Volume 44, Issue 3

Little is known about typography and its contribution to the meaning-making process in children’s storybooks. This study applied the systematic framework for a distinctive feature analysis of typography to explore the manifestations of typography in 24 recently published Arabic children’s storybooks and outline typography’s ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions as interpreted according to the Arabic sociocultural context. The findings show a pattern of visually manipulated typographic representations in terms of weight, expansion and spacing, curvature, connectivity, orientation, irregularity, and colors . In its ideational function, the typography constructed, reflected, and evoked visual images of real-life representations. In its interpersonal function, the typography communicated educative, social, and cultural messages and values to young readers. In its textual function, the typography supported dramatic atmospheres, matched the tone and rhythm of the story, harmonized with the stories’ themes, reflected the characters’ emotions and thoughts, and highlighted or differentiated incidents, concepts, and characters. The typography was found to be a promising communicative resource in Arabic children’s storybooks.

The present study investigates how car bumper stickers in Jordan are exploited as public texts and spaces to communicate transgressive messages about the self and the other. Using Bakhtin’s notions of the carnival and the carnivalesque, eighty-four ethnographically collected bumper stickers were analyzed. The analysis of data shows that this public form of communication is exploited by Jordanian drivers and car owners as a site of carnivalesque transgression and degradation in three discursive spheres: (i) castigating female materiality, calling into question female attainment of rationality, and stressing ‘female infidelity’; (ii) complaining about one’s suffering, burdens, and cares through a plaintive image of ritual lamentation and self-degradation; and (iii) creating a Bakhtinian ‘reversible world’ that attempts to reverse values, hierarchies, and power relationships, and in which the lowly is valorized, and the social discourse of the community is inverted. Like carnival and the carnivalesque, these bumper stickers provide a licensed space of transgression and degradation and reflect a special type of communication that is impossible in everyday life as such communication constitutes a form of carnivalesque ‘marketplace speech’ that is devoid of the norms of etiquette and decency. The present study contributes to research on transgressive language and popular culture in public spaces.

This paper explores the difficulties of translating Chinese expressions frequently used in communicating governmental policies to the public. In particular, we focus on the expression wenming 文明, a term with manifold meanings and uses, which often ends up being translated into English simply as ‘civilised’. This translational convention is problematic because wenming in Chinese tends to be used in many collocations where the English civilised sounds distinctly alien. In order to systematically investigate this translational problem, we propose a bottom-up tri-partite approach to the study of Chinese policy expressions in general and wenming in particular. This novel mixed-method approach not only allows us to go beyond essentialist generalisations about expressions frequented in Chinese political discourse, but more importantly it allows us to unearth and label practical difficulties faced by translators.

Previous research has shown that trade unions have resorted to a number of rhetorical tools to make their arguments and ensure the voice of their members was heard. In a time in which union membership is declining and many have questioned trade unions’ representation role, the recourse to figurative language – e.g. metaphors – might contribute to getting unions’ messages through, restoring trust among affiliates. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the metaphorical devices employed in trade union discourse, with a view to appreciating the way they are utilised in employee relations and highlighting the values unions intend to promote through these figures of speech. To this end, discourse analysis is carried out on a data corpus consisting of documents issued by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in a given timeframe, in which metaphorical language is employed. The analysis focuses on a specific topic, i.e. platform workers and the protection of their rights. The findings reveal that metaphors are used by trade unions to convey different meanings, which are intended to generate narratives aimed at safeguarding the rights of platform workers.

Given the unsettled debate about the role of nativeness and/or expertise in academic writing, we compared the first language (L1)-English expert writers and the Second language (L2)-English (Chinese L1) expert writers with a similar expertise level in the use of stance complement that -clauses. For our analysis, we selected equal numbers of published research articles written by the L1 and the L2 experts in the field of Telecommunications. We found considerable differences between the two groups of writers in terms of frequency, range, and semantic classes of words controlling that -clauses. First, although both the L1 experts and the L2 experts overwhelmingly used verb + that -clauses, they demonstrated relatively different syntactic preferences for stance construction. The L2 experts used more verb + that -clauses than the L1 experts, while the L1 experts utilized more noun + that -clauses. Second, the L2 experts were more likely to express greater certainty towards the claims in that -clauses than the L1 experts. Third, the L2 experts employed a narrower range of words controlling that -clauses than the L1 experts in all the semantic classes. These findings suggest that the nativeness status of academic writers still influences their use of evaluative that -clauses even at an advanced level.

Metadiscourse is the commentary on a text made by its producer in the course of speaking or writing, revealing something of how communication involves the personalities, attitudes and assumptions of those who are communicating. It offers a framework for understanding communication as social engagement and helps reveal how writers and speakers consider their audience in creating texts. This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to trace the growing interest in metadiscourse since its early incarnations in the 1980s. To do so we analysed all 431 papers relating to metadiscourse in the core collection of the Web of Science between 1983 and 2020, dividing the corpus into two periods following the massive increase in interest after 2006. We identify which topics have been most prevalent, which authors and publications most influential and which disciplines and journals most active in citing the metadiscourse literature. The findings show the importance of academic and business writing, cross-disciplinary, language and genre studies, and the increasing predominance of an interpersonal model. These findings may be of interest to those working in discourse analysis and the study of social interaction.