Volume 42, Issue 6

This paper describes one of the embodied resources language teachers use to pursue a response from students: placing one hand behind the ear in an Ear Cupping (EC) gesture. The data analyzed are taken from over 20 h of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom interaction video-recorded at a Japanese university. The paper explores how teachers use EC to pursue a response in cases when a Second-Pair Part (SPP) contribution from the student(s) is sequentially and temporally delayed, missing or inapposite. The findings suggest that the use of the EC gesture to pursue a response demonstrates the teachers’ orientation toward a normative understanding that a question posed within the classroom should be answered, even when a specific respondent has not been nominated. The analysis therefore reveals that the gesture constitutes an embodied means of monitoring intersubjectivity and increasing engagement in large groups of language learners.

This study examines Japanese enactment, an interactional phenomenon wherein participants in conversation act out themselves or others by utilizing specific designs of lexis, grammar, and prosody, as well as body movements. While these enactments can often be observed when a speaker depicts what someone said, did, or thought in the past, this article explores hypothetical enactments. Unlike enactments that are designed as representing real utterances and/or body movements performed in the past, hypothetical enactments are designed with linguistic and contextual features that indicate that they are fictitious. The data were drawn from a collection of video-recorded ordinary conversations in Japanese. Employing Conversation Analysis as its analytical framework, this study focuses on how Japanese speakers use hypothetical enactments to respond to co-participants’ complaints about a third party who is absent from an ongoing here-and-now interactional site (i.e., third-party complaints). The findings reveal that complaint recipients may produce hypothetical enactments as jokes or advice. When complaint recipients provide hypothetical enactments as jokes, they depict an improbable situation sarcastically. When complaint recipients provide hypothetical enactment as advice, they often demonstrate taking an alternative approach toward an antagonist. These enacted hypothetical scenarios may or may not be collaboratively extended by other participants, depending on how those participants treat the proposed scenarios.

This paper focuses on aspects of Nigerian corrupt practices and how perceptions of public service and leadership responsibilities are framed linguistically, or discursively, around predatory elitist interests. It is based on two premises. The first pertains to the ways in which the national wealth is metaphorically called the national cake , and how it is viewed as an object that elicits consumption. Textual data is generated from 19 national newspapers and blogs that show 85 occurrences of the term the national cake . The surrounding contexts of the term indicate that national wealth is eatable, shareable and is spatially located. The second premise relates to how the Nigerian elite use metonymic associations to make themselves serve as the aggregate of, or shorthand to, the geographical, partisan and religious interests of the country. This stand-for relationship plays a prominent role in establishing contiguous representations which aid (conceptual) proximity to the national cake . This study uses critical metaphor analysis, corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to demystify the facts about Nigeria’s national life otherwise overlaid by ideology.

Underpinned by the assumption that the legitimacy of a social practice is obtained discursively, this study proposes a linguistically-grounded model for examining moral legitimation in the sentencing phase of capital trials. Drawing upon state lawyers’ closing speech in six capital trials (Indiana, USA), the study identifies key strategies the State uses to justify death and explores their ideological basis. The quantitative findings indicate that moral legitimation is integral to this genre, and, qualitatively speaking, the State relies to a great extent on strategies such as naming labels, assignment of agency, and evaluation, respectively. This is followed by emotion-based reasoning and analogy. It is argued that the reliance on moral legitimation treats death as a natural corollary of such moral characterizations and precludes the discussion of the life-sentence option.

Processes of blame-attribution can be conceptualised as socially-situated and discursively-mediated events that feature attempts to assign meaning to harmful (or at least potentially harmful) occurrences. Part of the process involves the search for culprits and subsequent argumentation as to the blameworthiness of those singled out for blame. This study conducts a discourse analysis of blame-attribution in 33 online opinion pieces, posted on the website of the civil society organisation: ACTIVATE! Change Drivers. It concentrates on arguments that address the nexus between youth activism, active citizenship, the legacy of Apartheid and blame for the numerous problems afflicting the South African youth. The most recurring arguments hinged on constructions of the South African government as responsible to supporting the capacity of the contemporary youth to participate effectively in democracy, particularly since the youth continue to endure the repercussions of Apartheid. My analysis details the discursive repertoires through which this proposition is made, and considers its implications for research into contemporary online youth cultures and democratic argumentation.

In systemic functional linguistics, a delicate system of context is necessary for providing specific and checkable criteria for language choice. However, due to the complexity and vastness of the context system, little work has been undertaken for its extension, which results in a general and loose interpretation of the correlation between context and language. This study seeks to fill this gap by anchoring itself at a specific contextual domain concerning social conventions on emotion, namely the system of emotion . The correlation is addressed from two perspectives: a top-down perspective to explore how three crucial emotional features are realized via the selections from two linguistic systems, namely speech function and appraisal , and a bottom-up perspective to reveal the value construed by the realizational patterns for each feature. From a selected data corpus of modern Chinese novels, 8 realizational patterns are found, based on which the value systems of the emotional features are constructed; the Resonance Hypothesis is proposed to explain the process of correlation. The findings suggest that a delicate context system can explicitly demonstrate the correlation between context and language, thus theoretically strengthening their tie.