Language & Communication最新文献

This article presents the results of a comparative study on the leading theories used in European and North American rhetorical research. The aim of the study was to examine European rhetorical theories on their own terms and their relations with North American rhetorical practice. Using a mixed-method approach, the study addressed normative, declarative, and pragmatic dimensions of unity and theoretical diversity in contemporary Western rhetorical research. Study findings supported the premise that a Western theoretical community of knowledge of rhetoric scholars exists in the midst of the plurality of rhetorical research. The combined findings reveal strengths and shortcomings of North American and European perspectives, indicating how each draws from and/or pushes back against ways of thinking suggested by the other.

This article examines how mobile participants, at interactionally delicate moments, deploy noticings to invite joint attention on objects in the speaker's vicinity. Complementing recent accounts of environmentally occasioned noticings, the focus of this study is on noticings as a practice to delay and, by contrast, to accelerate joint onward movement through museum spaces. It is argued that the interactional function of these noticings is, first, to draw the co-participant's attention to objects that they treat as noteworthy, and second, to request movement towards the speaker in order to jointly orient to the noticeable. The analysis shows that participants may launch noticings at opportune moments to serve their own spatiotemporal trajectory, either by detaining or by prompting co-participants on. The analysis draws on the methodology of Multimodal Conversation Analysis and a corpus of naturally occurring mobile interactions recorded with external cameras and eye-tracking glasses. Our observations on the double function of noticings in the local context may shed light on different ways in which we enact and draw on the cooperative infrastructure of human communication in social interaction.

Theories of human language acquisition frequently posit human-unique attentional specializations to jumpstart language acquisition. There is a broad consensus that the developmental processes supporting language acquisition in our species rely on human-unique cognitive adaptions pertaining to the deployment and understanding of attention. However, close attention to the empirical evidence held to support these hypothetical psychological processes, reveals significant gaps between the nature of the evidence provided and these conclusions. In ape-human comparisons, species is confounded with a myriad of lurking variables. We explore these confounds and their implications for models of human language acquisition that appeal to human-unique attentional adaptions, revealing a large theoretical space wherein the phenomena of attention deployment and understanding can coalesce under particular environmental regimes.

There are age-related differences in signers of British Sign Language (BSL) and evidence that BSL is changing. Here we explore attitudes of BSL signers towards age-related differences and language change. We studied interview data from the BSL Corpus (Schembri et al., 2014) from 80 signers from four regions in the U.K. We carried out a thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke (2006) on responses to questions related to age variation and language change. Findings reveal signers were aware of variation and change in BSL, which also align with linguistic behaviour. Some variation and change was deemed more acceptable than others, e.g. signs for new concepts. Other changes were seen as a threat to BSL's vitality. We explore these attitudes, looking particularly at language endangerment and vitality within minority languages.

This paper investigates the role of local dialect forms and other semiotic signs in languagecultural practices on social media in the southern Dutch province North Brabant. Although dialect use is severely decreasing in this area, we find abundant dialect features in present-day media productions, but these are not simply some last remains. By conducting a qualitative discourse analysis of a carnivalesque music video (2020), we argue that non-linguistic resources and co-occurring dialect features are enregistered as recognizably ‘Brabantish’ for the purpose of indexing place-based identities. Moreover, we show that reproduction on TikTok (2021) takes place through recontextualization and indexical stance-taking.

This paper aims to unpack perceptions of self-mockery in present-day Chinese using an online self-mockery viral event. The metapragmatic analysis of comments indicates that its interpretation is closely intertwined with other cultural factors and open to construal in a folk manner. Despite folk concepts being largely consistent with etic understandings of self-mockery, they are at the same time emotional and socially salient. The interpretation of self-mockery within a social practice is determined by how it is enacted by what person and in comparison with others, i.e., the situationally (un)approved and culturally salient meaning.

This article aims to expand current scholarship on affect in semiotic landscapes through studying a common, yet under-researched practice in Chinese hostels. A product of the emerging experience economy, rural hostels represent the latest trend in commercializing language and affect. This is the first study to focus on a crucial branding practice in rural hostels, i.e., emplacement of language objects that resemiotize various resources from Chinese cyberspace, a vibrant space with dynamic circulations of affects. The affective economy of such objects mediated through chains of language commodification (crossing online-offline boundary via Taobao, etc.) will be examined. I will show that hybrid features and complex trajectories of such objects accentuate the interpenetrations of the digital and the physical in a physically-demarcated land, further complicating the concept of ‘semiotic landscape’. Field-work data collected from southern China will be analyzed to explain the role of language objects in constructing distinctive affective regimes. I will conclude by discussing potential conflicts of these regimes with rural spaces and implications of these place-making practices against the backdrop of an increasingly wired rural China. In particular, it is suggested that rural residents' new roles within Chinese cyberspace may further shape the affective economy of language objects.

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.