Language & Communication最新文献

The English-language Wikipedia article on the airplane states that Clément Ader ‘attempted to fly’, whereas ‘the Wright brothers invented and flew the first airplane’. The French-language Wikipedia, in turn, points to France's pioneering role in aviation – which contrasts with the emphasis placed on Portuguese-speaking aviators in the Portuguese-language entry. Paradoxically, in each language, the airplane has a different inventor. Through online ethnography, this article explores the multilingual landscape of Wikipedia, looking not only at languages, but also at language varieties, and unpacking the intricate connections between language, country, and nationality in grassroots knowledge production online. Advocating for an attention to how multilingualism online involves more than ‘Google Translate-ing’ content, this study challenges conventional views of user-generated content platforms as unproblematically global and multilingual.

Previous studies have identified the use of metaphor and metonymy in contexts of youth-led climate protests and social media activism. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews to investigate how secondary school students in England make sense of different creative uses of metaphor and metonymy in a sample of slogans shared on social media for the Global Climate Strikes and #FridaysForFuture. For analysing students' responses, we produced a coding scheme to unpack the relationship between figurative interpretation and narrative. The findings suggest that different creative uses (e.g. twice-true, juxtaposition and personification) prompted different kinds of thinking about climate change and its relevance to students’ personal lives. The study has implications for research on figurative creativity, narrative, and climate change education.

This paper investigates the offerings the concept of interactional space, when it is applied to study the co-present sighted participants’ access to participation in sign language interpreter-mediated deaf-hearing interaction. A multimodal interaction analysis was conducted on empirical data to illustrate how the participants manage access to participation in mobile transitions, i.e. as they move to around to carry out tasks. Two interactional space patterns with differential access to participation are described. The data show that access appears assumed, but fleeting and co-constructed from moment to moment as the participants reconfigure the interactional space. The concept of interactional space is found a valuable tool to systematically and holistically analyse how the participants manage and coordinate participation and access to semiotic resources in interpreter-mediated deaf-hearing interaction.

This paper uses a narrative lens to locate and analyze stereotypes about intimate partner violence (IPV) used by victim/survivors to describe the ways they made meaning about their relationships. I combine two models used for analyzing narrative: Labov & Waletzky’s (1967) and the Social Interactional Approach (SIA) (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008). Stories about what counts as ‘real’ IPV emerged as the most told story across the 34 participants in the study. I show, victim/survivors of IPV have internalized sociocultural discourses about IPV that only recognize certain forms of physical abuse as IPV. I argue that evaluation clauses (Labov & Waltezky), developed to analyze the micro-context of storytelling, also index macro, sociocultural knowledge, making it a natural connecting point with SIA.

This paper examines the coordination of vision when formulating place in driver training. Specifically, the study examines the visual practices involved when jointly establishing where to change direction. First, it shows how visual availabilities are exploited in establishing the place for the instructed driving action, and second, how verbal and embodied instructions may be adjusted to new visualities as movement in space ongoingly change the visual landscape. In conclusion, place formulations are questions that seek to establish a mutual reference point. By showing how the parties secure joint visual access to a landmark and how instructions are reflexively related to a changing visual environment, the study highlights the role of shared perception for giving and making sense of directions.

This paper examines the linguistic landscape of refurbished historical streets to reveal the semiotic construction of antiquity and commodification of heritage. Based on signage data collected from four historical blocs in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Ningbo in East China, this study reveals how Chinese semiotic artifacts contribute to stylizing antiquity and reinvigorating the space of consumption. Results suggest that the fabricated historical streets sustain the tourism rhetoric of cultural pride and commercial profit by appealing to history, tradition, exoticism, and nostalgia. The study problematizes orchestrated heritage tourism and points to the use of English as potentially subversive in the Chinese linguistic landscape.

Research on the relationship between contentious action and news production has often focused on the coverage and framing of specific events, not on the careers of keywords of the protest lexicon itself. However, these keywords play a central role in the negotiation of common understandings of social problems, the legitimation of claims and tactics, and even the shared imaginary of grassroots politics within communities of readers. This article seeks to contribute to this second avenue of media research by studying use of the concept activism and associated subject, activists. I ask how this word, which was a negative term for most of the twentieth century until the introduction and popularization of its modern sense in the 1960s, became a keyword of modern political participation by the public. A conceptual history grounded in insights of distributional semantics and semantic field theory, this article studies patterns of use of ‘activist’ and ‘activism’ in two major British quality newspapers, The Guardian and The Times. This comparative approach aims to identify both historical and media-internal factors that contributed to activism becoming a meaningful category in news reporting. Coverage is compared for three episodes of heightened civic contention: the student protests of 1967–1969; Eastern European human rights activism around the Helsinki Accords, 1975–1977; and the industrial strikes of the 1980s, particularly the period around the miner's strike, 1984–1986.

To what extent is the language of higher education continuous with the language of everyday life? The decline of Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University over a period of roughly three decades provides an insightful context for exploring the debate on language status in higher education. This article explores the shift from Afrikaans to English – and the attendant taaldebat or language debate – at Stellenbosch University. This shift is situated within a transforming South African higher education sector and within transnational teaching and research networks. The analysis focuses on conceptual issues relating to the concept of “language” implicit in university language planning initiatives. These include the intersection of language, race and social class, and semantic (dis)continuity within the domains of science.

The impact of Polish regional accents on guilt attribution was investigated in this study. Four recordings of suspect testimony were presented to one hundred and eighteen students who listened to a dialogue between a male middle-aged Polish police officer as an interviewer and a female young suspect. The current study aimed to examine how members of the same group perceive attitudes toward Polish nonstandard varieties of language in the courtroom. I also seeked to investigate stereotypes related to nonstandard Polish speakers as far as such factors as accuracy, creditability, deception, prestige, intelligence and likeability are concerned. Finally, this study aimed to find “the Polish accent of guilt”. The findings revealed that the suspect was assessed as being considerably more guilty while speaking with the Cracovian accent rather than Silesian, Podhale or Zamość accents. The Cracovian accent is the least credible and likeable of all accents which were examined in this study, but excels in the factor of prestige and intelligence. Podhale accent seems to be viewed as the most likeable. Zamość accent was rated the highest in intelligence.