Corporate apologies constitute critical legitimacy-repair rituals in contemporary crisis communication. Current research predominantly examines monomodal textual features or born-digital formats, neglecting how traditional apology letters adapt across polymedia landscapes. Two key limitations persist: (1) insufficient attention to interdiscursive negotiations between legal, PR, and marketing discourses within crisis management teams, and (2) inadequate exploration of multimodal transformations when apology letters migrate across channels. This study addresses these gaps through a critical genre analysis of 53 corporate apology letters (2009-2024) disseminated via email, newspapers, websites, and social media. Integrating interdiscursive and multimodal frameworks, we examine how rhetorical moves negotiate competing professional objectives while adapting to channel affordances. Three discoveries emerge: First, legal hedging strategies manifest in Moves 8-9 through selective cause omission and indirect responsibility admission. Second, emotional intensification commodifies contrition into relational capital, contrasting with East Asian deference patterns. Third, channel-driven "participatory control" emerges: websites embed regulatory documentation within relational prompts, while social media hijacks interactivity for narrative control. The findings reveal corporate apologies as neoliberal legitimacy interfaces, transforming ethical accountability into linguistically engineered spectacles.
Originating in Sweden and subsequently spreading throughout the Nordic countries (Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021), the phenomenon of simplification has become one of the most widely discussed topics when talking about communication. It is mainly aimed at people suffering from cognitive disorders (Maa ss, 2020, p. 19; Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021, p. 14). Although its use in foreign language teaching remains debatable, it has always had a significant and pervasive implication on language teaching. This article, based on existing scientific literature on the subject and following both qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (surveys) methods, aims to investigate a largely unexplored area of teaching French and Spanish to adult learners in university language centers in Finland. Our main research questions focus on how teachers perceive simplification and the importance they assign to it in addressing language complexity in oral and written materials. The results show that, drawing on their own teaching experiences, teachers at language centers in Finland can identify and describe this phenomenon, which they unanimously consider necessary for beginners. However, they believe that, as the learning process progresses, its use should decrease in order to promote the acquisition of the target language.
This paper explores the concept of writing along a "line of flight" by juxtaposing the literary corpora of Novas Cartas Portuguesas by the Three Marias and the poetry of Yu Xiuhua. The "line of flight", a philosophical concept proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), describes a non-linear existence marked by continual rupture and transformation. Writing along this trajectory entails a mode of literary creation grounded in disobedience and resistance to pre-established order. The authors are approached as "nomadic subjects", a term developed by Braidotti (2011) based on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of nomadism, which implies a refusal of fixed identity and a transgression of preconceived boundaries. While resisting essentialist categories, the authors simultaneously assert a female positionality and illuminate the gaps between women situated in diverse social, cultural, and bodily contexts. Novas Cartas Portuguesas constructs a kaleidoscopic female universe rooted in the figure of Mariana Alcoforado, whereas Yu Xiuhua's poetry complements this with the inscription of a differently-abled body, emphasizing the materiality of embodiment and revealing the often-invisible disparities among women across distinct lived realities.
Originating in Sweden and subsequently spreading throughout the Nordic countries (Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021), the phenomenon of simplification has become one of the most widely discussed topics when talking about communication. It is mainly aimed at people suffering from cognitive disorders (Maaß, 2020, p. 19; Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021, p. 14). Although its use in foreign language teaching remains debatable, it has always had a significant and pervasive implication on language teaching. This article, based on existing scientific literature on the subject and following both qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (surveys) methods, aims to investigate a largely unexplored area of teaching French and Spanish to adult learners in university language centers in Finland. Our main research questions focus on how teachers perceive simplification and the importance they assign to it in addressing language complexity in oral and written materials. The results show that, drawing on their own teaching experiences, teachers at language centers in Finland can identify and describe this phenomenon, which they unanimously consider necessary for beginners. However, they believe that, as the learning process progresses, its use should decrease in order to promote the acquisition of the target language.
Despite a growing interest in task-based teaching in second language acquisition research and L2 instruction, classroom-based studies investigating its applicability to L2 pragmatics instruction remain scarce. The current study aimed to compare the effects of task-based versus task-supported language teaching on EFL learners’ acquisition of L2 hedge phrases. 72 homogenous upper-intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to one control and two experimental groups. Experimental group 1 (TSLT-EG1; n = 25) followed a task-supported framework, whereas the second experimental group (TBLT-EG2; n = 23) followed the so-called “weak” task-based framework. The control group (CG; n = 24) took part in regular classes that were not intended to teach hedge phrases. The groups’ pragmatic production was measured using a written test and a focused communication task. The results suggest that both experimental conditions yielded positive outcomes, as evidenced by the acquisition of hedge phrases, with the TBLT group showing more lasting effects than the task-supported group in the written test.
