This study explores how commenters to Facebook news posts orient towards and negotiate norms for news interaction. Unlike the news producer, commenters cannot state rules or delete comments. Instead, they influence commenting practices by meta-interacting in the comment sections. Based on the idea of changing discourses in news journalism, commenters’ norms are compared with the news producer’s rules. The data consists of 159 comments in 14 threads below 9 news posts on the Facebook page SVT Nyheter by Swedish public service news producer SVT. Contrary to some earlier research’s aim to state whether news comments are meaningful, it is investigated how commenters orient towards violations against norms, i.e. maxims of quantity, quality, relevance, manner, positive politeness, and liberal values. Notions from interactional linguistics and discourse analysis are applied, i.e. adjacency pairs, format tying, and intertextuality, revealing both formal and content-based parts of the negotiations. The findings highlight that not only SVT’s lack of participation in its comment sections limits its possibilities to influence commenting practices. SVT is also institutionally restricted from orienting towards norms of quantity, quality, relevance, manner, and liberal values. The commenters, however, tell each other e.g. not to lie, not to make false conclusions, not to use ambiguous language, and not to exaggerate, illustrating both constructive and destructive aspects of their influence.
This article examines what happens in the unusual event of a staff member being unable to provide requested service to a customer in Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish service situations. The study analyzes 25 cases (out of a corpus of 1,100 service encounters) where staff members reject a request, with focus on how such rejections are handled lexically, prosodically, and with embodied resources by both customers and staff. In the data, customers generally express some kind of affect – disappointment, surprise, frustration, and/or irritation – after staff members have delivered a rejection.The study shows that affect is not only audible, but also highly visible. In fact, embodied expressions of affect often precede verbal ones, and the affect expressed by non-verbal resources (facial expressions with puffed cheeks, downturned mouths, wide eyes and bared teeth, selftouching, and various vocalizations such as clicking sounds and sighing) often convey greater affect than the immediately following verbal expression. The data suggest that nonverbal and lexical expressions of affect do slightly different things in interaction, and that bodily resources signal more intense feelings such as irritation and frustration, while lexical resources tend to signal disappointment. The affect-laden displays in the rejection sequences studied represent a sequentially ordered phenomenon and bear certain conventionalized, even stylized features.
Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, the article examines the dialogical conditions of professional writing within Swedish municipal administration. The article focuses on the formal briefing note genre, a central text genre in municipal administration written by civil servants to present assessments and decision proposals to politicians. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with employees in one Swedish municipality with the aim to understand the dialogical factors that shape writing by studying how writers perceive their situation and the norms and practices that guide their work. The findings suggest that writers view themselves as active agents who influence texts, learning from experience, colleagues and previous texts. Colleagues and superiors play a crucial role in reviewing and approving texts, providing a collective dimension to the writing process. Templates and phrase banks are essential tools to help writers produce consistent and effective texts. Texts are tailored for politicians, who are the main recipients, but politicians rarely give direct feedback. The article discusses how writing in local government is highly regulated, yet allows for individual agency, highlighting the complex dia-logical relations that characterize the writing situation.
