This article examines modality in Chilean Spanish from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective, using the Introduction to Report of the Commission of Historical Truth and New Deal with Indigenous Peoples (2008) as its data corpus. While descriptions of modality in Spanish remain limited, we address this gap by analysing congruent and metaphorical realisations of modality and their role in authorial stances in the construction of historical interpretations. The analysis focuses on the Report's Introduction, which outlines key historical periods and justifies their significance. Instances of modality are described by type, value, and realisation, and their contribution to authorial stances is interpreted within the engagement system. The findings reveal a patterned interplay between contraction and expansion of the dialogic space: probability and obligation with high values consolidate authority and present claims as necessary and indisputable, while lower values of obligation, ability, and inclination expand the dialogic space, allowing alternative perspectives and softening categorical assertions. Spanish-specific realisational strategies also support nuanced positioning, enabling the authors to foreground or background the modal responsible, shift focus from capacity to potentialities, and present intentions indirectly. Overall, the study contributes to SFL-based descriptions of modality in Chilean Spanish and provides a framework for analysing historical and official reports.
Instant messaging (IM) has become an integral part of professional communication in the Netherlands, yet its role in institutional interaction remains understudied. This study examines IM in pediatric rehabilitation, where professionals and parents of children with developmental disabilities use IM to communicate and collaborate. Our data comprises naturally occurring IM group chats in Siilo, an instant messaging (IM) app designed for healthcare professionals. The chats we studied were group chat exchanges between three pairs of parents and multiple paramedical health care professionals over a period of three months. Using a qualitative approach based on digital conversation analysis, we identify four key courses of action accomplished in IM interaction: (1) continuous progress reporting; (2) instructing parents on implementing care at home; (3) integrating children's experiences into therapy; and (4) displaying and transferring responsibilities. Our findings demonstrate that IM extends communication beyond clinical settings, facilitating real-time interaction, asynchronous coordination, and multimedia-enhanced collaboration. This allows for a more dynamic and responsive caregiving process, bridging institutional and home environments. However, it also raises questions about communicative burdens and professional boundaries. By situating IM use within an affordance framework, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of mediated communication in healthcare contexts.
This study employs a combination of diachronic discourse analysis and statistical methods to examine three Chinese historical biographies from distinct historical periods, with genre evolution, hybridity, and heterogeneity closely examined to elucidate the dynamic interplay between textual practices, the enactment of social actions, and sociohistorical forces. The analysis reveals that Chinese historical biographies exhibit pronounced hybridity, integrating five text types: narrative, evaluative, argumentative, explanatory, and expository. Diachronic heterogeneity is manifest in linguistic features and the relative emphasis on specific social actions of establishing value, disseminating knowledge, and entertaining readers. It is also found that the evolution, hybridity and heterogeneity of these biographies and their associated social actions can be attributed to the dominant ideologies - nationalism, truth-seeking, and sensationalism - that were prevalent during their respective periods of composition in China.
This study examines the use of lexical resources, specifically stance markers and discourse markers, to discuss scientific uncertainty in interactions between scientists and Committee members during Congressional hearing question-and-answer sessions in the USA. A corpus of 150 transcripts from hearings on climate change, emerging diseases, and genetic engineering is examined utilizing discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics. In focusing on how differences in lexical resources represent differences in the conceptualizations of scientific uncertainty, the analysis identifies important linguistic differences that may lead to the politicization of science. The findings show that the conceptualizations of scientists and Committee members do not always align and that the discourse marker, well, plays a role in identifying misalignments. The study emphasizes the importance of continued research on the role of stance markers in meaning-making associated with scientific uncertainty, thus contributing to the broader understanding of the influence of expert versus nonexpert identities on word choice.
The present study investigates the linguistic mechanisms underlying textual narratives that evoke horror in the Backrooms discourse. Originating on 4chan (an anonymous image-based internet forum) in 2019 and rapidly evolving through participatory storytelling, the Backrooms discourse depicts unsettling urban spaces marked by shifting architectural forms and ambiguous spatial configurations. Drawing on cognitive linguistic frameworks, including frame semantics and Cognitive Grammar, this exploratory analysis examines how language creates unease by systematically disrupting prototypical schemas. A corpus of 5,676 words from 10 Backrooms descriptions (Levels 0-9) is analyzed using an annotation scheme that identifies semantic incongruities, agentless constructions, and non-prototypical framing structures. The findings reveal that textual horror is generated by contradictions in spatial frames, dehumanization via passivation, and deliberate hedging that shifts attention from human agency to the environment. These linguistic features undermine conventional image schemas such as container and source-path-goal, contributing to cognitive disorientation. The study proposes a way of analyzing digital horror narratives and suggests that further quantitatively oriented research may expand understanding of the role of language in constructing textual horror.
This article uses 25 Think Aloud interviews to investigate the ability of patient-generated multimodal materials about endometriosis health care in the National Health Service Wales, UK, to evoke empathy in others. Critically evaluating relevant findings from several disciplines, empathy is reconceptualized as a dynamic and context-dependent form of social meaning-making. The combination of thematic analysis with a dynamic-systems approach to discourse analysis enabled the distinction between four interactive processes involved in empathy - "recognition", "resonance", "alignment", and "affiliation" - as well as revealing common linguistic resources used to express or withhold empathy in the data. Specifically, the study findings show that an individual's socially situated identities, as well as their own experiences of a particular healthcare system, may encourage or impede their empathic responses to representations of other people's suffering.
Comments play a significant role in online fandom construction on social media. This paper investigates the role of metapragmatic comments (MPCs) in constructing online fandom, discussing the underlying mechanism behind the use of MPCs on Chinese social media. The present study draws on a self-built dataset of 69,086 comments gathered from Weibo, which were employed in response to a public apology by a top Chinese e-commerce live-streaming influencer. Through a mixed-methods analysis, this study finds that different types of MPCs illustrate varying reactions and demonstrate how fans respond to the apology by either expressing their acceptance or signaling their rejection. Special attention is then paid to three emerging interactive patterns that reveal how MPCs are intended to dynamically construct online fandom, namely eliciting intense resentment, engaging in satirical humor, and catalyzing new topics. This study not only deepens our understanding of metapragmatic awareness revealed by fans' discourse within the context of e-commerce but also highlights how social media affordances and digital fan culture contribute to online fandom construction.
This study investigates how lawyers strategically employ Attitude resources of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation to construct moral legitimation in civil trials. Drawing on verbatim transcripts from 12 Chinese civil trial videos, the analysis examines lawyers' deployment of these resources, with a focus on their subtypes, targets, polarity, and ways of realization. The findings reveal that Affect: dis/inclination, Judgement: propriety/capacity, and Appreciation: valuation/composition are dominant Attitude subtypes in lawyers' argumentation. They are typically employed to target plaintiff/defendant, non-witness third parties, the court, evidence, and non-evidence entities, with positive/negative polarity tendencies. Predominantly inscribed and with limited instances of invoked Judgement, these resources contribute to the evaluation and abstraction types of moral legitimation. The strategic construction of moral legitimation by Attitude resources operates via hierarchical and binary mechanisms, stemming, respectively, from the inherent hierarchy among the appraised targets and the interplay between positive/negative polarity tendencies. This nuanced exploration illuminates the intricate relationship between linguistic strategies and power dynamics within courtroom discourse, offering valuable insights for enhancing persuasive techniques in legal argumentation.
Social interaction is pervaded by troubling experiences of marginalization, discrimination, and injustice, yet people's attempts to account for such experiences often encounter difficulties. In this article, we review findings from conversation analytic and discursive psychological research to illuminate these challenges. We summarize the findings regarding (1) the conditions under which troubling experiences of interactional inequality occur; (2) the stakes involved in accounting for such experiences; (3) the narrative and discursive resources used for making them culturally intelligible; and (4) the local consequences of talking about these experiences in different contexts. We draw on the notion of "hermeneutical injustice" as a framework to highlight the potential for social and societal critique embedded in these research findings. We argue that the difficulties in accounting for troubling experiences of interactional inequality are unevenly distributed, and that this injustice contributes to the reproduction of broader societal inequalities.
Engagement strategies in academic talks highlight how speakers position and manage their target audience, facilitating the effective communication of their academic stances. The present study investigates engagement strategies in academic talks delivered in L1 Mandarin Chinese and two varieties of English: L1 English and English as a lingua franca (ELF). Three corpora comprising 90 academic talks in the humanities and social sciences serve as the basis for analysis. The overarching findings underscore the prominence of hearer-mentions as the predominant form of engagement markers, with L1 English speakers notably favouring the combined use of hearer-mentions and directives to foster engagement with their audience. In comparison, L1 Mandarin speakers exhibit a proclivity towards using questions and directives as primary tactics for audience management and ELF scholars frequently incorporate knowledge appeals into their academic talks, while the use of personal-asides remains relatively infrequent. Moreover, the disciplinary nuances suggest that the choice of engagement markers may be influenced by specific disciplinary conventions and linguacultural variations. The findings not only contribute to a comparative analysis of academic spoken performance across diverse linguistic backgrounds and disciplines, but are also of potential interest to inform future speech training by adjusting and applying these strategies in communication.
There is a prevalent belief that 'good' mothers should avoid using smartphones around their infants, as it is thought to harm infant development and the mother-infant relationship. Despite this belief, many mothers find smartphones beneficial for accessing online support and information during the postpartum period. The social role of 'mother' comes with a suite of cultural, social, and moral expectations on how to behave and care for children. With the recent uptake of seeking parenting information or advice via smartphones and mobile applications (apps), a new social and educational discourse is emerging. Mothers are using digital technologies in various ways to support their mothering practices. However, there is limited understanding of the nuances of how, what, why, or when mothers use mobile apps or web-searching. Using one fragment of ethnomethodological interview data and adopting a 'culture-in-action' lens, we explore how a first-time mother constructs moral versions of 'mother' through her use of a baby app to support her mothering practices. Our analysis reveals the mother's cultural knowledge-in-use, showing smartphones as valuable resources for improving and supporting mothering practices. This study underscores the importance of understanding how mothers integrate smartphone technologies into their mothering practices in practical and beneficial ways.
This paper argues that meaning-making in the digital age has undergone a fundamental shift, no longer confined to the province of human actors. In today’s complex digital environments, semiosis – the core mechanism of signification – has become a distributed process, emerging from dynamic interactions among human users, algorithmic agents, and technological affordances. This shift challenges traditional anthropocentric models of semiosis and underscores the necessity for a reconceptualization of semiosis that can account for the heterogeneous actors shaping the contemporary semiotic landscape. To this end, this study advances a framework of distributed semiosis that integrates the roles of diverse human and non-human factors, with particular attention given to social media platforms – here conceptualized as platfospheres – as complex digital communicative environments. The paper draws on Peirce’s processual and relational model of semiosis, reframing signs as ephemeral relational dynamics (rather than static entities) unfolding within broader networks of distributed semiotic processes that are fundamentally inferential. It explores how Interpretants , as outcomes of relational sign dynamics, are increasingly becoming distributed within the hybrid ecosystems of contemporary digital environments. It thus offers a fine-grained framework for understanding the dynamics of semiosis in the digital age.
This study aims to investigate the use of the humor marker (HM) kaigewanxiao (literally, 'just kidding') in Chinese media discourse from a metapragmatic perspective. Based on 200 instances from the Media Language Corpus and adopting a corpus-based, bottom-up analysis, we establish a position-function taxonomy. The HM occurs in three sequential positions: prospective position, mid-message position, and retrospective position. These positions correspond to six interactional functions: (1) a prefiguration of an upcoming non-serious stance; (2) an adjustment; (3) a retraction from an immediately prior non-serious stance; (4) a repair of failed humor; (5) a shift from a non-serious to a serious frame; and (6) setting up a new joke. Through the lens of rapport management, we argue that the use of the HM in media discourse demonstrates the speaker's metapragmatic awareness in managing rapport with both the co-participants and the overhearing audience.
Since language plays an important role in the construction of ecological thoughts, the investigation of discourses of animals has become a major concern in the field of ecolinguistics. However, there has been a small amount of research which focuses on beneficial discourses of animals and engages in linguistic analysis of the positive ecological concepts conveyed by them. Therefore, this paper, from an ecostylistic perspective, employs ecological discourse analysis (EDA) to examine how positive ecological concepts are framed through representative discourses of wild animals in the documentary Wild China. More specifically, it draws upon transitivity patterns in conjunction with appraisal patterns within Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to analyse the clusters of linguistic features in discourses of wild animals and interpret the underlying ecological ideologies that can be realized from these linguistic expressions within the Chinese ecological contexts. The findings show that the discourses of wild animals in the documentary mainly carry two explicit ecological concepts, namely "living" and "equality", and two implicit ecological concepts, namely "harmony" and "sustainability". Through the application of the ecostylistic approach, this paper sheds light on the impact of discourses of animals on the transportation of positive ecological concepts.
This case study attempts to describe the mechanism of meaning-making in picture books as the unity of texts and images. The study proposes that the applicability of meaning/function-based local grammar extends to multimodal discourse. By examining six picture books considered prototypical conflict narratives, our study identified and analyzed multimodal local grammar patterns accounting for three meanings: evaluation, ownership, and identification. The findings revealed that some meaning units in verbal and visual modes possess stronger semantic and pragmatic relationships among themselves than with others. These multimodal meaning units further co-select to form larger meaning units. The study also demonstrated how these patterns reflect conflict resolution strategies. Three strategies were observed: updating specific functional elements of a multimodal local grammar pattern, replacing the entire pattern, and forming non-conventional verbal-visual co-selection relationships within a pattern. These findings may contribute to communication analysis and foreign language education.
This article investigates how the reframing of a client's identity emerges in talk therapy known as Motivational Interviewing (MI), and discusses the ethical dimensions of the therapist's role. As a method developed for conversations about behavior change, MI combines a client-centered and a directive approach that emphasizes, and ideally also strengthens, a client's autonomy and resources for change. One characteristic of MI is the extended use of a therapist's reflections on a client's change talk in ways which create a new narrative version that highlights the client's resources and commitment to change. Using a dataset of three first meetings of clients and therapists, we trace this narrative reframing by employing Bamberg's three-level method for the analysis of small stories through the story told, the here-and-now interaction, and references to broader cultural master narratives. We show how on all three levels, alternative identities emerge through narratives co-constructed between the client and the therapist, and we discuss the ambiguities of narrative ownership in the delicate balance between client-centeredness and direction in MI.
This article uses membership categorization analysis to investigate the discursive practices of unacquainted, matched Tinder users in chat conversations, in the process of developing a potential romantic relationship. Drawing on data from 157 Spanish Tinder conversations, we examine the identification work performed by the matched Tinder users to get acquainted and explore their compatibility. The analysis shows that in order to identify their matches and explore their compatibility, the Tinder users ask questions that invite their recipients to categorize themselves with respect to various membership categorization devices or categories, and the responses reveal the specific categories from these devices with which the recipients identify. Co-membership in the invoked categories is typically positively received by both parties and is understood to signal compatibility. Progress in the process of exploration is conducive to relational intimacy and is also understood to signal progress in the development of a potential romantic relationship. We conclude by observing that relationships are ongoing everyday accomplishments formed on the basis of much categorization work. The data are in Spanish and Italian with English translations.
In this article, we explore how praises directed at clients are used in Finnish career guidance encounters. More specifically, we examine how praise works as a tool for attending to the institutional agenda of career guidance. Our data set is a compilation of career and study guidance encounters within schools and universities, including 16 video-recorded and one audio-recorded career guidance sessions with 15 student-clients and 9 professionals. We use conversation analysis as an approach and method. Our analysis shows that the praises either focus on the client’s strengths or their effort and skill in “doing career work”. The praises occur in three contexts of performing institutional tasks of the encounters: 1. Mapping the client’s situation, where praise is used in closing-relevant positions to “set aside” unproblematic issues; 2. Taking a stance on the client’s strengths, where praise is offered to deliver professional views on the client’s character, and to counter their self-deprecations; and, 3. Contributing to decision-making, where praise is used to topicalize the client’s assets as cues to decision-making and to validate their interests. In general, the counsellors make efforts to show that their praise is grounded in the client’s self-report.
This study examines the use of literacy practices in a performance management system which aims to produce reflective practitioners, and how these practices were discursively resisted by staff. It employed a linguistic ethnographic research method, drawing on interactional data, interviews, field notes, and documentation to examine technologised literacy practices. These practices were a form of technologisation of discourse in the workplace, and were usually forms of writing connected to the performance management system that worked to also position reviewees as reflective practitioners. However, running parallel with these was a form of discursive counter-conduct that variously portrayed these practices as HR language, KPI language or managese. Implications for workplace discourse, and the interplay between institutional and professional discourses, are explored.
China implemented stringent COVID restrictions in 2020 but eased them in December 2022. Since metaphors can both reflect and shape people's views and stances, it is relevant to study how the state-backed newspaper Global Times used metaphors to frame the policy shift for different target readers. It extends our previous research on the newspaper's 2020 editorials, revealing the fluidity of metaphors used by the same text producer during a period of significant transition. Despite changes in COVID-19 policies, the newspaper continued to use WAR metaphors between January 2022 and February 2023. However, the gradual increase in JOURNEY metaphors and decrease in WAR metaphors over time suggest a transition from a "militaristic" to a "smoother" portrayal of the pandemic's progression. While the newspaper consistently maintained pro-China and anti-US stances, it used fewer metaphors to describe the US position. The metaphor shift for China from "a person who does not lie flat" to "a person who rolls up sleeves and works hard" aligns with the government's change in focus from the pandemic situation to economic recovery. It should be noted that translation practices further affect metaphor perception, with source-text readers exposed to more negative depictions of the pandemic and the US compared to target-text readers. Future research could explore these metaphors' impact on audiences.
