This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

Foreign language (FL) education has been marked by a monolingual principle that has favoured "intralingual" methodologies. Bakhtin's view of language interillumination--that languages throw light on each other--challenges such language teaching practices radically. Using conversation analysis methods, this article examines transcripts of…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

Simultaneous speech and turn-taking patterns vary considerably across cultures. Research on varieties of Spanish has confirmed that frequent, lengthy overlaps within and between turns are common. In this paper it is suggested that when speakers engage in simultaneous talk, they observe Grice's Cooperative Principle by adjusting their utterances so…

The goal of this research was to use politeness theory to analyze the developing tutorial relationship between students and peer tutors in a university writing center. The study monitored two pairs of tutors and students over a period of six weeks, focusing on weeks one and six. Using partial transcripts of recorded sessions along with observation…

This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1 learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written discourse completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective. The data demonstrate learners' overuse of zero marking…

This study aims to provide a perspective which allows honorifics to be seen beyond the frame of politeness and/or formality in social structures. Korean school grammar explains honorifics as linguistic forms that reflect relative social positional difference (e.g., K-H. Lee, 2010), and has assumed that social structure and language use have a…

This study explores dispute sequences in talk between bilingual couples communicating in Japanese. Specifically I examine naturally occurring face-to-face talk between Japanese wives and their American husbands who communicate primarily in Japanese at home. Conversation analysis (CA) is employed to document occasions where the talk between these…

The paper investigates Polish punk and hip hop (rap) song lyrics broken down into frequency lists. In an analysis inspired by MacLaury's view of categorization, the construals of punk and hip hop worldviews are shown to vary in the distance of the observer from the world, the width of the viewing frame, as well as the granularity and density of…

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) "communities of practice" (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners…

Thirty-one chat reference conversations were linguistically analyzed, compared to twenty-three instant messaging (IM) conversations held between students, and further correlated to students' satisfaction with the reference interaction. Conversations between librarians and students in chat reference are more formal than those solely involving…

This study investigates cross-linguistic influence (CLI)--also known as first language (L1) transfer--on referent introduction and tracking in oral narratives in Japanese as a second language (L2) within the framework of functional approaches to language learning. Narrative discourse produced by two groups of learners of Japanese, one whose L1 is…

This study examines verbal behavior in student-teacher talk and alignment of perceptions of communication effectiveness. Heightened awareness of conversational patterns is more productive in the learning environment than the rote use of discourse markers.

This paper investigates the differences in the discursive patterning of cases in Law and Management. It examines a corpus of 271 Law and Management cases and discusses the kind of information that these two disciplines call for and how discourses are constructed in discursive hierarchical patterns. A discursive hierarchical pattern is a model…

Orientations to the extremity of extreme case formulations--expressions using extreme terms such as "all,""none,""most,""every,""least" and so on--are initially shown in how they are sometimes qualified or softened. Further examination shows how ECFs can work as devices for doing "nonliteral," in the sense of being not accountably accurate…