Volume 43, Issue 4

Theories of indexicality explain the ways in which linguistic forms are linked to social forms. As such, indexicality deals in part with ideology and cultural discourses. This article demonstrates the ways in which intimate partner violence (IPV), seen as an indexical, discursive formation, facilitates the material and social manifestations and ramifications of IPV. I argue for an expansion of the concept “indexical field” to account not only for phonemic variables, but also lexicosemantic variables. Such lexicosemantic variables are legible in narratives, in particular stories, that are circulated in and around IPV discourse. The indexical field forms a web of potential meanings for IPV. In the indexical field, variables have multiple potential and sometimes conflicting meanings, which can be and indeed are activated and made meaningful differently by different groups of speakers. My data are made up of 57 interviews, 34 with victims/survivors of IPV and 23 with police officers. The differences in indexical meaning surrounding IPV are analyzed from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. In this article, I show how victims/survivors of IPV animate variables in the IPV indexical field with meanings that conflict with the meanings attributed to the same words, phrases, and events by police officers. Because police officers have more institutional power, their indexical meanings often receive preference and coordinate with those of the society at large.

This study examines judges’ language use in sentencing remarks in the Crown Courts of England and Wales. Six sentencing remarks were selected from all those available on the UK judiciary website (by October 2016). The cases selected for closer analysis are as similar to each other as possible, so as to ensure that the differences in the discursive features of the sentencing remarks largely reflect the differences in judges’ sentencing practices. It is found that judges selectively use an appraisal strategy – using moralised purposes to invoke judgements of offenders or their behaviour – across the six sentencing remarks. Judges’ use (or non-use) of the appraisal strategy is found to be correlating with their sentencing decisions: i.e., judges opt for the appraisal strategy when their sentencing decisions are below or further above the starting point, but not when the decisions are just a few years above the starting point. The finding reveals that the statutory starting point exercises a binding effect on the judges’ sentencing practices despite the judges having the discretion to disregard the starting point. Such a finding not only provides an insight into the judges’ sentencing practices, but also demonstrates that appraisal analysis is an effective means to get access to sentencing, which seemed so inaccessible to academic research.

Rhetorical structure theory (RST) and relational propositions have been shown useful in analyzing texts as expressions in propositional logic. Because these expressions are systematically derived, they may be expected to model discursive reasoning as articulated in the text. If this is the case, it would follow that logical operations performed on the expressions would be reflected in the texts. In this paper the logic of relational propositions is used to demonstrate the applicability of transitive inference to discourse. Starting with a selection of RST analyses from the research literature, analyses of the logic of relational propositions are performed to identify their corresponding logical expressions and within each expression to identify the inference path implicit within the text. By eliminating intermediary relational propositions, transitivity is then used to progressively compress the expression. The resulting compressions are applied to the corresponding texts and their compressed RST analyses. The application of transitive inference to logical expressions results in abridged texts that are intuitively coherent and logically compatible with their originals. This indicates an underlying isomorphism between the inferential structure of logical expressions and discursive coherence, and it confirms that these expressions function as logical models of the text. Potential areas for application include knowledge representation, logic and argumentation, and RST validation.

This article focuses on Kevin Spacey’s manipulative rhetoric in the YouTube video he posted on Christmas Eve in 2018 when he was facing a felony sexual assault charge in Nantucket District Court in USA. Drawing upon the notion of “double deixis” used for the second-person pronoun, this article questions the extent to which Spacey’s use of the first-person pronoun could be called “doubly deictic”. The findings show that Spacey’s strategic use of deixis allows him to blur identities and conflate fictional and real worlds. Not only is he using deixis in a way that hampers easy interpretation and complicates cognitive projection but he assigns his audience an awkward double positioning (as fans and citizens). The article also tries to elucidate the complex effects of Spacey’s manipulation on viewers. It suggests an addition to the notion of “double consciousness” that malfunctions here, as a “third consciousness” seems to be imposed onto the audience. This may explain why certain viewers are likely to experience some “cognitive dissonance” while watching this video that the media has defined as “creepy”.

In the present paper I discuss the affinities between conversation analysis and Wittgenstein’s later ordinary language philosophy. Although both paradigms differ in purpose, they share some similarities: they both conceive language as an instrument for action, understanding as a manifestation of behaviour, and meaning as something generated in situ. I suggest that the concepts of adjacency pair, positionally sensitive grammar, and action ascription particularise, in some ways, Wittgenstein’s notion of context. Both paradigms share similarities and differences in terms of method and in terms of their conception of rules; for example, both are inductive approaches but for Wittgenstein rules are normative in principle whereas for conversation analysts like Sacks they are primarily practical.

While discourses on terror by the United States and its allies have been the focus of most previous studies, this article investigates discourses produced in the Chinese context. 247 news articles from China Daily and People’s Daily were analyzed according to a revised system of attitude within the appraisal framework in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The findings reveal a correlation between polarity, types of attitude, and social actors being evaluated. Two Them groups, terrorism/terrorists in Xinjiang and Western media and governments, are overwhelmingly evaluated in terms of negative propriety of their behaviors and negative valuation of their things. Two Us groups, China and its people and non-Western countries supporting China, tend to be evaluated through positive valuation of their things, their positive capability, and positive and negative feelings (affect). The West is put in the same category as terrorism, quite contrary to what is commonly seen in the discourses produced by Western media. The attitudinal construction of Them and Us reflects not only the ideological square of negative other-presentation and positive self-presentation, but also the motivations of maintaining domestic stability and proper international relations behind China’s war on terror.