This paper investigates offensive animal metaphors in blog comments about the management of donations of money and medical relief during the coronavirus pandemic in China. Rather than understanding the metaphorical usage of language as a cognitive process, we consider its situational usage as a social action and invoke insights from Conversation Analysis. Based on data retrieved from Sina Weibo, we show how discussants use animal metaphors to accomplish varying actions and construct intelligibility between themselves and others about the relationship between (...) actions, moral accountability, and description of social events. We therefore argue that CA with its focus on topicality, action and societal membership can complement the cognitive understanding of the proximity between the source and the target domains. (shrink)

Research has shown that suicide rate in Australia is on the rise and that most people who die by suicide are not in contact with mental health services. They most likely communicate their suicidal thoughts to family members or close friends, whose responses may sound unhelpful and/or dismissive, thus reinforcing suicidal ideation. This national emergency has been tackled via a social media campaign, #YouCan Talk, launched by a government-supported digital platform, BeyondBlue. This article adopts a multimodal discourse analysis approach to (...) investigate how peer support is encouraged and articulated in the context of mental health discourse for suicide prevention. The two case studies selected for analysis from the BeyondBlue platform are the #YouCanTalk social media campaign, designed to teach carers to identify severe depression and effectively respond to suicide warning signs and a sample of posts from a thread for peer support in a monitored online forum devoted to help carers who seek peer advice. Unlike previous research, the article focuses on how pronouns and verbs index interpersonal relations in a systemic-functional perspective as well as other multimodal resources, such as visuals, layout and hyperlinking, to understand how identities are entextualised by both professional health providers and peer carers in digital platforms that address mental health issues. (shrink)

Identity has often been approached by asking questions about it in interviews. However, speakers sometimes reject, resist or modify category membership because of the sensitive inferential and interactional issues invoked. This article aims to provide a systematic analysis of category-eliciting question–answer sequences from a large corpus of Syrian interview data concerning several identities. Using conversation and membership categorisation analysis, four Q-A sequences are identified: minimal confirmation of questions seeking the hearably demographic fact of membership; modifying membership claims in response to (...) factual-type questions by rejecting some not other category-bound attributes; characterising membership as fact and nominating an alternative identity in response to questions about feelings; and, in response to questions seeking confirmation of a category implicated through the prior talk, warranting the denial of membership. The analysis therefore highlights a paradox: asking direct questions about category membership is used to generate talk about the topic of identity that would be difficult to collect otherwise, but this may in turn provide for a reluctance to self-identify, thus making identity a delicate business. (shrink)

This study employs the tools of conversation analysis in order to assess consultee satisfaction in chat endings obtained from the e-counseling provided by the Youth Board of Cyprus. In order to study whether consultees are satisfied with the service they receive during the chat, an alternative approach of exploring consultee satisfaction to those that rely on self-report or questionnaires, which are methods that are external to the actual interactions, has been applied. Therefore, internal indications of consultees’ satisfaction, as displayed in (...) the ways in which they express appreciation, or otherwise, during the closing stages of chats, is the preferred method. Indications of satisfaction, or otherwise, produced during the chat, through displays of appreciation, withholding appreciation or even exhibiting dissatisfaction, do help to inform chat-handlers about the extent to which they have satisfied consultees’ expectations. Internal indicators of consultee satisfaction are displayed in the closing stages of the e-counseling chats. The different expressions have consequences on how the chat ends, with satisfied consultees ending the chat with strong and enthusiastic expression of appreciation and with dissatisfied consultees expressing resistance in reaching termination. (shrink)

John Swales’ 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White’s 2004 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited’ was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has (...) emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. (shrink)

Le dévoilement de soi occupe une part significative des interventions initiales des fils de discussions sur les plateformes numériques de soutien social. Si ce type d’intervention répond au besoin des participants de s’exprimer, de partager leurs émotions, il pose des défis aux interlocuteurs en raison de l’absence de demande explicite de soutien. L’analyse des interactions d’un forum de soutien social en ligne pour personnes atteintes d’un cancer et leurs proches (2017-2018) vise à comprendre comment ce partage d’émotions et d’expériences est (...) interprété et répondu par les pairs, évaluant le cadre interactionnel activé dans de tels contextes. Les résultats montrent que si des actes de prescriptions de comportements et d’attitudes non sollicitées sont présents dans la grande majorité des fils, ils s’articulent finement à des actes d’empathie, qui permettent d’atténuer la force intrusive du soutien. L’analyse révèle aussi comment la formulation du dévoilement de soi influence le soutien offert (empathique/prescriptif). Au final, la présentation des formes d’accomplissement du soutien en réaction au dévoilement de soi permet d’envisager des pistes d’action pour favoriser l’engagement et le bien-être psychosocial des membres de ces forums. (shrink)

Previous research on the conversation analytic phenomenon of ‘repair’ has focused on its design and function in spoken interaction. Conversely, research on written text or writing rarely focuses on interaction. In this article, we examine repair in written discourse; specifically in online settings. The data corpus comprises one-to-one quasi-synchronous Facebook ‘chat’. First, we show that, as in spoken interaction, repair happens. This basic observation supports conversation analytic arguments that features of talk, like repair and laughter, do not ‘leak randomly’ into (...) interaction but are precision-timed and designed to accomplish action. Second, we report on two types of repair: visible repair which can be seen and oriented to by both participants in the interaction, and message construction repair, which is available only to the message’s writer. While the practice of message construction repair is made possible through the affordances of the online medium, it nevertheless shows how participants in written interaction are oriented to the same basic contingencies as they are in spoken talk: building sequentially organized courses of action and maintaining intersubjectivity. We suggest that assumptions about differences between spoken and online interaction are premature. Rather, we argue that online interaction should be treated as an adaptation of an oral speech-exchange system. (shrink)

This discourse analytic study integrates theories of stance and membership categorization to investigate one online discussion thread initiated by a woman who asks for diet and health advice on behalf of her boyfriend, an interactive move we term ‘asking for another’. Posters to the thread, in relatively explicit ways, construe the original poster as a ‘nag’ and ‘mother-figure’ and her boyfriend as a ‘victim of nagging’ and ‘childish’. Our analysis illuminates how two features of the asking-for-another post evoke these identities: (...) extreme case formulations, created via adjectives and adverbs, lead others to view the woman as inappropriately involved and controlling and her boyfriend as immature, and details about the boyfriend’s diet, provided via nouns and adjectives, index cultural ideologies of food and identity. This study illuminates the ambiguity and polysemy of the move of asking for another, contributing to research on identity construction and health-related advice-seeking online. (shrink)