Volume 44, Issue 2

This article addresses the question of whether context plays a role in creating novel multimodal metaphors. Or, to put the question differently, from where do Arab political cartoonists (as members of several, overlapping or hierarchically related knowledge communities) recruit creative conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes? Specifically, it draws a distinction between direct and indirect sources of metaphor, where embodied experience is classified as direct, and communication (watching TV, reading books and newspapers, etc.) as indirect. Discourse, albeit a major source of human knowledge and hence of metaphor, has received much less attention than it deserves. Using a large-scale corpus of 300 Arabic political cartoons, this study is intended to fill this research gap. It would be difficult to talk about multimodal metaphor without other construal operations such as metonymy and conceptual integration. To clarify the meaning of this, metaphor is seen as a byproduct of blending; and the visual representation of an abstract domain requires choosing a metonym, or chain of metonyms, from a specific domain that in the given context stands for the domain as a whole and that is eminently depictable. Thus, it is of interest to discuss why a cartoonist uses one metonym rather than another. This research is considered relevant for intercultural and cognitive studies, because it also addresses the question of how regional variation in knowledge is related to similar variation and diversity of metaphorical creativity.

The aim of the study was to compare the use of formulaic language, here called multiword structures, in advanced L2 English speech of two Swedish groups with a group of first language (L1) speakers of English. One Swedish group was resident in London and one in Stockholm, thus implying different degrees of exposure to English. Three categories, notably multiword phrases, multiword utterances and metalinguistic multiword structures, were investigated by comparing quantity and distribution. The groups completed two oral tasks, a role play and a retelling task. The results of the Swedish group resident in London were similar to the L1 English group on all measurements of multiword structures in the role play. In the retelling task multiword phrases were significantly fewer in both second language (L2) groups compared to the L1 English group, although there were L2 individuals within the L1 speaker range. Another question concerned the extent to which the three groups used multiword structures which were equivalents , i.e. transferable between English and Swedish. In the retelling task both Swedish groups produced significantly more equivalents than the L1 speakers. The implications of these findings are discussed.

The process of identification and annotation of evaluation has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, given the complexity of the topic, the discussion of some of the central issues is still ongoing. The present article contributes to this debate by presenting an annotation scheme that is designed for the identification and annotation of evaluative stance in a corpus of four English genres, namely, newspaper discourse, political discourse, newspaper scientific popularization and fora. A 4,862-word corpus was sampled from a larger 400,000-word corpus compiled within the research project STANCEDISC on the study of stance in discourse varieties. The scheme posits a series of ad hoc categories designed to optimise the transparency, reliability and replicability of the identification, annotation and analysis of evaluative stance. The categories are as follows: parts of speech (Noun Phrase, NP; Adjectival Phrase, AP; Adverbial Phrase, ADVP; Verbal Phrase, VP), function (classifying, predicational and attitude), metaphoricity (metaphoric and non-metaphoric), and value (positive and negative). The aim of this paper is to explain the scheme together with the theoretical justification of the categories and the methodological procedure adopted, and to illustrate the implementation of the scheme by discussing examples taken from different genres.

Recent studies have examined the interactional management of verbal and non-verbal vocabulary explanations in second language (L2) classrooms. However, the use of material resources in vocabulary explanations has not been fully investigated yet. Based on a corpus of fourteen class-hours of (50-min each) video recordings of an L2 Oral Communication classroom at a higher education setting in Turkey, this study explores how material resources are employed in vocabulary explanation sequences in combination with talk and gestures. Using the micro-analytic lens of multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) for the examination of the detailed transcriptions of vocabulary explanation sequences with material resources, three different patterns were identified: (1) gesture + material resources; (2) talk + gesture + material resources; and (3) scene enactment + material resources. The findings of this study contribute to classroom interaction research, more specifically to studies on vocabulary teaching, by providing a micro-analytic account of how material resources are employed in vocabulary explanations.

In this paper, I examine self-categorization practices as resources for the interactional organization of relative experiential entitlements. Locating the study in talk about child death, an explicitly moral domain of social life, this study utilizes 18 radio-based interactions from a South African talk-radio broadcaster. Using an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach, I examine affective responses to reports of child deaths, demonstrating how these practices reproduce child death as a contemporary social and moral concern. My findings demonstrate how practices of, and variations in, self-reference and self-categorization are resources for managing relative rights and obligations, thereby reproducing common-sense knowledge about parents and children in contemporary South African society. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of membership categorization analysis and the social organization of experience.

This study analyzes judges’ preliminary jury instruction in nine US federal civil trials. Following an overview of past and current jury instructing practices, including the role of pattern instructions, I describe the trial materials and introduce genre analysis and grounded practical theory, the two theoretical-methodological frames I use to analyze judges’ instructing. Judges’ preliminary instructions are shown to include the basic units identified in written pattern instructions. How they are performed reveals significant judge variation, and the variations make apparent difficulties built into the law that are backgrounded when solely written texts are studied. Some of these difficulties surface in judges’ description of the case and law, in orientation to note-taking, and in discussion of what is evidence and how to assess it. In concluding I argue that conceiving of high-quality jury deliberation as centrally dependent on getting instructions more comprehensible fails to recognize the fundamental judgment task that juries have. Being a good juror involves navigating communication dilemmas. Attending to the judge’s preliminary jury instructing, the paper argues, requires jurors honoring multiple principles that may be in tension.