Discourse Studies

This article argues that errors in audio data processing should be (re)examined to explore and expose the underlying components that enable linguistic communication and cross-cultural understanding. Examples of errors in the transcription of a Mexican social network’s conversations are analyzed to demonstrate the potential of such data in the development of sociocognitive language-processing theories (those that combine formal and pragmatic approaches). It is suggested that researchers working with audio-recorded data should expand the scope of what is considered useful data for the sake of both methodological reflexivity and identifying the underlying cognitive processes enabling linguistic understanding.

Confessions are central to criminal investigations. Although an increasing amount of attention is being drawn to the phenomenon of false confessions the majority of research focuses on psychological factors of false confessions. This study instead uses narrative analysis to examine the language of true and false confession narratives, with a focus on how evaluative devices convey degrees of guilt and blame. Justifications and deflection of blame were found to characterize true confessions, while false confessions did not place a primacy on these elements. Furthermore, the actual events of the crime were highly evaluated in true confessions, while false confessions left these events unevaluated. Although generalizability of these findings should be treated with caution, meaningful differences between true and false confessions occur at the level of discourse which may assist investigators in uncovering motives, key events, and the confessor’s state of mind, and may help guide interrogators’ questioning patterns.

This article describes a device used to challenge a target’s normativity in the course of an argument, a members’ method employed in arguments in public places. In this device, participants seek to challenge their opponent’s normativity by implying that the target of the device is not adhering to a norm mutually agreed-to in the earlier preparatory phases of the device. A pre-challenge phase poses an ‘enticing interrogative’, a question that fails to take for granted common-sense features of the target as a resource for obtaining a pre-figured reply. The resulting challenge phase implies that on the basis of the pre-challenge, the target is failing to adhere to some norm required of them by means of category or general membership. This article describes the way in which with this device parties to an argument may manufacture challenge an opponent’s normativity.

Work on advice has concentrated on institutional settings where there are restrictions on roles, actions and their organisation. This article focuses on advice giving in mundane settings: interactions between mothers and their young-adult daughters in a corpus of 51 telephone calls. Analysis reveals a range of designs that can be ‘advice implicative’ including advice-implicative interrogatives and advice-implicative assessments. Recipients orient to the characteristic features these implicit forms share with more explicit advice: normative pressure on the recipient’s conduct and epistemic asymmetry between advisor and advisee. Advice-implicative actions orient to contingencies on the recipient’s ability or willingness to perform the target action. They also display varying degrees of entitlement over the recipient’s performance of the target action. Manipulating contingency and entitlement can soften or heighten both the normative thrust and the knowledge asymmetry of the advice giving. This analysis further discusses the distinction between the practices of advising, directing and requesting, and allows consideration of how action design connects to relationality between parties.

The aim of this article is to propose a taxonomy of speakers from a socio-pragmatic perspective by taking an original approach to the study of single-turn political discourse, that is, political speeches, rather than debates, interviews or press conferences. This limitation on the scope of the study stems from the fact that the categorisation advanced is not concerned with turn-taking, but concentrates on the speaker’s use of other voices in his/her representation of reality. Thus, a clear distinction is made between the speaker and the sayer, namely the original speaker whose words are reported, or rather creatively reconstructed, by the current speaker ‘here and now’. The taxomony comprises a number of categories employed strategically by the current speaker in the service of different objectives. The speaker categories are inherently limited due to a single principle of categorisation: the form of the report. The singular speaker is the default type which enables the speaker to present himself/herself as an individual as well as his/her attitudes, values and beliefs, while the collective speaker enhances the speaker’s belonging to a group and allows him/her to speak on behalf of its members. The sayer categories, by contrast, are more varied due to three independent principles of categorisation: the form of the report, the genuineness of the sayer’s utterance and the number of accounts embedded in the narrating event. The approach taken to the analysis of the narrative passages that involve the proposed speaker types owes much to Chilton’s Discourse Space Theory and is concerned with conceptualisation of the speaker’s representation of events from chosen perspective(s). The corpus of speeches selected to investigate and illustrate individual categories consists of over 80 political speeches delivered by three Democratic American Presidents: John Kennedy, William Clinton and Barack Obama.