Volume 34, Issue 2

An investigation of plagiarism policies of Australian universities in the latter part of 2009 was undertaken to determine how such institutions construed the notion of plagiarism and how this was reflected in the language and expression of those policies. Various unexpected challenges emerged in using Martin and White's (2005) traditional APPRAISAL framework when analyzing attitudinal stance. The pronounced and widespread use of thingification and abstractions in the policies and the consequent ambiguity in identifying the appraised and/or the appraiser, presented challenges to Martin and White's distinction between Appreciation and Judgment (two subsystems of Attitude) and led to the adoption of Lee's (2007) double coding which seemed more aligned with the normative nature of the plagiarism policies. Overall, the findings suggest some movement away from the default punitive stance of plagiarism policies, to a more “educative” pedagogically based approach focused on the concept of student as apprentice researcher , already recognized as a valued member of the academic community.

E-mail has firmly established itself as a dominant channel of interaction for both social and professional purposes. Despite its importance as a communication tool, the influence of professional roles on discursive practices has yet to be thoroughly addressed, especially when e-mail is specifically used between academics, students, and other relevant stakeholders in the higher education setting, where English is a second or foreign language. Through the case study of an e-mail corpus containing messages received by an academic in one year, this paper investigates the general discursive patterns, discourse structures, and nonstandard linguistic features of e-mail discourse in higher education in Hong Kong. Specifically, it examines how such discursive practices are influenced by sender roles and sender–receiver relationships. Findings from the present study show traces of interdiscursivity in e-mail use in the academic domain and how sender roles influence the level of interdiscursivity between e-mail and genres of old and new. The similarities and differences in the discursive practices between academic professionals and students in e-mail communication also underscore the importance of having more fine-grained accounts of e-mail use in a wide range of settings in professional communication.

This paper examines how colleagues of an Italian restaurant in Hong Kong perform core business and relation-based talk in Facebook Status Updates beyond working hours and outside the workplace. Adapting Wenger's (1998) framework of Communities of Practice and Culpeper's (1996) model of impoliteness, we particularly concentrate on how they employ impoliteness strategies to get things done, and how power is negotiated in the three mechanisms of doing power as suggested in Wodak et al. (2012). Based on the analysis of 200 Status Updates collected from the research site, we find that such colleagues' talk outside the workplace can be conducive (or at least influential) to professional tasks and their relationships in the workplace. As our participants infuse their impoliteness strategies with Netspeak, they tend to employ the impoliteness strategies of “disassociating from others,” “being unsympathetic,” and “not treating others seriously.” Simultaneously, their impolite participation displays a tendency to challenge or subvert institutional authority and official status, typically by some normative mechanisms of doing power. We argue that Status Updates blur the line between “in the workplace” and “outside the workplace,” and that they become an alternative collocation of workplace talk which allows repositioning of work matters and renegotiation of power by impoliteness strategies.

This work proposes an innovative use of the ethnography of communication in tracking diachronic changes in an event. The object of the analysis is a segment on The Daily Show , entitled the “Seat of Heat,” which is conceptualized as a communication event, and which, I argue, exhibits a phenomenon formulated here as symbolic decay. The analysis suggests that symbolic decay is characterized by a decline of symbolic investment accomplished through a shift of sequential structure, ends (explicit goals/outcomes), and keying (emotional tenor) that inhibits the coordination of conjoint action, and through which interactants communicate the declining symbolic import of a communication event. Implications are drawn for future applications of the concept and the utility of the theoretical and methodological framework employed herein.

This investigation utilizes interactional sociolinguistics to consider the role of principal in fictionalized improvised entertainment. We explore how improvised contexts can offer an ambiguity of principalship. The animator could in fact be the principal, offering the performer the potential to articulate cultural truths. The possibility that he/she may not be provides a freedom from responsibility for what is being said, a space that performers may exploit to animate controversial beliefs without the normal interactional repercussions. We explore this in two sets of data, one from a production day of a Canadian television series in which the dialogue is improvised, and one from a large-scale ethnography of a community in Washington, DC, of performers of improv (a humorous theatrical performance in which characters, dialogue, and the performance structure itself are improvised). Observing footing shifts and drawing on metacommentary, we consider how improvisers show awareness of this potential, and we consider the cultural implications. Thus, while improvisation provides a unique forum for tackling difficult cultural issues, such as racism, improvisers may avoid doing so precisely because of the ambiguity of principalship. This research contributes to the current work in sociolinguistics considering the complex ways that language may be used in interaction to articulate cultural meaning.