Barbara De Cock

Profiling Discourse Participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates

The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.

Entre distancia, discurso e intersubjetividad: los demostrativos neutros en español

Este estudio trata los usos no situacionales de los demostrativos neutros del espanol.Estas formas se alejan de la oposicion tradicional en terminos de proximidad/distancia, entre otros por motivo de su referencia mas abstracta a proposicionesque a nombres. El analisis de conversaciones informales, debates televisivos ydebates parlamentarios nos permite ir mas alla de los analisis tradicionales dedemostrativos y deicticos en textos narrativos (que sean orales o escritos) y centrarsetambien en las diferencias entre tres tipos de interaccion. Mediante unanalisis detallado, se mostrara que esto y eso se especializan en usos distintos.Asi, mientras esto se especializa en la deixis discursiva, eso opera mas bien en elambito de la expresion de la intersubjetividad.

Construing confrontation. Grammar in the construction of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu

This study provides a linguistic perspective on the structure and the interpretation of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu (a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia), against the background of a larger corpus of narrative texts in Umpithamu. The analysis focuses on the role of participant tracking devices in the macro-structure of the narrative, and the role of case marking in the build-up of narrative motifs. It is argued not only that marked types of participant tracking serve to mark the boundaries of episodes, as often noted in the literature, but also that some types have additional functions within episodes, which leads to a proposal for refinement of Foxs (1987) Principle of Morphosyntactic Markedness. On a micro-structural level, it is shown how a rare system of case marking is used by the narrator to construe white–Aboriginal interactions as events in which the Aboriginal participants experience an extreme lack of control.

Discursive construction of human rights violations: the case of the Chilean Rettig report

Abstract Drawing on discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics, this paper analyzes the discursive construction of human rights violations in the report of the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, also called Rettig Commission. We show that there is a strong contrast in how the victims and perpetrators are represented in the case descriptions. While the victims are clearly identified, the perpetrators are not identified individually. Moreover, through a variety of strategies, the agent of the human rights violations often remains vague or unexpressed. Furthermore, we show that different sources of information are included in the event description – entailing different windows of attention – save the perpetrator’s testimonies. By doing so, the report clearly privileges in its discursive construction of the events the non-attribution of responsibility over the completeness of information principle.

Reference to Self and Other in the Digital Public Sphere: The Case of Political Blogs

In this paper, we analyze how a political blog author (Spanish Alejo Vidal-Quadras) establishes the reference to self and other in his blog entries. We furthermore look into how the commentators to this blog react and establish reference to self and other in the digital public sphere. More concretely, we show that they not only take up the references established by the main blog author but also create new references. These allow, on the one hand, for profiling themselves as part of a group and, on the other hand, identifying their interlocutor among the variety of possible interlocutors in the digital public sphere. By addressing different interlocutors, the commentators turn the comments section into a dialogic space, a dimension that is lacking in the main blog entries. However, the fact that they almost invariably identify interlocutors other than Vidal-Quadras but address Vidal-Quadras without explicitly identifying him, shows that Vidal-Quadras remains the main ratified interlocutor in view of his ownership of the blog. This paper shows then how participants in the digital public sphere create a complex relationship of self and other reference in political blogs.