Volume 33, Issue 1

Video blogs are a form of CMC (computer-mediated communication) that feature speakers who talk into a camera, and thereby produce a viewer-directed performance. Pointing gestures are part of the resources that the medium affords to design vlogs for the absent recipients. Based on a corpus of 40 vlogs, this research categorizes different kinds of common pointing actions in vlogs. Close analysis reveals the role multimodal factors such as gaze and body posture play along with deictic gestures and verbal reference in the production of a viewer-directed monologue. Those instances where vloggers point at referents outside the video frame, e.g., elements of the Web site that represent alternative modes of communication, such as written comments, receive particular attention in the present study, as they require mutual knowledge about the shared virtual context the vlog is situated in.

This study of gambling discourse focuses on how the governing party in Singapore makes use of the discursively constructed juxtaposing identities of social and problem gamblers as a symbolic resource for reaching its objective of public governance. To this end, the present article studies four gamblers' spoken testimonials recorded for a campaign launched by the Singapore National Council on Problem Gambling. The data were analyzed in relation to process types, appraisal resources, and code choice. It is found that via different linguistic means, the gamblers, as represented in the discourse, perform a range of identities, thereby foregrounding specific aspects of their self. Examples include the social gamblers' frequent use of relational processes to offer descriptive statements on the definition of gambling and the problem gamblers' self-evaluation of unethical behavior associated with gambling through intensive use of social sanction judgment markers. The results lead to the conclusion that the juxtaposition of the identities between social and problem gamblers is used symbolically by the government to construct the stigmatized identity of “problematic gamblers” so as to monitor its citizens' demeanor in the midst of legitimizing casino gambling.

We report findings from a discourse analysis study situated within a discursive psychology framework that examined how undergraduate nutrition science students took up a computer-mediated communication task in which they were asked to write about what they learned after attending a lecture. Students made learning displays by orienting to the lecture as a news receipt and making assessments of this new information in variable ways. Some did this by marking an extreme change of state through surprise tokens and realization patterns, functioning to position the new information as so extreme that anyone would have learned something new. Others displayed more neutral assessments of the information or claimed no change of state at all, functioning to distance themselves from having learned anything. Both strategies are ways of “doing being ordinary,” while completing a delicate task that presented them with a potential dilemma of displaying their learning for an invisible audience of their peers.

This paper focuses on how narrators convey emotion in the structure of oral narrative discourse in Spanish. To this end, the structure of personal oral narratives of highly emotional events in a sample of radio narratives is analyzed from two different approaches: Labovian and socio-cognitive . This work shows, first, how the Labovian approach to personal oral narratives of “vivid” events is applied to emotionally charged texts and, second, how the theoretical concepts of mental spaces and conceptual integration theory, as well as the latest developments within socio-cognitive theories, can help to better understand the processes that, on the one hand, enable speakers to create bonds with the listener, and on the other hand, enable hearers to make sense of the apparently chaotic information presented in these particular types of narratives.

In this article we interrogate apparently caring statements about homelessness and homeless people for the ways in which they maintain and perpetuate stigmatizing conceptions of homelessness. Drawing on a Foucauldian theoretical framework, we analyze conversations about homelessness gathered in focus groups with members of the general public. Participants used two strategies to construct positive identities for themselves as people who care about homelessness. They describe actions in which they helped specific homeless people, and they describe homeless people as “just like me.” Paradoxically, these statements tap into and reproduce long-standing conceptions of homeless people as culpable for their state, incapable of correcting that state, and in need of proper management and control for their own good. They also divide homeless people into the equally stigmatizing categories of deserving and undeserving poor. Our analysis is in contrast to the traditional literature on stigma, which uses large-scale surveys and experiments to show that negative attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors have stigmatizing potential and assumes that positive attitudes will lead to stigma reduction. We show that caring statements about homelessness and homeless people embed discursive practices that reinforce stigmatizing conceptions of homelessness and maintain existing social inequalities.

Interactional encounters call for participants to maintain joint involvement in the activity at hand. However, when interactional problems emerge, participants may seek to redefine the current participation framework to ensure the intelligibility of the situation as a whole. This paper describes one interactional resource to accomplish such a shift: humming. Drawing on data consisting of 32 instances of humming from three different settings, and using conversation analysis as a method, I demonstrate how humming can be used to manage problems caused by the participants either failing to perform the expected actions or performing inappropriate actions. Through humming, the participants can publicly “accept” their co-participant's solitary engagements, maintain the separateness of the participants' activities, signal a need for “time-out” from the joint activity, and downgrade the interactional import of their embodied actions. Thus humming is also related to morality. On the one hand, humming signals the participants' cooperative stance despite their divided involvement. On the other hand, the mere act of making the current participation framework audible may alert the co-participants about its inadequacy.

Despite a growing interest in the interaction in academic pedagogical settings, the role of texts in the actual interaction has not been systematically addressed. This article examines the practices and orientations through which written documents have a significant role in the openings of supervision encounters. We use videotaped recordings of supervision encounters and adopt conversation-analytical methodology to analyze the data. The analysis consists of two main foci: (i) the initial moments of the encounter prior to the actual supervisory activity, and (ii) the launching of the supervisory activity and the negotiation of what that activity will entail. We analyze the orientations toward the document as the necessary object of the joint activity and the prominent bodily orientation toward the papers during the initial moments of the encounter. Furthermore, when the participants move from the initial moments of the encounter toward the main activity, the paper document plays a major role in that interaction. In our conclusions, we summarize our observations as shared, implicit orientations related to the role of the document. These assumptions constitute the “implicit pedagogy” of the supervisory encounter. We will discuss some of the consequences of this type of pedagogy.