NIGERIA: FACE ACTS IN ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION TELEVISION PROGRAM. THE CASE OF IGBIMO IPETU

The concept of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has largely been under explored from the linguistic lens, particularly in the Nigerian context. This study thus provides a scholarly intervention in this regard. Drawing insights from Brown and Levinson’s face theory, four randomly sampled recordings of Ìgbìmo Ìpètù, an alternative dispute resolution television programme on the Ekiti State Television (EKTV) in southwestern Nigeria was analysed in this study. Focus was placed on the face acts as well as their pragmatic functions in the programme. Findings revealed that bald on-record face-threatening acts (FTA), bald off-record FTA and positive face acts characterized the discursive interaction of participants on the programme. While bald onrecord and off-record FTAs were deployed by the panel to criticize and condemn actions considered unsavory on the part of complainants and the accused, complainants and accused persons deployed on-record FTAs to protest/redress the panel’s decisions found unacceptable. The panel used positive face acts as a general principle in the interaction, particularly with cooperative accused persons, while accused persons deployed positive face acts to negotiate the discursive interaction and for face-damage repair. Keywords: Alternative dispute resolution, dispute and media, face acts.

Medieval Pragmatics: Philosophical and Grammatical Contexts

This chapter discusses grammar and pragmatic thinking in the schools after 1050, focusing on internal history and semiotics. Roger Bacon and Peter (of) John Olivi proposed far-reaching theories of language and meaning with pragmatic perspectives. Bacon foregrounded pragmatic understanding in his semiotics of language and proposed context and communicative effectiveness rather than formal completion as the criteria for linguistic acceptability. Grammarians’ analysis of interjections, speech fragments, and emotional expressions opened new ways of understanding meaning-making, discursive interaction, and double articulation within a grammatical system and new pragmatic thinking about signification, reference, and affect. Olivi’s pragmatic approaches to some philosophical and theological accounts of language and expression focused on speakers’ and listeners’ responsibilities and how words’ meanings and contexts can change over time.

Political debate on YouTube: revitalization or degradation of democratic deliberation?

It seems to be an established fact that social media multiplies the possibilities for civil society to express its points of view and intervene in the debate about matters of public interest. However, this greater social participation in political discourse through such platforms does not always translate into an improvement in the quality of democratic deliberation. The aim of this research is to examine the characteristics of comments and conversations on YouTube in a pre-election period to determine whether such discursive interaction contributes to strengthening the democratic system or if, on the contrary, is detrimental to it. Adopting a quantitative–qualitative approach, content analysis and critical discourse analysis are combined to examine 471 comments collected from the most viewed videos on YouTube in the month before the Andalusian elections held on 2 December 2018. Various aspects are considered, including the theme and typology of opinions, the use of foul language, and the modes that the conversation adopts. The results indicate a social discourse in which the exchange of opposing positions prevails, including comments with a strong emotional burden that tend to attack or criticize the ideology of the protagonists in the videos, and where rudeness is present (although there are exceptions), mainly as personal insults among the participants. The characteristics of the conversation taking place on this online video platform in the pre-election period do not meet the minimum standards for argumentation and civil behavior in digital political debate, thus far from contributing to an improvement in the quality of deliberative processes, it is deteriorated. Resumen Las redes sociales multiplican las posibilidades de la sociedad civil de expresar sus opiniones e intervenir en el debate sobre asuntos de interés público. Este hecho parece constatado. Sin embargo, la mayor participación social en el discurso político a través de este tipo de plataformas no siempre se traduce en una mejora de la calidad de la deliberación democrática. Esta investigación examina las características de los comentarios y las conversaciones que tienen lugar en YouTube en período preelectoral con el fin de dirimir si la interacción discursiva que se produce contribuye a fortalecer el sistema democrático o si, por el contrario, suponen un perjuicio para el mismo. Desde un enfoque cuantitativo-cualitativo, se combinan el análisis de contenido y el análisis crítico del discurso para examinar 471 comentarios, recogidos en los vídeos más visionados en YouTube en el mes previo a las elecciones andaluzas celebradas el 2 de diciembre de 2018. Se atiende a diversos aspectos: temática y tipo de las opiniones, uso de la descortesía verbal y modos que adopta la conversación. Los resultados apuntan a un discurso social en el prevalece el intercambio de posturas contrapuestas, donde priman comentarios con fuerte carga emocional que tienden al ataque o la crítica de la ideología que protagoniza el audiovisual, y donde la descortesía, aunque no de forma generalizada, está presente, principalmente como forma de ofensa personal entre los interlocutores. Las características de la conversación que tiene lugar en la plataforma de vídeos online en período preelectoral no cumplen unos estándares mínimos de argumentación y civismo en el debate político digital que, lejos de contribuir a mejorar la calidad de los procesos deliberativos, los estaría perjudicando.

The proper place of subjectivity, meaning, and folk psychology in psychiatry

‘The proper place of subjectivity, meaning, and folk psychology in psychiatry’ argues that Steven Hyman’s vision for psychiatry is excessively bioreductive. Hyman wrongly assumes that conceptual mental content is reducible to brain state descriptions and mistakes the neural vehicle of content for the content itself. Once we see that conceptual content, including the referents of folk psychology, shape brain activity, it becomes clear that content itself (or a lack of it) can be pathological. Therefore, treatment will sometimes be effective, even curative, by addressing that content through discursive interaction with the patient qua person. Diagnosis and effective treatment of mental disorders cannot just focus on neurobiology, as Hyman claims, both processes must also consider conceptual content and the complex interactions between content and the neurobiology instantiating it.

Social Interaction as Key to Understanding the Intertwining of Routinized and Culturally Contested Consumption

A number of concepts and concerns from cultural sociology were thrown out as babies with the bathwater when the sociological study of consumption became dominated by the use of practice theories. The concept of social interaction is one of them, perhaps due to assumptions about its association with symbolic and discursive interaction and reflexivity. In the field of sociological analysis of food conduct, however, there is a need for addressing both more culturally contested parts of food practices as well as more routinized parts. Food consumption and practices of provisioning, cooking and eating are both tacit, recursive, mundane activities, and at the same time discursively questioned through multiple, mediatized, cultural repertories of food. In the article, I will suggest how social interaction can be conceptualized as enabling the understanding of this intermingling of the culturally contested and routinized parts of consumption within a practice theoretical perspective. The conceptual suggestion consists in four analytical suggestions for how the culturally tacit and reflexive in food conduct become linked through social interaction. The four suggestions are about coordination, intersection, hybridity and normative accountability. The four suggestions are exemplified empirically on the basis of a number of qualitative studies of food conduct among Danish consumers.

From stance to identity: Stancetaking in contemporary English risk discourse

The study focuses on stancetaking – an intersubjective and context-bound discursive activity that unites micro- and micro-properties of discursive interaction. The purpose of this work consists in discovering discursive ways of situational identities construction in contemporary English risk discourse as a result of stancetaking on risk. The theoretical background for this research comprises post-structuralist and socio-constructionist approaches to discourse analysis, establishing a new, socio-cognitive, direction in discourse studies. Contemporary English risk discourse serves a situational environment for investigating stancetaking in this work. It is approached as a discursive phenomenon of two types – a risk discourse proper (communicative situation of risk) and a discourse about risk (metacommunicative situation of risk). Discursive framework of communicative situation of risk reveals cognitive, pragmatic, and interactional dynamics of stancetaking in the conditions of in situ discussion of eventual stances (decisions) on risks. The inquiry resulted in determining the stance-takers’ situational identities, ranging from risk-averse to risk-taking subjects. Investigation of conversational patterns and discursive dynamism of stance alignment enabled identification and characterization of interactional mechanisms of stancetaking in situations of risk. Explorations of stancetaking in ex situ discursive conditions of metacommunicative situations of risk shed light onto socio-semiotic potential and pragmatic-rhetorical patterns of stancetaking. Complex analysis of the stance-takers’ language output provided a basis for establishing a typology of their situational identities, constructed in mediated discourse situations – layman, expert, mediator whose strategic speech behavior depends upon the balance of epistemic and affective components in their respective stances.

The process of diversification of the non-verbal communicative components in the modern English discourse

This article focuses on the specific properties of the combinability of non-verbal components with each other in the modern English discourse including the characteristics of their interaction with verbal components. The structural, semantic and pragmatic features of non-verbal components as well as their universal, ethnospecific and individually meaningful characteristics are taken into account. The paper is based on the discourse methodology in analysing communicative phenomena. The complex nature of communication is presented as the unity of verbal and non-verbal components within the anthropocentric paradigm in language and speech research. This paper provides the research of the combinability of non-verbal communicative components with each other, the result of which is presented by different clusters of non-verbal components taking into account the characteristics of a discursive personality upon which depend the ways of diversifying the information and emotion through non-verbal components. The analysis of discourse-constitutive potential of kinesic, proxemic and prosodic communicative components contributes to developing the theory of discursive interaction of different code systems aimed at the investigation of communicative signs of different nature in their unity within the frames of different types of discourse.

ZU-UK’s Hotel Medea

ZU-UK’s overnight Hotel Medea positioned its audience as active participants throughout the three-act production, including, for example, as guests at Jason and Medea’s wedding in Act One, and as the couple’s children in Act Two. Chapter 6 utilizes Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator to consider this production and the degree to which the audience was, in fact, liberated. It suggests that the spectator’s emancipation was more intellectual, rather than physical, and that the use of ancient tragedy was key to this intellectual emancipation. It argues that through the constant shifting of perspective upon Medea the production encouraged the audience to have a discursive interaction with the traditions of receiving Euripides’ tragedy and to reconsider the ways, and reasons why, antiquity is reappropriated in modern society. The chapter reveals that in postdramatic classical receptions levels of formal innovation do not necessarily correlate to levels of textual innovation. Instead, the relationship between form and content, and its effect upon spectatorship, in postdramatic tragedies is seen to be fluid and, consequently, all the riper for analysis.

Discourse structure as the scaffolding of stance structure : developments of a central concept in a central site of discursive interaction in bioethics

This study explored how a major concept and principle in the interdisciplinary area of bioethics, respect for autonomy, changed across the first and the seventh editions of the textbook Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, a period covering 33 formative years in the institutionalization and growth of bioethics. The question explored by the study was: what can the structure of the stance interactions between authors reveal about institutional changes and the relative position of different academic disciplines in bioethics over this period? A new, relational method of content analysis that draws on methods developed in applied linguistics, concerning evaluative or stance-taking language and on the discourse or rhetorical structure of expository texts, was used in pursuing an answer to the question. Between the first and seventh editions, the core of Beauchamp and Childress's concepts of respect for autonomy and informed consent did not change significantly, though additions and refinements were added in the seventh edition. Philosophy retained a prominent place in the discussion across editions, but medicine, combined with other biomedical sciences and professions, slightly overtook philosophy's place of prominence. The interactions between these disciplines were, on balance, cooperative, and some division of labor was evident in the seventh edition, with philosophers used mostly for conceptual analysis and biomedical disciplines used mostly for technical and empirical support of the concepts. The overall number of disciplines represented in the bioethics discourse on autonomy grew exponentially.