Language & Communication最新文献

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.

Despite widespread application of semiotic theory in sociolinguistics, the development of children's social-semiotic landscapes remains underexplored. This paper analyzes the spontaneous responses of 94 children to short American English speech samples, with emic coding of responses. Results support a view of children's social-semiotic landscapes as rich and expanding; children as young as 5 volunteer a wide range of social indexes, but substantive comments increase in developmental time. Children use personal and local information early and often. Developmental increases in comments relying on more public or evaluative social knowledge suggest a developmental process building outward from the personal to the public. Children offer a window into the vibrant scaffolding process that all language users utilize, connecting language to the social in a local and dialogic process.

The present paper investigates, from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, how ‘journalators’ in English-language and Greek media rendered a controversial statement by French President E. Macron against the non-vaccinated, with the use of the slang verb emmerder. The paper examines how journalators sought to render the verb and re-narrate that particular discursive instance, largely judged as vulgar, divisive and improper for a head of state, in order to save or aggravate the French president's face through selective appropriation and reframing. It draws on narrative theory of translation as developed by Mona Baker (2005, 2006, 2010), and explores the concept of facework (Goffmann, 1967; Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Bull and Fetzer, 2010) and the notion of ethos (Mainguenau, 2002, 2014) to analyze from a critical discourse analytic perspective a corpus of press articles in English and Greek. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis indicate that there is an array of lexical choices and strategies to intensify or attenuate vulgarity and offensiveness and save or aggravate Macron's image. The study has also confirmed the role of ideology and ideological positioning in the choice not only of lexical choices but also what is selected or deselected to be translated.

As a metaphor for political power, participation, and legitimacy, the concept of ‘voice’ is central to considerations of representative politics during the modern era. Little is known about how political actors themselves understood and referred to their own voices, those of others, and their respective significance for representative politics. This article focuses on the British Parliament, which was since the eighteenth century regarded as a paradigmatic incarnation of political voice and as the pinnacle of modern representative government. Based on a corpus of Hansard debates from 1800 to 2005, we analyse MPs' explicit references to ‘voice’ in parliamentary debates. We aim to explore the salience of ‘voice’ for MPs and of different aspects of voice as a vehicle for expressing political will. We also shed light on how metadiscursive references to ‘voice’ change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This article adopts a critical approach to literacy and genre analysis to explore the place for multilingualism at a South African historically white university's law faculty. Drawing on data from think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews, it seeks to gain insight into the following: the (meta)cognitive reading strategies used by first-year English additional language (EAL) students in reading the legal judgment; the impact of language on strategy use, and lastly, students' perceptions of the value of their home languages for mediating reading challenges as surfaced in the think-aloud protocols. Drawing on Tardy et al.’s (2020) theoretical framework for researching genre knowledge, the findings demonstrate how reading strategies are utilised differently for different purposes. Participants' uses of the strategies of ‘setting a context’ and ‘rereading’ illustrate how language intersects with home and school-based discourses and the impact thereof on reading.

This article examines the pragmatics of Finnish municipality slogans by focussing on slogans that include a toponym, that is, a place name other than that of the municipality. We approach our data of 51 slogans from the standpoint of translocal chronotopes – imagery of time, place and social life that connects the municipality with another place. We demonstrate that toponyms position the municipalities geographically, culturally, socially, historically, economically, and politically. We also analyse responses that the slogans evoke in public online discourses. We argue that the interpretation of the slogan is affected by the choice of toponym as well as by structural and interdiscursive choices. The findings are discussed from the perspectives of discourse studies, onomastics, and place-branding research.

With the call to care for the environment becoming more urgent, the notion of what it means to be Green, in light of consumption culture, is explored. In conceptualizing Greenness as a continuous variable rather than an absolute quality, this linguistic landscape study examines the role that language plays in communicating Greenness across place-making discourses of luxury and mass/everyday housing. Despite the criticisms leveled at consumption culture for co-opting the Green movement, the study shows there are no easy assumptions to be made due to the multiple facets of Greenness as it interacts in complex ways with class-oriented discourse.

This study seeks to explore the relationship between the Basque informal form of address hika and gender. Hika consists of a complex system that is in decline among Basque speakers and is currently employed mostly by men. Focus group discussions and dyadic interviews were used to elicit data from 38 participants from different generations (in the age range 14–74) and profiles. In line with previous studies, our findings confirm the relationship between hika and masculinity, which is manifested in various expressions. This association has been enforced significantly in one or two generations, and the use of the informal address form has become marginal among the youngest female participants. While the meaning of the use of hika among men is usually clear, female forms are considered more uncertain or ambiguous by participants.