Volume 28, Issue 1

This article explores one aspect of scholarly work as a situated practice: the way that, in a conversation analysis group data session, scholars juggle their technical talk with personal value judgments ostensibly inappropriate to the practices of this particular branch of the social sciences. We see how value judgments are handled, and what visible part they play in proceeding with the formal, institutionally provided for, technical analysis. In the case we explore, some members of a routine data session (the authors) expressed negative evaluative views of the actions of a participant in the video they were analyzing, which at various points they characterized as ‘cynical’, ‘begging’, and ‘a shocker’. We show the data-session participants' orientation to these moral judgments, and their search for resolution in safely technical terms. Our interest is in bringing to light the workings of a routine piece of scholarly teamwork, not often subject to scrutiny; and to reveal how accountability plays its part in scholars' management of competing institutional, and personal, identities.

This paper draws upon insights from discursive and rhetorical psychology, and studies that take seriously the notion that visual materials contain arguments, to explore the rhetorical construction of a set of posters used by the British Countryside Alliance in their unsuccessful campaign against the ban upon hunting with dogs. It examines how versions of opposing arguments are constructed and countered through forms of stake inoculation, which are linked to the Bakhtinian conception of ‘heteroglossic engagement’. Specifically, it focuses upon the ways in which the posters juxtapose discursive and visual elements to argue that those in favor of hunting are not who their opponents think they are—something pursued by setting up and then undermining a characterization of opposing accounts. This regularity of practice, along with the organization's claim that hunt supporters are a ‘minority of ordinary people’, is related to other literature that attends to the rhetorical significance of ‘ordinariness’.

The teaching team that we examine during a report-card meeting works with a finely tuned measurement system for accountably deciding on pupils' future school careers. A substantial part of the sorting work is routinized and is based upon pupil results produced during the school year. But there are also pupils with overall scores that set them in a discussion zone. The discussions about such disputable cases are not only revealing as to what kind of criteria the teachers use for assessing pupils, they also make observable the descriptive practices the teaching team uses for granting access to higher-level schools within the highly differentiated high-school system in the Netherlands. We examine a descriptive practice the teachers use for characterizing a pupil in order to take a position in the discussion about which school type suits him best. The focus is on membership-categorization practices that typify pupils and on the criteria that account for membership-category ascription. We show that the way the teachers cast their assessments of pupils has to be analyzed within the situated activity system that organizes the decision making in the report-card meeting.

In this paper, I examine three theoretical sources on the relationship between language use and social structure. I identify common themes which link the concepts of symbolic capital (Bourdieu), social semiotic (Halliday), and ideologeme (Medvedev) and which lead to a critique of the structuralist tradition of semiotic theory. I explore the significance of speech prosody as an integral part of speech communication, and suggest that the utterance needs to be seen as a complex whole in which the structural and dynamic elements of speech are functionally combined. I illustrate this position through the analysis of a sequence of naturalistic dialogue, highlighting aspects of prosodic orientation between speakers and discussing its semiotic significance. I suggest that the mediating concept of speech genre can be used to understand how fluent conversation has both a structured and an improvisatory character. I conclude by suggesting that the activity of producing an utterance in everyday speech may be seen in terms of a musical analogy as performing a variation on a traditional theme. In closing, I identify a number of topics in this field on which our knowledge remains underdeveloped and indicate lines of enquiry for future research.

This paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic use of concessive constructions in business letter discourse. In linguistics, concession has been analyzed primarily within concessive clauses, which have been widely studied, either alone or compared with other syntactic categories such as adversative, causal, or conditional clauses. The term ‘concessive’ itself belongs to the terminology developed within traditional grammar to classify adverbials and adverbial clauses. Heretofore, less attention has been paid to the pragmatic use of concession, i.e., the way in which concessive constructions strategically function within a specific context. The context under analysis in this paper is that of the ‘business letter’ genre. Analysis of a corpus of English business letters shows that concessive constructions are used in this genre both for propositional (or ideational) and procedural (or interpersonal) reasons. This paper considers only the second to be truly pragmatic. Preference for the first or second strategy depends on the text types belonging to the genre. When procedural reasons prevail, concession is mostly introduced for politeness reasons, politeness being one of the factors constantly at play in business exchanges.

This paper examines a televised interview that BBC journalist and show host Clive Anderson conducted with the former head of state of the dissolved USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, assisted by the interpreter Pavel Palazchenko. The paper explores this interview, focusing on its opening and closing, its local organization, and the involvement of the audience. Applying conversation analysis, the paper traces the generic belonging of current talk and looks into a variety of features that shaped the image of Gorbachev as a television personality in British TV. It demonstrates how Gorbachev and Anderson moved between and played with a ‘talk show interview’ and a ‘news interview’ framing of interaction. The analysis demonstrates how the encounter helped portray Gorbachev as a witty and adequate performer, irrespective of the fact that he did not speak English—the language of the broadcast and of the viewers. This was due to what he said, but no less to how he performed, and not least to his way of utilizing the assistance of the highly skilled interpreter, and also, I will argue, to the fact that the interview allowed him to take part in a shared game of entertainment, in a genuinely hybrid form of talk.