Volume 41, Issue 3

This paper examines the language used by careers services in UK universities. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods and tools, the analysis of 2.6 million words collected from 58 UK university websites shows that the services highlight the quantity and variety of resources and assistance offered to Higher Education (HE) students. In addition, the close analysis of linguistic data brings to light a commonly used semantic pattern where the services act as the enablers of the students’ self-beneficiary actions. The main idea communicated in these webpages is that if HE students want to succeed in the graduate job market they need to prepare for the world of work, follow instructions and develop their employability. This course of action is presented by UK universities as natural or common sense. The interpretation and evaluation of linguistic patterns that emerge from the corpus-based analysis challenges the notion of employability and its association with the idea of ‘empowering’ young people to successfully compete in the graduate job market.

Given the extensive body of research in audio description – the verbal-vocal description of visual or audiovisual content for visually impaired audiences – it is striking how little attention has been paid thus far to the spoken dimension of audio description and its para-linguistic, prosodic aspects. This article complements the previous research into how audio description speech is received by the partially sighted audiences by analyzing how it is performed vocally. We study the audio description of pictorial art, and one aspect of prosody is examined in detail: pitch, and the segmentation of information in relation to it. We analyze this relation in a corpus of audio described pictorial art in Finnish by combining phonetic measurements of the pitch with discourse analysis of the information segmentation. Previous studies have already shown that a sentence-initial high pitch acts as a discourse-structuring device in interpreting. Our study shows that the same applies to audio description. In addition, our study suggests that there is a relationship between the scale in the rise of pitch and the scale of the topical transition. That is, when the topical transition is clear, the rise of pitch level between the beginnings of two consecutive spoken sentences is large. Analogically, when the topical transition is small, the change of the sentence-initial pitch level is also rather small.

The current study extends upon recent Conversation Analysis research on literacy events in second language (L2) educational settings. The study investigates the use of task answers as notes in an L2 book club member’s task report practices, including how he looks for things to say, how he chooses to read aloud, and how his task-report practices change over time with explicit instruction. Specifically, this case study shows how a facilitator’s specific instruction to not use task answers as notes during second orientation works as a catalyst for the L2 student to move from heavy to less reliance on his written answers to complete his task report. The findings offer insights into the way the student uses his task answer sheets as an affordance for managing an L2 task and how his changing task-report practices with the textual resource better meet the institutional agenda, one of which is to provide a venue for members to practice English as a second language.

Presidential primary debates in the USA are commonly concluded by brief closing statements, in which the competitors outline the central messages of their election campaigns. These statements constitute a subgenre characterized by a set of recurring rhetorical moves, which are defined as functional units geared towards the respective communicative objective, in this case political persuasion. Located at the interface of rhetorical move analysis and political discourse studies, this paper demonstrates that moves and embedded steps in closing statements fulfill the persuasive function of legitimizing the respective candidate as the most preferable presidential successor. The study is based on the transcripts of 98 closing statements, which were extracted from eight Democratic and eleven Republican primary debates held between August 2015 and April 2016. Typical moves, such as projecting the speaker’s future political agenda or diagnosing the current situation in America, are presented with the help of illustrative examples, frequencies of occurrence, and a sample analysis of a complete closing statement.

The objective of the current study is to investigate whether and how the text-function offered in the Video Relay Service (VRS) is used and to demonstrate how its use affects the interaction of participants within this setting. The VRS facilitates calls between a person using signed language via a videophone and a person who is speaking via a telephone. An interpreter handles the calls and simultaneously interprets between the users and has direct contact with both users. All participants are physically separated from each other. The data consist of 12 recordings from the regular VRS in Sweden and the method used is Conversation Analysis. The findings show that typed text is used to: 1) conduct a repair; 2) pre-empt problems; 3) recycle text; and 4) overcome language differences.

Scandalous revelations invite public scrutiny and strong oppositions that harm the hegemonic grip of the elites. When this happens, damage control discourses are deployed to quell public discontentment. One measure taken by the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund in 2016 to address its corporate and political scandal was to accept an independent radio station’s invitation to participate in what is labelled here “an accountability interview.” To show how the CEO successfully managed and evaded impressions of culpability in this complex and adversarial interview, I adopt membership categorisation analysis. The analysis reveals how the CEO successfully downgrades morally and ethically wrong behaviour, associates the interviewers with bad behaviour, and reframes perceived abnormalities as usual practices. This research is driven by two purposes: i) to demystify the complex communication of 1MDB and the CEO’s methods in navigating around tough questions; and ii) to contribute to the growing field of accountability interview analysis, especially in the South-East Asian region, as micro-interactional accountability interview studies tend to lean considerably toward western data and perspectives.