Volume 39, Issue 6 -

Early work in discursive psychology highlighted the rhetorical strength of devices that serve to establish matters as objective facts. More recently, there has been increasing interest within this discipline concerning mental state invocations (e.g. imagining; knowing; intending), which typically convey speaker subjectivity. Elsewhere, linguists have examined the social business enabled by speakers’ deployment of cognitive verbs, a prime example of which deals with overt references to thinking . The current article sets out to extend the work on thinking by synthesizing research from discursive psychology, linguistics, and conversation analysis in order to undertake an integrated analysis of thinking. In our examination of a UK talk radio corpus, comprising data from 11 talk radio shows, we demonstrate three discursive functions of deploying a thinking device: setting an intersubjective agenda; doing opinion; and managing ‘facts’. An integrated approach allows us to examine the rhetorical strength of these subjectivizing maneuvers, and contribute to the existing body of work concerning the discursive deployment of thinking and mental state terms.

As the number of South Koreans, especially those in their 20s and 30s, in favor of unification with North Korea decreases, it is not surprising that younger generations feel a lack of closeness or familiarity with North Korean refugees in South Korea. Targeting South Korean adolescents’ ambivalence toward unification and North Korean refugees is a talk show called Great Friends . Moderated by a South Korean host, Great Friends presents the experiences of a group of North Korean and South Korean youth. Given the current social climate surrounding North Korean refugees in South Korea, this study investigates how North Korean youth on this program are discursively constructed over the course of 17 episodes aired in 2015. Considering the unequal power relations between the host country and refugees, this study applies critical discourse analysis (CDA) to interpret how North Korean adolescents are presented to a South Korean audience. The analysis reveals the ‘othering’ of North Koreans through discourses of difference. Despite presenting North Koreans as friends to South Koreans, these discursive constructions create a dichotomy by positioning North Koreans as inferior to their southern counterparts. The findings contribute to rethinking how authorities promote the integration of North Koreans in South Korea.

In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of this combination is an approach to English language teaching that integrates multiple languages and multiple semiotic resources. This paper examines how a plurilingual approach to ELT can be viewed through a multimodal lens by analyzing the construction of a plurilingual talking book created as a student project in an elementary public school. The analysis uses multimodal analysis software to map the interaction of languages and images, in order to determine how these function as meaning-making resources in a multimodal, multiple-language text created by linguistically diverse students with high ELT needs. The findings indicate how combinations of different semiotic resources work together to create meaning, delineates the role of English in meaning-making, and illustrates the children’s multilingual interactions in the creation of their collaboratively composed multimodal talking book.

Contemporary Christian songs (CCSs) are gaining more favor in Chinese churches than traditional hymns (THs) nowadays; however, many scholars have criticized the intimate relationship established with God in CCSs from the perspective of theology. This study aims to explore whether the God-human relationship built in THs and CCSs has experienced a change by carrying out a comparative analysis of their respective constructed interpersonal meanings. Combining Halliday’s framework with judgment in Martin and White’s Appraisal system, this study compares 100 CCSs and THs from the aspects of modality, judgment, mood and projected roles with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.0., with some changes of the original categories of judgment system due to the specific nature of the judged subject in the data. The semantic analyses show that the God-human relationship constructed in hymns has changed, with the encompassing view of God narrowed to one focused on love, the sinful nature of humans replaced by their incapability, and the assurance in and reverence to God outweighed by closeness and intimacy with Him. Some cultural realities and the situation of the church are referred to as a way of explaining this change.

This article investigates differences in evaluative style in introductions to research articles written by scholars from China and Britain. A corpus of 30 research article introductions in applied linguistics was analysed in terms of Appraisal Theory and genre analysis, using the UAM Corpus Tool. Findings from this analysis suggest that both the Chinese and the British authors were aware of the need to argue for their own opinions and maintain good relationships with their readers. However, the Chinese writers made more categorical assertions, supported by lists of references to prior studies, while the British writers were more likely to acknowledge the existence of alternative views within the research community, and were more explicit about their own attitudes towards the research topic, prior studies, and their own work. The findings, and the illustrative examples, can inform the design of programmes to help novice researchers publish internationally, and might also usefully raise the awareness of journal article reviewers and editors regarding cultural variation in approaches to stance-taking.

Television interpreting, although serving the largest population of users, is underexplored compared with conference interpreting or community interpreting by the academic community, not to mention any systematic, in-depth analysis foregrounding or tailored to its salient multimodal features. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal social-semiotic theory of communication as well as frameworks established in nonverbal communication and audiovisual translation, this paper moves away from traditional language-based discussions of interpreter-mediated television events and attempts to gain new insights into this essentially multimodal communicative practice through multimodal analysis of data. This paper purports to testify a tentative framework of modal relations of “complementarity”, “dependency”, and “incongruity” which are at work in interpreted television events, with authentic data, amounting to a total length of 5 hours, recorded from live news programmes on Chinese TV. The findings of modal complementarity and dependency clearly point to the essentially multimodal meaning making mechanism involved in the semiotic ensemble that is to be perceived by the audience in a gestalt fashion, which reveals the inadequacy of linguistic approaches to television interpreting.