Language and Dialogue - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2015

This article examines how mediators contribute to formulating a particular type of interactivity by bringing to the forefront institutionally appropriate identities of participants. An existing collection of 18 transcripts from audio recordings of mediation sessions at a mediation center in the western United States serves as a source of interactional data. The study shows that mediators act as designers to construct mediation as a collaborative activity. They invoke identities as an exercise in articulating what is possible in this interaction and exerting control over interactants. Mediators are not just doing what is appropriate for this institutional context; their actions are an act of constructing identities out of what is available there. Participants can act in different ways (e.g., as an ex-husband and an ex-wife). However, relative to the institutional agenda of the meeting, they are encouraged to perform in the capacity of parents and to be collaborators.

The paper starts from the assumption that organisational culture, a type of behaviour considered acceptable by employees (Hofstede and Hofstede 2004), is not pre-extant but is jointly created during the interactions of the people working together. This paper is part of a longer study that has analysed institutional talk in a multinational company based in Romania by looking at different aspects of interaction such as types of questions, modality, mitigation, politeness and frames. The paper tries to identify the uses and functions of humour in the exchanges between the team leader and the team members in this multinational company.

This paper investigates the construction of Romanian national identity after the fall of the communist regime through the use of the discourse-historical approach advanced by Wodak (e.g. Wodak et al. 2009). The object of the analysis is represented by a corpus of eleven speeches issued by the Romanian presidents between 2002 and 2009. The results show that a new, supra-national type of identity emerges in Romanian official discourse, being based on the membership to international organizations membership and on its involvement in joint military actions and programmes. The supra-national identity is constructed and activated in regard to a specific form of menacing diversity, represented by terrorist organizations.

In this paper, I consider dialogue in Parliament as central, because it is the dialogic instances that bring to the fore the multivocality of political discourse, and I will show there are “other voices [speaking] through the speaking voice” (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu 2012, 152). I also start from the premise that, although restrictive and context dependent, in political discourse one may identify instances of the self. Politicians exploit language use with the purpose of creating emotions in their audience and their aim is to influence public opinion, to make voters think he/ she is “the right man at the right time”. Using extracts from the speeches delivered by a controversial Romanian politician, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, I will dwell upon the active management of voices in discourse as well as on projection of self into discourse with a view to discussing them as strategies used to construct a politician’s professional identity.

The present paper responds to two discussion articles previously published in Language and Dialogue 3:2 and 4:2: one by Wolfgang Teubert (“Was there a cat in the garden? Knowledge between discourse and the monadic self”), which is partly a critique of Roy Harris’ integrational epistemology (Harris 2009), and the other, itself a critical reply to Teubert, by Alison Sealey (“Cats and categories — reply to Teubert”). In this paper I adopt an integrational linguistic approach (e.g. Harris 1996, 1998) to Teubert and Sealey’s opposing philosophical views (social constructionism vs. realism), showing how their linguistic theories heavily rely on strategies of decontextualization (‘segregationism’) needed in order to cast themselves in the role of linguistic experts. Unlike the integrational linguist, who regards signs as radically indeterminate, the segregational linguist has to retain determinacy as a fundamental property of the sign — and hence the latter’s insistence that signs are ‘shared’. Both the relativist and the realist working within a segregational linguistic paradigm adhere to a semantic thesis of how words get their meanings that Harris (1980) has termed ‘surrogationalism’, i.e. the belief that words, in their function as names, ‘stand for’ things in the real world, the difference being that Teubert treats ‘reality’ as a discursive community-based construction (i.e. there is no objective reality for homo loquens), while Sealey thinks that material reality is independent of discourse and that words functioning as names of things reflect this to varying degrees.