Volume 43, Issue 6

Like other literary genres, songs can be a successful outlet for achieving certain goals. Using a qualitative and descriptive approach utilizing the stancetaking framework, this study examines the development and use of more than 50 Arabic songs as a vehicle to not only inform the public about COVID-19, but also take affective stances that connect the current distressing situation of the Arab people due to COVID-19 with past hardships and crises. These stances invoke salient sociocultural values that are understood and evaluated similarly by Arab people. Evaluating and positioning the insecurity of the pandemic against insecurities of the past activates the affects and messages of the stance, which align with the evaluations and affects of the listeners. That Arab people from different countries share similar evaluations of their insecurities and invoke similar sociocultural values in response to their dreadful situations is indicative of the co-construction of a shared Arab identity through the sociocognitive intersubjectivity of the stances that are indexed to shared repertoires, sociocultural values, and affects.

This study examines veiled aggression in diplomatic language use from the point of view of speech acts. More specifically, we examine how the speech act of ‘Tell’ is used to realise aggression in a small corpus of diplomatic notes written between February and May 1844, exchanged between a US American and a Chinese diplomat. Tell, by default, presents a ‘neutral’ informative illocution. However, in contexts of diplomatic conflicts, particularly when a threat is made, realising Tell often helps the aggressor to deliver menacing messages under a veneer of civility. Tell is also often intertwined with other speech acts through which aggression is realised, such as Request and Complain. By modelling the aggressive function of Tell in the ritual genre of diplomatic notes, this paper fills a knowledge gap by studying aggression in a setting in which aggression operates within the boundaries of the ritual frame of a diplomatic genre.

Survival discourse has emerged as a prominent theme in online discussions about the US–China trade war on the Chinese social media platform Zhihu. This study undertakes a critical discourse analysis of this emergent discourse by examining 80 answers (totaling 95,753 words) from Zhihu users within the broader context of the invocation of survival discourses in modern Chinese history. An intertextual method was adopted in this study, which helps us to better understand netizens’ arguments in favor of the Chinese government’s tough stance on the trade war with the US and the probable success of this strategy. The analysis reveals the historicity and intertextuality of these discourses, identifies strategies which are employed to support a tough stance on the trade war, and reflects on their implications.

This paper uses conversation analysis as an analytical approach to investigate how a tutor and her students in one-on-one speaking consultation sessions at a university in Hong Kong participate in interview-practice activities using English as a medium of instruction. The study uses approximately 4 h of recordings from six tutoring sessions. In particular, by focusing on how interactional practices are intertwined with the activity of note-taking/making, this paper offers a close examination of the advice-giving activity with the use of notes. The findings illustrate that whether the notes reflect what the student shares during an interview-practicing activity or a Q-A sequence during advice-giving activity, the tutor uses the notes to account for her ensuing advice. Based on the findings, I argue that the tutor’s notes play a pivotal role in grounding her advice during interview consultations at the L2 speaking center.

This study examines the use of gesture by participants of the reality television show Sisters Who Make Waves. Based on 23.5 h of footage involving 30 participants, the analysis focuses on gestural communication by the female participants, who must straddle a formal/informal communicative environment dictated by the medium of reality television. More specifically, I examine two features of pointing gestures by the participants: social parameters and context constraints. The main interest is how a combination of general cultural norms as well as considerations of the interlocutor’s social status contribute to gesture use. Context constraints and pragmatic concerns are also analyzed regarding the choice of manual or non-manual pointing gestures. These factors are seen to play a strong role in gesture choice. The findings show that the participants are sensitive to these social and contextual variables, especially regarding concepts like saving face, politeness, and friendly intimacy.

This article looks at participatory viewers’ engagement with foreign language video contents facilitated by the danmu interface on a video-sharing website in China. Using the video of the Chinese athlete Sun Yang’s public hearing hosted on Bilibili as a case study, this article investigates Bilbili users’ danmu -based translational efforts and their engagement with the translation problem inherent in the hearing through multimodal discourse analysis, with supportive analysis of individual users’ danmu footprints from a diachronic perspective. Danmu -based viewer activities are approached from the social semiotic perspective and situated in the distribution stratum of the communicative practice of video sharing, with a view to understand participatory viewers’ meaning making processes in their consumption of videos on the danmu interface. The findings show a manifest willingness from participatory viewers to engage with the dual translation problem specific to this case, who submit different kinds of translational inputs onto the video frame in response to the untranslated video and articulate translation-related discourses as prompted by the inherent translation problem in the video. This study contributes to social semiotic discourse analysis of danmu -mediated communication as well as to non-professional translation studies through a focus on novel translation practices emergent in the Chinese context of participatory viewing.