Volume 39, Issue 1 -

The language of fashion was first investigated by Roland Barthes in his influential book Système de la Mode , but it has since received scant attention from linguists, perhaps due to perceptions of frivolousness associated with the fashion world. This study explores contemporary fashion discourse through a systematic analysis of hyphenated phrasal expressions as linguistic features that are analytically challenging, but with strong expressive potential. The Fashion Discourse Corpus consists of 396,125 words compiled from the traditional fashion press (Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, Harper’s Bazaar) and two leading fashion blogs, representing both American and British English. For comparative purposes, a reference corpus was extracted from American and British benchmark corpora. The quantitative analysis revealed that hyphenated phrasal expressions were considerably more frequent in the Fashion Discourse Corpus. Follow-up qualitative analysis identified conventional, semi-conventional, and non-conventional types, along with recurring structural patterns and communicative functions used to describe and evaluate fashion phenomena. The fashion blogs in particular contained richly expressive items that seemed to reflect the writer’s unique voice and identity within the discourse community. The findings can be applied in journalism and communication courses to help aspiring writers learn to use hyphenated phrasal expressions effectively.

People who spent time in public care as children are often represented as ‘care leavers’. This paper investigates how ‘care leaver’ is discursively constructed as a group identity, by analyzing 18 written personal experience stories from several charity websites by people identified or who self-identify as care leavers. Several approaches to narrative analysis are used: a clause-level analysis based on Labovʼs code scheme; the identification of turning points; an analysis of ‘identity work’; and an analysis of subject positions relative to ‘master narratives’. The findings from each of the methods are then combined to reveal how intertextual, narrative-structural, and contextual factors combine to constitute a common care leaver discourse. This forms the basis for a characterization of ‘care leaver’ group identity as ‘survivors of the system’. The findings also reveal how ‘care leaver’ as type, including stereotype, influences how identity is constructed in the personal experience narratives.

Taking off from the Media Talk approach, this paper examines the communicative work of a Swedish sports webcast football show, Superlive , as an emerging form of web-based media format called Web-TV. This analysis is situated in a context in which broadcasting is going through fundamental changes, and broadcasters are rethinking their content in order to face the challenges arriving with recent decades’ technological developments, and especially the fact that television is no longer restricted to being broadcast but can be distributed through the web and be received on PCs, tablets and mobile phones. In this ‘post-broadcasting era’ producers are searching for new ways of reaching audiences through creating new forms of audience address. Superlive is a good example of these changes and how broadcasters now explore the possibilities of producing television exclusively for the Web. The analysis shows that what is taking place in Superlive is clearly in contrast to the performances one could expect in the conventional broadcast. Through the participants’ favoring of an interactional style characterized by informality and spontaneity, this show situates itself as backstage to the conventional forms of airings. As a result, this discursive space implies an interactional orientation to “co-presence” with the audience.

The English present perfect has received a great deal of sentence-based analytical attention in the empirical linguistic literature as well as some corpus-based coverage at the discourse level, in which analysis depends on close scrutiny of the context of a structure’s placement, i.e. several utterances, turns at talk, or sentences before and after. Due to the painstaking nature of such analysis, however, corpora used to date have been relatively small. This study, via a corpus of over 12 million words from television and radio interviews in the United States, categorizes the use of discourse-pragmatic functions of 268 present perfect tokens. From this analysis, one use stood out overwhelmingly: the present perfect in the employment of position-taking or support . Also, only very rarely was the present perfect used to initiate narratives, which is a finding that does not conform to previous understandings. The study contributes to the overall knowledge of present perfect use and has implications for how the tense can be taught to English language learners.

This paper analyzes two settings of digital communication in which social actors participate, interact and engage differently within virtual communities. Online identities are interactionally and discursively constructed and this process defines differences in groupness, illustrating the nature of those online spaces. This study builds on the notion of Citizen Sociolinguistics, that is, ordinary people producing metacommentaries on language uses, to examine the data in different digital communication settings. This work analyzes 500 comments posted by readers on the site of the newspaper El País , in response to an article announcing the new Spanish orthographic reforms. Additionally, it analyzes 200 threads of the “ Sólo español ” (“Spanish only”) sub-forum within WordReference.com. The analysis investigates identity and hierarchy in digital communication as socio-cultural results of linguistic interaction. By analyzing interaction and identity in online spaces, this paper proposes empirical ways to account for differences in virtual communities, reconsiders established criteria such as time and regularity in interaction, and proposes new criteria (hierarchy and authority) to accentuate the distinctions regarding virtual communities.

Quotative be like is a construction associated with informal spoken contexts and, especially, with various forms of embodied enactments. This study examines instances of quotative be like in a corpus of Twitter data (1,000,000 tweets; 1,113 quotative instances). Special attention is paid to how users of Twitter employ the platform’s affordances to animate their speech reports – i.e. to represent voices, enact body language, or otherwise ‘dramatize’ the speech reports. The aim is to investigate how a linguistic format which is richly embodied in face-to-face interaction gets ‘re-embodied’ on Twitter. The study finds that animation of reported speech on Twitter is visually, and predominantly typographically, afforded. In the material, oral practices are more frequently reconfigured and remediated rather than directly reproduced. That is to say, even when users are not reproducing spoken utterances, they often employ graphical strategies that are mainly understandable by analogy to spoken and embodied face-to-face interaction. However, users also draw on emergent online repertoires with no face-to-face analogues, such as ‘pure’ typographical play and the recruitment of established online memes. Thus, the findings suggest that orality lingers as a trace, but is not a necessary component, in bringing reported speech to life in a text-based computer-mediated setting.