This volume examines the way participants orient to aspects of their interactions with others as interpersonally sensitive across an array of languages and contemporary institutional settings. The individual chapters address interactional episodes where the participants signal that elements of the exchanges they are engaged in are problematic in terms of the vulnerability of their own and/or each other’s face and the role-identities assumed throughout the interactions. The volume contributors examine a range of activities. In some of these, an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity is expected, such as citizens’ encounters with traffic police officers, negotiations with a line manager, political news interviews, or public inquiries. Other types of activity, such as service calls or guided tours, involve no such expectations in and of themselves. In some cases, the situated vulnerabilities studied here, whether expected or not, lead to deviation from the expected trajectory of the communicative event, with implications for goal achievement. The collection of papers draws on diverse analytic perspectives. These include interactional discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis. The diversity of languages and institutional environments examined will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in face-to-face interaction and serve to stimulate debate in the field of pragmatics and beyond. Originally published as special issue of Pragmatics and Society 7:4 (2016).

Language Practices and Processes among Latin Americans in Europe is an innovative and thematically organised collection of studies dedicated to contemporary sociolinguistic research on Latin Americans across European contexts. This book captures some of the language practices and experiences of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans (SsLAs) across various regions in Europe, addressing language uses, language ideologies, and experiences with languages in particular geographical contexts and settings across the ten chapters. The book provides a new lens to study the sociolinguistics of the migratory trajectories of Spanish-speaking Latin American migrants and the situated practices and processes in which they participate in their host societies. The comprehensive volume will be of interest to researchers in the area of Spanish sociolinguistics, sociology of language, and language ideology.

Epistemic injustice was conceptualized by Fricker as a form of social injustice, which occurs when people’s authority ‘as a knower’ is ignored, dismissed, or marginalized. It is attracting increasing interest in the mental health field because of the asymmetries of power between people using mental health services and mental health professionals. People experiencing mental health distress are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice as a consequence of deeply embedded social stigma, negative stereotyping, and assumed irrationality. This is amplified by other forms of stereotyping or structural discrimination, including racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Consequently, individual testimonies may be discounted as both irrational and unreliable. Epistemic injustice also operates systemically reflecting social and demographic characteristics, such a race, gender, sexuality or disability, or age.

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chapters are organised in a systematic fashion, and span a wide range of theoretical research on how language communicates multiple meanings in context, how it influences our daily interactions and relationships with others, and how it helps construct our social worlds. Providing insight into a fascinating array of phenomena and novel research directions, the Handbook is not only relevant to experts of pragmatics but to any reader with an interest in language and its use in different contexts, including researchers in sociology, anthropology and communication, and students of applied linguistics and related areas, as well as professional practitioners in communication research.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.

An encompassing picture of what high-level competence in second languages and in multilingual use is about.

This book explores how language constructs the meaning and praxis of security in the 21st century. Combining the latest critical theories in poststructuralist and political philosophy with discourse analysis techniques, it uses corpus tools to investigate four collections of documents harvested from national and international security organisations. This interdisciplinary approach provides insights into the ways in which discourse has been mobilised to construct a strategic response to major terrorist attacks and geo-political events. The authors identify the way in which it is used to realize tactics of governmentality and form security as a discipline. This at once constructs a state of exception while also adhering to the principles of liberalism. This insightful study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of subjects such as applied linguistics, political science, security studies and international relations, with additional relevance to other areas including law, criminology, sociology and economics.