Volume 29, Issue 2

We report on preliminary analysis of data drawn from a corpus of the spoken English of Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Aimed to reveal the evaluative language used by Xhosa English speakers in the discourse of AIDS, with particular focus on affect , it was conducted using the analytical tools associated with appraisal analysis. Attitude-related expressions were classified as expressing affect, judgment , and appreciation , and grouped as either inscribed or evoked. Thereafter, all items expressing affect were classified as expressing happiness, security , or satisfaction and valued, positively or negatively, within the context of AIDS in the Xhosa culture. Findings reveal that the majority of feelings are implied, and reflect negative security. In order to provide a basis for comparison and to test the effect of topic and tenor, we performed a matched affect analysis on discussions about the bucket system which offers useful insights, suggesting that topic has an important effect on appraisal choices. A general pattern emerges which throws light on attitudes to AIDS, shows that appraisal can usefully be applied to a range of linguistic fields of study, and that it can inform AIDS educational campaigns in South Africa, where a similar evoked and implicit approach is evident.

Debates over food politics provide insight into the convergence of commercial and political discourses. As the organic food market has grown, campaigners and independent producers have faced the dilemma of how far they should promote their cause using standard marketing language. We report on a research project which combined corpus analysis, interviews, and focus group discussions to investigate the discourse of organic food promotion in Britain, the thinking behind it, and how people react to it. We found growing convergence across the sector. Whether produced by supermarkets, small politically committed producers, or environmentalist campaign groups, the language used tends to be poetic, vague, dialogic, narrative, and emotive, with an emphasis upon bucolic imagery and consumer self-interest. Text producers assume that consumer attitudes can be easily manipulated by such an approach. Our focus group data however suggest both a critical resistance to marketing language in general, and that attitudes to food may be less amenable to manipulation through standard promotional techniques than is commonly assumed. Our findings contribute not only to an understanding of food politics and persuasive discourse more generally, but also to the development of discourse analytic methodology which integrates textual analysis with investigation of sender and receiver perceptions.

This article is based on a corpus of transcripts of four criminal courtroom trials in China. It investigates interruption in the Chinese criminal courtroom discourse as a highly institutionalized and strongly goal-oriented discourse. The study focuses on the number, functions, causes, and distribution of interruptions as well as their correlation with the Chinese legal system and legal culture. Interruptions in Chinese courtroom trials are substantially asymmetrical in terms of the number, functions, and causes in the sense that prosecutors interrupt the most and defense lawyers the least, with judges being in the middle but somewhat closer to prosecutors. A defendant is the most interrupted party. The dominant side, represented by the judge and the prosecutor, interrupts to exercise control by stretching the Gricean maxims to the extreme. In contrast, a defendant interrupts mainly for cooperation or to insist on their right to speak. I also attempt to explain the imbalance by referring to the Chinese judicial system and legal culture and compare the interruption phenomena in Chinese criminal trials with those I observed in the United States.

This article reports a study of harmonic speech displayed in Akan oral praise poetry ( apae ). The study demonstrates that the recitation of Akan praise poetry—a fairly free verse form in terms of variable tempo and line length—is highly influenced by an isochronous rhythmic beat. Despite isolated occurrences of relatively long or short non-isochronous metrical accents, these poems are recited in a style that exploits tempo changes and ellipsis to maintain an oscillatory rhythm of beats at harmonic intervals, and this rhythm is found to remain constant through silent rest phases between individual poems as well as between lines. This research supports the notion that considerations of timing should be given more weight in linguistic theory and modeling.

The present study investigates the function of humor in parliamentary discourse. The data under examination come from the offcial proceedings of the Greek parliament and involve two main protagonists, the Greek prime minister and the leader of the opposition. The analysis reveals that parliamentary humor is used as a means of constructing and damaging participants' public image and political identity as well as attacking the opponent without violating parliamentary rules of behavior. Moreover, humor is used to introduce an informal tone to parliamentary procedures, thus distracting the attention of the wider audience from the important issues discussed in parliamentary debates. The negotiation of the humorous frame between the two politicians shows that, in settings where the serious mode of communication typically prevails, humor may be used at the expense of the humorist, thus canceling his/her efforts. Apparently, contextual parameters and genre rules and expectations play a significant role in successful humorous behavior.