Discourse Situation Research Articles

Participation constrained: Generating buy-in and rationalizing carbon forestry labor through participatory mapping in Southern Mexico

In recent years diverse actors have hailed participatory practice as an effective means to empowering people in payment for ecosystem services (PES) work. In Chiapas, Mexico participation is a central component of the Scolel’ Te carbon forestry program, the cornerstone of which includes Plan Vivo participatory mapping. Plan Vivo mapping is used by the managing NGO, AMBIO, to build trust relations between participating farmers and program managers so as to ensure the successful production of carbon credits. However, I argue that it is also used to instill in farmers a series of behavioral and attitudinal transformations designed to align farmer land-use activities and attitudes with the program’s carbon credit production objectives. Yet, despite these ambitions, the ability of the mapping activity in Scolel’ Te to achieve its stated goals is challenged on the ground. In order to explain this discrepancy between the aspirations tied to the mapping activity and the mapping experience, I assess Plan Vivo mapping as a situated discourse and as a labor process. Taking the former perspective, I show how the managing NGO uses a paternalistic discourse to justify participatory mapping, one that presents farmers as misguided resource managers in need of external intervention. Then, using a labor process approach, I show how PVM acts to reorient farmer relationships to their land and to development organizations by intervening in farmer land-use practices and by establishing trust relations. It is, however, a process that consists of inequalities that stand to potentially limit the effectiveness of the activity.

A construção de objetos de discurso nas práticas conversacionais de um grupo de convivência de afásicos

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2016v13n2p1131O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar excertos de uma interação de um grupo de convivência entre afásicos e não afásicos para demonstrar a construção de objetos de discurso em situações conversacionais. Para alcançarmos esse objetivo, a abordagem teórica deste trabalho está baseada na Análise da Conversação de enfoque textual-interativo. Os excertos analisados demonstram que os participantes afásicos do grupo, ao serem inseridos em situações conversacionais, lançam mão de recursos referenciais e interacionais, contribuindo para a construção de objetos de discurso e o gerenciamento do tópico. Os resultados de nossas análises possibilitam evidenciar os aspectos linguístico-interacionais das situações conversacionais do grupo de convivência de afásicos e não somente o déficit linguístico ocasionado pela afasia.

Exploring Subjectivity in Verbal Reports of Iranian EFL Learners in Institutional Discourse

The present study investigates Iranian EFL learners’ subjectivity in single-subject retrospective verbal reports that allow the examination of the changes in the cognitive, social and affective processes involved in L2 pragmatic production. To this end, eighteen EFL learners at three proficiency levels produced verbal reports after the administration of a written discourse completion task eliciting requests and apology in asymmetrical (status-unequal) relations in institutional discourse. Qualitative analyses of students’ responses indicate that sociocultural, socio-psychological and socio-affective aspects of the discourse situations influenced both their pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices and negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the speech acts of requests and apologies. Apparently, the degree of sociocultural accommodation to the L2 pragmatic norms may be a matter of choice as of ability.

Discourse implicature, Quintilian and the Lucidity Principle: rhetorical phenomena in pragmatics

Abstract At a meta-level this article seeks to reduce the perceived gap that exists between classical rhetoric on the one hand and linguistics on the other. The linguistic focus here will be on pragmatics and discourse phenomena. In this article, the main tenets of classical rhetoric will first be set out. Thereafter, some examples of productive crossover work from both sides that has sought to unify rhetoric and pragmatics will be discussed. Next, a number of suggestions will be put forward as to why there has been so little cooperation. These will highlight aspects of scope and audience. Finally, some solutions will be offered as to how those perceived stumbling blocks might be eliminated. In this discussion, there will be a particular focus on the pragmatic notion of implicature from the perspective of Grice, the neo-Griceans and also the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. In the case of the latter, his ideas on the importance of lucidity in productive discourse situations will be explored and recast within a light of modern pragmatic theory.

Meaning and interaction in Spanish independent si-clauses

This paper analyzes the coded meaning of the Spanish particle si (< conditional ‘if’) when it occurs with independent, asserted clauses. While previously analyzed as a marker of contrast, adversativity and/or discursive opposition, I show that these meanings are actually contextually-determined interpretations which arise in situated discourse, most typically in dialogic discourse between two interlocutors. The coded, non-truth-conditional meaning of si is argued instead to be epistemic in nature, marking the proposition that it accompanies as one that is obviously true to the speaker. This analysis allows for a unitary and unifying account of a number of diverse examples that are problematic for prior analyses. The analysis also permits a straightforward understanding of discourse patterns surrounding independent si-clauses, as well as their functional similarity to certain uses of conditional sentence structures.

The Body as a Site for (Un)Making the ‘Other’: Shona Speaking Migrants' Negotiation of Identity Politics in Johannesburg

Shona-speaking Zimbabwean migrants have become an ingrained part of Johannesburg, South Africa. This situation has radically transformed Zimbabwean migration to South Africa from a historically largely ethnicized—mostly Ndebele speaking—to a more mixed movement of both Shona- and Ndebele-speaking people. This pronounced presence of Shona-speaking migrants raises questions of how they situate themselves in Johannesburg in light of how their language indexes them as “amakwerekwere” in a hostile context characterized by intense othering. This article stems from a multisited sociolinguistic ethnography in Johannesburg and discusses the experiences of Shona-speaking migrants across various interactional domains. Migrants’ narratives reveal that without the “appropriate” linguistic repertoires in a hostile and xenophobic context, they navigate “insecure spaces” through a range of strategies that mainly center on the body such as “appropriate” dress code (stylizing and decoration), deploying a “streetwise” gait, and calculative management of personal space—acts that blur and destabilize the categories and classifications of a “legitimate” body. I frame my analysis within a selective reading of diverse critical perspectives on situated discourse, with the major concepts being from foundational work by Goffman, Bourdieu, and Blommaert, whose concept of “orders of indexicality” builds on the genealogy of work attuned to issues of the corporeal, power, inequality, and performative in sociolinguistic interaction.

How Spoken Language Comprehension is Achieved by Older Listeners in Difficult Listening Situations

Background/Study Context: Comprehending spoken discourse in noisy situations is likely to be more challenging to older adults than to younger adults due to potential declines in the auditory, cognitive, or linguistic processes supporting speech comprehension. These challenges might force older listeners to reorganize the ways in which they perceive and process speech, thereby altering the balance between the contributions of bottom-up versus top-down processes to speech comprehension.Methods: The authors review studies that investigated the effect of age on listeners’ ability to follow and comprehend lectures (monologues), and two-talker conversations (dialogues), and the extent to which individual differences in lexical knowledge and reading comprehension skill relate to individual differences in speech comprehension. Comprehension was evaluated after each lecture or conversation by asking listeners to answer multiple-choice questions regarding its content.Results: Once individual differences in speech recognition for words presented in babble were compensated for, age differences in speech comprehension were minimized if not eliminated. However, younger listeners benefited more from spatial separation than did older listeners. Vocabulary knowledge predicted the comprehension scores of both younger and older listeners when listening was difficult, but not when it was easy. However, the contribution of reading comprehension to listening comprehension appeared to be independent of listening difficulty in younger adults but not in older adults.Conclusion: The evidence suggests (1) that most of the difficulties experienced by older adults are due to age-related auditory declines, and (2) that these declines, along with listening difficulty, modulate the degree to which selective linguistic and cognitive abilities are engaged to support listening comprehension in difficult listening situations. When older listeners experience speech recognition difficulties, their attentional resources are more likely to be deployed to facilitate lexical access, making it difficult for them to fully engage higher-order cognitive abilities in support of listening comprehension.

Importance of Multi-Stakeholder Needs Analysis to Develop LSP Module:

This paper reviews and reflects on the needs analysis conducted to develop a trade-specific Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) module for prospective migrant workers incorporating English-Bangla-Arabic in a tripartite collaboration with the International Labour Organization (ILO), Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) and BRAC Institute of Languages (BIL). This paper explores the multifaceted nature of this needs analysis by asking some questions – what module, for whom, to serve what purpose, at what cost, under whose supervision, by whom and under what logistic setting.The analysis was carried out by observing classes and interviewing prospective migrant workers at Technical Training Centres (TTCs), interviewing the TTC instructors, conducting focus group discussions (FGD) with returnee migrant workers, sharing ideas with ILO personnel and advocacy groups such as BRAC Migration Program (MP). This process helped the researchers identify the target groups’ fragmented knowledge about target discourse situations which was somewhat compensated by the experiences of returnees. The expertise of the instructors helped to categorize the typical strengths and weaknesses of target groups and under continuous efforts of ILO to enforce international best practices for a decent working environment for migrant workers. Taking into consideration the multiplicity of issues and various inputs from the stakeholders, this paper underpins the importance of a multi-stakeholder needs analysis for better comprehension of the target discourse situation and appropriate delivery of services with some suggestions for future LSP modules.

Bilingual Commodification in La Mancha: From Language Policies to Classroom Practices

This presentation focuses on the emergent discourses about bilingual commodification (Heller, 2010) in the current “boom” era of the Bilingual Programmes. These situated discourses dealing with “bilingualism” have been analysed among a group of students attending a prestigious religious semi-private “bi-trilingual” school in Castilla-La Mancha, where the social actors co- construct those discourses through interactions (Gumperz, 1982). From a critical discourse analysis perspective (Fairclough, 1995) and a critical interpretive approach (Tollefson, 2002), this linguistic ethnography analyses bilingual education in Castilla- La Mancha region as well as the links between the classroom social practice, the linguistic policies and wider social and ideological processes of globalization and neoliberalism in late modernity.

Un modèle d’analyse de structures situationnelles de discours

A model for the analysis of situational discourse structuresIn this paper the author presents a model for the analysis of situational discourse structures applied to fait divers. Situational structures of discourse are defined as a sequence of experiential frames. Each frame permits to conceptualize one event forming a part of information introduced in discourse. The proposed model permits to analyze (1) the internal structure of experiencial frames activated in discours and (2) possible relations between frames identified in discourse. The author aims to present the role of situational structures in discourse comprehension – the process which implicates creation of discourse representation.

Eating words: a discourse historical analysis of the public debate over India’s 2013 National Food Security Act

Purpose– This paper aims to provide a situated critical discourse analysis of the public debate around India’s 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA), describing its rhetorical characteristics and the context within which it has taken place.Design/methodology/approach– Using Wodak’s (2001) Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), the authors examine media coverage of the NFSA, attending to perspectivization, intensification and mitigation and representational and argumentational strategies. The authors also consider this coverage in light of its intratextual, intertextual, situational and wider socio-political and economic contexts. The corpus consists of 29 English-language Indian newspaper and magazine articles, published in print and online between 2011 and 2014.Findings– This paper explains the rhetorical purchase of the term “food security” in contemporary Indian public policy debates by comparing the leftist, right wing and centrist arguments.Research limitations/implications– Owing to the detailed qualitative analysis presented here, the corpus is necessarily limited in size. Newspaper articles contributed by one of the authors were omitted from the study.Originality/value– The DHA claims to be an interdisciplinary framework, but relatively few studies involve true cross-disciplinary research. By contrast, this study relies on close collaboration by scholars active in economics and applied linguistics – thus, demonstrating both the potential for, and the value of, working coherently across academic disciplines. Also, unlike most DHA studies, which interrogate dominant discourses, this paper compares diverse discourses competing for influence.

Brief reply to Zwart

Brief reply to Zwart Benjamin Bruening Zwart’s (2015) reply to my 2014 Language article (Bruening 2014) seeks to refute the claim in that article that precede-and-command offers much better empirical coverage than c-command for the conditions that regulate coreference (binding principles A, B, and C). However, nothing in what Zwart says addresses the question of whether there is a structural condition on coreference, much less what that structural condition is if there is one. The empirical part of Zwart’s paper simply repeats what we already knew: that principle C can be violated in certain discourse situations. This was already allowed in the formulation of principle C in Bruening 2014:372, ex. 109, which was based on Schlenker 2005. (1). Principle C (Minimize restrictors): A definite description of the form the A may not refer to a discourse referent in active set C if A could be dropped without affecting either (i) the denotation of the description or (ii) its various pragmatic effects. Clause (ii) permits a full R-expression if there are pragmatic effects that would be affected if the R-expression were instead realized as a pronoun. Schlenker (2005) discusses some of these pragmatic effects. All of Zwart’s discussion only illustrates what some of these pragmatic effects might be. Since clause (ii) of principle C allows principled exceptions to principle C, all of the data in Zwart’s reply are consistent with the analysis in Bruening 2014 and do not affect it in any way, as far as I can see.1 Now, Zwart does seem to imply that perhaps there is no structural condition at all on coreference and that all apparent effects of structure are actually these pragmatic effects. To show that, however, he would have to address every single type of example in Bruening 2014 and the voluminous literature on principle C, and this he has not done. I would welcome a thoroughly researched paper arguing that structure is irrelevant to coreference and all apparent structural effects are actually due to discourse. Zwart’s reply is not such a paper. Zwart further claims that there are two different bans on coreference. Examples like the following are claimed not to admit discourse manipulation. (2). a. *He1 loves John1. (Zwart’s example 6a) b. *He1 said that John1 is an idiot. (Zwart’s example 6c) This is not true, however. Even Zwart acknowledges that coreference is allowed in 2a in certain circumstances (his n. 8). Coreference is also allowed in 2b in certain discourse situations, for instance where clarity of reference is required (No, no, no! John said that [End Page e179] John is an idiot!). But these are the same circumstances that make violations of condition C acceptable everywhere. Regarding reflexivity, Bruening 2014:376–82 showed that precede-and-command is indeed superior to other formulations out there, at least for English. Zwart goes on to suggest that c-command is the right condition for reflexivity. But c-command is both too strict (We talked to Bobby about himself/*him, where Bobby does not c-command the anaphor) and too permissive (it would permit long-distance reflexivity). Again, what Zwart says does not actually address the issues raised in Bruening 2014. As for ‘conceptual necessity’, ideas about it simply have to take a back seat to empirical coverage. Bruening 2014 is just one work in a long series demonstrating the irrelevance of c-command to syntactic dependencies. C-command is not relevant to variable binding or weak crossover (e.g. Barker 2012, Bruening 2014:§7.3), negative polarity item licensing (e.g. Hoeksema 2000), superiority (e.g. Shan & Barker 2006), the each … the other construction, and possibly even extraction (Bruening 2014:383–84). No one disputes the claim that c-command is a structural relation that falls out from binary Merge; it just seems not to be one that is used by syntax. Benjamin Bruening University of Delaware [bruening@udel.edu] [Received 14 July 2015; accepted 15 July 2015] REFERENCES Barker, Chris. 2012. Quantificational binding does not require c-command. Linguistic Inquiry 43.614–33. Google Scholar Bolinger, Dwight. 1977...

More Than Words: Examining Communicative Competence Through a Preschool-Age Child With Autism

AbstractUsing a social-ecological framework, this case study examined communicative competence through classroom interactions involving Aaron, a preschool-age child with autism who utilized an augmentative and alternative communication device (AAC). In addition to Aaron, participants included Aaron's father, the school director, classroom teachers, a paraprofessional, and 17 of Aaron's preschool classmates. The present analyses relied on ethnographic data collected by Russell and Valentino (2013)—specifically, five observations of classroom activities involving Aaron, one of which was video recorded, and six semistructured interviews of adult participants. Our extended analyses included a categorical analysis focused on communicative offers to and from Aaron as recorded in observational field notes and a new situated discourse analysis of the video-recorded small group activity. Together results revealed three key components of communicative competence: (a) presumed competence, (b) flexible multimodality, and (c) synchronized repetition. Implications focus on how to conceptualize and support communicative competence for children who use AAC from a social-ecological framework.

A critical political ecology of consensus: On “Teaching Both Sides” of climate change controversies

In the United States, contemporary anti-science education coalitions are increasingly linking climate change and evolution using “teach the controversy” campaigns. Awareness of this political phenomena raises questions about the extent to which portrayals of global warming predictions as mere knowledge claims undermine efforts to increase public understanding of scientific consensus about global warming. This paper uses a critical political ecology framework to explore the problematization of climate change consensus located and performed across discourses of secondary science teaching and learning. Theories of resistance are used to analyze teachers’ everyday experiences with classroom pushback about climate change. Data collection included key informant interviews with state science education stakeholders and on-line survey of 5th–12th grade science teachers in Oklahoma, USA. The article synthesizes the situated discourses of Oklahoma science teachers’ and their attitudes about teaching climate change in the face of public controversy. Our analysis demonstrates teachers marginalized by anti-science controversies but engaged in everyday acts of resistance to political, ideological, and religious norms. Most notably, science teachers re-purpose “teach the controversy” frames as a way to introduce climate change where it might not otherwise be included. We argue that, contextualized within a history of contestation over the teaching of evolution, the practice of teaching ‘both sides’ is an important boundary ordering device that bridges convinced and skeptical discourses in the classroom. This research informs new roles and possibilities for science education on global environmental change by reminding climate scientists, educators, and policy advocates that all climate change knowledge is coproduced.

Ethnographic Presentation of Speaking in Chamber

Every situation of discourse (Rugova,1978:126), either implicit or explicit, expresses its categories of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic values. Speaking situations in the chamber, (oda) in many planes, are typical and characteristic only for the category of interlocutors in this environment. The discourse differs from discourse (telling) and the other categories: speaking in chapel (church and mosque), in the case of the celebrations, marriage acts, inauguration and the written speech. In this discourse are included complexes of interactive rates and socializing means of social interaction, which define "scene" ,define "context and are obtained from the " referent ". Situations of speech, are ways and means of expression of the statement, but, even the suppression against the word ,is social competence of communication and Intelectology ( Ismajli, 1994:141). DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p313

Ways of asserting. English assertive nouns between linguistics and the philosophy of language

This paper focuses on the relationship between illocutions and the lexicon, in particular, illocutions and illocutionary nouns in their function of shell nouns. Theoretical insights from cognitive linguistics, supplemented by an empirical–conceptual approach to verbal communication, are used as a frame of reference. They share the idea that, though conceptualization does not lend itself to direct observation, it can be studied indirectly via language as there is a close relationship between linguistic and conceptual structure. In this vein, the semantics–pragmatics of illocutionary shell nouns is relevant to an understanding of illocutions and their categorization.This study singles out one type of illocutionary noun: assertive nouns, i.e. nouns that name assertive speech acts (e.g., assertion, allegation, argument, claim, etc.), and presents a corpus-based study of them. It approaches assertive nouns by analyzing their behavioral profile, i.e. the complementation patterns they occur with, as they emerge in their occurrence in reporting or denoting and, in so doing, in characterizing specific discourse situation speakers’ utterance acts as acts of F-ing.The methodology used involves descriptive as well as exploratory statistics. As for descriptive statistics, reliance scores are calculated and a chi-square test added. As for exploratory statistics, a hierarchical cluster analysis is applied to the data. Results show that (i) constructional possibilities are part of the semantic–pragmatic meaning of the noun, and (ii) there is a correlation between semantic–pragmatic similarity and distributional similarity. At the same time they lend argument from linguistic patterns to what philosophy states about the commitment to belief, truth, and knowledge that define assertive speech acts, thus showing the potential that descriptive English research has for application across disciplinary boundaries.

Making Sense of Student Performance Data

In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despite similarities in their contexts, the workgroups invoked different data use logics that shaped teachers’ learning opportunities. The first workgroup’s instructional management logic linked increasing student achievement to individualization. The second workgroup’s instructional improvement logic focused on students’ thinking and linked it to instructional changes but was limited by broader instructional management logics. Evidence-based practice cannot be understood apart from the data use logics in teachers’ communities, which are shaped by policy constraints.

'If it didn't work the first time, we can try it again': Conditionals as a grounding device in a genre of illness discourse.

This article explores the occurrence and some special patterns of conditional usage in medical discourse produced by doctors and patients. Findings are based on the Journal of the American Medical Association with its section 'Clinical Crossroads' which was founded to further the co-operation of patients with medical professionals. The analysis centers upon the concept of prediction, which is considered both a semantic concept governing verb patterns as well as a communicative act prominent in medical encounters. It is found that, in the discourse context investigated here, patients are more concerned with prediction than are doctors, but that they also produce at times unusual patterns in which they mirror their doctors' voices. The mapping of mental spaces, inherent in the conditional construction, then takes the form of a mapping of voices as institutionalized by the genre. Such uses of conditionals suggests that a classification based on content, or 'logic' from which only pragmatic types of conditionals depart, turns out to be inadequate, since the construction operates on two simultaneous levels; these are grounded in the discourse situation provided by the genre. For medical communication, this illustrates that patients engage in their own predictions but also strive for an alignment with their doctors.

Toward Discourse Comprehension of Traditional Vedānta

AbstractThis article focuses on strategies of discourse processing for the relay of Vedic truth-statements (mahāvākyas) in the context of globalization and secular modernity. Of primary interest is situational representation of communicative events and educational reforms surrounding the transmission of brahmajnāna, that is, knowledge (jnāna) of nondual reality (brahman). Culminating at the end of the Vedas, Upaniṣads codify contextual properties of teacher-student successions (guru-śiṣya-paramparās) structuring the transmission of brahmajnāna. Despite ongoing interest in Advaita Vedānta, there is still a need to conceptualize the teaching tradition (sampradāya) as a matter for empirical observation and thereby to propose a set of cognitive hypotheses that make it possible to account for the referential basis of discourse production and situation models representing Upaniṣads as a verbal means of knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa). Consequently, genre expectations in the Advaita sampradāya provide the starting poi...

The balanced scorecard and the construction of a management control discourse

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to synthesise a pragmatic constructivist view of management control and a critical discourse perspective on organizational action. These theories are deployed to build a conceptual framework that can be used to interpret the construction of a management control discourse in specific empirical situations. The framework is deployed to show how, in a particular instance, the balanced scorecard (BSC) can be seen as impacting on organizational action and success/failure.Design/methodology/approach– The paper develops a theoretical framework for management control which is used to interpret a case study of a BSC implementation in a major bank.Findings– The paper reports on a case study of a major bank where the BSC changed actors’ perceptions and actions. Although the bank avoided some of the worst excesses of pre-Credit Crunch delinquency, other problems such as misselling suggest that the BSC’s impact on organizational success/failure was ambiguous. The BSC may have improved organizational coordination but long-standing values based on a bonus culture contributed to long-term commercial problems.Research limitations/implications– With mainstream researchers on the BSC lacking a conceptual basis that explains the communicative impact of the BSC and interpretive researchers focusing on the role of rhetoric in spreading the BSC amongst practitioners, then the conceptual framework in this paper suggests a way of synthesising mainstream and interpretive research on the BSC.Originality/value– The originality of the paper lies in its application of pragmatic constructivism and critical discourse analysis to interpret and explain the impact of the BSC in a particular organizational setting.