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This article explains how shared leadership can be recognised and established in project-based learning as a situated English practice. It specifically explores the task characteristics of Cox et al.'s (2003) leadership model, which illustrates the functional relations between the procedural features of project work and its outcomes. The result of the analysis is that project work underlies the collective and highly integrative potential of the group of students, transforming them into a community of practice. The findings indicate that factors contributing to facilitating shared leadership are the interdependence of tasks between individuals driven by intrinsic motivation to act and the low complexity of tasks. The analysis also suggests that, although low complexity tasks may weaken shared leadership, they maximise relevance, thereby minimising cognitive effort. Consequently, this response strategy can help boost collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how otherness, having a negative representation potential, is covered in media discourse with a focus on the first day of the Russia–Ukraine war. In this article, I specifically investigate the representation of otherness that weaves the web of relations within the "us versus them" narrative espoused most strongly by Teun A. Van Dijk (1992. Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse and Society 3. 87–118, 2002. Discourse and racism. In David Goldberg & John Solomos (eds.), The Blackwell companion to racial and ethnic studies, 145–159. Oxford: Blackwell) and further developed within the premises of a proximisation theory (e.g., Cap 2013. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Chilton 2004. Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge). This framework concerns the positive self-representation of Ukraine and its performance contrasted with Russia's negative other-presentation. Following this account, otherness serves as means of legitimising media actions as preventive measures taken to inform society about the past, create the present state of the world through assertions (Dunmire 2011. Projecting the future through political discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Searle 2010. Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press) which endorse media credibility and predict future outcomes with respect to the horror of the unfolding war. This study argues that the representation of otherness takes place at the proximisation level of certain lexico-grammatical choices that are used strategically by media to cover the narrative of a "permanent military standby" and the "immediacy of otherness". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to look into discourse patterns of President Joe Biden from an anthropological pragmatics perspective, and the theory of speech acts, in particular. I will argue that speech acts are double-edged tools in human communication that have the power to create objective facts accepted and maintained by human agreement on the one hand but are also determined by fluctuating sociocultural context. In exploring the topic of the American presidency from an anthropological pragmatics perspective, this article addresses theoretical and methodological issues which further our understanding of linguistic structure of social reality determined by socially constrained functions that underlie culture. Thus, this paper argues for a broadened research path to advance the theory of speech acts in political discourse. An analysis of President Joe Biden's language practices uncovers the rhetorical concept of ethos and its criterion of credibility that is indicative of his presidential status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the discursive patterns of communicative events during the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. Studied through an ethnographic discourse analysis lens (e.g., Hymes 1972b, Saville-Troike [1982] 2003), Polish front-page news articles are shown to be artefact-filled language environment anchored in culture (Duranti [1997] 1999, Hoijer 1953) that can be studied by means of communicational grammar (Chruszczewski 2002) consisting of well-entrenched conceptualisations in the form of keywords and collocations as concomitants of cultural scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014, Baker 2006, Wierzbicka 1997). It agues that legitimation of patterned representations is based on a three-fold conceptual typology: (1) the axiological (valuational) dimension (Romanyshyn 2020, Pomeroy 2004, Krzeszowski 1997), (2) the metaphorical account of spatial/territorial reference (proximization) (Cap 2013), (3) us vs. them dichotomy (Van Dijk 1992a). It demonstrates how Polish press manufactures and discursively creates ideological attachments which underlie Poland's cultural legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]