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The author comments on some papers published in the September 1, 2009 issue of the periodical "Pragmatics" which, in his view, testify to the way in which the study of identity has shifted from categorical distinctions towards the delicacies of social and cultural positions in discourse. He notes that the focus of the papers is on associations between actual discourse and semiosis. He says that the papers represent a stage in a paradigm shift, in which scholars discard static categorical concepts of identity and develop performative models of identity.

The central issue addressed in this paper concerns the design of an appropriate contextual framework to support a dynamic implementation of FDG. The first part of the paper is concerned with the internal structure of the contextual framework. A particular hierarchical structure for the analysis and description of context, articulated in Connolly (2007a) and termed the Extended Model of Context (EMC), is presented as the starting-point. Alternative frameworks are considered, but all are found to have shortcomings. However, the original version of the EMC has also received some criticism. Consequently, a revised model of the EMC is proposed, in which the treatment of context is enhanced, and which is appropriate to a dynamic implementation of FDG. The application of the revised EMC not only to the grammatical model, but also to a broader discourse model, is also discussed. The next part of the paper is concerned with the interaction between the EMC and the FDG Grammatical and Conceptual Components. It is contended that all of the main types of context recognised within the EMC have a significant effect upon grammar. However, the only way in which contextual factors may directly influence the production and interpretation of discourse is through their presence in the minds of the discourse-participants. Consequently, the Conceptual Component plays a vital, mediating role in the handling of interactions between the EMC and the Grammatical Component. This point is particularly salient when considering a dynamic implementation, in which the flow of information around the model is of crucial importance. It is contended that this flow is essentially cyclic in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various contributions in the September 1, 2009 issue of the periodical "Pragmatics" which, according to the author, take their cue from sociolinguistics and discourse research to address aspects of Greek language and discourse, culture and identity in Greece. There are papers which unveil how Greek and other linguistics resources are mixed in mediating friendship and collegiality. It cites that a research uses alphabet choice as a window into the association of written language, digital technologies and linguistic/cultural contact.

What does it mean to represent events from the Holocaust in a graphic novel? And what if this is done not in the stark design of Art Spiegelman's Maus but in the light ligne claire (known from Tintin)? This paper explores the discursive practices surrounding The Search, a graphic novel produced specifically to teach children and young adults about the Holocaust. It asks how (novel) forms of subjectivation are articulated in the everyday, mundane practices of educational media workers. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of the subject and close micro-analysis of language (and semiotic) practices, the paper presents extracts from ethnographic observations of a team of authors designing teaching and learning materials to accompany The Search. These materials -- and their practices of production -- are participating in transforming memories of the Holocaust and thus (co)producing forms of globalisation. Findings suggest that while the Holocaust has traditionally been seen as a matter of 'national' responsibility, The Search and its teaching materials invite readers to see it as (global/universal) 'individualised' responsibility Students are subjectivated as global subjects: Firstly, as universal-ethical subjects and, secondly, as contingency-tolerant subjects. These materials thus constitute a mundane, everyday element shaping new ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I look at how through the use of teasing as a socially recurrent activity the members of a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic peer group (comprised of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children of Roma heritage) make particular identity ascriptions and displays salient and position themselves and others in particular ways in peer talk during break-time in an Athens primary school. Taking as a point of departure that identities are produced relationally, through systems of opposition (Barth 1969), the paper deals with how members of this school-based peer group exploit teasing as a versatile discursive device to construct one particular peer as a "poor" pupil and themselves by extension as "good" pupils in talk-in-interaction. The focus on the situated and relational construction of identity makes visible how children position themselves with regard to others in order to construct academic hierarchies. At the same time, it brings to the fore how through such positionings children may reproduce but also challenge powerful institutional discourses of academic success and failure in circulation in the classroom by negotiating identity options closer to their peer concerns. These processes of identity construction demonstrate how social selves are produced in interaction through contestation and collaboration and how identities may be simultaneously chosen and imposed through language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigeria, which is variously described by some people as 'a geographical expression', 'a unique nation', 'the giant of Africa', 'the most populous black nation on earth', among several others, had three distinct governments in the year 1993 alone. Against this background of political instability, numerous discourses which should be of interest and significance to linguists, political scientists, historians, social anthropologists and discourse analysts of various persuasions are examined in this work. Notable is the emergence of the metaphorical use of the word child in the farewell speech of the deposed Head-of-State, Chief Ernest Oladeinde Shonekan, when he spoke of the interim regime as 'a child of circumstance' and in the inaugural speech of the then new Head-of-State, General Sani Abacha, as 'a child of necessity'. These expressions were used not only as part of the reasons for either taking up or rather seizing the mantle of leadership but also as descriptive signals both to the state of the nation and the kind of government that they purported to lead. Using articles in some national newspapers, I attempt in this paper a functional-semiotic discourse analysis of the relevant statements, responses and comments on these national, dramatic, political changes. This paper is therefore an analysis of aspects of the linguistic features of discourses engendered by the diverse problematic, economic, socio-cultural and political events within the Nigerian polity and the political implications for putting in place adequate democratic principles in a developing nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not that sentences (NTSs), like the one in the title, have been little studied. This paper, based on a corpus of authentic instances of the form, provides the first thorough examination of the interpretations assigned to NTSs m context and an account for those interpretations. The brief version of the account is that the NTS structure encodes procedural instructions to the effect that NTSs are to be interpreted as the rejection of conclusions derived from contextual assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates participants' reflections on power relations embedded in the cultural-pragmatics of unsourced evidentials in Persian texts. Using Fairclough's (2013) critical discourse analysis, we adopted Hanks' (2018) ethnography of referential practices and Foucault's (1980) power dynamics to analyse 16 Persian texts through follow up interviews and focus group discussions on two opposing pairs of texts – one pair on Iranian national identity versus Persian literature, and another on Iranian politics versus religion. Our analysis revealed that unsourced evidentials appear in Persian predominantly due to censorship and sometimes due to deliberate use by authors (e.g., for winning an argument). Text consumers often overlook unsourced evidentials while reflecting on politico-religious referents, such as inequalities and bigotry. This has roots in Persian literature, religion, and politics of power embedded in the culture, and the participants' attention to inequalities and discriminations has roots in referential practices in current Iranian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the complex issue of negotiating identity among minority speakers of Albanian in modern Greece as surrounded by and interacting with major societal forces and dominant ideologies stemming from the Greek nation-state. Some of the theoretical questions related to the very concept of identity are also discussed. The major thrust of the paper is focused on a discursive construction of a shifting identity formation on the part of minority community members who often anchor their identities by means of an indexical machinery rather than by explicit propositional self-identification. This means that, even though they frequently label themselves Albanian (Arvanitika) speakers and foreground various kinds of symbolic contrasts to the dominant culture and ethnicity, they also perform an identity by referring to themselves as "we" which allows more room for negotiation and for the blurring of rigid boundaries that are frequently erected around an ethnolinguistic group in our analytical jargon. I argue that this identity management is to be expected in conditions of late modernity in which no schemes, modes of existence, and ideological views are taken for granted, and in which one has to cope with challenges emerging from macro-centers of control. In such a process reflexivity at the local level looms large questioning the inherited understandings of this and related phenomena as easily classifiable sociologically and sociolinguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two issues related to the overarching question of how to integrate Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) into a wider theory of verbal interaction (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 1). First, it proposes an addressee-oriented version of the Grammatical Component, presenting a first attempt to develop an FDG account of language comprehension; second, it aims to shed light on the interaction between the Grammatical and Contextual Components of FDG by exploring this crucial aspect of verbal communication from the perspective of the addressee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for proficient non-native speakers (NNSs) of English has increased across professional fields in recent years. While speaking skills involve a complex array of factors and constraints, previous studies resorted to unexamined perceptions or intuitive impressions drawn from surface linguistic features. Particularly missing is close analytic descriptions of non-native discourse that is produced in spontaneous contexts. The present study investigates the process by which NNSs of English produce connected discourse as it unfolds in real-time. The ability to produce connected discourse is considered a hallmark of advanced speaking proficiency and this study therefore focuses on tracing the sequential organization of multiple utterances that NNSs produce in spontaneous speech. Following the principles of conversation analysis (CA), the present paper analyzes three sets of excerpts demonstrating the contingent choices that NNSs make in building connected discourse. The findings offer empirical resources for non-native professionals to identify the practicality and generality of connected discourse in real-time speech contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical present (HP) is the use of the present tense to refer to past events, usually as part of a narrative. Most work on this topic has dealt with the functions of English HP, mainly within the context of tense switching in conversational narrative. Relatively little work focuses exclusively on HP in Spanish, and most of it deals with the function of HP in conversational narratives. There is a gap in the literature regarding the specific interaction between the semantics and pragmatics involved in the use of HP, especially with respect to the formal representation of this interaction. In order to fill this gap, this paper analyzes the use of HP within the Parallel Architecture framework (Jackendoff 2002) and examines the implications for the semantic/pragmatic structure. Language samples produced by native speakers of Spanish and data from a large Spanish corpus are used as part of the basis for analysis. The present study also explores how the use of the preterite and imperfect in narrative in the past parallels the use of the simple present and the present progressive in narrative within the present timeframe, and shows how this can also be fruitfully analyzed employing the Parallel Architecture. The result is an original model that extends the formal apparatus of the Parallel Architecture to an area where it has not been applied before, the interface between semantics and narrative structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a growing body of research on inferential sentences (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 1990, 1995, 2001, Koops 2007, Pusch 2006), most of this research has been on their forms and functions in written discourse. This has left a gap with regards to their range of structural properties and allowed disagreement over their analysis to linger without a conclusive resolution. Most accounts regard the inferential as a type of it-cleft (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 2001, Huddleston and Pullum 2002, Lambrecht 2001), while a few view it as an instance of extraposition (Collins 1991, Schmid 2009). More recently, Pusch's work in Romance languages proposes the inferential is used as a discourse marker (2006, forthcoming). Based on a corpus study of examples from spoken New Zealand English, the current paper provides a detailed analysis of the formal and discoursal properties of several sub-types of inferentials (positive, negative, as if and like inferentials). We show that despite their apparent formal differences from the prototypical cleft, inferentials arc nevertheless best analysed as a type of cleft, though this requires a minor reinterpretation of "cleft construction." We show how similar the contextualized interpretations of clefts and inferentials are and how these are a function of their lexis and syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines quantitative and qualitative analyses in a corpus-based study of how and for what purposes politicians, in the context of the Spanish Parliament, use the impersonal pronoun uno 'one'. I begin by contrasting how uno is used in parliamentary debate versus non-political language. After reviewing traditional definitions of the semantic range and general behavior of this pronoun, I argue that a more accurate account that the one provided by standard grammars is needed for us to better understand how the peculiar characteristics of a parliament affect intentionality in the use of impersonal pronouns. In particular, it is argued that uno is utilized by politicians to serve principally two purposes: 1) avoidance of bluntness - a means of preserving professional etiquette, and 2) avoidance of self- praise - demonstrative of humility. Both purposes serve the larger objective of preserving professional face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the book "Stancetaking in Discourse," edited by Robert Englebreston. It notes that the collected papers featured in the book analyze the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance that will support future research. It cites that the central to the book is the claim that stancetaking includes several general principles, such as it is a public action, it indexes wider sociocultural contexts and it is consequential to the interactants.

The article provides information on the book "Discourse Analysis," second edition, by Barbara Johnstone. It notes that the author sets out an approach to discourse analysis as an open-ended heuristic directed at a systematic analysis of a variety of constraining and creative options in discourse. Topics discussed in the book include some of the ways in which discourse and world are related and the relation of media to discourse.

The article provides information on the book "Political Discourse in the Media," edited by Anita Fetzer and Gerda Eva Lauerbach. The book consists of nine papers on the topic of political discourse from a cross-cultural and comparative perspective. The authors illustrate the difficulties of defining culture-specific discourse in general and they also define the characteristics of political discourse. The challenges and support in television news interviews are also described in the book.

The article offers information on the book "Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse," by Deborah Tannen. It notes that the volume presents a clear framework for understanding how ordinary conversation works to create meaning and build relationships. It cites that the volume utilizes transcripts of tape-recorded conversation to demonstrate that conservation offers the source for linguistic strategies that are formed in literary discourse and other spoken and written, public and private genres.

The investigation of speech acts has been of interest, especially in cross-cultural pragmatics, to many L1/L2 researchers for many years (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). Favor-asking, as an important speech act, is centered upon having the other party of conversation do a specific act (Goldschmidt 1999). Although some research has been done on favor-asking in different contexts, studies on this speech act are still scarce, if any, in Persian settings. The main thrust of the current study was to investigate favorasking among a sample of 20 native speakers of Persian (10 women and 10 men). The participants were selected from graduate students, since the employed oral DCT scenarios were designed to elicit favors asked from three different academic statuses: Higher, equal, and lower (professors, peers, and students, respectively). A total of 240 responses were then analyzed to identify the recurring patterns under the three open-coded categories of pre-favor, favor, and post-favor. The examination of the responses illustrated some variation triggered by gender and academic status differences, namely, the length of favors, frequency of some (sub)themes, and formality degree. Additionally, some relevant syntactic issues were explored (e.g. plural/singular pronouns/verbs), which contributed to the formality/informality of the favors, depending upon the contexts in which they were incorporated. Finally, some insights into Persian sociocultural interactions, favor-asking in particular, were provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines two commonly-used Japanese verbs of cognition, WAKARU and SHIRU, in naturally occurring conversation, and demonstrates that these verbs are expressions of position and attitude that are relevant both to individual speakers (i.e., subjective uses) and to relational activities among participants (i.e., intersubjective uses). My naturally occurring conversation data supports Lee (2006) that there seems to be a general principle that speakers' lexical choices are governed by information type, but the link between speakers' lexical choices and information type is not so absolute but fluid. In fact, while 24% of my data are those where only WAKARU is expected to be used or only SHIRU is expected to be used, 74% are those in which both WAKARU and SHIRU are possible regardless of information type. A closer analysis of such 'fluid' examples suggests that speakers choose one expression over another to express their personal attitudes and emotions toward the content of information and toward the other conversation participants. More specifically, their choice for WAKARU manifests such features as experiencer perspective and speaker empathy, and in contrast, their choice for SHIRU is characterized as observer perspective. The study is firmly in keeping with a usage-based perspective on language (e.g., Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Bybee 2006), which takes as its starting point the idea that language use shapes language form and meaning, and offers new insights into the interactional and performative nature of language by addressing the two commonly used verbs of cognition in Japanese conversation from a viewpoint of discourse pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qiye wenhua/'enterprise culture' has emerged as a new paradigm in China's economic reforms. Hailed as China's new 'culture' it featured in an interview with certain executives of non-state owned enterprises. In the examination of this discourse, the concept of 'communicative action' (Habermas, 1998) is adopted as an analytical tool. The main contention in this exploratory examination is that there is speaker intent to justify China's model of socialist market economy. This justification is mainly reflected in the semantic content of the discourse, which stresses what is 'unique' and 'characteristic' in China's economic reforms. The rationale for this contention rests primarily on the argument that given the context of skepticism and criticisms leveled at the Chinese model, and the fact that the speakers themselves are key players in the new market economy, it would be likely that in a public discourse of this nature there would be grounds for attempts at legitimizing the Chinese economic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TV-panel discussions constitute a communicative genre with specific features concerning the situational context, the communicative goals, the roles played by the participants and the acts that are carried out in the interaction. In the Spanish TV-debate Cada día, discourse is characterized as semi-institutional because of having both institutional characteristics -- due to its mediatic nature -- and conversational characteristics. In the communicative exchanges the social situation of the participants is negotiated by communicative acts, that is, facework is realised. Facework concerns the speakers' wants of face, both the individual face and the group face. In the present article face is described in cultural terms within the general face wants autonomy and affiliation and in accordance with the roles the speakers assume in interaction. In the analysis of an excerpt from the TV-debate Cada día two types of lacework are identified: On the one hand politeness, that is, when an attempted balance between the speaker's and the addressees' face is aimed at and, on the other hand, self-facework, which appears when only the speaker's face is focused on. No samples of the third case of facework, impoliteness, are found in this excerpt. The results of the analysis display the relationship between the communicative purposes of this communicative genre (to inform, to entertain and to convince people of political ideas) and the types of facework (politeness, self-facework) that are identified in the analysed data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how people in Venezuela see politeness in the context of family and friends as a first approximation to a better understanding of what is perceived as politic behavior in discourse. It presents evidence to confirm the claim of the author that the people who act as participants in questionnaires cannot avoid from making evaluations about the wider context in which they live. It notes that a test of social habits was used in order to reveal the different types of interactions and meanings observable in it.

Although the discursive construction of authority has been largely investigated for different kinds of interaction and settings, studies concerned with authority in ethnographic encounters are scarce. In the present article, I demonstrate that in this kind of encounters the mediational character of the interactants' roles and the transcendence of the co-constructed text with respect to the current event play a crucial role in the construction of authority through discourse. My data consist of two events in 1990 recorded as part of a research project on beliefs and ritual practices among the Totonac population in Eastern Mexico, as well as the corresponding field notes. While my focus is on the linguistic and discursive resources used in the recorded sessions, I demonstrate that a well-founded account also involves a previous event, in which the methodological tools and interactional dynamics were negotiated, as well as a rehearsal previous to each recording session proposed by my consultant as a means to ensure the relevance of the information and the appropriateness of its delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the presentation and contestation of discourses of womanhood in verbal art performance. In Tuscan-Italian Contrasto verbal duels the artists, both males and females, may impersonate female characters as they exchange insults between each other. In doing so, they deploy multiple discourses of womanhood to demonstrate their wit and verbal artistry. As a consequence, they often subvert and contest "appropriate" female behavior as well as ideas of morality, which might be connected to those behaviors. This highlights the manipulability of discourses of womanhood to obtain particular goals. We analyze Contrasti performances where characters of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are impersonated. We further argue that the contraposition of different discourses on stage increases the fluidity of gender as a category. In this sense poetic performances are revealed as a loci where perceptions of established gender roles and the connected moral order might be negotiated or destabilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an overview of the book "Controversy and Confrontation: Relating Controversy Analysis With Argumentation Theory," edited by Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen. Essays about the role of argumentative discourse in managing differences of opinion are the highlights of the book. The first part of the book features the contributions of controversy scholars while part two presents the contributions of argumentation scholars.

The article provides information on the book "The Linguistics of Laughter: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter Talk," by Alan Partington. The book is said to investigate the phenomenon of laughter-talk when it is used to achieve specific rhetorical ends. It notes that the book looks at both cognitive and interactional aspects of laughter-talk. It adds that the book shows the richness of corpus-informed research for an aspect that is related to discourse rather than lexis and grammar.