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This research examines the politicians' and experts' use of the two evidential markers I think and I know for authority and solidarity in UK government Covid briefings based on a corpus-assisted analysis. It not only analyses their evidential constructions, but also explicates their discursive functions in the British cultural context when public health was under challenge. It aims to demonstrate the different epistemic and affective stances of British politicians and experts and to highlight the power of I know in displaying leadership and facilitating solidarity in the discourse of crisis. It may also shed light on the distinctive stance strategies of British public health discourse in terms of the two evidential markers. • I think has great potential for displaying an epistemic stance, either tentative or authoritative. • I know is valuable for constructing the authority of a reliable 'knower' and building solidarity for an empathic 'sayer'. • I think is favoured by British epidemiologists to secure their academic authority flexibly. • British politicians preferred I know to I think in enhancing cooperation and demonstrating leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a qualitative discourse analysis of food‐related interactions in four U.K.‐based Polish–British families. The data include the families' video‐recorded celebratory meals and audio‐recorded interviews. The analysis explores how food talk projects 'stance' (Du Bois) – that is, how it indexes the speakers' positioning towards their sociocultural field, thus shaping their identities. The data reveal that, as the speakers negotiate their stances in the culinary context, they recurrently 'other' their interlocutors' foodscapes – represent them as different, abnormal and/or inferior. This othering could be interpreted as distancing from other speakers. However, the analysis shows that by humorously highlighting differences between their culinaro‐celebratory repertoires, the family members also reaffirm their sharedness. The speakers' discursive collaboration during their difference talk demonstrates how othering can be unifying in these transnational families, the potential of which is understudied in face‐to‐face interactions and in the context of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a Linguistic Ethnography (Blommaert & Rampton 2011) of a group of academically elite students in Singapore. The group comprises locals born in Singapore, as well as immigrants from China and Vietnam. My informants all attended a top-ranked secondary school in Singapore. I present data from interviews and a focus group discussion with them about their aspirations and educational pathways. These academically elite students describe a conventional aspiration amongst their peers involving transnational mobility and attending top-ranked universities in the US and UK. My informants discursively construct this aspiration as preferred, with a sense that they are expected to conform to such a trajectory. I argue that their consistent orientation toward the ideal trajectory and production of discourse about it denotes a collective moral stance (Ochs & Capps 2002), and hence a disposition embedded in a social field (Hanks 2005). In response to Archer's (2012) theorisations that dominant modes of reflexivity have changed, my informants' relatively stable orientations and ways of acting demonstrate how Bourdieu's notion of habitus continues to be relevant in late-modernity. In practical terms, this study also shows a clear link between elite schools, and the aspirations and resultant trajectories of individuals. This has direct implications for policy-makers in Singapore where the Ministry of Education has been attempting to curb elitism in the education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The treadmill is an attractive device for the investigation of human locomotion, yet the extent to which lower limb kinematics differ from overground running remains a controversial topic. This study aimed to provide an extensive three-dimensional kinematic comparison of the lower extremities during overground and treadmill running. Twelve participants ran at 4.0 m/s ( ± 5%) in both treadmill and overground conditions. Angular kinematic parameters of the lower extremities during the stance phase were collected at 250 Hz using an eight-camera motion analysis system. Hip, knee, and ankle joint kinematics were quantified in the sagittal, coronal, and transverse planes, and contrasted using pairedt-tests. Of the analysed parameters hip flexion at footstrike and ankle excursion to peak angle were found to be significantly reduced during treadmill running by 12° (p = 0.001) and 6.6° (p = 0.010), respectively. Treadmill running was found to be associated with significantly greater peak ankle eversion (by 6.3°,p = 0.006). It was concluded that the mechanics of treadmill running cannot be generalized to overground running. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The language of press and television news reportage is familiar territory for critical discourse analysis and other approaches to politics in the mass media (e.g., Kelly-Holmes and O’Regan, 2004, Chouliaraki 2005), as is that of newspaper editorials (e.g. Le 2003). But, in sympathy with, e.g., van Leeuwen and Jaworski (2003), we believe that a full understanding of mediated political culture needs to extend beyond this territory to consider a wider range of linguistic, visual and multimodal media genres. This article reviews the character of political sketchwriting in Britain as a basis for an assessment of its contribution to the national political mediascape. To do this, we draw on recent work in discourse analysis (Engebretson 2007) and sociolinguistics (Jaffe 2009) on the concept of ‘stance’. First, we illustrate the history of sketchwriting as a newspaper genre, tracing it back to the earliest days of political reportage in Britain. We then explore, with reference to a corpus of materials assembled during the British General Election campaign of 2010, how the stance-work of this genre is prototypically managed. Following this, we demonstrate the extension of such work to a wider range of political column discourse, under the general heading of ‘colour writing’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the linguistic resources adopted by pamphlet writers to express their stance and engage their readers during the so-called Irish paper war that preceded the 1800 Union between Great Britain and Ireland. The data (about 100,000 words) consists of 23 pamphlets divided, according to their position in the debate, into two sub-corpora of approximately the same number of words. My purpose in this paper is to investigate the communicative and rhetorical functionality of the linguistic features writers use to express their stance towards the union, with a view to determining how writers establish themselves as morally and intellectually authoritative in their texts. The analysis brings out the crucial role lexico-grammatical patterns play, but also demonstrates the need for a broader interactive perspective, in order to fully account for the dynamics of persuasive discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]