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A growing number of investigations into the historical development and status of academic prose have found that many national languages lose both prestige and distribution as a medium of expression in the sciences, while English progressively develops into the lingua franca of science. The investigation presented in this paper starts from the assumption that the status of English as a global lingua franca not only replaces the use of other languages but that the prestige associated with English styles of scientific writing can also influence text production in other languages in the sense that indigenous language- and culture-specific communicative conventions are superseded by the conventions operative in comparable English texts. Taking the example of macrosyntactic conjunction with and and und in English and German popular scientific texts, this article addresses the question of whether German communicative conventions are adapted to English communicative styles such that language-specific strategies of information organization in German change in the direction of English.

Although the United States Supreme Court plays a pivotal role in American government and American law, its opinions have seldom been the subject of linguistic analysis. Yet these opinions provide fertile ground for sociolinguistic and discourse analytic research. The American common-law system, with its rich rhetorical tradition of adversarial argumentation and judgemade precedents, furnishes the context in which the Court's decision-making takes place; however, the discursive processes by which the Court's opinions are structured have rarely been examined. This paper presents an analysis of Rasul v. Bush , in which foreign nationals detained as ‘enemy combatants’ at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, challenged the legality of their detention. By examining the parties' development of competing characterizations of the relevant events, I explore the role of adversarial argumentation in legal decision-making. By tracing the manner in which the Court draws upon these characterizations while framing its decision as grounded in existing law, I present an analysis of the intertextual processes of text construction by which the Court produces its decision as an authoritative legal text that both maintains and transforms existing law.

This article examines how preferred outcomes are negotiated and factualized during organization development consulting conversations. Paradoxically, organizational performance in itself cannot actually be improved during the consultation conversations. Whatever changes there are to be made, they are to be sought within the conversational situation of consultation. Even the outcomes have to be negotiated and made visible for all participants. Using discursive psychology and conversational analysis, we show how interactional and discursive strategies can be used to achieve this in one consultation process. The consultant constructed what we call the position of a witness for some participants who were invited to talk about change. Such a position was constructed by defining the participant as someone who has knowledge about the issue under consideration, and as someone who can be seen as an independent observer whose words are not restricted in any way in advance. This position of a witness and the role of an audience were discursively utilized in factualizing preferred outcomes of the consulting process as convincing. To our knowledge, this kind of factualizing of preferred outcomes in consultation has not been studied earlier.

This study examines temporal organization for interaction in a specific work setting: the airline cockpit. It is generally concerned with precise timing for turn taking as a feature of competent conduct in collaborative professional work, and for creating an acceptable orderly flow of talk for tasks. Specifically, it pursues an observation that moments of overlapping talk, when two or more parties talk simultaneously, are rare in cockpit interaction. Pilots are instructed in training not to speak simultaneously; however, cockpit talk is highly conducive to overlap. Mostly pilots know who will say what to whom, and when, because they are legally required to use scripted procedural wordings. The trajectories of turns are predictable and projectable, and therefore are vulnerable to terminal overlap, when a recipient starts talking just as a current speaker is completing a turn. This does not happen, because airline pilots precisely time next talk to start at the actual, not projected, end of current talk. Pilots allow talk to emerge complete. Pilots orient to the strictly sequential nature of their work to accomplish conflicting setting-specific demands for talk, in situ and in real time. The paper uses transcriptions from audio and video recordings of pilots on actual passenger flights.

This article presents a detailed exposition of Michel Pêcheux's approach to the study of the relations between language and ideology. Pêcheux's method of automatic discourse analysis (AAD) and his meta-theory of discourse are discussed and critically assessed, and examples of empirical studies in this tradition are described. In addition, the manual AAD-syntactic analysis phase is discussed in relation to a mini-study of English discourse. In conclusion, some similarities and differences of AAD and critical discourse analysis (CDA) are identified, as well as a summary of Pêcheux's specific contributions to knowledge.