Volume 32, Issue 3

This study re-analyzes focus group data on responses to human rights abuses, to investigate how participants' experiences in their local social and physical worlds influence empathy with distant suffering others. Metaphors, metonymies, narratives, and typifying scenarios were identified in the discourse dynamics. Scenarios, metaphors, and metonymies of space and place emerge as particularly significant in the dialogic co-construction of moral reasoning. Embodied experiences, specifically encounters with people begging in the street, become emblematic of perceived threats to personal space that should feel private and secure. Systematic spatial metaphors construct a landscape of empathic understanding with an optimal distance for empathy, neither too close nor too far. Faced with distant suffering others in prompt materials, participants respond with parallel reasoning on the symbolic landscape. Implications for increasing empathic understanding of distant others are discussed.

Mediation is predicated on the notion that disputants have an argument or disagreement about something. Mediation is set up with a “neutral” mediator to enable an agreement to emerge from competing positions. Mediators are appointed by a third-party (e.g., courts) to enable a neutral forum for joint decision making, where disputants can set out their proposals and negotiate an agreement where possible. However, in the family mediation sessions investigated in this study, there are specific challenges that confront the process of reaching agreement, namely the emotionality of disputing terms of visitation for children. Using conversation analysis, this paper investigates how parents explicitly challenge and contradict each other during mediation sessions with a court-appointed mediator. Rather than use the mediator to repackage and redirect contradictory statements, parents directly address each other by violating question–answer sequences, completing mediator turns, and repairing formulations made by the mediator, to name a few. These findings bear resemblance to arguments investigated in non-mediation settings (e.g., playgrounds). This similarity is particularly interesting given the fact that mediation is designed, at least in theory, to minimize direct challenges and contradictions (cf. Garcia 1991).

This paper analyzes the discursive construction which a women's movement (MMO) in Ecuador presents to the public as an alternative to the government's proposal on the issue of “solidarity economy and finance.” The MMO's proposal and that of the government are not exactly two conflicting voices, but they are somewhat divergent in the process of building the sumak kawsay (‘good life’), the central idea of the new constitution. The analysis of the selected MMO's speeches reveals that the pragmatic-argumentative resources connect their position with the country's recent crisis. However, the government proposal is presented discursively, decontextualizing the issue from the country's socioeconomic situation. Ethnographic methodology is used to collect the data, and to relate these data with the local and global context. As for the method of analysis, the pragmatic approach has provided useful tools at the micro-analytical level. However, this level places limits at the macro-analytical level, on the analysis of complex strategies and arguments; in this case, this research shows how discourse analysis needs to be complemented with studies of argumentation. Finally, the socio-cognitive notion of frame has been used at the interpretative level to explain the ideological meaning of the present data.

The interactive potential of computer-mediated communication has proved more difficult to realize than expected. This study tries to break away from the normative status of speech underlining computer-mediated communication by asking how social talk is manifested in Web-based learning environments. The asynchronous communication of 55 students during a study period of 18 weeks was examined using mediated discourse analysis. The students were training as pre-school teachers in a four-year program. Their ability to create a group culture seemed significant for how they developed group autonomy and were able to handle unexpected incidents or a loose framing. The communication between the students was in narrative format and was lengthy in character; trust and confidence were dropped off as part of a constant construction of group culture. These students did not adopt or develop known means of compensating for the loss of nonverbal clues. There were indications of sharing private concerns and information from other practices in life as a conditional aspect of participation. When having troubles to cope, it was the youngest students who failed.

In this article I discuss an example of verbal dueling in Hip Hop culture from the perspective of Bakhtin's (1984) notion of the carnival. Both carnival and Hip Hop are subversive in that they seek to represent alternative realities to the dominant status quo. This is illustrated and embodied in a variety of ways in the datum: the discourse strategy of “Signifying” (a feature of duels within Hip Hop culture) is inherently carnivalesque in its focus on skillful, mocking uses of language; the alteration and patterning of the formal features of the language of the duel are representative of subversion on a larger social scale; manner of performance and display of one's linguistic skill and expertise are paramount and supersede propositional content in terms of importance; the identity of the performers is also altered. I argue that performance of verbal dueling within Hip Hop Culture bears close similarities to the ritual festivities, textual parodies, and Billingsgate language of carnival. Carnivalesque subversion, as embodied in the language of verbal dueling, is arguably a human universal.

Speech rate is one of the most important elements in a news presentation, especially on radio, a sound medium. Accordingly, this study seeks to compare broadcasters' speech rate and the number of pauses in 40 news bulletins from the BBC (United Kingdom), Radio France (France), RAI (Italy), and RNE (Spain). Most authors addressing the medium of radio recommend a speech rate of between 160 and 180 words per minute (wpm). If this rate is considered, only one radio station, BBC, would be within the suitable limits. Instead, higher speeds and fewer pauses have been identified in the RAI and RNE bulletins. The second part of this study attempts to analyze whether perception in the news can be affected by different speech rates. The findings indicate that the extent to which the individuals surveyed experience subjective assessment varies according to the speech rate.

This theoretical article is concerned with the types of meaning that make up the content of texts; it deals with meaning as a subjective process and the relationship between text content and lexical semantics. The article critically reappraises the classic proposition-based discourse processing model of Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), provides a description of the micro and macro ideational units on which an alternative approach can be based, and shows finally how the role of these might be further understood from the point of view of recent developments in French linguistics.