Volume 34, Issue 6 -

The focus of this article is on the records written during an intensive assessment and rehabilitation course targeted at young adults suffering from severe mental health issues. The ability of the clients to cope with everyday life is assessed during the rehabilitation course and the final statement compiled by the keyworker includes the combined results of the assessments of each client. Using intertextual analysis, I examine these final statements and utilize the concepts of voice and direct and indirect reported speech. I ask how and what kinds of voices are used in final statement to assess the clients’ progress during the course and to define the future development tasks for them. Firstly, it is shown that the final statements are multi-voiced texts. They are persuasive statements about the clients’ development stories and descriptions of how the rehabilitation course practitioners have helped the client. Secondly, the analysis shows how voice and client knowledge are present in the final statement. The voices of assessment build the argument dialogically and highlight temporality, and in this way they produce a convincing description of the mental health client’s current ability to function and progress on the rehabilitation course.

Before the 2010 UK general election the leaders of the three major political parties engaged in three televised debates. In the debates they were prohibited from directly engaging with one another and from infringing on their rivals’ speaking rights. The leaders attempted to exercise power through positive face attacks. Previous evidence has indicated that in the United Kingdom quality face attacks are more severe than social-identity face attacks. I investigate the communicative value of key, the pitch height of the initial onset syllable, in which the leaders pitched their face attacks, and illustrate that the type, amount, and key of face attacks changed across the debates. In the final debate there was an increased use of high key, which added salience to positive face attacks. It was noticeable that only the candidate behind in the polls consistently selected high key to boost his quality face attacks. The others tended to pitch quality face attacks with mid key. I illustrate that selection of key established the context in which the face attack was to be understood and show that a fuller understanding of face work in political debate requires an account of the implicatures generated by prosodic selections such as key.

This study demonstrates how participants in haircutting sessions merge different roles during one of the most sensitive moments of an encounter: requesting and/or making revisions to a new cut. During the process of arriving at a consensus of whether or not changes need to be made to the new cut, the stylist and the client negotiate not only the quality of the cut, but also their expected roles. Caring about both the bodies and the minds of customers is an important element in measuring the quality of cosmetological services, a consideration which may oblige stylists to immediately agree with and act upon every client request or concern. However, simply yielding to the customer’s opinions can threaten the stylist’s role as a beauty expert, one who possesses their own professional standards. The analysis reveals that the participants frequently transform revision requests/offers into mutual decisions through a combination of verbal and bodily actions. In doing so, they harmonize the sometimes conflicting responsibilities of “service provider/patron” and “expert/novice.”

This article is an investigation and a discussion of hybridity and related terms as used in linguistic studies of genre. The theoretical points that are made are illustrated with data from empirical research done by others and with the authors’ own data. The focus is on written texts but hybridity in spoken interaction is also discussed. The article defines the notion of genre and discusses (proto)typicality in relation to genre and hybridity. Recontextualization is also discussed. This is followed by a discussion of terms that have been used to talk about the processes of hybridity, firstly, as used in research that has mainly been done on spoken interaction. The focus then turns to terms that have mainly been used in research on written texts: sequential intertextuality, genre embedding, genre appropriation, genre blending, as well as terms referring to pervasive trends such as commodification. Terms that take a product-like perspective on hybridity are then discussed. First there is a discussion of terms, such as “macrogenre,” which are used to describe the products of hybridization. This is followed by a discussion of genre chains and superordinate categories, such as “genre colonies,” grouped together because of the hybridizing forces that permeate them.

Conference abstracts are under-represented promotional texts in spite of their key role in the academic life of and communication among scholars. This generic study attempts to capture the structures and strategies of 160 applied linguistics conference abstracts from four world areas in terms of semantic units of Introduction, Method, and Findings and their Moves and Steps. Results revealed similarities and differences arising mainly from the idiosyncratic nature of genre, place of presentation, and western versus non-western, center versus periphery, and theory- versus application-oriented cultures. Implications for novice and non-native researchers to communicate and submit conference abstracts effectively follow a detailed report.