This paper reviews the implications for research in cultural literacy of the current hypothesis that revolutionary advances in communication technology are inseparable from an over-reliance on emotion, both in the representation of global disaster and human suffering and as a means of manipulating public behaviour in the political and commercial spheres. It explores the view that feeling has become a simulacrum or form of “hyperreality” whose “contagion” through targeted exploitation is an obstacle to deeper understanding of social processes. It summarises the challenges which this presents for research into the nature of cultural literacy by critically considering three current paradigms: affect theory, clinical psychology including neuroscience, and memetics with due regard for recent attempts to model social behaviour through computer-based simulation. Its conclusions are that historical comparisons between past and present of the processes whereby cultural artefacts mediate emotion, combined with highly contextualised empirical fieldwork into their contemporary impact, should be key foci of critical research into cultural literacy, using the full range of technological instruments available.

This paper seeks to make the case for a more empirical, situation-based approach to pragmatic analysis. It forms part of the recent move in pragmatics research away from the cross-cultural comparison of speech acts and neo-Gricean theoretical debates towards an analysis of real-life data based on the socio-cognitive and affective implications of inter-lingual conversational exchange. This approach is represented as ‘emancipatory’ in that it is highly contextually grounded and considers meaning from an ‘emergent’ perspective in which attempts at achieving mutual understanding are more or less effectively negotiated between participants. The notion of intention is called into question and emphasis is placed on the importance of metalinguistic commentary by interlocutors as an essential aid to interpreting transcriptions of previous exchanges. Close attention is given to linguistic features which define the attitudes and relationships between the participants: in this case, markers of ‘determinacy’, ‘distance’ and ‘intensity’.

The London Lord Mayors' Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments that were at the centre of the cultural life of the City of London in the early modern period. The Show was staged annually to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. The London mayoralty was not simply an entity of civic power, but always had its ritual and ceremonial dimensions. Pageantry was a feature of the day's entertainment. This book focuses on the social, cultural and economic contexts, in which the Shows were designed, presented and experienced, and explores the Shows in textual, historical, bibliographical, and archival and other contexts. It highlights the often-overlooked roles of the artificer and those other craftsmen who contributed so valuably to the day's entertainment. The Show was the concern of the Great Twelve livery companies from the ranks of one of which the Lord Mayor was elected. The book discusses, inter alia, the actors' roles, the props, music and costumes used during the Show and looks at how important emblems and imagery were to these productions. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage. From 1585 onwards the Lord Mayor's Show was with increasing frequency transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets produced in print runs ranging from 200 to 800 copies. The book also demonstrates the ways in which the Shows engaged with the changing socio-economic scene of London and with court and city politics.

The essay analyses the linguistic structure of a dramatic poem ‘The Story of M.’, scripted by the Black Manchester-based poet SuAndi. The poem offers a retrospective description of the social conditions of life in Northern Britain experienced by a mother and daughter of mixed racial and national origin. The essay considers the relationship between poetry, history, personal experience and social reality. It offers an alternative to viewing literature either as a mimetic representation of real life or as the symbolic distillation of a moment in history. Instead, following Voloshinov (1928) and Thibault (1991), it posits an approach to poetry, and especially to poetry in performance, in which the text engages the reader/audience in a dynamic dialogue whilst at the same time quoting and commenting on itself. Through this process, the poem becomes an active constituent of the reality it depicts. The interaction between narrative frames and the extensive use of parataxis positions the reader as an interlocutor in an insider/outsider relationship with the protagonists and with the events which have conditioned their upbringing.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Arnoud Lagendijk and the editorial team of Regional Studies for their infinite patience; and Bob Jessop, founder-director of Lancaster's Institute for Advanced Studies, for his help and advice, at the time of the programme and since. Notes For example, see coverage in Le Monde of the local responses to cutbacks in regional funding demanded by François Hollande since his election to the French Presidency in May 2012.

ABSTRACT Using data from the ESRC funded project Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication (PIC), this paper applies contrastive quantitative and qualitative analysis to data derived from oral statements, logbooks and retrospective reports by language teaching assistants in France and England. The data concerns their ‘ rapport ’ (Spencer-Oatey, 2003; 2005) with the members of staff responsible for their professional supervision and the paper assesses complaint behaviour across the two national groups. Basing our study on computer recorded discourse segments taxonomically codified as ‘negative assessment’, we show that the incidence of ‘indirect’ complaint (Boxer, 1993) is significantly higher among English assistants than among their French counterparts. A revised model for measuring ‘severity’ (House and Kasper, 1981; Olshtain and Weinbach, 1993) is applied to the data using corpus linguistic techniques. Its findings demonstrate that English assistants also complain more ‘severely’ than their French peers. Nevertheless, the difference in linguistic behaviour between individuals within each group is shown to be greater than that between the two national groups, implying that personality is a stronger determinant of cultural outlook than nationality.

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of interactions between French/English Foreign Language Assistants (FLAs) and their school mentors (MEs), and, more specifically of how 'advice' is sought, given and received. More generally, it will articulate a pragmatic approach (employing the notion of 'activity type') that can help achieve this aim. The paper draws on a sub-set of the data produced for the Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication (PIC) project, a project which deployed multiple and different methodologies, including, for example, not only transcriptions of live interactions, but also retrospective reflections on those interactions. We focus on the first non-casual meetings between FLAs and their MEs, a crucial part of which concerns 'advice'. We argue that advice call be viewed as a 'discourse type', and show how it is deployed in the context of the activity types constituted by those meetings. We conduct a detailed qualitative analysis of one audio-recording of a meeting based in England, and then compare it with one based in France, our interpretations being inflections, especially those of the FLA. We formed by the participants' re also deploy quantitative analysis and explore whether the patterns identified in our case studies can be generalised. Finally, we reflect on the implications of activity types and discourse types for pragmatics research, particularly politeness theory and cross-cultural pragmatics.

As the blurred boundaries between documentary, memory and 're-imaginings' of personal experience have become more intensively theorised, creative writing is re-emerging as an important resource in social science, following the extensive debates surrounding the sociology of literature in the 1960s and 1970s. This is especially true with regard to the type of mobility entailed by migration. This essay advances a methodology for incorporating creative fiction into mobilities research. It argues that certain types of literary text offer fresh perspectives on the overlapping layers of experience which characterise the mental condition resulting from cultural displacement, bringing together the historical, the global and the local within a single, multiply constituted, 'imagined space'. Literary accounts of this kind can be characterised as a data source in their own right, complementing social science research methodologies grounded in 'real-life' observation and offering hypotheses for subsequent ethnographic verification. Through the narrative processes of metaphorical transfer and space-time compression, Joe Pemberton's autobiographical novel Forever and Ever Amen (2000) demonstrates the potential of narratives informed by the experience of migration to present 'alternative cartographies of social space' (Rouse, 1991). The social relevance of such narrative representations is further demonstrated by their 'envelopment' within mainstream discourses, thereby illustrating how they 'articulate' with existing social norms.

This paper examines the sociopragmatic character of intercultural communication between English Language Assistants (ELAs) and their ‘mentors’ in French primary and secondary schools. With reference to Levinson's notion of ‘activity type’, it argues that judgements by mentors as to what constitutes ‘allowable contributions’ on the part of ELAs are determined by the extent to which mentors themselves have internalised French State regulations. The degree of internalisation can thus serve as a means of distinguishing between ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’. Awareness of this distinction and an insight into its social significance exemplifies what Spencer-Oatey describes more generally as a ‘sociopragmatic interactional principle’ or SIP. According to Spencer-Oatey, ‘SIPs’ are key elements in the successful management of ‚rapport’ in intercultural situations. By applying a methodology derived from Sinclair and Coulthard's analysis of oral discourse to recordings of ELA–mentor interactions, we identify specific sequences of moves that illustrate the relationship between political and cultural factors, SIPs and sociopragmatic misunderstandings in Anglo-French intercultural communication.

This article examines the discursive construction of cultural generalizations, by analysing generalizations about gender and culture made in a large corpus of diary, focus group and interview data produced by modern languages students at university in Britain during or shortly after their period of residence abroad. It is argued that although students demonstrate an awareness of the negative cultural evaluation of stereotyping through the use of mitigation strategies, they are nevertheless willing to produce generalizations under the right discursive conditions, particularly when permission is given by the other participants in the interaction and when they are able to produce evidence to legitimate the generalization in some way. Analysis of the entire corpus shows that, the most common form of legitimation is the appeal to personal experience, whereas close analysis of extracts from the data demonstrates the importance of discursive context and process in making such generalizations possible and acceptable.

This paper, arising out of the work of The Interculture Project, considers the relationship between student diary writing and the formation of personal identity as it occurs in cross-cultural situations. With particular reference to Grossberg (1996), we critically review the 'figures' associated with the concept of identity and argue that identity cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by separating 'intrinsic' from 'extrinsic' attributes. Instead, we follow an approach which accepts Kristéva's Freudian analysis of the outsider phenomenon and sees identity as a continuous process of discursive construction involving voluntary acts of self-differentiation through language. In this, we follow Ricoeur's (1990) distinction between ipse and idem and the associated notion of attestation according to which language verifies and 'bears witness' to who we are. We illustrate the validity of Ricoeur's approach by identifying a set of discursive features which occur in an extended student diary in which the author distances himself from his own statements and comments on his own responses to living in another cultural environment. Our analysis posits the existence of an 'intercultural self' whose identity is contained within the dynamic of one's own language and we draw conclusions from this analysis for the preparation of students for residence abroad. 'Attestation' et identité: narration and développement personnel pendant des périodes de résidence à l'étranger. En passant en revue les différentes 'figures' reprises par Grossberg (1996) et Hall (1996) dans leurs analyses de la notion d'identité personnelle, cet article met en cause l'opposition entre des perspectives intrinsèques (essentielles) et extrinsèques (constructivistes) proposée par Grossberg. Il cherche plutôt à lier une approche freudienne à la notion d'attestation développée par Ricoeur (1986) selon laquelle l'identité consiste à se différencier d'autrui et s'engager volontairement vis-à-vis de l'autre à travers le discours et, en ce faisant, de se construire une perception de soi-même dans le temps. A l'appui de notre approche, nous examinons des manifestations de ce processus dans l'analyse des procédés discursifs déployés dans un journal personnel rédigé par un étudiant britannique résidant à l'étranger.

Exploring French Text Analysis introduces students of French to a range of methods of text analysis, including stylistics and discourse analysis. The editors provide a clear framework for analysing written French critically. Through a series of commentaries on a range of texts by different contributors, they present a variety of models for readers to follow. The texts have been carefully chosen both to illustrate key points of language analysis and to present a picture of national identity. Texts including adverts, newspapers, magazines, travel writing, fiction and political texts cover a range of topics such as food, sport, law and the arts. The book also includes a comprehensive glossary of linguistic terms.