Mixed Discourse Research Articles

A quasi-deflationary solution to the problems of mixed inferences and mixed compounds

ABSTRACT Truth pluralism is the view that there is more than one truth property. The strong version of it (i.e. strong pluralism) further contends that no truth property is shared by all true propositions. In this paper, I help strong pluralism solve two pressing problems concerning mixed discourse: the problem of mixed inferences (PI) and the problem of mixed compounds (PC). According to PI, strong pluralism is incompatible with the truth-preservation notion of validity; according to PC, strong pluralists cannot find any appropriate truth property for mixed compound propositions, whose atomic constituents are from different domains of discourse. I argue that the strong pluralist is motivated to take the truth predicate in truth-involving universal statements to be deflationary to avoid the two pressing problems. Such a move entails that the truth predicate in the platitude of validity (V) does not denote any substantive truth property. Instead, it is merely an expressive device to help people generalize instances of (V) to (V). Analogous stories hold for the truth predicate in the platitudes of compound (e.g. conjunction). The upshot is that, the strong pluralist can solve PI and PC by further conceding that mixed compounds are true/false in a deflationary way.

Internal migration and changes in language repertoire among Sindhi youth

Today many young members of the Sindhi community are migrating from villages to cities in Pakistan, where the national language, Urdu and the co-official language, English, dominates. This study investigates the daily language patterns of transplanted Sindhi speakers and the impact of such patterns on their mother tongue. Furthermore, as these speakers frequently switch from one language to another due to exposure to multilingualism in urban settings, this study determines the dominant language being used by young Sindhis in their mixed discourse, compared to the discourse of older Sindhis. Reasons for adopting other languages in academic institutions and home-settings were also investigated. A qualitative case study was conducted to obtain detailed responses about the linguistic choices of twenty young Sindhi speakers. Two Sindhi families were also observed to study the language choices across generations in home-settings, and semi-structured interviews were conducted to determine reasons for the mixed languages which emerged. The data were analysed using frequency analysis for linguistic choices and thematic analysis of the daily life discourse. Results show that the young Sindhis in the city of Karachi are using dominant languages Urdu and English in their daily life and have higher proficiency in Urdu and English as compared to their mother tongue Sindhi. Moreover, there are several social, economic, and cultural reasons for switching from one language to another among the younger Sindhi generation, in contrast to the older Sindhi generation.

Representing Disability in Tort Litigation: An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Discourse (1998–2018)

This study empirically examines whether and how the introduction of disability rights impacted the portrayal of disability in personal injury court decisions in Israel and offers a method for doing such research in other legal realms and contexts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of Israeli district court judicial rulings over twenty years to measure whether a discursive shift occurred from a medical-individual view of disability to a social constructionist and a rights-based understanding of disability. Our coding system included descriptive and conceptual indicators, forming two indexes: a conventional index and a progressive index. Our findings reveal a steady dominance of the conventional discourse and a gradual yet limited rise in progressive discourse. Moreover, individual court decisions often manifest both types of discourse but are still dominated by a conventional view of disability and rarely apply direct disability rights terminology. These findings provide pioneering empirical evidence that substantiates the disability critique of tort law, demonstrating that judicial decision making is slow to adopt a disability rights perspective. More broadly, our findings show that the infusion of a disability rights orientation does not necessarily replace the older medical-individual view of disability but adds to it, resulting in a mixed discourse that includes both conventional and progressive elements.

Questioning Consilience and Autonomy in Self‐Determination Theory: A Critique and Hermeneutic‐Phenomenological Alternative

AbstractThis paper offers a theoretical analysis of Self‐Determination Theory (SDT) and its claims regarding human autonomy. Self‐determination theorists have advanced a form of self‐regulated, engaged behavior (i.e., autonomy), founded upon on a consilient account of human motivation that assumes multiple, hierarchical levels of organization and causation (e.g., biological, psychological, and social). Autonomy, from this perspective, is taken to emerge from underlying biological mechanisms, but also able to exert its own causal effects in the world as a unique psychological phenomenon. We contend that in theorizing this way, self‐determination theorists have invoked a mixed discourse of mechanism and autonomy that leaves important questions unanswered, perhaps most importantly those concerning how autonomy as a kind of volition can fit coherently in the mechanistic account of world that they advocate. We then offer an alternative perspective based upon the work of various hermeneutic‐phenomenological thinkers in philosophy and psychology. This alternative perspective conceptualizes human phenomena such as autonomy and motivation in agentic terms, emphasizing meaningful participation in possibility‐laden contexts of everyday practices.

Public responses to COVID-19 information from the public health office on Twitter and YouTube: implications for research practice

ABSTRACT We collected tweets directed at the official Twitter account of the Canadian Public Health Office as well as comments on a Canadian Public Health Office press conference posted to YouTube. We used a mixed method corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach to categorize and analyze these data. We found key differences between comments on each platform, namely differences in tone and sarcasm in YouTube comments, and more balance in Twitter mentions. Findings suggest that studying public responses to health information on one platform in isolation does not provide an accurate picture. To generate a fuller picture of misinformation, researchers should conduct studies across digital platforms using diverse methods. This research could influence how studies of health communication and public opinion are approached in the future.

Conceptualising Primary-Secondary School Transitions: A Systematic Mapping Review of Worldviews, Theories and Frameworks

There is continued interest internationally in primary-secondary school transitions. Fourteen literature reviews of primary-secondary transitions have been published over the last 20 years, however none of them have systematically analysed primary-secondary school transition ontology, i.e., researchers’ worldviews, theories/models and frameworks. This is a major gap in these reviews and the papers published in this area; this is of concern as it is difficult to trust the robustness of a study if its foundation, such as researchers’ conceptualisation of transitions, is not visible. Therefore, using the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre) approach, we undertook a systematic mapping review, of empirical studies published internationally between 2008 and 2018. Our objectives were to explore researchers’ and research participants’ conceptualisation of transitions, the conceptual framework used by the researchers and their discourse about transitions. Of the 96 studies included in this systematic mapping review, most had not clearly defined transition, and even when conceptualisation was explicit, it did not underline the research design or frame the findings. Most researchers adopted previously used theoretical frameworks.These theoretical frameworks can be beneficial; however, as the researchers did not adapt or develop them in the context of transitions research, it limits a meta-theoretical understanding of transitions. Further, the majority did not report study participants’conceptualisation of transitions. Similarly, a large number of researchers adopted a negative discourse about primary-secondary school transitions, with some using a mixed discourse and only two papers had a primarily positive discourse. This systematic mapping review is original and significant as it is the first study to provide a review of school transitions ontology and offers unique insights into the conceptual and methodological gaps that international transitions researchers should address.

Trânsitos Narrativos no Atlântico Negro: Francisco Félix de Souza em Múltiplas Versões, por

The article focuses on two novels – The Viceroy of Ouidah, by Bruce Chatwin, (1987; 1998) and O Ultimo Negreiro, by Miguel Real (2007) – and the film Cobra Verde, by Werner Herzog (1987), taking the historical character Francisco Felix de Souza as a guiding thread to think the relations between fiction and history in the construction of an imaginary about a chapter of the history of the Black Atlantic. Supported in the discourses of the historical field, we analyze a network of interdisciplinary and intertextual cooperative relations, with emphasis in the Social Sciences. These networks are brought into the dialogue in which the Black Atlantic, read by the dominant bias of literature, is a privileged passageway of texts that provoke historical truth and demand of the theory a hybrid and mixed discourse composed of fiction, theory and historical reflection.

“Our Fans Deserve Better”

When rugby league star Blake Ferguson was arrested and charged with indecent assault in June 2013, for squeezing the vagina of a woman at a Cronulla night spot, the story made headlines around the country. It was the first sexual crime involving a National Rugby League (NRL) player to be reported since Brett Stewart was acquitted of sexual assault in 2010, and reporting of previous cases focused largely on footballers’ attitudes towards women, women’s behaviour towards footballers, and use of alcohol. Using mixed methods discourse analysis, this article shows that the first 2 weeks of print media reporting created a frame for the case that had nothing to do with sexual crime, attitudes towards women, or gender relations. Although Ferguson had a history of inappropriate behaviour towards women, and alcohol abuse, the alcohol frame was almost unanimously chosen, marginalising the sexual crime and Ferguson’s actual victim. In contrast to reporting of previous cases, the focus was overwhelmingly on the impact on Ferguson’s career, his well-being and the game (including teammates, fans, and the NRL). The primacy of sport, and use of language to represent the case, impedes serious consideration of problematic attitudes towards women and the seriousness of sexual crime.

Spiritual Art and Hybridity: Mixed Discourse in the History of Art


 The article proposes a methodological experiment in writing art history, namely the incorporation of the study of mixed discourse into the area of art history. The term mixed discourse was defined by Ricoeur in his analysis of Freud’s writings. It refers to a mixed discourse of everyday and scientific language that is manifested in verbal and visual productions. A mix of epistemological modes is represented in products of mixed discourse that disturbs consumers. In the art history of the fin-de-siècle, the popular register of mixed discourse is usually overlooked. The article surveys what happens if this blind spot becomes the subject of scrutiny.

Technique and Understanding: Paul Ricoeur on Freud and the Analytic Experience

For Ricœur any study of Freud, or of psychoanalysis more generally, needs to take into account the crucial dimension of the analytic experience itself. Psychoanalysis, as a “mixed discourse,” aims to anticipate questions of meaning and explication alongside technical questions of energies, repression, displacement, and so on. The analytic experience is one which is practical and intersubjective, but which is also guided by various techniques or methods. These techniques, I will argue, should be understood as a type of techne, one which is less concerned with hermeneutic questions of meaning than with quasi-scientific questions of force, feedback, struggle, and process. The practice of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, deals with the ways in which these forces or drives become meaningful for a particular subject, and within a singular context or history. This article will aim to draw out both the interrelationship between techniques and practical understanding, and also the productive incommensurability between the two.

Language-learning holidays: what motivates people to learn a minority language?

ABSTRACTIn this article, we examine the experiences of 18 Galician language learners who participated in what Garland [(2008). The minority language and the cosmopolitan speaker: Ideologies of Irish language learners (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of California, Santa Barbara] refers to as a ‘language-learning holiday’ in Galicia in north-western Spain. We examine what motivates these learners to travel abroad to study Galician and in some cases to become new speakers of this minoritised language. We explore the ideologies and practices of these students, who as edutourists [Yarymowich, (2005). ‘Language tourism’ in Canada. A mixed discourse. In F. Baider, M. Burger, & D. Goutsos (Eds.), La Communication touristique. Approches discursives de l’identité et de l’alterité (pp. 257-273). Paris: L’Harmattan], are the targets and potential consumers of cultural and linguistic commodification. We explore the ways in which students themselves commodify Galician culture and language, in their attempts to capture what they perceive as an authentic learning experience and as a means of accessing a minoritised linguistic and cultural group.

FROM PROPERTY TO CIVIL SOCIETY: THE HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION OFVAKIFS IN MODERN TURKEY (1923–2013)

AbstractIn this article, I argue that shifting development discourses have shaped the meaning and function ofvakıfs (religious endowments) in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923. I identify three periods defined by their distinctive development discourse, and show how each of these discourses madevakıfs into both an object and a site of development. In the etatist discourse of the 1930s,vakıfs were articulated as national treasures tasked with financing state-led economic development. With the shift to a mixed economy discourse in the 1960s,vakıfs were reconfigured as private philanthropic foundations expected to create a skilled labor force. The neoliberal development discourse of the 1980s transformedvakıfs into welfare organizations focused on poverty. This article shows that in all three of these periods, the relationship between state, Islam, economy, and society was articulated, legitimized, and consolidated with reference to a seemingly stagnant but in fact malleable institution inherited from the Ottoman Empire—thevakıf. I refer to this process as the “local production of development,” a conceptualization emphasizing how global discourses of development are formed and transformed at the local level.

WANG CHONG, TRUTH, AND QUASI-PLURALISM

The first century Chinese philosopher Wang Chong 王充 has largely escaped the attention of comparative philosophers. That this oversight is undeserved is shown by two journal articles and an encyclopedia entry by Alexus McLeod (2007; 2011; 2012). McLeod sketches an intriguing picture of a philosopher whose style and approach to philosophy reminds more of analytic philosophy than of popular images of Chinese philosophy. Wang Chong preferred clear and direct argument to the “flowery and artificial writing” (華偽之文) that he perceived to be customary in his day, 1 adhered to a kind of metaphysical realism, and advocated a two-faced philosophical method of questioning (wen 問) what is unclear and challenging (nan 難) what is false or invalid. While McLeod deserves praise for making Wang Chong more accessible to a Western audience, I have my doubts about his analysis of Wang Chong’s theory of truth as presented in this journal (see McLeod 2011). McLeod argues that Wang Chong implicitly adhered to a kind of pluralism about truth somewhat similar to the theories defended by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch in the last two decades, and even improves on those by solving the problem of mixed discourse. In this response to McLeod, I want to challenge (aspects of) this interpretation of Wang Chong, and suggest a kind of “quasi-pluralism” that builds on both McLeod’s pluralist interpretation and my critique thereof.

A study of Sinhalizations in Sinhala-English Mixed Discourse

Pronunciation plays a vital role in creating a language acceptable to all. This is also true in the case of Sri Lankan English (hereafter SLE). This study concentrates mainly on the phonological features of non-standard SLE, identified mainly by deviations in pronunciation of a few vowels and consonants. The objective of this paper is to analyze the terms characterized as non-standard by using Muysken’s theory on Code Mixing. The proposed analysis will categorize elements into insertion and congruent lexicalization strategies. The study will analyze recorded speech of 20 urban bilinguals to obtain data. Self-assessment questionnaires will be used to determine attitudes towards phonologically marked items. Results will reveal that terms which are phonologically marked as non-standard. These phonologically marked items identified as Sinhalizations show more affinity to Sinhala phonology and are based on the speaker’s first language. They are products of a grammaticalisation process.

The Necessity of Shared Illusion in the Creation of “Reality”: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

In a rejoinder to Bonovitz that playfully joins him in a language that puts aside our typical conceptual tools that are still geared toward dualisms, I offer a phenomenological perspective on linking fantasy and reality. I suggest that Bonovitz offers a rich descriptive contribution to our work that, at its best, is a phenomenological description of the different modes of the creation of experience. In explaining his work, however, Bonovitz has developed a mixed discourse, one that shifts between a phenomenological sensibility and one that can slip into relying on our natural logic that differentiates between an isolated subjectivity and the world. Such a perspective underemphasizes the more radical phenomenological stance that in experience we are already engaged, already linked with our patients; that elaborating engagement within the frame of the play allows sufficient distance to begin to look at participation in a way that changes it into something new. Change occurs through the connections of different kinds of participation rather than through linking the separate spheres of fantasy and reality. In the end, however, this mixed discourse works in the sense of providing a compelling and thoughtful heuristic for revitalizing the role of fantasy in our clinical work.

Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth

The language of the aged has not been given as much attention as that of the youth. Hence, the aim of this research is to compare the language choices and discoursal features of the aged with that of the youth. This study focuses on the Chinese community from Tangkak, Johor, in Peninsular Malaysia, who use the Hokkien dialect. The older informants preferred to speak in their dialect while the younger informants preferred Mandarin. Older informants seldom code-switched but when they did, the codes in their mixed discourse were Hokkien and Mandarin, while that of the younger informants were Mandarin, Malay, and/or English. On the basis of an analysis of the audio recordings, observations, field notes, and informal interviews, the features are identified in the discourse of the aged, i.e., off-target verbosity (OTV), painful self-disclosure (PSD), and self-handicapping talk. The study shows that the discoursal features of the aged are clearly different from that of the youth.

His brain is totally different: An analysisof care‐staff explanations of aggressive challenging behaviour and the impactof gendered discourses

Using a discourse analysis on the texts of 10 interviews with care staff, this research explored the discourses used by care staff in constructing the aggressive challenging behaviours of men and women with learning disabilities. The research also explored discourses used differentially to understand the aggressive challenging behaviour of one gender. The analysis demonstrated the use of two main discourses, an individual pathology discourse which constructed the behaviour as originating in factors stable and internal to the client, and a context discourse which constructed the behaviour as a response to the client's circumstances. Participants used these accounts flexibly within their talk, and also used a mixed discourse which constructed the behaviour as due to both individual pathology and context. Despite the staff presenting their understandings as not being affected by the client's gender, the presence of two gendered individualizing discourses within the interviews was also demonstrated. Women's behaviour, unlike men's, was constructed with the use of discourses about their menstrual cycle or character flaws. The consequences of the use of these different discourses are discussed, as are the subject positions which they afford for both staff and clients. It is argued that clients are disempowered by the individual pathology discourse; that consideration of the broad contexts within which care‐staff actions are situated may allow them to manage blame whilst reflecting on their practice, and that the impact of gender stereotypes on the understandings staff have of a client's behaviour should be a legitimate area for consideration in clinical practice.

The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society

The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society

Variations des ancrages énonciatifs et fictionalisation d'une anecdote d'Albert Camus

Jean-Michel Adam and Gilles Lugrin : Variations of the enunciative utterer-centered anchor points and fictionalization of an Albert Camus autobiographical narrative In Camus's works, one can find three versions of the same autobiographical anecdote. The rewriting of an identical scene as fiction in The Stranger, clearly as fact in Reflections on the guillotine, and as mixed discourse in Camus's posthumous autofictional novel The First Man may be seen as a textbook case. This article examines the enunciative anchoring in each of these forms of discourse in order to study whether narrative fiction offers specific enunciative features that are linguistically identifiable.

A Phenomenological Perspective on Certain Qualitative Research Methods

AbstractIn this article the phenomonelogical approach to qualitative research is compared with certain other qualitative approaches following other paradigms. The thesis is that a deepened understanding of phenomenological philosophy can provide the alternative framework that many of these authors have been seeking. The comparison with other approaches is made in terms of theoretical and methodical consistency. Theoretically, the argument is that the situation known as "mixed discourse" exists because practitioners have not sufficiently freed themselves from the criteria and practices of traditional paradigms in which most qualitative researchers have been trained. The shift from the collection of numerical data to linguistic data takes place without appropriate shift in theoretical context. This state of affairs should be overcome in order to strengthen qualitative research. On the other hand, many qualitative researchers carry on practices that seem to be analogous to phenomenological prescriptions which are explicitly usually misunderstood or resisted when stated directly and generically. Thus, greater theoretical clarity and consistency as well as deeper reflection or better utilization of imaginative possibilities still seem to be called for in order to bring better theoretical conceptualization and more consistent practices to qualitative research.