Volume 25, Issue 1-2

Malaysia is a multi-ethnic, multilingual country with a population of about 23,953,136 people (The CIA World Factbook, 2005), and at least a hundred languages/dialects. Malays and other indigenous groups make up 58 percent of the population, the Chinese 24 percent, the Indians 8 percent while other ethnic groups constitute 10 percent of the total population. Most Malaysians are bilingual, as Malay, the national language, is the medium of instruction in state schools while English is a strong second language.

This study is a qualitative study of Malaysian children aged between four and six years engaged in a story-telling task. The question posed in this piece of research, then, is the role played by gender and ethnic identity in discourse. If it does play a role, what, then, is the nature of this role? Listed below are the aims of this study: 1. To chart relatively uninterrupted discourse in story-telling among children aged between four and six. 2. To discover gender and ethnic differences in narrative forms, in particular, focus will be given to the use of negation. 3. To examine the role of gender and ethnic identity on the discourse of children. The path taken by this study is to analyse discourse in story-telling. The aim is to examine the use of negation by children of both sexes and of two ethnic groups in Malaysia (Malays and Chinese) in the act of story-telling. This study is exciting in that actual transcriptions of the story-telling can be analyzed.

To make a request is to express a desire for the addressee to do something, and because it bears a requirement to be complied with, a request is usually best achieved when performed with tact and politeness. Bach and Harnish (1984: 48) define the term request as ‘a speech act expressing the speaker's desire for the hearer to do something with the added proviso that the hearer takes this expressed desire as the reason to act’. This paper examines the many varied forms that this speech act takes in the speech of five young Malaysian children who generally use the English language to communicate with their mother. The data shows the creativity of young children for whom English is a second language in that there are many ways of making a request. Although the forms vary, the function is constant, i. e. asking for something. The various strategies used by the children, the variety of English, i. e. Malaysian English, and the use of code switching in the data will also be described.

For years, society has classified women as being inferior to men. Women have faced difficulty in making their voices heard. However, women have risen above the constraints that have been placed upon them, that is, from being discouraged to speak in public to becoming prominent figures in our modernday society. Women, today, find themselves having to live up to the standards set for them by a male-dominated society. As their participation in public forums have increased, women have learned to behave and communicate more assertively in order ‘to cope with all the conflicting demands they face when up at the podium’ (Campbell 1989: 9). This study focuses on the assertive styles and strategies that Malaysian women have learned to use in a public forum. Samples of extracts depicting the use of assertions are presented.

For communication purposes, formulaic expressions can be an easy and efficient way to impart information. Very often campaign slogans are built on using such expressions. Because the context and implications are transparent to the listening public, further explanations are usually not required. But once people get used to such a paratactic mode of expression, orally oriented language users may be lulled into thinking that, when they use such a mode of expression, there is no need for further elaboration of an issue at hand. This study examines whether literate Malays (undergraduates) use formulaic expressions in the spoken texts they produce. And in the event that they do, the study also hopes to determine the nature of topics that draws the use of such expressions. The results of the study show categorically that urban students do not use formulaic expressions. However, there is a tendency among rural students to use such expressions especially when discussing topics which are context reduced, i. e. when topics are more abstract.

Academically speaking, for many years humour has been studied in the spheres of philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology and even the neurosciences. In its role, humour allows the speaker to represent a parallel reality, which often induces positive feedback such as laughter, smiles and grins from his/her fellow listeners. This gender study of humour, analyses the roles and functions as well as the similarities and differences of humour found in the recorded discourses of Malaysian males and females. Whilst males and females tend to share similar topics (such as sex), the data shows that both genders approach them in different ways. That is to say, males tend to be more direct as opposed to females.

This paper describes the use of repeats in Malaysian English. Speakers frequently repeat words in spontaneous speech, and this paper investigates the way in which words are repeated, the type of words that are repeated, and the functions of repeats in the speech of sixty-seven callers to a radio station. The findings reveal that there are preferred patterns of use, such as the frequent repetition of function words and the more frequent repetition of one word once. The findings also provide an understanding into the way in which repeats are used both as a hesitation device and as a repair mechanism.

This paper discusses some peculiarities of Malaysian English as spoken by Malaysian Iyers. Previous research showed that Malaysian Iyers, a minority group of Tamils living in Malaysia, had shifted from their mother tongue of Tamil to English mainly, though Tamil was used functionally (Sankar 2004). The study was conducted on 15 Malaysian Iyers who were audio taped in natural situations to study the linguistic patterns that emerged from their use of English. Approximately 120 minutes of audio taped data was analyzed by examining code switches made from English to Tamil. These switches were examined to find out if English grammar was applied to these switches. The findings showed that the respondents' use of the English language included Tamil words that were grammaticized into the English language through devices such as the inclusion of English suffixes such as the plural ‘s’, ‘-fy, ‘-en’ or the prefixes such as ‘un-’ and ‘de-’. Tamil verbs were also found to be conjugated to the past tense through the use of ‘-ed’ or the present continuous of ‘-ing’. These words appear to have become part of their English repertoire.

The interest of this paper is the discourse generated by Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in his first keynote address as party president at the 55 th UMNO General Assembly, 2004. The nation stood back in anticipation as he took over as Malaysia's fifth prime minister and party president from his predecessor, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who held power for 22 years. After almost a year in office, Abdullah has succeeded in emanating a ‘feel good’ social environment as reported in the media. This paper looks at the discourse mobilized to introduce a new concept, Islam Hadhari, by the new leadership. Its interest lies in the construction of discourse and ideology that manifests. The theoretical framework adopted is ideological discourse analysis as proposed by van Dijk (2004). Some comparison will also be made with the discourse produced by the previous UMNO president.

Political speeches are a special kind of discourse that ‘produce and reproduce beliefs, opinions, and ideologies’ (Wodak 2004: 381). One way of studying such discourse would be to look into the use of the grammatical category of performatives. As analysts seek to interpret a text, they must not forget the reality that political discourses are more about beliefs, opinions and ideologies constructed from a partisan perspective than an individual choice. The variety of hegemonic power practised by the political leaders determines to a large extent their exploitation of performatives: in an explicit or implicit manner. In this study, the researchers examine the use of performatives produced by two different political leaders in two political settings. The analysis of the use of performatives by the current Prime Minister of Malaysia is the mainstay of the study. The performatives found in the speeches of the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh are also analyzed for comparative purposes. The differences in style as well as the level of exploitation of performatives by the two leaders are examined exhaustively using the discourse-historical approach (Wodak 2001; Wodak et al. 1999) as the theoretical framework.

Previous studies (e. g. Macionis 2001 and Gilleard and Higgs 2000) have shown that the elderly are frequently subject to ageism (a form of social stratification which discriminates groups of people by their ages) in industrialised societies. In any sort of social stratification, language plays an important role in the sustenance of the inequality of power and hegemony (Kramarae, Schulz and O'Barr 1984; Foucault 1980; and Fairclough 1995). The code used in ‘talking down’ to the older persons (Coupland, Coupland and Giles 1991), is termed ‘elderspeak’ (Simpson 2002), ‘secondary baby-talk’ (la Tourette and Meeks 2000), ‘motherese–parentese language’ and ‘adult–child’ language (Masataka 2002). This paper discusses the features of elderspeak found in a Christian-based Malaysian geriatric day-centre,

Much attention has been paid in the literature to the writing and discourse structure of research articles, but the focus is predominantly on evaluating English research articles from an Anglo-American perspective. The unstated assumption of such studies is that writers whose first language is not English tend to write differently. Despite a number of cross-cultural comparisons in the literature, only surface discursive features have been examined, such as explicit devices that signal clausal relations, or the genre investigated has been stabilized with strong normative traditions. This study investigates how third party ideas are evaluated in research articles written in English and Chinese. The data come from three domains – the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences. The results indicate that there are no large differences between English and Chinese in the weightings of evaluation categories, even though they are realized by different grammatical resources in the two languages. Chinese research articles tend to use more explicit linguistic resources with less frequent use of mitigators, possibly because of the socio-pragmatic and typological differences between English and Chinese. The study also proposes a taxonomy of evaluative resources in English and Chinese research articles, which can be used in future research.

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