Volume 32, Issue 6

This paper examines the editorial discussion of Wikipedia's policy of “Neutral Point of View” during the collaborative authorship of the entry for Che Guevara. Such data provide a rare source of unprompted lay metalanguage on the relationship between the lexicogrammatical form of a text and its evaluative orientation and make possible an inductive approach to exploring this longstanding issue in critical linguistics inquiry. The paper illustrates this inductive approach in selecting a stretch of text identified by the editors themselves as problematic and relating their metalinguistic commentaries to the lexicogrammatical features of both the original text and the variations proposed. However, recognizing that naturally occurring metalanguage is itself situated within its own social practice, the paper considers ways in which the editors' readings are a function of their role as Wikipedia “prosumers” and goes on to discuss the need to theorize specific reader types within critical linguistic approaches to discourse analysis.

The present paper describes the role of metaphor in the commentary generated after Wimbledon's 2008 final and articulated in two genres within tennis discourse: post-match reports and the online forums opened after them. The starting assumption is that metaphor is sensitive to the discourse context(s) where it is used, and should be approached accordingly. In this regard, genre provides a good vantage point to gain insight into how metaphors are used and, more interestingly, enriched, re-elaborated, and, presumably, entrenched within a given community through repeated use. By focusing on the role of metaphor in discussing such engaging topics as a tennis match and the players in it, the paper attempts to shed some light into the empathetic and evaluative potential of metaphor as a discourse strategy as well as the importance of communicative interaction and language in the elaboration, expansion, and entrenchment of certain metaphors in discourse communities such as the one built around tennis.

This article is focused on the uses of the terms want and need to build directives and requests in family interaction. The study is located within the theoretical framework of discursive psychology, using the methods of conversation analysis. Within social cognitive research, mental state terms are analyzed as references to inner mental experiences. In contrast, this article analyzes the selection of want and need as sequential phenomena. The use of I want to deliver directives increases the likelihood of compliance when one cannot monitor or control whether a projected action will be carried out. Requests built using I need are recurrently delivered following a request from an interlocutor and delay the granting of the request while maintaining alignment. Thus rather than simply expressing an internal mental experience, the verbs want and need have specific practical uses in their normative sequential environments.

In this paper, we analyze an array of rhetorical strategies directly aimed at recruiting the reader to be an active collaborator in the construction of arguments in literary criticism. Many techniques for this purpose have been posited, mainly reporting the frequency of specific, discrete lexicogrammatical items. However, this approach does not capture techniques that are not necessarily realized by a discrete structure but can be interpreted in terms of function. Our approach brought to light some techniques not previously reported, which operate simultaneously in individual texts. In addition, a framework is needed to account for the saliency of the diverse strategies involved. We propose a typology of techniques that tap various aspects of the reader's experience – among them the social, affective, ideological, and the intellectual spheres. Furthermore, analysis of recruitment strategies has been mainly restricted to scientific and other texts that validate their arguments by empirical research. Our study is based on texts in literary research, a field which is dependent on convincing the reader of the superiority of the critic's new reading and presumably entails a greater need for active collaboration of the reader.

In the last few years, the language of teenagers has been the focus of attention from different perspectives. One of the features that characterizes this type of language is the particular way adolescents intensify their language. This is precisely the object of study of this paper. For this purpose, we have analyzed data from different corpora: COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language), SCoSE (Saarbrücken Corpus of Spoken English), and DCPSE (Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English) together with additional materials from other written and oral sources, including magazines oriented specifically to teenagers, British Library archival sound recordings, Web sites and Web-based glossaries of British teenagers' language. The results obtained show the frequent use of really and so as intensifiers; taboo words (e.g., bloody, fucking ) are also quite widely attested as intensifying expressions. Negatives are frequently intensified by teenagers in a particular way and expletives in certain types of questions and exclamations are a common reinforcing resource. Finally, a number of lexical devices to strengthen language are considered: prefixes (super-, mega-, uber-) , and expressions denoting the very positive qualities (cool, massive, wicked) . Comparisons are drawn with adult language to identify those intensification strategies which are typical of teentalk.

Minimal definition of narrative is based on more segmental elements in the studies carried out so far. This study investigates the intonational framework of the narratives produced by Turkish adult narrators using Mayer's picture book Frog, where are you? The findings reveal that narrators are not totally free to tailor narratives intonationally according to their idiosyncratic narrative skills only. There are deterministic constraints imposed by the narrative discourse to urge them to apply certain intonational patterns in certain parts of an oral narrative. It was found that Turkish narrators apply three major intonational forms to mark narrative units or events to tailor the narrative according to the listener. They use pauses to increase the thirst in the listener for the anticipated resolution in the course of the unfolding of the plot; they use rising intonation to inform the listener about the forthcoming part of the narrative; and they use falling intonation to mark the termination of an event or the narrative.