Volume 32, Issue 2

The latest wave of migration from Poland to the European Union is unprecedented in its scale. The changed economic and political circumstances of migration trigger the changes in the lived experience of migration as well as its perceptions. Yet, the “grand narrative” of economic migration that was a product of migrant experiences in previous epochs has not disappeared in the new circumstances. This article presents the voices in the debate about post-2004 migration that strongly rely on the “grand narrative” and thereby undermine the uniqueness of this wave of migration. Using the corpus containing postings from one of the leading Polish quality daily newspaper's Internet forum (2005–2010) as data, we analyze the macro-topics and argumentative strategies of contemporary articulations of the economic migration “grand narrative.” We suggest that the resilience of the hegemonic narrative of migration is caused by its being enmeshed in the multi-vector logic of post-1989 systemic transformation.

Academic weblogs are a new form of scholarly communication which provides both a space for researchers to present their ideas, observations, and reactions to others' work and a discussion forum. Although evaluation has been shown to play a prominent role in academic discourse, the function of this rhetorical device in academic blogs has not yet been studied. As part of an attempt to address this issue, the present study is aimed at identifying the types and frequency of evaluative adjectives in academic blogs and at analyzing their role in this genre. For this purpose, I adopt Thompson and Hunston's (2000: 5) definition of evaluation as “the expression of the speaker or writer's attitude or stance towards, a viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.” The study is based on the exploration of a corpus of weblog entries and comments taken from ten different academic blogs. The results show that evaluative adjectives are rhetorically used by participants in these blogs for two purposes: (i) to construct their identity both as knowledgeable researchers and competent academic bloggers; (ii) to build and sustain solidarity relations with other members of the community and signal their allegiances.

This study uses a conversation analytic framework to analyze practices by which language learners display that they are searching for language they have not yet fully acquired, i.e., words, word forms, syntactic structure, or pronunciation. Learners can present their solutions with rising intonation as candidate solutions to be confirmed or corrected by another speaker. They can also elicit a specific lexical item by presenting a more general term with rising intonation. When learners receive an ambiguous response to these search turns, they can initiate repair to disambiguate the import of that response in order to pursue linguistic accuracy, even when communication is displayed as otherwise successful. These search sequences therefore display an orientation to language learning, showing how the participants' situated identities as language learner/student and language expert/teacher are contingently constructed and negotiated in and through their talk and other semiotic resources as the local context evolves.

This paper analyzes localization problems in medical emergency calls. It argues that some localization problems can be related to difficulties in the alignment of operators' and callers' understanding of the overall functioning of the services and, in fact, be linked to the shift in the organization features of the emergency service. The data analyzed in this study are part of a wider corpus collected within a research project on language and technology carried out at the Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Bologna, Italy. The data were collected in two emergency service control rooms in northern Italy and central Italy. Through a detailed discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework of actual emergency calls, the analysis shows that some localization problems can be better understood by referring to the overall ethnographic understanding of the emergency service and its organizational development. The paper aims to show that some localization problems can provide some significant insights for the discussion of the issue of “conversationally constituted context” versus “invocation to more remote context” in the analysis of interactional data. The ethnographic understanding of changes in the organization of the emergency services makes understandable elements in the calls that cannot be explained otherwise.

Based on a corpus of 150 rap lyrics taken from Brazilian culture and 150 from German culture, the first stage in our research project on metaphor, rap lyrics, and culture demonstrated that the conceptual ( the mc ' s ) life is war metaphor, found in both corpora, which implies cultural variation in relation to the specific mapping parts involved. Thus, while in the German lyrics, the adversary is mapped onto the other MC, in the Brazilian lyrics, the adversary is mapped onto more abstract entities like politics, society, or the upper class. Currently, the second stage in the project focuses on specific expressions which have been selected from all the lyrics and include the war metaphor as one input that forms a blending network with at least one more metaphor input. Thus, in the German corpus, the striking and reiterated double-scope network results in a blend constituted by the inputs War and Rape, whereas in the Brazilian corpus, there is evidence that the formation of a blend constituted by War and Apocalypse is preferred. It will be shown how these dispersing tendencies might be related to different cultural contexts and functions of speech.

A reported utterance cannot be incorporated into the new discourse without undergoing certain transformations and losing some of its initial properties. Decision of representing or omitting information on certain aspects of the quoted utterance is not arbitrary, and this choice is subordinated to the writer's goals. In argumentative discourse the overall aim of convincing the addressee determines the way reported speech is presented to the readers. The present work analyzes those features of other discourses which are reproduced in argumentative discourse of the quality British press. Research revealed that of the six linguistic levels characterizing the initial utterance (phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and rhetorical), journalists choose only those relevant for the argumentative function the quotation performs. When reported speech is used as the thesis, the writer retains maximum control of the quotation by reproducing fewer levels, and focusing mainly on global semantics and pragmatics. When reported speech is used as an argument, the journalist, on the contrary, aims to show minimum control of the quoted utterance to increase its argumentative credibility. This is achieved by detailed reproduction of local semantics, lexica, and syntax of the quotation.

Drawing on naturally occurring conversation, the present study examines three utterance-final yes / no question particles, mi , o , and ang , in Shishan, a dialect of Lingao of the Tai-Kadai language family, spoken on northern Hainan Island (China). Both mi and o signal the proposition as deriving from an external information source (primarily preceding discourse). Mi marks simple, linear knowledge accruement/thought progression, based on external information, including plain registration of new information and simple inference. O signals conflicts between externally derived information vis-à-vis the speaker's pre-existing knowledge/expectation. Ang constructs a genuine query for unknown information, ascertaining whether the quality/characteristic, as coded in the predicate of the utterance, can ascribe to (i.e., ascribable as a property of) the entity represented by the sentential subject. The meaning of “property ascertaining” gives rise to the use of ang in various presequences (cf. Schegloff 1988).