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In Argentina, food and nutrition diseases are complex social problems that cover a wide range, from malnutrition deaths in a food producer country, to bulimia and anorexia in middle-class youth, among other issues like the increase in cases of diabetes and heart disease linked to the non-stopping growth of obesity. These problems mentioned are related to urgent situations, that even though rises from different social and economic contexts, the State should provide an answer. Obesity has become a central issue for the public agenda since excess weight has ceased to be the healthy signal of physical and economic well-being to become a disease, which must be fought by all means. Different programs have been carried out by the State to control and prevent it, with the collaboration of private sectors, including specialized medical centers. They propose different medical approaches, with their theoretical assumptions and therapeutic approaches, which are fundamental, because they are performative, both on disease control, as to the subjectivity, practices and lifestyles of the patient. In this paper we will analyze the discourse of the support groups for the therapies of obesity of patients in undergoing treatment. We will address the interactions in groups, managed by the participants themselves through the mobile networks, which set the determining weight of the medical assumptions about their identities, behaviors and attitudes. Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995, 2003, 2006), from a multimodal perspective (Kress, 2010) and qualitative (Guba and Lincoln, 1994) is the theoretical and methodological framework of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was at first intended to explore the nature and functioning of parenthetical discoursal units in the political debate genre. However, upon closer inspection of the functioning of these units, it was thought appropriate to pin down a more general criterion under which the concept of "parenthetical" could be subsumed. The notion deemed here appropriate for this purpose is that of discontinuous designation or referential twist, which will be referred to throughout this paper as referential leap or leap for short. The research presented here is not meant to be a statistical study based on large quantities of data and backed up in a scientifically rigorous way. Rather, it sets out to offer some impressionistic insights into referential discontinuities, including parentheticals, as attested in the political discussion broadcast on TVE on December 14th, 2015, between the leaders of the up to then two major political parties in Spain, namely, Mariano Rajoy, as the representative of the conservative party (PP), and Pedro Sánchez, as the representative of the socialist party (PSOE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper explores the relationship between pragmatic functions on conversational-discursive development and the gestures, within McNeill's (2016) theoretical frame, appeared along with these functions. In order to achieve this, firstly, linguistics structures that carry out pragmatics functions are recognized; secondly, the interrelation that this pragmatically marked structures with gestures is described; and, thirdly, frequent relations are analyzed in terms of the cooccurrence of such communicational resources. Furthermore, it is presented a first attempt to describe sexual variation about the relation between pragmatic management and gestures. The analyses of six conversational narrations conclude there are some relations between given topic (GTop) and completive focus (FocCompl) with various types of gestures. These cooccurrences are nonstatic and should be reviewed in a more extensive corpus. Also, data shows that male-female couples present more pragmatically marked functions than the other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the information about the paraverbal communication provided by Spanish manuals of forensic eloquence published in the 19th century. Specifically, the works analyzed are: Sainz de Andino (1847[1828]), Enciso Castrillón (1840), Corradi (1843), Saurí y Lleopart (1847), Pérez de Anaya (1848), López (2013[1849]) and León y Olarrieta (1862). In conclusion, the first published manual is the one that contains more information on paraverbal communication, followed by Enciso Castrillón (1840) and Corradi (1843). In the same way, it should be emphasized that in many of the works studied the pauses have a prominent role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the connection between oral competence and the argumentation within the juridical language context. These connections are based on the idea that the ability to use oral language increases its value when related to juridical aspects, where a significant part of the legal actions -court hearing and trials- is still an oral interactive situation. In addition, it is important to consider that the legal process, from the rule regulation until its application, is basically an argumentative action. Both aspects are tackled from the diachronic perspective, starting from the classical rhetoric contributions to the most recent neo-rhetoric and pragmatic argumentative theories, resulting in the reviewing of the different Juridical Argumentative Theory versions and its principal postulate. Conclusions are leading to the benefit of empowering the de iure reasoning structure and the control of orality in the jurist professional career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper analyses the speech that Esperanza Aguirre pronounced on June 13, 2015 in the Madrid City Council. This speech is very relevant because it anticipates the arguments that the Partido Popular will use in other elections. The goals are to understand Aguirre's narration about the latest municipal elections of Madrid and study her arguments. To this end, I have followed the works of Perelman, van Dijk and Lakoff, among others, in order to achieve an appropiate theoretical framework. Finally, the analysis shows how Aguirre presents herself as the legitimate winner of the elections and how Manuela Carmena is discredited for that position because of her relationship with Podemos, who don't accept the 1978 consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among verbal (im)politeness phenomena, greetings are particularly important in institutional interactions, both from the point of view of their expression and their perception (Placencia 2001; Ferrer 2003; Rigatuso 2003 and 2015; Sánchez Lanza 2003; Murillo Medrano 2004). In this paper, which is part of a broader research on expression and perception of (im)politeness in customer service encounters in health and educational institutions in a city in the linguistic area of the Buenos Aires Spanish variety, we propose to analyze the dynamics of greetings in interactions between employees and users in educational institutions, specifically considering the opening and closing instances of the communicative event. Greetings, as speech acts, are emphasized by the users as fundamental for the expression of politeness in these contexts. We attend in particular to the presence/absence of greetings, the schemes in which they are inserted, the formulas used, who formulates them and how they contribute to the expression of politeness in the institutional discourse. Our theoretical and methodological approach is based on Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982 and 2001; Tannen 1985, 1996 and 2004), with contributions from Ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1972), Goffman's Microsociology (1967) and Discourse analysis (Drew and Sorjonen 2000). For the study of politeness phenomena, we follow leading researchers in Sociocultural Pragmatics (Bravo 1999; Bravo and Briz 2004; Kaul 2008 and 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the Dialogical Approach to Argumentation and Polyphony, in this paper, I focus on the quotative evidential points of view expressed through metadiscursive negation in a corpus of political speeches given by various Argentine politicians. My goal is twofold. On one hand, I try to show that, in these cases, the negative enunciation is presented as triggered by discourse frames related to previous or potential speeches, i.e., by argumentative chains presented as the origin of the enunciation. On the other, I aim to prove that in a dialogical reply to those discourse frames, on which enunciation is based, a certain positioning of the speaker is built, together with a certain ethos (Ducrot 1984; Amossy 1999). Considering different scenographies (Maingueneau 1999) in political enunciation, which are adjusted according to the different addressees, I make a distinction between the confrontation, pedagogical, humbleness, self-defense (concerned with preserving one's image and equality) and closeness ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the linguistic and textual procedures through which adolescent subjects reformulate metaphorical expressions in a conversational context. My purpose is to examine the nature of the resources used in said reformulation, and to specifically analyze the procedures of metadiscursive qualification (Gülich and Kotschi 1995; Ciapuscio 2007a, 2007b) through which speakers comment and/or evaluate metaphorical expressions: the study reviews their presence, distribution and variation in exchanges among adolescent subjects who have been asked to reformulate metaphorical expressions in the context of a face-to-face conversation. My aim is to elucidate the extent to which the type and frequency of metadiscursive qualification accompanying and signaling reformulation processes are correlated with the degree of conventionality of the reformulated metaphorical expressions and, additionally, to contribute to the research on metaphor in a text corpus, especially, to the question regarding the conventional vs. innovative character of metaphors (Hanks 2004, 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-construction is basically a dialogical manifestation of conversational narratives, that becomes less productive when the communicative situations gain in formality and structuring. This paper analyzes the transition between conversational narrative and formal conversation to discover how co-constructions tends to disappear and get controlled in the formal communication. The study is based on an oral diaphasic corpus of Mexican Spanish, that allows to compare different levels of formality from oral conversations in different communicative situations, showing how the pragmatic conditions of the conversation operate in each level of formality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of Parliament and those who attend Parliament sessions are not only listeners but have the opportunity to react through different types of disruption (Cortés 2015a, 2015b). One of these is protest, which is conceived as a form of verbally expressed disapproval, displaying an opposition both to what is currently stated by the speaker and to forms of disagreement shown by other members of Parliament. However, this particular device of disruption has not received much attention in previous research. In this paper the reasons justifying such protests come under closer scrutiny, together with the conditions propping up their appearance in the co-text and the context of parliamentary speech. Two groups have been identified: those which have been produced to react to the content of the prior speaker's intervention (with different subgroups whether protest goes together with other means of disruption), and those types of protest which react to previous disruption, such as applause. For the study, we have selected a corpus of initial speeches of Presidents (of the Spanish Government) and opposition leaders in Parliamentary debates in Spain between 1997 to 2015; the corpus duration is 29h 13min 51s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study starts from the premise that the linguistic skills of grammatical nature involved in speech production of children with Asperger syndrome are shown intact or unaltered, whereas most of the dysfunctions in the discursive dimension are associated to specifically pragmatic skills. This idea is compatible with the underconnectivity theory, according to which there would be a neurophysiological correlate capable of explaining such discrepancies between grammatical and pragmatic skills. Likewise, it is considered that communicative dysfunctions in Asperger syndrome may be due to an integration deficit. In order to support these assumptions, the analysis of different categories is carried out; more exactly, grammatical skills (syntactic complexity and lexical diversity, cohesion and coherence) are compared to pragmatic skills (principle of cooperation and editing tasks). For this, forty recordings transcribed in CHAT format (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) were taken into account. Twenty of them came from speakers with Asperger syndrome, and the other twenty, from speakers without this disorder. The results of this analysis reinforce the starting point of the paper, according to which there would be clear dissonances between the structural abilities of language and the communicative ones. Finally, with the ambition to reach a greater comprehension about communication disorders, particularly about Asperger syndrome, this research seeks an interdisciplinary connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of conceptual metaphor theory and from the perspective of conversation analysis, this paper focuses on conceptual metaphors, metaphorical expressions, and the formulation efforts carried out by doctors and patients to communicate different aspects of cardiac crises. The main questions articulated in this study are: How do interactants describe and reconstruct cardiac crises and associated events? What role and relevance do metaphorical procedures have in those conversational tasks? According to the discursive roles, is it possible to identify specificities in the selection of metaphor type, in the chosen procedures and formulation resources, and in the functions metaphors acquire in the exchanges?. The analysis is based on a corpus of conversations among cardiologists and patients that took place in different healthcare services institutions in Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the use of irony as a persuasive resource in two interviews, given by Rafael Correa (president of Ecuador) and the spokesperson of the PAH (The Platform of People affected by Mortgages), Ada Colau (currently mayor of Barcelona), in 2012 and 2013 respectively. Both interviews refer to the subject of the evictions in Spain. For the analysis of this trope from a systemic perspective, we have based ourselves on the constructivist proposal of Hayden White, a philosopher of history, who analyzes this trope (together with metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, following the humanist Vico's tradition) in relationship with the plot of a historical work and the ideology which is being constructed. White's dialectic relationship established between the historical meaning of a book and the author's discursive resources selected to convey this meaning is an example of an extremely useful analytical proposal for the analysis of ideological discourses. Specifically, White's proposal helps us to interrelate dialectically irony (a kind of macro-function) with the various linguistic and discursive forms used in the text (narratives, free direct speech, lexical opposites, etc.), and the context within which these discourses take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to study the discursive polemic regarding the proposed new schema of agro-export taxes that took place in Argentina during the first half of the year 2008. In this context, the presence of ideological signs (Voloshinov, 1976 [1926]), that are the focus of discursive struggles for the imposition of different accentuations, becomes an important indicator of the construction of the discursive polemic. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the circulation of the signs campo and distribución, in particular, with the objective of determining their role in the struggle to establish discursive iniciative (Raiter et al., 1999) within said polemic. To that end, we analyze and contrast, in public speeches of the argentinean President, on the one hand, and of leaders of the agrarian organizations oposed to the new tax, on the other, the acentuations that these two signs acquire. In the first place, we consider the lexical-semantic relations at play (Dubois, 1962), as well as the role of these signs in the configuration of different topics (Van Dijk, 1978) that organize these discourses' local meanings. Furthermore, in order to specify the various ways in which these topics are constructed, we also take into account the components of political discourse defined by Verón (1984), as well as the presence of forms of manifest heterogeneity (Authier-Revuz, 1984) in the discursive and interdiscursive linkage of topics. The analysis reveals the complexity of one of the possible nodes of this polemic: the role of the State in the generation of economic growth and the equitable distribution of its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a set of narratives on critical episodes by people affected by migraine. The voice of patients has acquired higher relevance in recent years, after being long postponed in the field of medicine. Linguistic research on patients' discourse can contribute to the knowledge on and understanding of this disorder, and even to its diagnosis, as shown among others by the researches on cardiac and convulsive illnesses carried out by German and British teams (Gülich and Schöndienstt, 1999; Schwabe et al., 2008; Schwabe et al., 2007). In this article I present, from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory and of discursive production theory, an analysis of a corpus of patient narratives in which people explain their migraine attacks: I am interested in expanding the knowledge on how these patients conceptualize and transmit their illness and its main symptom, i.e. headache. The analysis of patients' contributions focuses both on the qualitative aspects of pain and on the description of its intensity, which is particularly rich as regards expressive procedures and resources and leads, occasionally, to the thematization of feelings of fear and panic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the use of the alternation attenuation/intensification as an argumentative strategy in the political discourse. We have used ten interpellations from the Journal of Sessions of the Parliament of Andalucía, belonging to the VIIIth Term (2010-2011), and six interpellations from the IXth Term (2013-2014). The distribution attenuation/intensification does not follow the pattern which is to be hoped: according to the role of the member of Parliament -according to his role of more power (Government) / less power (Opposition)-the politician should use intensification in speeches in which he shows his achievements, and he should use attenuation in his defence before accusations; whereas a member of Parliament belonging to the Opposition should preferably use intensification as an essential resource for accusation and critique. However, we can find situations in which, from positions of denouncement or critique, some members of Parliament use attenuation not only as a resource but as a constitutive principle of his entire discourse. This fact is in principle paradoxical, but it has a very clear argumentative functionality: attenuation can be used in order to intensify the argumentative strength of the discourse. The alternation attenuation/intensification focuses on the propositional content, intensifying it. The difficult equilibrium of the play attenuation/intensification shows the tension between the desire for softening, in order to protect the image, and the desire for accusing clearly, in order to discredit the adversary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the functions played by interjections in sermons of the eighteenth century, which sole purpose was preaching from the pulpit. Rhetorical speech finds in the oral tradition its construction model. Hence the frequency of this element of pragmatic significance in sermons: the interjection, among other linguistic elements that characterize this oral genre, becomes an index of communicative interchange between the two interlocutors of the speech: preacher and auditorium. It intensifies the interactional dimension of the act of enunciation. The high presence of expressions that contains interjections in texts from the eighteenth century should be in relation to the social context at that time and the functional tone of the homily, essentially admonishing and moralizing. In the third part of the present study the most used primary interjections are compiled and exemplified their basic discoursal functions: attitudinal, interaccional and phatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of conversational data has been considered of great interest in renewing the criteria of aphasia assessment and aphasia rehabilitation. By assuming this point of departure, the specific objective of the present paper will be to examine conversational interaction as illustrative of preserved metacognitive abilities associated with verbal behavior in people with aphasia. These abilities are supposedly sustained by a domain of intersection between the cognitive basis of verbal behavior and the executive function, i.e. a domain of interrelationship between language and high psychological processes (cf. Hernández Sacristán, Rosell Clari, Serra Alegre and Quiles-Climent, 2012). Differences and commonalities will be shown after examining three aphasic subjects (two fluent and one non-fluent case) in a -basically- free conversational interaction with family members and/or interviewers. The metacognitive dimension of verbal behavior includes abilities such as strategic inhibition of the linguistic use, control of concurrent semiotic procedures (e.g. phonic and kinesic gesturing), co-constructional activity, referred speech, etc. Conversational data provide the natural context for the expression of metacognitive activity associated with language. The abilities under examination have been also considered useful for developing therapeutic programs (cf. Hernández Sacristán and Rosell Clari, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe a version of the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) transcription format developed with the purpose of enabling open-access to the PerLA corpus of language pathologies through the Talkbank International Database. In doing so, adapting PerLA to a transcription and coding format compatible with CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis) software for automatic language analysis was required. However, CHAT conventions are not compulsory, but they allow for a wide range of variations depending on the nature of data, the scope of the study for which the data have been collected, and the kind of phenomena that are considered relevant for coding. The adaptation offered here has been envisaged to allow the transcription and coding of data showing a wide variety of language and communication disorders, in order to carry out further studies from a pragmatic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]