Language Sciences最新文献

This article contributes to the scholarship on digital identity work by examining the linguistic mechanisms of ambient identity construction in fully anonymous online environments. It investigates how video viewers construct textual personae by leaving massive anonymous comments in danmu, a viewing-and-commenting system that synchronously posts comments onto a video screen as it plays. Drawing on the sociological concept of homophily and the linguistics-informed Appraisal framework, this study systematically tracks the patterns in the attitudinal orientations among massive anonymous comments left over a high-profile Chinese video featuring a teacher's home visit. The article argues that the technological affordances of danmu lead to the inherent collectiveness of anonymous digital identity construction. It reports two attitudinal meaning-making mechanisms through which massive anonymous comments converge into a homogeneous mass and describes the viewers' collective ambient identities revealed in their comments. This project brings clarity to the dynamics of ambient digital identity construction by deploying computational tools to linguistic analysis and has practical implications for marketing research, social media monitoring, and community building.

In this article we review Per Linell's work within the last five decades that led to his dialogism framework, which he defines as a general epistemology of language, cognition and communication. We critically discuss how his contribution on the one hand, altered and qualified existent models within language, communication and cognitive science, because dialogism removed language and cognition from their abstract and mental seat in the brain, and embedded them instead in situational contexts and embodied interaction. In that sense, his dialogism successfully replaced monological assumptions about the mind, action and thinking with more contextual and temporally distributed ones. On the other hand, we also question why Linell has not pursued a more rigorous empirical program for studying human cognition, when he did establish a theoretical apparatus for approaching cognition from a dialogical starting point. In going through Linell's arguments over the past five decades we suggest that this absence of an empirical program is due to his humanistic roots which both have sensitised him to appreciating the contingencies and dynamics of human sense making and cognition, and have impeded him from buying into a necessary condition for pursuing a cognitive analysis, even if he conceptually and methodologically accepts a distributed view on cognition. The outcome of this discussion leads to an empirical-based cognitive analysis of a medical interaction. Altogether, the purpose of this article is to show how Linell's conceptual framework can be put to use in ways that make a dialogical cognitive science achievable.

Severinson Eklundh and Linell (1983) asked whether a minimal form of communicative interaction exists and, if so, how many moves it would require. In conversation analysis, the response to these questions has traditionally been that such a form exists and that it takes the form of a pair of adjacent utterances consisting of a first pair part (e.g., a greeting or a question) and a second pair part (e.g., a greeting in return or an answer to the question). Severinson Eklundh and Linell acknowledged that communicative exchanges could take the form of two-part sequences, but they argued that this format is relatively limited in scope. Instead, they proposed that the basic format for most communicative interactions is a three-part sequence and that this structure should not be reduced to a base pair with a sequence closing third as an expansion of the pair. This issue has been the subject of ongoing debate over the last four decades. In this article, we discuss how conversation analysis and extended dialogism have addressed the idea of a minimal form of communicative interaction. We review different approaches and how they overlap and diverge, and we make conceptual distinctions to account for their differences.

This article considers dialogicality as a dynamic ontology and epistemology, and as interaction in concrete daily situations. These two features of dialogicality are presented in selected examples involving communication of people with congenital deaf/blindness and their carers. Since people with deaf/blindness cannot use verbal language in their dialogues, they make themselves understood to their partners by using a variety of innovative non-verbal strategies. For example, they improvise, repeat touching gestures, overextend meanings of signs, guess meanings of co-participants, and otherwise. Each dialogical situation is a unique single case, in which participants use simultaneously different modalities of communication and attempt to balance their subjective and intersubjective activities.

This study analyzes the relation between utterances and human activities with a view to determining how and under what conditions discourse-initial verbless utterances can be considered pragmatically, semantically, and grammatically complete. The study is empirically based on a set of observations of discourse-intital action-guiding verbless speech acts, which for a large part have been observed in a cognitive ethnographic field study of the activity of gliding. Using the concept of illocutionary acts and ecological value theory as an overarching framework, the analysis shows how discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials are enabled and constrained by the activity, i.e. the lawful constraints, the available affordances, the information that specify affordances, and the values that guide the activity. The analysis shows that a discourse-initial action-guiding subsentential is a response to a present or emerging discrepancy between the state of variation a current action causes and the state of variation that the values that guide the activity requires. The conventional effect and the contextual conditions for the effect of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials is specified and provide the criteria for what constitutes a meaningful unit and thus also the criteria for semantic completeness. The semantic structure of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials is identified as a specification. On the basis of this semantic analysis, the grammatical patterns that realize this semantic unit is identified. It is a single-word focus construction. Based on this grammatical analysis, another more complex grammatical construction that realizes two communicative tasks is identified: a specification of an affordance and an indication of the condition for rightness of the action possibility. It is argued that this combination of communicative tasks is conducive to the performance of activities, and hence, may exert a functional pressure on the conventionalization of grammatical construction. In this way, it is shown how subsentential constructions can emerge from non-conversational, practical activities.

In honouring Per Linell's achievements, I pursue how dialogue was traced back to praxis. Hence, I begin with how, countering generative theory as overblown, Linell found a hard middle way and, thus, adopted a modest realism. In early work, he traced phonology to what can be heard and, later, diagnosed exclusive emphasis on things or rules as written language bias. Since much depends on how we speak, verbalizing derives, in part, from the influence of others. In modelling speech performance, he therefore turns to a duality of planning and execution. Activity can be orienting to others and/or their doings and sayings. The pattern recurs in initiative-response analysis which effectively tracks isomorphisms in the push and pull of dialogue (initiative and response). Given samenesses, forms, ways of acting, and uses of wordings, we sustain the sociodialogical consciousness of practical and linguistic knowhow. Praxis prompts people to act, transcend situations, use dialogue, construct practical theories and, slowly, change their languaging. In scaling down, I argue that the future prospects of Linell's work lie in rethinking the interdisciplinary area that is concerned with languages, human practices and, above all, their effects.

The background of this article is an interest in institutional communication. The context in which this has been studied concerns how diversity (in social background, ethnicity, school success etc.) is, and has been, interpreted in schooling, historically as well as in contemporary society. Through history, a range of categories allegedly accounting for school failure has been suggested, and the categories invoked reflect the position of schooling as a meso-structure in society. The categories adopted in public discourse and politics, and reproduced in media, create identities, and serve as arbiters of opportunity for children. It is argued that the dialogical perspective outlined by Linell, and focusing the contingencies between macro-, meso- and micro-structures in social interaction, represents an important step in defining an empirical strategy for analysing the interrelationships between situated action, situation-transcending practices and the sociogenesis of categorizing practices.

The paper discusses the ‘psychological reality’ of human languaging. Basing on the dialogical and distributed arguments, the point of departure is in observations of the actualities of languaging in different modalities and environments. Arguing against the psychological reality of ‘mental grammars’ as storages of internal rules and representations, the concept of decontextual and amodal language knowledge is replaced by a know-how that is associated both with the modality and indexicality of usages. Further, instead of a ‘grammar’, the reservoir of agentive knowledge is approached as a personal repertoire that is discussed, using the concept of timescales, as an assemblage that develops during the agent's personal trajectory, but that at the same time is made possible by developments over cultural-historical and evolutionary timescales. The discussion is associated particularly with the field of applied linguistics, and aims at offering new theoretical arguments for the research on language learning and teaching.