Volume 41, Issue 1

This paper reports an element of a team linguistic ethnography which investigated the ways people communicate with each other in the changing, dynamic environments of superdiverse cities in the UK. The particular example examined here is that of a ‘translation zone’ between an advice worker and her Chinese clients in a community centre with a remit to support Chinese people in the city. In the interaction the advice worker, herself a migrant from China, translates relevant aspects of the complex, bureaucratic welfare benefits system, deploying interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. More than this, however, the advice worker engages in recontextualisation, co-constructing and re-shaping the client’s narrative so that it meets the criteria of the government welfare benefits office. Recontextualisation is a consistent feature of the discourse practice of the advice worker as she seeks to support her clients. We propose that it may well be a salient feature of interactional encounters as people seek help and advocacy to negotiate complex bureaucratic systems.

In diasporic communities, switching among languages is a common practice and London is no exception. This paper examines the use of code-switching in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane from three different perspectives. It argues that Ali uses code switching (CS) as a sign of hybrid identity. Meanwhile, it contends that the main characters employ CS both as social power and as a tool of ‘emotional expression’. To achieve this aim, a new integrated approach is proposed drawing upon the concepts of ‘orders of indexicality’ and ‘polycentricity’, being sociolinguistic techniques designed to monitor different types of linguistic and cultural manifestations that signify diasporic ways of life. This approach complements an established taxonomy. The findings show that Ali makes significant use of code-switching strategies by balancing the two different cultures, thus reflecting her desire not to lose her hybrid identity. When it concerns her characters, the shifts in codes and/or varieties trigger shifts in the kind of relationships among them and their own identities. Finally, the findings reveal that ‘emotionality’ is a factor that influences code-switching and language choice.

Drawing on studies of the performative effects and agency of texts in organizations, the paper investigates how the agency of texts figures through their participatory status in interaction. The empirical data for the study consist of video-recorded performance appraisal interviews in a Finnish public organization in which the interaction relies heavily on an appraisal form. The data are analyzed through a sequential analysis that draws on multimodal conversation analysis and ethnographic knowledge. The analysis shows that the human participants orient to three different acts that are inscribed in the textual document: 1) presenting demands for the participants; 2) offering topics for the discussion as well as perspectives from which those topics should be discussed; and 3) suggesting conventional ways of progressing in the interaction. Furthermore, the material and the semiotic facets of textual documents are shown to be systematically related in that specific orientations to the material aspect of the paper form entail specific orientations to the semiotic content. The study sheds light on the subtle ways through which the distributed, albeit dissymmetric, agency of human and non-human participants is constructed, and on how texts are treated as more or less authoritative in face-to-face interaction.

The issue of legal reasoning has been addressed widely in legal academia and practice, but rarely considered by linguists. This paper, employing the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) genre perspective and the discourse semantics system as its conceptual framework, attempts to reveal the different ways of legal reasoning of common law judicial opinions and Chinese judgments from a textual perspective. One judicial opinion of a British case and one judgment of a Chinese case are explored for comparison. The findings suggest that Chinese judgments as a legal genre, compared with its counterpart of common law judicial opinions, unfold not in waves construed by multilayered Theme-and-New structure, but in chunks establishing no prediction or consolidation. We argue that this mode of text unfolding in waves is vitally important for readers to follow the judge’s reasoning and construct a sense of fairness and justice. We suggest that the periodicity and the generic structure of common law judicial opinions would be a valuable frame of reference for the Chinese judicial reform on judgments in improving its legal reasoning.

During recent decades, evidence-based treatment programs have become a given part of the youth justice system. Typically, such programs are evaluated through quantitative effect studies, in which a variety of outcome measures play a significant role. This case study offers an alternative, interactional evaluation of a treatment program. More specifically, the analysis focuses on an Aggression Replacement Training (ART) session that was held at a youth detention home in Sweden. In this session, two trainers and three detained adolescent boys perform an exercise that serves to teach the latter various apology practices. A detailed, conversation analytic examination of the interaction in the session shows that the trainers repeatedly problematize the boys’ contributions in a kind of deviant-making enterprise. Thus, rather than recognizing competencies that do become visible through closer inspection, the trainers one-sidedly highlight lack and deficiency. It is argued that the interpretative frame of ART, with its focus on pathologization, individualization, and responsibilization, amplifies the incarcerated boys’ deviancy, hence symbolically locking them up in a second, non-material or discursive, sense.

This paper analyses how representations of real life and fictional worlds are combined and differentiated in the talk produced in literary reading groups. We adopt a socio-cognitive approach to reading group interaction, which combines discourse analysis and Text World Theory to examine the social and cognitive processes enacted in examples of such talk. Text World Theory is a cognitive linguistic discourse analysis framework which examines the mental spaces (“worlds”) cued by language-in-use and the ontological relations between those worlds. This combined framework is applied to four extracts of reading group talk and facilitates the discussion of the structural, referential and representational aspects of the interaction. Our analysis considers the insights which reading group talk provides into the complex relationships between text and talk. We argue that ontological shifting in reading group talk performs various functions, such as claiming expertise, doing humour and play, and mitigating face-threatening disagreement. Talking about texts allows people these options for shifting between representations of real life and fictional worlds and this may go some way towards accounting for the popularity of such groups in contemporary culture.