Volume 45, Issue 4

This paper identifies a previously undescribed genre of narrative about instances where an absent third party trespasses into the epistemic territory of the speaker by disregarding the speaker’s expertise in a knowledge domain tied to the speaker’s identity. These narratives occurred in unstructured interaction between close friends. We extracted a collection of exchanges from a corpus of sixty audio/video recording of conversations elicited in a university setting and analyzed them using methods from Conversation Analysis. In such narratives, speakers vilify the absent third party, make extensive use of direct reported speech, and explain why they are the true authority on the subject in question. They often speak directly to the absent party, sanctioning their behavior. Listeners respond to these narratives by displaying shock at reports of the third party’s statements and amusement at re-enactments of the speaker’s retorts. Listeners also assist in the narratives, often participating in scolding and denigrating the trespasser. We argue that these narratives act to recruit listener assistance in an after-the-fact sanctioning of the trespassing third party and validation of the speaker’s knowledge and related identity.

Over the last decades, some feminists have put pressure on key institutions to convince them to adopt a particular type of linguistic policy, namely inclusive writing guidelines. These guidelines have nevertheless been criticized – by other militants and academics – for risking of falling short of their radical goal, or of their political one altogether. It is therefore worth asking the following question again, in a francophone and contemporary setting: can the implementation of institutional inclusive writing guidelines help pave future developments regarding gender equality, or is it offering a mere formal change of language? This paper starts by presenting a discursive study of the way multiple metadiscourses were juxtaposed and entwined within two sets of a university’s guidelines. Then, two in-depth interviews with the advisor for gender policy of the university offer insights into the institutional process of producing the guidelines, and their recontextualization in workshops. While the first part of the study shows that the “zero discrimination” discourse is largely dominant and absorbs other competing discourses, the analysis of the interviews points to attempts to prevent the guidelines’ total depoliticization. These guidelines turn out to be a hybrid political object, which raises questions about the institutional process of legitimating one type of feminism over others and also invites to reflect on institutional linguistic prescriptivism (verbal hygiene) more generally.

Internet users often express their evaluation of food in online posts. This study sets out to comprehensively annotate evaluative words in food posts in Chinese, which deserves more attention due to its increasing dominance on the Internet. The corpus includes 180 posts from Dcard, currently the largest anonymous social media platform in Taiwan. All the words annotated to be evaluative are categorized according to their grammatical class, evaluative function, and subjective polarity. We not only provide the frequency distributions of the evaluative words but also conduct four case studies of high-frequency evaluative words, identifying their lexico-syntactic patterns. While previous studies on evaluative language have tended to focus on particular words/phrases, with the data mainly from English, the present study provides a more comprehensive quantitative perspective and extends to Chinese data. Moreover, because conveying evaluations in online forums can be a mediatized performance intended for attention and visibility, our qualitative analysis demonstrates how Dcard users establish readers’ involvement through evaluation.

This paper examines how Yasser Arafat, President of Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004, relied on metaphor as a rhetorical device to promote his opposition to the Israeli government’s discrimination and brutality against Palestinians and settlement-building policies in Palestinian Territories. The metaphors analyzed here are drawn from more than 90 web documents, Arabic-language newspapers, interviews, and speeches. They are analyzed using the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) to explore the source and target domains on which Arafat draws to characterize both Israelis and Palestinians. The metaphorical constructs are analyzed in three stages: first, they are associated with source domains; then, the metaphors are analyzed for how these source domains conceptualize Israelis and Palestinians, and finally, the source domains that merit particular attention are identified. The findings show that Arafat particularly draws on nature metaphors as well as biblical and historical metaphors related to Jewish suffering and ultimate triumph over adversity to convey the message that the Palestinian people will ultimately be victorious against the Israeli occupation.

Health messaging is effective if it achieves audience adherence to guidance. Through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics, we examine the expression of obligation in poster-based health campaigns (4 posters) employed during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK by considering whether differences in grammatical mood and modality values impact on public compliance toward the message content. Effects of mood and modality variations are examined through a quantitative-cum-qualitative analysis of results from a representative survey ( N  = 1,089), which included closed questions on self-predicted compliance to health guidance and open questions on the respondents’ understanding of messaging. The quantitative results favour medium values of obligation (“should” vis-à-vis “must”) and directives in declarative mood for self-efficacy messages, and expressions of certainty when the need to take action to prevent negative outcomes is conveyed. The qualitative results show that, communication context and linguistic features being equal, message types (i.e., self-efficacy, moralising, fear appeals) and visual cues prevail in conditioning public reception. Moreover, since directives employing modality allow for speakers’ inclusion among the targeted addressees, they appear to offer more favourable outcomes than those in the imperative mood. This study provides empirical insights into the effects of modality and mood on health guidance compliance.

This paper develops a model to map out embodied movement as a stratified semiotic mode, that is, a conventionalized set of resources for meaning making. The model describes movement structure as a system that realizes specific meanings activated by contexts of situation. The model establishes an explicit link between contextual meanings and textual patterning by theorizing connections between genre, metafunction, and structure. Drawing upon an empirical study of one teacher’s embodied movement in the classroom, this paper maps out movement structure as distinct choices and reveals how movement, gaze and speech function rhythmically to construe information prominence and information boundaries at different levels of discourse organization, which further contributes to coherence and periodicity for the information flow and semantic flow in the lesson. Additionally, the paper reveals that the synthesis of different modes can enact semantic convergence and divergence to aggregate knowledge in pedagogic contexts. The analysis contributes to a systematic understanding of the types of meaning that embodied movement can realize and of the ways in which they are realized together with speech and gaze. The intertwined nature of movement structures, meanings and contexts also indicates that pedagogy is an embodied and situated construction.