Language, Culture and Society - Current Issue

This paper explores power/knowledge relations of nomenclature practices associated with non-Indigenous positionality statements. Focusing on the ways in which knowledge shapes meaning and understanding, and calls for decolonising scholarly practices, we interrogate the socio-cultural-political nexus of positionality statements to highlight some inherent challenges that ought to be addressed in contemporary research spaces. Taking a post-structuralist discursive approach, we examine four common self-referential non-Indigenous positioning words — settler, colonist, white, and non-Indigenous — to discuss the linguistic implications for relationality to, and with, First Nations Peoples and standpoints. To demonstrate the importance of understanding nuances of language, examples of positionality statements are provided throughout, and explanations provided that highlight the potential implications for cross-cultural mean making. Our purpose in writing on this topic is to provocate that positionality statements, when written and/or spoken with considered and informed use, are critical to decolonising the harmful practices and assumed superiority of the western ways of thinking and doing.

We analyse how Albanian onward migrants from Greece living in the UK construct and negotiate forms of vulnerability they experienced along their migration trajectories. Focus group participants weaved life narratives in which vulnerabilities were constantly but variably imbricated. The risks to personal safety that they experienced in Albania set participants’ migratory trajectories in motion. The hostile institutional policies participants were subjected to in Greece drove them to onward migrate. The UK was constructed as a migratory destination where racism was more subtly present compared to Greece. We, therefore, conceptualise participants’ migratory experiences as constituting trajectories of vulnerability.

While the problem still remains decriminalised in Russia, this study explores domestic violence victims’ storytelling in four episodes of the popular Russian talk show Pust’ Govoryat, which aired from 2017 to 2020. By drawing upon De Fina’s (2021) narratives-as-practice approach and van Leeuwen’s (2008) CDA theory, I critically examine storytelling as a discourse practice itself and situate constructed identities, norms, and values in wider dominant discourses of country’s social and political life. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Baker 2012) helps to analyse the representation of abusers and victims. Qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that the show, broadcast on the main state-funded federal channel, propagates a family ideology that supports victim-blaming, normalises and depolitisises domestic violence. The research indicates that such an anti-feminist, misogynist, and patriarchal discourse becomes an integral part of the state’s anti-Western and anti-liberal ideology and resonates with the general increase in epistemological violence in today’s Russia.

In Spanish, uno (‘one’) is third person pronoun whose referent is categorically a first-person singular referent of human nature: “Uno quiere salir adelante” (‘One wants to go onwards’). It represents the person speaking, but a second person or a nonspecified group of referents may also be included in the reference. Speakers refer to themselves by using this pronoun, but at the same time, they intend to give a universal reading to the content. The use of uno (‘one’) promotes a desubjectivizing style of discourse suited to achieve certain concrete communicative goals. Desubjectivization is a cognitive process based on the gradual cognitive salience or accessibility of personal referents. In this investigation, uno (‘one’) is analyzed as a desubjectivizing resource by observing its use across sex/gender factors. Sex/gender will be approached as a covariating factor with the use of the pronoun uno, considering that it is a grammatical choice that will contribute to the construction of a communicative style. Two pragmatic referential readings of uno were isolated and their analysis was performed in a corpus of social media texts (Facebook, X and Instagram). Results reveal that men tend to create a more desubjectivizing style according to their frequency of using unevenly both readings of uno in all and social media text. In turn, women showed an increasing percentage of just one of the uno’s reading on the social media X, thus, women tend to create a less desubjectivizing style than men.

This study explores pronominal address forms in the linguistic landscape of Hispanic Philadelphia, examining how Spanish-speaking communities use second-person singular pronouns (tú, usted, vos) in public signage. The research objectives were to identify which pronouns of address are employed and determine the variables influencing their usage. A corpus of 250 signs was analyzed across three Hispanic neighborhoods and virtual spaces, considering variables such as location, authorship, language composition, and speech act. Chi-squared tests and logistic regression were used to assess the impact of these variables on pronoun choice. The findings reveal that only “tú” and “usted” are present in the linguistic landscape, with “tú” being slightly more prevalent (55.2%). Language composition (p = 0.035) and speech act (p < 0.001) significantly influence pronoun selection, while location and authorship do not. Bilingual signs tend to favor “usted”, whereas monolingual signs prefer “tú”. Regarding speech acts, requests are more likely to use “usted”, while invitations and persuasive messages favor “tú”. The study concludes that while there is no evidence of a new speech community emerging, there is a convergence in pronominal use across diverse Hispanic neighborhoods, suggesting linguistic accommodation in written language. These findings contribute to our understanding of pronominal treatment in diasporic contexts and highlight the complexity of address forms in Spanish.