Language & Communication最新文献

This paper delves into the concept of ‘enregisterment,’ which defines processes and practices linking linguistic repertoires with social meanings, by examining meta-linguistic commentary in newspapers. Focussing on ‘Multicultural London English (MLE),’ the study analyses 200 articles from major British newspapers (2006–2022) qualitatively and quantitatively. The research uncovers recurring linguistic shibboleths, indexically linked social meanings, and prevalent language ideologies concerning MLE and other London dialects. Results reveal a consistent emphasis on specific linguistic shibboleths repeated in articles. Indexical links for ‘MLE’ are constructed through evaluative comments, alarmist metaphors employing xenophobic immigration tropes, and loaded keywords. ‘Cockney’ and ‘Estuary English’ are portrayed more favourably and, together with ‘Received Pronunciation (RP)’, serve to stigmatise MLE. This study underscores the role of media discourse in shaping the enregisterment of dialects, contributing to social stratification and the ‘othering’ of certain linguistic varieties.

Teknonyms represent a special category of the addressing system of the Arabic language and most of its dialects. The present study analyzes Syrian Arabic teknonyms that have not been tackled before to highlight how often, in what situational contexts they are used and their pragmatic characteristics. The data were elicited from open-ended questionnaires supplemented by interviews with 74 representatives of the Syrian lingua-culture of both genders and subjected to a socio-pragmatic and lingua-cultural analysis. The findings show that teknonyms are an inherent feature of the modern Syrian culture and a significant identity characteristic of its representatives used as a marker of politeness. The results indicate that teknonyms pragmatically afford speakers the opportunity to simultaneously achieve closeness and respect.

This study investigates multiple discourses surrounding the trends, changes and opposing emblematic signage of authenticity and the ideological constructions of place within Grünerløkka, Oslo, Norway. Our theoretical framework is grounded within the political economy of place and the sociolinguistics of authenticity. Three different datasets are used in the analysis: a) 60 interviews conducted with local residents, business owners and journalists; b) multilingual and multimodal signage found within this neighborhood's changing linguistic and semiotic landscapes; and c) texts from online media. We take both a discourse and multimodal analytic approach in our investigation of the circulating tensions of place found both ‘online’ and ‘offline’ of what constitutes an ‘authentic’ neighborhood to individuals. Our findings suggest that the conflicting ideologies of authenticity are bound to the pressures of change and resistance. These are inextricably connected to local consumer practices that are inevitably tied to global market forces and marketing strategies within the social and material constructions of urban landscapes.

In this paper, we examine the language of diplomatic mediation from the perspective of speech acts and interaction, by studying an unofficial transcript of an emergency meeting in 1991 between representatives of the European Economic Community (EEC) and Slovenia and Croatia. We use a bottom-up methodology, bringing together ritual, speech acts and interaction, to capture recurrent conventions of diplomatic mediation in a strictly language-anchored fashion. The EEC representatives had a vested interest in swiftly resolving the conflict, and even before consulting with the Slovenian and Croatian representatives they already reached an initial agreement with the Yugoslav state representatives. Due to this fait accompli situation, we assume that they had to show particular awareness of the ritually ‘neutral’ tone of the mediator. Through our methodology we capture the replicable features of diplomatic mediation, and because of this our results are relevant for the study of the language of diplomacy.

This article investigates the evolution of U.S.-China trade negotiation in governmental discourse under the presidencies of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping (2017–2021). Paying attention to the development of the political context, we examine trade metaphor use in American and Chinese governmental texts from a dynamic metaphor perspective. Based on the three dominant patterns of metaphoricity activation in the Trump and Xi trade corpora, the analyses reveal that trade metaphors in these governmental texts involve dynamic cognitive (metaphoricity transformation), affective (sentiment development), and socio-political (attitude change) processes. Unlike Cameron's (e.g., 2007) finding that the dynamics of metaphor use at a micro timescale (e.g., minutes) contribute to the reconciliation of discourse participants at a macro timescale (e.g., years), the results show that metaphoricity transformation across a micro timeline (e.g., days, months) does not advance the reconciliation across a macro timeline (years). Although the Trump-Xi trade dispute decreased at the end of 2019, the analyses of dynamic metaphors show that bilateral antagonistic perspectives continued for years.

A global but under-recognized phenomenon, constructive news is an alternative to predominantly negative news. While it is known to have positive effects on readers, the nuts and bolts of the language and images that achieve these effects are under-researched. Drawing on theories and approaches from metaphor studies, news translation studies and (multimodal) discourse analysis, this article compares the use of verbal and visual/multimodal metaphor and visual metonymy in a bilingual corpus of UK and Spanish online constructive news, also considering them in the light of an interview with an employee of the Spanish news outlet. The findings shed light on how constructive news is ‘done’ across languages and cultures and suggest ways in which news translation studies and metaphor studies may benefit from each other's approaches.

Esperantist radical Eugène Lanti (1879–1947) anticipated a total ‘unification’ of humankind, envisioning that national, linguistic, and social differences would soon give way to a global, stateless, monolingual, postcapitalist utopia. This vision was grounded in Lanti's understanding of history as teleological progress toward increased rationality, social integration, and demythologization, as well as in his cosmopolitan reinterpretation of the social utility of Esperanto, which prioritised anti-nationalism, revolutionary tactics, and class-struggle over humanism and language rights. Lanti's linguistic–political thought is, consequently, an enticing and a reflexively potent example of a non-canonical approach to linguistic community, progress, and radical equality. A critical reading of it – as is laid out here – casts light on some of the tensions immanent in any linguistic universalism.

In this paper, we employ the language ontologies framework to artificial intelligence (specifically, OpenAI's ChatGPT) to investigate the ‘ethnographic encounter’ between human and non-human language users. Our focus is on the exchange and interplay between human language users and non-human artificial language generators in the production of written text. We analyse how such programs transform our understanding of what language is or might be; their practices to create language are unfamiliar, and yet they make sense to human interlocutors. Drawing from, and building on, the language ontologies framework, we discuss the practices involved in such encounters and suggest the need for an updated ‘toolkit’ in our understanding of language to account for transhuman interactions.

This paper investigates knowledge management in interaction and the role of epistemic stance in place identity construction. We examine how a US expat in Toronto negotiates her New Yorker identity in conversation with two Canadians by demonstrating how authoritative epistemic stances are employed to produce relations of distinction, adequation, and authentication in service of place identity construction. We also discuss ‘epistemic disputes’, wherein epistemic stances and claims to place identity are challenged through the notion of epistemic rights. In doing so, we argue for the fundamental connection between information state, management of knowledge in interaction, and processes of identity construction.

Despite increasing attention to its spread, there has been little sustained engagement with online disinformation’s localized effects. This paper provides a case study of online commenters’ own interpretations of potential disinformation campaigns, by analyzing The Financial Times’s anonymous comment boards below coverage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Despite a lack of clear-cut evidence of ongoing disinformation campaigns, disparate textual features retrievable in discourse come to function as contextualization cues that situationally index ongoing disinformation campaigns. Participants’ awareness of the possibility of disinformation may thus engender accusations of disinformation towards any comment criticizing the protest movement, with several arguments becoming stereotypically indexical of potential disinformation campaigns. The case study provides a linguistic-anthropological account of the interrelation between disinformation and social polarization.