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.

Lists are a recurrent interactional pattern across languages, including Spanish. Despite their occasional study, one of their key components, generalized list completers, has been mentioned only in passing. The supposed preference for three-partedness has not been explored quantitatively either. Here, I begin to fill these gaps by exploring list-construction in Spanish. From a theoretical standpoint, I propose the categorization of generalized list completers into exhaustive and non-exhaustive. Practically, I focus on the generalized list completer y ya está (“and that’s it”) and its role in making lists three-parted. The present investigation sets out to contribute to the scarce investigation into lists, in general, and lists in Spanish, in particular, by accounting for the meaning conveyed by Spanish lists as a situated practice in interaction.

We draw on theorizing by Goffman on face (1967), framing (1974), and participation framework (1981) to demonstrate how one mother and father do parental and family facework as their young children exhibit what could be construed as “misbehavior” during a videorecording of a family mealtime that the mother, an English-language instructor, made and posted to her YouTube channel for the purposes of providing learners access to “real English conversation.” Our analysis shows how the parents communicate with their co-present young children as well as the YouTube viewers to present themselves as good parents, and the mother as a good language instructor, even though the family mealtime was, in the mother’s words, somewhat “hectic” and “chaotic.” We demonstrate how facework is achieved collaboratively through numerous strategies, including verbal accounting, repetition, laughter, smiles, gaze, hand and arm gestures, eyebrow movements, and on-screen text that is added post-recording. The study contributes to understanding how “private” family interactions are shaped into the “public” YouTube context; how facework is a joint, interactive process; and how parental and family identity presentation occurs in the context of one mother’s professional work (online language instruction).