Amidst ongoing global debate about reproductive rights, questions have emerged about the role of language in reinforcing stigma around termination. Amongst some 'pro-choice' groups, the use of "pro-life" is discouraged, and "anti-abortion" is recommended. In UK official documents, "termination of pregnancy" is…

This article examines the discourses around climate change in the UK press from 2003 to 2019. Our main goal is to investigate how the media discourse developed during a period of significant world events, whilst also exploring the change in the UK public's perception of the problem. We combine the novel technique of Usage Fluctuation Analysis…

Authorial voice is often identified as a key trait of successful writing in English rhetoric and composition, leading to research on its construction, development, and assessment in various types of written texts. Using Hyland's (2008) interactional metadiscourse framework, existing studies have also examined the use of particular voice-related…

When a paediatrician establishes a trusting relationship with their patient, the chance of a positive outcome multiplies. A calm child, who participates fully in the communicative exchange is more receptive to the clinician's requests and reports weaker sensations of pain. This experience stays with the child, shaping how they approach their…

In this article, the central argument is that research on the semiotic repertoire should also focus on how repertoires are racialized, and race is evoked through the semiotic repertoire. The article uses data from the South African educational context to advance a position in which semiotic repertoires simultaneously give and restrict access,…

This case study investigates a migrant adult's identity work in playful talk occurring spontaneously in a classroom for Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA). Based on 12 hours of video-recorded interactions among four learners and their teacher, I identified five playful episodes. This paper focuses on two episodes…

Social media offer an unprecedented opportunity for companies to interact more closely with customers and market their products and services. But social media also present reputational risks as negative word-of-mouth can spread more quickly and widely through these platforms than ever before. This study investigates how companies respond to…

While addressing issues of prejudice and exclusion is crucial for helping adult second language (L2) learners acquire and critique socio-interactional norms of their pluralistic communities, there is still a lack of work examining how teachers can problematize prejudiced talk when it arises in the classroom. Within the detail-oriented frameworks…

Although many studies modelled writing quality by analysing basic skills (spelling, grammar, etc.), few focused on top-down compositional strategies at the discourse level. We propose that using both narrative and argument discourse modes in an argumentative essay (a multi-discourse mode [MDM] strategy) capitalizes on their complementary…

Following the first coronavirus case reported to the World Health Organization in Wuhan in 2019 and the ensuing city-wide lockdown that was imposed, many people attempted to leave the city, culminating in a vigorous discourse on the dominant Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. This study seeks to examine how online participants discursively…

Recent studies found linguistic positivity bias in academic writing, that is, researchers tend to present their works with more positive words than negative ones. The present study aims to examine the issue from a diachronic perspective, and it is probably the first one that employed a mixed method of both a small lexicon analysis and sentiment…

This study investigates 'partnership' as a key discursive tool for extending neoliberalism in the field of international development. As a case study, it examines the language-in-use among development organizations when discussing public libraries as potential partners in Africa. Critical discourse analysis of 20 interviews with development…

As the main symptom in palliative care, pain requires careful assessment. Repeating patient answers is one recommended communication technique for helping convey to patients that they have been heard, and to encourage them to say more. We examined 23 episodes where experienced doctors repeat patients' answers with mirrored rhythm and…

Until now, there has been very little unified analysis of metadiscourse across speech and writing. Drawing on a reflexive metadiscourse model, this article conducts a multidimensional analysis of metadiscourse across 10 spoken and written registers in a corpus of 626 texts. Two metadiscourse dimensions, participants' interaction and discourse…

This article is a quantitative and qualitative diachronic study of how the expression "politically correct" (PC) and related phrases are used in the American magazine Time from 1923 through 2006. The data show a dramatic increase in the frequency with which PC-phrases are used in the early 1990s. From this time onwards, the phrases are…