Volume 45, Issue 5

The emergence and proliferation of online depression communities (ODCs) on social media have illuminated the emotional landscape of individuals experiencing depression and the linguistic characteristics intrinsic to depression narratives. Despite the substantial growth of these communities, scant research has been conducted on unmanaged ODCs. These communities often construct narratives of unbecoming that recount experiences that have been missed, lost, rejected, or undone, thereby offering a window into the nuanced complexities of depression narratives. Drawing upon the discursive psychology approach, this study selectively investigates 2,000 comments of 20 core participants in ‘Zoufan’ Weibo, a representative ODC in China, to discern how the participants communicate discursive positioning via linguistic cues. Adopting the four-world approach, I code four types of positioning cues, map them onto three discourse worlds, and report the most salient linguistic resources observed within each world. I further argue that the commenters construct a realm (the fourth world) characterized by an emotional estrangement from the self and the environment. The findings offer insights into depression narratives in Chinese ODCs and highlight the value of the discursive psychology method in emotion studies.

This paper explores the ways in which conversation partners demonstrate and develop familiarity and rapport with each other from a distance when one partner, an astronaut, works in the isolated, confined, and extreme environment of a spacecraft. Employing methodologies of pragmatics and pragmatic act theory, I explore radio communication between astronauts on missions in space and support crews on the ground. The audio-recorded conversations (189 h) took place between mission control centers on earth and astronauts on board the International Space Station. The findings reveal that rapport-building in space-to-ground communication occurs through a range of strategies, including stylistic playfulness, recognition of familiarity between speakers, reassurance, and self-deprecating humor. What distinguishes this exploration from existing research is its focus on the coexistence and intertwining of rapport-building with task-oriented communication in the extreme environment of human space flight.

This paper reports on an appraisal analysis of a representative sample of 32 posts, and associated comments, on a Chinese political web forum, which is a first attempt to critically apply the appraisal framework to this context. One of the key findings is that the Chinese contributors to this forum judged the behaviour of others by relying to a great extent on assumed references and cultural knowledge. This ‘insider’ knowledge, in particular the perceived social status of the target group, is realised using different kinds of appraisal resources, mostly of the invoked type, with some of these resources different to those commonly used by native English speakers in similar contexts. The use of such resources enabled contributors to express negative judgement of people they perceived to be in the elite, as well as towards other nation-states. In this paper, we identify status-sensitive linguistic resources that invoke attitudes in this context, and thus propose to split the appraisal category of judgement: social sanction: propriety into ethics-based propriety and social-hierarchy-based propriety . We discuss how these resources are deployed by the contributors to position others in ways that depend on both knowledge of cultural context and the online communicative context in which these interactions take place.

This study documents the mechanism by which a speaker accomplishes targeting the current turn at an unselected recipient; it does so by reference to what we will call participants’ differential relationships to a referent . Several video recordings of Japanese ordinary conversations are examined with the methodology of conversation analysis. The findings show that the differential relationships are resources for generating double accountabilities of action; the targeted turn implements one action for the selected recipient and another for the target recipient. The use of differential relationships also provides publicly witnessable grounds for the distribution of turn-allocation techniques. We argue that targeting is a rich domain in which turn allocation and the accountability of action intersect.

The study compares interactional metadiscourse used by American and Chinese corporate leaders in corporate social responsibility [CSR] statements to serve the interpersonal and persuasive purposes of the genre. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted on the corpus of English CSR statements made respectively by corporate leaders of 21 Chinese and 21 American companies from 2015 to 2019. The results indicate that although both American and Chinese sub-corpora are rich in interpersonal resources, the American CSR statements overall utilize remarkably more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese CSR statements. Specifically, the American CSR statements employ more hedges and boosters for argumentation and persuasion. They also use more polarized attitude markers for overt expressions of emotions, in comparison to the Chinese CSR statements which favor moderate emotional appeals through centralized attitude markers. The American CSR statements use more first-person pronouns to accentuate authorial stance, whereas the Chinese CSR statements utilize more third-person pronouns to play down authorial presence. These differences can be traced to the influences of different social-cultural backgrounds and communication traditions rooted in the Chinese and American contexts.

Since the late 1980s, there has been a reconceptualization of ageing, which is also reflected in how older adults are referred to. Research on Australian English indicates that while the label seniors activates positive associations of health and well-being, the characteristics related to the label the elderly are generally negative. The question is whether this difference in semantic stereotyping is also extended to how a heavily stigmatized and little-researched mental illness, late-life depression, is conceptualized, depending on which label for older adults, i.e.,  seniors or the elderly , is used in the media. Relying on the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP; Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22(1). 1–39), we examined 26 articles containing the keywords “seniors” and “depression” and 83 articles with the keywords “the elderly” and “depression” published in eight leading Australian newspapers between 1987 and 2022. The analysis found that alternative conceptualizations of late-life depression do emerge, depending on which label is used: while seniors activates a less permanent state of late-life depression over which those affected have some degree of control, the elderly elicits a lasting state where those affected have very little control over their condition. Such findings clearly demonstrate the framing effect of figurative language as used in the media to shape the perception of a debilitating condition such as depression: how mental illness is metaphorically conceptualized can serve to intensify or help disperse the fears and taboos surrounding it.