Volume 30, Issue 6

Meetings are the backbone of organizational life and as such constitute an important component of workplace discourse. We expand here upon earlier work which suggests that a meeting constitutes a distinct genre, taking informal rather than formal meeting talk as our focus. To further explore the genre theory perspective, the analysis draws on theoretical and analytical tools deriving from work on “activity types” (Levinson, Activity types and language, Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1979]) by concentrating on the role of the meeting chair which is characterized as a structural device for managing these interactions. Acts that index “chairing” are analyzed as discourse types (Sarangi, ATs, DTs and interactional hybridity: The case of genetic counselling, Harlow, 2000) enacted in the context of the corporate (informal) meeting activity type. We analyze data from two comparable data sets, one recorded in Europe and one in New Zealand. Despite the effect of local context on the instantiation of the meeting event, there seem to be generalizable features (e.g., the chair's function in openings and closings and the agenda) which make meetings recognizable to participants. The findings indicate striking similarities across the organizations, lending support to the existence of a meeting genre, and emphasizing the significance of the chair role which shapes and is shaped within the context of the genre. We close the paper by discussing how the activity- and discourse-type approach can contribute to the study of spoken business genres.

This article examines a striking shift in the style and register of recent official-languages legislation in three Anglophone jurisdictions: Canada, Ireland, and South Africa. The discourse of certain key Canadian and South African statutes is shown to be very different from the traditional language of the law, whereas the recent Irish legislation reveals no such stylistic shift, nor is the “new discourse” maintained in subsequent and related Canadian or South African statutes. It is argued that the motivation for the stylistic shift in the Canadian Charter and South African Constitution, away from traditional legal register toward greater transparency, while undoubtedly consistent with a broader movement toward “Plain English” in legal language, also specifically reflects the impact of the Human Rights Revolution (here described as the “Great Values Shift”).

In this paper, a comparison is made between the discourse functions of two of the most frequently occurring and versatile discourse particles in spoken English, namely well and so , to provide an account of the similarities and differences between the uses of the two particles in naturally occurring data. Following a brief introduction which sets the background to the present study, a two-part analysis which contrasts in detail the discourse functions of well and so both qualitatively and quantitatively in the data with reference to previous work will be presented. This contrastive analysis serves to further our understanding of the ways in which well and so work in discourse and to demonstrate that the functional framework developed in the present study supplies a robust yet flexible platform on which comparisons could be drawn. This suggests the potential of applying the present functional framework to other discourse particles for a holistic approach to the description and interpretation of these linguistic items.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is increasingly found in European schools, and while research has examined many aspects of its application, there still remain unexplored areas. One such area is the effect of a second language on the discourse norms of students' first language, an issue of importance in the context of concern over the increasing influence of English. This study analyzes argumentative texts written in Spanish by secondary students studying partially through English on a CLIL program and compares them with Spanish texts written by students studying the traditional, Spanish-medium curriculum. Comparison is based on differences between Spanish and English discourse found in previous studies, and draws on approaches from systemic functional linguistics, including analysis of clause complexes, interpersonal and textual Theme, and text structure. Differences were found between the CLIL and non-CLIL student texts which frequently followed distinctions previously made between English and Spanish discourse, the CLIL student texts displaying more features associated with English discourse. Areas of particular difference included text organization and use of clause complexes. Possible explanations for these differences are discussed, along with implications for CLIL and language teaching.

Acts of evaluation and their meaning-making functions have been approached from a variety of perspectives, under a range of disciplines and conceptualizations. In the field of social psychology, for example, the concept of attitude is predominantly interpreted as fairly stable, enduring inner dispositions of the individual. However, when the perspective is shifted to encompass the communicative and relational aspects wherein evaluative acts are embedded, a variety of crucial functions, beyond the signaling of individual preferences, becomes visible. The article presents a communicative approach for analyzing contextual and relational aspects of attitudes. Through a qualitative analysis of argumentation and social interaction it demonstrates how construction of attitudes in a face-to-face group interview situation can be accounted for as an interplay between sequentially organized stance taking, relationship regulation, and definition of common social identity. In this way, at first sight puzzling observations become understandable: culmination of attitude expression can be accounted for with respect to the emergence of a common social identity, a virtuous ingroup.

This study examines how extraposition constructions with adjectives, such as it is important to honour those who have done honour to us (CB) function in the deontic and directive domain. It is found that in these two domains, which correlate with different sets of adjectives, the adjectival expressions can function on two distinct levels, either relating to the real world (State of Affairs [SoA]-related), or relating to the speaker's argumentative goals (speaker-related). These levels have also been noted for other linguistic categories, such as interclausal relations (e.g., Davies, On the semantics of syntax: Mood and condition in English, Croom Helm, 1979; Sweetser, From etymology to pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Verstraete, Rethinking the coordinate–subordinate dichotomy: Interpersonal grammar and the analysis of adverbial clauses in English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2007). Within the set of speaker-related uses, a further distinction will be proposed between text-building uses and mental focus on a proposition uses. The first type serves to build arguments, or to specify or justify the organization of a text. The second type is used to make the hearer focus mentally on a propositional content. It will be argued that this latter type is a partially filled construction in the sense of Goldberg (Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure, University of Chicago Press, 1995). In this sense, this study proposes a constructionally motivated typology of extraposition constructions in the deontic-directive domain.

A formulation is a type of metapragmatic utterance that enables participants to comment on some segment of the ongoing talk and to negotiate meaning within an interaction. Formulations have often been investigated in therapeutic and counseling interactions, but little is known about the use of formulations in other institutional settings. Broadening the scope of inquiry to higher education, the present study explored the distributions, functions, and responses to two types of explicit formulations (those prefaced by what you're saying is and are you saying that ) in university discourse. Using MICASE as a source of data, the study focused on the two explicit formulations in different types of university speech activities (e.g., lectures, study groups, research labs). The study's findings indicate that in higher education — just as in therapeutic contexts — the production of formulations is highly constrained by participants' institutional roles and their relative power. This article further illustrates the ways in which formulations can serve as didactic tools in educational contexts. Finally, the article concludes by highlighting potential interactions between formulation frames, response types, and participant structures.