Agency, Responsibility, and Actor Positioning In Courtroom Narratives

Viewing language as a system consisting of grammatical resources for meaning making, this study explores how agency and responsibility are attributed in legal narratives through the lens of transitivity. Drawing upon the opening address of three American trials, the quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that agency and blameworthiness of the individuals on trial are discursively negotiated through starkly different grammatical choices, so that polarized positionings of the same social actors and events are accomplished for the audience. It is argued that such manipulation of grammatical resources exhibits subjective intervention on the part of the presenter and constitutes a prime mechanism of inference and attitudinal evocation for the jurors. In effect, the opening statement, which is in principle intended to be merely informative, becomes not only argumentative but also evaluative.

The Fragmentation of Religious Authority in Provincial Towns in Indonesia: The Case of the mui (Indonesian Muslim Scholar Council) in Pekanbaru and Pontianak

This article discusses the fragmentation of religious authority in Pekanbaru and Pontianak, Indonesia, focusing on the local mui (Indonesian Muslim Scholar Council). Employing qualitative methods, the mui Pontianak and Pekanbaru experience similar religious authority fragmentation due to the human agency. Members of the mui Pontianak and Pekanbaru represent Islamic organisations in Indonesia’s fight for the religious authority of their Islamic organisations, not for the cohesion of religious authority in the mui. Because religious authority has the desired will, it is no wonder that outside the mui Pontianak and Pekanbaru many Muslim figures struggle to preserve it. Individuals challenge the religious authority of the mui Pontianak and Pekanbaru. Some of them are local Muslim preachers. They strengthen and preserve their religious authority by preaching Islam, thus contributing to the growth of the mui fragmentation in these two cities.

Historiographic Metafiction and the Metaphysical Detective in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet

Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet explores the writing of history as an attempt to construct a narrative from a multitude of unreliable and conflicting sources. As a result, any attempt at historiography is also plagued by the problems of representation found in literature. More particularly, not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable. By examining the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Amulet this paper will discuss Bolaño’s use of the tropes of metaphysical detective fiction and how they help foreground the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction. This will, in turn, highlight the intersection between detective fiction and historiographic metafiction and how by combining these two genres writers can reimagine historical contexts and find new meanings and significance.

Laughter as Strategies in Business Communication Between Thai and Burmese Professionals

Laughter is not just an element in human communication that signifies happiness and enjoyment, it can be used as a communication strategy to lubricate successful interaction including business communication. Nonetheless, not many studies have paid attention to laughter in business communication. Therefore, this paper sheds light on how Thai and Burmese participants used laughter in a restaurant and in a business meeting in Yangon, Myanmar. Audio data was collected together with various pieces of ethnographic data, for example, participant observations reported from extensive field notes, semi-structured interviews and audio recordings. The analysis was based on the classification of laughter adopted from Hayakawa (2003), and Murata and Hori (2007). The findings reveal that laughter is deployed as a communication strategy with different purposes such as to make fun of work, to ease tension and to threaten other interlocutors and unveil those factors which stimulate the laughter in informal and formal settings.

Survival and Sovereignty: Forces on the Rise in Aurelio Tolentino’s Novels

Aurelio Tolentino (1869–1915) is best remembered as the first nationalist dramatist who was in and out of prison because of his mutinous writings. His five extant novels manifest the sociopolitical struggle of early 20th-century Filipinos from the worldview of a versatile author. Tolentino’s fiction from 1909 to 1914 unveils how the colonized adapted ingrained, rigid, and conventional Spanish influences to the liberal and materialistic scheme imposed by the United States. A sociohistorical approach was used to investigate Tolentino’s narratives, revealing a people with a pliant but firm character brought about by their four centuries of subjugation. The literary method used in the study likewise illuminates the economic and literary struggles of the author as an ex-convict. The novels illustrate how the suppressed survived and yearned for sovereignty from the dual domination that beset the land.

Thai elf Users’ Characteristics of Relative Clauses

To build up the empirical description of elf’s morphosyntactic system, this study examines Thai elf users’ characteristics of relative clauses and analyses the causes underlying their use of the construction. Data were taken from the writing of 116 advanced and upper-intermediate English majors at a university in Bangkok. The results indicated that Thai elf users’ relative clauses exhibit preferences for unmarked and explicit structures. Both linguistic and functional causes are responsible for their production of the construction: they form relative clauses full of basic and transparent structures in order to ensure simple and successful communication. The overall results reveal the nature of elf communication. Although Thai elf users’ relative clauses are associated with some specific patterns, their use of this grammatical construction is governed by general linguistic processes which have been found to operate in the interactions of many groups of elf speakers, especially at the phonological and pragmatic levels.

Connecting Faith through Theatre: Barazan’yee as a Semi-Ritual Performance in Thai Muslim Communities

This research paper examines the creative process used to connect young Muslims with their experience, their faith, and their community through a community-based performance. It also stresses the different levels of connections that resulted from the performance itself. The author sought to reconnect Barazan’yee, an important Arabic poetic chant, to people in the Bangkok Islamic community using tools from community theatre. The performance design process allowed them to tell their own story in relation to Bar’zanyee poetry in ways that are meaningful to them and their community, thus connecting their lives to the life of Prophet Muhammad. The first performance was in a public theatre resulted in a shift in structure and participation choices for audience in the second performance at a public theatre. Although both performances were conducted in a semi-ritualized environment of the Muslim community, the latter better engaged both the performers and audience.

Unmaking Masculine Determinacy: A Postmodern Challenge in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus

Venus, a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks, employs unconventional theatrical approaches in retelling the history of a 19th-century freak show attraction. This study examines how the critique of gender bias and sexual manipulations in Venus is explored and projected in ways that can be described as postmodern. Through the subversion of conventional forms and language, the blending of fact and fiction, the pastiches of both low and high generic and linguistic presentations, the liberating of a marginalized voice, and the revision of the philosophical premises that subordinate the female to the male order, the play questions the masculine determinacy inherent in social institutions and traditions and invites a conscious reconsideration of default meaning and truth.