The paper analyses the interactional functions of stories in YouTube videos where finance influencers (“finfluencers”) share advice relating to personal finance and wealth. Applying positioning theory on a dataset of 80 videos, this paper investigates self-presentation and the embedding of stories in this discourse context. The findings show that stories and the act of telling justify or elaborate recommendations and definitions and thereby seek to demonstrate the influencer’s expertise in finance. Stories aim to establish relatability by aligning the influencer, or rather their story-self, with the hypothetical viewer. Yet some stories about personal achievements seemingly disalign the successful finfluencer and their target audience of novices. The analysis suggests that story functions in finfluencer advice videos are different from story functions attested in the discourses of, for example, lifestyle influencers and peer-support forums due to differences in genre norms, target audience and discourse community.
Neutrality has long been central to Austrian national identity, symbolising independence, humanitarianism, distinctiveness within Europe, and nationhood itself. Since its inception in 1955, it has been discursively contested at critical junctures such as Austria’s accession to the European Union. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reactivated and destabilised this cornerstone of Austrian national identity, sparking renewed debate about its meaning. This article examines how neutrality was defended, redefined, and contested across politics, traditional media, and social media between February 2022 and September 2025. Drawing on a German-language corpus of 8625 texts, the study integrates the Discourse-Historical Approach with corpus-based argumentation and narrative analysis to identify recurring topoi and narratives. Results show field-specific patterns: politics mobilises topoi episodically, media routinises them in polarised coverage, and social media refracts them into volatile and populist framings. The findings confirm neutrality’s resilience but highlight mounting pressures from European integration, economic crisis, and far-right populist co-optation.
This article examines how selected prosodic cues in Donald Trump’s campaign rallies guide audience inference in populist political performance. Rather than offering a corpus-wide account, it presents a discourse-pragmatic case study of four focal extracts drawn from a larger dataset of 10 campaign rallies from the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Combining time-aligned transcription with Praat-based inspection of F0, intensity, duration, and pause structure, the study analyzes how local prosodic patterning contributes to contrastive framing, audience uptake, and affective alignment in live rally settings. The findings show that pitch movement where recoverable, durational marking, pacing, and strategic pausing do not encode ideological meanings in themselves; rather, they make particular interpretations more accessible in context, including antagonistic contrast, ridicule, collective alignment, and crisis escalation. By situating the analysis at the intersection of discourse pragmatics and socioprosodics, the article argues that prosody is not merely ornamental in populist rallies but part of the interactional organization through which speaker and crowd co-construct political meaning. The study contributes a more empirically bounded account of how vocal form shapes inference in mediatized political performance.
This paper examines the methodological challenges of using the grammatical contrast between active and passive clauses as a proxy for ideological bias in computational discourse analysis. Paying particular attention to a recent analysis of New York Times coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we note the conflation of syntactic categories like “passive” with semantic properties like “agentless,” and we argue that conclusions that equate the two require a warrant that is often not provided. We outline construct-valid alternatives for investigating agency and responsibility in news discourse, emphasizing the independence of grammatical considerations from the semantic matter of agent identification. Our analysis contributes to methodological debates about the integration of computational tools in critical discourse analysis.
This chapter examines Chilean colloquial language in medical consultations between two GPs and 14 university students, who self-identify as having invisible disabilities. It shows how locally grounded verbal resources may help legitimise students' lay expertise, support sensitive concerns, and mitigate epistemic asymmetries. We argue that colloquial Chilean Spanish can function as a key communicative resource for equity, not simply by replacing medical jargon with plain language, but by creating interactional conditions in which students' lifeworld concerns are treated as legitimate parts of the consultation. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analysed 14 videotaped consultations by identifying stretches of talk containing colloquial expressions and applying corpus methods to examine their frequency and context. Building on Cordella's Fellow Human Voice, an illustrative case study explores interactional patterns observed across the dataset, focusing on the GPs' use of colloquial and interactional resources to display attentiveness, normalise psychological symptoms and formulate inclusive recommendations.
