Pragmatics - Volume 21, Issue 4, 2011

This article briefly reviews the rise of Critical Discourse Analysis and teases out a detailed analysis of the various critiques that have been levelled at CDA and its practitioners over the last twenty years, both by scholars working within the “critical” paradigm and by other critics. A range of criticisms are discussed which target the underlying premises, the analytical methodology and the disputed areas of reader response and the integration of contextual factors. Controversial issues such as the predominantly negative focus of much CDA scholarship, and the status of CDA as an emergent “intellectual orthodoxy”, are also reviewed. The conclusions offer a summary of the principal criticisms that emerge from this overview, and suggest some ways in which these problems could be attenuated.

Schegloff described utterances such as “lemme ask you a question” as pre-questions, pre-pre’s or pre-delicates (Schegloff 1980). This paper provides a discussion of similar utterances in a specific institutional setting - political radio phone-in programs in Israel. The participants use these utterances in ways that are similar to Schegloff’s description. Yet, the pre-construction has additional institutional functions for the differing roles of the host and the caller. Hosts use these utterances to manage the interaction during overlaps as a means to secure an exclusive turn of talk following them. Callers use them infrequently at the beginning of their talk as story-prompts. Hosts may challenge this usage and the interactional role reversal. Regular callers can use the pre-constructions similarly to hosts. In this way, the pre-constructions in the Israeli radio phone-in programs are employed as interactional practices that relate and construct the roles in this institutional setting.

This paper looks into whether there are any differences in demonstration of attentiveness between different generations and different cultures. By attentiveness I mean a demonstrator’s preemptive response to a beneficiary’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations surrounding a beneficiary and a demonstrator, which takes the form of offering. When and how often one would demonstrate attentiveness may vary according to such factors as generation and culture. Three groups of people from different generations and different cultural backgrounds (Japanese and Americans) served as the participants (280 people for the questionnaire data and 18 people for the interview data). It was investigated whether there were any differences among the participants in demonstration of attentiveness, in the reasons for demonstration of attentiveness, and in rating degree of imposition to demonstrate attentiveness. It was also examined whether there was any relationship between degree of imposition to demonstrate attentiveness and demonstration of attentiveness; and in which relationship (the relationship between a demonstrator and a beneficiary of attentiveness varied from very familiar to not very familiar at all) attentiveness was demonstrated. The data were collected using a questionnaire with six situations, based on field notes; and the interviews were conducted using the same six situations. The results show that in most situations there were no major differences among the participants in the choice of demonstration of attentiveness and the reasons for it. The participants chose to demonstrate attentiveness in four situations in the questionnaire, because they wanted to be of help to the other party. There was a relationship between degree of imposition to demonstrate attentiveness and demonstration of attentiveness in four situations. Overall, the interview data confirmed the questionnaire data.

This paper investigates ways in which participants in everyday German narratives construct emotions as social phenomena; i.e. in particular, how they organize and communicate emotional involvement. I will argue that contextualizing emotions and affects permeates various levels of linguistic and interactional structures – even grammar: Participants in everyday German storytelling use specific syntactic patterns as resources for indexing affective stances and making past events interpretable and emotionally accessible to their co-participants. The analysis concentrates on particular syntactic resources (such as averbal constructions, infinite constructions, minimal syntactic phrases etc.) used to contextualize affect and emotion. Instead of treating these ‘dense constructions’ (e.g. averbal constructions “I:CH (.) mit meinen sachen rAuf, […] ICH (-) wieder rUnter,”; ‘me (.) with my stuff upstairs, […] me (-) down again,’) as elliptic structures and conceptualizing them as incomplete or reduced sentence patterns, this study explores the specific forms and functions of ‘dense constructions’ in interactive usage. I will argue that ‘dense constructions’ – even though they do not follow the rules of the grammar of Standard German – represent conventionalized patterns participants use to fulfil various communicative tasks in specific communicative genres. In producing such ‘fragmentary gestalts’, conversationalists index sudden, reflex-like actions, and thus, stage dramatic, emotionally loaded events for their co-participants to “re-experience” (Goffman 1974/1986: 506).

This study aimed to investigate language socialization of affect in Mandarin parent-child interaction. Natural conversations between Mandarin-speaking two-year-olds and their parents were analyzed, focusing on the lexicon of affect words and the conversational interactions in which these words were used. The results showed that the children tended to use the type of affect words which encoded specific affective states, with the children as the primary experiencers. The parents, on the other hand, tended to use affect words not only to encode affective states but also to express evaluative characterizations. They often used affect words to negotiate with the children the appropriate affective responses to a variety of stimuli or to socialize the children’s behaviors into culturally approved patterns. In addition, it was found that the structure of conversational sequences served as a discourse-level resource for the socialization of affect. The findings were further discussed in relation to Clancy’s (1999) model of language socialization of affect.

Although communication in medical practice is reputed for exactitude and objectivity, many doctors in several countries make equivocal, concealing utterances in certain situations when relating with clients. This phenomenon, despite its importance in doctor-client interaction, has received little attention from language scholars who have discussed concealment mainly as a strategy in news delivery. The present study examines concealment items in the interaction between doctors and clients in South-western Nigerian hospitals and their pragmatic implications for medical communication in Nigeria. Fifty (50) conversations between doctors and clients on several ailments were tape-recorded in the six states of South-western Nigeria. Structured and unstructured interviews were conducted with selected doctors and clients. The corpus was examined for the linguistic and pragmatic resources deployed by doctors in concealing information, and was analysed using Jacob Mey’s theory of pragmeme and insights from the literature on news delivery strategies. Concealment was found to take place between doctors and clients in a two-phase mode: Referential and pragmatic. Utterances which have descriptive forms at the referential level assume subjective and divergent shades in the context of concealment at the pragmatic level. Nine concealment strategies (jargonisation, veiling, forecasting, mitigation, stalling, normalisation, dysphemisation, euphemisation and doublespeak) were found to be employed to achieve four broad goals: Preventive, palliative, culture-compliant and confidential with respect to 25 diseases /medical procedures. Concealment in consultative encounters takes into account the socio-psychological security needs of clients and attends positively to clients’ cultural expectations.

Text mining aims at constructing classification models and finding interesting patterns in large text collections. This paper investigates the utility of applying these techniques to media analysis, more specifically to support discourse analysis of news reports about the 2007 Kenyan elections and post-election crisis in local (Kenyan) and Western (British and US) newspapers. It illustrates how text mining methods can assist discourse analysis by finding contrast patterns which provide evidence for ideological differences between local and international press coverage. Our experiments indicate that most significant differences pertain to the interpretive frame of the news events: whereas the newspapers from the UK and the US focus on ethnicity in their coverage, the Kenyan press concentrates on sociopolitical aspects.