Volume 35, Issue 4 -

In this article I discuss “wicked” women in contemporary pop culture, analyzing the language of the “heroines,” or protagonists, of three popular American television series: Weeds, Nurse Jackie , and Saving Grace . All feature female characters who are “flawed” in some way and can be described as “non-conforming,” since they engage in behavior that would be socially and morally condemned – they deal in drugs ( Weeds ), are addicted to pills ( Nurse Jackie ), or are alcoholics ( Saving Grace ). While this has attracted some comment in the mainstream media, such comments are not based on any empirical research and have tended to center on these women’s behavior. In contrast, the approach taken here focuses on their linguistic practices, in particular their use of “bad language,” including taboo words and swearing. The analyses show that all three female protagonists challenge stereotypical expectations about appropriate “feminine” behavior for white heterosexual Anglo-American women through their use of “bad language,” while the impact of such cultural representations depends on a range of factors.

Since the first description of classroom talk from a conversation analytic perspective, the field has significantly expanded, providing a comprehensive account of the system that operates in the specific setting. However, apart from the system that defines the boundaries of the participants’ permissible conduct, the departures from it have received little attention, forming a vague picture of the parties’ opportunities for deviant behavior. The present paper explores exactly this aspect, illuminating the other side of the coin. In particular, students’ departures from the canonical pattern are examined and a broad classification of them (institutionally oriented versus institution-threatening departures) is proposed. The analysis demonstrates the import of those departures and the way they contribute to students’ exercise of agency.

This paper reports on a comparative study of thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts, conducted within the systemic functional theory of Theme–Rheme (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and the thematic progression model evolving from Daneš’s work in the 1970s. It is suggested, following a detailed analysis of a corpus of sixty English and Chinese texts, that there are some similarities and disparities in structuring thematic information between the two languages. Overall, the key differences identified are that the English news tends to have a greater incidence of textual , and thus, multiple Themes, whereas the Chinese news tends to allow elliptical participants and circumstantial elements to be thematized more frequently. Such differences can be attributable to the distinctions in grammatical structure across the languages.

This paper offers an interactional analysis of discourse-connective que -constructions in Spanish. In particular, we discuss how these constructions operate at discourse level and we analyze the kind of interactional activities conversation participants are engaged in while using them. In previous studies, initial que has been described along the following lines: as an expletive element, as a marker of background information, as a modal particle, as signaling the presence of the speaker, and as part of a quotative construction. Nevertheless, analyses of free-standing que -constructions are usually based on subjective data from introspection and tend to focus only on the clause introduced by que , regardless of its discourse context. Our hypothesis is that the meaning of discourse-connective que -constructions is primarily indexical: they refer to a relevant piece of contextual information that can be retrieved from a previous utterance or turn, a previous discourse situation, a proposition being observed or one that is inferable from the speech situation. This paper helps define the discourse contexts where que -constructions are used more precisely, while also providing a description of the situated meanings que -constructions express in particular types of context.

We analyze small stories in a focus group on immigration to understand how small stories offer resources for group interaction in zero-history groups. Our analysis reveals two new functions of stories in deliberation: through small stories participants establish interactional identities (notably the role of expert) and reveal social categories relevant to the issue. Attending to how stories are elicited by other participants also reveals how group members use ventriloquism to have their arguments voiced by people representing particular social categories as a result of their small stories. This empirical analysis raises a normative question for public deliberation scholars: If narratives are vital to public deliberation, what happens when some people have relevant stories to tell and others do not? We suggest how small stories research can help deliberative theorists consider this question.

Metaphor use in psychotherapy practice has been influenced by conceptual metaphor theory and the “internal target–external source” assumption, where targets comprise abstract therapeutic issues, while sources comprise concrete conceptual materials external to the therapeutic setting. The relevance of metaphor is hence questionable in trauma talk, since traumatic events involve intense bodily experiences which are already concrete and do not require any external inferential support. We examine transcripts of semi-structured interviews with 14 subjects following the 2010–2012 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, focusing on the role of metaphor in their conceptualization of a sense of “control” over their immediate physical environment, and more abstract aspects of their lives in the earthquakes’ aftermath. We discuss four discursive patterns which show how speakers used metaphor as a mechanism to extend or refocus initial discussion of physical control, to subsequent discussion of abstract control. This suggests that metaphor goes beyond a conceptualization role to play a “scaffolding” role in trauma talk, where an initial target topic may serve as a source concept for a subsequent target topic. Therapists therefore do not necessarily have to “look externally” for productive source domains, but could capitalize upon conceptual materials which present themselves as therapeutic interaction unfolds.