Interpersonal Language Research Articles

Why do Mandarin speakers code-switch? A case study of conversational code-switching in China

Multilingualism is becoming increasingly common worldwide, with multilingual studies becoming more popular and accelerating interpersonal language contacts; however, it remains controversial and ambiguous in China. The current study aims to explore code-switching (CS) patterns and factors among Mandarin-dominated mainland Chinese speakers and investigate multilingual development in China through CS, as it is a multilingual practice. Conversational analysis was conducted to analyse daily interactions in short videos posted online, categorise language varieties and frequencies, identify CS patterns, and examine the factors influencing CS patterns. The results revealed that foreign languages and dialects other than Mandarin were spoken by Mandarin-dominated speakers. Three of four CS patterns were also pinpointed regarding language practices in China. Insertion was the most predominant pattern, followed by backflagging and alternation. The CS patterns employed by Mandarin-dominated mainland Chinese speakers were influenced primarily by participant-related factors, followed by linguistic-related factors, sociopsychological factors, convenience, and situational factors. The prevalence of the insertional CS pattern and the influence of personal factors suggest that China’s Mandarin-speaking community is in an early phase of multilingual development.

Teaching Meaningful EFL Small Talk: Exploration, Supportiveness, and Celebration

Whilst teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) rightly focuses on meaningful and purposeful transactional language use, interpersonal language is often downplayed or given cursory treatment even though it is an equally essential and perhaps even more fulfilling dimension of target language interaction. Interpersonal language as expressed through small talk, for instance, represents an important personal and interactional resource for establishing, developing, and maintaining relationships. However, small talk is often reduced to formulaic categorisation or practised through routinised communicative functions. To understand how foreign language users engage in small talk, a qualitative study was carried out through conducting participation-observations. The results of this study reveal the exploratory, celebratory, and supportive relational dimensions to small talk and illustrate how such insights can be exploited in FL teaching and learning. In this article, we argue that small talk should be appreciated, valued, and accentuated not only for its ability to enhance meaningful and productive communication but also needs to be exploited for its exploratory, celebratory, and supportive interactive function.

Macro-level engagement in computer engineering MOOC lectures: comparing a high-rated and a low-rated course

Although digital advances have enabled hundreds of universities to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) to millions of students worldwide, the high dropout rate on these MOOCs indicates a disjunct between the potential of the offer and the success of its uptake. Many studies point to issues relating to interpersonal connection as a major factor in this disjunct. Interviews with students support the conclusion that lecturers’ interpersonal tone is crucial to shortening psychological distance in pre-recorded videos. However, it is unclear how the interpersonal tone preferred by students can be realised discursively. This paper captures discursive instances by modelling an engagement framework and identifying particularly useful strategies through comparison of a high-rated and a low-rated engineering MOOC course delivered on Coursera. Findings show that in the high rated course the lecturer consistently anticipated students’ state of mind and in response constructed a discourse that performed several interpersonal functions. On the other hand, in the low-rated course the lecturer mostly anticipated and addressed knowledge gaps and issues of difficulty, but not students’ emotional responses, and so deployed far fewer interpersonal strategies in the lecture discourse. These findings shed light on how lecturers can use interpersonal language in pre-recorded lectures to improve student engagement.

Understanding Anxiety

This study is the first of its kind to diachronically analyze how the use of language surrounding anxiety has changed in each version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Using corpus linguistic technology, the collocations of the word “anxiety” were analyzed and ranked using log dice to determine the strength of associations both within and across each version of this clinical guide. The results demonstrate that collocations among anxiety are changing with each published manual. In addition, specific diagnoses (i.e., generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, and panic disorder) are in flux over time. Lastly, the interpersonal language associated with anxiety is changing, leading to implications for both researchers and clinicians in the field of mental health.

Creating the system of teaching Russian as a second language to primary school children from migrant families

In modern Russian schools, foreign-speaking children from migrant families study on a par with Russian-speaking classmates. To adapt in the educational space, such students should be bilinguals. The necessity of forming the Russian-speaking component of the bilingual language personality of children from migrant families determines the relevance of this work. The aim of the study is to create the system of teaching Russian as a second language to primary school children from migrant families. The material included the scientific works on Russian as a foreign and as a second language, studies on the social and linguistic adaptation of migrants. Methods of complex theoretical analysis and modeling were used. The model of teaching Russian as a second language has been created, including target, methodological, content, and procedural components. The characteristics of each component of the teaching process are given, the parts of the components and the main content of these parts are determined. The super goal of teaching is the formation of the Russian-speaking component of the bilingual language personality with the help of language adaptation, including interpersonal language adaptation, linguistic-cultural adaptation, meta-subject language adaptation, psycholinguistic adaptation. Integration of the target, methodological, content, and procedural components of the model will make teaching Russian as a second language structured and purposeful and will contribute to the formation of a bilingual linguistic personality of a child from a migrant family. The prospects of the research are further study and description of the model components, as well as testing the proposed system of teaching Russian as a second language.

Exploring Interpersonal Language in Wedding Discourse on Social Media

As evidenced by YouTube's rising online popularity, sharing experiences via social media is becoming more and more common. Since the advent of digital media, communication and experience sharing have changed. A wedding speech is an intriguing example of this genre, where the speaker naturally expresses gratitude to the newlyweds and guests while reliving family history. By recognizing important linguistic elements, the audience can better understand the interpersonal ties presented. The present study aimed to explore the interpersonal language and investigate the significant linguistic features of social media speech through a spoken analysis of YouTube videos. Approximately 2.5 hours (and 13,707 words) worth of real audio-visual recordings of wedding speeches were gathered and transcribed. The theoretical foundation for this study is strengthened by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The findings and discussions section provides a comprehensive review of interpersonal language as it relates to appraisal theory, for example, the context variables of genre and register and lexico-grammatical features. These findings were investigated to comprehend the underlying interpersonal meanings in various language strata domains. The present study advances our knowledge of how language shapes speakers' communicative behavior in wedding discourse and provides insight into this novel media text form.

Halliday’s Interpersonal Meta-function Analysis of Entrepreneur’s Public Speech in English and Central Kurdish

This paper examines the role and significance of Interpersonal language meta-function in understanding and constructing language use and functions among language users in a business context in English and Central-Kurdish languages. In analyzing entrepreneurs’ public speeches, the researchers employ the descriptive and qualitative approach with the content analysis. The instrument used in this study is to examine the qualitative exploratory data among entrepreneurs’ public speech in business discourse in English and Central-Kurdish. The paper attempts to answer the following questions; What is the dominant mood type among the entrepreneurs in English and Central-Kurdish in business discourse? How does the use and selection of the personal pronoun by entrepreneurs in English and Central-Kurdish influence the interpersonal meta-function? and lastly, What are the frequency and occurrence of Attitudinal mode in the public speech of entrepreneurs concerning Type and possible Polarity? The findings show the information about the distribution of the results in regard to the mood types, the use and selection of personal pronouns and the frequencies of each attitudinal mode in an entrepreneur’s public speech in English and Central Kurdish quantitatively. The study reveals that the prominent type of mood is declarative mood, besides the use and selection of the Personal Systems play a significant role in which the speaker expresses his attitude, influence and maintaining friendship and intimacy with the audience. The dominant personal pronoun is first personal system and the positive Affect mode exceeds other attitudinal modes both in English and Central-Kurdish.

A systems approach to multilingual language attitudes: A case study of Montréal, Québec, Canada.

People are shaped holistically by dynamic and interrelated individual and social-ecological systems. This perspective has been discussed in the context of varied aspects of bilingual experiences, namely language acquisition and development. Here, we applied a Systems Framework of Bilingualism to language attitudes, which may be especially responsive to social-ecological influences. One hundred twenty-three French-English bilingual adults (M age = 21.20, SD = 3.21) completed self-report questionnaires on demographic information and their attitudes toward languages. A subset of these bilinguals (n = 73) completed a social network survey. We used language-tagged social network analysis and geospatial demographic analysis to examine the role of individual characteristics (i.e., first language), interpersonal language dynamics (i.e., person-to-person interactions), and ecological language dynamics (i.e., neighborhood language exposure). At an individual level, we found that bilinguals' language background (i.e., first language) predicted attitudes of solidarity toward a language (i.e., whether a language is associated with personal identity and belongingness). When considering sociolinguistic layers of influence, we found that bilinguals' social network and neighborhood-level language exposure jointly predicted their attitudes of solidarity toward a language, as well as their attitudes toward the protection of minority languages. While most studies have examined language experience in a unidimensional nature, the present study investigated multilingual language attitudes by considering multiple systems within a social-ecological framework. Taken together, the results suggest that several interrelated interpersonal and ecological systems are associated with language attitudes, which could have important implications for planning future language policies in multilingual societies such as Montréal.

The Construction of Stance and Authorial Voice in Medical Texts Written by Professional Scholars

The focus of the present study is on how professional scholars argue their propositions while maintaining a relationship of solidarity with their readers in the discussion section of medical research articles. More specifically, it provides explanations of (1) how attitude features of effect, judgment, and appreciation are disseminated across academic medical texts published in reputable journals, (2) how different writer voices are constructed through the use of evaluative language, and (3) the assumptions that professional published writers make about the values and beliefs of their readers. Mackey and Gass (2005) Appraisal theory was employed in the present study because it focuses on interpersonal meanings that provide writers and speakers with the means to be critical, value, reject, accept, and challenge other positions. The findings revealed high instances of Appraisal resources in the discussion section of the medical texts. Thus, language played an important role and was used rhetorically to achieve argumentative goals. The interpersonal language was highly achieved through resources of engagement. The study contributes new understandings of interpersonal meaning in the professional writers’ medical texts from the functional perspective of Appraisal theory. The findings may provide new directions for the development of literacy in the genre of academic research writing.

“The findings might not be generalizable”: Investigating negation in the limitations sections of PhD theses across disciplines

Ph.D. thesis writers' abilities to effectively use interpersonal language and engage with disciplinary communities are recognized as key features of successful thesis writing (Hyland, 2006). As a high-stakes part-genre in Ph.D. theses, the ‘limitations’ section often contains caveats about writers' findings/methods/claims as realized through negation, functioning to convince disciplinary expert examiners to view any shortcomings more favorably (Paltridge & Starfield, 2020). Negation, as a disclaim marker within Martin and White’s (2005)appraisal framework, combines with other interpersonal resources to construct writer-reader relationships. Nevertheless, discipline-specific forms/functions of negation in theses' ‘limitations’ sections remain underexplored. Accordingly, this study investigated negation using the appraisal framework within the ‘limitations’ sections of 120 Ph.D. theses across disciplines (hard-applied, hard-pure, soft-applied, soft-pure). Results showed common as well as discipline-specific properties of negation devices alongside their co-articulations with other relevant appraisal resources. The corpus-informed results are expected to shed light on the nature and practice of each discipline that educators may take into account during thesis writing instruction.

“Establish a niche” vianegation: A corpus-based study ofnegationwithin the Move 2 sections of PhD thesis introductions

AbstractThe past few decades have witnessed an upsurge of scholarly interest in the generic descriptions of PhD theses following Swales’ seminalGenre Analysis. Fitted within the Create A Research Space (CARS) model, the thesis introduction plays a key role in justifying research originality/significance, where novice writers engage with academic communities through “establishing a research territory” (Move 1), “establishing a niche” (Move 2), and “occupying the niche” (Move 3). As the hinge of the CARS model, Move 2 (hereinafter EN) is of strategic importance as it enables writers to “sell” their ideas by pointing to the gap/niche in the “marketplace” of previous research, which is typically realized through the co-occurrences ofnegationalongside other interpersonal language resources.Negation, as adisclaimmarker within Martin and White’sappraisalframework, is a prominent linguistic indicator of EN. Nevertheless, little research has systematically examined the use ofnegationin ENs of PhD thesis introductions. Accordingly, the study investigatednegationvia theappraisalframework addressing subtypes ofnegation(disalignment,cautious detachment,unfulfilled expectation) within ENs in the introduction sections of 120 PhD theses. The results showed thatdisalignmentis the most frequent subtype ofnegation, while “not” and “no” are commonly used as indicators ofnegation. Our findings also revealed intriguing co-occurrences ofnegationsub-categories alongside other relevantappraisalresources. The corpus-informed results are expected to shed light on the nature and practice of PhD theses that educators may take into account during thesis writing instruction.

Gender Differences in Influencer Advertisements on Instagram: A Multimodal Perspective

Congruent with the rapid development of internet users worldwide, social media advertising has been mushrooming on various social network platforms, including Instagram. Among the many forms of advertising that marketers have relied on is influencer advertising, which pertains to hiring popular Instagram influencers to endorse particular products or services on their Instagram accounts. This study explores how these Instagram influencers use both texts and images to convey their advertising messages. Further, the study explores the differences in how male and female influencers construct their endorsement posts. A total of 20 advertisement posts were collected from 10 influencers and were analyzed from the multimodal approach integrated with the concepts of linguistic metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Then, the gender differences in texts and images were elaborated. It is shown that interpersonal language dominates the language used in the captions, despite the specific differences in the linguistic items used by men and women. Likewise, in the images, the influencers seem to consistently put the spotlight on themselves rather than on the products to captivate the followers' attention. The findings of this study will eventually contribute to the literature on advertising language and multimodal analysis.

Appraisal in Young Children’s Friendship Conversations: How Young Friends Establish Common Ground, Negotiate Relationships, and Maintain Play

Children’s first years at school are critical for their language development, academic progress, and social learning. Hopefully, children make friends when they start school because friendships support children’s learning and well-being. Friendships need to be developed and maintained, and interpersonal language resources like evaluative language provide linguistic tools that contribute to this relationship work. Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005) provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing evaluative language. This research applies the appraisal framework to explore evaluative language in the conversations of 2 pairs of 5-to-6-year-old friends. Children in each dyad identified each other as ‘very best friends,’ and their conversations were recorded as they played together. They used appraisal resources to negotiate and build common ground, to encourage responses from their friends, and to enrich their play. This research applies Martin and White’s (2005) framework in a new context and brings a new tool to the study of children’s peer conversations.

MANAGING INTERPERSONAL MEANING IN SOCIAL MEDIA: A CASE STUDY OF INDONESIAN LANGUAGE USE

Social media has become an important platform for everyone to broadcast information, opinions, and emotion freely and borderless in today's society. Among other social media, Twitter is the most well-known social media platform for idea-sharing. With a resource such as hashtags, people can search, follow, and contribute to a specific topic, which can create a nationwide and even worldwide discussion. With such a high engagement between users, how the twitter users use language to manage interpersonal role-relationship effectively will determine how smooth a communication goes. Character education is an integral part of Indonesia's education system. Therefore, in this internet era, it is also essential to understand the language resources of interpersonal meaning that students can exploit to engage more positively while exercising their freedom of expression in social media. This study draws upon the Systemic Functional Linguistic's (SFL) theory of interpersonal metafunction (Halliday, 1978; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014; Martin, 1992) that focuses on Mood and Modality and the Appraisal system (Martin, J.R.; White, 2005). As a case study, the data are taken from a trending topic in Indonesia Twitter, by choosing purposively some data that can best reflect the variety of interpersonal meaning.This study shows that specific interpersonal language resources can produce a more negotiated stance and solidarity that can lessen personal conflicts between users and encourage more positive communication.

DDRel: A New Dataset for Interpersonal Relation Classification in Dyadic Dialogues

Interpersonal language style shifting in dialogues is an interesting and almost instinctive ability of human. Understanding interpersonal relationship from language content is also a crucial step toward further understanding dialogues. Previous work mainly focuses on relation extraction between named entities in texts or within a single dialogue session. In this paper, we propose the task of relation classification of interlocutors based on their dialogues. We crawled movie scripts from IMSDb, and annotated the relation label for each session according to 13 pre-defined relationships. The annotated dataset DDRel consists of 6,300 dyadic dialogue sessions between 694 pairs of speakers with 53,126 utterances in total. We also construct session-level and pair-level relation classification tasks with widely-accepted baselines. The experimental results show that both tasks are challenging for existing models and the dataset will be useful for future research.

Lecturers’ Appraisals of English as a Lingua Franca in European Higher Education Settings

In this chapter we analyzed lecturers’ attitudes towards using English in European Higher Education settings. Twenty-eight university teachers were brought together from thirteen universities across six European countries for an online training for teachers in English Medium Instruction (EMI) settings. The lecturers’ written exchanges about English as an academic Lingua Franca (ELF) in one of the training modules were the target of our study. These exchanges (110 posts) were coded and analyzed using Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, which is a model of evaluation within the general theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics. In this framework, affect, judgement and appreciation are regarded as regions (types) of feelings in interpersonal language that reflect attitude (positive or negative). The results showed that teachers’ exchanges about ELF are interwoven with other types of English, in which they discussed different stakeholders and aspects of English, towards which their attitudes vary, which points to the multidimensionality of attitudes towards EMI. The results also show that appreciation and judgment regions were used more than affect in their language when discussing the use of English in Higher Education (HE).

Self-Denigration in 21st Century Chinese

Abstract The present paper aims to explore the characteristics of the self-denigration phenomenon in present-day Chinese, hence revisiting a key Chinese linguacultural phenomenon from a contemporary angle. We investigate the following understudied phenomenon: Self-denigration has changed together with Chinese interpersonal language use and interactional technologies, and is currently being used in remarkably innovative ways, in particular in the domain of online interactions. While various historical self-denigrating forms have remained in use, significantly more newly invented ones have gained popularity. We argue that the cluster of self-denigrating forms used in present-day Chinese can fulfil a variety of sociopragmatic functions. Some of these functions - such as showing off - paradoxically contradict with the conventional understanding of self-denigration as a ceremonial form of deference behaviour expressing modesty. Our investigation is based on data drawn from computer-mediated communication (CMC), as well as semi-structured interviews.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy

This paper is a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy . It critically interrogates the pattern of speech of the characters and its relation to how social power abuse and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted in the text. The analysis of the text unravels the perennial issues of corruption, poverty and societal imbalance which exemplify socio-political problems in Nigeria. There is also the reflection of the use of discursive features such as a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences to achieve pragmatic functions of social and interpersonal language use like interrogating issues, declaring personal motive and commenting on socio-political issues. These functions reflect communicative interactions in the realm of political, economic and cultural practices of Nigerians in the conversation situations analysed in the texts. Analysis of the text illustrates the view of the deprived people and shows that those who are in power are responsible for the use of language to create power and social inequality. CDA is therefore a useful tool to access salient information in texts and talk in order to checkmate power abuse and social inequality. The paper concludes that Soyinka’s use of language in the text foregrounds social imbalance and disorientation of the people by the ruling class. Keywords : Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Inequality, Ideology, Abuse of Political Power, Power Relation. DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/66-04 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

Asking the right questions: Demystifying writing assignments across the disciplines

Writing assignments in university classes can be opaque to novice undergraduate students, including L2 writers, who may struggle to identify the appropriate genre for their response. This paper introduces a simplified 3 × 3 matrix (adapted from Humphrey et al., 2010) as a heuristic for analyzing writing assignments across the disciplines. The matrix asks questions at the text, phase (move), and sentence levels using the Hallidayean view of language as construing ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings simultaneously. To exemplify the potential of the 3 × 3 matrix, two assignments are analyzed from a pathways program for international undergraduate students at a US university: a “research paper” in Art History and a proposal in Political Science. Interpersonal language choices present particular challenges in these tasks. The 3 × 3 matrix provides the tools to deconstruct and demystify academic genres by enabling content instructors, EAP faculty, and eventually students to ask the right questions.

Learning English Through Workplace Communication: Linguistic devices for interpersonal meaning in textbooks in Hong Kong

Using language to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships contributes to effective workplace communication. Importantly, language plays a significant role in constructing professional role and identity, building solidarity and rapport, presenting comments and views, and facilitating collaboration and problem-solving in the workplace. Yet, the teaching of workplace interpersonal language is under-researched, and the extent to which such teaching materials, in particular textbooks, can assist ESP teachers in the classroom is unknown. In this article, we report on a study which evaluates textbooks designed for a module on learning workplace English in the senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong. Specifically, it examines the textbooks, both qualitatively and quantitatively, regarding the presentation and teaching of linguistic devices of four broad areas of interpersonal meaning in different written and spoken workplace text-types and student activities. While linguistic devices in all the four broad areas of interpersonal meaning are identified, some areas, and most of the linguistic devices, are not given sufficient attention. The article therefore recommends that the textbooks should address the deficiencies identified and present interpersonal language in the workplace much more explicitly. It also highlights the need for ESP teachers to not exclusively rely on textbooks for teaching interpersonal language.