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Scaling the value of multilingualism: ‘Common-sense’ narratives of growth and inequality in an expert report to the U.S. Congress Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Kristina Wirtz
I examine the powerful institutional scaling project of the 2017 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century. I analyze the scalar configurations emerging in the report’s narrative argumentation with the goal of denaturalizing its scale-making narratives in the production of a ‘common-sense’ regimentation of the value of language
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Prospective expertise: The use of ‘listen’ in the discourse of television sports pundits Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Ian Hutchby
This article details the functions of the imperative verb ‘listen’ in the pre-match build-up discussions of television football pundits. Data were recorded from live coverage of recent national and international football competitions. The analysis shows how ‘listen’ plays a role in what is referred to as prospective expertise: the work accomplished during the extensive pre-game build-up sections of
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Introduction to “scaling stories: Narratives and the dialogic regimentation of scales” Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Michele Koven, Elise Kramer, Sabina M Perrino
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Bonding with followers: Chronotopes and scales in political communication on Instagram Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Anna De Fina
In this study, I apply the notions of chronotopes and scales to analyze how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a US politician and activist, constructs a relatable persona in her Instagram stories. I focus on two strategies that she deploys: the mixing of chronotopes associated with different scales of formality/publicness within the same story, and the use of downscaling strategies to reduce the formality
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Constructing cancel culture: Strategic scaling in stories of “cancellation” Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Elise Kramer
Narratives about cancel culture are stories about problematic scaling—yet in telling these stories, cancel culture critics themselves engage in crucial forms of scaling. In this article, I analyze a selection of cancel culture narratives published in mainstream media outlets, focusing on how narrators define the here-and-now and project it into the future. I argue that in order to represent cancel
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‘My family wouldn’t have survived, and I would not be here’: Juxtaposing counterfactual and actual pasts and presents in narratives of rescue by Aristides de Sousa Mendes Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Michele Koven
This paper examines the alignment of multiple chronotopes in narrative discourse about Holocaust rescue. Participants talked about actual alongside hypothetical or counterfactual events surrounding their families’ rescue from Nazi-occupied Europe in the summer of 1940, thanks to then-illegal visas from ‘righteous gentile’ Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Specifically, participants recounted how their families
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‘Neyse Halim Çıksın Falim’: Turkish women’s intimate discourse in fortune-telling sessions through coffee cup readings Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Betil Eröz, Esranur Efeoğlu-Özcan, Banu Çiçek Başaran Uysal
Turkish coffee is not only a popular beverage consumed daily in Türkiye, but also a medium that enhances social connections among women within the same communities of practice. In this study, we examine coffee cup fortune-telling as a discourse type and analyse the sociocultural and linguistic characteristics of this intimate and interactional data among 25 Turkish-speaking women who are close friends
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‘Poisonous caterpillar fire should not burn a person twice’: Cultural orientations in Nigerian alternative dispute resolution encounters Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 Simeon Ajiboye
Extant studies on alternative dispute resolution (ARD) have focused on the language use, benefits, importance, linguistic parameters and contextual features of ADR but have yet to pay attention to participants’ strict orientation to culture despite the positive implications of these orientations for sustainable harmony in the Nigerian society. This study, therefore, examines participants’ orientation
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How is joint laughter ‘pre’ to advice-giving: A sequential pattern that centralizes trouble in student supervision Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-08 Zhiying Jian
This conversation analytic study identifies a sequential pattern, where the construction of laughable is succeeded by joint laughter between students and supervisors, and is used to anticipate the exposure of trouble and advice-giving. Drawing from authentic supervision meetings in UK institutions, this study identifies key features that appeal joint laughter: (1) students’ disaligment with formal
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Identity construction in digital communication for public engagement in science Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-07-30 Carmen Pérez-Llantada
This article explores identity construction in citizen science web texts. Keyness and concordance analyses show that these texts reflect, construct and negotiate identity construction in various ways to ultimately support citizen participation in scientific processes. Scientists primarily construct a professional identity through self-representation markers (‘we’ pronouns). They present themselves
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Book review: Francisco Yus, Pragmatics of Internet Humour Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-06-01 Hui Li
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Shifting responsibility onto coparticipants: Disaffiliative accounts in request sequences Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-25 Andrew Chalfoun
Accounts—verbal explanations for conduct—are normally understood to do affiliative work by mitigating or disavowing negative inferences generated by problematic or dispreferred actions. Using conversation analysis, this paper identifies an alternative accounting practice whereby speakers use accounts to actively disaffiliate from coparticipants. In such cases, the account serves as a vehicle for criticizing
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Disclaiming knowledge to encourage participation in research group meetings Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-24 Fabíola Stein, Helen Melander Bowden
This study investigates instances where experienced researchers make explicit claims of lack of knowledge (e.g., ‘I have to reveal my ignorance completely’) in the context of paper discussions during research group meetings. Drawing on multimodal interaction analysis, the analysis focuses on epistemic disclaimers in their sequential contexts, and the local management of institutional identities and
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Book review: Robert Lawson, Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-21 Francesca Marino
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Book review: Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter, Essentials of Conversation Analysis Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-20 Yue Yu
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Book review: Gerard J. Steen, Slowing Metaphor Down: Elaborating Deliberate Metaphor Theory Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-20 Xinman Liu
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Requesting another to taste: Passing food and the distribution of agency in the organization of bodily trajectories Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Hanna Svensson
This paper offers an analysis of the organizational features of passing food objects as a commonplace embodied social practice to accomplish requests to another to taste food during joint cooking activities. Situated within the cognate frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains the formal features of passing food from hand to hand
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Choice, marketing and subjectivities: A discursive-semiotic analysis of six Montessori websites Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-24 Valentina Bertotti
In Australia, the term ‘preschool’ generally refers to settings that cater for the education of children in the year before compulsory schooling, hence making it a pivotal site for neoliberal discourses that seek to frame preschoolers as requiring ‘school readiness’. While much research has focused on the implications of neoliberal reforms in the primary through tertiary and childcare sectors, particularly
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‘I know what it is’. An interactional study of sex discovery in prenatal ultrasound examinations Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-20 Christian Licoppe, Nicolas Rollet, Luca Greco
One of the most exciting moments in a prenatal ultrasound session is learning the sex of the baby.Following a conversation analysis perspective, we present a multimodal analysis of sequences of interaction between patient and practitioner at the time the foetus’ sex is the focus of attention. Based on video data collected from maternity wards and private practitioners, we report on two types of sequences
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Acknowledging and legitimizing the embarrassment: Responding to embarrassment-telling Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Guodong Yu, Lijun Xin
Sharing embarrassing experiences is an ordinary and recurrent social phenomenon, and this article carries out a conversation analytic study on how embarrassment-telling is interactionally co-constructed in talk-in-interaction. It is found that embarrassment-telling is delivered as an incident that should not have happened happens by accident to the teller due to the embarrassment-teller’s unintended
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Identifying disputants’ attitudinal variations in family mediations: A data mining approach Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Qingxin Xu
This article combines linguistic analysis and data mining methods to explore variations in speakers’ evaluative meaning-making in conflict talks. It focuses on conflict style construction through evaluative language, specifically how disputants advance attitudes. The corpus consists of 230 minutes of family mediation talks involving 12 divorcing spouses. The research draws from the Appraisal framework
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Whose questions? Ventriloquation in entrepreneurial podcasts Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 Geert Jacobs, Julia Valeiras
While interaction is a signature feature of podcasts, new research on selected entrepreneurial podcasts has shown how they are de-dramatized as part of the leadership branding project, indexing the genre’s transition from a homespun to a corporate medium and echoing the notion of media re-colonization. This article reports on a case study of the use of questions in a single entrepreneur’s six-episode
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Backchannel forms and functions in context and culture: The use of backchannels in Arab media discourse Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Raeda Tartory, Sami Al-khawaldeh, Samia Azieb, Bassam Al Saideen
Forms and functions of verbal backchannels, that is, short tokens such as uh-huh, yeah, and mhm uttered by a listener to the main speaker – have been widely investigated in conversation analysis. Few studies have examined the use of backchannels in Arabic culture, particularly in the context of media discourse. This study stresses the importance of contextualizing the forms and functions of backchannels
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Deconstructing gender stereotypes in standardized English language school textbooks in Algeria: Implications for equitable instructional materials Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Fadhila Hadjeris
The pressing need to promote gender equality in today’s globalized society is underscored in Sustainable Development Goals and juxtaposed with the goal of cultivating global citizenship. Despite these efforts, mainstream post-colonial discourse on Maghrebi women categorizes them as less citizens neglecting ‘the complexity’ of their lives and experiences. The scarcity of research that depicts Algerian
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Doing being ordinary nonetheless: Navigating social expectations in a peer support group Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Sarah Hitzler
Peer support groups offer spaces where individuals with similar problems can gather to offer each other support and understanding. Successions of narratives have been described as very effective instruments in building shared understanding in such groups. This article adds to these findings by analyzing a single case in an obesity support group. It shows that successions of narratives can be used to
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AI and racism: Tone policing by the Bing AI chatbot Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Timothy Appignani, Jacob Sanchez
This paper looks at the way that Bing AI uses tone policing and racial gaslighting in its conversations with users as a method of disciplining them away from critical anti-racist ideological engagement and towards an ethos of white supremacy. We use a critical discourse analysis to examine the conversations produced through our use of Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot to find that through both the content
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Laughter in hospital emergency departments Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Susy Macqueen, Luke Collins, Gavin Brookes, Zsófia Demjén, Elena Semino, Diana Slade
For patients, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are unfamiliar, institutional contexts involving high-stakes communication in heightened emotional circumstances. This study examines laughter, as one expression of emotion, in an existing 649,631-word corpus of naturally occurring clinician-patient interactions recorded in five Australian hospitals. A mixed methods approach revealed (1) the spread
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Book review: Gábor Tahin, Heuristic Rhetoric: Principle and Practice Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Tianlu Ji
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Book review: Patrizia Anesa and Jan Engberg (eds), The Digital (R)Evolution of Legal Discourse: New Genres, Media, and Linguistic Practices Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Chunhui Zhang
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Book review: Mark Jary, Nothing is Said: Utterance and Interpretation Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Jiayu Han
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Book review: Simon Statham, Critical Discourse Analysis: A Practical Introduction to Power in Language Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Baorong Huang
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Discourse markers in small talk and tasks Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Andrew J Guydish, Allison Nguyen, Jean E Fox Tree
Discourse markers help people navigate conversations. We tested how the use of five discourse markers – so, but, oh, I think, and like – was influenced by communication medium (text, phone, videoconferencing) and conversation type (task-related conversation or small talk). Additionally, we tested whether these discourse markers influenced the amount of words contributed throughout the conversation
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Framing offer-related actions as assistance at jewelry stores in Japan Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Takeshi Hiramoto
While most of the studies on assistance in talk-in-interaction from the conversation analytic perspective presuppose that the actor who receives assistance already has or is expected to have problems, issues, needs, or demands, assistance can be offered without the expression or existence of plausible expectations of problems, issues, needs, or demands. Using the methodology of conversation analysis
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The #PantamiMustGo political activism: A textual analysis of narrative agency in protest discourse Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Innocent Chiluwa, Chuka Fred Ononye
This study analyses the narrative structure of the #PantamiMustGo hashtag activism in Nigeria. Applying qualitative textual analysis, the study examines the issues that were made salient in the protests and how they were constructed. Through the analysis of narrative agency, the study finds that activists constructed Ali Pantami as a threat to national security and called for his resignation. Two discourse
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Time-oriented decisions in Palliative Care team meetings Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-17 David Monteiro, Oriana Rainho Brás, Michel Binet
In a wide diversity of workplaces time and temporality are an omnirelevant feature of the praxeological and material environment, as observable by the pervasiveness of chrono-metrical and chronological technologies and artifacts, and by workers’ orientation to matters of punctuality, productivity and other aspects of task dispatch and managerial organization. Professionals’ orientation to time takes
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Supporting and challenging hate in an online discussion of a controversial refugee policy Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Simon Goodman, Abigail Locke
Online hate is a serious problem affecting a range of minoritised people. Existing theories suggest that poor behaviour online is due to anonymity but fail to explore how such discussions unfold. This is where a discursive and rhetorical psychological approach is appropriate as it offers a micro-level analysis. In this research paper, a discursive/rhetorical approach is applied to an online debate
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Negotiating joint commitment in collaborative work project: Focus on text-based requests and news deliveries in atypical work Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Mikko T Virtanen, Riikka Nissi
The shift to service and gig economy and increasing polymediality have created communicative contexts where the workers have to construct varying social relations in different kinds of digital and text-based interaction environments. This article examines how transprofessional collaboration is managed in such contexts in the field of applied arts. Based on email and mobile messaging data, we study
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Denial from the other side: Experiences of racism as narrated by South Sudanese refugees in Australia Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Anikó Hatoss
This paper discusses experiences of everyday racism as narrated by South Sudanese refugee-background informants living in Australia. The paper draws on accounts of verbal and physical attacks reported during a sociolinguistic interview about the refugee experience and adaptation to the Australian lifestyle. The study contributes to the exploration of features of refugee narratives, using the socio-interactional
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The disputed territories of information: The case of alleged war crimes during the Kosovo War Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Majlinda Bregasi, Thomas Christiansen
This article analyses participants’ sense-making and demonstrates procedural consequentially and relevance, and makes the data on which observations are based available to readers. By looking at a TV interview, in Albanian, of Hashim Thaçi, the former PM of Kosovo, given to respond to allegations against him regarding involvement in war crimes, the focus will be not only on what it is said but also
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Responsive advice-giving to troubles in supervision interaction Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Zhiying Jian
Advice-giving is not only a crucial pedagogic activity in student supervision but also responsive conduct to students’ expressions of trouble in talk in-interaction. However, we know little about how advice-giving arrives in such sequences. This study uses conversation analysis to examine supervisory advice-giving in responding turns after students express their trouble. It is demonstrated that students’
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Linguistic variation in supreme court oral arguments by legal professionals: A novel multi-dimensional analysis Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Yingqi Huang, Zhonggang Sang
This study uses the method of novel Multi-Dimensional Analysis to compare the discourses of justices, appellant’s attorneys, and respondent’s attorneys to provide a corpus-based description of linguistic co-occurrence patterns in their registers during oral arguments based on the extracted seven functional dimensions: (1) Instructive argumentation versus Informational production; (2) Elaborative exposition;
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Inferred vision: An analysis of the commentators’ descriptions of players’ visual perceptions and intentions during volleyball broadcasts Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Naonori Akiya
This study explores how inferential description relates to expert knowledge by analyzing commentators’ inferential descriptions of players’ visual perceptions and intentions during live volleyball match broadcasts. The analysis revealed that even when the commentator could not provide the viewer with detailed visual evidence of what, when, and how the player perceives their surroundings, they could
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Illusory authenticity: Negotiating compassion in animal experimentation discourse Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Núria Almiron, Laura Fernández, Miquel Rodrigo-Alsina
Society’s compassion towards nonhuman animals used in experimentation has grown exponentially. This paper adopts critical discourse analysis to examine how the animal experimentation industry negotiates this societal moral response. To this end, the discourse of the largest animal experimentation interest group in Spain has been studied. Our findings show that the industry, as represented by this interest
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Understanding performance responses: Instructional transitions in musical masterclasses Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Darren J Reed
This paper extends analysis of the ‘assessment receipt’ to include talk and embodied interaction during ‘performance responses’ in music masterclass interactions. By grounding the analysis in questions of performance completion and audience applause onset, it details the utility of variously position assessment tokens, during performance, before applause, during applause and after applause. These different
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Co-constructing parenthood in multiparty interaction: Orienting to parents’ rights and responsibilities to act on behalf of others Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-13 Ruey-Ying Liu
Drawing on naturally occurring, multiparty interactional data involving parents, children, and third parties (e.g. friends and relatives), this conversation analytic study investigates how the status of ‘parent’ is co-constructed on a moment-by-moment basis in the course of everyday interaction. The analysis focuses on participant orientation to parents’ rights to act on behalf of their children and
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Doing mutual understanding in child and family therapy sessions: How three interlocutors calibrate new information Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-06 Kristina Edman
This paper presents an analysis of how three interlocutors sequentially organize and accomplish mutual understanding in naturally occurring audiovisual recordings of therapy sessions. The analysis is in keeping with microanalysis of face-to-face dialog (MFD) and follows operational definitions of three-step micro-processes that interlocutors use when they calibrate new information; that is, how they
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Discursive management of patients’ disagreement with doctors’ recommendations in Nigerian hospital visits Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Akin Odebunmi, Oluwatomi Adeoti
Patients’ disagreement with doctors’ treatment recommendations, which receives participatory or non-participatory attention from the consultative parties, constitutes a major discursive issue in clinical encounters. However, the literature on medical discourse has demonstrated more concentration on the participatory than the non-participatory dimension of the encounters. This discursive representation
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Public note-taking on a digital platform as a workplace practice Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Elina Salomaa, Esa Lehtinen
Unlike traditional note-taking with pen and paper, in which the note-taking process is only partially accessible to the co-participants, note-taking in the digitalized workplace may be done publicl...
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‘I just need a yes or no’: Managing resistant responses in U.S. Senate hearings Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Marissa Caldwell, Joshua Raclaw
Using conversation analysis, this article examines how questioners manage resistant responses in the context of U.S. Senate hearings. In particular, we examine how questioning Senators use explicit...
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Three decades of the framing perspective on social movements: Changing trends and continuities Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-29 Oriol Barranco, Lluís Parcerisa
This article reviews the development of the framing perspective on social movements since its emergence over three decades ago. The review led to three conclusions. During this period, the impact o...
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On the defence of antifascist Italy in Alcide De Gasperi’s 1946 speech to the Paris Peace Conference Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Emanuele Brambilla
Faced with the gradual rise of neofascist parties in Europe, the present paper looks back at the past to analyse a speech delivered by one of the founding fathers of the European Union, namely Alci...
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Arguing through best practice: The role of argumentation from example in activists’ social media posts on sustainable fashion Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Sara Greco, Chiara Mercuri, Barbara De Cock, Rebecca Schär
Examining a multilingual dataset of Twitter and Instagram messages posted by a variety of actors (NGOs and individual activists, small brands, and others) during the 2020 and 2021 Fashion Revolutio...
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Place formulations and the incongruity procedure: On police officers’ practices for assembling appearances of wrongdoing Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 André Buscariolli
‘Place’ is central to police work. Not only does the law prescribe proper uses of public spaces, but officers learn how to infer suspicion from people’s conduct and appearances at particular places...
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Introduction Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Manfred Kienpointner
This special issue represents some of the recent developments within argumentation studies. The following overview provides some historical context for the five papers which constitute this special...
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A functional diversity of argumentative styles Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Frans van Eemeren, Bart Garssen
In dealing with the different ways in which argumentative styles manifest themselves in various communicative practices from several communicative domains, van Eemeren and Garssen start from a defi...
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Neither speaker nor recipient: The middle-distance look of unaddressed participants Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Einav Argaman
This article studies the middle-distance look of ratified unaddressed participants and the way in which it is sequentially organized in relation to the discursive conducts of current speaker. An an...
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Argumentative strategies to evade state apologies: The Turkish example Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Yeliz Demir, Juliette Schaafsma
Countries are often reluctant to publicly recognize and express regret for past wrongdoings despite urgent pressures or calls to do so, and in the past decades there have been numerous examples of ...
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What’s in a frame, what’s in a name? Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Hank Johnston
This report reviews the development and organization of social movement research, the place frame analysis in the field, and its weak relationship with cognitive-linguistic approaches to frames and...
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Multimodal engagement strategies in science dissemination: A case study of TED talks and YouTube science videos Discourse Studies (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-03-18 Edgar Bernad-Mechó, Julia Valeiras-Jurado
The growing interest on science dissemination offers new opportunities to communicate science openly to various audiences, but also brings on the challenge of adapting to an audience that does not ...