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Linguistic repertoire is regarded as one of the foundational concepts of sociolinguistics but despite its prominence during the early years of the discipline, it is commonly believed that for decades scant theoretical development on repertoire occurred. This situation is seen to change in the early 2000s when several (Northern) researchers increasingly advocated that linguistic repertoire could be more productive to theorize contemporary communicative practices than language. In this paper, I aim to foreground the South/North entanglements in the coinage and development of linguistic repertoire and present erased, forgotten, or obscured parts of the linguistic repertoire story. I show how Southern thinkers, both linguists and non-linguists came up with precursors to the way in which repertoires are currently conceptualized. By presenting this obscured narrative from the South, I want to offer critical questions about the trajectories of concepts and the kind of knowledge that gets excluded by the sidelining of Southern thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article offers a critical appraisal of resemiotisation through the investigation of a controversial comment made by South African president, Jacob Zuma. The comment (that Jacob Zuma took a shower to minimise his risk of contracting HIV/AIDS) was made during a rape trial in 2006. Over a period of eight years, this comment has been continually recontextualised into different modes, and has served different functions. This article investigates newspaper reports, cartoons and YouTube clips which were collected from 2006 to 2014. All of these texts refer to the “Shower comment” in linguistic, visual or multimodal ways. Drawing on a multimodal analysis, focussing specifically on modes of representation, the article critically discusses the notions of mode, time and space in connection to resemiotisation. I argue that a Bakhtinian account of time, space and body allows for a non-binary view of semiotic phenomena that will lead to a deeper theoretical understanding of semiotic transformations in all their complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been an increased focus on narratives produced within or about the workplace. A number of different analytical approaches to narrative exist and there has been quite a vigorous debate between researchers interested in life stories (or so-called big stories) and those researchers proposing an increased focus on small stories. This paper will use small story analysis (SSA) to examine workplace identity in discourses on organizational processes in one workplace in South Africa. The data for this study were collected by conducting interviews and focus group discussions with 19 members of a large South African retail company. We find that participants often introduce small stories which offer discourses that contradict or contest 'official' company discourses (or the so-called sanctioned grand narrative stories). We argue that small stories can be a valuable resource to investigate organizational discourses, as participants often introduce questions of identity which do not necessarily fit the dominant organizational discourses through small stories. Small story analysis seems to be an ideal tool to investigate contradictions and inconsistencies which occur in all discourses but are typical of contexts of diversity and transformation such as the South African workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]