Volume 36, Issue 3 -

The language that young people use in technologically mediated interactions has been sensationally exoticized by the mass media, constructed as a distinct form of communication barely comprehensible to adults, and presented as a threat to standard English, as well as to human relationships and the social order. The question of young people’s actual role in linguistic and social change is one that runs through much of the existing research on the subject, but also one that remains limited to adult perspectives. In the present study, I aim to address this gap by investigating young people’s own metalanguage in a genre where traditionally such metalinguistic awareness would be little expected – in teenage personal blogs. The material used is composed of 32 personal blogs written by American teenagers in the period between 2010 and 2013, collected from a popular dating website, Mylol.net. The teenage bloggers are shown to frequently orient to their peers’ Internet language and to norms of orthography, perpetuating many aspects of standard-language ideology and linking them with adolescent concerns. I wish to use these examples in order to draw attention to the diversity of teenagers’ attitudes to language and technologically mediated communication, which works to challenge particular dominant assumptions. More broadly, I will argue that a full understanding of young people’s online practices and their potential impact on language and communication crucially requires more nuanced attention to youth voices and youth agency.

From a critical sociolinguistic approach, this paper analyzes the stories of place and locality which emerge during a series of narrative interviews conducted with a small group of Ghanaian migrants who, unsheltered, lived on a bench in a public transport area on the outskirts of a Catalan urban town. By understanding narratives as situated interactional events with which both the researcher and the researched negotiate, shape and co-construct storyworlds, I focus on the social meanings of the stories of geographic (and socioeconomic) dis/emplacement whereby migrants strategically present their spatial orientations in town, which include largely unknown social networking sites. I complement their narrated in-group “safe mooring” spaces and their out-group zones of “mismeeting” with guided co-ethnographic visits to these selected locations. I claim that the imbrication of stories of dis/location with collaborative multi-site ethnography contributes to the study of the migrants’ alternative spatialization and ethnicization of their host societies, and to the discovery of alternative localities which challenge some conceptions about migrants’ (im)mobility practices and identity management in new urban geographies. These may broaden our understandings of how they make sense of their transnational survival experiences in contexts of extreme precariousness, from a dialogical, participant-oriented, reflective perspective.

This study is a corpus-based examination of metaphors in the media coverage of the global financial crisis of 2008. Based on conceptual metaphor theory, it discusses how and why metaphors of living thing were used in the news reports, with a particular focus on the two negative emotions of fear and anxiety. The research started with the compilation of a 1-million-word corpus of news articles. With the use of the software suites Wmatrix 2.0 and WordSmith 5.0, metaphors directly conceptualizing the emotions of fear and anxiety were identified. The findings showed that these metaphors described various stages and intensities of negative emotions, and that they were tailored to increase the negative feelings of the readers, which in turn increased the news value of the articles for the newspaper. Various theoretical and lexicogrammatical implications have also arisen from the study.

This discourse analysis examines the job interview as a site of moral accounting for applicants. Twenty job interviews were audio-recorded in an employment agency in a major city in the United States. Using ventriloquism as a theoretical framework, I analyze communication between the applicants and the interviewers and show how moral accounting takes place in this institutional encounter. Applicants in this study used moral accounts to reframe their identity, which was problematic due to the social stigma of unemployment. Moral accounts gave applicants the discursive power to avoid accountability for problems that threatened their moral identity as workers: a history of unemployment, a current state of poverty, and failure to pass a skills test. Despite these problems, applicants constructed a desirable image of self, using moral accounts that staged figures of legitimacy in the talk. Speaking in the name of figures – previous employers, situations, values, and ideology – gave applicants the power to neutralize these problems and frame their identity as morally good. Accounting is therefore an act of ventriloquism, and it is intertwined with moral identity. This study extends Cooren’s (2010) theory of ventriloquism by identifying constraining and empowering figures that decrease or increase one’s discursive power in interaction and contributes to job interview literature by analyzing the moral aspect of this institutional talk.

This paper introduces Connected Concept Analysis (CCA) as a framework for text analysis which ties qualitative and quantitative considerations together in one unified model. Even though CCA can be used to map and analyze any full text dataset, of any size, the method was created specifically for taking the sensibilities of qualitative discourse analysis into the age of the Internet and big data. Using open data from a large online survey on habits and views relating to intellectual property rights, piracy and file sharing, I introduce CCA as a mixed-method approach aiming to bring out knowledge about corpuses of text, the sizes of which make it unfeasible to make comprehensive close readings. CCA aims to do this without reducing the text to numbers, as often becomes the case in content analysis. Instead of simply counting words or phrases, I draw on constant comparative coding for building concepts and on network analysis for connecting them. The result – a network graph visualization of key connected concepts in the analyzed text dataset – meets the need for text visualization systems that can support discourse analysis.