Discourse Studies

The aim of our study is to show the ways in which family members coordinate their minds, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are jointly remembering shared events that they had experienced together as a group. So far, little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups. Our goal is to specifically examine the central role that direct questions have when they act as embodied reminders through the interanimation of multiple behavioral channels (language, pointing, eye-gaze, etc.) in family interactions. The video data for analysis comes from an ongoing project on how collaborative remembering takes places among small groups of Argentinean Spanish speakers as each group recalls a vacation taken together several years ago.

This article analyzes doctor–patient communication at admission interviews in an outpatient mental health care service at a public hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina. These interviews are the first contact between professionals and patients, and they result in the admission or rejection of the latter into the medical institution. In particular, we observe how context, understood as a sociocognitive and scalar concept, is reshaped with gaze direction and agenda-setting through interaction, resulting in three hierarchical spaces which can be represented as degrees in a scale: the public, the private, and the intimate level. This description will allow us to understand a series of communicative difficulties that may result from scale maladjustments, in which professionals interact with patients at different levels and therefore cannot give adequate feedback to satisfy mental health care needs.

Questions represent a crucial tool of interaction between parents and children from a very early age. This study aims to investigate which function – argumentative or explanatory – most characterizes Why-questions asked by children to their parents in a natural setting such as mealtimes at home. Why-questions asked by 13 children – eight girls and five boys aged between three and seven years – coming from 10 middle- to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families with a high socio-cultural level were analyzed. In the corpus, the explanatory function largely characterizes children’s Why-questions. Questions we observed play fundamentally an educational role, since they favor the acquisition of new information and the transmission from parents to children of parental behavioral models (social behavior). The argumentative Why-questions, less frequently asked by children in our sample, are also important from an educational point of view. By these questions children challenge their parents to make clear the reasons behind their opinions, suggestions, rules and prescriptions, which are often largely implicit. Altogether, the results of this study indicate that both the explanatory and argumentative types of children’s Why-questions have a knowledge-seeking function, that is, children asking such questions are seeking knowledge of something.

Despite its apparent simplicity, the speech act of complimenting has received a great deal of attention in the literature. However, studies have mostly focused on compliments’ realization in face-to-face conversational exchanges, while they have often been neglected in other channels such as online communication. This article is intended to redress the balance in support of online exchanges. More specifically, we aim to investigate how users of online social networks like Facebook use compliments to evaluate others and strengthen social rapport in English and Spanish. In order to do so, we gathered two balanced corpora in both languages (50 examples in each language). The samples were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed using a systemic functional framework. The analysis reveals that compliments constitute a system of choices where several available options help Facebook users to encode their evaluation of the other from various perspectives (e.g. as an emotion, as an unquestionable truth, etc.). Furthermore, results also show that despite superficial similarities, compliments in both languages follow remarkably different frequencies of use which reflect deep cultural differences.

In this double case study of child psychotherapy, we demonstrate the positive effect of children’s involvement in play activities on their verbal expression of inner emotions and cognitions. Discourse analysis of therapy sessions complemented with the therapist’s reflections show that children who have difficulty in verbalizing hard feelings and cognitions gain control of the communicative situation by getting involved in playful activities. Therapists’ verbal entrance into play can be used to negotiate the therapist–child relationship in terms of power and solidarity.

Corrigendum to Obituary ‘Shoshana Blum-Kulka (1936–2013)’ by Zohar Kampf and Michal Hamo, Discourse Studies, 15(4): 369–370, DOI: 10.1177/1461445613499224.