Contraction of negatives as evidence of variance in register-specific interactive rules

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcah Yaeger-Dror

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the contraction of negatives in a carefully chosen corpus of discourse and writing, to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Evidence is presented that negative contraction is conditioned by interactional and other register variables. The point is made that the pragmatic as well as morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished from each other. Although a Cognitive Prominence Principle predicts noncontraction when the negative conveys semantically focal information, a Social Agreement Principle predicts contraction. This is because it would be face-threatening (and, therefore, in conversation analysis terms “dispreferred”) to focus on disagreement, which is most often the semantic information conveyed by negatives. This hypothesis is examined using corpora which differ along several dimensions. The most important of these (for this study) appear to be the interactional versus informational register dimensions (Finegan, 1994). Data from instructional (workshop presentations), confrontational (political debates), and casual conversational material are contrasted with comparable reading style materials. The following general results are predicted. The Cognitive Prominence Principle will take over in informational contexts when disagreement is acceptable or neutralized. The Social Agreement Principle will take over in more interactional contexts where disagreement is not acceptable. The results are of interest to the student of focus, the sociolinguist concerned with dialect, register, and style variation, and even the speech technician.

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Tempest ◽  
Bill Wells

The ability to argue and to create alliances with peers are important social competencies for all children, including those who have speech, language and communication needs. In this study, we investigated the management of arguments and alliances by a group of 5-year-old male friends, one of whom has a persisting speech difficulty (PSD). Twelve argument episodes that arose naturally during video-recorded free play at school were analysed, using Conversation Analysis. Overall the data show that the child with PSD was just as likely as one of his friends to be included in, or excluded from, play alliances. Detailed analysis of two episodes reveals that the child with PSD competently used a range of linguistic devices in and around arguments and that his speech difficulties apparently did not impact on his ability to form alliances. This study highlights the need for those of us who work with children to take account of peer interactions and to consider the linguistic strategies that children employ when participating in peer talk and play: the social world in which inclusion and exclusion are accomplished. The study also illustrates the value of qualitative micro-interactional analysis as a research tool for investigating social inclusion and exclusion.


While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.


Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Svensson ◽  
Burak S. Tekin

AbstractThis study examines the situated use of rules and the social practices people deploy to correct projectable rule violations in pétanque playing activities. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, and using naturally occurring video recordings, this article investigates socially organized occasions of rule use, and more particularly how rules for turn-taking at play are reflexively established in and through interaction. The alternation of players in pétanque is dependent on and consequential for the progressivity of the game and it is a practical problem for the players when a participant projects to break a rule of “who plays next”. The empirical analysis shows that formulating rules is a practice for indicating and correcting incipient violations of who plays next, which retrospectively invoke and establish the situated expectations that constitute the game as that particular game. Focusing on the anticipative corrections of projectable violations of turn-taking rules, this study revisits the concept of rules, as they are played into being, from a social and interactional perspective. We argue and demonstrate that rules are not prescriptions of game conduct, but resources that reflexively render the players’ conducts intelligible as playing the game they are engaging in.


Author(s):  
Dalia Sulieman ◽  
Maria Malek ◽  
Hubert Kadima ◽  
Dominique Laurent

In this article, the authors consider the basic problem of recommender systems that is identifying a set of users to whom a given item is to be recommended. In practice recommender systems are run against huge sets of users, and the problem is then to avoid scanning the whole user set in order to produce the recommendation list. To cope with problem, they consider that users are connected through a social network and that taxonomy over the items has been defined. These two kinds of information are respectively called social and semantic information. In their contribution the authors suggest combining social information with semantic information in one algorithm in order to compute recommendation lists by visiting a limited part of the social network. In their experiments, the authors use two real data sets, namely Amazon.com and MovieLens, and they compare their algorithms with the standard item-based collaborative filtering and hybrid recommendation algorithms. The results show satisfying accuracy values and a very significant improvement of performance, by exploring a small part of the graph instead of exploring the whole graph.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greer Cavallaro Johnson

This article builds on contemporary understandings that identity is accomplished interactionally and discursively through storyteller/interviewer engagement inside the telling of the story. It introduces a new notion of narrative inquiry through the concept of “transactional positioning” to achieve an imagined interaction between a listener outside the institutional interview context and a tale told in an interview narrative some time ago. Texts are arranged by a select listener in a pre-thought out way to imaginatively fill gaps between what the narrator said and what he could have said during the interview but did not. The intertextual activity on the part of the listener aims to expand, retrospectively, the positioning of the interviewee so as to make more visible his ideological dilemma, uncovered through conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis of an interview narrative about the social trauma of being an Italian-Australian interned during World War II.


2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Leahy

Therapeutic discourse is the talk-in-interaction that represents the social practice between clinician and client. This article invites speech-language pathologists to apply their knowledge of language to analyzing therapy talk and to learn how talking practices shape clinical roles and identities. A range of qualitative research approaches, including ethnography of communication, conversation analysis, and frame theory, provides a background for the case presentation of a 13-year-old girl who stutters. Asymmetry is a feature of the therapeutic discourse presented, with evidence of recognition of the client’s communicative competence emerging. Applications of analyzing therapy talk are discussed, illustrating the relevance of this approach for clinicians.


Author(s):  
Sandra A Thompson

Abstract The action of proposing has been studied from various perspectives in research on talk-in-interaction, both in mundane as well as in institutional talk. Aiming to exemplify Interactional Linguistics as a drawing together of insights from Linguistics and Conversation Analysis, we explore the grammar of proposals and the stances displayed by participants in making proposals in the context of joint activities, where a future or hypothetical activity is being put forth as something the speaker and recipient(s) might do together. Close examination of interactions among American English-speaking adults reveals four recurrent grammatical formats for issuing proposals: Let’s, Why don’t we, Modal Declaratives, and Modal Interrogatives. We argue that these four formats for doing proposing within a joint activity are used in socially distinct environments, contributing to a growing understanding of the fit between entrenched linguistic patterns and the social work they have evolved to do.


Author(s):  
Dr. R.Rooba Et.al

The web page recommendation is generated by using the navigational history from web server log files. Semantic Variable Length Markov Chain Model (SVLMC) is a web page recommendation system used to generate recommendation by combining a higher order Markov model with rich semantic data. The problem of state space complexity and time complexity in SVLMC was resolved by Semantic Variable Length confidence pruned Markov Chain Model (SVLCPMC) and Support vector machine based SVLCPMC (SSVLCPMC) meth-ods respectively. The recommendation accuracy was further improved by quickest change detection using Kullback-Leibler Divergence method. In this paper, socio semantic information is included with the similarity score which improves the recommendation accuracy. The social information from the social websites such as twitter is considered for web page recommendation. Initially number of web pages is collected and the similari-ty between web pages is computed by comparing their semantic information. The term frequency and inverse document frequency (tf-idf) is used to produce a composite weight, the most important terms in the web pages are extracted. Then the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) between the most important terms and the terms in the twitter dataset are calculated. The PMI metric measures the closeness between the twitter terms and the most important terms in the web pages. Then this measure is added with the similarity score matrix to provide the socio semantic search information for recommendation generation. The experimental results show that the pro-posed method has better performance in terms of prediction accuracy, precision, F1 measure, R measure and coverage.


Author(s):  
Ольга Евгеньевна Казьмина

В статье на примере Италии анализируется социальная работа католических организаций, адресованная беженцам и иммигрантам. Работа написана с использованием полевого материала автора, собранного в одном из католических приходов Болоньи. Цель статьи – проанализировать отношение к миграционной ситуации в Европе ее крупнейшей конфессии – Римско-католической церкви – и изучить формы социального служения католических организаций среди беженцев и иммигрантов. Актуальность темы определяется тем, что задача адаптации беженцев и иммигрантов и их интеграции в принимающее общество остро стоит в настоящее время во многих европейских странах. Государства ищут приемлемые для себя пути этой интеграции. Законы, регулирующие иммиграцию и определяющие статус беженца и иммигранта, часто становятся предметом жарких политических споров. От светского дискурса о миграционном кризисе и мигрантах, зачастую подчеркивающего прежде всего права той или иной стороны, отличается дискурс религиозный. Позиция христианских организаций Европы заключается прежде всего в сострадании к беженцам и мигрантам и стремлении улучшить их долю. Миграционный кризис в Европе сделал европейские христианские организации более заметными и способствовал деприватизации религии в сильно секуляризованном обществе. Христианские организации, и в частности приходы и благотворительные структуры Римско-католической церкви стали важными акторами в выстраивании отношений с мигрантами и их интеграции в европейское общество. Ключевые слова: Миграция, Европа, Италия, Римско-католическая церковь, социальное служение. The article, using Italy as an example, analyzes the social work of Catholic organizations, addressed to refugees and immigrants. It is based on the author's field material, collected in one of the Catholic parishes of Bologna. The goal of the article is to analyze the attitudes to the migration situation in Europe from the part of its largest denomination – the Roman Catholic Church – and to study forms of social service of Catholic organizations among refugees and immigrants. The significance of the topic is determined by the fact that now many European states face the challenge of adaptation of refugees and immigrants and their integration into the host society. They are looking for acceptable ways of this integration. The laws that regulate immigration and stipulate the status of a refugee and an immigrant often provoke heated political debates. The secular discourse about the migration crisis, which usually emphasizes the rights of one of the sides, differs from the religious discourse. The position of Christian organizations of Europe consists first of all in the compassion to refugees and migrants and in the hope to possibly improve their fate. The migration crisis in Europe made European Christian organizations more visible and contributed to deprivatization of religion in a highly secular society. Christian organizations in general and Roman Catholic parishes and charity structures in particular became important actors in building relations with migrants and integrating them into the European society. Key Words Migration, Europe, Italy, Roman Catholic Church, social service.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Christophe Merle

Fictional utopias of the early modern time, as an alternative and an opposite to classical social contract theories, and fictional dystopias of the 20th century, as the opposite of the democratic and liberal rule of law, remain a major reference or for our contemporary political debates when it comes to characterize warn against considerable dangers entailed in political options, regimes, opinions etc. Today, classical utopias are mostly overwhelmingly considered in a negative way, although there were initially designed to be a more comprehensive solution for the problem of political evil than the social contract theories. From the beginning, dystopias were designed as the greatest political evil ever. Yet, both are not only fictional, but also radically impossible to ever b realized, for reasons that have not been really analyzed yet. In the following, I enquire into these reasons.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document