Volume 42, Issue 1

Making use of Occasioned Semantics, I look at how a taxonomy of different types of alcoholic beverages is constructed within a story told during the closing of a meeting at a neighborhood organization. The data are in Japanese with English translation. The use of taxonomic analysis within Occasioned Semantics is discussed, with a separate example. The story is shown to be placed at a point in the closing routine where an invitation to join a post-meeting drinking session is expectable. Within the story, the teller, Kaicho, who is the head of the organization, constructs an occasioned inclusion taxonomy of alcoholic beverages. He then adds two binary evaluative contrasts to the more specific level of the taxonomy. What Kaicho accomplishes through telling the story, what he accomplishes through constructing the taxonomy with its evaluative contrasts, and how the constructed taxonomy cannot be seen simply as the reflection of an underlying cognitive structure are discussed. It is argued that an ad hoc element is an inherent part of any actually occurring taxonomy. The role of cultural knowledge in the analysis of meaning in interaction is discussed.

This conversation analytic study explicates the differential actions of the English phrase I don’t know (IDK) and its equivalent in Japanese, wakannai , as deployed by Japanese learners of English during peer discussions for language learning. By examining natural classroom interaction, we explore second language (L2) speakers’ use of these tokens for various pragmatic actions. The data consist of 47 h of discussions in English language classes in three Japanese universities. The discussions were carried out in the target language, English, for the most part, but occasionally the participants used their common first language (L1), Japanese. All cases of IDK and wakannai examined here occurred in first positions during production of opinions or first assessments. The analysis revealed that within a single discussion session, the participants marshalled IDK and wakannai to perform differential actions. Overwhelmingly, in our data, IDK was deployed to manage their epistemic stance, while wakannai was produced to make a public assertion of their insufficient knowledge.

Theoretical linguistics embraces the analytic micro-system of representation as the core of language ability, and thus deals primarily with the computations of phonology, morphology, and syntax for structural processes. Looking into recent progress in human biology, however, there have been continuous indications that the internalized language is organized for creating structural sequences larger than phrases and sentences. Research on the right cerebrum of the brain, for example, shows its neurological tasks for composing a coherent story while the studies of individuals with deficits in underpinning genotypes reveal disruptions in constructing narratives. Moreover, investigations of human evolution are compelled to acknowledge a mysterious gap in psychological capacities of Homo sapiens and their later descendant, Homo sapiens sapiens , implicating a distinct stage of the language origin beyond syntax. What all these pieces of neurobiological evidence suggest is that humans have been bestowed an inherent linguistic capability for computing the synthetic macro-system of representation.

This paper proposes a method for analyzing the dialogical functions of metaphors in communicative interactions, and more specifically in the context of medical interviews. The dialogical goals proposed and pursued by the interlocutors are coded using a coding scheme that captures seven mutually exclusive categories of dialogical moves. The functions of the moves, including metaphors, can be identified and correlated with other variables relevant to the type of communication under analysis. The coding scheme is used to analyze a corpus of 39 interactions between healthcare providers and patients affected by Type 2 diabetes. The exploratory quantitative analysis, for the purpose of determining the different distributions of metaphor uses between patients and providers, is combined with qualitative analysis in which the thematic areas of the metaphors are considered. The findings show how patients and providers use metaphors for pursuing different dialogical goals and meeting distinct communicative needs.

The discourses of risk serve to organise the ways in which we understand and respond to potential harms and threats, which have become a major concern in our daily life. However, the discourses of risk have not been extensively investigated using linguistic text-based methods on the multimodal level, nor deeply examined beyond Western contexts. Grounded in the literature of risk and multimodal discourse, the aim of the study is to demonstrate Multimodal Discourse Analysis from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective as a potential methodology to investigate how risk discourses are constructed in and through semiotic resources in a non-Western setting. Through a case study of child helmet awareness advertisements in Vietnam, the multimodal analysis reveals a comprehensive picture of risk discourses constructed across various semiotic modes. In this analysis, the discourses of risk are constructed through a negotiation of expert knowledge and traditional values to encourage the audience to take actions and provide helmets for their children. Findings of the study demonstrate the use of Systemic Functional multimodal approach to media and communication to provide evidence for risk discourses in the Vietnamese setting, which are at odds with the current literature and can potentially be extended to other contexts.

Analytical writing is an academic genre that combines features of expository and argumentative discourse. Although the ability to write analytically is crucial to succeed at school and beyond, the pathway to master this type of writing mode has rarely been explored. We analyzed the writings of 226 native-speakers of Iberian Spanish from elementary school, high school and university levels, each of whom wrote two texts in Spanish. Three types of rhetorical moves were identified based on the communicative goals of analytical writing: expository, argumentative, and assertive. The findings show a developmental improvement in rhetorical structure and a transition from assertion-based texts, where writers focus on their own standpoint as the pivot of the text, to exposition-based texts, where presentation and discussion of data and of evidence become more dominant.