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Recently there has been renewed interest in the intersection of identity and epistemics in social interaction, yet epistemics has still rarely been analyzed in political identity construction. This paper combines research on identity from a sociocultural linguistic perspective with epistemics using Conversation Analysis. The focus here is on understanding how a small group of student activists construct their shared political identities through epistemic stances towards their academic majors and career goals. Through a discourse analytic study of conversational data among these activists, I demonstrate the validity of the relationality principle of identity in accounting for how identities are constructed as related to one another. Furthermore, I examine the relational process of authentication in epistemic stances to legitimate claims to knowledge regarding political and academic identities, as well as alignment of stances in building group solidarity and shared political identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newer forms of racism in the context of right-wing extremism are characterised by an apparent distancing from overt racist devaluations. In addition or even beyond biological features, it is now cultural characteristics attributed to social groups which serve as grounds for practices of othering and social exclusion. This paper analyses racist discourse in the comment sections of the influential far-right blog pi-news.com where these practices can be observed in detail. With reference to discourse analytical approaches to racism and using corpus-linguistic, data-driven methods, especially word embeddings and collocations, it is shown how racism is linguistically and discursively expressed. Next to both overt and more implicit racist nominations and predications, the notion of Heimat ('homeland') is analysed; it is used to draw racist demarcations without relying on overtly racialising terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and ‘away-days’. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions within the team. Third, a more hierarchical authoritarian or a more interpersonal egalitarian leadership style can be identified via specific combinations of these five discursive strategies. The article concludes that the egalitarian leadership style increases the likelihood of achieving a durable consensus. Several related avenues for research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is a study of police interviewing using an integrated approach, drawing on conversation analysis (CA), critical discourse analysis (CDA) and pragmatics. The study focuses on the balance of power and control, finding that in particular the institutional status of the participants, the discursive roles assigned to them by the context, and their relative knowledge, are significant factors affecting the dynamics of the discourse. Four discursive features are identified as particularly significant, and a detailed analysis of the complex interplay of these features shows that power and control are constantly under negotiation, and are always open to challenge and resistance. Further it is shown that discursive dominance is not necessarily advantageous to participants, due to the specific goals and purposes of the police interview context. A wider consideration of the context illustrates the contribution that linguistics can make to the use of police interview data as evidence in the UK criminal justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyse letters of complaint about instances of comic discourse where the humour is regarded as overstepping the mark and causing offence. We are particularly interested in how this sense of offence is registered and how complainants articulate the offence for which they seek some form of redress. In pursuing this interest, we seek to bring together two distinctive modes of analysis: linguistic discourse analysis and symbolic cultural analysis. This is methodologically appropriate to the discourse involved because of the ways in which epistolary complaints use forms of linguistic framing for offsetting potential objections to what they want to say, and because of the highly figurative language which is employed in voicing the substantive complaint and the censure of the humour that is entailed in this. Our focus overall is on the underlying ambivalence involved in negotiations between ethical and comic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the co-presence of two potentially contending discourses of gender relations — the Discourse of Egalitarian Gender Relations, and the Discourse of Conservative Gender Relations — in the domain of parenthood in a Singaporean national advertising campaign. The difference between the two discourses is a question of symmetry and asymmetry, respectively, in gender roles and expectations. By undertaking a combined analysis of linguistic and visual structures in the texts, I will show how the two discourses are manifested within, and across, the advertisements in the series. I conclude by suggesting that the distinction between the two discourses is not a clear-cut one. Rather, on closer scrutiny, they work in tandem to maintain a largely unchallenged conservative gender order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]