Marjut Johansson

Presentation of the Political Self Commitment in Electoral Media Dialogue

This study focuses on the presentation of political self in electoral media dialogue. The situated event of a presidential election forces the politician to construct an identity of president-to-be and therefore to create a persuasive relationship with the public hoping to have the perlocutionary effect of voting. The notion of commitment is defined from the intersubjective perspective as the accountability of the words and actions towards the co-participant. It manifests itself in the discursive positioning of the speaker in subjectifying expressions of commitment. The data analyzed are from a TV debate held in France in 2007 when two presidential candidates, Ségolène Royal and Nicholas Sarkozy, were elected for the second round. In her talk, Royal constructs a presentation of political self as an expert in social and political matters, whereas Sarkozy focuses mostly on his personal qualities that demonstrate he will be a reliable future president.

Prologue Analyzing the Fine Details of Political Commitment

The goal of this introduction is to contextualize the multifaceted notion of commitment. It examines its conditions of use in ordinary language and in the research paradigms of pragmatics, social psychology, and discourse analysis. Particular attention is given to the microanalysis of commitment in ordinary language and in political discourse as well as to its subjective and intersubjective dimensions.

Advanced FL learners explaining their writing choices: epistemic attitude as an indicator of problem-solving and strategic knowledge in the on-line revision process

ABSTRACT Verbal protocols are usually used to study cognitive processes involved in various activities, as it is argued that they could make implicit processes of thinking visible and thus reportable. Here, it is proposed that verbalisations can also be approached from another angle, namely as a discourse that contains linguistic markers of writers’ revision activity. This small-scale study explores advanced foreign language (FL) writers’ choices during an on-line revision activity in a test environment. The starting point is the writers’ focus on certain phases in this activity that are signalled by the Finnish cognitive verbs meaning to think, combined with the linguistic marking of epistemic attitude during the revision processes. In these revision contexts, the writers explained how they solved problems related to their previously written texts. They revised problematic linguistic forms and functions both at the micro and macro levels on the basis of their strategic knowledge. The analysis showed that two types of revision activity were signalled by the epistemic attitude: change and pause in the process. Furthermore, contrary to a previous research study, the writers often appeared to focus on meaning-based problems related to lexical choices, which, however, were accompanied by hesitation and doubt regarding the correct choice. Moreover, the advanced writers showed strategic knowledge during the revision process, as they used several strategies that were occasionally accompanied by implicit reasoning for decision-making.