"So you're saying": the interrogation of Jordan Peterson
<p class="p1">In this article, I analyse the infamous Cathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson on the 16th of January 2018 and subsequent viewer comments on Channel 4's YouTube channel. My first hypothesis is that Newman's frequent attribution of statements to Peterson using the now notorious "so you are saying" gambit (YSG) is what triggered outrage among Peterson's followers, which, in turn, generated media interest. My second hypothesis is that the interview is best understood as a series of Face threats by Newman on Peterson using the YSG. To ascertain if my hypotheses are true, I performed corpus linguistic analyses on the interview and comments to provide objective descriptio…
A multimodal analysis of facework strategies in a corpus of charity ads on British television
Abstract The aim of this article is to carry out a qualitative multimodal analysis of the codification of verbal and non-verbal politeness strategies in a sub-corpus of five charity commercials aired on British television. Brown and Levinson's (1987) verbal politeness strategies are taken as a starting point together with a detailed analysis of facework that is realized through paralinguistic and extralinguistic modes of communication ( Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006 , Machin, 2010 ). In what we have identified as the problem phase of the commercial, our analysis has revealed that advertisers deliberately attempt to create threats to the viewer's positive and negative face by making him/her fe…
Teaching Competences Through ICTs in an English Degree Programme in a Spanish Setting
In this chapter I shall describe the ways in which a group of lecturers in English language and linguistics have attempted to help students acquire competencies using ICTs in an English Studies degree programme in Spain. The introduction of competence-based learning constitutes a major paradigm shift brought about by the convergence of degree systems in the European Higher Education Area, and is part of a concerted effort to make our degrees less teacher-centred with a view to giving students greater opportunities to participate in their own learning process, both inside and outside the classroom. I will outline how general and discipline-specific competences are acquired through the use of…
Relatos digitales un género de expresión personal mediatizada: introducción
This article provides a critical review of some of the most relevant studies on digital storytelling and proposes a genre typology that allows an initial classification of digital storytelling into two main types: educational and social. Digital storytelling is a multimodal emergent genre characterised by its versatility and flexibility which has resulted in a series of subgenres. However, the main premise here is that differentiating between social and educational– although one does not exclude the other– and bearing in mind that most digital stories may lie at the intersection of both, is the most useful way to start labeling the massive production of digital stories available nowadays on…
Facework and Prosocial Teasing in a Synchronous Video Communication Exchange
This study centres on the analysis of prosocial teasing during a videoconference (telecollaboration) exchange between mixed-gender adolescent secondary school students from Spain and Germany. We contend that the provocative elements present in prosocial teasing activate a play frame, in Gregory Bateson’s terms, in which seemingly hostile face acts can be interpreted as playful behaviour. We argue that successful teasing can ultimately enhance the face of the teaser and that of the person being teased and thus build up rapport between them. Our analysis of the facework in the interaction during this telecollaboration exchange is based on Erwin Goffman’s notions of face, demeanour and deferen…
Telecollaboration in a secondary school context: Negotiation of meaning in English as a lingua franca/Spanish tandem interactions
En este artículo presentamos nuestra investigación sobre la negociación de significado en dos interacciones con los mismos estudiantes españoles y alemanes de 16 años de edad en colegios de España y Alemania respectivamente. Las interacciones incluyen dos constelaciones de idioma, es decir, inglés como lengua franca y un tándem español. Nuestra investigación se llevó a cabo dentro del proyecto Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition project (TILA). Nuestro análisis cualitativo de la interacción demuestra que la telecolaboración ofrece muchas oportunidades para la comprensión y el aprendizaje. No hemos encontrado pruebas concluyentes para apoyar la hipótesis de que la negoci…
Violent women in Spanish TV ads: Stereotype reversal or the same old same old?
Why did different agencies, promoting diverse products, create three ads featuring violence perpetrated by women on their rather immature and submissive male partners in order to sell their products? I posit that the female viewers connect subconsciously with the image of the proactive female protagonists through the psychological mechanism in which we identify with ‘our like’ on the screen. This, in turn, allows for the projection of ‘common ground’, a positive politeness strategy, to favourably dispose the female audience towards the protagonists and, by extension, the products advertised. The success of these ads depends on women viewers identifying with the apparently dominant female pr…
Markedness and Naturalness in the Acquisition of Phonology
pennock@uv.es (este artículo no aparece en grec)
Target frames in British hotel websites
This article centres on four-word phrase frames in British hospitality websites. Our aim is to identify those frames that are specific to this website genre, which we call target frames. Each phrase frame represents an identical sequence of words except for one variable word, that is A*BC or AB*D. The words that fill the slot, marked with an asterisk, are called fillers. We used a corpus-driven approach using KfNgram software to identify the phrase frames in our corpus (COMETVAL). We regard phrase frames as genre-specific when they are significantly more frequent than those found in the written section of the BNC, which represents General British English. We further filtered our selection o…
Teachers’ perspectives on telecollaboration in secondary school foreign language education
In recent years, telecollaboration has proved to be a useful tool in the acquisition of foreign languages and intercultural communicative skills (Belz 2003b; Clavel-Arroitia, Pennock-Speck 2015a, 2015b; Hewitt, Brett 2007; O’Dowd 2007; Su et al., 2005). This paper focuses on how prepared secondary-school teachers believe they are in order to successfully implement telecollaboration in the classroom. To gather information on their views we carried out an online survey of 179 secondary school foreign language teachers and a series of focus group interviews in the context of a European project, TeCoLa. The advantage of the double- pronged approach to data collection, quantitative and qualitati…
Constructing female identities through feminine hygiene TV commercials
Abstract In this paper we report the results of a qualitative multimodal analysis of a corpus of Spanish and British TV ads featuring female hygiene products such as tampons, liners and sanitary towels/pads. We contend that advertisers of menstruation-related products employ a wide range of strategies to convey both overt information about the products advertised, as well as to – and more importantly – indirectly transmit stereotypical beliefs of women which inevitably helps reproduce and sometimes perpetuate a gender-biased type of discourse ( Holmes and Marra, 2005 ). Crook's (2004) distinction between the product-claim and the reward dimension in ads has been taken as the starting point …
Imperatives in voice-overs in British TV commercials: ‘Get this, buy that, taste the other’
Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials. To this end we have carried out an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus (Multimodal Analysis of TV Ads) which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six d…