Volume 38, Issue 5 -

The ability to construe and to interpret cause–effect relations is critical to the task of knowledge building in science. It is essential to understanding investigative processes and to interpreting claims. However, in the discourses of science the linguistic construal of cause and effect can be far removed from that of its everyday, commonsense expression. Studies in systemic functional linguistics have found that scientific causality is often realized inside a clause rather than between clauses (Halliday, M. A. K. 1998. Things and relations. In J. R. Martin and R. Veel [eds.], Reading science: Critical and functional perspectives on discourses of science , 185–235. London & New York: Routledge). This paper aims to further understand the challenge of making meanings of scientific causality from a linguistic perspective. I analyze the language of biology in five research articles, which are students’ key reading texts in a core undergraduate biology course at a leading Australian university. I argue that a discourse semantic understanding of “cause inside the clause” is critical for revealing the diverse language resources for constructing scientific causality.

In this paper, we present an analysis of how constituents procure services at the constituency office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom. This paper will investigate how several previously documented interactional practices (e.g. entitlement) combine at the constituency office in a way that secures service. From a corpus of 12.5 hours of interaction, and using conversation analysis, we examine constituents’ telephone calls and meetings with constituency office staff and the MP, identifying practices constituents use. First, constituents opened encounters with bids to tell narratives. Second, constituents presented lengthy and detailed descriptions of their difficulties. These descriptions gave space to manage issues of legitimacy and entitlement, while simultaneously recruiting assistance. Third, we examine ways in which constituents display uncertainty about how the institution of the constituency office functions, and what services are available. The paper offers original insights into how constituency services are provided, and how constituency offices give access and support to ordinary citizens, while expanding the conversation analytic literature on institutional service provision.

We explore employment of the Hebrew construction ('ani) lo yode'a / lo yoda'at (lit ‘[I] not m/f-sg .know’), roughly equivalent to English ‘I don’t know’, by callers and hosts in 80 interactions on Israeli political radio phone-in programs, as compared with its functions in casual conversation. Five uses were attested in the corpus of radio phone-ins and correlated with the syntactic form of complementation (if available) for each token of the construction: (i) expressing literal lack of knowledge; (ii) expressing epistemic stance of uncertainty / hedging; (iii) gaining cognitive processing time in the midst of self-repair; (iv) expressing affective stance of contempt or criticism; and (v) avoidance strategies. While most of these uses are common to both genres, some are unattested in casual conversation. By exploring the functions of the ('ani) lo yode'a / lo yoda'at construction and their distribution according to institutional role, the study (i) sheds further light on the use of the construction and its evolvement through use; and (ii) shows how hosts and callers exploit this specific construction in ways that establish the Israeli political radio phone-in institutional genre.

In the last seven years, several corporate scandals have shaken public confidence in Chilean corporations. Considering this scenario and the fact that business ethics is an under-researched area in Chile, this study set out to examine one corporate genre, namely, codes of ethics. The codes of ethics from eight Chilean companies were analyzed. This sample offers both typicality and systematic variety as the eight texts have been produced by large-sized companies, five of which have been involved in media scandals. Each sentence was analyzed in order to determine what function it serves. The functions that exhibit the highest occurrence frequency in the corpus are educational (35.8% of sentences) and regulatory (33.9%). The other functions which emerge from the data are self-promotional (8.8%), inspirational (8.5%), commissive (7.8%), and aspirational (4.9%). The predominance of educational and regulatory functions evidences a deontological, compliance-based approach, while the striking salience of the self-promotional function, which ranks third, suggests the strong sense of pride which, according to some Chilean scholars, characterizes the Chilean entrepreneurial class. A critical analysis of the quantitative results and the language used in these documents points to some rhetorical flaws, which may render these texts ineffective.

As explicit expression of attitude is restrained in translations of canonical texts, the peritext often becomes a place for the translator’s attitudinal mediation. Unlike previous studies where the translational peritext is under the name of the translator, this study presents a special case in which the peritext attached to the translation of the Platform Sutra , a religious text, is attributed to the translator’s teacher, whose lectures in the source language served as the basis of the peritextual commentary. By adopting the appraisal framework, the study demonstrates how explicit attitudes, especially judgements, are instilled in the commentary to direct the readers to see the protagonist Huineng as a hero and many other characters as villains. Despite the apparent attribution of the commentary to the translator’s teacher, the translator plays an active role in reorganizing, translating and sometimes modifying the attitudinal expressions from the original lectures. Putting the commentary under the name of the translator’s teacher functions to further enhance the mediating power of the attitude. The specialness of the case study will make it complementary to existing studies on attitude as mediation.