In this article, I reflect on the complexities of signification and suggest that the study of music allows us to push forward the radical project of dis-inventing language in applied linguistics (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). In thinking about language, music, and meaning, I focus on a song that has travelled around the globe and that has sounded…

Interpreting how people accord meaning to life situations is an old challenge in sociology. Emphasis has been given to values shared within social groups; other sociologists have stressed the discursive or communicative dimensions of society. This paper seeks an alternative interpretation by combining sociological inquiry and insights from…

In Dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois 2014; Tantucci et al. 2018), naturalistic interaction is inherently grounded in resonance, viz. the catalytic activation of affinities across turns (Du Bois and Giora 2014). Resonance occurs dynamically when interlocutors creatively coconstruct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance…

Applied linguists and Communication scholars have mainly adopted different yet complementary approaches to research on language and health communication. Using discourse-analytic (DA) approaches such as conversation analysis and corpus analysis, applied linguists tend to focus on describing and explicating health messaging techniques in naturally…

The focus to date on interactive encounters has resulted in there being little research into monological texts and speeches produced in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts. They are, however, the very substance of what interpreters and translators increasingly deal with today. The quality of these language professionals' performance depends…

The field of applied linguistics is a remarkable case of deep intersection of the skewed geopolitics of knowledge (epistemic inequalities) and language (the ascendency of English as both a topic of research and academic lingua franca). The dominance of the Anglo-sphere through epistemology and language in applied linguistics renders the process of…

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…

The literature provides diverging perspectives on the universality and stability of economic metaphors over time. This article contains a diachronic analysis of economic metaphors describing trade in a corpus of 225 years of US State of the Union addresses (1790-2014). We focused on two types of change: (i) replacement of a source domain by…

A growing scholarly literature in a subfield of applied linguistics focuses on language testing and language requirements for migrants. We sought to understand what theoretical paradigms and methodological approaches have framed this research and propose future research directions. To this end, we conducted a systematic review of articles on…

This paper investigates the phenomenon of greeting in English, which can be surprisingly challenging for speakers of other languages, such as Chinese. By 'greeting' we mean the seemingly 'simple' act of choosing conventionalized expressions at the opening of an encounter. Following pilot interviews with Chinese learners of English who reported…

Research on bias in artificial intelligence has grown exponentially in recent years, especially around racial bias. Many modern technologies which impact people's lives have been shown to have significant racial biases, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Emerging studies have found that widely-used ASR systems function much more…

In this article, a tripartite interpersonal model is proposed to analyze academic lectures delivered in English. The model combines two approaches to metadiscourse: the reflexive or narrow approach (Mauranen 1993; Ädel 2006), and the interpersonal or broad approach (Hyland 2005, 2019). The criteria adopted by the reflexive approach were exploited…

Academic communication crucially involves readers, or hearers, buying into an argument. The audience has to be hooked, involved and led to a desired conclusion, and this is perhaps no more urgent than in a Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT). In this competitive environment, doctoral students present their research using only one static slide…

Periods of extremely hot and cold weather can cause significant mortality and morbidity in both temperate and more extreme climates. In the UK, their occurrence prompts the issuing of number and colour coded warnings providing an assessment of the level of risk. These are designed to minimize health impact by prompting timely and appropriate…

The discourse of mastery is prominent in applied linguistics. The idea of mastery, however, does not remain only on the discourse level: curricula and policies are meant to be implemented, and therefore mastery and all that is associated with it (near perfection, dominance over something, etc.) is also practiced. In this paper, I argue that we…