Volume 45, Issue 6

‘Risk’ is typically thought of as something negative, and as something that should be avoided at all cost: risk characteristically has to do with the probability of an unwanted event occurring. However, risk may also be seen as something positive, even energizing, as in the context of financial markets or gambling. Voluntary risk taking has typically been approached through the concepts ‘action’ and ‘edgework’. In this study, both negative and positive aspects of risk are explored in the context of adventure tourism. The focus is on how risk is discursively constructed in adventure tourism websites for Sápmi, centring on destinations in Sweden (Kiruna), Finland (Rovaniemi) and Norway (Tromsø). Our primary material from the booking platform Adrenaline Hunter amounts to 12,000 words. The findings show an ambivalence between negative and positive aspects of risk, but in a scalar sense, ranging from “soft” to “hard” types, with a negotiable awareness of how relative what counts as “extreme” may be. The theoretical suggestion is that positive aspects of risk need to be taken seriously for a fuller understanding of the very concept of ‘risk’ and of the workings of risk discourse.

“Moments of conflict” occur regularly in daily routines within parent-child interaction. Video data of a mother attempting to ready her son for kindergarten make perspicuous the subtleties of emotion displays in negotiations for future courses of action, e.g., parental directive/non-compliance. By focusing on the interactional dynamics of emotion display in conflictual action negotiation sequences, this conversation analytic study highlights the significant role of emotion display in compliance negotiation and managing a parent-child relationship. The findings demonstrate how emotion display may constitute a social action to which co-participants in interaction respond within the progressivity of sequences of action, and how both parent and child orient to each other’s displays of emotion. Further, that emotion displays may be used as resources for negotiating compliance. Emotion display also allows parents to propose affiliation on a relational level while remaining firm on family rules. Our study contributes to the growing body of research on directive/response sequences in parent-child interaction, and more broadly to conversation analytic research on affect and emotion by illustrating the nexus between emotion display and progressivity.

Narrative navigation and lawyers’ use of linguistic persuasion in affidavits and skeleton arguments for appellant relief in criminal cases remains one of the under-researched areas in the field of language and law. This is a phase at which lawyers have the opportunity to influence the judicial decision-making process through their ability to persuade the appellate judge to believe their version of the case to be the true version. The argument chosen by the lawyer and the manner of telling it are inseparable. By utilising data from ten appellate level criminal cases from the High Court of Malawi, this study investigates the narrative structure of lawyers’ affidavits and skeleton arguments using Aristotle’s rhetorical analysis framework. Our findings reveal that the appeal to logos is simply a templatic genre structure that lawyers are meant to follow. However, lawyers’ appeals to ethos and pathos reveal excessive redundancy and low deployment of important linguistic resources that can help them be appropriately persuasive, which can be acceptable to the wider discourse community.

With the growing use of corpora in second language (L2) research, examining the role of writing topics alongside first language (L1) background and L2 proficiency in shaping L2 usage has become increasingly important. This study contributes to this line of inquiry by using a learner corpus of 1,198 argumentative essays to explore how writing topics, in tandem with L1 background and L2 proficiency, influence the use of ‘V that’ clauses (e.g., I think that it is important… ) among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writers. The findings reveal significant effects of writing topic on the diversity and semantic distribution of ‘V that’, variations across L1 backgrounds, a decrease in frequency with higher L2 proficiency, and interaction effects among the three factors in all aspects of ‘V that’ usage. These findings highlight the importance of considering topic effects alongside L1 background and L2 proficiency in corpus-based L2 research, suggesting both theoretical and methodological implications.

Grammaticalized complement-taking-predicate (CTP) clauses like I think have been much studied in declaratives but not in interrogatives. We propose a typology of the grammatical functions that these CTP-clauses can convey, i.e., polarity bias, polarity reversal, modal orientation and opinion marker, and we relate these to the different dialogic functions that interrogatives can serve , i.e., Question, Query and Challenge. We apply the proposed analysis to samples of are you sure , do you think and is there a chance from the British Spoken sub-corpus of Wordbanks Online and discuss how their source semantics influences the grammatical and dialogic functions they specialize for: are you sure reverses polarity, typically in Queries; do you think is used mainly as opinion marker in Questions; and is there a chance marks modal orientation in Questions.

This article examines how audience-sensitive art exhibition labels engage visitors of different age groups – children and adults – from an appraisal perspective. The potential of evaluative language and emotionally charged expressions in enhancing visitor engagement is increasingly recognized by museum professionals, while it has received limited in-depth exploration in the research literature. A corpus of 56 audience-sensitive labels from an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia was compiled for a comparative analysis of how they negotiate affect, judgement, and appreciation meanings. The findings reveal that both sets of labels frequently employ positive and inscribed appreciations to evaluate the qualities of the artworks. However, there are notable differentiations regarding the realizations of attitude types, subtypes, polarity, mode, appraisers, and the appraised triggers/targets. This article contributes to our understanding about the use of evaluative language in art exhibition labels for children and adults, offering insights into audience-sensitive label writing practice in the art museum context.