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- Volume 3, Issue, 2012
Pragmatics and Society - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
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Development of interactional competence: Changes in participation over cooking sessions
Author(s): Machiko Achibapp.: 1–30 (30)More LessThis study explores the development of the interactional competence of an 8-year-old, Japanese learner of English over three cooking sessions with native speakers of English at her home during her period of residence in Australia. The study draws upon Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development in order to elucidate the L2 child’s process of acquiring interactional competence in this unfamiliar social practice (i.e., cooking-relevant talk). The analysis reveals marked changes in the child’s participation pattern over time, moving from making relevant minimal responses to more initiated, and autonomous participation. The child recycled some of the interlocutors’ utterances from the previous sessions, showing that the earlier cooking sessions provided her with a linguistic challenge and became a resource of language learning for her. She also made use of a textual resource (i.e., the recipe) as a scaffold to move toward more autonomous participation. In addition, the role of the recipe became less central as her participation became increasingly more independent.
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Formulating professional identity: The case of humanitarian aid
Author(s): Kevin McKenziepp.: 31–60 (30)More LessRecent scholarly and practitioner research on the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been concerned with questions about the moral legitimacy of humanitarian aid in settings of armed conflict. At issue is the extent to which NGO activities are said to affect the conduct and outcome of warfare, thereby potentially implicating humanitarian aid in the partisan interests which it has traditionally eschewed as a condition of its legitimacy. This paper explores how such issues are taken up in the explanations offered by humanitarian aid operatives in descriptions of the work they carry out in settings of armed conflict. Drawing on a corpus of conversational material recorded in open-ended interviews with representatives of various NGOs that operate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), I examine how speakers work to make themselves accountable to demands for sympathetic affiliation with the losing (or vanquished) parties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while maintaining a non-aligned stance relative to the partisan considerations that animate that conflict’s conduct. Both in first-hand narrative accounts of personal transformation and in descriptions of contrastive examples where professional colleagues are said to maintain a too-sympathetic affiliation with the partisan concerns of the Palestinian population whose needs they service, speakers work to provide for the legitimacy of their professional activities in the context of otherwise conflicting demands for moral accountability.
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Citizenship, participation, and CMD: The case of Nigeria
Author(s): Innocent Chiluwapp.: 61–88 (28)More LessNaijaPals and Nolitics, respectively a hosting site and a discussion forum by and for Nigerians, provide an opportunity for the citizens’ social and political participation. As a hosting website with social networking and blogging activities, NaijaPals maintains an online community, with Nolitics as a discussion forum solely dedicated to social and political debate. Members exchange information and engage in critical analysis of Nigeria’s political system. A total of 104 ‘posts’ are analyzed in the framework of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The analysis highlights the roles of political discourse in Nolitics, mainly as social critique, with the aim of shaping political leadership and involving the citizens in political governance. Discourse in this context is viewed as discursive practice, in the form of political propaganda; anti-corruption campaigns; socio-political mobilization; and recommendations for growth — all of these mediated in written texts. The analyses also show that metaphors, directive speech acts and questioning are used as discursive strategies.
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Greek and English linguistic identities in the EU: A translation perspective
Author(s): Maria Sidiropouloupp.: 89–119 (31)More LessTranslated and original texts have been claimed to differ with respect to their linguistic make-up. Parallel versions of texts seem to reflect aspects of the identities represented by the respective languages. The study exploits this potential, in the EU context, with a view to raising awareness of linguistic and cultural differences between English and Greek. A descriptive approach to parallel English and Greek EU material reveals aspects of linguistic preference across languages, with reference to the five dimensions of cultural values in Hofstede and Hofstede’s model of cultural relativism (2005). Translation practice can provide evidence of the linguistic manifestation of socially preferred patterns of behavior which determine linguistic action. Aspects of linguistic preference traced in the EU English-Greek translation context are shown against a background of linguistic preference manifested in other genres.Raising awareness of identities across languages is expected to ultimately provide recommendations for quality improvement in the EU translation practice, or how to achieve near-native command in language acquisition, while foregrounding the significance of the experienced socio-cultural realities in the study of meaning making.
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“The baby dey CHUK CHUK”: Language and emotions in doctor–client interaction
Author(s): Akin Odebunmipp.: 120–148 (29)More LessNigerian Pidgin is a popular informal communicative code in Nigerian social, economic and political experience. It is sometimes spoken in formal situations in the hospital setting when participants find it pragmatically convenient. Despite its communicative significance, little research has been carried out on the use of Pidgin in conversational interactions in Nigerian hospitals, a gap this study fills by investigating how Pidgin is used in constructing emotions relating to social and medical conditions in hospitals. Seventy five (75) interactions between doctors and clients in Nigerian Pidgin were sampled; the data analysis was based centrally on relevance theory. Nigerian Pidgin evokes negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions manifest as pain and fear, while positive emotions appear as excitement and relief. Doctors and clients gain access to each other’s intentions through their shared knowledge of Pidgin, their co-construction of ailments, and their contextually based local interactional resources. They thus negotiate emotions as cue-dependent variables that are steered with the help of cognitive processes.
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Inclusivity and non-solidarity: Honorific pronominals in Ainu
Author(s): Mitsuko Narita Izutsu and Katsunobu Izutsupp.: 149–166 (18)More LessSome languages use first person inclusive plurals for second person reference. Such usage has often been associated with the notions of solidarity or lesser social distance. However, this line of explanation cannot provide an adequate account for the use of inclusives for second person honorific reference in Ainu, an indigenous language of Japan. Members of an Ainu-speaking community or family have traditionally expressed loyalty or deference to their leader (village or family holder), rather than friendship or companionship. The present paper argues that the usage of first person inclusives for second person reference may be classified into two types: a solidarity-based usage (positive politeness) and a power-based usage (negative politeness) (cf. Brown and Gilman 1960). We aim to demonstrate that the Ainu honorific usage of inclusives can only be explained using the power-based account. A similar power-based honorific usage of inclusives is also attested in some South Asian languages, such as Tamil and Limbu.
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The future in reports
Author(s): Marina Bondi
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