Discursive Repertoire Research Articles

Phrase-final intonation in narratives told by Turkish-German bilinguals

In this study, I examine how three preadolescent, Turkish-German bilingual girls use intonational resources from both of their languages as one strategy for organizing monologic narratives. In so doing, I show that the bilingual narrators make strategic use of phrase-final tunes that have their origins in the speakers' (and their community's) bilingualism. In particular, these speakers utilize two phrase-final rises that differ in their frequency of occurrence, acoustic, phonological and functional characteristics. The contrasts in the rises taken in conjunction with the contrasts between rises, levels and falls provide the speakers with conventionalized strategies for cueing specific narrative contexts. These conventionalized strategies represent a fusion of Turkish and German intonational patterns into a single intonational grammar and form part of the bilingual linguistic and discursive repertoire. As such they also represent one locus of contact-related language change.

Under the Feminist Post-Structuralist Lens: Women in Computing Education

Despite various reform efforts, a persistent concern remains within education regarding the under-representation of women in non-traditional subject areas, such as science and engineering. As society is becoming increasingly technocratic, this article examines this issue in relation to Information Technology (IT), as a relatively new educational area. In doing so, I review some of the literature surrounding the gendering of this site and draw upon empirical findings from a study exploring the experiences of women in university computing courses. The aim of this article is to consider and critique the dominant paradigms that have been adopted, drawing upon constructions and understandings of subjectivity of educational theorists who offer alternative ways of approaching this issue. In this article I argue that to move forward we must disrupt and dismantle the gender binary that is so insidiously embedded in the discursive repertoire of the dominant paradigm of educational research and reform. A feminist post-structuralist approach, as employed by several educational theorists, offers opportunities for transcending such duality, while engaging more effectively with the lived experiences of individual women.

The Entrepreneurial University: A discursive profile of a higher education buzzword

The growing orientation of public universities towards the corporate sector has had a sign ficant impact on higher education governance, management, and discourse. The rhetoric of the free market, man fested most tangibly in business-related lexis, is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by academic leaders, politicians, and the media, as well as parts of higher education research. Within this rhetoric, enterprise and enterprising, as well as entrepreneur and entrepreneurial, stand out as keywords carrying sign ficant ideological loads that reflect the colonisation of academia by the market. The organisational and policy-making implications of academic enterprise have received considerable attention from higher education researchers, while discourse analysts have identified general discursive features of the ‘marketised’ higher education landscape. What the present paper adds to the existing debate is an in-depth study of a set of keywords in which processes of adaptation and appropriation crystallise, thus showing how macro-level social phenomena are mirrored, on the micro-level of linguistic detail, in the collocational behaviour of individual lexical items. The textual data that this paper is based on, gleaned mostly from the Internet, show that entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, enterprise, and enterprising are ambiguous in denotation and rich in connotation, making them susceptible to processes of semantic appropriation to suit particular agendas. Prevailing motfs and representations are ident fled through a combination of the computer-supported survey of Web-based material and the qualitative analysis of sample texts.

Knowledge and interpretation in environmental conflict: Fish farming and eutrophication in the Archipelago Sea, SW Finland

The article deals with the role of knowledge in discursive interpretations of an environmental conflict. The research is embellished through a special case study of the debate on the water eutrophication problem and the fish farming industry in the Finnish Archipelago Sea in southwest (SW) Finland. The main question addressed in the article concerns the competing definitions of the eutrophication problem and its spatial dimensions, and the possible implications these definitions have on the political efforts to solve the problem. My focus lies on the role of knowledge as a resource in the struggle over the definition. Accordingly, I will ask how the actors’ frames and knowledge are connected with their position within the power hierarchy, and their relation with the study area. The results illustrate the dependence of the environmental debate on scientific research, but they also show the lay people’s ambivalent attitude to science. The several gaps, uncertainties and controversies in the knowledge base allow interest groups to select the research results that support their view and challenge other scientific interpretations or to oppose environmental restrictions by referring to uncertainties of knowledge. Tensions are revealed between local and translocal views and several forms of knowledge. Disagreements do not arise, however, between pure, separate forms of knowledge. Particularly the fish farmers’ discursive repertoire holds ingredients provided by traditional knowledge, knowledge based on their own experiences, knowledge produced in co-operation with researchers and popularised science. The results show how the lay persons’ mistrust in scientific knowledge is linked with their critical attitudes towards the motives, interests and values of outside actors. The mistrust implies a strong spatial element, an experienced outside threat to local identity, way of life and traditional user rights of natural resources. Producers and users of scientific research are seen as part of the complex of social and cultural power representing urban recreation interests, ecological fundamentalism and an alienated connection with nature.

The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse among Nineteenth‐Century English Cotton Spinners

This article offers a critique of framing perspectives on collective action discourse and an alternative dialogic approach. The argument set forth is that the latter sees collective action discourse as a joint product of actors' agency and discourse dynamics, including its multivocal nature. Such discourse is a joint product of challengers' rational actions and the constraints of the discursive field. Challengers seek to appropriate and subvert the dominant discourses that legitimate power, creating discursive repertoires. To illustrate this, the contentious actions of English cotton spinners in the 1820s and 1830s are analyzed. The spinners produced a discursive repertoire drawing on mill owners' dominant discourses.

Comic Antiphony in Satirical Performance: The ‘Trata’ of Skyrian Carnival

In this paper, I examine carnival and, in particular, satire within carnival on the island of Skyros, in the north‐west Aegean, Greece. I focus on the nature of the soundscape created by music and sound in carnival, to elucidate how Skyrians culturally construct ‘noise’ as meaningful voice and interaction. Analytically, I apply the concept of antiphony, that is, a musical mode of ‘call and response’, to explore the reproduction of cultural meaning in satirical performance. Specific attention is drawn to the satirical verses recited during two separate performances in the 1995 carnival. I explore the conditions of how and why the antiphonal response embedded in the Skyrian discursive repertoire created not only new comic dialogue but an entirely different performance. Even beyond Skyrian carnival, antiphonal form can become an active and innovative involvement in the re‐creation of a meaningful framework of cultural dynamics.

Comic Antiphony in Satirical Performance: The ‘Trata’ of Skyrian Carnival

In this paper, I examine carnival and, in particular, satire within carnival on the island of Skyros, in the north-west Aegean, Greece. I focus on the nature of the soundscape created by music and sound in carnival, to elucidate how Skyrians culturally construct ‘noise’ as meaningful voice and interaction. Analytically, I apply the concept of antiphony, that is, a musical mode of ‘call and response’, to explore the reproduction of cultural meaning in satirical performance. Specific attention is drawn to the satirical verses recited during two separate performances in the 1995 carnival. I explore the conditions of how and why the antiphonal response embedded in the Skyrian discursive repertoire created not only new comic dialogue but an entirely different performance. Even beyond Skyrian carnival, antiphonal form can become an active and innovative involvement in the re-creation of a meaningful framework of cultural dynamics.