Discourse & Society

This article analyses the linguistic and multimodal interactions of a group of seven cancer patients and two carers, who had previously met on a residential course and subsequently set up an online support group. I explore how this group of participants constructs relationships of support and solidarity online over 7 months using a range of multimodal resources including web links, video clips, avatars and songs. This is a semi-ethnographic case study that arose from my own experiences as a participant in the support group. I gathered the data directly from the WhatsApp facility on a ‘smartphone’ and then analysed the interactions and their use of diverse resources by means of Interactional Sociolinguistics analysis. The article finds that participants construct support and solidarity in highly inventive ways: by using diverse modes and types of expression, by means of humour, building a ‘special’ sense of in-group togetherness, and biographical work, that is, recasting ‘who they are’ in light of their illness.

This article explores the discursive patterns of legitimization of anti-immigration policies adopted by the Polish right-wing government which has been ruling the country since October 2015. It argues that legitimization of anti-immigration policies is essentially threat-based and coercive, involving a specific selection of rhetorical tools deployed to characterize different immigrant groups and individual immigrants from mainly Middle East and East African territories. Construed as ‘different’, ‘alien’ and ‘unbelonging’, in a whole lot of cultural, ideological and religious terms, they are claimed to pose an emerging threat to the safety of Poland and the personal safety and well-being of Polish citizens. The article draws on discourse space models and Proximization Theory in particular, revealing how the concepts of closeness and remoteness are manipulated in the service of threat construction and the sanctioning of tough anti-immigration measures, such as the refusal to accept non-Christian refugees from war territories in Syria. It demonstrates how Poland’s government manufactures and discursively perpetuates the aura of fear by conflating the issue of refugee migration into Europe with the problem of global terrorism, and how virtual threats to Polish cultural legacy and values are conceived to justify the government’s opposition to the idea of the multiethnic and multicultural state in general.

This article presents an analysis of the use by police investigators of presupposition-bearing questions (PBQs) in interrogation as a process for communicating certainty of guilt. Among the techniques of interrogational maximization employed by police is the communication to the suspect of the interrogators’ certainty of the suspect’s guilt. While social science research notes that such communication of certainty is given directly, for example by statements that they ‘know’ the suspect is guilty or by direct accusations such as ‘you did it’, this analysis shows that certainty of guilt can also be communicated by presuppositions embedded in interrogation questions. Discourse analysis of the complete transcript of the interrogation of a 14-year-old suspect reveals further that through the use of 117 PBQs, interrogators are able to accrue inadvertent admissions to three crucial global ‘facts’ about the suspect’s involvement in the crime – each of which is composed of multiple subsidiary ‘facts’. In addition to identifying the role of PBQs in eliciting inadvertent admissions, the analysis also notes how PBQs serve as ‘a powerful instrument in the implicit assertion of debatable propositions’ as part of the interrogational record.

This study examines the interview discourse of five African American speakers in Washington, D.C., particularly paying attention to their discussions on issues surrounding a marginalized section of the city, namely, Southeast. The study provides discourse-based evidence of Southeast’s marginalization, which is reflected in the widely circulating discourse on Southeast’s reputation. Drawing on Positioning Theory, the study shows how Southeast speakers and non-Southeast speakers exhibit different positioning in assessing the reputation. The study illuminates how different positioning characterizes some of the key aspects of a marginalized neighborhood, concomitantly reflecting how different groups in the city construct and evaluate their own identities and others.

This article explores multimodal communication and social interaction in university-level architecture education. Drawing on ethnography of North American programs of ‘design-build’ architecture, we consider how the judgment of a ‘good’ (or ‘bad’) design is as much a result of how it is communicated as what is communicated. In settings like the design ‘review’, students endeavor to persuade an audience of the merits of their proposed design. This is ideally accomplished through the ‘convergence’ of multiple design media on the same ‘idea’ or design gestalt. ‘Convergence’ involves not just technical competency; it is also a social achievement: an effect of composing and coordinating multimodal semiotic media according to shared representational and communicative conventions. Failure to recognize convergence is often an effect of intersemiotic dissonance. This is also the risk of a design’s failure in the eyes of the faculty jury, who often direct their critiques toward communicative inconsistencies.