Language & Communication最新文献

The Faroe Islands is one of the world's smallest countries but has in recent years become increasingly noticed in the global tourism market. Using the notion of “destination branding”, this article investigates how the official tourist board of the Faroe Islands, Visit Faroe Islands (VFI), brands the destination to tourists on their Facebook page. The data consists of VFI's Facebook posts from 1/9–2020 to 31/8–2021; these are analysed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, namely corpus-based analysis, grounded theory categorisation, and multimodal analysis. Through the analyses, it is concluded that VFI promises unique and authentic experiences by turning the Faroe Islands' unspoiled and unexplored nature and unpredictable weather into tourist commodities. The Faroese destination brand includes a dichotomic relationship between elements of convenience and inconvenience – between accessibility and inaccessibility – that both emphasise the destination's extremeness and, on the other hand, mitigate it.

Scholarship on neoliberalism has shown how employability discourses compel students to invest in English. What remains underexplored is the role of affect in these processes, and how it works to anchor these discourses deep within people’s subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I explore the affective economy of English in India in order to demonstrate how and why English becomes desirable, for whom, and with what consequences. In doing so, I map the webs of complex logics and actors that not only discursively (re)produce English as a thing to be desired, but also draw boundaries around who can and should desire it.

Terms of address in Turkish spontaneous pet-directed speech and those reported by the same pet-owners in questionnaires were compared with a focus on the proportion of diminutive and hypocoristic morphemes attached to various types of bases in order to see whether different data collection methods revealed different patterns of language use. The results showed that pet owners used diminutive and hypocoristic morphology along with the possessive marker in their spontaneous interactions to express endearment. While hypocoristic forms occurred with similar frequency in both sets of data, pet owners were less likely to report diminutives in their questionnaire responses although they used them in their spontaneous interactions. This is attributed to the use of diminutives to express the type of empathy, which could be easier to establish in spontaneous face-to-face communication. This attribution correctly predicted that stigmatized inverse address forms, as well, were rare in questionnaire responses.

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.