A wide range of digital practices are currently employed to disseminate specialised knowledge beyond expert communities. Expert knowledge needs to be recontextualised so that it becomes accessible, understood an acceptable to diversified audiences with varying levels of expertise. How knowledge brokers construct and project their authorial voice plays a key role in this endeavour. This paper proposes a framework for analysing the construction of authorial voice in digital practices that recontextualise expert knowledge, based on the discursive choices made by knowledge brokers and the discursive roles enacted through them. The framework is applied to a corpus of 40 digital dissemination texts: 20 author-generated texts published in The Conversation and 20 writer-mediated research digests in two disciplines: Economy and Natural Sciences. Overall results show that Stance-taking and Comprehensibility roles are more prominent than Credibility and especially Engagement roles. Differences are observed in the Credibility roles enacted by knowledge producers versus mediators, and in Stance-taking across disciplines. The results offer insights into how expert knowledge is disseminated in trustworthy digital sources and can inform more critical consumption and production of such practices.
This study examines the multimodal discursive construction of the 2021 Spanish energy crisis in online newspapers, a crisis marked by energy price surges and severe consumer impact. Drawing on Social Semiotics, with a critical stance, a multimodal discursive analysis of headlines and images in 20 articles, from Spanish and International newspapers, is carried out to critically look at how the energy crisis is constructed in the discourse. The results reveal a significant difference between the two data sets. From an international perspective, Spain enacts a protagonist role and engages in proactive crisis management and resolution, while the Spanish articles focus on citizens’ predicament, constructing crisis as an eventuation and ignoring the human social roles played in it. Both similarly show, however, the power of the interplay of multimodal resources in consolidating specific interpretations and reproducing divergent views on the same crisis.
This study analyzes the linguistic and conceptual role of adwene (a judicial concept) in Akan judicial discourse. Using transcripts collected from 10 Akan Native Courts in Ghana and working within Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Framework (CMF), the paper explores how interpretations of adwene are used to construct and understand participants’ intentions, stance, and worldview regarding justice, legality, morality, and social acceptability within Akan judicial practice and jurisprudence. The findings reveal that the term adwene is structurally conceptualized and interpreted by participants through multiple distinct, yet interconnected, conceptual categories: thought, brain/mind, wisdom, and integrity. Participants’ verbal argumentations and evaluative commentaries on testimonial narratives demonstrably illustrate the functions of these conceptualizations in managing accountability and culpability within the legal discourse. In conclusion, this research explicitly establishes the systematic interface between cognition, as mediated by the conceptualization of adwene, and linguistic behavior among judicial interlocutors. The study posits that participants’ legal and social actions are fundamentally grounded in and dependent upon the established cultural and judicial understanding of adwene . Consequently, a deeper understanding of the conceptual metaphors and usage patterns associated with adwene is crucial for elucidating how judicial participants construct and interpret their judicial ecology and, ultimately, shape customary legal practice.
