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With the popularisation of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) like Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant, natural language-based interaction with machines is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. The conceptualisation of these tools as agentive assistants who help with a variety of tasks in both the household and at work is guided by their marketing: When Apple introduced the Siri-technology at their keynote event in 2011, the system responded to the question 'Siri, who are you?' with 'I am a humble personal assistant'. This claim to a speaking subject position while at the same time locating this subject firmly in a servile social role has become a defining feature of the social place of IPAs: Designed to postulate agency, they do so not in equality with humans but as their servants. This paper offers an interdisciplinary analysis of video advertisements for IPAs, combining sociological and linguistic approaches. We treat agency and actors not as something given but as something that becomes visible through communicative acts, suggesting an understanding of these advertisements as socio-technical visions in which the negotiation of agency in human–machine interaction serves two functions: Firstly, the asymmetrical relationship between the human and the machine promises a symmetrisation of human–human relationships. In an imagined diversified world of equal human rights and relationships, social inequality is reconfigured in the relationship between human and non-human entities. Secondly, the negotiation of agency between humans and machines deflects from questions regarding the increasing agency and power of the companies behind these IPAs and their growing access to and influence on people's private lives. Our paper will thus provide insights into how agency is ascribed in human–human and human–machine interaction considering social practices of symmetrisation and hierarchisation as well as a critical investigation into the triangular relationships between humans', machines', and companies' agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pets using "talking buttons" to ostensibly tell their owner about their thoughts and needs have become a huge success on social media. With buttons that upon activation play a prerecorded message, these devices are marketed as tools in teaching human language to animals in order to allow them to "speak their minds." This article investigates these practices of technologically mediated human-dog interactions through the analysis of social media videos and examines the claim that these button-based interactions are illustrative of animals' language acquisition. This article concludes that "talking buttons" in human-dog communication should rather be understood as semiotic assemblages in which meaning is collaboratively constructed through the dynamic, situated interaction of bodies, linguistic resources, objects, and touch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most trans people change their name in accordance to their gender in the process of transitioning. The decision for a new name can take place at any stage during an individual's exploration of their identity, typically coming into use when the individual comes out to others and asks to be addressed with this new name. Whether or not this new name is accepted and adopted by others is not only a matter of time, but correlates to the acceptance of the "new" gender and thus of a person's right to change their name. This article offers an analysis of trans name change announcements as performative speech acts and analyses the reactions to this name change, i.e. the acceptance or refusal of this new name, in relation to the speech act's felicity conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system (Helbig and Buscha 1988). This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: Masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). The use of neutral gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). Historically, this can be illustrated in relation to nouns, pronouns and articles: 1 By neuter nouns denoting 'socially incomplete' women, e.g. das Weib 'woman (archaic), hag, n.', das Luder 'hussy, n.' and in the increased use of neuter eliciting diminutives in reference to female individuals, e.g. das Mädchen 'girl, n.', das Fräulein 'miss, n.' (Nübling 2017). 2 Through the use of neuter pronouns and neuter articles in combination with female names in a number of German dialects, e.g. das Emma, es 'the (n.) Emma, it' (Busley and Fritzinger 2018). In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones seems to be used as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanise women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. This paper focuses on the intentional manipulation of grammatical gender in reference to women as a tool of degradation and dehumanisation and outlines the historical development of neuter forms of reference in contexts where feminine would be expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]