Band 30, Heft 4

The letter is the written genre, which in the past was nearest to orality, and it was used in the eighteenth century as a very important way of communicating officially and privately. The corpus of 33 letters under study constitutes a dialogue which discusses the issues concerning the marriage of a young mulatto girl with a slave. The corpus introduces 16 subjects — speakers and listeners or readers and writers in different production formats — instantiating the voices in this story. These voices represent conflicting ideologies — social and religious — but also conflicting interests in the development of the action. The study takes the corpus as a single text and interprets the plurality of voices as polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense.

This article argues for the use of other measures when analyzing human error in cross-cultural communication than the more traditional functionalist approaches to culture (Askehave et al., Culture in a business context, Academica, 2006), such as Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Using a case study, the behavior of a crew member in an emergency situation which was retrospectively ascribed as human error due to cultural background by a shipping company, the article analyzes what was contextually relevant for the participants and argues that cross-cultural interaction is not merely a linguistic challenge. This article examines how accountability is managed and how nonnative speakers orient toward and manage potential human error, using an interpretative approach in the form of discursive psychology, principles of conversation analysis, and Wittgenstein's philosophy as the point of departure. The analysis discusses how the participants use different strategies to accomplish accountability in an emergency context, such as emotion categories, discursive remembering. It is argued that the interpretative approach can provide the contextual sense-making analyses that Dekker (Human Factors and Aerospace Safety 1: 247–265, 2001, Dekker, The field guide to human error investigations, Ashgate & Cranfield University Press, 2002, Dekker, The field guide to understanding human error, Ashgate, 2006) is in search of when analyzing human error (Nevile and Walker, Human Factors and Aerospace Safety 5: 109–135, 2005).

This article offers a critical examination of the recent initiative that considers developmental issues to be an important agenda in CA-based studies (Brouwer and Wagner, Journal of Applied Linguistics 1: 29–47, 2004; Firth and Wagner, Modern Language Journal 91: 800–819, 2007). This initiative seems to take a narrower view of learning than what natural interactional details in CA studies allow us to see. Spoken interactions are not always stable enough to demarcate the objects of learning for theoretical predictions or pedagogical prescriptions, particularly when seen in reference to contingent pragmatic actions enacted in discourse-in-interaction. The contingency of interaction has to be treated as central if we want to recover learning as the participants experience it. This paper proposes that if the contingency of interactional details is treated as being analytically central, CA research can still tell us very useful things about the phenomena of learning because it can recover the participants' contingent sense-making practices through which the task of learning is discovered, acted on, and realized. This point is demonstrated through a close analysis of two excerpts from English as Second Language (ESL) classroom interaction.

Social networking sites are an increasingly prominent form of computer-mediated communication that provides a venue for individuals to document their life experience through the publication of “status updates.” The stories reported in updates fall outside the literary, conversational, and electronic narrative canon, but are a rich data source for re-examining key concepts in narrative theory, including factors that give rise to perceptions of narrativity. This article examines the narrative potential of status updates found in the social network site Facebook, based on the analysis of just under 2000 updates posted by British users. The episodic narrativity of the updates is influenced by the online discourse situation where recency is prized over retrospection and updates are distributed within a multidimensional web of connections between Facebook Friends. The narrativity represented in the surface features and genres of the status stories are characterized by the present tense of Breaking News (Georgakopoulou, Small stories, interaction and identity, John Benjamins, 2007) and archived in reverse chronological order. These narrative characteristics are in keeping with stories in other Web genres (blogs, e-mail, discussion forums) and suggest that the parameters associated with prototypical narrativity are by no means abstract or universal, but constrained by the canonical data from which they were originally derived.

A question not often asked in metaphor research is the extent to which different methodologies, aimed at investigating different aspects of metaphor, can be brought together productively. One recent exception is Wee (Language in Society 34: 219–238, 2005a), which recasts models of metaphor processing as production strategies facilitating discourse objectives characteristic of particular discourse genres. This article complements and refines Wee's analysis by examining instances of psychotherapeutic discourse. I argue that the demanding nature and interpersonal dynamics of psychotherapeutic talk define discourse objectives that cannot be straightforwardly aligned with particular metaphor strategies. Instead, discourse objectives are shifting and pragmatically modulated in ways that are reflected in more intricate patterns of metaphor deployment. By analyzing the co-occurrence of discourse markers and other linguistic features with these metaphors, I also suggest how the prevailing emphasis on signaling metaphoricity in discourse per se can be fruitfully expanded to include the analysis of these co-occurring features, or “contextualization cues,” within the entire discourse context. I conclude by discussing the implications of my findings for researching metaphor, discourse analysis, and psychotherapeutic practice.

In this article we explore language in a specialized corpus of gender-related talks by Osho, one of the founders of the New Age postmodern movements. Specifically, we examine the coordinate structures “man and woman” and “woman and man” which, unlike the gendered lexical items “man”/“woman”, have not received attention in the previous language and gender studies. For our research purposes, we adapt a new methodological framework (Baker et al., Discourse and Society 19: 273–306, 2008) integrating corpus analysis and qualitative analysis. The qualitative analysis of the corpus evidence (frequency, collocates, and concordances) in relation to gender construal in the specialized corpus seems to indicate a newly emerging semantic profile of the coordinate structures with “man” and “woman”, as well as a new, holistic gender identity which is in line with the holistic views of the New Age and Osho movement.