One of the key means by which knowledge is disseminated in the academic discourse community is the spoken presentation of papers at an academic conference. In contrast to the written research article, the spoken presentation remains relatively under-researched from a linguistic perspective, limiting the knowledge available for explicating this…

The category of the social increasingly informs the way people think about rhetoric. The foregrounding of the social has a two-fold origin in an uneasy relationship between poststructuralism and sociolinguistics. Poststructuralism has provided a strong version of the hypothesis that language is determinative. Sociolinguistics has established that…