Pragmatic variation across geographical and social space

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All rights reserved.This chapter examines how pragmatic variation interfaces with several dimensions of space, not only geographical space but also social space. We approach space from a variational pragmatics perspective and conceive it as a layered phenomenon with local, regional, and national levels that are intertwined with one another as well as with social dimensions of space. We present an empirical study of greeting behavior in Swedish service encounters to illustrate how these layers of space interact and are relevant for pragmatic variation. Qualitative observations of greeting sequences combined with statistical analyses of several co-variables are used to unravel connections between the choice of a greeting form and spatial and social factors. We show that the levels of nation and region (i. e., data from a certain country and town) can account for a certain degree of variation in the choice of greeting forms, but the local levels of space (i. e., interactions in specific venues) and social variables like the speaker's age and gender also have an explanatory force. Spaces can also bear recognizable cultural meanings to the people who interact in them, triggering certain kinds of social behavior that is symbolically represented in language use.Peer reviewe

Discourse and religion in educational practice

Despite the existence of long-held binaries between secular and sacred, private and public spaces, school and religious literacies in many contemporary societies, the significance of religion and its relationship to education and society more broadly has become increasingly topical. Yet, it is only recently that the investigation of the nexus of discourse and religion in educational practice has started to receive some scholarly attention. In this chapter, religion is understood as a cultural practice, historically situated and embedded in specific local and global contexts. This view of religion stresses the social alongside the subjective or experiential dimensions. It explores how through active participation and apprenticeship in culturally appropriate practices and behaviors often mediated intergenerationally and the mobilisation of linguistic and other semiotic resources but also affective, social and material resources, membership in religious communities is constructed and affirmed. The chapter reviews research strands that have explored different aspects of discourse and religion in educational practice as a growing interdisciplinary field. Research strands have examined the place and purpose of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes and the interplay of religion and teaching and learning in a wide range of religious and increasingly secular educational contexts. They provide useful insights for scholars of discourse studies to issues of identity, socialisation, pedagogy and language policy

Portfolio Decision Analysis for Evaluating Stakeholder Conflicts in Land Use Planning

Urban planning typically involves multiple actors and stakeholders with conflicting opinions and diverging preferences. The proposed development plans and actions greatly affect the quality of life of the local community at different spatial scales and time horizons. Consequently, it is important for decision-makers to understand and analyse the conflicting needs and priorities of the local community. This paper presents a decision analytic framework for evaluating stakeholder conflicts in urban planning. First, the stakeholders state their preferences regarding the actions in terms of a set of criteria and estimate the weight of each criterion. Then, a conflict index and overall value for each action is calculated. Next, a set of Pareto efficient portfolios of actions are generated by solving an optimization problem with different levels of conflict as a resource constraint. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the actions is performed. The framework is demonstrated using real-world survey data collected in the municipality of Upplands Vasby, Sweden

Discourse and the Linguistic Landscape

Research into the way that linguistic and other semiotic signs are displayed in public space has opened up a productive field for social language analysis over the last few years. Often focused on the policy implications – at both institutional and grass-roots level – of public signage, linguistic landscape research has, from the very beginning, engaged with issues of politics and ideology and thus, indirectly, discourse. In recent years it has also begun to theorise the ways in which semiotic artefacts and practices generate meaning by interacting in explicitly dialogical ways. To date however, theorising that is directed specifically at the relationship between linguistic landscape studies and discourse studies has been slight. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship by focusing on select case studies which exemplify the way that acts of linguistic and semiotic display in the public arena operate as key sites for social organisation and for political regulation and contestation. These short case studies also examine how meaning is generated through complex layering of contexts, the interplay between multiple signs, the narrative potential of landscapes and the dialogic possibilities presented by social media which allow local meanings to be up-scaled and reconfigured, thus pulling site-specific semiotic events into much broader discourses