Language Use in the Public Sphere: Methodological Perspectives and Empirical Applications. Edited by InésOlza, ÓscarLoureda, and ManuelCasado-Velarde. Pp. 564, Bern/Oxford, Peter Lang

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 500-501
Author(s):  
Daniel Moulin
1996 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 63-69
Author(s):  
Agnes Verbiest

Male/female communication training offered by enterprises to their company executives starts mostly from common sense ideas about sex-based differences in language use. The corresponding guidelines for women as newcomers in the public sphere as well as for men, often derived from one or more out of three well known theories, are shown to necessarily lead to deceptions because of their gender blindness. A gender approach to differences in language use between men and women cannot produce direct guidelines for language users but may help them to benefit from the fact that all language users, newcomers included, are norm subjects in interaction.


Author(s):  
Michael Westphal

AbstractThis article illustrates the value redistributions of Jamaican Creole (JC) and Standard English (StE) in the public sphere of radio by investigating changes in the discursive practices of language use, norms and other framework conditions of radio production, as well as listeners’ perception of linguistic variation on air. JC was marginalized and stigmatized in pre- and early post-independence Jamaican radio but has subsequently acquired an important role, mainly in dialogic and informal contexts. Despite its increased value, JC has not substantially challenged the prestige position of StE, which has remained the unmarked choice for formal broadcasting. However, there has been a localization of StE on the air away from exonormative standards and towards Jamaican English (JE) while British and American influences remain in place. In this linguistic decolonization process both JC and JE have acquired new values, but remnants of an unequal power distribution linger on.


queerqueen ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
Claire Maree

Chapter 5 examines the visual and sonic mapping of excess onto the queerqueen figure through layering of censorship tropes such as redaction characters (fuseji) and pixelization onto audiovisual media. Censorship tropes index complex histories of the use of language and images in the public sphere. Manipulation of censorship tropes exposes discourses of discrimination that shape language use in the media. This chapter analyzes the use of censorship beeps in the late-night television show Matsuko no heya (Matsuko’s Room; Fuji Television Network) hosted by Matsuko Deluxe, a contemporary queerqueen superstar who gained mainstream popularity in the early 2000s. The show pivots on staged (im)politeness and a pretense of low-cost production and minimal editorial effects. In Matsuko no Heya, self-censorship edited into the footage (re)creates Matsuko’s image as a sharp-tongued, honest-speaking, entertaining personality. It simultaneously (re)creates Matsuko’s linguistic performance of gender and sexuality as that which already exceeds the limits of respectability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Jef Verschueren

This article starts from the observation of current changes in the nature of a globalizing public sphere for which older structural boundaries have lost much of their relevance. Though the public sphere has traditionally been a topic for social scientists (and philosophers), a redefinition in terms of the realm of publicly accessible meaning, and of struggles over socially and politically important meaning, necessitates a contribution from the humanities. In particular, linguistic pragmatics, providing tools for an analysis of the way in which explicit and implicit forms of meaning interact in the process of generating meanings, is argued to be a useful instrument. The argument is supported with an analysis of the differences in meaning landscapes that emerge even in different-­language versions of the ‘same’ text, illustrating how dependent publicly available meaning is on basic pragmatic processes. The article concludes that a maturing science of language use is therefore needed to understand variations in the accounts of social and political reality that people in a globalizing public sphere live by.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mieke Vandenbroucke

AbstractIn this article I address a number of recent controversial language-related incidents and ideological statements regarding the use of French in the public sphere by Flemish nationalist aldermen in two Flemish towns. By drawing on interviews with different stakeholders (shop owners, aldermen, and passers-by), I address the different perceptions and ideological indexicalities of French shop names and signs in these Flemish contexts. In the data, the indexical field (Eckert 2008) of French in Flanders emerges as both polyvalent and indexically ordered, while the Flemish nationalist interpretations involve rescaled and historically recursive indexical meaning that can only be understood vis-à-vis the historical language ideological debate in Belgium. Language use in the public sphere has thus become a tool to impose monolingual ‘doxic logics’ (Bourdieu 1977) in Flanders, in spite of the fact that commercial and private language use is not regulated by language laws in Belgium. (Flemish nationalism, language ideologies, linguistic landscape)*


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