Volume 41, Issue 4

Iran has undergone a metamorphosis in its ideological and national identity due to its historical upheavals in the past century, e.g. the Persian Constitutional Revolution (1906–11), Islamic Revolution (1979), Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). This paper aims to present the diachronic changes in the Iranian official national anthems’ lyrics. Through a critical discourse lens, I demonstrate how the socio-political changes have influenced these anthems and how such transformations have shaped the ideological identities of Iranians’ pre- and post-Islamic revolution to outsiders via lyrics. More specifically, I show how these identities are constructed through texts and via intertextual means. The findings display that the changes in Iranian anthems not only index a socio-historical transformation, but also a kind of acceleration in terms of political developments in contemporary Iran, and the ways in which the leaders may have employed their own ideological views to project Iranian identities.

This study examines the use of metaphors, metonymies and metaphorical similes for love in a corpus of 52 year-end number one hit songs in the USA from 1946 to 2016 according to Billboard charts. The analysis is performed within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Our findings indicate that the theme of romantic love is prevalent in US mainstream pop music over the course of seven decades but shows evolutionary features. Metaphors of love evolve from conventional to novel with a notable increase in both heartbreak and erotic metaphors. Remarkably, the study finds that the two predominant conceptualizations of love in pop songs – which in a significant number of cases overlap – are the following: experiential, originating in the physical proximity of the lovers, and cultural, reflecting possession by one lover and showing a non-egalitarian type of love.

Our study maps the practices of managing Latin in English texts from over a thousand years. Mediation is a communicative activity which involves explaining the content of a conversation or text to another person. In contexts of multilingual writing, this is typically self-mediation, which a writer may perform by complementing code-switches with intratextual translations in the text. The data for the study are drawn from corpora of English historical texts, dictionaries and manuscripts, and mediation is analyzed in terms of support, intratextual translation and flagging. The findings show that while cognitive support helps a reader understand all of the content of the text, intratextual translation may also have relational functions, where the reader is expected to understand both languages used, as when code-switching and translation are a vehicle for humor. Intratextual translation can also be used to add credibility to the writer’s argument or to link it to a broader discussion on the topic. Mediation is also facilitated by flagging code-switching and intratextual translation metalinguistically or visually. Support is needed for Latin as a language which has always been part of relatively few English-speakers’ repertoire, but these strategies are expected to apply to other language pairs as well.

This paper examines text formulations in the interaction between peers in primary school during dialogic reading, in inquiry learning settings. In this context pupils collaboratively use information from texts to answer their research questions. The data analyzed include 25 excerpts of pupils demonstrating understanding of text. We used Conversation Analysis to analyze how pupils demonstrate their understanding by the use of text formulations, as a specific type of formulations, and how these formulations function as a bridge between the reading action and the discussion of text content. Parallel to the types of conversational formulations (gist and upshot), we found two practices of demonstrating understanding, namely (1) formulating the gist of relevant text to demonstrate literal understanding, and (2) formulating an upshot to demonstrate how the text contributes to the reading goal. Both types are used to establish shared understanding of text, but focus the discussion as well on what participants find relevant information in the text to further talk about. To reach shared understanding and to use it for next steps, both interactants need to have access to the text in some way. This study contributes to our understanding of how pupils collaboratively use text to build their knowledge.

Emails have become the institutionalised communication medium for many discourse activities in work contexts. Sociolinguistic research in this area has mainly focused on the textual and communicative conventions of emails, as defined by disciplinary cultures and practices. This study is the first to analyse the intertextual nature of email communication for commercial contract negotiation purposes, with a particular focus on the communicative function of embedded emails. This concept relates to a genre of email discourse, which embeds the meaning of a series of messages generated by different participants in response to the original email, hence the name ‘embedded emails’. This study uses discourse and genre analysis to examine how a geographically dispersed team of legal and business professionals in Europe exploited the dialogic nature of embedded emails to negotiate amendments to contracts pertaining to an international Merger & Acquisition (M&A) transaction in English. The findings of this study show that embedded emails facilitate transparent collaboration between the individual professionals, by enabling them to monitor the exchange of proposals and counter-proposals during the negotiation process. This documented ability to trace and participate in contract negotiation activities through intertextual chains of embedded email communication is a key feature of professional communicative competence.

The product pitch is a widespread genre within business communication and is used to introduce a product in the market. Product pitches are meant to convince an audience of the value of the product they introduce. Because they are subjected to strict time constraints, these presentations need to be particularly effective in their persuasive efforts, and speakers need to make the best use of all the semiotic resources they have at their disposal to efficiently convey their message. Researchers and practitioners with first-hand experience in this genre agree that it is inherently persuasive and multimodal. However, little is known about the complex interplay established between the different semiotic modes that are at stake in a product pitch, and about the potential effect that these multimodal ensembles have on persuasion. This study analyses a corpus of product pitches using a combination of computer assisted multimodal discourse analysis and ethnographic observations and interviews to probe into the use of multimodal persuasive strategies in these presentations. The findings show how speakers highlight the unique selling points of their products and present them as the best solution to a problem, resorting to a series of persuasive strategies (e.g. attention getting, evaluation) that are realised through carefully orchestrated multimodal ensembles.