The metapragmatics of legal advice communication in the field of immigration law

Metapragmatic comments are crucial in lawyers’ attempts at managing legal advice communication with asylum seekers. Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, this paper aims to demonstrate how/when/why textual features which tell interactants how to interpret the ongoing speech are used in the context of lawyer-client communication in the field of immigration law. The data analysis reveals how lawyers frame the discursive conditions (i.e. linguistic diversity, the institutional need for efficiency and the presence of emotional lifeworld concerns) of the local interaction in the lawyer’s office. This is necessary as clients are not always acquainted with the discursive routines of the legal consultation, nor aware of its position within the wider chain of discursive asylum events. As many aspects of the legal advice context resemble the interactional conditions of the government-asylum seeker communication, it proves key yet challenging for lawyers to metapragmatically signal their advocating role in a way that enables a relationship of rapport with their client.

Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholders

A speaker/writer uses a placeholder (PH) to fill in the syntactic slot of a target word when she has no immediate access to the word or prefers to avoid explicitly mentioning it for contextual reasons. In the present article, I point out a hitherto understudied usage of PHs: a speaker/writer who does not have in mind a specific target form may use a PH to refer to an arbitrary entity (e.g. person, object, action, event, proposition). I substantiate this claim by analysing a variety of original data on Japanese wh-derived PHs. Further evidence for this claim comes from a cross-linguistic survey of wh-derived PHs in Korean and demonstrative-derived PHs in Romanian and Bulgarian. I show that the arbitrary-referential function is observed in PHs in all these languages, regardless of their origins (i.e. wh word, demonstrative) and their categories (i.e. nominal, verbal).

On the dialogic frames of mirative enunciations

In this paper we will describe the meanings of surprise associated to different uses of the discourse marker mirá in Argentinian Spanish. Our aim is to contrast the subjective stances of surprise emerging in response to the different dialogic frames prompting mirative enunciations with mirá. From the Dialogic Approach to Argumentation and Polyphony, we intend to show how these stances of surprise can be explained as dialogically “caused” by the argumentative representation of: (a) a sudden discovery that brings out something new, (b) a sudden discovery related to something that contradicts a previous belief or assumption and (c) a sudden discovery of something that exceeds its ordinary magnitude or degree.

Discoursal representation of masculine parenting in Arabic and English websites

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences and similarities between Arabic and English parents’ role in Arabic and English parenting website texts and the linguistic exponents used to address parents and signal their roles, and to find out the socio-cultural ideologies that have given rise to variations in gender roles. To this end, a corpus of 40 articles targeting gender-neutral titles and father related ones were selected equally from English and Arabic websites. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Sunderland’s (2000, 2006) framework of analysis, the data were analysed and contrasted. The English texts reflected the prevalence of ‘shared parenting’ discourse, whereas the Arabic ones revealed a ‘very traditional parenthood’ discourse. These differences can be attributed to variation in the socio-cultural practices dominant in Arab and Western societies. Such findings will hopefully provide some useful insights for family life educators and parents who resort to such websites.

Epistemic calibration

Sometimes a division has been made between expressions of knowledge and expressions of emotion, but in the actual instances of interaction, they are deeply intertwined. In this paper we investigate the relationship between these expressions through the notions of affiliation and epistemics. More specifically, we analyze the phenomenon of ‘epistemic calibration’ in response to tellings of personal experience, where recipients fine-tune the strength of their access claims and the degree of their generalizations to be in line with their epistemic statuses in relation to those of the tellers. Drawing on a dataset of Finnish quasi-natural conversations with neurotypical participants and participants diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, we explore how such calibration is done in practice. Our analysis points to different challenges in epistemic calibration, which, we argue, play an important role in influencing the hearing of these responses as less than fully affiliative.

Spatializing kinship

This paper explores children’s language socialization into kin-based peer relationships in Amdo, Tibet. I examine spontaneous interactions in one extended family to show how children link place and kinship using spatial deixis, the grammatical system that encodes context-dependent reference to location, in Amdo Tibetan. I analyze uses of spatial deixis in two interactive routines: (1) peer-group play, and (2) children’s scaffolding of infants’ roles in multiparty participation frameworks. I argue that children use their emerging deictic repertoires to ‘spatialize kinship,’ mapping kinship relations onto the immediate spaces of co-present interactions as well as the enduring places of the village’s geography. Previous studies have noted that culturally specific forms of relationality influence adults’ uses of deixis by shaping the pragmatics of interactive settings. Building on these insights, the data from Amdo demonstrate the need to consider cultural associations between place and kinship when examining the acquisition of deixis in early childhood.

Material and embodied resources in the accomplishment of closings in technology-mediated business meetings

This study uses conversation analysis (CA) and video-recorded data from an international company to investigate closings in technology-mediated (i.e. distant) meetings. The focus is on the situated affordances and multimodal resources that the chair and participants deploy to transition from meeting talk to a coordinated exit. Due to restricted access to bodily-visual leave-taking behaviours, other mutually recognized practices need to be implemented to initiate and advance closings: (1) when closing is made relevant as the next step, (2) when opportunity spaces to move out of the closing emerge, and (3) when departure from the meeting needs to be negotiated. This progression requires the close coordination of co-participants’ vocal and embodied conduct in the physical setting and rendering actions publicly intelligible via the screen at specific moments. The analysis portrays closings as emergent, collaborative accomplishments, in which the import of multimodal turn constructions and (dis)aligning behaviours must be negotiated in situ.

Navigating the complex social ecology of screen-based activity in video-mediated interaction

Task-oriented video-mediated interaction takes place within a complex digital-social ecology which presents, to participants, a practical problem of social coordination: How to navigate, in mutually accountable ways, between interacting with the remote co-participants and scrutinizing one’s own screen –which suspends interaction–, for instance when searching for information on a search engine. Using conversation analysis for the examination of screen-recorded dyadic interactions, this study identifies a range of practices participants draw on to alert co-participants to incipient suspensions of talk. By accounting for such suspensions as being task-related through verbal alerts, typically in the form let me/let’s X, participants successfully ‘buy time’, which allows them to fully concentrate on their screen activity and thereby ensure the progression of task accomplishment. We discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of the complex ecologies of technology-mediated interactions.

Knowledge types and presuppositions

Public apologies are so prevalent in our social lives that they have become a subject of scholarly investigation all over the globe. The present study, which involves coding, frequency counting, and qualitative analysis, examines the strategic aspects of 16 public apologies issued to Filipino apologizees. The results of our analysis indicate that apologizers often choose varied knowledge types and draw upon presuppositions to strategically omit details that can negatively influence their credibility and the reception of their apology. More specifically, apologizers use the audience’s presuppositions to avoid presenting common knowledge of the offense that may incriminate them further; they also omit the mention of future action that may hold them more accountable for their transgressions. Our present analysis bolsters the view that although the sincerity of public apologies cannot be exactly measured, they are still performed as part of image repair and management of interpersonal relationships.

Tradition, modernity, and Chinese masculinity

This article examines the multimodal construction of ideal manhood in male participants’ self-introduction videos in a Chinese reality dating show. A framework is developed to model identity as evaluative attributes and to explicate how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources. Analysis of 91 videos shows two versions of idealized Chinese masculinity, namely, modern masculinity (mainly embodied by participants who have won a date), and traditional masculinity (mainly embodied by participants who have not won a date). Modern masculinity highlights career-oriented qualities, socio-economic status, and luxurious lifestyles, while traditional masculinity highlights family values, skills in Chinese cultural heritage, and class mobility. The findings provide new understandings of the complexity of Chinese masculinity in the dating show context, which reflects the influence of capitalist globalization on the one hand, and the government’s attempt to govern public conduct and morality on the other.