Conversational partners align the meanings of their words over the course of interaction to coordinate and communicate. One process of alignment is lexical entrainment, whereby partners mirror and abbreviate their word usage to converge on shared terms for referents relevant to the conversation. However, lexical entrainment may result in…

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non-Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than…

The purpose of this corpus-based study is a bottom-up investigation of strategic devices used by heritage language speakers (HLSs) during narration and conversation. It offers a critical review of compensation/communication strategy definitions and classifications, and presents the results of an investigation into strategies employed by an…

This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

This research investigates whether there are relationships between the choices of concept reiterations and interlocutors' orientations, between the choices of concept reiterations and contexts of communication, and between affective connotations of paraphrase, interlocutors' orientations and contexts of communication. The data were collected from…

Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four…

Through the lens of conversational analysis (CA), humor or funniness is not an inherent property of a message, nor an internal state of any social action, but as something interactionally achieved (Glenn, 2003). Teachers are often encouraged to utilize humor to reduce anxiety, lower affective filters, and make language more "memorable"…

The study presents an exploration of how interpersonal relationships are created in a speech text. It investigated former President Muhammadu Buhari's Independence Day speech using mood structural analysis. The analysis aimed to explore the power of using mood structure in addressing Nigerians about the President's programs and policies during the…

The present study examined the role of hedges in a referential communication task. Pairs of participants received an identical set of cards, each card displaying a geometric configuration (a "tangram"). One participant, the director, instructed their partner, the matcher, to reproduce a series of predetermined tangram sequences using…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

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…

A published research article is not the final product in the knowledge dissemination circle. One genre entailing negotiation of academic outcomes is reply articles which seem to carry an evaluative burden (Khosravi & Babaii, 2017) and provide the academics with an opportunity to communicate their comments and criticisms on the published…

In this paper, we examine higher education instructor preferences for forms of address from students. We share qualitative and quantitative analysis of data from a large survey of higher education instructors, considered across a range of demographic and contextual factors. Through the lens of Positioning Theory, our work demonstrates the ways in…

Drawing on students' language repertoires for conjecture, we here focus on communication acts to consider students' mathematical identities in action. Our attention to authority and positioning in mathematics classrooms led us to interrogate the intertwined nature of discourses and how they may make identities available. We use an interaction…

Requesting plays a key role in human communication. One can request the same thing in multiple ways (e.g., "Pass the salt" vs. "Could you pass the salt?"). How do speakers determine which request form to produce? And how does this choice affect a recipient's evaluation of a request? Previous analyses of naturalistic…