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This article argues for the inclusion of verbal and nominal ellipsis in the Spanish as a Second Language classroom, mainly at intermediate and advanced levels. A qualitative analysis of Spanish textbooks and grammar manuals reveals that ellipsis processes are frequently ignored in this type of teaching materials. A succinct linguistic description of the main elliptical processes in Spanish (verbal ellipsis, nominal, fragments, and null complement anaphora) is presented and a series of sample learning activities are proposed for the practice of these constructions and their inclusion in teaching materials. At the same time, I argue for the importance of the so-called discourse grammar and of the mechanisms of discourse coherence and cohesion, of which ellipsis is an example, in the construction of complex discourse and, consequently, in the integral teaching of Spanish as a second language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review discusses the book "Multimodal Chinese Discourse: Understanding Communication and Society in Contemporary China" by D. Feng. The book explores the field of multimodal discourse studies in the context of China, focusing on identity construction at the national, corporate/university, and individual levels. It provides analytical frameworks and delves into the social, cultural, and historical contexts of contemporary China. The book offers novel insights into the relationship between language, politics, and society in the digital era. While the book demonstrates the applicability of analytical frameworks, it lacks large-scale multimodal corpora and the use of multimodal analytical software. Overall, it serves as a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in multimodality, identity studies, and political discourse analysis in China. [Extracted from the article]

The present work attempts to examine the relationship between grammar and discourse. (i) First, it compares Warrongo (an ergative language that has antipassives and an S/O pivot) and English (an accusative language that has passives and an S/A pivot). Despite these polar opposite morphosyntactic characteristics, Warrongo and English behave almost in the same way in discourse – in terms of new mentions, lexical mentions and topic continuity. There are, however, two differences in discourse. First, Warrongo antipassives and S/O pivot have much higher functional loads than English passives and S/A pivot. Second, Warrongo antipassives have a use that English passives do not have. (ii) Then, the present work shows that grammar and discourse are not independent of each other and that they share one principle. The hierarchy of "O > S > A" is attested in grammar and discourse crosslinguistically and irrespective of the morphosyntactic types of the languages concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study adopts a cross-register approach to style, examining style with relation to the situation of use. While register tends to be avoided by style research as a confounding variable, this investigation of the styles of four American presidents in memoirs, official letters, and public addresses illustrates that adding a register dimension leads to a more accurate, nuanced analysis. The study identifies linguistic features associated with register vs. style variation in the corpus and analyzes intraspeaker differences across registers with regard to the following functional categories: information density, oral style, situation-dependent discourse, and narration vs. immediacy. The results indicate that even authors with a well-defined individual style consistently adjust their language to the demands of the situation, with the most noticeable differences lying between strictly regimented literate registers and the more oral, less conventionalized ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the apparition of the web 2.0, memes have emerged as a form of language that blends visual and linguistic signs in a compressed format. Memes represent a typical production of our postdigital society, insofar as they blur boundaries between the digital and the non-digital, circulate quickly and may have an influence on our society. Memes also participate in the reinterpreting and expressing complex emotions, ideas, and cultural references in a new, condensed form. The aim of this paper is to show how memes convey hateful representations, both through language and visual signs based on popular culture, thus participating in a climate of violence in public discourse. This discourse analysis is based on a case study of memes that present excessive messages, through a particular blend of linguistic and visual utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the shifting boundaries in populist discourses in China, with a focus on how the political leader's discourse socially constructs the people. By combining critical and post-structuralist discourse analysis, we argue firstly that prevalent Western-centric approaches to the study of populism only partially capture the notion of the people in contemporary China, the study of which requires a mixture of elements from these approaches. Secondly, that the image of a Chinese people embracing the Chinese Dream and the promise for a New China, is narrated in a context where the Chinese Communist Party infuses all levels of society with messages of development, prosperity, peace and freedom. And thirdly, that while previous leaders would normally address the people in a formal and detached way, the distance between leadership and the people has been reduced in the Xi Jinping era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the offensive realist explanation of the war in Ukraine found in the work of John Mearsheimer. It argues that Mearsheimer's failure to take seriously predispositional factors means his account of the war offers an incomplete basis for discerning motives, predicting the conflict's evolution, or responding to Russian aggression. To address this deficit and explain how ideological beliefs and meanings expressed in discourse are shaping Russia's prosecution of the war, the article sets out an interpretive framework that draws on insights into armed conflict and ideology from the likes of Michael Freeden and Jonathan Leader Maynard as well as contributions to Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) primarily in the work of Teun van Dijk. To explore the Russian ideological and discursive aspects at play in the Ukraine war, the article fixes its analytical gaze on an address delivered by Putin to the Russian nation on February 24, 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a series of lectures Halliday presented in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong in 2005. As Amy Tsui indicates in her companion paper in this issue, it was to have been the first chapter in a book that would also include chapters by other scholars discussing the educational use of some of Halliday's theoretical and practical proposals, but for various reasons the book did not eventuate. (See also the first sentence of the paper.) One distinctive feature of the paper is its reach over a very large range of concepts in Halliday's theory. Another is its accessibility for educators looking to find a general introduction to aspects of systemic functional linguistic theory relevant to education. The final section illustrates the analytical use of the theory in various educational contexts through examples of discourse analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrastive discourse relations indicate a local change as regards discourse topic continuity, and thus a local halt in the flow of discourse, which requires a reorganization of the sequential ordering of discourse units with respect to chronology and/or logic. Interlocutors presume discourse to be coherent.[1] However, coherence does not lie in the discourse as such; it is the recipients who construe discourse coherence with the help of discourse relations. Continuative and contrastive discourse relations Continuative and contrastive discourse relations, which are among the cognitively most salient kinds of discourse relations, differ in their functions with regard to how they convey how the flow of discourse proceeds locally (see also [18]; [27]; [31]). Discourse relations indicate the nature of the relationship holding between two (or more) adjacent (or non-adjacent) discourse units, and signal the sequential status of discourse relations with respect to discourse hierarchy. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the linguistic realization of continuative discourse relations in British English written discourse comparing narrative and argumentative dyadically edited texts. The data comprise 18 co-edited texts and metadata documenting the editing process (keystroke logs and transcripts of the dyads negotiating discursive well-formedness). The focus of analysis lies on the linguistic realization of coordinating continuation and narration, which keep the discourse on the same level, and on the linguistic realization of subordinating elaboration and explanation, which introduce a deeper level in the discourse hierarchy. Special attention is paid to contexts in which the discourse relations are encoded in intra-clausal coherence strands, and to contexts in which they are additionally signalled in the peripheries. The quantitative analysis of the signalling of continuative discourse relations shows genre-specific preferences for the signalling of continuation and elaboration in the argumentative data, and continuation, narration and explanation in the narrative data. Both the products of the edited data, the co-edited texts, and the metadata show that the linguistic realization and interpretation of continuative discourse relations are – to varying degrees – subject to recontextualization. We suggest that this variation provides evidence for (1) discourse relations as constitutive parts of discourse grammar, and (2) genre as a blueprint which constrains their linguistic realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the utility of metaphor as an investigative tool in "long-distance" corpora and discourse studies. I show that metaphor is both important for understanding discourses and useful for diachronic analysis because it allows us to abstract out above the purely lexical level, enabling comparison across contexts where the same concept could be lexicalised differently. The case-study is concerned with the oft-discussed metaphor of migrants are water in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800–2018 and the conventionalisation and evaluative patterns are presented. The findings confirm that the water metaphor has an extensive discourse history regarding how migration is represented in the UK press, but also that evaluations may differ significantly. The paper shows how metaphor can provide a way to find discourse evaluations and framings across different time periods. The use of second-order collocates illustrates how corpus tools can help re-contextualise data to ensure interpretation heeds contemporary framings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper encompasses a revision of the most relevant studies on the use of numbers in the press as well as the application of their premises to the specific case of the coronavirus crisis in Spain. With this goal in mind, we have focused on three Spanish newspapers (ABC, El País and El Mundo) to examine the use of numbers in their headlines during the four weeks prior to the declaration of the state of alarm in the country as a response to the health crisis created by the Covid-19. This analysis has served not only to evaluate the validity and applicability of the postulates of the reviewed literature, but it has also allowed us to observe how numbers along with their linguistic context can trigger an alarming effect on the readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book is worthwhile reading and reflecting on, especially for those scholars and students showing great interest in the sphere of CDA/S. References 1 Wodak, Ruth. Chapter 3 introduces the seminal symposium of CDA/S initiated by Van Dijk in Amsterdam in 1991 to discuss the theories and methods of CDA/S with its "original five" members (p. 73). Meanwhile, with an extensive scholarly focus on political and media communicative practices, CDA/S has become ever more significant in understanding the power of discourse and in pursuing social changes. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores how narratives and their discursive elements construct the idea of rebelliousness in subjects who followed different pathways through politics and activism after the Spanish 15-M movement. Methodologically, two representative examples of narratives have been selected on the basis of interviews with participants in the movement. To study these cases, the concept of rebel narratives is proposed from the perspective of narrative as social practice. The analysis applied here is based on a dialogue between the two cases studied, as discourses in which the activity of their tellers develops in certain contexts of discourse production. Based on this analysis, it is suggested that rebelliousness, in addition to manifesting subjective affiliations, fulfils a performative function with which the subjects legitimise their chosen path and constitute themselves, motivating, in the cases presented, revisions of the past or the rhetoric characteristic of a hero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been broadly applied to understand the social implications of discourse, yet few studies have compared different forms of discourse in Chinese media, especially on the topic of race. Referencing the CDA framework, this study compares two sample news items from Mainland China and Taiwan about the killing of George Floyd and the associated social movements, analyzing their presentational forms, sourcing patterns, headlines, lexical and syntactic choices. A racial analysis is also conducted to better comprehend how racism is constructed and potentially reproduced in Chinese media. The results suggest that the two media sources bifurcate in reporting styles – due to respective journalistic environments and regulations – and their attitudes towards the cause of the reported event. However, they both explicitly identify the issue of racism in the US. This study applies CDA in a non-US context to uncover the reporting styles and racial connotations in Chinese news discourse from Mainland China and Taiwan, identifying future directions for racial discourse analysis in Chinese media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an Introduction to the present issue, this article explores the workings of discourse and dialogue in communicating unity and diversity through language in vast social and cultural contexts. In what follows, discourse analysis is presented as a dialogue-oriented field that arose at the crossroads of linguistics and social sciences to overcome the limitations of traditional, autonomous linguistics. The dialogic profile of discourse analysis is demonstrated along three exploratory vectors that recognise dialogism as an inseparable criterion in the study of discourse. Accordingly, it will be shown that dialogicity is what lies at the core of discourse organization, discourse practice and discourse worlds. The discussion of the dialogic provenance and orientation of discourse (analysis) is closed by the volume presentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National stereotypes are inherently evaluative, often negatively, and potentially prejudicial. While research has examined stereotypes from an organisational perspective, this is overwhelmingly in experimental settings involving students (Landy, 2008); in other words not in workplaces, and not involving employees doing their jobs. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 53 authentic business meetings, this study finds that among certain communities, national stereotypes are used in workplace narratives, and argues that such narratives constitute a contextual, situated social practice. The novel methodology pinpoints and categorises all stereotypes in business-meeting narratives, before discussing what role they play in indexing the identities of the stereotyped and the stereotyping. Finally, evaluation, ideology and power are critically engaged with to explain their use or non-use, thus making a theoretical contribution to studies of evaluation, workplace narratives, and stereotyping in discourse. While ethically problematic, and potentially detrimental to business success, their use may be motivated by local workplace goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

She finds out that war metaphors are largely utilized as an important linguistic device in the discourses around "coronavirus" in the UK and US corpora, while relatively absent in the German discourse. Moving to Chapter 5 by Jaworska, it adopts a comparative, corpus-assisted discourse analysis to present how the coronavirus is discursively constructed in the popular public media in the UK, USA and Germany respectively. Jones, Rodney H. (ed.) 2021 Viral Discourse Cambridge Cambridge University Press vi + 98 978108986625 US$20.00 (pbk) As one volume of the Cambridge Elements series in applied linguistics, I Viral discourse i intends to demonstrate how the range of tools available to discourse analysts can be employed to deal with a pressing, "real-world" problem, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. [Extracted from the article]

This paper aims to identify and define the different linguistic functions that emoji can carry in French and English computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Emoji are graphical icons, representing attitudes or concepts, that can be used on any smartphone or computer with a variety of communicative roles inside a conversation. Using a multimodal corpus containing 1200 emoji and the messages in which they were used, we tested an initial typology of emoji functions inspired by previous frameworks. The quantitative analysis of the data, along with the detailed examination of specific examples, led to the construction of a new, more refined typology consisting of three primary functions (expressive, interpretative and referential) and five secondary functions (relational, politeness, emphatic, structural and aesthetic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the management of unaccompanied child migration. A legal framework laid out in international law aims to give internationally recognised human rights to children. These legal texts (re)invent the label of "child", and more specifically, of "unaccompanied child". This is a legally prescribed lexical label that discursively produces the figure of "child" as a legal, psychological and biometric surveillance object, resulting in ambivalent management of the children. In this paper, I show how this figure of the unaccompanied child is (re)invented in legal texts and then circulates in the humanitarian world via a process of entextualisation on supra/national and local levels in Greece. Drawing on eight months of ethnography on Lesvos Island, I demonstrate the tensions, disruptions, refusals and unsettling moments of struggle that arise when this definition and its related policies are implemented on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine promotional materials produced by two organisations in Singapore, TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot, to investigate how these two groups employ discourses of love to support their opposing views regarding the reconcilability of Christianity and same-sex desire. TrueLove.Is is a Christian ministry that encourages LGB Christian Singaporeans to "come out, come home", while Pink Dot is Singapore's largest and foremost LGBTQ movement. We identify similarities and differences in their persuasive discourse strategies regarding ideas of love as discussed by lesbian Christian pastors. Although they position the idea of love similarly, their agendas are completely polarised. TrueLove.Is takes the position that non-heteronormative activity is ungodly and sinful, while Pink Dot offers a reconciliation between Christianity and same-sex desire. We employ Peterson's (2016) approach to homophobic discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and a comparative discourse analysis to investigate the ideologies that inform the two organisations' materials about the treatment of LGBTQ Singaporeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the discourse structure of Free Indirect Discourse passages in narratives. We argue that Free Indirect Discourse reports consist of two separate propositional discourse units: an (explicit or implicit) frame segment and a reported content. These segments are connected at the level of discourse structure by a non-veridical, subordinating discourse relation of Attribution, familiar from recent SDRT analyses of indirect discourse constructions in natural conversation (Hunter, 2016). We conducted an experiment to detect the covert presence of a subordinating frame segment based on its effects on pronoun resolution. We compared (unframed) Free Indirect Discourse with overtly framed Indirect Discourse and a non-reportative segment. We found that the first two indeed pattern alike in terms of pronoun resolution, which we take as evidence against the pragmatic context split approach of Schlenker (2004) and Eckardt (2014), and in favor of our discourse structural Attribution analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two branches of discourse studies, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse theory (DT), could benefit through extending their critical focus and incorporating findings and methodologies of neighbouring disciplines. While indebted to the attentiveness of CDA to ordinary language, ideology studies have by contrast developed interpretative, non-judgmental analytical frameworks that explore the many-faceted features of ideology, power, and the political. In turn, the macro-focus of DT on binary distinctions, articulatory equivalences, and the construction of hegemony through empty signifiers, overlooks the complex internal conceptual morphology that produces multiple ideological vocabularies. Through a layered filtering of texts, utterances, and linguistic intensities, ideological micro-morphology reveals processes of semantic decontestation in order to defend, alter or criticize political thought-practices. It illuminates the complex interrelationship between word and concept and accepts fantasies as ineluctable and decodable features of communal life. By reaching out beyond their disciplinary confines, the interplay of these parallel approaches could enrich the scholarly understanding of the political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics on 'Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice.' In this introduction we discuss the aims and structure of this special issue focused on the development of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory originally developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the current state of play of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory associated with Laclau and Mouffe and the 'Essex school', and identifies ways forward at the level of theory development, research practice and critique. The article starts by disentangling the different meanings of the notion of 'discourse' in 'discourse theory', clarifying the specificities of discourse theory as a theoretical and analytical framework and situating discourse theory in, but also beyond, critical discourse studies. It then moves to an assessment of the current state of discourse theory, its main contributions, and the identification of shortcomings and ways forward. This discussion is organized around five topics: methodology and the theory-analysis dialectic; the logics approach; the discursive-material relation; the role of fantasy and other psychoanalytic categories; and populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Logics of Critical Explanation proposed a methodological approach that could render the insights of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) and post-Marxist political theory more conducive to critical empirical research. It also offered a language with which to counter positivist tendencies to colonize the space of methods and research strategies, showing how PDT could facilitate both explanatory and critical endeavours. Since its publication in 2007, a number of studies have applied the logics framework to empirical cases, while critically engaging with its methodological and theoretical arguments. The main purpose of this article is to evaluate some of these developments, and to set out some future challenges faced by this research programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quotative be like has been described as "one of the most striking developments [in English]" (Tagliamonte and D'Arcy 2004: 493). Despite the vast research on quotatives and the upsurge of be like, the potential impact of discourse type on the grammar of quotation has rarely been assessed. Yet, discourse type has proved a relevant factor in linguistic variation (see Travis 2007; Buchstaller 2011; Travis and Lindstrom 2016). Drawing on vernacular spoken data from our multigenerational corpus of Australian English, we include discourse type as a predictor in our recursive partitioning and logistic regression models. Our results show that similar linguistic constraints operate on be like across discourse types. However, significant differences emerge regarding its social conditioning in narrative as opposed to non-narrative discourse, pointing to a strong association between be like and female storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the corpus-based research on medical discourse has focused on "involved" language (e.g., 1st person pronouns, discourse markers) and its importance in creating patient rapport (Adolphs, Brown, Carter, Crawford, & Sahota, 2004; Skelton & Hobbes, 1999; Staples, 2016). However, in the broader literature on health care interactions, providers' information provision is equally important in patient-centered care (Ong, de Haes, Joos, & Lammes, 1995). This paper investigates the ways in which providers and patients use informational language in medical discourse using multidimensional analysis (MDA; Biber, 1988). We first examine three corpora of medical interactions and then focus a new MDA on one type of interaction that requires more informational language use: discussions of disease and treatment options. The analysis revealed multifaceted aspects of information provision that differ depending on the nature of the information, including providers' procedural information for medical treatment and impersonal information provision for explaining the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the linguistic manifestations of gender discriminating stereotypes in the news coverage of the 2015 rape case "People v. Turner". The case centers around a rape perpetrated by Brock Turner on the Stanford University campus in California. Articles from the online edition of the Stanford Daily are systematically analysed with respect to rape-myth consistent argumentation, amount of coverage granted to the perspectives of victim and perpetrator, naming/labelling of victim and perpetrator, and the transitivity choices that were made. All these factors can be identified in the news coverage of the Brock Turner case in one way or another. They result in victim blaming and mitigating perpetrator responsibility serving to show that sexist reporting is still an important issue where serious crimes like rape are concerned. Such linguistic practices re-victimise victims of sexist violence and ultimately contribute to a misogynist discourse and the reproduction and perpetuation of sexist stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of Discourse Grammar. It is argued that the structure of exclamatives can be related to other sentence types in terms of discourse strategies that are used for constructing texts, in particular by means of cooptation, a cognitive-communicative strategy that enables speakers to use existing text pieces for new discourse functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism has been on the rise in Europe, especially in the last decade. Finland is no exception, and a populist party 'The Finns Party' has gained momentum since the 2011 parliamentary election. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses of the Finns Party in their official releases on immigration and language in the 2015 parliamentary election. The socio-politically situated examination draws from Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, especially the concepts of biopower, biopolitics, racism, governmentality and subject position. In addition, language identity, language ideologies, and populism are used to discuss how linguistic identity and ideology are perceived and constructed in the data, especially in terms of discourses of inclusion and exclusion of ethnically Finnish but linguistically non-dominant groups, and immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adapts O'Halloran's (2010) electronic supplement analysis (ESA) to investigate debates about UK poverty in online newspaper articles and reader responses to those articles. While O'Halloran's method was originally conceived to facilitate close reading, this paper modifies ESA for corpus-based discourse analysis by scaling it up to include multiple texts. I analyse (key-)keywords and concordances to compare seven articles from the Mail Online (2010–2015) with their 2354 reader responses generated using the newspapers' Below the Line (BTL) comments feature. The analysis provides a snapshot of the discourses BTL commenters draw upon when writing about UK poverty. Unemployment, benefits receipt, and single parenthood were repeatedly referred to in the newspaper articles and their comments, but BTL commenters also drew on personal narratives and (fictional) anecdotes to index notions of flawed consumerism, scroungers, and the deserving and undeserving poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of populism has turned researchers' attention to the importance of affect in politics. This is a corpus-assisted study investigating lexis in the semantic domain of anger and violence in tweets by radical-right campaigner Nigel Farage in comparison with four other prominent British politicians. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of discourse show that Farage cultivates a particular set of affective-discursive practices, which bring anger into the public sphere and offer a channel to redirect frustrations. Rather than expressing his own emotions, he presents anger as generalised throughout society, and then performs the role of defending 'ordinary people' who are the victims of the elites. This enables him to legitimise violent emotions and actions by appealing to the need for self-assertion and self-defence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the status of argumentative discourse. We argue that argumentation can contribute to instances of different discourse genres, regardless of whether it is functional to their purposes. By analyzing examples from the daily press in the light of an approach to discourse analysis inspired by pragmatics, we show that also texts that are not expected to be argumentative have underlying argumentative structures and that a text's being argumentative is a matter of degree: the understanding of underlying argumentative structures contributes to a varying extent to the understanding of what a text as a whole means and of its point in the speech situation. This role of argumentative structures in text understanding suggests considering argumentation as a cognitively-based dimension of discourse, connected to human rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political communication is expressed in politicians' speeches, campaign advertisements and government statements. Politics are also articulated in music, in both traditional political contexts such as anthems and party political broadcasts as well as less traditional contexts including songs, promotional videos and live performances. There is a wide spectrum of opinions as to exactly what are relations between music and politics, though most scholars acknowledge it can communicate meanings, though again, what these are remains contentious. One way to better understand relations between music and politics and meanings expressed in music is to closely examine these issues through the prism of discourses analysis. Through such an examination, not only what is being communicated becomes clear, but also how this is done, contributing to the fields of political communication, musicology and discourse studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forward an argument about the relation between utopian thought and political discourse. It demonstrates how utopias frame normative discourse in general and political discourse in particular. The argument is informed by Kenneth Burke's theory of the negative command and its place at the basis of all human language. I argue that utopias are necessarily based in the hortatory negative and are, in literary terms, like religious texts in general being 'words about words' designed to coordinate "the tribe". Burke calls such texts 'logological'. The argument I put forward here points to a rapidly crumbling utopia that has beset much of the world and all of the West since at least the Reagan-Thatcher era in which a new corporatist political economy was given global impetus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR) is a deliberative process that has been used in the United States to involve panels of citizens in producing balanced and easily understandable accounts of proposed ballot measures and their potential effects. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the CIR process is shaped by evaluative framing in which the rational component cannot be clearly separated from the emotive base of assigning responsibility. We analyze the argumentative dynamic of advocates' presentations during the 2010 CIR on Measure 73 and discuss emotional claims as products of narrative structures that define problem situations. We explore how the distinction between manipulative and valid emotional claims within the context of public deliberation can be made with the help of three categories of analysis: Themes, Ideals, and Scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of aspect in L2 is influenced by the properties of the lexical-aspectual class, coercion at the syntactic-pragmatic interface and grounding information (foreground and background) in discourse. This paper addresses how these linguistic functions influence the acquisition of Spanish aspectual past tenses (pretérito indefinido and pretérito imperfecto) by Mandarin Chinese learners. The results show that activities and accomplishments are more problematic for learners to acquire and that dynamicity, rather than telicity, plays a determinant role for Chinese learners. Moreover, factors concerning coercion – a pragmatic and discourse mechanismremain difficult to master at C1. Our results also support the Discourse Hypothesis, though showing different patterns of association (lexical and grammatical aspect) across levels. We conclude that an integrative perspective gives a better account of the acquisition process of Spanish aspectual tenses [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressing vagueness is a common phenomenon especially in spoken discourse. The present paper examines vague language 'sort of' (e.g., kayak gitu) realised in spoken discourse in Indonesian. It accounts for the pragmatic functions of 'sort of' examined in their discourse context. The data under investigation include a 24-hour corpus of a television talk-show discussing various social issues. A pragmatic qualitative data analysis is predominantly employed directed towards a functional analysis of the use of 'sort of'. Descriptive statistics accompany the qualitative analysis to reinforce the investigation. The quantitative analysis shows that 'sort of' was infrequently used in the context of Indonesian television discourse. The corpus displays various forms of lexical devices for 'sort of' in Indonesian. The pragmatic analysis shows that 'sort of' was employed as a politeness strategy to tone down strong linguistic expressions and to save the speaker's positive face. The infrequent use of 'sort of' in the discourse type under investigation in this study reinforces the notion that 'sort of' is a feature of informal interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political discourse becomes more and more 'mediatized' nowadays but, as I argue in this article, mediatization should be considered neither as a testament to 'de-ideologization' nor as a restyling of the 'inherently ideological' contemporary political communication. Ideology, I claim, is a potentiality of mediatized political discourse and as such, it rests with the generic capacity of the latter to recontextualize symbolisms from the institutional past serving the ordering of the institutional present. How is the recontextualization of symbolic meanings facilitated by the aesthetic and affective qualities of different media genres? In what ways does recontextualized discourse serve the neoliberal order of the present? Lying at the heart of the ideological analysis of political communication, these are questions which can be insightfully addressed through a discourse analytics of mediatization as the one I apply here on two political advertisements from the Greek general election of January 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two emerging discourse uses, topic-shifting and trail-off, of a temporal conjunction ranhou in spontaneous Mandarin conversation. Unlike traditional approaches that focus exclusively on such textual functions as temporality and consequentiality of ranhou, the present study considers the role of prosody in making ranhou recognizable as a topic-shifting and trail-off marker in interaction. Using the framework of conversation analysis, this paper reveals that, as a topic-shifting marker, ranhou signals both stepwise and disjunctive topic shifts; as a trail-off marker, it marks the closure of the current turn and invites the recipient’s response. The prosodic analysis demonstrates that the topic-shifting ranhou shows a significantly longer duration and larger pitch range than its other uses; the trail-off ranhou features intonational independence, loudness diminuendo, and/or durational lengthening. These prosodic designs, in collaboration with particular sequential environment, make the new discourse uses and their associated interactional purposes recognizable by conversation co-participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fifty Shades trilogy is often associated with BDSM, yet practitioners of BDSM typically disavow the trilogy. Previous research highlights how mechanics of BDSM such as agency and consent are misrepresented in the trilogy; this study highlights differences in affect. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among BDSM practitioners in Berlin, Germany, this paper considers reception beyond reading as evidence of BDSM's affective phenomenology. The paper combines an Ortner-inspired "cultural ethnography through discourse" with close reading: it compares discourse and affect observed in the field with that in the novels, and suggests that the portrayal of BDSM in the novels and portrayals of the novels as representations of BDSM misinterpret the affective phenomenology of BDSM. Through attention to language, this study shows how affect and situated discourse become mutually constitutive in shaping the legibility of phenomenological experience, suggesting that playful reterritorializations of semiotic forms can counter mimetic perpetuations of symbolic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies one of the key-metaphors that has dominated British EU-debates for the past 25 years, i.e. the slogan, Britain at the heart of Europe. The discourse career of this metaphor up to the Brexit referendum shows a decline in its affirmative, optimistic use, and a converse increase of deriding uses to the point of declaring the heart of Europe irredeemably diseased, dead, non-existent or rotten. We argue that these changes in the metaphor scenario of the heart of Europe concept helped to entice the British public to integrate the information supplied by pro-Brexit campaigners into a narrative of a dying EU, which motivated their voting preferences. Even statements that were exposed as factually wrong or implausible before the Brexit referendum were still accepted as fitting the narrative and thus considered as more reliable than unframed pieces of counter-information supplied by the Brexit critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giménez Bartlett’s novel recovers the historical figure of La Pastora, who was represented by Franco’s discourse as a diabolic monster. La Pastora is an intersex person, and she also is a maquis (guerrilla). It is this double level of marginalization as intersex and maquis that is to be studied in this essay. Through the analysis of La Pastora’s character, memoria histórica and sexual identity will be uncovered as central to Giménez Bartlett’s novel since they reveal as well as denounce the lack of space for the “other” stories of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. At the same time, Donde nadie te encuentre lays bare the issue of marginalization and repression in Franco’s Spain of non-normative gender and sexual identities — “dissident identities” as Raquel Osborne (2012) calls them — of any identity that does not conform to the models of sexuality imposed by Francoist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests a theoretical and methodological framework for a systematic contrastive discourse analysis across languages and discourse communities through keywords. This constitutes a lexical approach to discourse analysis which is considered to be particularly fruitful for comparative analysis. We use a corpus-assisted methodology, presuming meaning to be constituted, revealed, and constrained by collocation environment. We compare the use of the keywords intégration/Integration in French and German public discourses about migration on the basis of newspaper corpora built from two French and German newspapers from 1998 to 2011. We look at the frequency of these keywords over the given time span, group collocates into thematic categories, and discuss indicators of discursive salience by comparing the development of collocation profiles over time in both corpora as well as the occurrence of neologisms and compounds based on intégration/Integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 participants in the US and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining personal definitions of religion and spirituality. Methodologically, the study shows how the key word procedure can be used to compare the semantic profile of subjective concepts between different languages and cultures by contrasting them to standard language and by using socio-biographical context variables to build contrasting sub-corpora. To control the in-equivalence of existing reference corpora in terms of size and design a so-called reference control corpus (RCC) is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first briefly discusses the relationship between comparative discourse analyses of original and translated texts as the basis for revealing the behavior of a particular linguistic phenomenon in context and use. Concretely, the paper examines how global English impacts on translations from English into German with regard to so-called 'linking constructions,' a hitherto rather neglected area of connectivity in discourse. The analysis focusses on the forms, functions, distribution, and the translation equivalents in parallel and comparable corpora. Results indicate that the use of linking constructions differs substantially in English and German discourse, and these differences may well block English influence on German discourse norms via translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an empirical study of the discourse-pragmatic functions of subject left dislocation (LD) in Old Occitan. Data come from the complete troubadour biographies, in which the most common manifestation of subject LD is a nominal subject + sentence adverb si + verb, as in "Bertrans de Born si fo uns castellans" [Bertran de Born was a nobleman]. Whereas previous accounts fail to integrate syntax with discourse-pragmatic function, these results reveal the importance of both in explaining the occurrence of subject LD. Using recent approaches to the clausal left periphery (e.g., Benincà 2006), I distinguish LD subjects from conventional (i.e., non-dislocated) pre-verbal subjects. Next, following Fleischman's (1991) analysis of si in Old French, I illustrate how subject LD structures the flow of information in discourse. In particular, subject LD marks a constituent as a discourse topic and can also introduce a new referent into the discourse and thereby mark it as topical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed a discourse pattern, the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract topic. The paper discusses findings from various studies that characterize usage of lexical and clause-level constructions in the course of producing texts based on the two discourse patterns, and contrasts these findings with quantitative and qualitative analyses of clause combining in the same texts. The study relies on a corpus of 40 texts collected from Hebrew speaker-writers, who each produced a narrative and an expository text following a semi-structured elicitation controlling for the components of field, tenor, and mode. The distributional and functional findings of the study suggest that discourse patterns, like other constructions, occupy a cline of idiomacity/schematicity. In its conclusion, the study considers the tangential and intersecting points between Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]