Volume 44, Issue 5

Although the importance of time in political discourse cannot be denied, few recent studies address the representation of time as a factor in election campaigns. This discourse analytical study focuses on the role of time in the campaign literature produced by the nine main parties in the 2019 EU election in the UK, which resulted in a landslide victory for the newly-formed Brexit Party. The corpus consisted of the manifestos or leaflets produced specifically for this election by the nine parties in question, amounting to 57,226 words. The timelines of the different parties are analysed, showing how the parties envisioned different timelines: some capitalized on public frustration by offering immediate satisfaction, while others legitimized their aspirations through timelines that reached across and beyond the uncertainties of the Brexit phase. Representations of linear time, cyclical time and radical rupture are contrasted, and the key significance of time in the populist performance of crisis is discussed.

In Mandarin Chinese, the expression nǐ kànzhe bàn ba can be employed in either ‘you-decide use’ ( you assess and decide by yourself ), whereby the speaker disclaims his/her deontic authority to the recipient in decision-making, or ‘I-claim use’ ( you have to assess and decide cautiously ), whereby he/she claims a higher degree of deontic authority than the recipient when determining a proposed action. Focusing on the ‘I-claim use’ of nǐ kànzhe bàn ba , this study examines how this expression is manipulated by customers to negotiate solutions for their complaints with customer service representatives in Chinese e-shopping platforms. Utilising naturally occurring data from Taobao service encounters spanning about one year, this study employs a discursive approach and finds that this expression fulfills one of a number of pragmatic functions: (1) when there is no mutual agreement on the complaint proposals, the customers deploy it to upgrade their deontic authority to orient to their own unilateral solution and refrain from further negotiations; (2) when expressing a negative evaluation, the customers use it to pre-empt potential complainables that reflect their strong deontic authority; or (3) following non-substantive rectification on the part of the agent, the customers use it to express diluted deontic authority in order to display disaffiliation and solicit more substantive proposals. By analyzing the use of this expression in e-shopping service encounters, our study contributes to understanding how deontic authority is exercised in negotiating solutions to complaints.

The present study explores the linguistic complexity (LC) of public legal information (PLI) texts for young persons by deploying the Hallidayan model of lexical density and grammatical intricacy. It examines how the Australian legal statutes’ grammatical intricacy and lexical density are reformulated into PLI texts to make them more accessible for a specific vulnerable group. The findings reveal that although the PLI texts were claimed to be written in plain language, they trade some types of complexity for others. The paper extends Halliday’s model of complexity by adding lower rank complexes and embedded clause complexes as realisations of intricacy and density. It proposes “embedded intricacy” as a feature of a hybrid of spoken and written language. Furthermore, the study suggests reconsidering how law can be recontextualised for young persons in a more accessible way.

This paper argues that classroom role-play can be conceptualised theoretically as an oral genre, as defined within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The work draws on analysis of 15 video-recorded child-led role-plays in which groups of three 4–5 year-old children engage in five different life-like social scenarios. The study is underpinned by SFL register and genre analysis of the children’s interactions, and the findings reveal how the children’s linguistic choices have a direct impact on the dynamically unfolding role-play, and how imaginary scenarios are construed by the instantiation of individual genre stages, some of which serve to regulate the role-play and others that mimic real life social scenarios. The findings suggest that the two different types of stages construe two separate, but interwoven contexts, with the make-believe context often being dependent on the regulative context. The paper offers new insights into the ways in which SFL can reveal nuances in children’s dialogic and dynamic language in play.

Drawing on the notion of voice, this study examines both textual and contextual voices of translated news narratives relating to the 2014 Hong Kong protests. It analyses narrative voices, including those of primary, secondary and tertiary narrators, comparing the original and translated news texts and discusses the socio-cultural context in which these narrative voices are produced. The analysis draws on translated news reports published between 28 September and 16 December 2014 from three media outlets: Reference News , BBC Chinese and New York Times Chinese, together with their source texts from a range of mainstream global media. The findings show how the media outlets employ a complex interplay of narrative voices in their translated news texts and the extent to which the narrative voices of certain groups have been emphasised or suppressed. This sheds light on the shifts in voice within and between media outlets and the contextual factors which might have contributed to them.

A phrase-frame (p-frame) is a multi-word sequence with a one-word variable within the sequence (e.g., it is * to ). P-frames are important components of language production and can demonstrate phraseological patterning. This study examined p-frames retrieved from one learner business emails corpus (1,413 texts based on the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database) and one working professional email corpus (1,145 texts from the Enron email dataset). P-frames were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of their structural characteristics, functional characteristics, and variability. Our results showed that the working professionals and the learners of business English used p-frames differently. The working professionals used p-frames in ways that aligned with written conventions, whereas the learners of business English used p-frames in ways that did not accord well with written conventions. This difference was detected by comparing tendencies in function-word frames and frames for referential function. In addition, p-frames used by the working professionals displayed a higher degree of variability than those by the learners of business English. This study facilitates an understanding of learners’ p-frame use in English for business purposes and suggests that p-frames be incorporated into the teaching and learning of L2 business writing.