Volume 38, Issue 2 -

Contemporary scholarship on race investigates how racism is deeply embedded in everyday norms and practices in ways which subtly, even unwittingly, serve to reproduce white domination. In South Africa, like many other postcolonial societies, racial constructs continue to be particularly salient. This paper focuses on how a young South African, Bernadette, navigates the complex terrain of racial positioning in a focus group interview with her peers. Drawing primarily on Labov’s seminal work on narrative, as well as more recent interactional approaches, it investigates how Bernadette uses the reported speech of others in her stories as a key narrative strategy for racial positioning. The analytical findings suggest that despite her efforts to distance herself from what she perceives as racist talk, she slips into a racializing discourse which is much less overt than that which she rejects, and which has the effect of reassembling the apartheid hierarchy as an explanatory framework. This paper argues that a narrative lens enables the researcher to begin uncovering the multilayered complexities of racial positioning and the subtle ways in which racial discourses circulate in contemporary talk.

The aim of this paper is to highlight and describe the forms of verbal emotive utterances that appeared in a longitudinal corpus of 11 Swedish children interacting with parents, siblings and friends. The children were in the ages 0;9 to 5;10 and were recorded four to six times during a two-year period. The verbal emotive expressions of the material are divided into the categories Descriptive versus Accompanying utterances. Descriptive utterances are emotive mainly from semantic conventions, whereas Accompanying utterances are emotive due to prosodic and contextual traits. The categories are illustrated and related to conventions, language development and cognitive growth. By classifying and labeling verbal expressions as emotive in different ways, it is argued that we can gain a better understanding of how language is used when intertwined with emotions, but also that we access a way to compare and investigate emotive language in a more thorough manner.

As China internationalizes its own banks more and more, and the Chinese are an expanding market in Western banks, the linguistic specificities of communication strategies may be understood and applied in the professional environments of banks. The present comparison is based on the key features of metadiscourse markers in the Chinese English-version CEO letters and the Western English-version CEO letters in banking annual reports. Metadiscourse in business genres is an under-represented topic, particularly across cultures; this study invites further inquiry. This paper applies corpus-based contrastive analysis to CEO letters in English from Chinese and Western banks. Comparing distribution patterns of metadiscourse markers, we found that both interactive and interactional metadiscourse was more frequently used in the Western letters. This suggests that Western CEO letters tend to use more credibility and affective appeals, while Chinese CEO letters are based more on rational appeals. Variation in use of metadiscourse is discussed with a focus on the interplay of linguistic and cultural features. This study contributes to the fields of Chinese English professional written communication, and cross-cultural writing in workplaces.

Branding is essentially discursive in nature and yet discourse studies of branding are surprisingly few in number. The present study is a rare attempt to examine how branding, in particular place branding, can be conceptualized and operationalized linguistically through the investigation of a corpus of marketing texts on the official branding of Hong Kong. A quantitative analysis using corpus tools and techniques was first conducted to identify the main textual patterns based on frequency information. A qualitative analysis then followed to investigate the dominant textual patterns in context in order to uncover the branding strategies used and their associated linguistic realizations. Findings from the present study reveal that the branding discourse of Hong Kong is strongly business-oriented, largely constructed through taken-for-granted qualities, and heavily reliant on the technical branding jargon. Such findings can be directly compared with those from traditional marketing research to pinpoint any inconsistencies between official branding policies and consumers’ perceptions. This will in turn provide more concrete suggestions to help bridge the divide, if any, between brand creators, consumers and other stakeholders involved, and ultimately promote more inclusive branding for all.

Previous research has established that conversationalists treat “arrangement making” as closure implicative contributions. This study adds “conditioned arrangement making” to the list with an examination of how general practitioners propose conditioned follow-ups to patients, that is, the opportunity to return to the clinic if their condition does not improve or if it should worsen. The data consists of 52 audio-/video-recorded naturally occurring general practice consultations in Denmark. Using the conversation analytic method, the paper examines why the hypotheticality of this particular kind of proposition making is a resource for practitioners in terms of accomplishing progression towards termination of the consultation, and also in terms of accomplishing agreement upon appropriate, responsible and reassuring treatment plans. Among other things, conditioned follow-up propositions enable doctors to communicate “no problem” diagnoses while preserving care continuity. The study, therefore, contributes to the understanding of how use of grammatical formats such as conditional clauses influences institutional interaction.

This study explores how marketing and science rhetoric have become entrenched in online science news stories. The schematic structures of a corpus of 270 news stories from three types of website (university websites, the websites of Futurity.org and MSNBC.com) have been analyzed and compared. An eight-move structure identified from the corpus suggests that the genre of news stories is a hybridization of promotional discourse for marketization and science discourse for explanation. Hybridization is first evident in university press releases, which are then spread by the mass media without significant changes. From the perspective of intertextual chains, the emerging discourse practices can be attributed to the power shifting of news production from journalists to science institutions and further from journalistic to scientific norms. In turn, the discourse practices accelerate the shift of power, which could ultimately lead to the loss of independent and critical science journalism.