Volume 37, Issue 2 -

This essay attempts a rapprochement between Kent Bach’s view on semantic minimalism and the most radical version of contextualism about language on offer: Charles Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Despite common assumptions held by defenders of semantic literalism – which cast Bach’s proposal as a form of contextualism – Bach rejects all conceivable forms of contextualism. In this paper, I argue that in spite of his systematic rejection of contextualism, Bach’s position bears a striking resemblance to Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Further, when analyzed in light of the conceptual framework developed by Travis, Bach’s strand of minimalism can be shown to contain a deep-rooted conceptual inconsistency to the extent that he aims to ascribe “pure semantic content” to a linguistic entity that is necessarily pragmatic.

The television news interview has been widely studied in the field of Conversation Analysis. Few researchers, however, have paid attention to the interview fragments that often occur in news bulletin programs. This article applies Conversation Analysis and the notion of recontextualization to the analysis of experiential interview fragments deployed in CCTV News. It is shown that this type of fragments enjoys a relatively fixed sequence structure: introduction–fragment, where the fragment consists of (question+) answer turns. The introduction may be designed to raise a question, offer background information or summarize key points. The fragment itself, unlike a complete interview, is often selected and designed to achieve particular communicative purposes. In CCTV News, for example, the fragments tend to be employed to represent ordinary people’s experience, beneficiary identity and positive image, among others.

The goal of this contribution is to explore the relationship between the target of certain ironic instances and the source of their echoic mentions (Sperber and Wilson, “Irony and the use-mention distinction,” in Peter Cole’s Radical Pragmatics , Academic Press, New York, 1981; Wilson and Sperber, “On verbal irony,” Lingua 87, 1992), discussing specific cases in which the originators of the ironic utterances or opinions echoed could not be conceived as victims of the irony. As most accounts of irony claim, it necessarily involves criticism, in which case it should have a victim or a target. Sperber and Wilson’s Echoic Mention Theory suggests that an ironical remark will have as natural targets the originators of the utterances echoed. Following their account, the target of the irony should be the addresser of the echoed utterance. However, in our corpus of ten full-length literary works and excerpts from the Israeli media, we have found ironic occurrences, which seemed to express at least some sort of criticism if not more, where the echoic source would not make a plausible target for the irony. It may be suggested that the reason for the discrepancies is that these utterances also present cues for humor or traces of parody.

Clinical guidelines require the patient’s participation in the entire rehabilitation process, including discharge planning. However, very little is known about how this institutional requirement is actually dealt with in everyday clinical practice. Adopting a conversation analytic approach, our paper tackles the matter, looking at situations in which patients achieve interactional initiatives within interdisciplinary entry meetings (IEMs) at a rehabilitation clinic in German-speaking Switzerland. Based on audio-visual recordings of 11 IEMs, whose central aim is to formulate patients’ rehabilitation goals and to plan their discharge, the paper offers a detailed analysis of two conversational environments in which patients accomplish initiatives: incipient disagreement among the interdisciplinary team and difficulties faced by the professionals in moving towards the formulation of a goal. In both situations, the progress of the activity is at stake. Moreover, the analysis reveals the interactive and stepwise accomplishment of patients’ initiatives. Our paper argues that shedding light on how patients’ initiatives are interactively implemented makes it possible to discuss how issues of epistemic rights and entitlement to participate are locally negotiated. In the final discussion, the paper raises the question of how patients’ competence in intervening in the goal-formulation activity can be taken into account in clinical guidelines on patient participation.

This paper integrates contributions coming from psychology with a phenomenological and semiotic perspective and focuses on the relationship of reciprocal constitution between “Subject” and “Object.” This relationship is evoked through radically different concepts such as the notions of “experience,” “consciousness” and “embodiment,” focusing attention on “discourse” as a macro-procedure generating the mutual link between Subject and Object. Therefore, the relationship between subject and object is identifiable through the text, namely “diatext.” It will be further argued that human beings act as “diatexters” of their existence in the world. Accordingly, psycho-discursive practices have the performative power to constitute both objects and subjects because they offer a creative solution by interlacing the “Body-Mind-Problem” to the “Mind-Culture-Problem.” In detail, the discursive resource granted by metaphors may be recognized as a modelling matrix embodying thought, as the interweaving of conceptual fields and as reasoning processes.