Volume 43, Issue 2

This paper examines the identities – older and other – being claimed and attributed through the telling of a sexually-explicit anecdote by an older female client in a hair salon. I draw on the methods of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to analyse both the anecdote itself and the longer (3 min) sequence of which it was a part. I show that in telling this rather improper anecdote the client was able to enact membership of a just-become-valued category in a sequential environment where asserting membership of that category, as done by two of her co-participants, was illegitimate for her on the basis of age. I also argue that in choosing to tell an anecdote at this point rather than assert membership she orientated to that very illegitimacy, and thereby to her own older identity. The analysis and the subsequent discussion highlight the way orientations to ageing and other identities may be displayed less through the semantic surface of talk, than in the sequential structures and interactional practices of the unfolding encounter. As such this paper contributes both to membership categorization analytic research and to the burgeoning corpora of studies loosely categorisable as ‘discursive gerontology’.

In this article, we narrow our investigation to the talk provided by one teacher in the exploration phase of a primary school science project. The exploration phase warrants attention given its role in providing students with a common base of science activities that draws on their prior knowledge. We examine lesson excerpts from a grant-winning primary years science teacher who sets up her Year 3 students to explore garden ecosystems. The study’s analytic framework is derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics and focuses on the way the teacher uses certain aspects of ideational, interpersonal and textual functions to mediate between the instructional and regulative discourses. Our findings show that the teacher orientated to the regulative discourse to provide students with access to an instructional discourse. Additionally, the teacher used a significant number of pronouns for signalling, and sequencing connectives that flowed on to a significant number of complex noun groups. We draw attention to the range of speech functions and comment on their role in school science lessons.

This conversation analytic study investigates the chair’s practice of addressing participants in multiparty meeting interaction. Paying close attention to the participants’ verbal and embodied actions, I examine 12 h and 30 min of video-recorded faculty meetings in a U.S. school district. I focus on how the meeting chair uses terms of address (e.g., first name, occupational title) during the meetings. The analyses show that when the chair uses an address term, she not only establishes a recipient, but also invokes and makes her institutional identity relevant as a meeting chair. In particular, the chair uses an address term while carrying out actions such as 1) opening or closing a topic, 2) managing the floor for different speakers, and 3) conducting relational work (e.g., welcoming a new member). The findings show that the address terms facilitate the chair’s actions that promote progressivity – between and within (a) topic(s) in the meeting agenda – and foster social solidarity by displaying affect toward individual participants. This study contributes to research on address terms and their functions, as well as to meeting interaction, particularly with regard to chairing practices.

The concept of axiological-semantic density from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is extremely helpful in analysing political knowledge-building, as it describes the strength of relations between various people, political stances and moral judgements, enabling these to be positioned in relation to each other. We present a multi-level translation device designed to identify strengths of axiological-semantic density in political news articles from the Daily Sun , South Africa’s most popular tabloid newspaper. This translation device was devised through analysis of selected texts from a corpus of 516 articles published between January and June 2015. It was developed through a collaborative process involving the first author and a team of student research assistants. The final translation device has five tools, of which two, the wording and charging tools, are described in this article, and then illustrated using an example analysis of a Daily Sun political news article. Both tools reveal insights into South African political discourses and ways in which axiological-semantic density can be enacted in future research. Making axiological-semantic density visible using such a translation device also has practical applications in assisting readers to understand the ways in which publications such as the Daily Sun position political parties, enabling them to engage more constructively in discussions on the country’s future.

We investigate the relationship between Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments by analyzing the frequency and type of Engagement expressions in a corpus of English and Russian comments, following the Appraisal framework. The comments in question, 10,000 words in each language, were posted in response to opinion articles in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail and the Russian online news channel RT . In the context of online news comments, users generally characterize constructive comments as posts that tend to create a civil dialogue through remarks that are relevant to the article and do not provoke an emotional response. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, we conclude that the language of constructive comments is more explicitly subjective in both languages. The main difference in the use of Engagement expressions in constructive and non-constructive comments lies along the lines of certainty/uncertainty and reliability/unreliability. As for cross-linguistic differences, it seems that English constructive comments place emphasis on the reliability of a commenter’s knowledge, while Russian constructive comments employ more modals of necessity, which have a prescriptive function.

This paper studies adults’ responses to children’s requests by focusing on turns that account for not granting the request on the grounds of involvement in another activity, i.e., multiactivity. The data consist of everyday interactions among family members at homes and in cars. The collection – 17 request sequences – is analysed with the conversation analytic method. We show the following: first, account turns verbalise either the ongoing or the requested activity, or both; second, account turns are a practice for foregrounding and communicating “exclusive order”, i.e., they indicate that two progressing activities intersect with each other and cannot be progressed simultaneously, and that one activity is prioritised over another; third, account turns are used either to suspend or abandon the course of action initiated by the request; fourth, accounts – through various sequential and turn design features – display adults’ level of commitment to resuming and returning to the requested activity later; and, finally, accounts indicating high commitment negotiate the “sequential implicativenesses” of the intersecting courses of action, displaying orientation to progress initiated activities. Accounts that display partial or no commitment frame the prioritisation of an activity in terms of “incapability” or “unwillingness” to progress the request sequence and thereby construct the “limits of multiactivity” in situ .