As a genre of institutional talk, broadcast interviews require interviewers and interviewees to design their talk for an overhearing audience. Based on data from Indonesian broadcast interviews, this study explores the tension that arises between adhering to this institutional norm and simultaneously addressing one another. Focusing on references to person deployed within a story told by an interviewee depicting two figures in conflict, the analysis demonstrates how both co-participants and the audience construe the storytelling as a departure from this norm. Co-participants' responses to the telling—including laughter, gaze aversion, elaborate postural shifts, participation in story reenactments and engagement in mutual blame—suggest that they treat the responsibility for maintaining the norm as a matter of mutual accountability rather than one attributable solely to interviewers, who are institutionally tasked with managing the interview process.
This article examines how twenty users detect, correct, accept, or playfully repurpose voice-to-text errors, comparing voice with text. Using screen recordings, screenshots, and stimulated recall interviews, the analysis reveals how users hold voice and text together. I call this attentional work transcriptive listening: a situated comparison between acoustic memory and algorithmic written form, made when users decide whether the output stands for the utterance. Voice-to-text repair is not a technical inconvenience but a site where the speech–writing relation is managed under algorithmic conditions. The algorithm’s orientation toward standard written Chinese naturalizes a language ideology, yet users’ remedial work turns the gap into situated meaning-making. Under algorithmic pre-writing, integrating speech and writing becomes belated and remedial rather than spontaneous.
Kit house catalogs did more than advertise houses; they participated in constructing ideas about what made a house desirable and what a home should provide. This study examines changing representations of domestic value in catalogs produced by the Aladdin Company between 1915 and 1975. Combining a quantitative analysis of adjective use across a corpus of Aladdin house descriptions with a qualitative analysis of the Sunshine, a house plan marketed repeatedly between 1919 and 1953, the study traces changes in aesthetic, functional, and spatial language over time. The results reveal not a straightforward replacement of one set of domestic values by another, but a recurrent reweighting of values that remained available throughout the period. The Sunshine makes this process especially visible: a relatively stable material form is repeatedly recontextualized through changing combinations of affective, aesthetic, functional, and spatial qualities. Rather than treating catalogs as transparent reflections of consumer preference, the study approaches them as mediating texts that both draw upon and participate in constructing historically situated ideas of the desirable home. The analysis demonstrates how linguistic evidence can illuminate the changing meanings attached to material objects and the cultural values through which those objects are made desirable.
This article examines how K’iche’ Maya migrants in Austin, Texas negotiate language use and self-identity in a multilingual diaspora context. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with five K’iche’-speaking migrants, the study analyzes everyday communicative events. Using linguistic boundary-making, the article demonstrates how language is used in constructing inclusion and solidarity. In restaurant kitchens and other workplaces, K’iche’ serves as a tool for micro-community formation and covert communication. Additionally, in contrast to highland ideologies that emphasize rigid linguistic distinctions, diasporic interactions often collapse boundaries between closely related Mayan languages, privileging mutual intelligibility over categorical separation. By documenting how boundaries are continually renegotiated, this study contributes to scholarship on migration, sociolinguistic adaptation, and Maya diaspora communities.
