Language & Communication最新文献

In interpreter-mediated encounters, one participant's contributions are multivoiced, other participants' contributions are collectively produced, as the interpreter mediates their words. It is interesting what mediation does to their voice, and even more relevant if participants speak in ways deviating from local norms. This paper offers a case study of an interpreter-mediated court meeting. I discuss how a courtroom interpreter handles the accused's contributions, what consequences the interpreter's choices have, and what it adds to our understanding of voice. I argue that speaking and being heard “in one's own terms” is not necessarily the most beneficial to less powerful institutional participants.

Everyday metalinguistic ascriptions (“My name is Oliver”, “Swahili ng'ombe means cow”, “She lied about you”) seemingly attribute properties to phenomena of a distinctively linguistic ontology. However, non-representational approaches to cognition, such as ecological psychology, cannot accommodate this linguistic ontology without contravening their non-representational principles. An alternative might be to construe metalinguistic ascriptions as ‘folk’ fictions which are, strictly speaking, false. Yet this would render unintelligible the practical role that metalinguistic ascription occupies in everyday discourse. We suggest another alternative. By analogy to mindshaping approaches in folk-psychological debates, we propose a non-representational account of metalinguistic ascription as a form of language-shaping. Metalinguistic ascriptions shape language behavior over temporal and social scales by prospectively shaping discursive niches.

The Tel Aviv neighborhood of HaTikva, originally home mostly to Mizrahi Jews, has undergone a considerable demographic shift in recent years. This paper discusses the narratives of Mizrahi longtime residents of the neighborhood, who are uncomfortable with the recent changes. Focusing on a micro-analysis of the stylistic variation in two interviews, the results show that the voiced pharyngeal approximant (ʕ), a linguistic feature strongly associated with Mizrahi identity, is used in the construction of place identity, by reinforcing the links between these speakers’ Mizrahi identity and their status as authentic residents of the neighborhood.

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.