Language and Dialogue - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2022

Abstract

Foucault’s notion of governmentality has been the focus of much research. However, little work provides an account of how governmentality is enacted as social practice. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring talk taken from a face-to-face coaching session and text taken from a career consultant’s website as data, the purpose of this paper is to make visible, and thus analysable, the way in which governmentality and the regulation of identities are enacted. In order to do this, we use critical discursive psychology as a method. Findings indicate that the coach is talked into being as an expert who diagnoses a ‘problem’ concerning the coachee’s career path and provides advice on how to solve the ‘problem’. This advice, drawing on wider social Discourses of happiness at work, regulates the identity of the coachee by prescribing acceptable ways of thinking about, and acting on, the self and so enacts governmentality.

Abstract

This contribution explores the stances of speakers of Romance languages towards the use of English as a lingua franca in a business context. Grounding on an audio-visual corpus collected in a wine fair in France, the analysis focuses on three extracts where participants comment in a playful way (i.e. through laughing, joking and humorous enactments) upon the fact that they are not speaking English. Through a sequential and multimodal analysis, the study will highlight the participants’ ambivalent stance: on the one hand, through these playful practices they display a local resistance towards the mainstream language choice; on the other hand, these same practices reveal their vulnerability to the social pressure concerning the speaking of English.

Abstract

Dialogue plays a most important role in interpersonal relations creating and strengthening social cohesion. Conversely, the lack of dialogue – and more tellingly a deliberate resistance to it – leads to social friction and animosity. In this paper I focus on a strategy used to intentionally disable a possibility of a meaningful dialogue and to deny any voice to the “other”. Dehumanising the “other” by linguistically representing them as animals or machines exempts the perpetrator from any obligation towards the “other”, including the obligation to respect their rights. I adopt Haslam’s model of dehumanisation (2006) which shows how, by means of metaphorical language, women are dehumanised and denied the possibility to participate in a meaningful dialogue in the so called manosphere.

Abstract

This paper examines sex differences in the use of expletives in spontaneous informal conversations among the contestants in the Spanish version of Big Brother. The results of the analysis of a corpus of 33,050 words empirically support some of the previous findings of self-reported use obtained from questionnaires and interviews. However, some unexpected findings were also noted – two of the women employ profanity more commonly than two out of the five male participants and one female swears particularly often in mixed-sex conversations. According to the results of the study, the ‘profanity gap’ in Spanish society may be narrowing, but it has not completely disappeared.

Abstract

In this paper we examine how couple and family therapists, in accounting for the moments of their first therapeutic encounters identified as meaningful, invoke asymmetric affiliations with their clients in the Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) dialogues. Applying Conversation Analysis and drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we analyze how these invoked (dis)affiliations are constructed in the fine interactional details of the interview and in/through the categories mobilized by the participants. The findings show therapists’ explicit affiliation with one spouse and often concurrently disaffiliation with the other in yet another interactive format. Consequently, the asymmetric affiliations are further strengthened by remaining unrecognized, unaddressed and ultimately unreflected in the IPR dialogue. The interviewer’s key role in promoting or constraining the therapist’s recognition of the asymmetric relations is discussed.

Abstract

Our paper investigates interpreter-mediated communication as intercultural dialogue in psychotherapy and assessments of cognitive functioning. We rely on previously published data to demonstrate the characteristics of communication in this setting and point to challenges relating to the validity of the assessments and to the efficacy of therapy. Using analytic tools from Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis, we specifically investigate how interpretation affects the interactional trajectory of communication, how interpreters manage both cultural and epistemic differences between the primary participants, how they deal with potential threats to the patient’s face and how they overall facilitate intercultural dialogue. We discuss concerns about the outcome of tests achieved in these circumstances and the challenges and potentials of interpretation in therapy.

This article reviews Let’s talk. How English Conversation Works978-0-198-85069-4

This article reviews When Politicians Talk: The Cultural Dynamics of Public Speaking978-981-16-3578-6

This article reviews Politeness in Professional Contexts978-902-720-742-5