Abstract: This study examines the organization of repair in Chinese conversation. First, six major patterns are established which characterize how the repair source is redone, i.e., whether it is a morpheme, a word, a phrase, or a clause being recast, and whether it repeats, replaces, adds to, or abandons the original construction. Then, to investigate the potential constraint on organizing this kind of speech, the repair pattern, the syntax of the repaired segment, and the extent of recycling are analyzed. Although repair is accomplished within the syntactic environment, the findings suggest that the way in which it is done is conditioned by neither syntax nor the repair pattern. Rather, the extent of recycling is subject to quantity and lexical-form complexity. On the one hand, a repair tends to recycle only the word immediately prior to the repair source, despite its category; on the other hand, the recycling tends to be blocked if the preceding word is in complex NP form. Both constraints are significant for the speaker attempting to resume the conversation as soon as possible and to keep it going. Moreover, they also reflect the speech preference of Chinese speakers, thus indicating a facet of conversational Chinese

Abstract: Based on a concept of disability as a sociocultural construct established and maintained in part by language, this article presents an analysis of a variety of discourses of disability, focussing on the theme of expertise as it is negotiated within medical encounters and described in disability narratives. This article argues that expertise must be considered a dynamic and multidimensional construct, one negotiated interactively among participants in a discourse

Abstract: This paper reports the findings of research which examines the contrasting roles played by interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings. Much of the work on interruptions originates within conversation analysis (Bennett, 1981; Kennedy and Camden, 1983; Jefferson, 1973, 1984, 1986, 1993; Schegloff 1987; Roger et al., 1988, etc.) and has focussed on either gender or power or both (Zimmerman and West, 1975; West, 1979; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Dindia, 1987). Most of these studies involve dyadic conversation. Little research has been done on business discourse (Drummond, 1989), and relatively few studies have attempted cross-cultural and/or cross-linguistic comparisons (Murata, 1994; Makri-Tsilipakou, 1994). Defining what is to count as an interruption in sequences of natural language data involving speech overlap is a complex matter, especially if interruptions are seen as indicators of power. Our research attempts to define what we call interruptive strategies and their pragmatic significance in British and Italian management meetings, which are task-oriented and multiparty speech events. Power relationships are an important variable, and this paper examines the cultural and linguistic differences which the respective use of interruptive strategies by British and Italian managers reveals

Abstract: L'A. analyse les interactions entre un groupe d'etudiants en dessin graphique d'une universite des Etats Unis et une communaute privee locale ayant fait appel a leurs services. Les dessinateurs et le client rendent compte differemment de l'objectif des tâches et des roles sociaux. De plus, alors que les premiers parlent des artefacts du materiel en termes de qualites formelles, les seconds leur attribuent des contingences historiques, politiques et culturelles

Abstract: This article analyzes Japanese mass media text-specifically 38 examples of the newspaper opinion column Column, My View- taken from the Asahi Shinbun newspaper. The manner in which the writer presents his or her own view as it relates to the column's central message is examined by appealing to the concepts of commentary strategy. Discourse levels that this article focusses on include: (I) the location of the headline paraphrase, i.e., where the central message reflecting the writer's view and/or opinion appears within the column; (2) the characteristics of column-initial paragraphs, (3) the overall sequencing of commentary sentences in Column, My View; and (4) the sequencing of commentary sentences within each danraku paragraph. The preferred rhetorical style in Japanese newspaper texts places commentary sentences toward the conclusion in multiple levels of discourse. This article argues that such preference is enhanced, in part, by inclination toward the topic-comment information structure as well as an array of grammatical phenomena that are critically functional in the Japanese language

Abstract: (1996). The Latin American origins of ‘alternative modernism’. Third Text: Vol. 10, No. 36, pp. 29-44.

Abstract: This paper is framed as a study of the political and social functions addressed by cooperation in a story series. It presents a qualitative account of a specific workplace conversation in which four factory workers take story turns and form them into a series, and supports this by examples from a large corpus of other talk stories. An ethnographic account of the data provides an analysis of the intertextual relations between the stories in the series; the solutions achieved for the story tellability requirement; and extrapolates from them a set of categories for some of the structural variations and similarities which might be found in other story series. The paper also explores the story features from which the participants make their selections in order to achieve a degree of collegiality in their talk.

Abstract: L'A. met en evidence deux facteurs importants qui suscitent les applaudissements, dans les discours diplomatiques. L'analyse porte sur sept discours prononces par des leaders politiques israeliens, palestiniens, americains et russes, lors de la signature des accords entre Israel et l'OLP en septembre 1993. Certains enonces contenant des mots ou de syntagmes appartenant a des champs semantiques appropries, tels que la paix, le courage, la gratitude, sont les principaux themes, souvent applaudis par l'assistance. D'autre part, un changement de tempo conduit parfois egalement au meme resultat

Abstract: In this article, an analysis of medical student-patient interaction is presented. The analysis is based on the methodology of conversation analysis and draws on related work within the field of doctor-patient interaction analysis. The problem doctors and patients experience with regard to patient-initiated questions have been well researched, but little has previously been known about how medical students handle patient-initiated questions. Topic shifts represent an area which often is laden with interactional trouble and is therefore a key element in the analysis of doctor-patient and student-patient interaction. Previous theoretical explorations within the fields of topic shifts and cohesion are used as a basis for a detailed characterization and grouping of the responses medical students give to various types of patient-initiated questions. It is argued that although there are some differences in the responses given by students compared to those of doctors, medical student-patient interaction to a large extent resembles doctor-patient interaction

Abstract: Since 1955, when Stephen Hero appeared, editions of genetic docu ments for many Anglo-American modernist texts have steadily prolifer ated.1 These include Valerie Eliot's 1971 edition of the manuscript of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Garland's 64-volume James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden (1978-82); editions of early versions for many of Virginia Woolf's works, from John Graham's 1976 edition of the holograph manuscript of The Waves to S. P. Rosenbaum's 1992 Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One's Own; the Cornell Yeats, comprising eleven volumes of W. B. Yeats's manuscript materials to date (1982); my 1977/1984 genetic text of Ezra Pound's Fourth Canto; and Cheryl J. Plumb's 1995 edition of the uncut version of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.2 How has the vast body of genetic materials for modernist

Abstract: L'A. examine une affirmation communement admise sur le caractere trompeur des enonces evasifs (reponse intentionnellement non pertinente semantiquement). Deux types de caracteres evasifs sont distingues: evident et indirect. Le caractere trompeur de l'enonce ne peut toutefois pas etre analyse au niveau de l'acte de parole lui-meme. Le caractere trompeur de l'enonce evasif peut etre vu comme un moyen d'induire chez l'auditeur une (fausse) croyance quant a la pertinence d'un enonce, il est donc metadiscursif par nature