Language and Dialogue - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2023

This paper looks at cross-cultural variation in corporate communication over the pandemic, focusing on the language adopted by rail companies in the UK and Italy to enhance trust in safety and highlighting how they engage in communicative action with potential passengers and other online users. The analysis shows that UK companies generally prefer personal forms of self-mention and avoid technicisms, while Italian companies adopt more formal language and more impersonal forms of self-representation. Common elements seem to be related to repeated communicative functions, and the semantic elements they involve, thus highlighting the close link between pragmatic units and lexico-grammatical patterns (with their semantics), as well as the interplay between meaning, dialogic action and context in communication.

The current study aims to compare the complaints/responses to complaints on the Facebook pages of Vodafone UK versus Vodafone Egypt. 200 complaints and 200 responses to these complaints were collected from the Facebook pages of the two companies in September 2022. The analysis results showed that the UK customers produced significantly more expressions of disapproval, particularly ill consequences and annoyance, than their Egyptian counterparts. The Egyptian customers produced significantly more blame and requests than the UK customers. In terms of responses to complaints, the UK responses were dominated by acceptance strategies, particularly in the form of offers of repair, while the Egyptian responses came mainly in the form of partial acceptance, particularly in the form of seeking further information.

The article proposes a dialogic approach to ridiculing in the French presidential debate of 2022, illustrating the ridiculing act as representative of the core dynamics of political debates. The analysis enabled the configuration of a prototype of the ridiculing act within a dialogic sequence of action and reaction, which shows that ridiculing most frequently occurs as an immediate reaction or reactive chain to actions initiated in the free discussion sections of the dialogue. The selected dialogic sequences are shaped by some particularities of ridiculing as a macro speech act of negative humour and the genre of the presidential debate, such as the interplay of the different layers of meaning, as well as the fixed rules of turn-taking, the front-staged nature of the talk and the participation framework.

The article addresses the issue of intracultural dialogue between two strong political mindsets, liberal and conservative. This polarization is typical of contemporary cultural divides and emerges in the public sphere through mass media, often finding its outlet through humour, which may be treated as a mediating factor. It will be discussed on the example of a popular Polish humorous talk show broadcast on the public TV channel as compared to one broadcast on commercial television. The central finding of the study, seemingly replicable for other languages and television cultures, is the discovery of the central item on the discursive agenda, i.e., a worldview hiding in the conservative epistemic stance that assumes the authority of the journalists running the show.

Cartoons are designed as a response to a social event and aim to create a humorous effect in the audience through their multimodal discourse. The interpretation requires contextual and cultural information which has to be shared by the cartoonist and the audience. Our research focuses on the dialogue of humorous cartoons between the West and the East. From a dialogic perspective, the action, i.e., the cartoons published in the French and Swiss media, generates a reaction in the Romanian media. We discuss the transfer of national stereotypes at a European level and show that, although the cartoons target a particular out-group, they ricochet to another group. Thus, new boundaries are set up and humour functions as a divisive social activity.

The article analyses a Romanian corpus of intercultural dialogues recorded in natural settings during language proficiency examinations and discusses the usages of the frequently occurring word yes (Rom. da). The framework is provided by the Mixed Game Model (Weigand 2009, 2010, 2017, 2018, among others) intersected with the socio-cognitive approach to intercultural communication (Kecskes 2007, 2008, 2010, 2013, among others). Beyond the analysis of a single lexical unit in a limited collection of texts, the author aims to demonstrate how a particular word of the lexicon becomes a culturally-socially-cognitively-discursively-rhetorically situated utterance that acquires specific functions when it is used by interlocutors who negotiate their communicative agendas to come not only to mutual understanding but also to achieve their convergent-divergent institutional purposes.

This study investigates children’s dialogic negotiation of the moral order of the classroom in a heterogeneous peer group. Drawing from video-ethnographic research in two primary schools in Italy, the study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyze 9- to 10-year-old children’s dialogic interactions around the appropriate and inappropriate ways of behaving in the classroom. As the analysis illustrates, children reproduce institutional moral norms and ideologies to sanction perceived infringements of the classroom moral order. In response to that, the recipients provide accounts to justify their conduct or resist the moral accusation of their classmates. In the discussion it is argued that these morality-building practices are relevant to (a) children’s negotiation of their social organization and local identities in the peer group and (b) children’s socialization to the moral expectations of the classroom community.