Electoral Defeat, Conversational Practices of Blame and Avoidance of Responsibility in Nigerian Media Political Discourses

This paper addresses electoral defeat suffered by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) at the 2015 presidential polls and the communicative character of blame and avoidance of responsibility as evident in the Nigerian media political discourses. Discourse analysts are yet to study the linguistic aspects of blame and avoidance of responsibility in great details. This work is intended as a contribution towards filling this lacuna in knowledge by examining the conversational discursive practices adopted by Nigerian politicians in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the twin goals of positive self-presentation and consolidation of political capital (Hansson, 2015). Some PDP members enlisted the discursive strategies of blame avoidance, in which blames and denials are carefully and strategically planned to serve positive self-representation (semantic macro-strategy of in-group favouritism) and negative other-representation, that is, semantic macro-strategy of derogation of out-group, (https://www.hse.ru/en/). We illustrate the linguistic mechanism of blame and avoidance of responsibility and how it thrives as a dominant recurrent theme in conflict talk and public communication discourses. The findings tend to enrich and enliven the literature on discourse studies and by extension open fresh vistas of critical research into language use in politics.

The Apocalyptic Hijab: Emirati Mediations of Pious Fashion and Conflict Talk

This article examines Emirati public discourse on, and imagination of, gendered pious fashion and conflict talk as animated in the sitcom Shaabiat Al-Cartoon (SAC) and other connected cultural expressions. Through a multimodal analysis, it contributes to discussions of the politics of piety by analyzing the strategic illustration of the UAE’s female fashion sense and use of the linguistic features that move verbal dueling to verbal attack. In this prefabricated orality, the article outlines linguistic forms in mediating gendered conflict talk and animating pious fashion. The paper further argues that a multimodal social semiotic performance that is based on language and apparel can produce powerful effects on the co-production of gendered identities. Additionally, it demonstrates through this analysis how the producers of an episode of SAC, through the use of semiotic cues, attempt to reflect and shape Emirati sociocultural values and idioms on pious gendered clothing and perceptions of religiosity and modernity.

Analysis of Conflict Talks in Zootopia from the Perspective of Adaptation Theory

Conflict talk is a common and complex linguistic phenomenon existing in life, mainly referring to verbal interaction events such as disputes, dissent, and refutation between the two parties in the conversation. This paper is based on Verschueren’s adaptation theory, combined with the representative conflict cases in the movie Zootopia, and the multi-angle analysis of the expression of dialogue conflicts. And it tries to find the specific causes of conflict talks, in order to provide methods to solve or alleviate the discourse conflicts in life.

Prefacing opposition: Resources for adumbrating conflict talk in second language peer discussions

This study provides an empirical analysis of conflict talk among second language learners, focusing on the opening aspects of conflict talk sequences, specifically the short sequences between an arguable and initial opposition. Data is based on 178 hours of small group discussions video-recorded in Japanese university English classes. Analysis revealed: (a) repetitions and why-type questions directly following an initial speaker’s claim were likely to adumbrate upcoming oppositions, (b) when a questioning repeat failed to elicit an account for the original speaker’s claim, the potential opposer explicitly pursued an account for the claim with a why-type question, (c) a major action these repeats and why-type questions performed was to call for speakers of potential arguables to provide sufficient accounts for their claims. The findings contribute to research on argumentative talk in classrooms by extending analysis beyond adjacent turns, by highlighting the resources of repetitions and why-type questions that speakers deploy to adumbrate oppositions, and by explicating the details of second language learner talk in peer discussions.

Intercultural and interpersonal communication failures: analyzing hostile interactions among British and Spanish university students on WhatsApp

Although the use of the mobile application communication technology for interpersonal communication seems to be less physically threatening, building successful relationships has become more complex. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the way(s) British and Spanish university students manage a hostile situation when disputing among each other on WhatsApp, the present study aims to shed light on conflict management by investigating the differentiated topic management strategies the participants in the study deploy. This, in turn, will add new empirical evidence to the expanding field of intercultural pragmatics. Through a detailed analysis of the hostile interactions, the results show a differentiated linguistic process by means of which participants initiate, maintain and escalate conflict talk that also relates to the speaker’s failed attempts to understand and negotiate each other’s intended meaning in interaction.