Epilogue: commentary on stancetaking in motion
Published in Text & Talk
Teacher talk in primary school science: a focus on the exploration phase
Published in Text & Talk
In this article, we narrow our investigation to the talk provided by one teacher in the exploration phase of a primary school science project. The exploration phase warrants attention given its role in providing students with a common base of science activities that draws on their prior knowledge. We examine lesson excerpts from a grant-winning pri...
Are netizens social Darwinists?: Recontextualization of Chinese survival discourse in online discussions about the US-Ch...
Published in Text & Talk
Survival discourse has emerged as a prominent theme in online discussions about the US–China trade war on the Chinese social media platform Zhihu. This study undertakes a critical discourse analysis of this emergent discourse by examining 80 answers (totaling 95,753 words) from Zhihu users within the broader context of the invocation of survival di...
Conversation analysis and Wittgenstein
Published in Text & Talk
In the present paper I discuss the affinities between conversation analysis and Wittgenstein’s later ordinary language philosophy. Although both paradigms differ in purpose, they share some similarities: they both conceive language as an instrument for action, understanding as a manifestation of behaviour, and meaning as something generated in situ...
Politeness, performance, and pointing: gesture in Chinese reality television
Published in Text & Talk
This study examines the use of gesture by participants of the reality television show Sisters Who Make Waves. Based on 23.5 h of footage involving 30 participants, the analysis focuses on gestural communication by the female participants, who must straddle a formal/informal communicative environment dictated by the medium of reality television. Mor...
The effects of manipulative rhetoric in Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank” YouTube video
Published in Text & Talk
This article focuses on Kevin Spacey’s manipulative rhetoric in the YouTube video he posted on Christmas Eve in 2018 when he was facing a felony sexual assault charge in Nantucket District Court in USA. Drawing upon the notion of “double deixis” used for the second-person pronoun, this article questions the extent to which Spacey’s use of the first...
Fighting terrorism, fighting the West: Them versus Us appraisal in Chinese media’s discursive war on terror
Published in Text & Talk
While discourses on terror by the United States and its allies have been the focus of most previous studies, this article investigates discourses produced in the Chinese context. 247 news articles from China Daily and People’s Daily were analyzed according to a revised system of attitude within the appraisal framework in systemic functional linguis...
Arabic songs: an affective forum for combating COVID-19 and other insecurities
Published in Text & Talk
Like other literary genres, songs can be a successful outlet for achieving certain goals. Using a qualitative and descriptive approach utilizing the stancetaking framework, this study examines the development and use of more than 50 Arabic songs as a vehicle to not only inform the public about COVID-19, but also take affective stances that connect ...
Indexicality and ideology in narratives about intimate partner violence
Published in Text & Talk
Theories of indexicality explain the ways in which linguistic forms are linked to social forms. As such, indexicality deals in part with ideology and cultural discourses. This article demonstrates the ways in which intimate partner violence (IPV), seen as an indexical, discursive formation, facilitates the material and social manifestations and ram...
With or without a purpose? Judges’ appraisal of offenders or their behaviour in six sentencing remarks
Published in Text & Talk
This study examines judges’ language use in sentencing remarks in the Crown Courts of England and Wales. Six sentencing remarks were selected from all those available on the UK judiciary website (by October 2016). The cases selected for closer analysis are as similar to each other as possible, so as to ensure that the differences in the discursive ...
