Volume 42, Issue 3

President Macron’s New Year message on 31 December 2019 was given against a background of social unrest due to his proposed Pension reforms. He defended his policy reiterating the phrase “un projet de justice et de progress social”, but passing responsibility for resolving the crisis to his Prime Minister. The general analytical framework is that of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Macron uses first person singular ( je ) and plural ( nous ) subject pronouns to more or less the same extent but the singular form is used mainly with mental processes and the plural with material processes. There are in addition a large number of first person pronoun references other than those that function as grammatical subject: Macron manipulates the ambiguity of the plural pronoun to associate the general public with regard to responsibility for the government’s actions. Material processes are encoded more frequently as non-finite or as nominalizations where specification of the agents is not required, than as finite verbs. Obligation is attributed to the plural nous rather than the singular je . Thus Macron defends his policies while avoiding accepting personal responsibility for them.

News is central to human communication and has an important signifying power as a particular subsystem within language. This study sets out to comprehensively examine how four major TV global news providers – CNN, BBC, DW and RT – have covered the COVID-19 pandemic from outbreak to mid-crisis. We apply a multi-level content analysis approach that rests on theories of proximization and representation of distant suffering, following a computer-assisted analysis that aids in identifying concepts occurrence and the semantic relationship among the highly frequent clusters. We explore the news representation during 2020 of COVID-19 as proximal versus distant discourses of suffering, safety and compassion conceptualized in light of theories on distant suffering. A total number of 12 dataset reports consisting of 2,017,875 words were analyzed. The results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic news formulates a particular type of discourse on suffering that individualizes the sufferer, sets out the course of action and turns the fast-approaching pandemic into a global cause for action.

Many an ethically minded translator would think twice or thrice prior to translating an ideologically loaded text as they need to reflect the encoded ideologies of the original narrative in the target narrative. Yet, some translators decide, for different reasons, to undermine and challenge the narratives in question, thus applying various reframing strategies to superimpose certain directionality on the original narratives. This paper, therefore, examines the English translations of the Arabic editorials on Daesh (ISIS), published by the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) that has a large impact on the US policy and the public. In this paper, we explain how media translation contributes to (re)framing the current civil war in Syria on the one hand, and how this promotes the narrative of ‘Arab and Muslim terrorists’ on the other. The study finds that by relying on the narrativity feature of selective appropriation, MEMRI extensively employs the textual reframing tools, i.e., addition and omission, thus promoting different narratives of the civil war. We propose that rival narratives could be circulated through translation where the translators reframe the original narratives and reconstruct the embedded narrativity features that, in turn, renegotiate the original arguments.

This case study identifies and examines interactional practices of non-directive play therapists during their therapeutic sessions with autistic adolescents. The study involved two therapists and two adolescents (siblings) on the autism spectrum. The video-recorded sessions took place at participants’ home and were conducted in Polish. Employing insights and tools from discourse-analytic approaches, in particular conversation analysis (CA), the findings show how clients and therapists are both involved in co-constructing therapeutic interactions by orienting to each other’s utterances. CA is presented in this article as a useful tool for recognizing and describing the therapists’ interactional contributions and their local functions. The therapeutic practices identified in the analysis (talk-in-practice) – e.g. mirroring, meaning expansion, recast and scaffolding – are further juxtaposed with theories concerning interactional practices in non-directive therapies (talk-in-theory) in order to provide a more detailed picture of these practices as well as complete them. The findings from this study expand the current state of knowledge of non-directive play therapies of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and carry practical implications for specialists involved in ASD treatment.

The phenomenon of intensification is pervasive in natural language use. Previous research has extensively discussed what intensifiers are and how they are associated with semantic developments. Corpora prove to be a useful tool to examine the semantic dimension of intensifiers. What has been overlooked, however, is the internal structure(s) of meaning conveyed by “intensifier + adjective” constructions in naturally occurring text and speech. The semantic relationship between the intensifier and the modified adjective needs to be made more explicit to address the pragmatics of intensification. Using BNC Sampler (a part-of-speech tagged corpus of general English) this study examines the most frequently used adjective intensifiers in both written and spoken discourse. Concordance lines generated for the adjective intensifiers are used to illustrate evaluative expressions in context. The observation contributes to debates on the pragmatics of intensifiers for evaluative meaning construction and transmission.

Recently, there has been a surging interest in meaning-making processes in Chinese social media. However, most studies focus on the current contexts, ignoring the process of entextualization, that is, how semiotic resources have been decontextualized from the original/prior contexts and recontextualized in the current Chinese social media context. This paper intends to fill this gap by studying an example of entextualization coupled with modal shift. Specifically, an oral warning – initially a line frequently uttered in a Japanese animation serial – has been reshaped and reused to type comments in various video scenes and for various meanings on a Chinese video-sharing website Bilibili ( https://www.bilibili.com/ ) . Drawing on selective notions in computer-mediated communication and social semiotic multimodality, this paper analyses a set of these comments, which we call high energy texts , focusing on their multimodal quality and the meaning-making processes involved . We suggest that new possibilities are generated during the modal shift (i.e. from speech to writing); in particular, warning acts carried out through high energy texts have been transformed into a collective social action that is recognized and understood by Bilibili users, the participation of which enables the users to build alignment and enact different identities. Our paper showcases how a social semiotic multimodal perspective can enrich our understanding of the semiosis in Chinese social media.