Volume 36, Issue 5 -

Some texts offer to the reader/viewer ambiguity and in-betweenness and they effectively contradict reality within the world of the story and within the world of the reader/viewer. In this paper we look at three distinct fictitious texts as our case studies ( Blow-Up [fiction film], Austerlitz [novel] and Mindgame [theatrical play]), which confuse the reader/viewer with their particular ways of contradicting reality. In other words, we elaborate texts in relation to their capacity to raise critical thinking through the working notions of ambiguity, in-betweenness and unreliability. We argue that our case studies not only surprise and disturb the reader/viewer with plot twists, reverse chronology, unreliable narrators, ambiguous perceptions of the protagonists and so on, but they also bring a critical eye to the dominant concepts and the working institutions of the society; and also to the dominant ways of perceiving reality. In other words, these texts through the use of all the above-mentioned literary devices in their storytelling enable the reader/viewer to think critically.

Most gender studies performed from a cognitive perspective focus on the description of metaphors underlying the conceptualization of men and women in different cultures. Little attention has been paid so far to gender-related aspects of the pragmatic uses of conceptual metaphors. This paper analyzes a corpus of opinion columns by two groups of contemporary Spanish and English journalists (male versus female journalists) with a view to identifying the pragmatic functions of the cognitive metaphors found in their discourse. Such metaphors have turned out to act as either mitigating or intensifying devices of the writers’ claims. From a gender perspective, a tendency has been observed for male journalists to use conceptual metaphors in order to intensify axiologically negative opinions or descriptions, while female journalists tend to make use of them for the mitigation of negative descriptions. In both cases, metaphor is also used for the creation of humor, but while male journalists do so by means of downgrading others, female journalists repeatedly play themselves down in an attempt to gain the readers’ sympathy through laughter. These general tendencies have been found to be largely modulated by culture-specific pragmatic factors (i. e. preference for indirectness) and maxims (i. e. Modesty and Approbation).

This article analyzes a television news story using a particular example. In line with the research tradition of the ethnomethodological approach of membership categorization analysis, our main analytical concerns are (i) to understand the logic of practical reasoning and intelligibility involved in the production of the news story; (ii) to examine how this intelligibility is generated and what resources – such as commonsense knowledge of the social structures – are used to make the news story communicable; and (iii) to explore how specific forms of categorization employed in the news story are used to induce certain readings or to promote certain worldviews. The news story analyzed describes the progressive increase of foreign participants at the San Fermín running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. It also highlights the still minority participation by women at this massive event. The results of the analysis show that both “foreigners” and “women” are presented as being in the wrong place. Through association with their typical predicates, both “foreigners” and “women” are construed in the news story as the “other.” A final reflection is made on the concept of identity, which is understood as a situated accomplishment.

This article studies how, in welfare interviews, interviewers receive simple positive responses from interviewees that are not indexing any answer options. Using videotaped data from welfare-related interviews in Finland ( N =23), it is shown that interviewers receiving response particles joo ‘yeah’ and kyllä ‘yes’, and the verb repeat response pystyn ‘I am able’, may treat them (i) as interchangeable, and (ii) differently, since they take into account the prior speaker’s social identity. Minimal responses delivered by the unemployed are taken for granted, while the same responses delivered by elderly retirees are accountable. Hence, social identity is demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential in the reception of positive minimal responses. This analytical claim should be carefully considered by anyone collecting data through interviews.

This article examines interactions between defense attorney Don West and witness Rachel Jeantel in the 2013 State of Florida v. George Zimmerman trial following the murder of Trayvon Martin. The focus of analysis is how the defense constitutes the term creepy-ass cracker as evidence of violence and aggression on behalf of Trayvon Martin. Their argument is located within an ideological framework of a post-racial American society wherein the defense claims colorblindness (Bonilla-Silva 2014) for their client George Zimmerman. Trayvon Martin’s observation of Zimmerman’s whiteness, as indexed by the word cracker , is positioned as evidence of a culture and an individual with inherently violent, racially motivated intentions. The article examines interactional moments during the defense’s questioning of Rachel Jeantel wherein creepy-ass cracker is positioned as immoral within a post-racial ideological framework, and evidence of racism toward white people. Don West’s use of pauses, hyper-articulated Standard American English, and emblematic deictic terms discursively and linguistically segregate Martin’s and Jeantel’s community from the hegemonic white practices of the courtroom. West’s attempts to assert symbolic control over the semantic meaning of creepy-ass cracker reflect the relative unmarkedness of Standard American English and whiteness in contemporary United States judicial systems and society.

Most previous research on turn-taking mechanisms has not centered on extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching, although brief overlaps have been discussed (e. g. Schegloff [2000, Overlapping talk and organization of turn-taking for conversation, Language in Society 29, 1–63]). This study departs from conversation analysis (CA) perspectives and attempts to uncover extended concurrent speech as a strategy for guānxì (relationship) management employed by non-familial equal-status Mandarin speakers in everyday practice in a southeastern city of mainland China. Spontaneous mundane conversations were analyzed and interpreted by means of a discursive-interactional approach, inclusive of interactional sociolinguistics. The participants were found to co-construct extended concurrent speech to maintain or enhance guānxì without any manifestations of negative evaluation. The study suggests the importance of situating research in local and large contexts, including the participants’ relational history, occupation, age, sex and social distance, and the necessity to examine extended concurrent speech, floor taking and topic switching in different varieties of Chinese. The findings can promote our understanding of intercultural communication that involves native Chinese speakers.