Volume 28, Issue 2

This study problematizes activity frames and participation frameworks (Goffman 1981), exploring how students deploy online (MSN Messenger) and offline activity frames in identity performances. One problem in analyzing participation frameworks and particularly notions of subordinate forms, like crossplay, byplay , and sideplay , is that these concepts require that the analyst can identify one dominant activity. This was not possible in the present data, which consist of video recordings of computer activities in a seventh-grade classroom. It is shown how MSN (online) identities were invoked in subsequent and intermittent face-to-face interaction; a dialogue that started on MSN would continue in face-to-face interaction, and vice versa. This means that frame switches constituted important features of the students' identity work. Similarly, the students employed nicknames or what are here called tags, that is, textual-visual displays of ‘speaker’ identities, located in the boundary zone between online and offline activities. In the classroom interactions, there was thus not one dominant activity frame, but rather the activities involved borderwork , and more specifically frame switches and a strategic use of tags.

The aim of this article is to consider the nature of mandatory genres (legally regulated genres) emanating from European Union directives and point to the challenges that such genres pose due to their legal origin and complex text production and text reception processes. Taking its point of departure in one of the most recent mandatory genres within an EU medicinal assessment and approval context (the European Public Assessment Report [EPAR] summary) the article presents the results of an empirical study of 15 EU-approved, Danish EPAR summaries, testing whether the respondents believe the EPAR summaries live up to their declared purpose. The article concludes that the majority of the respondents do not think the EPAR summary fulfills its communicative purposes of providing information about The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use's review and recommendation of the product and providing information that is understandable and useful to laypersons, respectively. The article points to some of the reasons why, in spite of careful preparation, and extensive guidelines prior to its ‘launch’ into the discourse community, the EPAR summary apparently fails to fulfill its communicative purposes.

This article examines a discussion among US Federal Trade Commission attorneys concerning a passage in a draft memo. The focus is primarily on the expression ‘we think it's bad public policy’, which is a reformulation, and a generalization, of what is said in the draft. I propose certain techniques of studying generalization, based in earlier work by Charles Frake and by Harvey Sacks. A close analysis of transcribed talk is combined with semantic/taxonomic considerations and related to ethnographic setting. A central finding is that generalization must be understood not only within its local context of talk but also within wider discursive contexts. The formulation is fitted to an argument, which is in turn fitted to a broader controversy in the agency. The analytic techniques employed in this essay should have broad applicability in studies of how participants formulate their utterances.

In this article I conduct an examination of discursive identity of a legal ‘object’ in the course of its treatment by various figures in the legal process. The need for this examination arises from a widespread concern about the effects of creating ‘records’, i.e., transforming spoken discourse by way of documentation into ‘evidence’. After a brief review of the current discussion about this phenomenon, I argue that the identity of textualized evidence is upheld by way of references to other texts, all of which create a field of signification within which an object under discussion (evidence) shows different facets without however losing its identity. In order to support my argument, I offer an analysis of ethnographic data pertaining to a specific criminal case. My objective for the analysis is to trace the status of a specific discursive identity after its enunciation during an attorney–client conference. My findings indicate that textualization should be understood not as a form of fixity for discourse, but rather as semantic pivot that provides for different ‘argumentation figures’ within the referential grid of the legal case.

This paper concerns delineating an interpersonally consistent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of argumentative/persuasive essays (APEs) written by tertiary students. In order to examine undergraduate students' interpersonal management, I principally adopt schematic structures from a Sydney school genre-based approach in addition to two important interpersonal systems of interaction and evaluation recently developed within systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Drawing on SFL alongside interaction in writing and Bakhtinians' dialogic literacy , the interpersonal aspects in APEs are examined from three main perspectives: Interactive (schematic structures), Interactional (the metaphorical realizations of commands), and InterPERSONAL meanings (the three main appraisal systems: attitude , engagement , and graduation ). Analyses of two sample essays demonstrate that the framework provides ESL teachers with resources to be able to guide students to write academic essays successfully by meeting the expectations of academic audiences both in structure and language features.