Volume 39, Issue 4 -

This article investigates how children’s recipes are adapted structurally and linguistically for their young readership. It is based on comparative data, using 24 children’s and 24 adults’ versions of the same recipes, and additional online and printed children’s recipes as reference. Even though recipes have been researched extensively, research on recipes for children in particular is rare. Based on general research on facilitation methods in recipe writing, the article analyzes how children, as the target readership, are accommodated in the analyzed recipes and how they differ from recipes intended for adults. Findings suggest that children’s recipes often have an appealing title, are more detailed and clearer, and use visual support. There is a tendency to reduce presuppositions and include additional advice. However, they seem less consistent than adult recipes and, in contrast to the general trend for accommodation, often use technical terminology without further explanations. The request for an adult helper distinguishes children’s from adults’ recipes and serves as a differentiating feature. These findings indicate that children’s recipes are adapted to the particular context and needs of a young and inexperienced audience.

This article investigates the discursive practices of older first-time parents in interview interaction. Our focus is on the ways in which cultural notions surrounding the timing of parenthood are mobilised, and how speakers orient to potential discrepancies between the category ‘parent’ and their own stage of life (SOL) or age category. The data corpus comprises qualitative interviews with 15 heterosexual couples and individuals in the UK who became parents between the ages of 35–57 years. Examining reproductive biographical talk at midlife at a time when the average age of first time parents is rising and delayed parenting is increasing across Western countries provides a testing ground for the analysis of norms concerning the ‘right time’ of lifetime transitions, and age-appropriateness more generally. Inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of ‘chrononormativity’, our analysis demonstrates that ‘older parents’ engage in considerable discursive work to bridge temporal aspects of their parenthood. Moreover, we show how the notion of chrononormativity can be theoretically and empirically elaborated through the adoption of membership categorisation and discourse analysis. In explicating how taken-for-granted, temporal notions of lifespan events are mobilised, our findings contribute to research on age-in-interaction, social identity and categorisation, and on the methodology for analysing the discursive age-order and chrononormativity more broadly.

This study investigates linguistic strategies used in recipes from Mandarin Chinese food blogs that prompt interactions between writers and readers. Using analytical concepts such as contextualization cues and frames to analyze 122 recipes collected from five popular food blogs in Taiwan, this study explicates two research questions. First, what linguistic strategies do writers frequently employ as contextualization cues to prompt interactions from readers? Second, how do these contextualization cues help readers choose frames when responding to writers? The findings show that writers of popular food blogs often adopt three linguistic strategies to engage readers’ discussions on recipes: narrative orientations, speech acts, and direct reported speech from family members. Three implications arise from interactions in the context of food blogs. First, writers usually adopt manifold contextualization cues to establish the frames of recipes intended by them. Second, the ways writers and readers use language to discuss food and create coherent discourses on food construct food blogs in Taiwan as an online community. Finally, recipes may reflect social phenomena, i.e. in Taiwan, more and more people, especially female caregivers in their families who are concerned about health, started to cook after serious breaches of food safety.

This study aims to explore the sequential organization of hinting in an online task-oriented L2 interactional setting. Although hinting has been studied within conversation analysis literature, it has not yet been treated as a distinct type of social action. With this in mind, the study sets out to describe the sequential environment of hinting through the unfolding of the action with pre-hinting sequences initiated through the deployment of interrogatives, knowledge checks, and past references; maintained with base hinting sequences initiated through blah blah replacements, designedly incomplete utterances, and metalinguistic clues; and finally progressively resolved with screen-based hinting. Based on the examination of screen-recorded video-mediated interactions (14 hours) of geographically dispersed participants using multimodal conversation analysis, this study provides insights for an overall understanding of the interactional trajectory of hinting as a context-specific social action and contributes to research on L2 interaction in online settings.

Previous corpus-based research has demonstrated that antonyms co-occur frequently and serve essential functions in discourse. However, these studies are mostly based on written corpus data. Therefore, the present study investigates how antonyms are used in spoken Chinese. Antonyms co-occurring within five turns were manually identified in the National Chengchi University (NCCU) Corpus of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin (27 transcripts, approximately 11 hours) and categorized by their functions. It is found that antonyms that are dialogic in nature prevail in spoken Chinese, and the results reconfirm that antonyms are often used to signal a nearby contrast or to express inclusiveness/exhaustiveness. Compared with written Chinese, spoken Chinese shows a stronger preference for three functional categories, i.e. Interrogative Antonymy, Corrective Antonymy, and Negated Antonymy, which clearly reflect the spontaneous, interactive nature of conversation. The comparison between spoken and written Chinese also shows that antonyms in spoken Chinese co-occur in particular lexico-syntactic frames less often, and that the morphosyllabic structure of antonyms, a crucial factor that influences the functional distribution of antonyms in written Chinese, occupies a minor role in spoken Chinese. This study reveals how the use of antonyms varies across spoken and written Chinese, complementing previous corpus-based studies of antonymy that have drawn conclusions mostly from formal written texts.

This conversation analytic paper reports on the interactional functions of the Greek subjunctive polar interrogative clause na (su) po (káti)? ‘may I tell you something?’ in informal Greek conversation (Corpus of Spoken Greek). It is shown that the clause is a practice for securing a multi-unit turn and prefacing big packages in interaction, such as arguments and tellings. It is argued that the interrogative clause is used as a discourse marker when it occupies the initial slot of an extended turn. By employing an interactional approach to grammar, this study brings sequential context, social action and practice into the analysis of the clause na (su) po (káti)? , and sheds light on the vehicular structure of social action and the emergence of linguistic devices that project multi-unit turns.