Volume 38, Issue 1 -

Drawing on discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics, this paper analyzes the discursive construction of human rights violations in the report of the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, also called Rettig Commission. We show that there is a strong contrast in how the victims and perpetrators are represented in the case descriptions. While the victims are clearly identified, the perpetrators are not identified individually. Moreover, through a variety of strategies, the agent of the human rights violations often remains vague or unexpressed. Furthermore, we show that different sources of information are included in the event description – entailing different windows of attention – save the perpetrator’s testimonies. By doing so, the report clearly privileges in its discursive construction of the events the non-attribution of responsibility over the completeness of information principle.

This paper interrogates the ways Chinese journalists judge behaviors of different news actors (individuals or institutions written about in a news report) in Chinese hard news reporting on risk events. Drawing on a newly constructed corpus of hard news reporting and following the appraisal framework, the study examines language patterns of judgement and suggests how lexicogrammatical patterns of judgement , semantic features of judgement and social orders are intimately connected. Corpus analytic findings show that news actors of different social statuses are judged in different manners. Social elites are primarily judged positively in relation to their “capacity” and “tenacity” in dealing with risk situations, whereas ordinary risk makers are mainly judged negatively in relation to their “propriety” in producing risk situations. Additionally, the same judgement marker in the same phraseological pattern may realize different valences of judgement in relation to news actors of different social statuses, and judgement of different news actors tends to select distinctive local patterns. It is argued that such different discursive patterns of judging news actors point to the distinction in the way social values are (re)produced and journalistic professional practices undertaken in the production of Chinese hard news.

The aim of the paper is to show the extent to which the game metaphor shapes the Home Box Office (HBO) show (2002–2008) The Wire , which sets out the interconnection of the systems of drug dealing/trafficking, police department, court, organized labor, media, public school, and local policy, as well as the similar structure which all those systems are built upon. As our theoretical-methodological framework we will adopt cognitive and cultural linguistics as a starting point for a contextually embedded sequence analysis. We will focus on the multimodal ubiquity of game as a cultural model, as well as the contextual frames in which this metaphor is embedded with regard to the everyday life of the protagonists on the TV show and the institutions they are part of. Therefore, we will first analyze a specific metaphorical scenario where the conventionalized source and target domains chess and drug business are inverted, which has cultural-contextual implications, before we come to a second scene where the same domains are again accessed, this time in reverse.

For the evaluation of a story, story recipients rely on a narrator’s identity work. Uniquely, these related processes of identity work and story evaluation unfold explicitly in the Red Chair segment of The Graham Norton Show , where “bad” stories are rejected by flipping the narrator out of a red chair, and narrators of “good” stories may walk away from the chair. We collected every Red Chair story broadcast in 2013 and analyzed these by drawing on Bamberg (2011, Narrative practice and identity navigation. In James A. Holstein & Jaber F. Gubrium [eds.], Varieties of narrative analysis , 99–124. London: Sage)’s three main dimensions of identity navigation, namely, agency, sameness/difference, and constancy/change. The analyses reveal diverging tendencies, which we bring together by means of the concept of identification, viz. (i) the story recipient’s affiliation with the protagonist of the story and/or with the narrator, or (ii) the recipient’s vicarious experience of the events. We propose that a story recipient’s evaluation can be related to the extent to which identification is elicited. This identification is not only based on the navigational dimension of sameness/difference, as often proposed, but it is, among others, a result of the narrator’s unique identity navigation along the three closely interwoven dimensions, thus also including agency and constancy/change.

This paper reports on a study that comparatively investigated the differences and similarities in the use of first-person pronouns by English and Chinese native speakers (ENSs and CNSs) in their academic English writing. Using a corpus comprising journal research articles (RAs) from the fields of Physics, Computer Science, Linguistics and Management written by ENSs and CNSs, I present data to reveal that (i) the use of first-person pronouns in Physics is more frequent than that in other disciplines for both ENSs and CNSs; (ii) there are no consistent ENS/CNS frequency differences in first-person pronoun usage across the four disciplines; (iii) the plural first-person pronoun we is used more often than the single form I in single-authored RAs, particularly so for CNSs; and (iv) the distribution patterns of we vary greatly in different RA sections. These findings may have implications for the teaching of academic writing, as well as for cross-cultural understanding among academics.