Organizational discourse is a burgeoning area of study featuring the role of discourse and communication in organizational dynamics. While its rhetorical and literary roots date back to the ancient Greeks, a more recent impetus has been the analysis of professional talk in institutional settings, beginning in the 1970s, and the role of slogans, creeds, jokes
The concept of power, who holds it and how they use it has been of great interest to almost every field of social science. A crucial way in which power is expressed and resisted is through language. Ng and Bradac (1993) argue that language reveals power, language creates power, language reflects power, and language obscures
Scholarship on gender and discourse has a long, interdisciplinary history. Anthropologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries documented differences between women’s and men’s speech in non-European cultures. However, gender differences within cultures have never been sufficient to constitute separate women’s and men’s languages. Around the early twentieth century, academics’ attention also turned to the English
The communicative roles of gestures during talk in interaction are partly a function of their placement within unfolding turns and action sequences. Gestures occur both as free-standing unit-acts and as components of multimodal turns. A facial gesture, usually enacted with eyebrows and/or the mouth, can occur in the role of operator on a concurrent or
Social scientists are not interested in identity in the sense of an individual’s unique name and address. They are interested in identity in the sense of the category that an individual belongs to (or is made to belong to). All languages have explicit names which allocate people to a category of person (e.g., madre in
The “truth-bias,” the expectation that, normally, one tells the truth, is proposed to be the cornerstone of humanity (Bok 1978). Yet, it is the skill of displacement – speaking of things which are not present – and thus also the ability to deceive that is the basis of human language (Aitchison 1996). A society of
The law operates primarily through language. Legislative bodies enact statutes and ordinances, judges hand down decisions, juries issue verdicts, and people enter into a wide variety of contractual relationships; in each case, a legal effect is produced through language. Nevertheless, until recently, the study of legal discourse was not well developed. Since the 1980s, however
Using language – “languaging” (Becker 1988) – is possible at two levels of discourse. Generally, when we use language, we look through it at a world we believe to exist beyond language. However, we can also use language for metalanguaging, i.e., in order to look through it at the process of using language itself. Discourse
Human emotionality is an ongoing stream that pervades every aspect of social life, talk, conversation, and discourse. Emotions are appraisals of situations; they have somatic bodily characteristics and their expressions can take nonverbal forms (facial, vocal, posture). Theoretical approaches to the emotional dimensions of discourse are found within three traditions of research: psychology of emotions
The concept of argument has a long history in communication. An argument is a concluding statement that claims legitimacy on the basis of reason. But argumentative discourse is a form of interaction in which the individuals maintain incompatible positions. More specifically, argumentative discourse directs attention to the arguments of naïve social actors engaged in intersubjective