"Those are your words, not mine!" Defence strategies for denying speaker commitment

Language Use in Past and Presen

Unilateral norm breaking in a presidential debate: Lech Wałȩsa versus Aleksander Kwaśniewski

This study analyzes the 1995 television presidential debate between Lech Wałȩsa and Aleksander Kwaśniewski. We show that the debate's institutional nature was subverted by the former candidate's use of an informal register characterized by jocular tenor, use of marked forms of address, and disparaging metapragmatic comments. Wałȩsa's casual style appeared to the other participants in the debate (his opponent, the journalists in the studio, the media, and the viewing public) as a bid to conduct the debate on his own terms, not as a "formal, public" event but as an "informal, personal" one. Such appropriation of the debate was resisted, and ultimately Wałȩsa was held accountable for his actions and his style was judged negatively. According to the media reports of the election results, the negative perception of Wałȩsa's debating style was largely responsible for tipping the electoral balance in favor of the other candidate.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

The linguistic construction of reality in the Black Book of Polish Censorship

The Black Book of Polish Censorship is an important document of censorial practices in Poland in the 1970s. It is a collection of censoring regulations which worked preventively to silence or distort those aspects of Polish life which were uncomfortable for the communist establishment. Although the role of censorship in totalitarian regimes is well known, the linguistic mechanisms by which (a) information flow was controlled and (b) preferred constructions of reality were mediated, have not been studied. Arguing that the language of the Black Book was indicative of the organization of power in the Polish censorial institutions and in the country as a whole, we also demonstrate how censorship regulated the flow of information in such a way that the only acceptable version of reality was represented in the media, and that the censors posited themselves as gatekeepers of information.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

'Telling our way of life': Modes of mediating social life in German and Polish primary-school textbooks

The events of 1989-1991 in Central and Eastern Europe brought political and economic changes to the post-Communist societies, which required them to redraw the social and psychological maps of their countries and carried with them the promise of partaking in the 'Western way of life'. The introduction of liberalised ideologies, both at the official level and in most of the freed media, also had to be translated into the countries' education systems. New textbooks that would accommodate the new social and political realities had to be written. We are interested in this article in whether and how these new realities are reflected in primary-school teaching materials. For this paper, our analysis will focus on data from two current textbooks that are used in German and Polish primary schools, respectively. We shall be focusing particularly upon those units of the book aimed at defining or describing realities. Taking into account both linguistic and visual modes of representation, we are interested in revealing the 'way of life', the lived ideologies, constructed in these textbooks. © 2000 Taylor and Francis Ltd

Strategies of silence: Omission and ambiguity in the black book of Polish censorship

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The last romantic hero: Lech Watȩsa's image-building in TV presidential debates

In this paper we analyze the strategies of Lech Walȩsa's image-building as a powerful leader of the nation. We argue that Walȩsa realizes three different versions of his leadership which are founded on the following defining criteria: his anti-Communism, heroism and working-class background. The paper is based upon the transcripts of two 1995 television presidential debates between Walȩsa and his counter candidate, Aleksander Kwaśniewski. Following broadly Goffman's work on self-presentation and the social constructionist approach to discourse, we argue that Walȩsa linguistically constructs his image in these debates situating himself within long-standing tradition of the Polish Romantic hero. We draw parallels between his projected self-image and the well-established characters from the Polish nineteenth century literature and pre-World War II Polish history. Given that these literary and historical traditions have a strong presence in the heritage and the collective consciousness of the Polish nation, Walȩsa positions himself as a credible candidate who is both their inheritor and continutator. © Walter de Gruyter.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Border ethnography and post-communist discourses of nationality in Poland

In this article I shall explore discursive constructions of ethnicity, and in particular notions of ‘Polishness’, among members of three-generation families living in the Polish town of Zgorzelec, on the border with Germany. The data come from a Europe-wide ethnographic project studying communities living on the borders between the EU and its ascendant nations, funded by the European Commission’s 5th Framework Programme (www.borderidentities.com). The most characteristic feature of the data concerning ethnicity is a clash between my informants’ declared identity (mainly constructed in terms of Polishness) and the constructions of Polishness. Even though the latter is usually described in negative terms, almost all interviewees choose to describe themselves in ethnic terms from the spectrum of labels they have been given. Drawing upon Billig et al.’s (1988) concept of ideological dilemma, I shall argue that the apparent contradiction in my informants’ discourse of identity is a result of two different ideological bases underpinning it: the lived ideology accomplished in their discourse clashes with the intellectual ideology explicitly adopted in their declarations of identity. Finally, I shall discuss this shift in terms of the particular place of residence of the members of Polish community right of the national border. I shall also explore the role of the interviewer in my informants’ discourses of ethnic identity. ‘Insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’ of the researcher in relation to the community under investigation was perceived as a challenge to a coherence of the narratives and resulted in constant discursive negotiations of my interlocutors’ ‘stories of Polishness’. (Sage Publications

Shopping for a New Identity: Constructions of the Polish–German border in a Polish Border community

This article aims to show the varying constructions of the Polish–German border in the Polish border town of Zgorzelec. We are interested in how informants from three generations discursively position the frontier itself and the two towns on its either side: Polish Zgorzelec and German Görlitz. The data comes from a Europe-wide ethnographic project studying communities living on the borders between the European Union (EU) and its ascendant nations, funded by the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. We suggest that the inhabitants of Zgorzelec construct the border on two planes: public and private. In the public sphere, the border is constructed as a means of identifying ‘us Poles’ against all those living on the other side. In those nationalized terms, the border is also constructed as protecting Poland and Zgorzelec's (Polish) community. On the other hand, in the private sphere, the border is represented as virtually invisible allowing the individual to cross it for shopping or entertainment. The border becomes a gateway in which the individual becomes a customer, a shopper with his or her national identity pushed to the background. We also show that the two spheres intersect, creating spaces in which the two orders of discourse are made to co-exist and the discursive mechanisms of separation run next to the mechanisms of inclusion. We explore our informants’ discourses as mediated by the historical context of common experience (eviction, displacement, communism) pertaining mostly to the older generation and by the cultural-economic context (shopping, entertainment) largely in the case of our younger informants. (Sage Publications

Visual Methods in Researching Language Practices and Language Learning: Looking at, Seeing, and Designing Language

The changing ways of using language and various understandings of what language is have consequences for the way we research language practices and language learning. When engaging in social contact, people use diverse and complex forms, modes, and varieties of language to communicate, and moreover, these resources often include icons, images, and other semiotic ways of meaning making. Visuality thus has a natural position in people’s language practices. In this chapter, we discuss how visual methods have been adopted and used as a methodological tool in researching language practices and language learning. With this focus, attention is geared to the materiality of language, on the one hand, and to the alternative and complementary strategies to study experiences and meaning making of language users and learners, on the other. In presenting the major contributions and work in progress from this perspective, we focus on discourse ethnographic approaches in the contexts of language learning, multilingualism, and identity negotiations, and we have structured our text around the visual research strategies of looking, seeing, and designing.peerReviewe