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In this article we examine displays of epistemic status and stance among long-term Anglo-Australian residents of remote communities through a case study of a 2-h interaction by four men who have demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of locations in their region. We show how equal access to knowledge of places is oriented to, as well as how differences in rights to authoritatively claim knowledge emerge in disputes over details of locations which are resolved when it is established that one member can provide more specific or up-to-date knowledge. This study not only contributes to understanding epistemic management practices in contexts where there is a high degree of shared knowledge, but also grounds the exploration of new insights into the ways in which the epistemics of referring to places appear to diverge from what has been described for referring to persons.

This paper focuses on the stancetaking formats used to express personal thoughts, namely Finnish mä aattelen/aattelin ‘I think/thought’, mä mietin ‘I think/wonder’, and mun mielestä/musta ‘I think/in my opinion’. We study how these first-person formats are used in mental health rehabilitation group meetings, which aim to promote joint decision-making. In particular, we analyze whether the institutional asymmetry between support workers and clients is reflected in the use of these thought expressions. Our data comprise 23 video-recorded rehabilitation meetings, and the adopted methods are conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. Most of the stancetaking formats in our data are produced by support workers (106/129). The results of a sequential analysis conducted in this study demonstrate that support workers' thought expressions are embedded in their institutional actions, which are beyond the clients' authority. Moreover, our data suggest that support workers' and rehabilitants' thought expressions generate different participation dynamics. Although previous research has considered I think-formats typically as calls for other views, in institutional settings such as ours, these formats can also be interpreted as highlighting an institutional agent's controlling position. Acknowledging the existence of such differences in stancetaking practices can advance the design of new protocols to facilitate client participation. publishedVersion

The International Criminal Court (ICC) represents a criminal justice setting exceptionally welcoming to discourse scholars. The court website provides ample information about ongoing cases, hearings are livestreamed, and transcripts, video footage, and other relevant documents are available online. Against this background of comprehensive transparency, this paper explores the additional value of physically attending ICC trial hearings. An auto-ethnography of how the ICC court landscape structures the visitor's path to the courtroom gallery, it is claimed, brings out the staged nature of the Court's projection of transparency. The ensuing discussion explicates the implications of these staging practices for the hearing transcripts published on the ICC website. It is argued that these transcripts contribute to this projection of transparency by obfuscating the processes through which the Court constitutes its audiences, both the ‘physical’ gallery audience as well as its ‘virtual’ counterpart browsing through the materials on the ICC website. In this sense, the paper enhances our understanding of ICC hearing transcripts as ethnographic objects, because it shows that their sociocultural entanglements also extend to the ways in which they are disseminated and the role they play in staging the ICC as a transparent institution.

In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce a finite or infinite path, which determines the qualitative winner or quantitative payoff of the game. We study bidding games in which the players bid for the right to move the token. Several bidding rules were studied previously. In Richman bidding, in each round, the players simultaneously submit bids, and the higher bidder moves the token and pays the other player. Poorman bidding is similar except that the winner of the bidding pays the "bank" rather than the other player. Taxman bidding spans the spectrum between Richman and poorman bidding. They are parameterized by a constant tau in [0,1]: portion tau of the winning bid is paid to the other player, and portion 1-tau to the bank. While finite-duration (reachability) taxman games have been studied before, we present, for the first time, results on infinite-duration taxman games. It was previously shown that both Richman and poorman infinite-duration games with qualitative objectives reduce to reachability games, and we show a similar result here. Our most interesting results concern quantitative taxman games, namely mean-payoff games, where poorman and Richman bidding differ significantly. A central quantity in these games is the ratio between the two players' initial budgets. While in poorman mean-payoff games, the optimal payoff of a player depends on the initial ratio, in Richman bidding, the payoff depends only on the structure of the game. In both games the optimal payoffs can be found using (different) probabilistic connections with random-turn games in which in each turn, instead of bidding, a coin is tossed to determine which player moves. While the value with Richman bidding equals the value of a random-turn game with an un-biased coin, with poorman bidding, the bias in the coin is the initial ratio of the budgets. We give a complete classification of mean-payoff taxman games that is based on a probabilistic connection: the value of a taxman bidding game with parameter tau and initial ratio r, equals the value of a random-turn game that uses a coin with bias F(tau, r) = (r+tau * (1-r))/(1+tau). Thus, we show that Richman bidding is the exception; namely, for every tau

This article investigates the relationship between physical and social space and the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust in a small county in rural Poland: Wegrow County, located north-east of Warsaw. The focus of this article is a cluster map representing the murders of 3771 individual Jews – 35% of the Jewish population as it was recorded in 1940 – in the years 1942–1944. This cluster map is supplemented with alternative maps – a deep map and a story map – in response to ethical issues associated with quantifying Jewish lives and human tragedy. The cluster map shows the extent of brutal violence that took place during the 1942 liquidations of the ghettos, and the different survival strategies undertaken by Jews afterwards. Particularly, it unveils that many individuals fled to forested areas in response to the liquidation of the ghettos, and that attempts were made to escape the trains leading to the Treblinka death camp. This article demonstrates the value in applying spatial tools to research new fields of history, and the innovative ways in which visualizations can engage existing historical research.

UID/FIL/00183/2019 Relevance is one of the crucial criteria for assessing the quality of argumentation in education. In argumentation and education, relevance has never been analyzed or coded. While several theories have included in their analysis some indicators of cohesion or clarity, this characteristic of dialogue and discourse has never been addressed as a distinct phenomenon. This paper builds on the existing studies in linguistic and philosophy to advance criteria for assessing relevance, which in turn can be used for developing a coding scheme for evaluating dialogue moves. Relevance is analyzed starting from the pragmatic principle that dialogue moves are instruments for pursuing a common dialogical goal. Starting from a classification of the possible types of dialogue moves, defined based on the possible dialogue that they propose or continue, five criteria of relevance are illustrated, capturing both pragmatic and topical coherence. Such criteria are shown to provide guidance for distinguishing not only relevant from irrelevant moves, but also the degrees of strength of relevance. The theoretical framework and the assessment criteria will be illustrated through a corpus of classroom interactions collected in Portuguese middle-grade schools. publishersversion published

The national “Double First-class” strategic plan, a new ambitious higher education policy, which was officially launched at the end of September 2017. This emphasises that 42 Chinese universities have a target of being ranked in the global “First-class” category within ten years. Under the guidance of the strategic plan, Chinese academics in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) will face significant opportunities and challenges. Compared with those in Science and Technology (S&T), academics in the HSS have less internationalisation in terms of academic discourse power. This study used a mixed-research method to investigate Chinese HSS academics’ perceptions of this innovative strategic plan across different types of universities, academics’ ranks and locations of academic training. Findings showed that these three variables have significant influences on Chinese academics’ perceptions in research publications, research policy understandings and academic promotion strategies.

This paper analyses how narratives contribute to the multiple and sometimes conflicting corporate identities in a pharmaceutical company. Stories are important for companies; they enable members to legitimize internal decision-making, and to represent themselves towards new employees and clients, as well as within the company (Linde, 2001). In corporate settings, these narratives are often stories of vicarious experience, i.e. “stories about other people engaged in actions that the tellers did not witness” (Norrick, 2013a: 385), as a result of the collective nature of corporate identity. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic data, we demonstrate how two dominant narratives of vicarious experience, the founder's narrative and the so-called Bad Pharma narrative, serve as shared resources that are strategically mobilized by different tellers (Georgakopoulou, 2007). We examine how these contradictory stories constitute the company's identity discourse. To account for this co-existence, we examine what tellers include in (re)tellings of and reflections on the narrative; how they account for and mitigate certain narrated events; how they establish epistemic authority; and how they position themselves in relation to the narrative by mobilizing personal and collective identities in different ways, including or excluding themselves as protagonists and/or as original tellers of the different identity narratives.

We generalise a search algorithm by Mohri and Riley from strings to trees. The original algorithm takes as input a nondeterministic weighted automaton M over the tropical semiring and an integer N, ...

Wikis are widely considered to be student-centred platforms which promote collaborative learning. Previous research has, however, demonstrated that without teacher intervention some students fail to engage with one another collaboratively in these environments. This study contributes to the emerging literature on the role of teachers in supporting collaborative learning during wiki activities by examining teacher and student online interaction during wiki-mediated collaborative writing activities in three Kuwaiti high school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes. Teacher and student discussion posts and text edits during the eight-week projects were analysed using a discourse analysis framework and triangulated with data from semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that the approaches adopted by the teachers in this study ranged from directive to dialogic. Where the teachers took a more directive approach, students tended to interact with the teacher rather than with the peers and wrote by themselves individually. Where the teachers adopted a more dialogic approach, however, there was greater student-to-student interaction and collaboration leading to jointly constructed texts. Such findings point to the benefits of adopting a dialogic approach to teaching during wiki-mediated collaborative writing activities.

We examine whether an adaptation to lesson study using a creativity framework promotes teacher learning. Lesson study is a professional development model that engages teachers in a cycle of planning, teaching, and reflecting upon a lesson with the purpose of understanding how to optimize students’ learning opportunities. The adaptation to lesson study intended to increase teachers’ capabilities for studying instructional materials before planning a lesson. We use data from a geometry study group where 6 geometry teachers who had not previously worked together investigated instructional materials for designing a lesson. The findings show evidence of teacher learning in relation to three visible changes. First, the teachers increased their mathematical knowledge for teaching by demonstrating the relationships between curricular concepts and anticipations of student thinking. Secondly, the teachers advanced the development of a professional community by using a shared language, considering a framework for understanding students’ prior knowledge, and developing mutual accountability to provide high-quality instruction. Finally, the teachers developed teaching and learning resources by identifying ideas for the lesson and designing tasks that use students’ prior knowledge to develop mathematical understandings. The study provides a case of using a creativity framework to make lesson study viable in other contexts different than Japan and promote teacher learning in professional development.

This study examines how young immigrant children in multilingual playful activities with peers and adults engage with and explore heritage language forms (e.g., their features, social values and pr ...

News photos of refugees and migrants tend to be highly evaluative since they capture the moments of human suffering, vulnerability and helplessness. Informed by the works of Martin and White (2005) and Economou (2009, 2008) on Appraisal Theory and evaluative stance, the current paper identifies the visual evaluative resources in Reuters’ Pulitzer-winning photos of refugees and migrants’ crisis in Europe for the year 2016. When considering photos evaluative stance, this paper argues, news photos should not be merely viewed as witness or proof of the events, rather they should be acknowledged for their aesthetic properties and compositional perspectives. This marks the importance of introducing delicate refinements to Martin and White’s (2005) APPRECIATION model by adding, replacing and removing subcategories to account for the range of visual resources deployed in the photos under discussion. Photos’ visual cues and semiotics codes are added to the APPRECIATION model. Doing so, a distinction between the evaluative stances infused by photos aesthetical properties and those arising from photos’content and the depicted participants is established. Two authorial voices are then proposed: the Witness voice and the Artist voice. The delicate modifications introduced to the APPRECIATION model helps to dig deep into the embedded evaluative stance of the photos. Applying the suggested APPRECIATION resources, it is found that Pulitzer-winning photos aestheticize the suffering of the refugees and render it beautiful and photogenic. However, the evoked positive APPRECIATION resources instantiate negative JUDGEMENT values of social exclusion, impersonalization, and Otherness.

The enigma of creativity is rarely discussed in doctoral education, yet it nestles snugly against the term originality, a key criterion for thesis assessment. This article engages with this occluded topic through an investigation of how four L2/multilingual PhD candidates studying in the Faculty of Arts in an Australian university perceive the presence of creativity in their doctoral writing. It also explores how and when these writers feel they can be creative in their writing practices. Methodological approaches included a workshop program designed around the concept of creativity for Arts doctoral students, followed by individual and group interviews. The findings indicate that while each doctoral writer actively engaged with the idea of creativity they also encountered social, cultural, political and other environmental barriers. These constraints often led to a lack of writer agency which, in turn, led to self-censorship. Nevertheless, several enablers to their creativity were uncovered with participants recognising the usefulness of learning specific writing practices and other strategies to allow creativity to emerge in their work. The article also offers a model of creativity that may provide a useful starting point for others to use in understanding the highly complex role creativity holds for doctoral writing.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the on-going debate in the literature on mock im/politeness by exploring the ways in which teenagers use apologies. The data have been taken from the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). The starting-point for the corpus analysis was to search for ‘apology expressions’ operationalised as one of the forms sorry, pardon, excuse me, forgive me, (I) apologize (and variations of these) in order to describe their frequencies and functions. In the next step, I investigated how the expressions were used in ‘insincere’ ways (for example sarcastically or for banter). Apologies used for banter were typically followed by a response in the next turn denying or rejecting the apology. They functioned as a solidarity strategy establishing a relationship of rapport between the teenagers. Ironic apologies were identified by a special ironic or sarcastic tone. In addition, it was possible to find some correlation between certain forms (in particular oh sorry) and the ironic interpretation of the apology. Ironic apologies could also be signalled by the use of expanded forms of apologies, intensification and more formal expressions associated with overpoliteness. Teenagers' conversational style was also characterized by the use of apologies for mimicry to perform stories or for comic parody.

This paper examines a range of impolite values recently developed by the Italian politeness markers per favore, per piacere, and per cortesia ‘please’ in conflictive contexts. In describing this functional development, I adopt Mazzon's (2017) definition of ‘pragmatic reversal’, i.e., a shift whereby a politeness marker is progressively used with confrontational meanings. Drawing on a corpus of online written Italian, this study analyzes the interactional contexts where politeness markers are used impolitely and suggests an explanatory path for their reversal. The corpus-based study shows that typical contexts of confrontational uses are impolite commands, prohibitions, and quotative constructions reporting a content which is harshly criticized and challenged by the writer. In the latter case, the politeness markers (usually prefaced by ma ‘but’) function as extra-clausal markers of disagreement – some also occurring as holophrastic interventions to rebut the interlocutor's argument. The idea developed in this paper is that politeness formulae are prone to pragmatic bleaching precisely in view of their routinization as ‘politic’, conventional, and neutral forms. Once partially bleached, they start acquiring new values within the realm of modulation, even – and this is the interesting fact – in the ‘opposite’ direction, as insistent reinforcement of impolite acts such as urgent pleas, rude requests, rebuttals, and even insults. This pathway of impoliteness-driven pragmatic change has also been documented for some English markers such as please, sorry and I'm afraid, which suggests the emergence of a recurrent pattern of pragmatic reversal involving equifunctional forms in different languages.

Thesis and dissertation writing often presents significant challenges for many PhD candidates and it can be even more demanding for multilingual doctoral students who use English as an additional language (EAL). Second language writers who are unprepared to engage in disciplinary academic writing require institutional language support services. Among these services, individual (or one-on-one) consultations with learning advisers, who identify students’ specific writing issues and provide personalised advice, are resource-intensive but may have significant impacts on thesis and dissertation writing. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of individual consultations through student learning experiences. It analyses the reasons for service use, evaluates students’ perceived impacts of consultations on thesis and dissertation writing, and explores their views on service improvement. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 13 EAL doctoral students enrolled in an Australian university. Results show that individual consultations were operated in four different formats and participants accessed consultation services because their learning needs were not met in group settings or they had identified writing issues. Participants reported pedagogical and psychological impacts, and provided practical suggestions for service improvement in terms of timing and adviser availability. This study provides important insights into the role of individual consultations on thesis and dissertation writing in a second language.

This paper uses conversation analysis and video-based methods to study how the driver and passengers interact in order to coordinate multiple activities in cars. The video data have been recorded in naturally occurring driving situations in Britain and Finland. The analysis focuses on leave-taking during drop-offs, i.e. situations where the driver is pulling over for a momentary stop to let a passenger out of the car. It shows how in-car participants time and coordinate the conversation's closing step by step with respect to the car's movement and the eventual stop; i.e. they coordinate leave-taking as multiactivity. The paper suggests that some of the ways in which leave-taking is managed as multiactivity contributes to the construction of safety in traffic.

It is widely acknowledged that perceptions of (im)politeness vary across different cultural groups. However, the emphasis on cross-cultural or cross-linguistic variation has resulted in individual variability in perceptions of (im)politeness being relatively neglected in (im)politeness research. In this paper, we move to examine more closely the extent to which the individual variability in evaluations of the relative (im)politeness of an apology that emerged amongst the twenty-five Australian in a previous study (Chang and Haugh 2011) could be attested across a larger sample of eighty respondents. Our analysis confirms that there is indeed significant variability in elicited perceptions of (im)politeness with respect to the apology in question, and that the rationales that individuals draw upon to warrant their classifications of (im)politeness also vary significantly. We argue that this kind of variability amongst individual speakers in their perceptions of (im)politeness of the same discourse event has significant implications for the way in which we go about studying and theorising (im)politeness. However, we caution that while further experimental studies are clearly needed in (im)politeness research, it is important that they be grounded in studies of contextualised, naturally occurring discourse rather than being based on constructed or decontextualised instances of language use.

Old/Middle Chinese codas of the entering tone are well preserved in Sino-Korean except for Chinese *-t, which changed to Sino-Korean -l. This article claims that Old Chinese coda *-t changed to Sino-Korean -l because coda -t was not fully developed in Old Korean by the time the Sino-Korean phonological system was formed in the eighth century. This article also proposes that the syllabic structure of Old Sino-Korean was (C)V at the earliest stage and gradually changed to (C)V(C). Evidence is presented from place names of the Samguk sagi along with other relevant Old Sino-Korean materials. The results of this study suggest we must reject the views that Sino-Korean coda -l developed under the influence of similar changes that occurred in Chinese dialects, that Middle Chinese coda -t remained the same in Sino-Korean until the sixth century but changed to -l in the seventh century, or that it was realized as -r due to phonetic adjustment caused by released codas of Old Korean.

It is often assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that speakers generate special cues in whispered tone and intonation to make up for the absence of fundamental frequency. The present study examined this assumption with one production and three perception experiments. The production experiment compared duration, intensity, formants and spectral tilt of phonated and whispered Mandarin monosyllabic utterances with four lexical tones spoken as either statements or questions. For tones, no acoustic properties were found to occur only in whispered but not in phonated utterances. For intonation, some spectral tilt measurements differed between the two phonation types. The two tone perception experiments used phonated and whispered utterances as well as amplitude-modulated noise based on those utterances as stimuli. Results show that once turned into amplitude-modulated noise, phonated and whispered tones had similar identification patterns, indicating that the non-F0 tonal cues in whispers were already in phonated speech. The intonation perception experiment used original utterances as stimuli and showed a substantial drop in overall identification rate and an overwhelming bias towards statement. Thus the spectral tilt differences found in the acoustic analysis were not helpful for intonation perception. Possible reasons for the lack of effective enhancement in whispered speech were discussed.

Word feature vectors have been proven to improve many natural language processing tasks. With recent advances in unsupervised learning of these feature vectors, it became possible to train it with much more data, which also resulted in better quality of learned features. Since it learns joint probability of latent features of words, it has the advantage that we can train it without any prior knowledge about the goal task we want to solve. We aim to evaluate the universal applicability property of feature vectors, which has been already proven to hold for many standard NLP tasks like part-of-speech tagging or syntactic parsing. In our case, we want to understand the topical focus of text documents and design an efficient representation suitable for discriminating different topics. The discriminativeness can be evaluated adequately on text categorisation task. We propose a novel method to extract discriminative keywords from documents. We utilise word feature vectors to understand the relations between words better and also understand the latent topics which are discussed in the text and not mentioned directly but inferred logically. We also present a simple way to calculate document feature vectors out of extracted discriminative words. We evaluate our method on the four most popular datasets for text categorisation. We show how different discriminative metrics influence the overall results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving state-of-the-art results on text categorisation task using just a small number of extracted keywords. We prove that word feature vectors can substantially improve the topical inference of documents’ meaning. We conclude that distributed representation of words can be used to build higher levels of abstraction as we demonstrate and build feature vectors of documents. Our method can help in any multi-domain environment to automatically extract discriminative keywords. It can be used to organise and search documents more efficiently.

This article examines the mediating role of agency in second language teacher identity, specifically vis-a-vis the impact of native-speaker ideologies on teachers' professional sense of self in constructing an authoritative position as French teachers. The narrative analysis of one teacher's interview accounts demonstrates how this teacher circumnavigated the constraints of a native-speaker ideology by making use of the affordances of the notion of plurilingualism, as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, as a conceptual resource to rearticulate an identity as a different kind French language teacher. While some have characterized plurilingual approaches as aligning with a neoliberal agenda, the analysis shows that such a view undermines the complexity of language as a social practice and its role in mediating agency. The article argues for a close examination of the complex, socially embedded ways in which language teacher agency in language is taken up and mobilized to impact daily instances of constructing meaning within the context of second language education.

This study explores the language learning potential of written corrective feedback (WCF) processing using model texts with young second language (L2) learners in an instructional setting. Eight pairs aged between 10 and 11 years from two primary school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes engaged in two three-stage collaborative writing and feedback tasks five months apart. Between each task, one of the classes participated in a six-week instructional intervention in which they were trained to use models. Results indicate that young learners follow sequential routes or trajectories across writing and feedback processing tasks that involve a wider range of interrelated problem-solving behaviours, noticing and uptake possibilities than previously acknowledged in process-oriented studies of WCF. The children’s use of trajectories was found to impact differentially on their developing L2 knowledge. Preliminary evidence suggests that children who received instruction with models followed more beneficial trajectories than their peers.

Researchers have long noticed the phenomenon of inflection decay in the evolution of English, which may be driven by the Principle of Least Effort ( Millward and Hayes, 2010 , Zipf, 1949 ). However, most studies in this line of research were based on exemplar-oriented observations while few explored the phenomenon from a quantitative perspective. In addition, it remains unclear whether the trend of inflection decay has continued in Modern English. In the present study, an index named Inflectional Entropy was developed to measure the diachronic change of the inflectional trend of Modern English in the 20th century. A trend of inflection decay in Modern English was found based on experiments on several large-scale corpora. The findings provide quantitative evidence to linguistic theories such as Principle of Least Effort, Language Niche Hypothesis ( Lupyan and Dale, 2010 ), and Principle of Entropy Minimization ( Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2018 ).

Building upon previous literature and insights from natural corpus data, this paper questions the theoretical bases and applicability of Information-Structural categories, such as topic and focus, and proposes an alternative approach to this field. In the proposed framework, so-called “information-structural” phenomena are epiphenomenal effects of diverse linguistic devices, related directly to a broad array of primarily intersubjective, interactional and discourse-structuring aspects of communication and language. The paper presents cross-linguistic data that support this view and proposes the ensuing directions for the systematic study of these phenomena.

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of oral and written Spanish advertising discourse by analyzing variation between the second-person object clitic te [‘you’] and the clitic se [‘one’] from a cognitive viewpoint. The variable choice of te or se strongly conditions the interpretation of advertisements and their meanings. The main cognitive explanatory notion will be salience; both clitics, te and se, imply different degrees of referent salience. Second-person te is more salient than se; therefore, the meanings conveyed by each one in media discourse will be notably different. Results indicate that the distribution and usage of the clitics te and se reveal different persuasion strategies in advertising discourse. In general terms, te is used when a special deictic meaning is needed, such as indexing the second person as a potential consumer of the product or idea, whereas se tends to appear in utterances that describe the general and objective benefits of the product or idea advertised, denoting a desubjectivized meaning.

The paired study of the Jewish Talmud in havruta is a traditional, well-established and prestigious form of study. Havruta conversation is a confrontational speech event in which disagreements are not only expected but also appreciated. The aim of this study is to explore for the first time disagreement patterns carried out by women studying in havruta pairs. 21 havruta conversations were observed and recorded, and semi-structured in-depth interviews were held individually with the participants. The findings show that women studying in havruta pairs adopt the basic confrontational characteristics of the genre. However, disagreements were found mainly in conversations in which both learners were equally knowledgeable and equally dominant. In a context were disagreements are welcomed, not all of them are equally desirable by the women participants. Desirable disagreements included downgraders, softening expressions and agreement markers and were ended in agreement. When these elements were missing, disagreement led to a threat to the face of the participants, and they expressed dissatisfaction in the interview with how the conversation had gone. An examination of the parts of the conversation that elicited dissatisfaction revealed a high frequency of disagreement markers, ungrounded disagreements, and face-threatening acts such as ironic echoing of the interlocutor.

The present study aims to identify the linguistic strategies and resources that characterize the review response genre, hotel management's responses addressing negative comments posted by dissatisfied customers on travel websites. It has been established that hotel management should proactively manage the hotel's online reputation by monitoring the online comments and by giving each of the negative ones an effective response. While the majority of the research has primarily explored the effectiveness of the genre from the analysts’ perspective, the present study approaches the issue from the customers’ perspective by collecting the dissatisfied customers’ views upon their reading of the hotel management's responses. The data comprises these responses downloaded directly from TripAdvisor and responses of a questionnaire survey administered to frequent travelers. Results suggest that effective responses and less effective responses differ in the use of moves and metadiscourse, the two linguistic resources hotel management uses in their attempt at achieving respectively rapport management and persuasion.

Studies on whether lying, as opposed to merely deceiving, is possible with untruthful implicatures have found conflicting evidence. Here, we present two experiments in which we investigated whether untruthful implicatures are judged as lies and the alleged difference between untruthful generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. Furthermore, we investigated untruthful implicatures in language acquisition. Our results show first that false implicatures are categorized as lies, but also that participants differentiate between false asserted content and false implicatures. Second, there is no contrast between PCIs and GCIs in either truthful or untruthful usage. Third, our results reveal an overall similar performance across all three tested age groups (5–6 years, 8–9 years, adults), showing that inferred content is accessible earlier than originally thought. We argue that these results are due to the child-oriented material as well as the high relevance of the implicatures in our experiment, and that previous findings in conflict with our own are caused by children's pragmatic tolerance.

This article explores a summative assessment delivery activity frequently encountered in Swedish higher education, the grade conference. Drawing on data from a Swedish module on Environmental Engineering, we analyze ten video recorded face-to-face meetings, each involving one student and one teacher discussing a grade awarded on the basis of a student written report. Utilizing Linell's concept of communicative projects, our dialogical study describes the interactional characteristics of this institutional activity type. In that context, we also discuss the interactional framing of each meeting, the issues considered talk-about-able within the activity, as well as the institutional and personal expectations made salient in this type of summative assessment interaction. We find that the activity involves a small set of characteristic communicative projects, which on the whole serve the activity's overarching purpose of delivering and achieving acceptance of a previously determined grade on a student written report. Teacher dominated, the activity provides occasion to discuss different aspects of student work, but participants also engage in subtle negotiations of institutional and personal accountabilities.

This article draws on qualitative research conducted with graduates of several cohorts of a TESOL program for international students, and discusses teacher identity and teacher agency co-construction, and the varied material effects of the program on graduates’ possibilities to be agentive in their academic and professional contexts by tracing engagement with native speaker ideology and tensions in reconciling teaching goals and professional contexts. The analysis reveals that the impact of the program on graduates to generate possibilities for agentive action develops through the creation of an iterative reinforcement of agency, scaffolded through program readings, conceptual knowledge, and activities within the ecology of a flexible academic space where authoritative discourses in the academic context become internally persuasive professionally (Bakhtin, 1981). A “third space” (Bhabha, 1990) of hybridity reconfigures professional subjectivities allowing the emergence of other positions. Professional identities are linked within space and time through reflective self-awareness of the possibilities for agentive action and performative demands in professional contexts and entail developing context-driven counter discursive enactments of agency.

The development of information technologies has made traditional news media aware of a public desire for bottom-up participation in the news production process. As a result, ordinary people have frequently participated in or even become the focus of news output. By following van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach of critical discourse analysis, this article examines how ordinary people are represented in China's news reports of social conflicts. The data include 106 news reports collected from the state-run websites of Xinhuanet and People's Network. Analytical results show that ordinary people have an either positive or negative representation in three relations constructed between ordinary people and government institutions, namely, antagonistic, jural and harmonious relations. It has also been found that journalists construct super-ordinate identities for ordinary people and represent them either positively as advocates of government policies or negatively as violators of social rules. The representation of both identities and relations of ordinary people is realized through both macro and micro discourse strategies. In essence, the complex representation of identities and relations is the result of the diversified ideologies underlying China's news reports.

This paper examines the functions of emojis as used by Omani men and women friends and relatives in messages exchanged on WhatsApp. The data consists of naturally occurring WhatsApp conversations taken from one male-only and one-female only WhatsApp groups. In order to determine the types of emojis used and the frequencies, I used what Herring (2004) describes as “coding and counting” in her description of computer-mediated discourses analysis. Then, I performed a qualitative analysis of selected extracts using theories and methods of interactional sociolinguistics. In line with studies such as Dresner and Herring (2010), the analysis of select, representative excerpts including various emojis demonstrates that emojis do not only serve as indicators of users’ emotions, but also serve many other communicative functions. They can serve as what Gumperz (1982) calls “contextualization cues”; indication of celebration; indication of approval of others’ messages; responses to expressions of thanks and compliments; conversational openings and closings; linking devices; and indication of the fulfillment of a requested task. In other words, emojis serve to create alignments between participants, structure interactive exchanges, and indicate message tone.

Applying a micro-analytical form of discourse analysis to a set of microblogging record over a three-month period, the study examines how ten top global brands utilize linguistic resources and strategies to build positive and socially acceptable images with the public across two significant social media platforms, i.e., with the English speaking public on Twitter and with the Chinese speaking public on Weibo. In the process of the examination, the notions of face and facework from interactional linguistics are utilized and further defined. It is found that impression management by these global corporations on social media is characterized by duality of facework: on one hand, global brands promote their corporate assets, as evidenced in the use of speech acts such as disclosing corporate information and broadcasting corporate products and campaigns; on the other hand, they build solidarity with their followers, as evidenced in the use of speech acts such as greeting, directing, expressing, sharing, and retweeting. Finally, the study points to the emergence of a global culture on social media and concludes with a glocalization perspective for further studies of corporate communication practice in the age of digitalization.

The importance of writing to academic achievement has been well-documented. Substantial research has investigated writing among monolingual speakers, but less research has examined writing in bilingual students, particularly in early childhood. Understanding young bilingual children’s writing development and identifying instructional pedagogies that support their growth as writers, is imperative. To guide pedagogy and research, we conducted a review of the research on writing in young bilingual children. A search of databases for studies published between 2000 and 2017 yielded 35 peer-reviewed articles that met inclusion criteria. Results of a content analysis demonstrated that young bilingual children develop knowledge and understandings of print and a range of composing strategies that support bilingual and biliterate writing. Pedagogies most supportive of young bilingual students’ growth as writers were meaning-based, provided explicit instruction on concepts about print that were contextualized within authentic activities, and created curricular space for multimodal forms of literacy. Genre-based writing instruction, technology-mediated composing, and ESL-enhanced content area literacy instruction also were found to be supportive. The evidence indicated that instruction in the native language as well as dual language instruction supported biliteracy.

This article presents an interview-based case study of a language teacher agency from social justice, queer, and ecological perspectives. We use Pantic’s (2015) model of teacher agency for social justice to investigate four aspects (i.e., “sense of purpose,” “competence,” “autonomy,” “reflexivity”) of Jackson's agency, a queer language teacher. A central driving force of Jackson's agency was her identification of contradictions between her sense of purpose and the educational structure in which her work was located, and thus her sense of purpose changed based on her context—from tending to her students' pastoral needs and to educating students about homophobia and Queer culture. Favorable conditions at the institutional and classroom levels enabled Jackson to exercise agency. They were a supportive department, an institution located in a liberal region, a conducive curriculum, student-teacher rapport, and timing of an instructional module (on LGBTQIA Rights). Jackson exercised agency particularly through the means of identity as pedagogy and also by changing the program's materials, by decentering herself as the sole holder of knowledge, and by coming out in the classroom.

Prior research has documented cross-cultural differences in Western and East Asian societies as reflected in their language use patterns. Research also shows that people with bilingual and bicultural competency can flexibly change their language use patterns in response to different cultural contexts (Canagarajah, 2013). In this paper, we studied compliment response patterns of the same Chinese-English bilinguals in two highly popular social networking platforms (Facebook and Renren). Results showed that while Renren and Facebook are two technically similar platforms, Chinese-English bilingual users who are members of both online cultures flexibly switched and adapted their compliment response patterns in response to the online community in which they were participating. The Chinese-English bilinguals’ compliment response patterns were aligned with modesty principles more when they participated in Renren community, and less so when they participated in the Facebook community. Conversely, their compliment response patterns on Facebook were aligned with agreement principle more, and less so when they participated in Renren community. Our findings support that the linkage between language and culture are immutable even in a virtual context, and that bilinguals, who are members of both Renren and Facebook, change their compliment response patterns in response to the online community in which they are participating. The study has both theoretical and methodological significance.

In this article, we analyze the interactional work of interpreters from the viewpoint of patient-centered care. Interpreters can support patient-centered care by both translational and non-translational actions. They can calibrate the talk in rendition so as to benefit the intersubjective understanding of all parties, and can also help doctors and patients understand each other better through various embodied means. Our analysis draws on a multimodal analysis of interaction (see e.g. Goodwin, 2018; Mondada, 2016) and is based on a detailed analysis of three primary care consultations video recorded at a Finnish health center. In each consultation, the patient is a refugee or an asylum seeker and the interpreter is a professional community interpreter. We demonstrate three practices that seem to enhance patient-centeredness. Firstly, we show how interpreters can balance between direct interpretation and mediation to produce a clear yet precise rendition of turns at talk. Secondly, we demonstrate how interpreters display recipiency and provide interactional space for the patient by producing response particles that encourage the patient to continue talking. Thirdly, we illustrate how embodied co-operation in interpreted consultations makes the renditions more intelligible and tangible for all the parties involved in interpreter-mediated interaction.

In the literature, an interlocutor’s active listening responses such as “hmh” are often defined as “continuers”, serving to prolong another interlocutor’s turn. However, to date, experiments on the effect of non-interruptive active listening responses on a conversational partner’s duration of talk have given contradictory results. Studies have shown one interlocutor’s active listening responses to correlate sometimes with longer and sometimes with shorter turns of another interlocutor. To investigate this contradiction, the effect of a confederate’s active listening on German participants’ (N = 32) duration of speech was tested individually in an experiment simulating two significant conversational contexts extracted from the literature: explaining and socializing. The effect of active listening responses on the duration of talk interacted significantly with the conversational context. When socializing, the confederate’s active listening led participants to talk longer. Whereas in the explanatory context, this effect was absent, indicating that the function of active listening responses is context-dependent.

The purpose of this research is to find out how bilingual adolescents in Korea negotiate language choice in the face of competing ideologies and across contexts in which Korean is both the dominant language and the national language. This study presented both quantitative findings with turn and qualitative findings through narratives of case study in order to understand the students’ language choices and the language ideologies embedded in families. The findings showed that their language choices are influenced by a few different elements. First, the interlocutors were a crucial affecting element of the participants’ language choices in the contexts of Korean monolingual ideology. The peer groups also influenced the bilinguals’ language choices. Above all, the parents’ attitudes influenced by social ideologies affected the bilingual students’ main language use. This study emphasizes the complexities of language choices of Korean bilingual adolescents, referring to the contradictions between the ideologies of the internal factors of families and individuals and the external factors of Korea. This study shed light on the problem of unequal capital possession when the linguistic capital is connected to economic advantage based on ideologies on the society.

This study examined the role of immigrant bilingualism in third language learning (L3 = English). It focused on the respective effects of students' competence in the minority language (L1 = Turkish or Russian) and language of instruction (L2 = German). We analyzed a sample of 8752 German 10th-grade students (N = 7964 monolinguals, N = 436 Turkish-German students, N = 352 Russian-German students) and drew on standardized tests in L1, L2, and L3. OLS-regression models showed L3 advantages for balanced bilinguals at a high level in both language groups compared to their average monolingual peers when third variables were controlled, while advantages in the L2 dominant bilinguals could only be observed in the Russian-German sample. Balanced bilinguals at a low level and L1 dominants attained lower L3 levels than monolinguals. However, comparisons with comparably high proficient monolinguals, as well as further analyses with the bilingual samples separately, revealed that only L2 competence – and not L1 competence – explained immigrant students' L3 proficiency. Our findings indicate that the advantages of immigrant bilinguals in L3 learning mainly depend on their competence in the language of instruction.

Replicated data types ( rdt s) concern the specification and implementation of data structures handled by replicated data stores, i.e., distributed data stores that maintain copies of the same data item on multiple devices. A distinctive feature of rdt s is that the behaviour of an operation depends on the state of the replica over which it performs, and hence, its result may differ from replica to replica. Abstractly, rdt s are specified in terms of two relations, visibility and arbitration. The former establishes whether an operation observes the effects of the execution of another operation, the latter is a total order on operations used to resolve conflicts between operations executed concurrently over different replicas. Traditionally, an operation of an rdt is specified as a function mapping a visibility and an arbitration into the expected result of the operation. This paper recasts such standard approaches into a denotational framework in which a data type is a function mapping visibility into admissible arbitrations. This characterisation provides a more abstract view of rdt s that (i) highlights some implicit assumptions shared in operational approaches to specification; (ii) accommodates underspecification and refinement; (iii) enables a direct characterisation of the correct implementations of an rdt in terms of a simulation relation between the states of a concrete implementation and of the abstract one determined by the specification.

This study provides converging corpus-based evidence (originally in Hebrew) for (1) findings, supportive of the first prediction of the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora, Givoni, & Fein, 2015b), regarding the anticipated processing speed superiority of default (spontaneous) interpretations over nondefault (context-dependent) counterparts. Indeed, as shown by Giora et al. (2015b), default negative sarcasm was processed faster than nondefault negative literalness and nondefault affirmative sarcasm, all enjoying equally strong contextual support. Our corpus-based study here tests the second prediction of the Defaultness Hypothesis, (2) expecting relatively slow nondefaultness to be prompted by implicit and explicit cues, rejecting (as unintended) default counterparts. Findings indeed show that (ia) speakers are sensitive to the defaultness of negative sarcasm. Hence, they implicitly preserve conceptually weak syntactic slots for nondefault interpretations; and when (ib) wishing to be polite, speakers mute the sarcastically intended negatives by explicit metalinguistic mitigators (to put it mildly). Furthermore, (iia) when intended compositionally (often literally), speakers dismiss as unintended the default (sarcastic) interpretation of the negative constructions, by explicitly prompting a nondefault (literal) counterpart (by means of but not Y either). Complementarily, (iib) speakers intentionally fool addressees in order to humor them by using explicit cueing (just kidding), rejecting as unintended default (literal) interpretations of affirmative utterances while inviting nondefault (sarcastic) counterparts. Our corpus-based study, then, provides usage-based support for the Defaultness Hypothesis.

One of the most widespread practices in compulsory education is the annotation of feedback messages by teachers on texts written by students. The aim of this paper is to describe the nature of these types of teachers’ responses, in order establish possible profiles of assessment practices in Elementary and Secondary Education, as well as to identify which aspects of writing a story are considered more important in writing assessment. An analysis was made of 10,585 assessment messages which 41 schoolteachers in Elementary and Compulsory Secondary Education wrote on short stories composed by 393 students from various schools. The assessment notes were categorized according to code, place, extension, assessment content, and implicit metalinguistic content. Findings reveal the predominance of direct correction of specific spelling and grammar mistakes. The frequency of these corrections is, additionally, the best predictor of the global grade given by the teacher for the composition. Therefore, we conclude that teachers of compulsory education approach assessment of narrative texts from a conception which places excessive emphasis on more local and superficial aspects of the composition in detriment of other semantic, rhetorical or pragmatic aspects. Some teachers, however, mostly in Secondary Education, also recorded non-corrective assessment content, such as markings, questions, suggestions for expansion, or justifications. Certain assessment patterns are evident, which combine other types of evaluation (semantic-organizational, or superficial). Finally, the limitations and implications of those results toward teacher training are discussed.

Agreement attraction (e.g., ∗The key to the cabinets are rusty) is not attributable to the linear proximity between the local noun and verb (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002). However, agreement with a disjoined subject (e.g., The horses or the clock is red) is specifically sensitive to the number of the nearer noun (Haskell & MacDonald, 2005). The present study highlights other differences between the influence on agreement of a local noun in the classic attraction configuration and the nearer noun in a coordinate subject. Experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm and eyetracking during reading show, first, that a singular second conjunct tends to elicit a singular verb; this influence of a singular noun contrasts with the lack of effect from a singular attractor. Second, in comprehension a singular second conjunct both facilitates processing of an ungrammatical singular verb and inhibits processing of a grammatical plural verb. This symmetrical effect contrasts with the lack of an agreement attraction effect in comprehension of grammatical sentences. It is proposed that variable agreement with coordinate subjects should be given distinct theoretical treatment, relating these phenomena to the cross-linguistic phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement.