The study uses a discourse-analytic approach to explore Chinese police’s discursive strategies of regulating citizens’ negative emotions during police-citizen interactions. Through analyzing natural-occurring conversations from two famous Chinese police documentaries, we find that the police’s extrinsic emotion regulation targets at six types of negative emotions, which can be realized through four explicit discursive strategies, including comforting, distracting, negotiating, and showing empathy, as well as six implicit strategies, namely delegitimating, hope-building, evoking the influence of family bonds, displaying good intent, pinpointing misunderstanding, and affirming. Given the persuasive and educational orientation of Chinese policing, these strategies closely align with appeals to pathos, logos, and ethos. This study offers insight into the growing literature on extrinsic emotion regulation in the context of police-citizen interactions.

The role of gossip in social and kinship groups has been well established over the past three decades. However, there is little research that explores this type of talk in interactions involving individuals with dementia. Drawing on interviews with caregivers and conversations involving four women with dementia, we will (a) review comments from caregivers related to the sense of loss they experience because they are no longer able to engage in gossip with their family member, (b) consider the discursive challenges of gossip in relation to the cognitive processing load and (c) present evidence that people with moderate to late-stage dementia still engage in gossip but due to compromised cognitive functions their contributions do not always match the expectations of neurotypical interlocutors.

This article offers a re-examination of perspective-taking skills in autism, based on the conversation analytic notions of recipient design and intersubjectivity. Perspective-taking is here conceptualised as an interactional achievement; an interpersonal, social process that builds shared understandings through sequential tradjectories of talk. Micro-analyses of naturally occurring interactions between adults with autism and neurotypical carers demonstrate autistic turns that are not designed with a sensitivity to recipients’ displayed needs in interaction, leading to breakdowns of intersubjectivity. Four types of so-called neurodivergent recipient design are presented: (1) references that do not facilitate recipient recognition; (2) stereotypical ‘nonsense’ talk that does not facilitate the recipient’s action ascription; (3) non-repaired misunderstandings; and (4) perseverative storytellings that are pursued despite the recipient’s display of disinterest. The perspective-taking can be said to be mutually challenged in these interactions, as shared understandings are not achieved. Such interactional approach to perspective-taking offers ecologically valid insights into the problems that are observable in natural interactions between autistic and neurotypical people, and future quantitative research in the autistic intersubjectivity is suggested.

This study examines how bitch and bastard construct gendered identities in contemporary British English conversation. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the Spoken BNC2014, it examines collocational patterns and “ be + bitch / bastard ” constructions to trace how gendered meanings are enacted across speaker and target sexes. bastard predominantly targets men, representing masculinity through moral evaluation, functioning as a discursive resource for policing fairness and integrity. BITCH constructs more variable representations: it is frequently used by and about women to regulate interpersonal and emotional conduct, yet can also mark assertive femininity or position men outside socially recognised norms of masculinity. These patterns highlight how moral and relational discourses intersect in the linguistic representations of gender, sustaining long-standing associations of masculinity with public morality and femininity with emotional virtue. The findings show that derogatory language remains a critical discursive site where gendered identities and hierarchies are reproduced, contested, and occasionally re-signified in everyday interaction.

When students resist answering sensitive questions, teachers face dual pragmatic challenges: eliciting a response while mitigating the face-threat acts. This study conceptualizes teachers’ use of approximation elicitors, strategies to reformulate and approximate their initial questions. Based on the analysis of 26 recorded interactions, this study identifies three types of approximation elicitors: (1) authority-grounded elicitors, which frame the elicitation within institutional roles to legitimize the request; (2) logic-guided elicitors, which reduce the imposition on students’ negative face by scaffolding the response; (3) affective-alignment elicitors, which primarily address students’ positive face wants by demonstrating empathy, understanding, and solidarity, embodying the friendliness maxim. Furthermore, this study reveals a matching pattern between the choice of approximation elicitors and topical contexts, demonstrating that teachers’ pragmatic choices are highly sensitive to specific contexts. These approximation elicitors, grounded in Chinese style of politeness, offer a nuanced understanding of how teachers navigate sensitive communications beyond the classroom.

This study analyzes the interactional activity of code-switching between the Spanish and English languages in mother-child interactions. The data, drawn from video-recorded interactions of first-generation Latina mothers and their children, is analyzed using the methods of Conversation Analysis. Findings show that participants change codes to show their orientation to issues of epistemics by claiming (their own) lack of knowledge and negotiating epistemic status. First, participants code-switch to mark a lack of certainty or understanding, or rather, to present a K− epistemic stance. Second, participants switch codes to negotiate knowledge, as the language used by speakers orients to their epistemic status. This study contributes to our understanding of bilingual family interactions and the ways in which code-switching occurs in everyday interactions.