Volume 32, Issue 1

Drawing on the intuitive assumption that several types of asymmetries characterize all kinds of human interaction and play a crucial role in any communicative event, this paper aims to explore knowledge asymmetries beyond a level of truism. We focus on exploring the concept of knowledge asymmetry in its communicative complexity, its inherent dynamics, as well as its multifaceted nature. As an illustration of this, we offer an analysis of the emergence of different asymmetries in a highly specialized institutional event, namely a criminal trial by jury within a US legal context. In particular, we present instances showing the emergence of these communicatively salient asymmetries between some of the different interactants found within this specific communicative situation.

The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last decade. While research has suggested a range of potential affordances and limitations of online counseling modalities, very few studies have offered detailed examinations of how counselors and clients manage asynchronous e-mail counseling exchanges. In this paper we examine e-mail exchanges involving clients and counselors through Kids Helpline, a national Australian counseling service that offers free online, e-mail, and telephone counseling for young people up to the age of 25. We employ tools from the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyze the ways in which counselors from Kids Helpline request that their clients call them, and hence change the modality of their counseling relationship, from e- mail to telephone counseling. This paper shows the counselors' three multilayered approaches in these e-mails as they negotiate the potentially delicate task of requesting and persuading a client to change the trajectory of their counseling relationship from text to talk without placing that relationship in jeopardy.

Psycho-semiotics is a qualitative research perspective aiming at developing the seminal intuition by Peirce (Collected papers, Harvard, 19311958) according to whom man is a complex network of signs. Hence, text and talk-in-interaction are the basic psycho-discursive practices ( Wetherell, Subjectivity 22: 7381, 2008) where the intersubjective nature of sense making is revealed. Peirce is an inspiring point of reference for psycho-semiotics also at a methodological level, since he considered not only deduction and induction as research practices able to characterize the process of scientific knowledge production, but he emphasized an inferential modality labeled abduction. Moving from such assumptions, the aim of the present paper is to introduce the notion of diatext as a reflexive way to enhance the value of this abducing procedure. Diatextual approach is a specific methodological orientation within critical discourse analysis specifically aimed at capturing the dynamics between interlocutors, text, and context which characterize any kind of human interaction. A corpus of empirical data, collected within different social contexts, will allow us to discuss and to understand how diatexts actually work as yeast for human discourses.

In this paper, a particular case of grammatical gender agreement system is discussed, concerning the referent of young females or small children. These referents are grammatically treated as neuter nouns, disregarding their biological sex. This is termed gender disagreement. It is argued here that this is due to the older classification of nouns based on active and inactive distinction, stemming from the active alignment. What decides the distinction is the ability to reproduce, which was once a characteristic of active nouns. This criterion has not been given much attention in analyzing modern languages, but it has been very persistent in spite of various sociocultural factors that forced changes in other parts of grammar. Thus, it can be claimed that gender disagreement is a result of a shift of gender agreement criteria and persistency of a specific criterion, i.e., the ability to reproduce proves to be still an important criterion in gender agreement system in modern languages.

Contemporary linguistic and rhetorical analysis of legislative writing reveals various kinds of indeterminacy, much of it either accidental or unavoidable, but some designed to politically influence subsequent court interpretation. Analysis to date, however, has concentrated on final texts, preventing discovery of rhetorical strategies only evident from an analysis of the text's evolution. Focusing on a contentious attempt in the New Zealand Parliament between 2005 and 2007 to repeal a section in the 1961 Crimes Act that provided parents or guardians with a defense for using excessive physical force on their children, this article reports on an investigation into whether analysis of successive stages of the formal legislative process, including the oral debates in the House of Representatives, might reveal textual traces of non-ambiguous language use designed less to clarify the law than to secure the assent of opposing parties. As well as confirming reliance of the legislative text on indeterminacy, what of particular interest showed up was a significant use of redundancy: a feature which could appear on the surface to be nothing more than a mechanism for achieving precision the holy grail of legal discourse but which in this instance performs additional rhetorical work.

This paper compares two Japanese conditional constructions tara and to used as nonconditionals for narrative effect in spoken and written narratives collected from five native speakers of Japanese. These two constructions connect clauses where two unrelated past events happened in sequence as in: Miru to/Mitara, ame datta When I looked, it was raining. Examination of the spoken and written narratives revealed that tara is predominantly used in the spoken narratives while to is favored in the written narratives. Although both constructions are similar in the unexpected effect, the reason why the teller uses them differently can be attributed to the nature of the two different communicative modes. The teller in spoken narrative uses tara to intensify the heightened suspension whereby s/he creates the surprising effect. The speaker-teller exploits the situatedness of the listener's co-presence and recreates a story in the way the listener can share suspenseful moments and a sense of uncontrollability. The teller, when writing, uses the to construction to issue a narrator's voice, Look what happened. The writer takes the omniscient narrator's viewpoint and directs the reader to an unexpected result even when the writer is absent.