Lavric, Eva and Machteld Meulleman (eds.) Du corps aux langues dans le football : match interdisciplinaire Körper und Sprachen im Fußball. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press.ein Match der Disziplinen, 2023
One of the characteristic features of sports commentary in the media is the relatively high formu... more One of the characteristic features of sports commentary in the media is the relatively high formulaicity of language describing the action components of a sports event. Such linguistic routines are found in both spoken and written commentary by professional sports commentators, particularly those commentaries that are produced in real time. However, the question arises of whether the use of phrasal routines is automatic and passes unnoticed or whether some of them can become the subject of foregrounding and, thus, the metalingual focus of the sports commentator. Based on a corpus of English online live text commentaries, this paper provides a qualitative case study of one of such recurrent phrasal routines – the English expression ‘battle fever’. The data indicate that some sports commentators tend to exploit the intertextual nature of the phrase as well as deploy it as a trigger for metalingual and multilingual play, e.g. through humorous translations, thus attesting the users’ metapragmatic awareness. The findings show that a routine phrase can become not only the focus of attention but also – almost paradoxically – subject to linguistic creativity and innovation.
In: Ermida, Isabel (ed.) Hate Speech in Social Media: Linguistic Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 341-367., 2023
The chapter addresses the issue of how conflict is negotiated within the architecture of online n... more The chapter addresses the issue of how conflict is negotiated within the architecture of online news forums, adopting a combined socio-critical perspective on anti-social discourse (NETLANG). Drawing on data from the NETLANG corpus (the section on “body shaming”, “physical identity/ features/impairments”), it maps three crucial dimensions of conflict talk, namely “structure”—“linguistic realisation”—”meaning” (cf. Kakavá, 2001). The chapter extends the meaning of conflict by considering its sociolinguistic indexicality, that is, how it is related to identity construction, particularly status negotiation and assertion. The chapter distinguishes conflicting representations (which tend to be “idea-oriented”: nominations, predications, argumentation, perspectivisation, framing, positioning and intensification/mitigation and aggressiveness, that is, antagonistic interpersonal verbal acts (e.g. swearwords, namecalling, and uncooperative communicative practices, such as trolling). It is suggested that the latter, as instances of person-oriented communicative acts, have a “prosodic” function, essentially serving the purpose of intensifying and enhancing one’s claim.
The findings indicate that conflict has identity-constructing and identity-affirming functions. Conflict talk solidifies the ingroup’s position/ unity (e.g. as a virtual, imagined community). Addressive conflict talk leads to heated debates among the commenters, while non-addressive conflict talk, which is directed outside one’s social bubble (i.e. the absent other), contributes towards forging a mutual harmony within the ingroup, though possibly also stirring further controversy and addressive conflict talk. It appears that some of the heated, conflict-based debates actually serve a ritual function, attesting to the commenters’ enjoyment of argumentation. Arguably, such ritualised forms of conventionalised conflict have a phatic function and can be described as sporting “conflictual phaticity”.
Racism is a major social and cultural problem that has, in various forms, plagued football for a ... more Racism is a major social and cultural problem that has, in various forms, plagued football for a long time. Despite the attempts of official bodies to root it out, racist talk and behaviour are still rife among players as well as in fan communities. The present paper provides a case study of online users’ comments on the media coverage of a series of controversial incidents during a recent UEFA Europa League matchinvolving an alleged verbal act of racial abuse between two players. Adopting a discourse analytical perspective, the paper contrasts how the match controversies were reflected in the users’ public online discourses in two different cultural communities, namely the UK and the Czech Republic, and identifies some of the similarities and differences between the two. The analysis shows how the users reframe the underlying racist issue, trivialize it through humour and relativize its seriousness. The data indicate that such discourses surrounding football are important for understanding how fans construct various group identities and how specific socio-cultural contexts influence the perception of race-related controversies.
In: The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Edited by James Stanlaw, John Wiley & Sons, 2021
A scholarly treatment of cliché needs to consider the connection between the perceived non-origin... more A scholarly treatment of cliché needs to consider the connection between the perceived non-originality of form and the ensuing negative evaluation. The key role in this process belongs to pragmatic meta-awareness because, when referencing a cliché, speakers demonstrate their familiarity with the underlying stylistic norms and point out other interlocutors' failure to meet them. Though cliché often originates in linguistic creativity, its semantic trajectory is one of decline, as evidenced by the negative reactions clichés normally receive; see also its typical synonyms such as hackneyed phrase, trite expression, stock phrase, dead metaphor, verbal crutch, perpetually misused expression, platitude, etc. From a semiotic perspective, a cliché is any sign or form of meaning-making that is patently non-original and that, without engaging the original source in some kind of reflective criticism, implicit commentary, or creative reuse, is also typically subject to the characteristic negative evaluation stemming from the non-originality of its formal components.
Linares Bernabéu, Esther (ed.) The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, [P&bns 335]., 2023
The article deals with online interactional humour in user comments on YouTube. Drawing on an ext... more The article deals with online interactional humour in user comments on YouTube. Drawing on an extensive dataset of verbal reactions to a video discussing the (in)appropriateness of joking about the 2019 burning of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the analysis traces how online commenters recontextualise the disaster and how they jointly produce humorous interaction on a sensitive topic. The analysis focuses on the emergence of joking threads, which consist of jokes shared by the commenters and additional (non-)humorous metapragmatic comments that develop the interaction in various directions. The data reveal that commenters cooperatively engage in a rich range of humour-related practices on a socially sensitive topic, which oscillate between disaster humour and religious humour.
Cap, Piotr (ed.) Handbook of Political Discourse. Edward Elgar Publishing., 2023
This chapter discusses public participation in media discourses as a complex and essentially poli... more This chapter discusses public participation in media discourses as a complex and essentially politicized area that lies at the intersection of various fields, calling for an interdisciplinary approach from various perspectives such as those provided by discourse analysis, communication studies and political science. It argues that users’ engagement with the media is inherently political; not just because of its frequent critical nature, with users demanding the accountability of public figures and questioning public policies and actions, but also because of their often ambivalent relationship to the mainstream media, reflecting the frequent distrust in the existing power structures. In its main part, the chapter deconstructs some of the potential problems with various kinds of digitally mediated public participation. It notes how context collapse contributes to the merger of the private vs. public spheres, and how that can result in accidental and dispreferred participation. In this connection, the chapter argues that public participation is framed by the dominant political forces and power structures, and the national legal frameworks that typically constrain the complete freedom to exercise one’s discursive participatory options.
In: Alexander Brock, Janet Russell, Peter Schildhauer and Merle Willenberg (eds.) Participation & Identity: Empirical Investigations of States and Dynamics. Peter Lang, 2022, 2022
This article develops the theoretical notion of embedded participation
frameworks found in some n... more This article develops the theoretical notion of embedded participation frameworks found in some new genres of digital media communication. Based on data from live online sports commentary, it identifies how several recursively embedded interactional frames are employed in the text. The analysis concentrates on utterances that constitute ‘vertical’ interactions, cutting across the boundaries of the frames. Attention is paid to discourse representation and synthetic addressivity, which concerns the vertical transposition of real or hypothetical utterances from the lower-level interactional frames (typically the sports field or the stadium) into the media frame, and the journalist’s production of utterances addressed to participants located in the other frames. It is argued that while such vertical utterances can be speculative and fictional, the reconfigurations of the participant roles enhance the ‘pseudo-dialogism’ of the text and contribute to an internally variable and dynamic structure of the live text coverage.
This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and me... more This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretati...
Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 2017
This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recentl... more This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.
In humour studies, the targeting of some other group tends to be seen as the characteristic featu... more In humour studies, the targeting of some other group tends to be seen as the characteristic feature of ethnic jokes/humour. The outgroup is perceived to be different from the ingroup and to hold some stereotypical qualities that are subject to humorous treatment. While some forms of humour that involve such outgroups have some political implications (e.g. three-nation jokes), the political dimension tends to be backgrounded. Based on data from reader comments in English and Czech online newspapers on the recent migration crisis, this paper documents several forms of humour that targets ‘the other’– jokes, witticisms, irony and allusion. The focus is on how certain subtle intertextual references, which presume an ideological alignment between the producers and recipients of humour, can give rise to humorous effects. Intertextuality is carried through specific phrases and formulations that readers can easily recognize as belonging to other texts and prior discourses. The analysis of t...
A textbook for lst-year students of English. The definition of language, the description of a lan... more A textbook for lst-year students of English. The definition of language, the description of a language, Standard English, grammars and dictionaries for Czech students of English, varieties of English, a brief survey of the history of English and of linguistiuc research, glossdary of linguistic terms.
Clanek srovnava implementaci směrnice Evropskeho parlamentu a Rady 2001/37/ES ze dne 5. cervna 20... more Clanek srovnava implementaci směrnice Evropskeho parlamentu a Rady 2001/37/ES ze dne 5. cervna 2001 do pravniho systemu Velke Britanie a Ceske republiky s ohledem na jazykový rozbor textů obecných a dodatecných varovani o skodlivosti kouřeni uvaděných na obalech tabakových výrobků. Srovnavaci analýza ceske verze textů se zdrojovými texty a překlady textů do dalsich jazyků vede ke zjistěni, že mezi jednotlivými jazykovými verzemi existuji významne rozdily. Některe zjistěne rozdily prameni z odlisneho přistupu k možnostem nabizených směrnici (britska vyhlaska je vůci ni přisnějsi, ceska vyhlaska naopak voli tentativnějsi vyjadřeni), několik odlisnosti take vychazi z podstaty překladatelskeho procesu do cestiny. Dokumentovan je rovněž přiklad chybneho překladu, který měni celkový význam jednoho z varovani. Vsechny zjistěne jazykove odlisnosti maji spolecne to, že oslabuji silu ceských varovani, a vedou tak k zavěru, že ceske texty varovani o nebezpeci kouřeni jsou k tabakovemu průmyslu...
This introductory chapter explains the rationale and the objectives of the collection focusing on... more This introductory chapter explains the rationale and the objectives of the collection focusing on the choices taken to frame the project in a coherent manner despite the apparent diversity of approaches, materials and scopes. First we highlight the role of the national media in European public spheres in sustaining, but also reconstructing, collective identities. Then we proceed to explaining the key concepts permeating all contributions, namely “the other” and othering, distinguishing between two of their key discursive functions – differentiation and discrimination. Next, we provide reasons for looking to semi-public media environments for a more calibrated analysis of othering, arguing that – following the rise of participatory media technologies – the public sphere has been extended to encompass new actors and non-elite voices. We also justify this choice with the reference to the ideological plurality of the contemporary public spheres in Europe and the fact that (critical) dis...
This paper explores the role of laughter in broadcast TV documentary programs. Although the prima... more This paper explores the role of laughter in broadcast TV documentary programs. Although the primary design of many TV documentaries is to attend to the smooth transmission of information to the audience, some program formats include components of seemingly unscripted interpersonal interaction between the participants. In these interactions, we frequently find situations that evoke the participants’ laughter, even though they are not designed as humorous and may not contain any evident intentional humor. Based on data obtained from a recent British documentary series, this paper documents how laughter emerges within interactions between the presenter and other interlocutors in order to deal with situations of personal failure and success arising from joint collaborative effort. The paper argues that laughter indexes extreme emotional reactions, thus being indicative of an underlying incongruity between the participants’ expectations and the actual state. Moreover its presence in the ...
The article analyses competitive verbal interaction between commentators and readers/other commen... more The article analyses competitive verbal interaction between commentators and readers/other commentators in online minute-by-minute match reports. The text of MBMs frequently quotes other voices, which are conventionally reacted to by the commentator. The dialogism has a competitive nature, with the commentator striving to top the readers through humour or criticism. Such interpersonal gossip is linked with the non-serious elements of male discourse, and is explained as a strategy of synthetic personalisation.
Approaching Czech linguistic functionalism In: Chovanec, Jan, Chapters from the history of Czech functional linguistics. Brno: Masaryk University, 6-26. http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/131563, 2014
This text outlines some of the basic theoretical concepts of Czech functionally-oriented linguist... more This text outlines some of the basic theoretical concepts of Czech functionally-oriented linguistics as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, the Prague School, as this approach came to be known, quickly assumed the position of the leading branch of structuralist thought in Europe and became immensely influential on account of its modern conception of the discipline. Th is text deals with its historical context, research programme, and main contributions to general linguistics. It closes with a brief discussion of the heritage of the discipline and a glossary explaining some of the major concepts.
In humour research, intertextuality has been extensively studied with the aim of understanding ho... more In humour research, intertextuality has been extensively studied with the aim of understanding how humorous texts are constructed on the basis of previous texts. In this paper, we elaborate on the sociopragmatic functions of intertextuality, pointing out not only how humorous texts rely on previous texts and background knowledge, but also what sociopragmatic functions intertextuality serves in actual communicative situations, e.g. the effect the recognition (or not) of intertextual references has on the segmentation of recipients into various groups. To this end, the paper discusses intertextuality in relation to such traditional concepts as textuality and genre, and adds a focus on the speaker’s intention and the recipient’s interpretation. The paper serves as a framing introduction to six other papers in the special issue on the topic of “Intertextuality and humour”, articulating a common research position and arguing for the extension of scholarly attention to such applied domain...
This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch bet... more This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch between a speaker’s communicative intention and the undesirable humorous effect of his/her utterances. Based on a case study of a sports media interview, it focuses on how the interviewee may violate the communicative norms governing the expected responses, and how such a violation, motivated by the desire to avoid personal accountability, generates unintended humour in the media reception framework.
Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.
This article explores prejudicial and racist discourse in reader comments in internet news discus... more This article explores prejudicial and racist discourse in reader comments in internet news discussion forums. Based on data from an online debate among Czech commenters on the mainstream iDnes.cz news site, it seeks to contribute to the existing critical linguistic approaches to discursive strategies of othering. Analysing user comments referencing a news article on a sensitive social topic, namely the complicated reception of Central European Roma immigrants in the UK, the paper focuses on three salient themes found in the data: (a) the re-education of the ethnic minority; (b) the users’ perception of the media as politically correct and siding with the outgroup; and (c) the outgroup’s negative stereotype associating it with criminality. The paper argues that the discourse on these topics simultaneously relies on and reinforces the negative stereotype of the ethnic group, while revealing a complicated relationship between three stakeholders: the ingroup, represented by the commenters; the outgroup, made up of members of the ethnic groups; and the media, as representatives of the authorities and the elites. The findings reveal how quasi-humorous comments that involve such stereotypical representations contribute to the normalization of everyday racism against ethnic outgroups.
Jezik, književnost, kontext. Language, Literature, Context., 2020
Adopting the definition of populism as a political style and performance, this article deals with... more Adopting the definition of populism as a political style and performance, this article deals with the contextualized performance of populist rhetoric. Drawing on data from a videoblog on current affairs produced by the head of the most prominent Czech populist party, the analysis documents some of the typical features of populist discourse, e.g. the discursive construction of a narrative of threat, the intentional production of scandal talk, and the extreme othering of outgroups, particularly elite social actors (the media, the mainstream media, the EU) that are deemed not to represent the real interests of the people. The paper argues that public performances of populist politicians skilfully exploit various forms of context and intertextuality in order to foster their anti-establishment agenda.
Lavric, Eva and Machteld Meulleman (eds.) Du corps aux langues dans le football : match interdisciplinaire Körper und Sprachen im Fußball. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press.ein Match der Disziplinen, 2023
One of the characteristic features of sports commentary in the media is the relatively high formu... more One of the characteristic features of sports commentary in the media is the relatively high formulaicity of language describing the action components of a sports event. Such linguistic routines are found in both spoken and written commentary by professional sports commentators, particularly those commentaries that are produced in real time. However, the question arises of whether the use of phrasal routines is automatic and passes unnoticed or whether some of them can become the subject of foregrounding and, thus, the metalingual focus of the sports commentator. Based on a corpus of English online live text commentaries, this paper provides a qualitative case study of one of such recurrent phrasal routines – the English expression ‘battle fever’. The data indicate that some sports commentators tend to exploit the intertextual nature of the phrase as well as deploy it as a trigger for metalingual and multilingual play, e.g. through humorous translations, thus attesting the users’ metapragmatic awareness. The findings show that a routine phrase can become not only the focus of attention but also – almost paradoxically – subject to linguistic creativity and innovation.
In: Ermida, Isabel (ed.) Hate Speech in Social Media: Linguistic Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 341-367., 2023
The chapter addresses the issue of how conflict is negotiated within the architecture of online n... more The chapter addresses the issue of how conflict is negotiated within the architecture of online news forums, adopting a combined socio-critical perspective on anti-social discourse (NETLANG). Drawing on data from the NETLANG corpus (the section on “body shaming”, “physical identity/ features/impairments”), it maps three crucial dimensions of conflict talk, namely “structure”—“linguistic realisation”—”meaning” (cf. Kakavá, 2001). The chapter extends the meaning of conflict by considering its sociolinguistic indexicality, that is, how it is related to identity construction, particularly status negotiation and assertion. The chapter distinguishes conflicting representations (which tend to be “idea-oriented”: nominations, predications, argumentation, perspectivisation, framing, positioning and intensification/mitigation and aggressiveness, that is, antagonistic interpersonal verbal acts (e.g. swearwords, namecalling, and uncooperative communicative practices, such as trolling). It is suggested that the latter, as instances of person-oriented communicative acts, have a “prosodic” function, essentially serving the purpose of intensifying and enhancing one’s claim.
The findings indicate that conflict has identity-constructing and identity-affirming functions. Conflict talk solidifies the ingroup’s position/ unity (e.g. as a virtual, imagined community). Addressive conflict talk leads to heated debates among the commenters, while non-addressive conflict talk, which is directed outside one’s social bubble (i.e. the absent other), contributes towards forging a mutual harmony within the ingroup, though possibly also stirring further controversy and addressive conflict talk. It appears that some of the heated, conflict-based debates actually serve a ritual function, attesting to the commenters’ enjoyment of argumentation. Arguably, such ritualised forms of conventionalised conflict have a phatic function and can be described as sporting “conflictual phaticity”.
Racism is a major social and cultural problem that has, in various forms, plagued football for a ... more Racism is a major social and cultural problem that has, in various forms, plagued football for a long time. Despite the attempts of official bodies to root it out, racist talk and behaviour are still rife among players as well as in fan communities. The present paper provides a case study of online users’ comments on the media coverage of a series of controversial incidents during a recent UEFA Europa League matchinvolving an alleged verbal act of racial abuse between two players. Adopting a discourse analytical perspective, the paper contrasts how the match controversies were reflected in the users’ public online discourses in two different cultural communities, namely the UK and the Czech Republic, and identifies some of the similarities and differences between the two. The analysis shows how the users reframe the underlying racist issue, trivialize it through humour and relativize its seriousness. The data indicate that such discourses surrounding football are important for understanding how fans construct various group identities and how specific socio-cultural contexts influence the perception of race-related controversies.
In: The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Edited by James Stanlaw, John Wiley & Sons, 2021
A scholarly treatment of cliché needs to consider the connection between the perceived non-origin... more A scholarly treatment of cliché needs to consider the connection between the perceived non-originality of form and the ensuing negative evaluation. The key role in this process belongs to pragmatic meta-awareness because, when referencing a cliché, speakers demonstrate their familiarity with the underlying stylistic norms and point out other interlocutors' failure to meet them. Though cliché often originates in linguistic creativity, its semantic trajectory is one of decline, as evidenced by the negative reactions clichés normally receive; see also its typical synonyms such as hackneyed phrase, trite expression, stock phrase, dead metaphor, verbal crutch, perpetually misused expression, platitude, etc. From a semiotic perspective, a cliché is any sign or form of meaning-making that is patently non-original and that, without engaging the original source in some kind of reflective criticism, implicit commentary, or creative reuse, is also typically subject to the characteristic negative evaluation stemming from the non-originality of its formal components.
Linares Bernabéu, Esther (ed.) The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, [P&bns 335]., 2023
The article deals with online interactional humour in user comments on YouTube. Drawing on an ext... more The article deals with online interactional humour in user comments on YouTube. Drawing on an extensive dataset of verbal reactions to a video discussing the (in)appropriateness of joking about the 2019 burning of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the analysis traces how online commenters recontextualise the disaster and how they jointly produce humorous interaction on a sensitive topic. The analysis focuses on the emergence of joking threads, which consist of jokes shared by the commenters and additional (non-)humorous metapragmatic comments that develop the interaction in various directions. The data reveal that commenters cooperatively engage in a rich range of humour-related practices on a socially sensitive topic, which oscillate between disaster humour and religious humour.
Cap, Piotr (ed.) Handbook of Political Discourse. Edward Elgar Publishing., 2023
This chapter discusses public participation in media discourses as a complex and essentially poli... more This chapter discusses public participation in media discourses as a complex and essentially politicized area that lies at the intersection of various fields, calling for an interdisciplinary approach from various perspectives such as those provided by discourse analysis, communication studies and political science. It argues that users’ engagement with the media is inherently political; not just because of its frequent critical nature, with users demanding the accountability of public figures and questioning public policies and actions, but also because of their often ambivalent relationship to the mainstream media, reflecting the frequent distrust in the existing power structures. In its main part, the chapter deconstructs some of the potential problems with various kinds of digitally mediated public participation. It notes how context collapse contributes to the merger of the private vs. public spheres, and how that can result in accidental and dispreferred participation. In this connection, the chapter argues that public participation is framed by the dominant political forces and power structures, and the national legal frameworks that typically constrain the complete freedom to exercise one’s discursive participatory options.
In: Alexander Brock, Janet Russell, Peter Schildhauer and Merle Willenberg (eds.) Participation & Identity: Empirical Investigations of States and Dynamics. Peter Lang, 2022, 2022
This article develops the theoretical notion of embedded participation
frameworks found in some n... more This article develops the theoretical notion of embedded participation frameworks found in some new genres of digital media communication. Based on data from live online sports commentary, it identifies how several recursively embedded interactional frames are employed in the text. The analysis concentrates on utterances that constitute ‘vertical’ interactions, cutting across the boundaries of the frames. Attention is paid to discourse representation and synthetic addressivity, which concerns the vertical transposition of real or hypothetical utterances from the lower-level interactional frames (typically the sports field or the stadium) into the media frame, and the journalist’s production of utterances addressed to participants located in the other frames. It is argued that while such vertical utterances can be speculative and fictional, the reconfigurations of the participant roles enhance the ‘pseudo-dialogism’ of the text and contribute to an internally variable and dynamic structure of the live text coverage.
This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and me... more This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretati...
Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 2017
This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recentl... more This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.
In humour studies, the targeting of some other group tends to be seen as the characteristic featu... more In humour studies, the targeting of some other group tends to be seen as the characteristic feature of ethnic jokes/humour. The outgroup is perceived to be different from the ingroup and to hold some stereotypical qualities that are subject to humorous treatment. While some forms of humour that involve such outgroups have some political implications (e.g. three-nation jokes), the political dimension tends to be backgrounded. Based on data from reader comments in English and Czech online newspapers on the recent migration crisis, this paper documents several forms of humour that targets ‘the other’– jokes, witticisms, irony and allusion. The focus is on how certain subtle intertextual references, which presume an ideological alignment between the producers and recipients of humour, can give rise to humorous effects. Intertextuality is carried through specific phrases and formulations that readers can easily recognize as belonging to other texts and prior discourses. The analysis of t...
A textbook for lst-year students of English. The definition of language, the description of a lan... more A textbook for lst-year students of English. The definition of language, the description of a language, Standard English, grammars and dictionaries for Czech students of English, varieties of English, a brief survey of the history of English and of linguistiuc research, glossdary of linguistic terms.
Clanek srovnava implementaci směrnice Evropskeho parlamentu a Rady 2001/37/ES ze dne 5. cervna 20... more Clanek srovnava implementaci směrnice Evropskeho parlamentu a Rady 2001/37/ES ze dne 5. cervna 2001 do pravniho systemu Velke Britanie a Ceske republiky s ohledem na jazykový rozbor textů obecných a dodatecných varovani o skodlivosti kouřeni uvaděných na obalech tabakových výrobků. Srovnavaci analýza ceske verze textů se zdrojovými texty a překlady textů do dalsich jazyků vede ke zjistěni, že mezi jednotlivými jazykovými verzemi existuji významne rozdily. Některe zjistěne rozdily prameni z odlisneho přistupu k možnostem nabizených směrnici (britska vyhlaska je vůci ni přisnějsi, ceska vyhlaska naopak voli tentativnějsi vyjadřeni), několik odlisnosti take vychazi z podstaty překladatelskeho procesu do cestiny. Dokumentovan je rovněž přiklad chybneho překladu, který měni celkový význam jednoho z varovani. Vsechny zjistěne jazykove odlisnosti maji spolecne to, že oslabuji silu ceských varovani, a vedou tak k zavěru, že ceske texty varovani o nebezpeci kouřeni jsou k tabakovemu průmyslu...
This introductory chapter explains the rationale and the objectives of the collection focusing on... more This introductory chapter explains the rationale and the objectives of the collection focusing on the choices taken to frame the project in a coherent manner despite the apparent diversity of approaches, materials and scopes. First we highlight the role of the national media in European public spheres in sustaining, but also reconstructing, collective identities. Then we proceed to explaining the key concepts permeating all contributions, namely “the other” and othering, distinguishing between two of their key discursive functions – differentiation and discrimination. Next, we provide reasons for looking to semi-public media environments for a more calibrated analysis of othering, arguing that – following the rise of participatory media technologies – the public sphere has been extended to encompass new actors and non-elite voices. We also justify this choice with the reference to the ideological plurality of the contemporary public spheres in Europe and the fact that (critical) dis...
This paper explores the role of laughter in broadcast TV documentary programs. Although the prima... more This paper explores the role of laughter in broadcast TV documentary programs. Although the primary design of many TV documentaries is to attend to the smooth transmission of information to the audience, some program formats include components of seemingly unscripted interpersonal interaction between the participants. In these interactions, we frequently find situations that evoke the participants’ laughter, even though they are not designed as humorous and may not contain any evident intentional humor. Based on data obtained from a recent British documentary series, this paper documents how laughter emerges within interactions between the presenter and other interlocutors in order to deal with situations of personal failure and success arising from joint collaborative effort. The paper argues that laughter indexes extreme emotional reactions, thus being indicative of an underlying incongruity between the participants’ expectations and the actual state. Moreover its presence in the ...
The article analyses competitive verbal interaction between commentators and readers/other commen... more The article analyses competitive verbal interaction between commentators and readers/other commentators in online minute-by-minute match reports. The text of MBMs frequently quotes other voices, which are conventionally reacted to by the commentator. The dialogism has a competitive nature, with the commentator striving to top the readers through humour or criticism. Such interpersonal gossip is linked with the non-serious elements of male discourse, and is explained as a strategy of synthetic personalisation.
Approaching Czech linguistic functionalism In: Chovanec, Jan, Chapters from the history of Czech functional linguistics. Brno: Masaryk University, 6-26. http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/131563, 2014
This text outlines some of the basic theoretical concepts of Czech functionally-oriented linguist... more This text outlines some of the basic theoretical concepts of Czech functionally-oriented linguistics as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, the Prague School, as this approach came to be known, quickly assumed the position of the leading branch of structuralist thought in Europe and became immensely influential on account of its modern conception of the discipline. Th is text deals with its historical context, research programme, and main contributions to general linguistics. It closes with a brief discussion of the heritage of the discipline and a glossary explaining some of the major concepts.
In humour research, intertextuality has been extensively studied with the aim of understanding ho... more In humour research, intertextuality has been extensively studied with the aim of understanding how humorous texts are constructed on the basis of previous texts. In this paper, we elaborate on the sociopragmatic functions of intertextuality, pointing out not only how humorous texts rely on previous texts and background knowledge, but also what sociopragmatic functions intertextuality serves in actual communicative situations, e.g. the effect the recognition (or not) of intertextual references has on the segmentation of recipients into various groups. To this end, the paper discusses intertextuality in relation to such traditional concepts as textuality and genre, and adds a focus on the speaker’s intention and the recipient’s interpretation. The paper serves as a framing introduction to six other papers in the special issue on the topic of “Intertextuality and humour”, articulating a common research position and arguing for the extension of scholarly attention to such applied domain...
This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch bet... more This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch between a speaker’s communicative intention and the undesirable humorous effect of his/her utterances. Based on a case study of a sports media interview, it focuses on how the interviewee may violate the communicative norms governing the expected responses, and how such a violation, motivated by the desire to avoid personal accountability, generates unintended humour in the media reception framework.
Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.
This article explores prejudicial and racist discourse in reader comments in internet news discus... more This article explores prejudicial and racist discourse in reader comments in internet news discussion forums. Based on data from an online debate among Czech commenters on the mainstream iDnes.cz news site, it seeks to contribute to the existing critical linguistic approaches to discursive strategies of othering. Analysing user comments referencing a news article on a sensitive social topic, namely the complicated reception of Central European Roma immigrants in the UK, the paper focuses on three salient themes found in the data: (a) the re-education of the ethnic minority; (b) the users’ perception of the media as politically correct and siding with the outgroup; and (c) the outgroup’s negative stereotype associating it with criminality. The paper argues that the discourse on these topics simultaneously relies on and reinforces the negative stereotype of the ethnic group, while revealing a complicated relationship between three stakeholders: the ingroup, represented by the commenters; the outgroup, made up of members of the ethnic groups; and the media, as representatives of the authorities and the elites. The findings reveal how quasi-humorous comments that involve such stereotypical representations contribute to the normalization of everyday racism against ethnic outgroups.
Jezik, književnost, kontext. Language, Literature, Context., 2020
Adopting the definition of populism as a political style and performance, this article deals with... more Adopting the definition of populism as a political style and performance, this article deals with the contextualized performance of populist rhetoric. Drawing on data from a videoblog on current affairs produced by the head of the most prominent Czech populist party, the analysis documents some of the typical features of populist discourse, e.g. the discursive construction of a narrative of threat, the intentional production of scandal talk, and the extreme othering of outgroups, particularly elite social actors (the media, the mainstream media, the EU) that are deemed not to represent the real interests of the people. The paper argues that public performances of populist politicians skilfully exploit various forms of context and intertextuality in order to foster their anti-establishment agenda.
Analyzing Digital Discourses Between Convergence and Controversy, 2021
This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discou... more This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discourse in modern digital communication by probing some of the social functions that online communication has for its users. An array of experts and scholars in the field address a range of forms of social interaction and discourses expressed by users on social networks and in public media. Social functions are reflected through linguistic and discursive practices that are either those of ‘convergence’ or ‘controversy’ in terms of how the discourse participants handle interpersonal relations or how they construct meanings in discourses. In this sense, the book elaborates on some very central concerns in the area of digital discourse analysis that have been reported within the last decade from various methodological perspectives ranging from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to corpus linguistics. This edited collection will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of digital discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social media and communication, and media and cultural studies.
This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the ... more This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre’s characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans. The book will be of interest to many scholars in linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis and social sciences, as well as to all others interested in modern online genres, news media and sports discourse.
This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recentl... more This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.
This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and onli... more This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.
This book deals with participation frameworks in modern social and public media. It brings togeth... more This book deals with participation frameworks in modern social and public media. It brings together several cutting-edge research studies that offer exciting new insights into the nature and formats of interpersonal communication in diverse technology-mediated contexts. Some papers introduce new theoretical extensions to participation formats, while others present case studies in various discourse domains spanning public and private genres. Adopting the perspective of the pragmatics of interaction, these contributions discuss data ranging from public, mass-mediated and quasi-authentic texts, fully staged and scripted textual productions, to authentic, non-scripted private messages and comments, both of a permanent and ephemeral nature. The analyses include news interviews, online sports reporting, sitcoms, comedy shows, stand-up comedies, drama series, institutional and personal blogs, tweets, follow-up YouTube video commentaries, and Facebook status updates. All the authors emphasize the role of context and pay attention to how meaning is constructed by participants in interactions in increasingly complex participation frameworks existing in traditional as well as novel technologically mediated interactions.
The book provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse anal... more The book provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse analysis, connecting two areas of scholarly interest that have not been studied extensively before. The volume adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, concentrating on the various roles humour plays in print and audiovisual media, the forms it takes, the purposes it serves, the butts it targets, the implications it carries and the differences it may assume across cultures. The phenomena described range from conversational humour, canned jokes and wordplay to humour in translation and news satire. The individual studies draw their material for analysis from traditional print and broadcast media, such as magazines, sitcomts, films and spoof news, as well as electronic and internet-based media, such as emails, listserv massages, live blogs and online news.
This book presents a selection of several articles that characterize the main strands of linguist... more This book presents a selection of several articles that characterize the main strands of linguistic thinking of Czech functionalists, particularly with respect to the English language. Several classic and well-known papers are complemented with an introductory chapter that outlines the basic theoretical concepts of Czech functionally-oriented linguistics as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century ("the Prague School"). The book is freely available online in multiple formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI; see the link below).
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2021 (hardback), Pragmatics and Beyond ... more John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2021 (hardback), Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, vol. 318, ISBN: 978-90-272-0807-1
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The findings indicate that conflict has identity-constructing and identity-affirming functions. Conflict talk solidifies the ingroup’s position/ unity (e.g. as a virtual, imagined community). Addressive conflict talk leads to heated debates among the commenters, while non-addressive conflict talk, which is directed outside one’s social bubble (i.e. the absent other), contributes towards forging a mutual harmony within the ingroup, though possibly also stirring further controversy and addressive conflict talk. It appears that some of the heated, conflict-based debates actually serve a ritual function, attesting to the commenters’ enjoyment of argumentation. Arguably, such ritualised forms of conventionalised conflict have a phatic function and can be described as sporting “conflictual phaticity”.
frameworks found in some new genres of digital media communication. Based on data from live online sports commentary, it identifies how several recursively embedded interactional frames are employed in the text. The analysis concentrates on utterances that constitute ‘vertical’ interactions, cutting across the boundaries of the frames. Attention is paid to discourse representation and synthetic addressivity, which concerns the vertical transposition of real or hypothetical utterances from the lower-level interactional frames (typically the sports field or the stadium) into the media frame, and the journalist’s production of utterances addressed to participants located in the other frames. It is argued that while such vertical utterances can be speculative and fictional, the reconfigurations of the participant roles enhance the ‘pseudo-dialogism’ of the text and contribute to an internally variable and dynamic structure of the live text coverage.
Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.
The findings indicate that conflict has identity-constructing and identity-affirming functions. Conflict talk solidifies the ingroup’s position/ unity (e.g. as a virtual, imagined community). Addressive conflict talk leads to heated debates among the commenters, while non-addressive conflict talk, which is directed outside one’s social bubble (i.e. the absent other), contributes towards forging a mutual harmony within the ingroup, though possibly also stirring further controversy and addressive conflict talk. It appears that some of the heated, conflict-based debates actually serve a ritual function, attesting to the commenters’ enjoyment of argumentation. Arguably, such ritualised forms of conventionalised conflict have a phatic function and can be described as sporting “conflictual phaticity”.
frameworks found in some new genres of digital media communication. Based on data from live online sports commentary, it identifies how several recursively embedded interactional frames are employed in the text. The analysis concentrates on utterances that constitute ‘vertical’ interactions, cutting across the boundaries of the frames. Attention is paid to discourse representation and synthetic addressivity, which concerns the vertical transposition of real or hypothetical utterances from the lower-level interactional frames (typically the sports field or the stadium) into the media frame, and the journalist’s production of utterances addressed to participants located in the other frames. It is argued that while such vertical utterances can be speculative and fictional, the reconfigurations of the participant roles enhance the ‘pseudo-dialogism’ of the text and contribute to an internally variable and dynamic structure of the live text coverage.
Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.