Investigates why conversational participants view their partner more positively than do conversation observers. Focuses on self-presentation concerns and cognitive load. Finds that cognitive load and self-presentation concerns both influenced evaluators to be more positive in their social judgments, but were distinctive in that self-presentation…

Examines the burlesque discourse of William F. Buckley Jr. in his books discussing his liberal opponents. Finds that Buckley's work mediates tragedy and comedy in that he accepts and rejects his political antagonists at one and the same time. Discusses the classification of literary genres as frames of acceptance and rejection, which center on…

Deals with the effects of aesthetic quality and argumentational integrity or fairness on the persuasiveness of contributions to argumentation. Basic argumentative dialogs were varied in aesthetic quality via the use of figurative language and in fairness via the addition of faulty, insincere, or unjust arguments.(Author/VWL)

Considers how the Internet is revolutionizing the investment world and how the Securities and Exchange Commission recently passed a rule requiring businesses to use plain English to try and rid disclosures of their traditionally complex and ambiguous language. (SC)

Provides an alternative analysis for the demonstrative system of reference in spontaneous oral discourse. The alternative model is based on interaction between and among participants and is intended to replace the traditional proximal/distal distinction that statistically centers around the speaker as the primary focus of information. (Author/VWL)

Developing literature on late twentieth century U.S. immigration rhetoric has failed to attend adequately to the character of sovereignty claims in contemporary immigration politics. This essay demonstrates the centrality of sovereignty discourse by examining texts created by the state, specifically public affairs videos produced and distributed…

Standardized survey interviewing is a form of institutional talk whose special constraints often conflict with ordinary conversational practices. Although survey manuals tend to recognize the conflict between standardization and respondents' requests for clarification, an alternative strategy for managing troubles in answering--"projective…

This paper presents the main lines of a genre analysis of the macro-structures of research articles (RAs) in applied linguistics, an area that deserves more attention both for pedagogic and research reasons. The analysis is based upon a detailed study of a corpus of 40 RAs, selected as random sets of 10 drawn from four leading journals in the…

In this article, I argue that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can complement and extend existing critical and radical writing pedagogies; CDA provides the theoretical and methodological context that can articulate explicitly the relationship between language practices and politics. I use CDA to analyze texts that circulated on the campus of…

We explored how women talk about feminism and feminists and position themselves in relation to a feminist identity within a conversational setting. Nine pairs of female graduate and senior undergraduate students talked about feminism in sessions lasting 60 minutes. Sessions were analyzed using discourse analysis. Participants positioned themselves…

This article represents a first turn of talk in an ongoing dialogue. Our focus here is on the value of sustained dialogue across the boundaries of research discourses. We argue that such dialogue can illuminate the categories of thought and action (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) that "we" in a given discourse take for granted, situate them as choices…

Michel Foucault's concept of power/knowledge is applied to an exploration of how managerial discourse affects the practice of public environmental education at a publicly owned electric utility. Emerging from interviews with people at SaskPower is a managerial discourse with a particularly instrumental approach to environmental education. The aim…

Science education reform has long focused on assessing student inquiry, and there has been progress in developing tools specifically with respect to experimentation and argumentation. We suggest the need for attention to another aspect of inquiry, namely "mechanistic reasoning." Scientific inquiry focuses largely on understanding causal…

Constructions of the HIV/AIDS pandemic are largely influenced by the dominant discourses of sexuality and disease. Deeply embedded in positivistic frames of references that favour conceptions of a medicalised and/or moralised body which operates contextually and socially detached, these discourses remain those that, in the main, frame…

This article offers a critical analysis of discourses and power structures and the ways they operate in two instructors' adult education and ESOL classrooms. The instructors defined learner experience in specific ways and subsequently used those definitions and drew on their learners' experiences to define their curricula and pedagogy. They…