Roberta Piazza

The pragmatics of conducive questions in academic discourse

This paper deals with the conducive questions asked by tutors and students who try to convey their preference for a given answer from their hearer/s. In interpreting such questions, textual and contextual elements play a crucial role; in fact the view proposed here is that, beyond the level of formal conduciveness inherent in such questions, conduciveness is really the result of the overall stream of conversation and can only be adequately analysed in pragmatic terms. The paper expands and develops a prior model for the analysis of conducive questions which hinges on the concept of the polarity that exists between a questioners old belief underlying the question, the new assumption s/he formulates in his/her mind, the expected answer and the formal aspect of the question itself. Some classes of conducive questions are defined which express different degrees of conduciveness and convey different discourse functions. The study can also bear some practical relevance for international students as it offers an insight into an aspect of the academic discourse produced within university seminars in England and, to a lesser extent, Italy and sheds light on some of the effects of the asymmetry inherent in the tutor-students role.

Dramatic discourse approached from a conversational analysis perspective: Catherine Hayes's Skirmishes and other contemporary plays☆

This study deals with the staged or dramatic discourse of modern theatre. In particular, it looks at the mechanisms for conversational repairs in four plays by C. Hayes, M. Norman, S. Shepard and H. Pinter. These mechanims were coded for each play, using categories developed for the study of natural conversation (e.g., whether they were self-initiated or other-initiated and self-performed or other-performed). The repair framework was expanded beyond purely formal linguistic terms so as to be sensitive to all signals of repair behaviour. From a pragmatic perspective then, this study viewed any utterance as eligible to function as trigger of a repair. The four plays showed different use of repair mechanisms as a reflection of the playwrights assumptions about real-life discourse and a preference for repairs of one type rather than another as a means of suggesting the diverse relationships between the characters in the play.

‘… might go to Birmingham, Leeds … up round there, Manchester … and then we always come back here …’: The conceptualisation of place among a group of Irish women travellers

This study of a group of Irish women travellers in the South of England provides the opportunity for a discourse of situated self-identity within a mobilities paradigm. The stability-aspiring travellers’ community, to which the women in the study belong, invites a reflection on existing approaches to place-identity in that these women conceptualise their place in terms of its positive affordances and services that make their life liveable. The five women’s emerging discourses of both mobility and stability suggest that their emotional attachment to the place where they momentarily reside can be explained in terms of the beneficial results they gain from it. A scrutiny of the deictics used by the women, as well as a qualitative interactional analysis of the semi-structured interviews, suggests that for these travellers the sociolinguistic phenomenon of place-identity is layered and scalar so as to account for a loyalty to their distant provenience from Ireland, together with their present attachment to the encampment. As these women conceptualise place in terms of what it can provide for their families and community, their often idealised conceptualisation of locality resembles a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia of compensation’, in which the meticulous functioning of the site protects the community and defends it from outer contaminations.

A pragmatic cognitive model for the interpretation of verbal–visual communication in television news programmes

The combination of the verbal and the visual track in television news discourse poses a considerable analytical challenge. In the viewers’ minds the co-habitation of these two semiotic channels triggers a complex network of inferential processes, based on expectations of coherence and relevance, with which they make sense of the representation of the world offered in the news. Through the analysis of a number of news items, this article considers the cognitive processes which viewers may activate when extracting meaning from the multimedial messages contained in television news. The analysis of news items from two British television networks offered by the authors traces the possible meanings that, it is assumed, become available to a potential, ‘idealised’ or ‘implied’ viewer, who accesses the information with some social and cultural knowledge of contemporary Britain. Building on existing studies, the article proposes a model for the classification of verbal–visual relations.

When cinema borrows from stage: theatrical artifice through explicitness in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and Dogville

ABSTRACT Framed within the debate on the different nature of theatrical and filmic communication, the study considers two avant-garde films by Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and von Trier, Dogville, as examples of texts that travel from one medium to another and show closeness to the theatre. This is revealed not solely through the artificiality and the enclosure of the setting and the mise-en-scène, but also at the level of the discourse understood as the ensemble of images, music, gestures, and dialogue. The two films exhibit an unnaturalness unusual in cinema, a medium in which the editing realises a seemingly realistic representation of characters and events. The discussion focuses on how such a sensation of artificial non-realism is achieved in the films. It is argued that it derives from the marked explicit relation between the various levels of communication in the two films, the verbal and the visual, as well as between the dialogue contributions by the different participants in the narrative, characters, and narrator. The construct adopted for the analysis is indexicality, which is interpreted in a broad sense and that, as is discussed, contributes to the “monstrative” dimension of the films in terms of the explicitness of the communication.

‘Since Big Fat Gypsy Weddings […] Now [People]…Understand More ‘Cos of That Programme’: Irish Travellers’ Identity Between Stigmatisation and Self-Image

Irish travellers are transient people like Scottish travellers, gypsy and Romany communities. As a consequence of their mobility, travellers’ relation with place poses a number of questions; in spite of their symbolic or nominal inscription in an original Irish motherland, they tend to develop an emotional attachment to other particular localities (Piazza, 2014). Many groups of Irish travellers today aspire to a settled life in their own caravans in serviced encampments. The loyalty to a nomadic lifestyle, mixed with need of services and a desire to be stationary while in mobile dwellings, has contributed to making Irish travellers the object of discrimination by settled residents who are suspicious of them, even though their knowledge of the travellers and their needs is severely limited. The police response to travellers’ unauthorised occasional settlements in parks outside cities tends to echo this suspicion with the positioning of a van with surveillance cameras to monitor their moves. Such charitable organisations as Friends, Family and Travellers, however, aim to ‘end racism and discrimination against Gypsies and travellers, whatever their ethnicity, culture or background, whether settled or mobile, and to protect the right to pursue a nomadic way of life’ (http://www.gypsy-traveller.org/).

The Representation of Travellers in Television Documentaries

As Pietikainen (2003: 589) points out, ‘[j]ournalism is paradoxical. Ideally, news should present a truthful, balanced, impartial and neutral account of the events [...] but a good news report has an angle, a striking headline and lead, and an appealing story as a result of dozens of decisions and choices’. Although this comment refers to news reports specifically, it has been applied to factual documentaries that, I believe, operate along very similar lines. This chapter investigates how the discourse of documentaries can encourage a particular view of the issue in hand among viewers, in this specific case of ‘travellers’ as the collective term used to describe Britain’s mobile communities that are of Irish or Scottish rather than Roma gypsy descent. The discussion concentrates on factual films’ ‘representation’ of travellers as a non-transparent ‘mediating’ process ‘whereby an event [...] filtered through interpretive frameworks [...] acquires ideological significance’ (Poole 2002: 23). Throughout its history, the genre of documentary has displayed a variety of forms, some ‘extremely self-conscious and aesthetically ambitious’, some others showing a commitment to ‘reportorial or observational naturalisms’ (Corner 2005: 49). The documentary films in this study belong to the latter type and discuss the community of travellers, notoriously disadvantaged and often perceived as disturbing and threatening by the settled parts of society.

Features of the authorial voice-over in La terra trema

Viscontis film The Earth Trembles is a homage to the ideology of the Italian post-war left. The paper proposes a linguistic analysis of the denarratising techniques that the neorealist director used for the voice-over comment of that film to create the impression of a narrative occurring not once but several times. The notion of the pseudo-narrative explored by Henderson (1983) and Kinder (1989) is applied.