Volume 33, Issue 6

From the viewpoint of genre analysis, this paper discusses generic embedding in a selection of the How to be British postcard series. Produced by Lee Gone Publications in the United Kingdom, the texts display comic strips that target British culture, lifestyle, language, and people. On the grounds of Halliday's systemic functional social semiotics, the examination has adopted Lim's (2004, 2007) and O'Halloran and Lim's (2009) analytical framework for logical-semantic relations between sequential panels. Hence, panel-to-panel relation has been addressed as the crucial narrative mechanism engendering mirth in the corpus. Findings show that if postcards use comic strips to be more attention-catching and entertaining, embedded comic strips tend to simplify their logical-semantic strategies in order to fit the communication system of postcarding.

This paper examines how “reported writing” is sequentially embedded in Dutch criminal trials. In the Dutch criminal court, because of its inquisitorial nature, judges have an active role. They interview the suspect during the hearing and while doing so they frequently read from the case file. The case file consists of various documents that have been drawn up in the preliminary investigations, such as police records of suspect and witness statements. The statements are not read out loud in their entirety, but fragments are selected and woven into the courtroom discourse. The case file plays an important role because, according to the immediacy principle, the judge's verdict must be based on the information and documents that have been dealt with during the trial. In the context of examining the evidence in the courtroom, this paper illustrates how judges embed fragments from a document that they choose to read out loud, in order to establish the facts. Furthermore, this paper shows how reported writing allows the judge to assign turns to and animate “written voices,” and make those words a part of the courtroom interaction and hence the reconstruction of what happened.

This paper examines how disagreement over the meaning of the text is conducted and managed in a religious peer-group conversation. Using Bible study sessions as data and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as a method, it investigates how different interpretative versions meet, clash, and merge in social interaction. The paper focuses on the oppositional turn and its linguistic composition and describes three disagreement types: denials , contradictions , and corrections and additions . The paper shows that although all of them treat the previous interpretation as insufficient, they are used to accomplish different social actions and are carefully chosen to fit to their local interactional context. Furthermore, these disagreement types vary depending on how explicitly they express the polarity between the presented views, and in so doing may allow several possible interpretations or enforce participants to construct one definite meaning for the discussed text.

The present paper explores the accounting practices through which alternative moral stances are talked into being, and made sense of, as children account for the morally charged topic of “fighting.” Data are drawn from ethnographic work, combined with video recordings of classroom sessions informed by the ART (Aggression Replacement Training) moral reasoning training program, in a fifth-grade class in a Swedish elementary school. An ethnomethodological approach is taken toward how features of the talk-in-interaction during these sessions indirectly make available systems of accountability motivated by institutionalized standards to talk about morality in a certain way. As will be demonstrated, the teachers' use of reversed polarity questions, assertions, and formulations work to hold children accountable for producing a certain moral stance. It is found that the children have learned to artfully design their contributions (justifications, detailing, second-stories, event descriptions, extreme cases) so that they can both comply with and subvert the institutionalized standards at the same time.