Volume 34, Issue 5

Despite its reputation for sensationalism and championing of superstition, the Daily Sun is South Africa's most-read newspaper, with over five million readers. The tabloid targets English-literate, predominantly black, first-time newspaper readers. The Daily Sun 's publisher, Deon du Plessis, called the potential reader “the guy in the blue overall [...] who lived in the township [...] owned his own house [...] worried about his kids, rather than manning the barricades”. Contrary to ideas of tabloids addressing readers as individuals, media studies theorists Steenveld and Strelitz (2010: 531) argue that they “help constitute an imagined community [of readers],” following Anderson's (1983) imagined community. So far, there has been little empirical evidence for this community. Our research uses the APPRAISAL framework (Attitude, Graduation, and Engagement, cf. Martin and White 2005) to investigate the creation of a community in ten of the Daily Sun 's “letters of the day,” written by readers, selected by the editor. The investigation of the writers' APPRAISAL choices exposes the readers' values, beliefs, and interests, as well as the writers' attempts to align the potential audience with these qualities. The cumulative effect of the APPRAISAL strategies suggests that the nature of this imagined community is advisory, and fosters a feeling of neighborly support.

This paper reports on the linguistic accuracy of five renowned “chatbots,” with an evaluator (an ESL teacher) chatting with each chatbot for about three hours. The chatting consisted of a series of set questions/statements (determined as being in the domain of an ESL learner) – aimed at assessing the accuracy and felicity of the chatbots' answers at the grammatical level. Results indicate that chatbots are generally able to provide grammatically acceptable answers, with three chatbots returning acceptability figures in the 90% range. When meaning is factored in, however, a different picture emerges, with the chatbots often providing meaningless, nonsensical answers, and the accuracy rate for the joint categories of grammar and meaning falling below 60%. The paper concludes on the note that although chatbots as “conversation practice machines” do not yet make robust chatting partners, improvements in chatbot performance bode well for future developments.

Dutch direct mail sales letters have traditionally had an indirect structure. In such a format, the transactional proposition is presented late in the letter in order to maximize the possibility that the readers will pay attention to, be interested in, and feel motivated to consider the proposition in a positive way. Nowadays, this type of direct mail letter seems to compete with letters of a different structure, one that is more direct, that has a transactional proposition earlier in the text. Two diachronic corpus studies were conducted to see whether this impression could be corroborated. Both studies give some evidence of a drift toward a more direct structure. Some tentative explanations are offered.

The paper investigates how children attending a religious Russian Heri-tage Language school are taught to relate to their parents in culturally acceptable ways. It examines hypothetical direct reported speech that promotes respectful and humble communication behavior in interactions with their parents. The paper is based on discourse analysis of audio- and video-recorded interactions and longitudinal ethnographic observations. Analysis demonstrates that the moral concept of humility is valued in the school and is considered important for children's everyday lives outside of school. Through the use of hypothetical reported speech children receive concrete understandings of this complex moral concept. The use of hypothetical reported speech allows for creation of a situation where absent parties become active characters. The hypothetical reported quotes are presented as relevant to all of the children while being simultaneously “typical” and “de-personalized.” This allows teachers to avoid accusing a particular child of behaving inappropriately toward a parent. Furthermore, the role of mothers is highlighted in the quotes positioning them as important in the everyday lives of children. While the hypothetical reported speech demonstrates to the children how to be respectful and humble toward parents, it also presents ways to disagree with the parents. Prosody was found to be utilized in the hypothetical speech as an important way to allow for positioning of the social actors in relation to each other to take place. The teachers produce a “layering of voices” (Bakhtin 1981) in the quotes. This layering allows an opportunity for the teachers to express their own stances toward the quotes while at the same time to present to the children acceptable norms through creation of typified characters.

This article presents an investigation of the use of social categories in talk about Christians in a small community of users discussing religious issues on the popular video-sharing site, YouTube. The article focuses on how self-proclaimed atheists employed and modified the category of “Christian” to describe others in a series of antagonistic debates – called “drama” by users. Three video pages, including video talk and comments, were analyzed using membership categorization analysis (Housley and Fitzgerald 2002) to focus on how users, and in particular atheists, employed and modified the category of “Christian” to talk about others. The analysis shows the category of “Christian” was used in different ways to evaluate the actions of others, often leading to conflict about the use of the category. The study shows how the meaning of categories is dynamic in talk, and how local, specific uses emerged as stable on different timescales in the drama. Findings also show that categorization often revealed user beliefs and expectations about social interaction, particularly when the categorization led to moral judgments.

Little research has focused on strong disagreement since it is generally believed to be impolite and dispreferred (Pomerantz 1984). This study employs Spencer-Oatey's (2002, 2005, 2008) rapport management model to investigate strong disagreement because it emerged as salient in natural conversations. Data were derived from approximately 49 hours of conversational interactions among 62 non-familial equal-status Chinese speakers of English at two unorganized English Corners in a southeastern city of mainland China. The study shows that strong disagreement was used to preserve rights, conduct facework and achieve interactional goals. Despite a few potentially face-threatening ones, all the instances of strong disagreement served to maintain or enhance, rather than damage, the rapport of the participants. Strong disagreement did not lead to negative evaluations. It seemed to be perceived as appropriate. This might have resulted from the way strong disagreement was expressed, the link between perception and behavior, the value of face and rapport to the participants, their English proficiency and pragmatic awareness, interactional goals and identity construction. The findings support the few studies that have found disagreement to serve positive functions in conversational interaction. They could be a valuable resource for research on pragmatic features of EFL learners.