Dialogic features and interpersonal management in the early courtroom action game

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Krisda Chaemsaithong
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Negotiate Agreement ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
Early English ◽  
Opening Statements ◽  
Interpersonal Negotiation

Abstract There are certain areas where present-day studies of language use can learn from history. Using a dialogue-analytic approach, this study investigates dialogic features and interpersonal management in the early English courtroom. Drawing upon a corpus of 81 opening statements from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (1759–1799), the quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that this courtroom action game is highly dialogic and that an active jury was significantly presupposed in this particular historical setting. The lawyers consistently endeavored to solicit solidarity and in-groupness through pronominal choices, and to argumentatively negotiate agreement and secure consent through directives, shared knowledge markers, asides, and questions. The findings testify to the central role of dialogism and interpersonal negotiation in historical courtroom action games.

Investigating audience orientation in courtroom communication

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 545-570
Author(s):  
Krisda Chaemsaithong
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Closing Arguments ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
Relational Practice ◽  
Interpersonal Negotiation

Abstract This study presents an empirical study of audience orientation, investigating lawyers’ overt interpersonal negotiation with jurors. Drawing upon a corpus of the closing arguments of five high-profile American trials, the quantitative and qualitative analysis identifies the traces and degree of the jury’s presence through pronominal choices, questions, directives, references to shared knowledge and asides. Such relational practice does not merely “oil the wheels” of courtroom communication but also constitutes a key way to the meaning-making process in this phase of the trial. The findings attest to the centrality of relational work in accomplishing transactional goals in institutional discourses.

Language Use and Sustainable Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Policy-Makers and Educators in Northeast Vietnamese Areas

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-130
Author(s):  
Ha Ngan Ngo ◽  
Maya Khemlani David
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
The Status ◽  
Wedding Songs

Vietnam represents a country with 54 ethnic groups; however, the majority (88%) of the population are of Vietnamese heritage. Some of the other ethnic groups such as Tay, Thai, Muong, Hoa, Khmer, and Nung have a population of around 1 million each, while the Brau, Roman, and Odu consist only of a hundred people each. Living in northern Vietnam, close to the Chinese border (see Figure 1), the Tay people speak a language of the    Central    Tai language group called Though, T'o, Tai Tho, Ngan, Phen, Thu Lao, or Pa Di. Tay remains one of 10 ethnic languages used by 1 million speakers (Buoi, 2003). The Tày ethnic group has a rich culture of wedding songs, poems, dance, and music and celebrate various festivals. Wet rice cultivation, canal digging and grain threshing on wooden racks are part of the Tày traditions. Their villages situated near the foothills often bear the names of nearby mountains, rivers, or fields. This study discusses the status and role of the Tày language in Northeast Vietnam. It discusses factors, which have affected the habitual use of the Tay language, the connection between language shift and development and provides a model for the sustainability and promotion of minority languages. It remains fundamentally imperative to strengthen and to foster positive attitudes of the community towards the Tày language. Tày’s young people must be enlightened to the reality their Tày non-usage could render their mother tongue defunct, which means their history stands to be lost.

Varieties of Intentionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Keiser
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Grammatical Analysis

In Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone offer a multifaceted critique of the Gricean picture of language use, proposing in its place a novel framework for understanding the role of convention in linguistic communication. They criticize Lewis’s and Grice’s commitment to what they call ‘prospective intentionalism,’ according to which utterance meaning is determined by the conversational effects intended by the speaker. Instead, they make a case for what they call ‘direct intentionalism’, according to which utterance meaning is determined by the speaker’s intentions to use it under a certain grammatical analysis. I argue that there is an equivocation behind their critique, both regarding the type of meaning that is at issue and the question each theory is attempting to answer; once we prise these issues apart, we find that Lepore and Stone’s main contentions are compatible with the broadly Lewisian/Gricean picture.

Doing Tricks

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Borba
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Business Transaction ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Social Scientific

Sex work has long been of interest to a variety of fields, among them anthropology, sociology, public health, and feminist theory, to name but a few. However, with very few exceptions, sociolinguistics seems to have ignored the fact that commercial sex, as an intersubjective business transaction, is primarily negotiated in embodied linguistic interaction. By reviewing publications in distinct social scientific areas that directly or indirectly discuss the role of language in the sex industry, this chapter critically assesses the analytical affordances and methodological challenges for a sociolinguistics of sex work. It does so by discussing the “tricks” played by sex work, as a power-infused context of language use in which issues of agency (or lack thereof) are paramount, on sociolinguistic theory and methods. The chapter concludes that the study of language in commercial sex venues is sociolinguistically promising and epistemologically timely.

Separatism: a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted study of word-meaning development in a time of conflict

Corpora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-416
Author(s):  
Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Word Usage ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Dominant Ideologies

This paper considers the role of historical context in initiating shifts in word meaning. The study focusses on two words – the translation equivalents separatist and separatism – in the discourses of Russian and Ukrainian parliamentary debates before and during the Russian–Ukrainian conflict which emerged at the beginning of 2014. The paper employs a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis to investigate the way wider socio-political context affects word usage and meaning. To allow a comparison of discourses around separatism between two parliaments, four corpora were compiled covering the debates in both parliaments before and during the conflict. Keywords, collocations and n-grams were studied and compared, and this was followed by qualitative analysis of concordance lines, co-text and the larger context in which these words occurred. The results show how originally close meanings of translation equivalents began to diverge and manifest noticeable changes in their connotative, affective and, to an extent, denotative meanings at a time of conflict in line with the dominant ideologies of the parliaments as well as the political affiliations of individuals.

Zanieczyszczenie powietrza jako zagrożenie bezpieczeństwa zdrowotnego w Polsce – w świetle teorii sekurytyzacji

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-176
Author(s):  
Joanna Stryjek
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Human Health ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Scientific Debate ◽  
Copenhagen School ◽  
The Eu

Nowadays, air pollution constitutes one of the most serious threats to human health and life. Poland belongs to the group of countries with the highest level of air pollution in the EU and OECD. The scale of the threat posed by air pollution shows its importance when it comes to the health security of the Polish citizens. However, the ongoing (political and scientific) debate on health security in Poland often ignores the problem of air pollution. The aim of the article is to 1) assess the threat currently posed by air pollution to health security in Poland, 2) locate the threat in the area of health security, and 3) analyse the process of transferring the problem of air pollution from the sphere of politics to the area of security, in accordance with the theory of securitization, developed by the Copenhagen School of Security Studies. Qualitative analysis of documents together with the application of the theory of securitization show that, in Poland, the state has started to play the role of an actor securitizing air pollution as an existential threat. Nevertheless, this process is at an early stage, and its further success depends, inter alia, on decisions and possibilities related to taking extraordinary measures to eliminate the threat posed by air pollution.

Agency in scientific discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (62) (1) ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Tobias WEBER ◽  
Mia KLEE
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Early Career Researchers ◽  
Research Endeavour

In recent times, the trend of aiming for objectivity and reproducibility in science has arrived in linguistic discourse. A critical point in this debate is the agency in speakers’ language use and, simultaneously, in the researchers’ description and interpretation. The aim of objectivity demotes, by default, the role of the subjects, often by imposing structures to limit agency. We can see various scenarios where researchers can purposefully bend rules, thus exerting their agentive stance in the research endeavour. This paper aims to address issues pertaining to agency as opposed to the goal of reproducibility, where the researchers’ and consultants’ agency on different aspects of the research process shape its outcomes. Training early career researchers and students in using

scholarly journals Contrastive Pragmatics: Apologies & Thanks in English and Italian

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Cuneyt Demir ◽  
Mehmet Takkac
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
American English ◽  
The Status ◽  
Language Competency ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Remedial Strategies

<p>Awareness of language or language competency has greatly changed from the focus of language itself as form and structure to language use as pragmatics. Accordingly, it is widely accepted that different cultures structure discourse in different ways. Moreover, studies have shown that this holds for discourse genres traditionally considered as highly standardized in their rituals and formulas. Taking inspiration from such studies, this paper employs a corpus-based approach to examine variations of the apology and thanking strategies used in English and Italian. First the apology itself as a form of social action is closely analyzed and then thanking. This study also pays special attention on analyzing and contrasting apology and thanking strategies in American English and in Italian in terms of Marion Owen’s remedial strategies (Owen, 1983), and Olshtain &amp; Cohen’s semantic formulas in the apology speech act set (Olshtain &amp; Cohen, 1983). The purpose of the study is not only to compare apology and thanking speech acts but to also learn their contextual use. The findings suggest that the status and role of the situation affect the speakers’ choice of apology and thanking strategies, and semantic formulas are of great importance.</p>

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