Volume 34, Issue 1

An analysis was conducted of the discourse of Nick Griffin (leader of the BNP, the far right-wing British National Party), as featured on a television debate, broadcast on the popular BBC current affairs program Question Time (22 October 2009). On the basis of equivocation theory (Bavelas et al. 1990), it was hypothesized that Griffin's discourse may be seen to reflect an underlying communicative conflict. On the one hand, to be seen as racist is widely regarded as reprehensible in contemporary British society; on the other hand, much of the BNP's political support comes from its anti-immigrant stance. In this context, it was proposed that while Griffin denies criticisms that characterize the BNP as anti-immigrant or racist, he puts over his political message through implicit meanings, seemingly vague and ambiguous, but which carry clear implications regarding the BNP's continued underlying anti-immigrant stance. These implicit messages were further conceptualized as a form of “doublespeak” – language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words, and which may be characterized as a form of “calculated ambivalence.”

As a highly frequent discourse marker in spoken English, so prototypically indexes a “resultative” or “inferential” relation between two propositions. This article, however, focuses on instances of so that do not overtly preface a proposition, but occur either at the end of an intonation unit or as intonation units in themselves. It is argued that nonprefatory tokens of so can prompt the interlocutor to recover an implicit proposition and establish the relevance of the prior segment to the turn, or can merely serve as a turn yielding device. This article lays bare these nonprefatory uses of so , as well as the four discourse structures in which they operate, in a corpus of English interviews with native speakers of English and Dutch, enabling the comparison of native and learner data. Contrary to previous studies of discourse markers, and of so in particular, (the nonprefatory use of) so is found to be significantly more frequent in the learners' speech than in the native speakers'. This is attributed to an interplay of three main factors: the learners' desire to be viewed as coherent speakers, their limited inventory of markers, and a functional resemblance of so with comparable markers in the learners' mother tongue.

Although initially related to the country's colonial and apartheid history, material inequality in South Africa has deepened, with recent research suggesting that South Africa now has the highest levels of inequality in the world. In this paper, we examine the interactional reproduction of inequality by paying particular attention to the discursive and interactional practices employed in students' talk about food. Specifically, we examine foodrelated troubles talk and foodrelated jokes and humor, showing how students who described foodrelated troubles produced these troubles as shared and systemic, while students who produced foodrelated jokes displayed that they take for granted the material resources needed to have a range of food consumption choices available to them, while treating food consumption as a matter of individual choice. These orientations were collaboratively produced through a range of interactionally organized practices, including patterns of alignment and disalignment, pronoun use, laughter, and aspects of the formulation of utterances. While our analysis primarily focuses on these discursive and interactional practices, we also consider how discursive practices can be linked to the material conditions of participants' lives outside of the analyzed interactions.

The aim of the study is to show how reported client–practitioner conversations function as assessments. The setting of the study is a rehabilitation course targeted at young adults. The data consist of informal backstage meetings among the practitioners, which do not have an officially stated or recognized task of assessment making. However, the study demonstrates that the meeting talk is rich in reported client–practitioner conversations with a dimension of assessment. The located assessment functions of reported conversations and the accompanied meeting talk are (i) making negative and positive portraits of clients; (ii) treating clients' voices as selfevaluative and influential; and (iii) presenting practitioners' own past talk as problematic and creating selfadvice for future conversations. By making reported conversations visible as everyday assessment practices, the article challenges the onesided view of assessment as a separate and formal professional practice, which is conducted with standardized tools such as psychological and social ability tests.

Drawing on how divergent discourse frames can lead to contests of how and what to tell in institutional autobiographical narration, this article presents data from a Norwegian asylum interview. Institutional interviewing is basically an information-sharing endeavor; the interviewer aims to get information on the situation of the interviewee in order to establish how to deal with his or her case, framing the discourse as truthful, in contrast to other discourses of innocence and morality. The outcome depends very much on the interviewee's ability and willingness to share relevant information on his or her case. The interactional dynamics of the interviews must be considered in order to achieve an understanding of what identities are constructed by the participants. Intertextuality plays an important role in the analysis. In the interplay between elicited accounts and interactional processes, meanings and identities are negotiated and resisted in narrative discourse as part of the encounter between the interviewing officer, the interpreter, and the asylum applicant, within the social practice of asylum procedures. Finally, the need for further in-depth analyses of such interviews is pointed out.