Adam Jaworski

The power of silence : social and pragmatic perspectives

Silence and the Study of Communication Silence and Speech The Pragmatics of Silence The Politics of Silence and the Silence of Politics The Extensions of Silence Conclusion

‘We Beat ’em’: Nationalism and the Hegemony of Homogeneity in the British Press Reportage of Germany versus England during Euro 2000:

This article analyses the press reportage (written texts and visual images) of the football game between Germany and England during Euro 2000. We examine how the press construct the nation as a homogeneous collective within which the (implied) reader is positioned as belonging. The article also examines the press coverage of civic disturbances involving England supporters. We demonstrate how the ‘football hooligans’ undergo ‘othering’ in the press through de-authentication, pejoration, homogenization, and minoritization and universalization. In doing so, the press are able to police the moral boundaries of what is considered normative in terms of membership within the national collective. We argue that the formulation of nationalism and the homogeneity and unity of the nation in the British press in relation to the England–Germany football game takes the form of three main strategies: separation, conflict and typification. Separation is predominantly realized in the rhetoric of ‘us’ and ‘them’, whereas conflict is largely made manifest through the useof military metaphors and war imagery. Finally, typification is achieved by the use of stereotypes, representing the nation as ‘timeless’ and ‘homogeneous’, with those who do not conform being instantly ‘othered’. It is postulated that in adopting the above stances with regard to the nation, the press reproduce and maintain hegemonic social relations, and in- and outgroup distinctions on both inter- and intranational lines. In other words, the papers support and uphold a hegemonic world order of sovereign nation states, who areresponsible for the behaviour of their citizens.

Metalanguage : social and ideological perspectives

Metalanguage brings together new, original contributions on peoples knowledge about language and representations of language, e.g., representations of dialects, styles, utterances, stances and goals in relation to sociolinguistic theory, sociolinguistic accounts of language variation, and accounts of linguistic usage. The book follows from and complements a great tradition of the study of metalanguage, reflexivity, and metapragmatics, and offers a new, integrating perspective from various fields of sociolingustics: perceptual dialectology, variationism, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics. The broad range of theoretical issues and accessible style of writing will appeal to advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics and in other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities including linguists, communication researchers, anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, critical and social theorists. The book includes chapters by Deborah Cameron, Nikolas Coupland, Dariusz Galasi?ski, Peter Garrett, Adam Jaworski, Tore Kristiansen, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, Dennis Preston, Theo van Leeuwen, Kay Richardson, Itesh Sachdev, Angie Williams, and John Wilson.

Social roles and negotiation of status in host-tourist interaction: A view from British television holiday programmes

Although folk discourses frequently emphasise such raison d’etre benefits of tourism as broadening ones horizons through knowing foreign people(s) and cultures, most critical studies of tourism stress tourists’ relative illiteracy with regard to the ‘reading’ of the local. This paper is based on extracts from two British holiday programme series, BBCs Holiday 2000/1 and ITVs Wish You Were Here?, in which the presenters engage in some form of verbal (and non-verbal) interaction with local people. A close discourse analysis of these interactions reveals that the dominant ideology of tourism, as propagated in the programmes, gives evidence of only limited contact between tourists and local people, although the former often create the illusion of closeness, familiarity and ‘friendship’. Most contact with local people occurs in their principal roles as either ‘helpers’/‘servants’, ‘experts’, or as part of ‘local scenery’. At times, however, local people are seen to resist these super-imposed roles, casting themselves as worldly and cosmopolitan. Meanwhile, it is often the presenter-tourists who construct for themselves parochial identities by adhering to stereotyped interpretations of local people and seeking ‘safe’ interpretations of the host culture. These encounters are therefore often sites of power struggle, in which presenter-tourists assert themselves as dominant and powerful, while local people may subvert these attempts, for example, by claiming high status for themselves through expert knowledge.

Vocative Address Forms and Ideological Legitimization in Political Debates

In this article we examine the role of vocative forms of address in shaping the political space in public/political discourse. We are particularly interested in strategic uses of forms of address by participants in political debates in order to gain legitimacy for their ideologies. Our data come from four formal television debates between Lech Wałęsa, the former Solidarity trade union leader and president of Poland, and two other Polish politicians, which were held between 1988 and 1995. Due to this historical perspective, we are able to contextualize discursive patterns in the rapidly changing political and social situation in Poland, and show the diachronic development of the ideological underpinnings of discourse.

Relevance, accommodation and conversation : Modeling the social dimension of communication

This paper addresses the issue of the role of the social component in a theory of communication. In the first, theoretical part of the paper, we examine what constitutes an adequate social, or sociolinguistic, basis for modeling communication. We ask whether there may be radically different orientations to social assumptions about communication by different theorists, and we review several current frameworks: relevance theory, conversation analysis, and accommodation theory. We also make reference to other well-established and (broadly) sociolinguistic approaches - politeness theory, frame analysis, and what we might call pragma-semiotics. In the second section of the paper, we introduce some interactive data from an audiological clinic to illustrate the varying remits of the different theoretical perspectives, and what social dimensions they are best and least able to handle. What we hope will emerge is a clearer understanding of the social basis of communication as a platform for future, more integrative theorizing.

Shopping and chatting: Reports of tourist-host interaction in the Gambia

Abstract As it becomes continually easier, at least technologically, for people to move around the world, so the growing numbers of global tourists, in their search for constantly novel experiences (Urry 2002), travel to destinations which are increasingly exotic and distant to them, not only geographically, but also in economic, social and cultural terms. This, in turn, brings them into contact with people from these very different cultures and societies. This paper examines interactions between tourists and hosts in The Gambia, a ‘winter sun’ package holiday destination in West Africa. To investigate the nature of such interactions, 20 ‘communication diaries’ were completed by a group of British tourism students during their week-long field trip to The Gambia and followed up by small group discussions with some of the participants. The students were asked to record as many individual interactions with Gambians as possible noting the following information: Time; Place; Situation; Interlocutor; Languages spoken; Topics; Result of interaction; Perceptions of interactions. 194 interactions were recorded. Many of the interactions were ‘transactional’ in that tourism workers treat them as potential sources of income. However, their tenor is predominantly ‘personal’ as they were full of phatic communion and chatting. Central to the tourist experience in The Gambia is the role of the ‘bumsters’ due to their mediating function between the tourists and other Gambian people. The omnipresence of the ‘bumsters’ in all tourist areas and their constant ‘pestering’ of tourists is initially annoying to the latter but also acts as a catalyst in encouraging contact with other Gambians by familiarising tourists with local people. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of the global economies of tourism.

Half-hearted tokens of transparent love? "Ethnic" postcards and the visual mediation of host-tourist communication.

One negotiation site of heavily mediated, indirect, and usually inadvertent communication between hosts and tourists is the picture postcard rack. As “hegemonically scripted discourses,” postcards make important assumptions about the tourist’s touristic experience, as well as the image of that experience she/he will want to communicate to others “back home.” Of more importance, however, are the assumptions being made in postcards about the people actually represented in them. Certainly, postcard images of local people (locals rather than necessarily hosts) are often designed specifically to communicate their ambassadorial hospitality—their host-like qualities—and to promote the kind of ethnotourism discussed widely in the tourism literature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the postcard images of local ethnic minority people such as the Zulus in South Africa and the Sami in Finland. In these two instances of intense exoticization and commodified cultural representation, and in stark contrast to postcard images of the Welsh in Britain, this study was interested in exploring the ways in which both the “represented host” and “consumer tourist” understand and view these visual representations. In this programmatic article, we therefore report our initial analyses of three distinctive sets of postcards as a means for discussing how research might seek to situate and, thereby, complicate assumptions inherent in these “ethnic” postcards about both the traversed, mediatized Other, and the constantly directed tourist gaze.

Elite mobilities: The semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities and privileges. In the rapid expansion of ‘luxury tourism’ we find a wing of this truly global culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elite status, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series of multimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that explores and critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict interactional orders of these ‘new’ elite mobilities. Mimicking the fleeting encounters of super-elite travellers themselves, we undertook a series of ethnographically grounded but patently frugal sorties into five different spaces (or modes) of luxury travel. Drawing on our own fieldwork material and quoting the visual rhetoric of advertisers, we trace the normative production of an ostensibly enclavic landscape that imagines (or re-imagines) limitless aspirations and unbounded pleasures for all consumer-citizens regardless of their power or wealth.

Tourism discourse: Languages and banal globalization

Described as the“one of the greatest population movements of all time,” tourism is firmly established as one of the world’s largest international trades. And it is not just people who are on tour; language too is on the move. In this paper we examine some of the ways that our research has shown language commonly being taken up in tourism’s search for exoticity and authenticity. Specifically, we present a series of different touristic genres (broadcast media, guidebook glossaries, guided tours) where local languages are stylized, recontextualized and commodified in the service of tourist identities and of tourism’s cosmopolitan mythology. It is in this way that the globalizing habitus (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) of tourism privileges or elevates those who choose to travel, containing linguistic/cultural difference under a guise of celebration and respect. These playful, seemingly innocuous “textualizations” of language/s are also exemplary enactments of banal globalization (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010), the everyday, micro-level ways in which the social meanings and material effects of globalization are realized.