Volume 31, Issue 2

Because the world has become increasingly dependent upon CMC (computer-mediated communication) to interact, the very fibers of political discourse have undergone changes. Chatting online using interactive channels has become one mode out of many that interlocutors employ to pore over political issues. In this light, using the influential study of Chafe and Danielewicz (Properties of spoken and written language, Academic Press, 1987) as a model, we examine the linguistic choices made by political adversaries engaged in online chat and compare their choices with those made by opponents using spoken language and written language. The evidence uncovered clearly distinguished political chat from editorial writing and face-to-face debating, and even when frequency counts were similar to either the editorials or the spoken discussion, subtle differences were observed. The basis for these differences is discussed, revealing that political chat is different on many levels.

This paper discusses the management of rapport by a group of English-language teachers through their request e-mail discourse. The group was regarded as a community of practice consisting of two types of members—core and peripheral. The paper explores and compares the ways the core and peripheral members managed rapport while making requests through e-mails. It is argued that to the two types of members, rapport weighed differently and was thus managed differently by differential manipulation of three aspects of the macro-structure of the discourse including (i) the blending of discourses, (ii) the generic structure of the request e-mails, and (iii) the rhetorical approach chosen. The observed differences in rapport management are explained with reference to the career prospects and duties of the e-mail authors.

The presentation of scientific discourse in academic texts is characterized, among other features, by the construction of an authorial voice which projects an image of the authors themselves and of their relation to their arguments, community, and readers. The construction of the author's voice is here explored in the frequency of use, distribution, and discourse function of first-person pronouns across languages (English and Spanish) in research articles within the discipline of Business Management written in English as L1, and in English as L2, and in Spanish by Spanish academics. The divergences observed suggest that the disciplinary and the linguistic variables interplay and determine the textual points in the research article at which authors make themselves visible, and the frequency of that visibility. Significant conclusions can be drawn as to how visible Spanish academics make themselves when writing in English, and whether the divergences/similarities found in comparison with their Anglo-American peers respond to interference of their academic literacies in Spanish. This knowledge may then allow them to make informed decisions as to whether and/or in what senses they may modulate their voice to comply with what is expected from writers publishing in international contexts in Business Management.

“Evaluation” may be expressed through varying context-dependent and, therefore, often unpredictable lexico-grammatical operators. Its analysis relies, at least partly, on “local” grammars or categories (Hunston and Sinclair, A local grammar of evaluation, Oxford University Press, 1999). The aim of this paper is to outline a systematic approach to the identification of evaluative meaning in the discourse of online property advertising, which can be applied to the analysis of evaluation in other types of promotional discourse. The online descriptions of three established estate agencies in the East of England are explored in terms of appraisal choices, specifically appreciation (Martin and White, The language of evaluation, Plagrave, 2005). The appraisal framework is reviewed with particular reference to the study of property advertising carried out by Pryce and Oates (Housing Studies 23: 319–348, 2008) and general advertising theories (e.g., Darley and Smith, Journal of Marketing 57: 100–113, 1993). Revised categories of positive evaluation are identified in correspondence with different values of subjectivity, affect, and explicitness. The analysis reveals similarities and differences in the nature and distribution of the evaluative options across the three sets of descriptions. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings and approach are discussed in the final section.

The objective of this study, based on eight psychiatric interviews recorded in a Spanish hospital, is to investigate how psychotherapy is made visible in psychiatric interviews. In particular, the focus is on how psychotherapy is provided in subsequent psychiatric interviews to hospitalized inpatients. Since much of what happens in psychiatric interviews is talk, psychiatrists (as professionals) are responsible for framing such talk as a distinctive type of speech exchange that differs from ordinary conversation. To fulfill their institutional mandate, psychiatrists need to design their speech as therapeutic and produce the necessary “explicative transactions” accordingly. The accomplishment of this task seems to require the employment of an array of third-turn utterance types like repair, assessments, or formulations. A particular word search is also shown to perform a similar job. Altogether, these interactional devices are initiated by the psychiatrist to (i) conduce patients to discover the beneficial effects of psychotherapy and (ii) highlight psychotherapy as a visible process. On the whole, these interactional objects enable the psychiatrist to constitute the psychiatric interview as a self-explicating phenomenon. This investigation utilizes the research tools developed in conversation analysis (CA).

Genre, from the systemic functional linguistics point of view, refers to the organization of any speech activity in stages, determined by the overall purpose of the genre and by social conventions. In this paper, the SFL approach to genre and register is applied to the genre of online movie reviews. A corpus analysis shows specific stages in the genre: Descriptive stages (in turn, Subject Matter, Plot, Characters, and Background) and an obligatory Evaluation stage. Each stage is described in detail, in particular its characteristics and placement in the texts. We then turn to lexicogrammatical characteristics of the two main stages, showing that Description and Evaluation can be distinguished from each other using two features: evaluative words and connectives. Evaluation stages contain significantly more evaluative words. In terms of connectives, Description was shown to contain more temporal markers than Evaluation, whereas Evaluation contains more causal markers, indicating a basic distinction between narration (which tends to necessitate more temporal relations) and comment (which makes more use of cause, result, concession, condition, and contrast relations).