Genres Of Communication Research Articles

Style on Trial: The Gendered Aesthetics of Appearance, Corruption, and Piety in Indonesia

Abstract In the two decades since the end of Suharto regime in Indonesia, two apparently distinct public industries have emerged in tandem: gendered forms of religious style, glossed as modest fashion, and legal efforts to hold citizens accountable for theft, glossed as corruption. Many of the most high-profile anti-corruption cases in the past decade have brought these two fields into semiotic interaction, as female defendants increasingly deploy forms of facial cover associated with extreme religious piety to signal humility and shame when appearing in court, in the process complicating the relationship between religious semiotics and criminality. Analyzing how and why these two genres of political communication have intersected in the past decade, and to what effects, requires situating these shifts in the context of dense aesthetic archives in which the spectacularity inherent to fashion resonates with the unique impulses of a post-authoritarian political landscape in which uncovering secrets is especially alluring. I argue that the hermeneutic impulses motivating popular fascination with criminal style, often circulated via social media, open new analyses of the ethical relationship between beauty and justice. Building on the scholarship on transparency and on the human face, I argue that putting gendered religious style at the center of the analytical frame—from religious self-fashioning to court appearances, and as forms of political protest—reveals the ethical impulses behind seeing and being seen, and the faciality of scandal.

The Category of Tonality in Peripheral Genres of Business Communication

The Category of Tonality in Peripheral Genres of Business Communication

The place of the academic article as a genre in academic communication. Book Review: I. P. Khutyz. Genres of academic discourse. Traditional and new. Moscow: Publishing House VKN, 2021. 132 p.

The place of the academic article as a genre in academic communication. Book Review: I. P. Khutyz. Genres of academic discourse. Traditional and new. Moscow: Publishing House VKN, 2021. 132 p.

Online Self-Presentation by Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine Medical Professionals in China

ABSTRACT Despite increasing research that examines language features of online medical consultation (OMC) conversations in China, limited attention has been directed to how medical professionals purposefully present themselves in their biographies on OMC websites, an emerging genre of health communication, with even fewer comparative studies on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine (WM) medical professionals in this regard. To fill these gaps, this study compares the personal claims and self-presentational strategies used in TCM and WM medical professionals’ biographies on a Chinese OMC website. It is found that while Chinese TCM and WM medical professionals present themselves in similar ways, they also demonstrate some important differences. The similarities may be driven by their shared goal of building trust in the OMC context, whereas the differences may be ascribed to TCM-WM differences in clinical philosophies, education histories, clinical cultures, and medical practices.

Toward the Formation of the Public in a Marginalized Communicative Culture: Analyzing The Long Road of Woman's Memory

Abstract This study analyzes Jane Addams’ contribution to an enduring topic: how marginalized people join the public from beyond political, socioeconomic, cultural, and gendered barriers. I study Addams’ book, The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), which discusses the seemingly irrational devil baby case in Chicago. Using the concept of public and hidden transcripts and the method of cultural discourse analysis, I contextualize the book within the theorizing around the concept of the public by Addams’ contemporaries, Gabriel Tarde and Robert E. Park. The analysis shows that Addams’ discussion aligns with three conceptual aspects of the formation of the public. First, Addams describes the awakening of consciousness about a collectively relevant concern, and second, the emergence of interaction about the topic. Third, Addams constructs a conceptual distinction between two functions of memory, highlighting independent critical judgment as the divider between the two, which is the decisive factor that Park argues distinguishes the public from the crowd. Addams’ writing contains an unusual perspective in that she discusses development toward the formation of something like the public in a marginalized communicative culture. Instead of focusing on performative and dramatic public debate, Addams addresses discreet genres of communication and illustrates their public relevance.

Making sense of digital communication between students, parents, teachers and school leaders in Danish state schools

Communication in Danish schools takes place with the aid of digital platforms developed and/or subsidised by the public sector and has done so for more than two decades. Within the same time frame, commercial social media platforms have emerged and become successfully integrated with key communicative practices. In order to understand how these communicative practices come about, we conducted interviews with students (from two different age groups), parents, teachers and school leaders in two primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark. The interviews focus on sense-making processes in digital communication and were analysed using Lomborg’s concept of communicative genres in social media. The analysis yielded four analytical categories through which the meaningfulness of using different digital platforms was assessed: (1) importance, (2) precision, (3) speed and (4) frequency. The findings are discussed in the framework of platformisation as well as the notion of technology paternalism. We argue that critical reflection on the use of commercial platforms in public institutions is needed. When key communicative practices in this arena rely on the services of data broking commercial actors, we risk further normalisation of problematic datafication.

ABOUT BUSINESS E-MAIL AS A GENRE OF PROFESSIONAL INTERNET COMMUNICATION IN THE COURSE OF “LANGUAGE OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION”

The research focuses on exploring lexical-grammatical, syntactic, punctuation features of the text of business e-mail as a genre of professional Internet communication in the course of “Language of business communication”. The tasks are outlined as follows: 1) to reveal the contents of the course of “Language of business communication”; 2) to highlight the importance of the content module on professional Internet communication; 3) to analyze business e-mail as a genre of professional Internet communication. The descriptive method and various types of linguistic analysis are applied. Emphasis is placed on the motivational-practical (speech) component of the course as a defining feature of the “Language of business communication” discipline, which determines the approach to the thematic content of the four content modules. The proposed research highlights the fourth content module, which reveals the peculiarities of Internet business communication and encompass follows themes: “Internet communication: specifics, types, genres”, “Language organization of business Internet communication”. The analyzed content module involves familiarizing students with the concept of Internet style, types of network communication, genres of business Internet communication, types of posts in social networks, and the culture of Internet communication. To improve the practical skills of business electronic correspondence, an educational model (formulated in linguistics) was used, which consists in the synthesis of four interrelated aspects. The first aspect is based on mastering the theoretical foundations of the researched problem: philology students reveal the essence of the concept of an electronic business letter, systematize the basic principles of creating and rules for writing business e-mails. The second aspect is practical. It consists primarily in the formation of skills and abilities to analyze the texts of business letters. For example, the structural-compositional, lexical-grammatical, and punctuation features of an electronic Cover Letter and a Request Letter are considered. The third aspect is research. It involves independent processing of the text of an electronic business letter in accordance with the proposed algorithm. The fourth stage is creative. It provides for the independent creation of an electronic business letter taking into account the specified requirements. The results of the research can be used as materials for practical classes on the language of business communication, Ukrainian language for professional purposes, language culture, etc. Key words: “Language of business communication”, business e-mail, professional Internet communication, etiquette of business correspondence.

Специфика языковой реализации жанра обращения руководства в годовом отчете (на материале русского языка)

The article is carried out within the framework of the analysis of institutional business discourse and is devoted to the problem of genres in corporate communication. The paper aims to reveal structural-linguistic and communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of the genre of top-managers’ message in the annual report in Russian language. The article considers the genre as an open and flexible scheme in a prototypical model with different frequency of elements. More and less typical sets and narrative schemes are described, which make it possible to establish genre relatedness in the type of text under study. Typical speech patterns and their sequences are also established. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the change in the genre-forming factors of the top-managers’ message in annual reports belongs to one of the insufficiently developed areas in Russian linguistics. In this regard, for the first time an integrated approach to the linguistic analysis of this genre has been implemented on the Russian material. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the elements of the genres of business letter and report are the most frequent in the type of text under analysis. It has been established that the category of addressee serves to vary the distance between communicants. It is also demonstrated that the described discursive practices of constructing written speech in the top-managers’ messages in annual reports of Russian companies are due not only to the informing, but also to the argumentative function.

Corporate Elites on Stage

Inspired by Austin’s work on the performativity of speech acts and Goffman’s notion of speaker positionings, this paper explores how annual general meetings are propelled by and interwoven with a corporate genre of professional communication. While observing more than thirty corporate annual general meetings for listed companies at Nasdaq Stockholm in Sweden over three years, we identified that the corporate elites populating the stages at these meetings act as meeting-professionals. Being meeting-professionals, the corporate elites have acquired knowledge of how to conduct a formal meeting by learning the genre, identifying which positions are available during a meeting and, based on these two pieces of knowledge, utter speech acts. Our concluding discussion points to the need for future studies of how corporate elites learn and use the genre of corporate communication to utter speech acts that ultimately form these kinds of formal meetings and perpetuate capitalist relations.

Institutionelle Kommunikation in der digitalen Öffentlichkeit: Das kommunikative Repertoire der Polizei Hamburg auf Twitter

Abstract This paper uses the notion of communicative repertoire to investigate the language conduct of an institutional organization in a social media environment, with the Twitter (now ‘X’) account of Hamburg Police as a case in point. Theoretically drawing on interactional sociolinguistics, media linguistics and Twitter research, we view communicative repertoire as the sum of linguistic and semiotic resources that are mobilized by organizational agents to participate in a multi-faceted digital public space that comprises both the dissemination of messages to a digital audience (the account’s followers) and dialogic exchanges with self-selected members of the digital publics. The analysis is based on all tweets produced by the Hamburg Police over a period of three months, complemented by an interview with the organization’s social media team. We operationalize the communicative repertoire by means of a multi-level analytical scheme that comprises: (a) different types of linguistic and graphic resources, (b) two participation formats (initiative and responsive messages) and (c) several action types. The findings show that the language conduct of Police Hamburg is multi-faceted and shows striking stylistic differences between initiative and responsive tweets. While initiative tweets draw on pre-digital genres of Police communication (e.g. call for witnesses), responsive tweets repeatedly show accommodation towards users. Overall, the case of Hamburg Police illustrates how mediatization transforms practices of institutional communication.

Semantic word change as the main way to create a comic effect in the speech genres of Internet communication

The subject of the study is the semantic change of a word as a way to create a comic effect in the Internet communication. The object of the research in the article is Internet memes. Special attention is paid in the article to new ways of creating a comic effect, which the authors of memes find against the background of an increase in the level of intra-genre competition. Comic genres of Internet communication are becoming a kind of thesaurus reflecting the current state of the Russian language and the changes that have occurred in it. Nevertheless, the novelty and dynamic change of linguistic trends in the speech comic genres of Internet communication suggest an insufficient theoretical justification of the problem, which determines the relevance of this work. To establish the methods used to create a comic effect, methods of analyzing dictionary definitions and contextual analysis of lexical units in the meme (including the influence of the non-verbal component) were applied. The main conclusions of the study: 1) there are a number of ways to create a comic effect based on a semantic change of a word; 2) certain features (conditions) of using these methods increase their effectiveness: the ambiguity of lexemes, the assignment of an essential role to the non-verbal component of a meme, the colloquial or slang character of the actualized meaning, the presence of a token, the recognition of verbal and non-verbal components, intentional violation of spelling rules. A special contribution of the authors and the novelty of the research is the study of ways to create a comic effect (based on semantic word change) in the genre of an Internet meme, including a non-verbal component that has a special effect on the recipient's perception of information.

Contemporary quantitative and qualitative public relations research methods in Arab scholarly studies: A meta-research

Communication scholars in the Arab countries have started to address new fields of scholarly literature in the public relations discipline over the last decade. The crucial change induced by the Arab Spring in many Arab countries has propelled public relations scholars to investigate the type of changes that affect scholarly research methods in the genre of communication at large, and public relations in particular. In the current study, the meta-analysis method was utilised to examine a total of 61 scholarly work (2012 to 2022), from seven Arab countries (Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Jordan and Sudan). The sample included 23 master’s theses and 38 PhD dissertations. The criteria for evaluation mainly addressed methods, interdisciplinary approaches, topics and contextual variables. The results reveal that first, the majority of the sample studies depended on quantitative methods. Second, interdisciplinary approaches were evident and included fields of marketing, political communication and social media research. Third, the topics studied in the seven Arab countries varied, as explained in detail in the paper. Fourth, the contextual variables included socio-political and cultural variables. Lastly, future research is needed to investigate the new impacts of social media on research methods in the field of public relations.

Digitality in the Open Science age: practices and genres

No matter where we are in the revolution versus evolution debate, digitality has undoubtedly brought about radical changes of practices and genres. Today digital genres born in the Internet age as New Media resources (science news reports or science blogs) compete with a traditional print-based genre of a research article. Although few works have synthesized the interaction of these “old” and “newly-born” genres, the Open Science digitality context has not received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, and little attention has been given to such features of scientific genres as multimodality, interdiscursivity, participatory culture. Thus, the relevance is in the reconceptualization of the Open Science practices and classifying the Internet-born genres of science communication. The qualitative method of discourse analysis is used in the lens of the social semiotic and the social genre theory proposed by the New Rhetoric School. As a result, four groups are suggested: research genres, promotional genres, trans-scientific genres, presentational genres. As a result of the analysis, we have come to the following conclusions. First, hybridization penetrates all the discourse and language levels: written discourse is combined with oral discourse, scientific style – with spoken style, scientific discourse – with journalism. Second, multimodality competes with the writing-based space, thus getting the potential of a meaning-making tool. As a result, the concept “science” has been reconsidered; science has become not only the professional community property but an active area of engagement with other fields and audiences in the process of science popularization. Digitality serves more than a medium and genres are not only recontextualized but gained more complexity.

Theorising Support for Interdisciplinary Early-Career Researchers Using Communicative Genre and 'Rules of the Game'.

Qualitative social scientists working in medical faculties have to meet multiple expectations. On the one hand, they are expected to comply with the philosophical and theoretical expectations of the social sciences. On the other hand, they may also be expected to produce publications which align with biomedical definitions and framings of quality. As interdisciplinary scholars, they must handle (at least) two sets of journal editors, peer reviewers, grant-awarding panels, and conference audiences. In this paper, we extend the current knowledge base on the 'dual expectations' challenge by drawing on Orlikowski and Yates' theoretical concept of communicative genres. A 'genre' in this context is a format of communication (e.g. letter, email, academic paper, and conference presentation) aimed at a particular audience, having a particular material form and socio-linguistic style, and governed by both formal requirements and unwritten social rules. Becoming a member of any community of practice involves becoming familiar with its accepted communicative genres and adept in using them. Academic writing, for example, is a craft that is learned through participation in the social process of communicating one's ideas to one's peers in journal articles and other formats. In this reflective paper, we show how the concept of a communicative genre can sensitise us to the conflicting and often dissonant expectations and rule systems governing different academic fields. We use this key concept to suggest ways in which the faculty can support early-career researchers to progress in careers which straddle qualitative social science and medical science.

Importance of Background Knowledge in Covid-related Internet Memes

2020 was the most challenging year of our lives so far: Covid-19 was our enemy; it was everywhere, on each and every continent, except Antarctica. We were living in a dystopian world and could not see any way out. Besides isolating ourselves and wearing masks everywhere, we had no means to protect ourselves and our loved ones. The only way to stay in touch with our peers and loved ones were our phones and the internet. The internet connected us to people all over the world, we were not alone, we shared feelings and we shared memes. Internet memes were the easiest genre of communication as they expressed so much in such a short time: with only two clicks (copy and paste) we were able to share it with all the people we wanted to.
 Our research focuses on the analysis of conceptual metaphors found in Internet memes during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to better understand what kept a lot of the people sane during those days.

Dear Einstein: scientific disclosure in the scientist's correspondences to children

Einstein is one of the names with the greatest impact in the scientific field. Furthermore, the physicist corresponded with children from different parts of the world. The documents can be consulted in the book “Dear professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s letters to and from children”, which is precisely the corpus of this investigation. Focusing on the scientific theme, the central objective of the research is to analyze the textual discursive strategies used by the scientist to disseminate science to children and the aspects of the science communication genre for children that are present in the letters. The didactic discourse, aspects such as the playful dimension, humor, transgression, and interpellation, with a use of words that bring the presumed public closer to scientific content, stand out in Einstein's letters. The existence of Einstein's letters remains a rare example of contact from a renowned scientist who proposes to dialogue with children.

Approaching digital genre composing through reflective pedagogical praxis

With the development of Web 2.0 we have witnessed an ever-expanding repertoire of digital genres. This brings with it new communicative needs and invites us to reflect on possible ways of teaching digital multimodal composing in EAP courses. Using case study research and genre theory as a heuristic, this article critically discusses the implementation of a pedagogical practice that sought to raise the students' rhetorical consciousness of aspects of genre continuity, evolution and innovation, focusing on digital genres of professional and public science communication. The examination of the digital texts composed by the students shows that several factors (genre awareness, genre knowledge transfer, reliance on acquired content and formal schemata and interdiscursive performance) may play an important role when recontextualising specialised content across genres. The study findings also suggest that while rhetorical consciousness facilitates the processes of recontextualising and repurposing content to reach broad audiences, L1 transfer could negatively influence digital genre composing. In light of the findings, I advocate explicit instruction in “metageneric texts” and methodologies for raising awareness of “inter-genre-al” forms across connected genres online. This instruction could support the students’ professional development and the participatory framework for scientific research advocated by the Open Science agenda.

Preschool children's discourse competence in different genres and how it relates to iconic gestures.

Based on the linguistic analysis of game explanations and retellings, the paper's goal is to investigate the relation of preschool children's situated discourse competence and iconic gestures in different communicative genres, focussing on reinforcing and supplementary speech-gesture-combinations. To this end, a method was developed to evaluate discourse competence as a context-sensitive and interactively embedded phenomenon. The so-called GLOBE-model was adapted to assess discourse competence in relation to interactive scaffolding. The findings show clear links between the children's competence and their parents' scaffolding. We suggest this to be evidence of a fine-tuned interactive support system. The results also indicate strong relations between higher discourse competence and increased frequency of iconic gestures. This applies in particular to reinforcing gestures. The results are interpreted as a confirmation that the speech-gesture system undergoes systematic changes during early childhood, and that gesturing becomes more iconic - and thus more communicative - when discourse competence is growing.

Genological stratification of diplomatic discourse on social network X (based on the material of the countries of the Romance and Germanic language areas)

Relevance. The rapid advancement in technology has profoundly impacted various aspects of human life, including communication. The advent of the internet and microblogs like X has revolutionized not only personal and professional interactions but also diplomatic discourse. This evolution presents new avenues for philological research, particularly in the domain of communicative linguistics.Purpose. The purpose of this article is to determine, describe and make an attempt to predict the levels and structure of genres of diplomatic discourse in the coming decades using examples of its manifestations on X in the best traditions of classical linguistics schools and considering the achievements of new research areas in linguistics.Methodology. The analysis utilises a comprehensive review of existing literature on discourse theory and internet communication genres. It incorporates a detailed examination of X�s role in modern diplomatic interactions to propose a new stratification matrix for genres termed twiplomatics.Results. The article highlights the genres of tweeting as the implementation of diplomatic discourse within the framework of virtual (internet) communication on the example of the social network (microblog) X. A contribution is made to the development of the theory of genological theory, in particular, the genre of virtual communication. A hierarchical stratification of speech genres for twiplomatics is offered.Conclusions. The findings contribute significantly to the field of discourse genology by providing a structured genre classification system for diplomatic discourse on X. This research not only enriches our understanding of digital communication dynamics but also sets a foundation for future studies in virtual communication genres, potentially guiding the development of more effective digital diplomatic strategies.

COMMUNICATE TO ENGAGE: STORYTELLING, CONTENT CREATION, AND PROMOTING THE IDEA OF SUSTAINABILITY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE IN TRAVEL VIDEOBLOGS

In the area of digital media narratives, an important communication role is played by influencers who, thanks to original media messages, become creative gatekeepers of specific ideas. Travel videoblogs are often underestimated as pure entertainment, whereas they can be seen as important tools for public discourse creators. The research uses methods of compositional and content analysis, supplemented with narratology and netnography. In the space of popular travel videoblogs, the main ideas promoted include the ideas of sustainable development and intercultural dialogue. Bloggers create and stimulate the existence of online communities, express specific ideas, concepts and worldviews that partly come from the area of scientific discourse, particularly anthropological, cultural and ethical ones. The research highlights the serious public role played by the digital nomads as influencers and new kind of friendly authority and presents case study of successful communication strategies, narrative skills and technical competences of authors. The online travel narratives can be seen as marketing of ideas and thus used as practical tool of communication for institutions, non-governmental organizations and other actors of communication. The paper analyses new material (new genres of communication, new channels, new strategies) and topic of high importance in the context of intercultural conflicts and ecological problems. One of the most influential Polish travel vlogs, Globstory by Kaja Kraska (initiated in August, 2014), serves here as a case study. It was chosen because its content is typical for this genre and because of creative and engaging practices of the vlogger who successfully influences the public and its understanding of specific ideas and problems.