Language & Communication最新文献

This paper reports a study of Arabic-French language alternation in medical consultations in Algeria to reveal the ways in which code-switching is used to build and organise activities in medical interactions. Conversation analysis is applied to examine the participants' linguistic choices. Audio-recorded data was collected in two public hospitals in the Northwest of Algeria. This study suggests that there are misperceptions in the research literature about doctors' use of French as a resource to disempower patients and to limit their contribution in consultations. It refines our understanding of the nature of language alternation – code switching - in Algerian medical consultations. The results show that: 1) French is dispreferred with patients, 2) code-switching is used as a resource to organise and distinguish activities in turns and sequences, however, 3) doctors' use of French can contribute to pushing back against patients' resistance and to disaffiliate with patients’ stances.

Stockwell and Minkova (2001: 34) state that ‘the lexicon is the language layer most responsive to socio-political and cultural changes’. Despite this, lexis has been labelled as the ‘Cinderella of sociolinguistics’ (Beal 2010; Durkin 2012) due to the lack of focus on this level of linguistic structure by variationist sociolinguists. This article redresses the dearth of lexis-oriented sociolinguistic studies by considering the ways in which the lexicon is responsive to cultural changes in Cornwall, UK, by providing a case-study of the polysemous noun emmet (‘ant’ or ‘tourist’). From a study of 80 speakers from Cornwall, I consider the variation and change of emmet from the perspectives of semasiological and onomasiological usage as well as its social meaning. I conclude that this article provides support for Stockwell & Minkova’s (2001) claim and that lexical variation can provide unique insights to the sociolinguistic endeavour and enable sociolinguists to tell new stories about language and society.

The distribution of vos ‘you’ and uno ‘one’ in generic messages is studied in a corpus of female speakers of Spanish (Argentina).The question was how it is possible that the form vos, so clearly defined as the pronoun to refer to the interlocutor, could have an impersonal reading, alongside the indefinite pronoun uno, which seems much more fit to do the job. The alternation between the generic use of the forms vos and uno cannot be, in our view, the result of chance nor a merely stylistic tool, but corresponds to the communicative strategies that speakers utilize in each and every context. This paper studies the different factors that play a role in the selection of each of the pronouns.

This paper examines the indexical association between Mandarin full tone and a newly emergent cute feminine style. Prior work has identified full tone as a component of cosmopolitanism in mainland China, but we argue that the influence of Taiwanese pop culture and social media phenomena has resulted in expanded indexical boundaries for this variable. A matched guise task was conducted to examine the connection between Mandarin full tone and social meanings, traits, and other symbolic resources for mainland Chinese listeners. The full tone stimuli were perceived as feminine and youthful, explicitly linked to Taiwan, influencer, and stereotypical “cute-coded” behaviors that typify a stylized femininity. We argue that both speaker traits and the more abstract social meanings are attached to full tone and can be activated during social perception.

This study conducted a questionnaire survey with 100 Japanese women who have taken English lessons in two formats, online and in-person, taught by both Filipino and Western English teachers whose different advantages are featured in Japan's English teaching industry. Analyzing their decisions on what types and modes of lessons to take at which learning stage and why, the study discusses how both expected and unexpected learning patterns and reasonings pertain to global issues of (1) the hierarchical diversification in the global English teacher labor market and (2) the privilege/marginalization of Japanese/Filipino women in the world of neoliberal learning/teaching of English as a tool for upward mobility.

This article analyzes how perceptions of communicative competence are discursively constructed in interactions of L1 and L2 users of Japanese. Talking about appropriate language use is an inherently metapragmatic activity and therefore a product of metapragmatic stancetaking practices—here conceptualized as social actors’ positioning vis-à-vis potential and limitations of language use. The analysis shows that the interactants take stances toward (1) a general competence to speak Japanese, (2) a competence to translate into Japanese, and (3) competence in an honorific register. L2 users’ communicative competence is subject to interactional negotiation and evaluation. Naturalized links between competence, nationality, and identity are established through comparison, giving rise to intercultural discourse as a site for the (re-)production of native speaker ideologies.

Since 2010, the Philippines has been one of the largest contributors of workers to the increasingly global industry of remote English language tutoring. In this nascent and growing industry, Filipino online English tutors are employed by online platforms as independent contractors where they instruct students on a piece-meal basis. This article draws on interviews with 11 Filipino online tutors to discuss the various strategies that Filipino online English tutors deploy to successfully navigate their encounters with students whose cultural backgrounds differ from their own. We suggest the notion of intercultural bricolage to make sense of online tutors' self-acquired strategies for retaining students and succeeding as online tutors despite the various difficulties encountered with this type of remote work. While the notion of intercultural bricolage applies to the practices of many offline language teachers as well, we highlight how elements unique to online teaching—including lesson-by-lesson contracts—make intercultural bricolage an indispensable component of tutors’ success on online language teaching platforms.

This paper analyses the effort sounds made by caregivers in routine interactions with very young infants. Video recordings were made of 15 mother-infant dyads in Germany during nappy changing. The multimodal analysis of the interactions revealed that effort sounds were used when handling the infant’s body, such as dressing them or lifting them up, but also made to link to the sensations of the infant. The sounds achieved their meaning within sequences of actions and contextualised via temporality, phonetic variation and multimodality. With these vocalisations, I propose, parents can give infants’ sensations a voice, make them public, and thus achieve a co-ordination of experience.

This research examined how listeners categorize and stereotype speakers belonging to intersecting social categories (nationality; sexual orientation) based on voice alone. In Study 1, British heterosexuals categorized the nationality and sexual orientation of British and Italian speakers who self-identified as gay or heterosexual. Participants correctly categorized British speakers as co-nationals and Italian speakers as foreigners. Categorization accuracy of gay speakers’ sexual orientation was poor. Italian gay speakers were perceived as most likely to be gay and non-native speakers. Study 2 examined stereotyping of speakers who sounded either native or foreign, and sounded either gay or heterosexual. Foreign-accented (vs. native-accented) speakers were rated as less competent, and gay-sounding (vs. heterosexual-sounding) speakers as less gender typical. Foreign-accented gay speakers were perceived as the least competent and gender typical.

Drawing on a transdisciplinary approach to critical discourse analysis, this paper looks at the case of Chinese higher education to explore how neoliberal ideology is constituted, recontextualized, and legitimated in the public discourse of Chinese universities in a socio-political context marked by the intricate integration of administration and politics. The analyses show how these universities have endeavored to respond to the economic imperatives of a globalizing knowledge-driven economy while strategically absorbing the socio-political governance agenda inherited from the state's institutional legacies. The findings suggest that the discourse of higher education in China is a highly contested space for competing ideologies, reproducing a narrative that facilitates the commodification of higher education and dismisses the contradictions between ideological values at the glonacal nexus.