Let’s talk about pain and opioids: Low pitch and creak in medical consultations

In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor-patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms, and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions

Frames and Coherence in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love

This study in linguistic stylistics examines the coherence in Sam Shepard's play Fool for Love by focussing on the relationship of speech exchanges to frames and the relationship of frames to one another. A frame, defined as the activity that the speakers are engaged in, consists of two types: (1) single-speaker frames, which involve only one speaker and an implied or passive listener, and (2) multi-speaker frames, which involve more than one speaker. The following paper, however, will examine only multi-speaker frames.Because frame analysis enables one to focus on units larger than those usually examined in linguistic stylistics, it can be seen to provide a clearer understanding of textual coherence in dramatic texts. Specifically, the study argues that both coherence in Shepard's play results when speech exchanges and frames are formed into patterns which the reader perceives as unified wholes, and that coherence may result when even discontinuous utterances are organized into a pattern which the reader can perceive as a unified whole. On a larger scale, it is shown that discontinous frames can themselves be arranged into a pattern which can be perceived as coherent by the reader, and that overall coherence depends not upon continuity between frames, but rather on the arrangement of discontinous or continuousframes into a coherent whole

‘The words are stuck inside me; I write to heal’: Memory, recall, and repetition in PTSD blogs.

This paper addresses issues around the automatic repetition of particular memories in the narratives / blog accounts of individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Based on a long-term project that examines how people with various body-related conditions and ailments write or speak about their bodies, the focus of this paper is on 80 blog accounts wherein individuals with PTSD write both about living with the condition and about their steps towards healing themselves. The paper pays special attention to how the act of repeated blogging counters the paralyzing repetition in their heads, leading them to re-cognize particular distressing life-events and thus creating alternate episodic structures (Gee 1992). In particular, the article addresses: What insights about repetition and memory are we able to glean from PTSD pathographies, and in what ways does current scholarship in narrative analysis, applied sociolinguistics, and psychology permit a more complex understanding of the condition

Poverty, TESOL’s Narratives and “Other Languages”: Hermeneutic Tensions in Texting-Researching Practices

This brief response addresses concerns raised by Ruanni Tupas in his reading of my book, The English-Vernacular Divide. It provides some background about my study, and attempts to uncover some researching and texting tensions I experienced when writing the book. Straddling as I am different geographic spaces—India and the US—with different discourses regarding English language learning and teaching in each space, the response details how my focus on the local and everyday became a way of showing how some discourses about English (its being a democratizing force, or the language of empowerment) run the risk of turning a blind eye to issues of poverty, access and “other languages, issues that are crucial for TESOL to address.