sequence as one in which the callers are seen as primarily responsible for the decision and commitment to do that particularly beneficial action. Implications for additional discursive approaches to empowerment are also discussed.

This article explores the intertextual nature (as defined by Kristeva) of linguistic markers used to denote quotations ( quotation markers ) in the 1999 Israeli televised electoral campaign. Three kinds of quotation markers were identified: source markers (references, qualifiers), describing the source; speech markers (lexical, graphical), attesting to speech production; and circumstance markers , describing the context (time, place, participants, background) in which the quotation was produced. It was found that, in addition to their overt role as references to the quotation, quotation markers also encode the ideological and argumentative value attributed by the parties to the quotations and their sources. Source markers serve to affiliate the sources with the positively regarded “we” group, to exclude them, or to establish them as neutral; speech and circumstance markers serve to affiliate quotations with the positively regarded ideological text of the party, to exclude them, or to mark them as neutral. Moreover, these three markers serve to reinforce the reliability of quotations that fulfill a corroborative role. These values are encoded by the mere presence of the markers, as well as by such devices as variation in the frequency of the markers, their content, emotive connotations, grammatical forms, and incorporation in recurring patterns.