My Rhetorical Situations and Discourse Communities

Article about discourse communities

Metapragmatics and genre: Connecting the strands

Genre analysis involves at least a foray into the social/contextual dimension framing genre-exemplars. One way to explore this dimension is drawing on the concept of metapragmatics, which is primarily associated with (American) linguistic anthropology. However, with a few exceptions, genre studies have not consistently operationalized metapragmatics, either theoretically or practically. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to explore one possible angle of such operationalization by means of studying discourse fragments reflecting on fragments of (these very or other) discourses (so-called metapragmatic discourses) vis--vis any generic properties of the reflected discourse. Specifically, we analyzed comments sections for a number of YouTube videos exemplifying several lifestyle genres. The results indicate that generic references can range from simply using a generic label to refer to the discourse in question (as a token of a certain type/genre) to actually discussing the generic characteristics of the genre it instantiates, as well as projecting certain (generic) metapragmatic stances. Another observation is that different wordings used by the discourse community to refer to generic models can be, as it were, proper generic labels, but they can also be words and phrases that would hardly qualify as proper names of genres from an analysts point of view. Both these proper and other - genre-like - labels are also often used in conjunction with or are replaced by other ways of metapragmatically referring to what the speaker does or even what they are in/by dint of using the discourse in question. This suggests that any generic labels or cues are just part of a large pool of other possible metapragmatic meanings, knowledge, and ideologies circulating in discourse communities. More broadly, the results may indicate that genre studies should see genre as an even less stabilized entity because what a genre is depends on what people who actually use it make of it, as well as augment their standard toolkits with methods aimed at exploring metapragmatic discourse.

Toxic YouTubers “hated” by Doctor Who? Animating multiphrenic incarnations of Not My Doctor anti-fandom

This article considers how popular/spreadable misogyny enters into Doctor Who fans’ discourse communities via fan-cultural appropriation, mixing external political and internal fan discourses. This can oppose fannish communal norms such as “convivial evaluation” and “ante-fandom”. The theoretical perspective taken in the article combines work on toxic fandom with anti-fandom to thus understand fan toxicity as “multiphrenic”, i.e. drawing on multiple discourses and self-investments, including responding to its own anti-fans. The article goes on to examine YouTube voiceover-commentary videos from one communally-prominent Whotuber representing Not My Doctor anti-fandom, showing how they use devices such as the acousmetre and “stripped down” subjectivity to open a projective space for toxic fandom and enact a flat affect characterising what is termed “performative rationality”. Crucially, leftwing narratives of toxicity and hate are completely inverted to the extent that Doctor Who and the BBC are presumed, without evidence, to “hate” straight white male conservative fandom.

Gig Expectations: Literacy Practices, Events, and Texts in the Gig Economy

This article explores the writing and reading requirements of the literacy practices, events, and texts characteristic of work mediated by the online labor platforms of the gig economy, such as Airtasker and Freelancer, which bring together people needing a job done with those willing to do it. These emerging platform-based discourse communities and their associated literacies are a new domain of social activity. Based on an examination of seven gig economy platforms, the present article examines the core literacy event in the gig economy, the posting and bidding for tasks, together with the texts that enhance and support this process. While some tasks require written texts as the outcome or product, all tasks involve the creation of some form of written text as part of doing the work. These texts are both interactional and interpersonal. As well as being a part of negotiating and then getting a task done, they relate to the complexities of building the identities, knowledge, and relationships required of those working in a virtual work space rather than a traditional workplace. While most of these texts reflect familiar text types, the core text cycle is argued to be an “emergent” genre. Implications for education are presented.

The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action to citizens: A contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse

This paper sets up to show how accountability for communicative action is constructed in online journalism as an object of talk, comparing British English and Israeli Hebrew discourse communities. The analysis utilizes a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference supplemented by cognitive semantics and corpus-assisted tools. The discussion draws on data collected from the websites of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, Ha’aretz and Ynet. Focusing on self- and other-positioning of commenters and columnists as citizens, we explore how the accountability of the elite for communicative action and the accountability of their actions to citizens are discursively constructed by ordinary persons (in their role as commenters) and by non-ordinary persons (in their role as columnists, including journalists, experts and authors). The analysis indicates conceptual similarities coupled with discursive differences between the discourse communities under study.

Neo-Thomism in Action

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), Pope Leo XIII expressed the conviction that the renewed study of the philosophical legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas would help Catholics to engage in a dialogue with secular modernity while maintaining respect for Church doctrine and tradition. As a result, the neo-scholastic framework dominated Catholic intellectual production for nearly a century thereafter. This volume assesses the societal impact of the Thomist revival movement, with particular attention to the juridical dimension of this epistemic community. Contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds offer a multifaceted and in-depth analysis of many different networks and protagonists of the neo-scholastic movement, its institutions and periodicals, and its conceptual frameworks. Although special attention is paid to the Leuven Institute of Philosophy and Faculty of Law, the volume also discloses the neo-Thomist revival in other national and transnational contexts. By highlighting diverse aspects of its societal and legal impact, Neo-Thomism in Action argues that neo-scholasticism was neither a sterile intellectual exercise nor a monolithic movement. The book expands our understanding of how Catholic intellectual discourse communities were constructed and how they pervaded law and society during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

‘We Are a Global Community’: Communicating Knowledge through Moocs and Teacher Training Platforms

A socio-rhetorical discourse community consists of a group of people who come together to pursue objectives that predate those of socialization and solidarity, and who aim to develop and maintain their own discoursal characteristics. We have examined MOOCs (Massive Open Online courses) and teacher training educational platforms in order to ascertain whether and to what extent they may be identified as networked learning tools and discourse communities characterized by a commonality of goals, mechanisms and procedures of intercommunication, exchange of knowledge, information, as well as specialized genres and their terminology. MOOCs and learning platforms have dramatically changed the way people learn. Starting from ongoing research, we analyze the metadiscoursal features of an ad hoc corpus of online filmed lectures drawn from two MOOC providers (FutureLearn and Coursera). We look at both interactive and interactional resources (to guide the listener through the texts and to involve the listener in the subject), in order to discover how these features are used to control, evaluate and negotiate the communicative goals and impact of the ongoing exchanges. The quantitative and qualitative analysis shows a significant use of metadiscourse markers in the video lectures with a higher frequency of interactional features such as self-mentions, engagement markers, hedges and boosters, rather than interactive ones. These commentaries in the lectures signal the instructors’ attitudes towards the texts and their listeners. Additionally, they were found to perform a rhetorical function since they persuasively reinforce the instructors’ attitude and stance. Thus, their use engages the participants as members of a digital community, where commitment, dedication, and common goals seem to be fundamental features.

MELODRAMATIC PLATFORMS: THE AFFECTIVE THEATRE OF POLARIZED POLITICAL STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Once a site of promise for democratizing mass communication, the internet has also become a site of problematic information and polarized affect. Contrary to claims that polarization is not necessarily encouraged by social media platforms; our two-year, mixed-methods study of affect and narratives of race and national belonging in social media discourses of the 2019 Canadian and 2020 U.S. federal elections reveals clearly polarized collective political storytelling constructing conflicting meta-narratives marked by a highly affective moralizing tone and clear binaries of us versus them and good versus evil. Surprisingly, there is very little research that has drawn on either narrative emotions analysis or melodrama to understand the kinds of polarization that take place within social media platforms. This talk shares our finding; achieved through our innovative approach to affective discourse analysis developed through iterative, grounded theoretical qualitative study; that discourse communities formed according to social as well as political identities construct these polarized meta-narratives in the genre of melodrama, readily ensuring the emotional engagement of social media users through “sensationalism and predictable plot lines of good battling evil, plots and characters that do not encourage reflection, and refusal of nuance” (Loseke, 2018, p. 517).

Genre Analysis of Memo from Headmaster to Teachers

<p>Discourse analysis has always been a great tool for analyzing both spoken and written discourses in various discourse communities. Specifically, it has largely been used for written discourse analysis. For instance, it has been used in analysis of memos. Memos have been a valuable part of written discourse in different settings. Thus, this paper is the analysis of a memo written by a school headmaster. The author used Genre Analysis as a discourse analysis for analyzing the memo text in this paper. Although there are several models for genre analysis, Genre Analysis of Vijay. K Bhatia Model has been used in this study. The findings revealed that the memo was related to a professional genre of school while meeting not the entire characteristics of professional genre. The research suggested that future studies be conducted concerning memo analysis.</p>

Evidentiality in science from specialization to popularization: A case study of COVID-19 texts

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, medical texts on the pandemic have enjoyed wide popularity, and one of the key issues has always been the accuracy and dependability of the information they contain. The use of evidentiality, a linguistic system which functions to indicate the source and credibility of information, is thus worth exploring in COVID-19 texts. Adopting a synthesized framework within the overall model of systemic functional linguistics, this paper sets out to investigate the lexicogrammar and semantics of evidentiality on the basis of data collected in the form of both specialized and popular texts on COVID-19. Evidentiality in these texts is explored along four dimensions: (i) evidential taxonomy, where specialized texts favor reporting, while popular texts favor belief and inferring; (ii) information source, where specialized texts highlight the voices of authorship, original research, and patients, whereas popular texts highlight the voices of scientists, institutions, countries, and laypeople; (iii) modalization, where specialized texts typically indicate a higher degree of modal responsibility than their popular counterparts; and (iv) engagement, where specialized texts favor dialogic expansion and popular texts favor contraction. It is hoped that these findings will shed light on linguistic variation according to different contextual configurations, as well as clarifying rhetorical conventions in discourse communities of science.