Volume 33, Issue 3

A small group of ethnically diverse Malaysians was assembled to discuss the state of multiculturalism in Malaysia. Discursive analysis was used to get at the participants' accounting practices and constructions of multiculturalism. Participants' accounts revealed an increasing social distance between the Malays and the non-Malays, but differing assessments and explanations for such group boundaries. Participants' accounts drew on both their own experiences and on broader ethnopolitical discourses to tell their side. Participants used various voicing practices to represent or evaluate the current situation and how it became this way. Religion, especially Islam, was used as an ethnopolitical discourse and was articulated in different ways. For instance, the Malays invoked being Muslim as the primary source of identity and imagined community, while the non-Malays cited the politicization of Islam as a cause for the increasing boundary between groups. Despite these differences participants seemed willing to engage on these “sensitive issues” through criticism and defensive accounts sequences.

Politicians and orators employ words as weapons in order to exert ideological control and make an audience believe something in an ostensive way. In this regard, taking critical-political discourse analysis and appraisal theory as theoretical frameworks, it is the purpose of this paper to shed some light on the dysphemistic words and expressions identified in some of the memorable wartime speeches over a crucial two-year period for the outcome of the Second World War (1940–1941) by one of the most outstanding British politicians and statesmen, Winston Churchill. As metaphors are pervasive in political discourse and vital to the language of leadership, special attention is given to the analysis of dysphemistic figurative language within Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory and Charteris-Black's critical metaphor analysis. The results obtained support the idea that Churchill's skillful use of dysphemism is closely connected with his overall political goals of instilling courage and inspiring confidence in his fellow countrymen in such difficult times for Britain as those of a war against the powerful Nazi Germany.

This is a study of a concessive discourse pattern in which the speaker first makes an assertion, then backs down from it, and eventually recycles the original standpoint. This practice bears a strong resemblance to show concessions which Antaki and Wetherell (1999) identify as typical of ideological debate. Our data are from Swedish conversations in everyday as well as institutional settings. We argue thus that the practice of conceding and reasserting does not limit itself to specific rhetoric purposes but is a generally available device for reasoning and argumentation in conversation. The practice enhances intersubjectivity in interaction by acknowledging other viewpoints, signaling reciprocity between the participants, and contributing to preference for agreement. We account for the dialogic nature of this concessive pattern by analyzing first same-speaker produced and then other-induced concessions. We also consider the relation of the concession–reassertion format to other concessive practices.

This article discusses the results of an investigation on construal of pedagogic positions in a series of online interactions between two students performing learning activities in a three-dimensional virtual learning environment. It aims at analyzing how students offer praise while performing learning activities in the absence of a teacher or mentor. Results show that while students were highly focused in the learning activities, they construe different pedagogic positions through their language behavior, taking more proactive or reactive roles. The main area of attitudinal language used was Appreciation and most evaluative language in the corpus targets the objects created by the students themselves, falling within the Composition subtype. Positive evaluation and Negative evaluation play important roles in the performance of the learning activity: Positive evaluation is used in the corpus to provide feedback on the improvements made in the world and manage conflict or reassurance; Negative evaluation serves two key functions – the management of the revision of the work done and the control of the tasks to be performed. It is argued that the understanding of pedagogic subject positions construal is an essential step for the elaboration of pedagogic strategies, including those which incorporate the extended potentials of new technologies.

Language users systematically prefer one lexical item ( because ) over another (even highly similar) one ( since ) to express a causal relationship in discourse. Such choices provide a window on speakers' cognitive categorizations, and have been modeled in previous work in terms of subjectivity. This paper analyzes the Dutch connectives omdat (‘because’) and want (‘since/for’) in written text, conversation, and chat interactions. These can be considered a case in point for linguistic categorization since related European languages show similar distinctions. We sketch a profile for the interpretation of omdat and want based on corpus analyses of large numbers of occurrences in different media and genres. However, we focus on the deviations from the prototypical use of the connectives. We analyze instances of those deviations, in order to be able to understand the deviating use. We conclude that deviations should be interpreted in terms of core elements of the prototypical use. Therefore, the semantic-pragmatic profile of want and omdat should not be considered as hard-wired all-or-nothing rules, but rather as a prototype structure with a core meaning/use and more peripheral uses. The non-prototypical, peripheral uses are motivated deviations: we need the elements in the core profile to understand the deviations.

Human language inevitably depicts the world from a human point of view. This article briefly reviews key positions on the use of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric language taken by scientists and discourse analysts. It then presents the data used in this investigation – a corpus of transcripts of the television series Life . The methods of analysis are explained, as is the focus adopted, which is less on the more obvious, lexical choices made by the presenter, David Attenborough, and more on the grammatical patterns which we suggest play a significant role in the depiction of the wide range of species represented in the programs. Three grammatical features – pronouns, the connective so , and the to infinitive form – were explored in context, and the results demonstrate how, separately and together, they play a significant role in the representation in these texts of animals' perspectives, connoting in subtle ways both intention and evaluation. We suggest a need for greater dialogue between broadcasters, discourse analysts, and ethologists.