In the name of the law, stop the disrespect!

The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis USA in May 2020 raised questions about the impartiality of police officers when dealing with the public and particularly those from black and ethnic minorities.  Six years earlier, in 2014, a team of researchers from Stanford University investigated exactly this issue by using footage from police body-worn cameras to analyse the language they used during routine traffic stops in the multiethnic city of Oakland in California. 

The researchers transcribed footage from 981 traffic stops of both black and white drivers, which were conducted by 245 different officers during a period of one month. Participants in the study were given transcripts of these interactions without knowing the race, age or sex of the drivers. They were then asked to rate the respect shown by the officers through placing their language on a gradient, showing how respectful, polite, friendly and formal they were. The research team used a model based on linguistic theories of respect where respectful language includes apologising, being grateful, expressing concern for the other person and softening commands to reduce confrontation. 

The results demonstrate that, although officers used the same levels of formality for both black and white drivers, they were rated as significantly less respectful, polite or friendly to black drivers than they were to whites.  Even after controlling for the severity of the traffic offence, the length and outcome of the stop and the race of the officers themselves, interactions with white drivers were consistently more respectful. In fact, 57% of white drivers were more likely to hear an officer say one of the most respectful phrases (e.g. “sir”, “thank you”) in the transcripts whereas black drivers were 61% more likely to hear one of the least respectful (e.g. “hands on the wheel”, or use of first name). 

The researchers conclude that the racial disparities in their study are clear, however the causes of them are not.  They write that these disparities could have far-reaching effects as personal interactions with the police build a community’s opinion about them and ultimately lead to a relationship of trust or distrust. They suggest that future research could expand body camera footage beyond just text to audio features such as intonation and video features such as facial expression, to try and investigate how interactions progress and sometimes break down.  This could be invaluable in informing police officer training and to establish better relationships with the communities they serve. 

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Voigt, Rob, Nicholas Camp, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, William Hamilton, Rebecca Hetey, Camilla Griffiths, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer Eberhardt. 2017. Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect. PNAS 114 (25): 6521-6526.

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/25/6521

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

 

The shifting tipping point - one metaphor, many uses

To understand what a metaphor is, let’s start by considering a real world example. For tipping point, we might imagine an object that should be kept upright, such as a vase of flowers, at risk of falling when it loses its centre of gravity. As the tipping point is not the vase’s natural state, we assume something has caused the unbalance e.g. a curious cat, or an earthquake. We also realise that there will be consequences when this tipping point is reached, and we expect these will be negative. The glass is likely to smash, causing danger to bare feet, and destroying the vase. The contents will also spill onto the floor, possibly spreading water and causing further damage, or possibly partly retrievable if some of the flowers can be rescued. But we recognise that reaching the tipping point is very unlikely to have many positive outcomes, as it takes us from our pretty vase of flowers, to an undesirable mess on the floor.

The job of a metaphor is to map the knowledge we have from these real-world examples, onto something else. But whereas the source domain of a metaphor relates to concrete entities (such as the unlucky vase), the target domain will be a more abstract and complex phenomenon. Therefore, how the metaphor is used - the linguistic and discursive context - will help to shape how we conceptualise this target.

From the 1960s onwards, tipping point was regularly mapped onto moments of social change, most popularly in the early 2000s to describe the sudden spread of a new trend or idea in society. Conventionally, tipping point came to be used as an everyday expression meaning a time of important, often uncontrollable, things happening that lead to change. It was most often applied to an individual, reaching a personal tipping point and joining a wider group or process in society. Notably, the more negative interpretations were largely removed, and the metaphor was seen as more exciting than threatening. Over time, the metaphorical mapping had therefore become somewhat ‘bleached’ of its source domain.

But from 2004 scientists began to use this metaphor in relation to the world’s climate, and it is now common to hear and read about ecological tipping points in the media. Van der Hel, Hellsten & Steen (2018) examined 326 articles from major world newspapers, and 301 scientific articles, to see how this metaphor developed and was used from 2005-2014. They looked for both the discursive context of the metaphor (Who is using the phrase? What is it being used to refer to?) and the linguistic characteristics of its use (How is the phrase combined with different parts of speech and punctuation? Is the use of the phrase deliberately metaphorical?) From this study they tracked the changing use and meanings of tipping point in both the media and science.

The metaphor was first used by scientists as an attempt to explain to the media their complex research into abrupt changes in the climate system. Use of the phrase at this time drew attention to its metaphorical meaning, rather than the conventional one, by also expressing related ideas of falling, danger and irreversibility. By making explicit references to the source domain in this way, the metaphorical meaning is more ‘deliberate’, and actively encourages us to reflect more on the concrete meaning of the expression. Therefore the metaphor highlighted the serious and threatening nature of a tipping point and, by extension, the catastrophic issue of climate change.

Until this time tipping point in climate change news articles had mainly been used in the conventional sense, to refer to changes in individual social attitudes towards the environment. But from 2005-2007 the phrase began to appear more frequently in inverted commas, to note its increasing, and unfamiliar, use by scientists. The phrase also began to be used in reference to humanity as a whole, in contrast to the previous convention of usually referring to an individual in society. This use of punctuation and the new collocations again serve to focus attention on the metaphorical status of the phrase. In doing so, a reader may be encouraged to draw deeper on their source domain knowledge, and reconsider the metaphor’s meaning.

Within the scientific community, use of the metaphor continued to increase from 2008. But whereas it may have begun as a rhetorical device, it subsequently became a mainstream scientific concept, and a theoretical tool. The imagery of a tipping point largely replaced some earlier metaphors (e.g. thresholds), and studies explored what the causes and outcomes of different potential tipping points might mean in various climate contexts. This suggests an inspirational role for the metaphor, through capturing the imagination of scientists, and opening new directions for studies.In contrast, the media used the metaphor less after 2007, but it re-emerged from 2011 in news reports from political speeches at international climate conferences. In these reports, it was increasingly tied to specific locations (e.g. the Amazon) and events, and was often still expressed using inverted commas. However the phrase also began to be used for other, non-climate related changes, such as sudden policy shifts. This suggests that the tipping point metaphor in the media had become more flexible, again incorporating the conventional expression of a drastic change.

This study shows that in science and the media, a metaphor can help explain complex ideas, and encourage new ways of thinking about a phenomenon. It also demonstrates their versatility: tracing how a metaphor that had become an everyday expression was mapped onto a new target domain, leading to a restructured understanding. By examining the linguistic and discursive contexts of tipping point, Van der Hel, Hellsten & Steen (2018) highlight the numerous and changing roles that metaphors can play, and how they can help scientists and journalists in public debates on important topics.

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van der Hel, S., Hellsten, I. and Steen, G., 2018. Tipping points and climate change: Metaphor between science and the media. Environmental Communication, 12(5), pp.605-620.

This summary was written by Sarah Kirk-Browne

Does Gaga ‘live for the applause’? Or, is it more of a ‘Poker Face’?

As one of the best-selling pop artists of our time, Lady Gaga is a name few would fail to recognise. From ‘Poker Face’ to ‘Telephone’, her artistry has earned her a level of notoriety comparable only to a few other music legends. Along with her success, she’s built a loyal fanbase that she affectionately refers to as the ‘Little Monsters’. At shows, she often invites her ‘Little Monsters’ on stage, whilst at other times, she’s surprised her fans by appearing at a movie premier. Here, Lady Gaga appears to navigate between her identity as an international superstar whilst simultaneously appealing to her fans to recognise her as an ‘ordinary person’. But, how does Gaga manage these apparently conflicting identities and what linguistic devices does she use to achieve this? In her 2018 paper, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson decided to find out:

To examine the ways in which Gaga navigates the ‘ordinary person’ and ‘celebrity superstar’ identities, Valentinsson examines tweets sent by Gaga aimed at her fans and transcripts taken from media interviews with Gaga.

A group of Lady Gaga's superfans - her 'Little Monsters'

Central to Valentinsson’s analysis are the concepts of stance and stance-taking. These two terms describe two aspects of communication. The term ‘stance’ refers to the way that people align or position themselves in relation to some object, person or idea. So when a speaker expresses their attitude towards something, that speaker is taking a stance. The notion of stance-taking refers to the actual process of making that alignment, which is usually achieved through communication. For instance, if you said, ‘I don’t like cheese’, you'd be taking a stance that you ‘don’t like the dairy goodness of cheese’. The Stance-taking bit would be you actually saying those words.

To examine Lady Gaga’s stances in relation to her fans and journalists, Valentinsson first turns to Gaga’s Twitter account where she observes that Gaga often creates a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary people’. She does this through a number of linguistic strategies. For instance, in one tweet aimed at her fans, Gaga uses terms usually associated with the family (‘mommy’, ‘kids’, ‘mother’) to take a stance of intimacy that allows her to align with her fans. In another tweet, which references the two awards that Gaga won at the People’s Choice Awards, she uses the third-person pronoun ‘we’ in the sentence: ‘we won two people’s choice awards’ to include her fans as recipients of the awards. In other contexts, Gaga uses the @ function of Twitter to ‘speak’ to her fans directly, referencing an awareness of issues effecting her fans in real life. Together, these ‘strategies’ allow Lady Gaga to create a stance of alignment with her fans, rejecting her celebrity status, therefore presenting herself as an ‘ordinary person’. 

             

In interviews with journalists, however, Valentinsson observes an altogether different set of strategies used by Gaga. In these contexts, Gaga adopts a relatively confrontational stance. She does this by refusing to answer questions she deems inappropriate or correcting journalists’ comments about her stage performance. For instance, in one interview, asked whether the sexual references in her songs would negatively influence her record sales, Gaga responds by confronting the interviewer with her achievement of selling 4 million records. Valentinsson argues that, by taking these stances, Gaga explicitly creates a stance of disalignment with the ‘media enterprise’ and reinforces her earlier identity as an ‘ordinary person’.

Concluding, Valentinsson argues that Gaga maintains an ‘ordinary persona’ by engaging in stance taking moves that emphasise her alignment with her fans above all other audiences. So, it seems, at least Gaga is not a ‘Judas’ afterall and she’s certainly not as ‘Shallow’ as the media would like you to believe…

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Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn (2018). Stance and the construction of authentic celebrity persona. Language in Society 47, 715–740.

doi:10.1017/S0047404518001100

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

‘I thought’ I knew you so well…

Language is such a crucial part of our lives that the way we use it can even reveal something about our relationships with other people. Michael Sean Smith* explains that people come to a conversation with both their own first-hand knowledge about themselves and also with the second hand knowledge they have of the other speaker.  Being able to show such knowledge in a conversation is crucial to demonstrate engagement, closeness and intimacy in the speakers’ relationship.

Life moves quickly and things can change in the time that elapses between two conversations.  This means that discrepancies may arise between the speakers’ first hand and second hand knowledge. The phrase I thought is one way that speakers indicate a mismatch between their knowledge and what is now being said. To find out exactly how I thought works, Smith studied 75 hours of data taken from online corpora (or ‘banks’) consisting of examples from face-to-face and telephone conversations.

As seen below, I thought is used to signal a misunderstanding between what has been said and what the speaker believed to be true.

Shirley:   you know Michael’s in the midst of moving this weekend
Geri:       I thought it was last weekend

Shirley:   no he had some complications but he’s gonna be all moved in
              on Monday

Geri:       uh huh

Here, Geri signals a problem in the conversation with the use of I thought, which Shirley is then able to correct. She provides an explanation, thus filling in the gaps in Geri’s knowledge.  So, I thought points to an unexpected discovery on the part of the person who says it, one that is not their fault but in fact indicates a gap in knowledge which it is their listener’s responsibility to provide.  This nearly always leads to the gap being filled and shared knowledge being happily resumed.

However, Smith found that sometimes I thought doesn’t signal a gap in knowledge.  Instead the speaker might use past shared knowledge to their advantage.  This can be seen in the following telephone conversation:

Zoe:   what you watching

Dad:   football home improvement and now you’ve got me watching that
         crazy fresh prince

Zoe:   I thought you didn’t like it ha ha

Dad:   well I didn’t until you got me watching it ha ha it’s kinda funny

It is clear here that, although Zoe is correct with her I thought, she is well aware that there is no gap in their mutual understanding.  Her I thought reinforces her relationship with her father and demonstrates their shared knowledge as she teases him about his new taste in TV viewing.  Therefore it shows recognition and appreciation on Zoe’s part of the fact that a change has occurred since they last spoke.

In both of the above examples, the listener accepts the discrepancy and explains or corrects it.  However, Smith found another less common function of I thought, witnessed in the following conversation between Julie and her housemate, Karen.

Julie:     did you see my patio I’m putting in look how much is done now

Karen:   oh it’s a patio?  I thought you were gonna grass it?

Julie:      nooo!

Karen:   you told me you were gonna grass it

Julie:     I told you I’m gonna do a flagstone patio that’s why I took all
             these rocks over here

Karen:   well, I never know what you’re gonna do from week to week

In this case, the recipient of the I thought comment, Julie, completely denies responsibility for Geri’s misunderstanding and feels no necessity to explain herself or correct the situation at all.  This leads to a much more assertive and argumentative conversation.

The most interesting thing about this little phrase I thought is how it can convey so much information about the speakers’ relationship.  The gaps in knowledge that it signals only arise in long-term relationships where two people continuously learn about each other over time as well as in their current conversation.  This knowledge is carried from conversation to conversation.  Nevertheless, each speaker also has their own independent life and what was reported in previous conversations may change by a later conversation. 

So, in a way, I thought is like a verbal traffic light calling a stop to the talk so that a gap in knowledge can be fixed.  But I thought I’d told you that already………..

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Smith, Michael Sean (2013). “ I thought” initiated turns: Addressing discrepancies in first-hand and second-hand knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 57: 318-330.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.006

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle.

*Michael Sean Smith is a researcher in the Department of Applied Linguistics, University of California, USA

The pen is mightier than the javelin?

safe and secure Olympic Games?

Summer Olympic Games have been called ‘sport mega-events’ due to their huge scale.  They take place in large capital cities and are generally considered as immensely important occasions, for which massive security operations are mounted. Malcolm N. MacDonald and Duncan Hunter were interested in investigating the language used to describe the security operation surrounding the London 2012 Games and to do this they considered the distinctive linguistic features used in Olympic security documents.

They analysed 176 online documents from 11 UK institutes involved in the security for the 2012 Games.  They found that the Games were made to seem exceptional through certain linguistic devices.  For example, superlative adjectives were often used to stress just how important and unique the Games were:

The London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games will be the largest sporting event in UK history … It will involve the biggest peacetime security operation ever undertaken in the UK.

These adjectives give a very definite idea of sheer size and scale.  As well as this, they found that a recurrent theme in the texts was the impact the Games would have on different security sectors, such as

 The Olympics are the biggest peacetime operation … there will be an impact on policing during 2012’

The phrase ‘safety and security’ was found to be used 132 times in just 12 texts. It seems to be used emblematically to suggest the main goal of the security operation.  For example:

The Government has made safety and security at the Games a top priority …

The phrase occurs 254 times in the texts and is often found with other words such as strategy, programme, delivery and operation, as evidenced in the following example:

 … delivery of Games safety and security compatible with the broader Games operation.

It is also used in its adjectival form ‘safe and secure’, usually in front of the word ‘Games’.  The researchers surmised that the phrase is deliberately used to join the positive connotations of ‘safety’ with the more problematic concept of ‘security’, making ‘security’ in turn seem more positive.  The phrase was used so often in the texts analysed, almost repetitively at times, that as well as stressing the necessity of the conjoined concepts, they also appeared as ‘real’ rather than as abstract concepts.

In the texts, prospective visitors to the Games were often addressed directly in the second person (you) and presented in a passive position, as just seeing things, whilst the security agents were much more ‘active’:

 … you will see security measures at and around the venues … We will use familiar methods that are proven to work … you will see …security guards … who will all have a role in security at the Games

Visitors are often ordered to do things in the texts, being addressed with imperative verb forms as in

Aim to arrive at the Olympic Park around two hours before… and Make sure you’re in your seat at least 30 minutes before… They are generally spoken of as being somehow controlled. 

The texts use the noun threat very frequently, often along with the noun terrorist, as in The greatest threat to the security of the 2012 Olympic Games is terrorism.  Interestingly, although all the texts incite the fear of a threat, this is never actually attributed to a particular person or group of people.  Instead, it is closely linked with the abstract notion of ‘terrorism’ in general.

MacDonald and Hunter feel that there is a political agenda behind the use of language in the texts that they studied.  Between 2001 and 2011 Europe and USA experienced five major terrorist attacks. In consequence many documents have been written which, although they are designed to allay the fear of a terrorist attack, actually do the opposite by making the reader feel powerless before this supposed ‘threat’ to an event that is presented as exceptionally important.  In the researchers’ eyes, this provides an excuse to mount huge security operations in whichever major city may be hosting the sporting event.  They conclude that such undemocratic, almost dictator–like behaviour, revealed through language use, is actually anti-democratic and ironically goes against the inclusive nature of the Olympic spirit.

So maybe whoever said ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was right?
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MacDonald, Malcolm N. and Hunter, Duncan (2013) The discourse of Olympic security: London 2012.  Discourse and Society 24 (1): 66-88.

doi.  10.1177/0957926512474148

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Representing gender in children's reading materials

would a boy have been shown with flowers in the 1970s?

Are girls and boys portrayed differently in children’s reading materials today than in the past? During the 1970s and 80s, studies of children’s reading materials found that males not only featured more than females but also they tended to take the lead roles and were more active than their female counterparts, who were often restricted to traditional stereotyped roles.

Many of these earlier studies of gender in children’s reading material analysed the texts based on their content, which meant that researchers made their own judgements about what was sexist and what was not.  Now, however, advances in computer and electronic technology mean that ‘corpus linguistics’ can be used to analyse texts more systematically. Using this method, John Macalister set about answering the question of how far gender roles in writing for children had changed since the 1970s.

Macalister based his study on New Zealand’s School Journal, a multi-authored journal of prose, drama and poetry, published and distributed to New Zealand school children every year.  He focused his research on the words ‘boy/s’ and ‘girl/s’and any variants of those, such as ‘boyhood’ and ‘girlfriend’. He analysed the frequency of the words; whether they were alone or connected to each other somehow (usually by ‘and’); what ‘roles’ or occupations were assigned to boys and girls; their attributes, signalled by adjectives and, finally, what they were ‘doing’ by analysing their associated verbs.  He concentrated his research on four issues of the School Journal from the years 1910, 1940, 1970 and 2000.

In the first three issues of the Journal, Macalister found that ‘boy/s’ outnumbered ‘girl/s’. However, by the final issue the numbers were roughly equal with ‘girl/s’ slightly exceeding ‘boy/s’.  This shift in numbers since 1970 shows how awareness of gender bias has resulted in more equal treatment of girls and boys. The same can be shown with the ‘interdependence’ of the words. In the 1910 issue, 48% of the occurrences of ‘girl/s’ was found connected to’boy/s’.  However, this reduced noticeably as the century progressed, so that by 2000 the figure stood at only 4%, proving that there is a trend towards increasing individuality in the treatment of ‘girl/s’.

Macalister found that there was a greater number of ‘roles’ associated with ‘boy/s’ in the 1910 - 1970 journals and these roles were more likely to relate to employment.  However, it was striking that by 2000, there was an absence of any clearly marked occupation for ‘boy/s’, whereas ‘girl/s’ seem to have taken over roles beyond the confines of home and school, appearing as ‘delivery girl/s’ and ‘girl/s crew’ for example.

In all of the issues, ‘little’ was the only adjective that was consistently applied to both ‘boy/s’ and ‘girl/s’ and ‘girl/s’ was always more likely to be associated with an adjective than ‘boy/s’.  Some examples of the kind of adjectives attributed to ‘girl/s’ in 1910 were ‘beautiful’, ‘dreamy’ and ‘gentle’ whilst ‘boy/s’ was attached to ‘bold’, ‘clever’ and ‘thoughtful’.  However, by 2000 the adjectives had become more evenly distributed with both ‘boy/s’ and ‘girl/s’ described as ‘brave’, ‘naughty’, ‘young’ and ‘pretty’ amongst others.

When the verbs associated with the words were analysed it was found that in the 1910 – 1970 issues, ‘girl/s’ was encountered ‘doing’ far less often than ‘boy/s’ and even in 2000, ‘girl/s’ was marginally less often portrayed as ‘doing’.  One interesting result to emerge is that in 2000 there is an absence of an association between ‘boy/s’ and mental verbs whereas before they could sometimes be found thinking and reading etc.  So, it seems that boys are being depicted in a more limited fashion than they were in the past.

Macalister concludes that overall gender stereo-typing in New Zealand school reading material has been successfully addressed since 1970.  It would be interesting to investigate whether the same has happened in Great Britain.

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Macalister, John (2011) Flower-girl and bugler-boy no more: changing gender representation in writing for children. Corpora 7 (1): 25-44.

doi 10.3366/cor.2011.0003

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Agreement in the House of Lords? Not likely!

A vintage engraving from 1861 showing tumult in the House of Lords 

Anyone who has watched Question Time in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords of the British Parliament will know that there is a certain kind of institutional rudeness which is acceptable as part of the ritualized confrontational encounters that take place there. It is the job of MPs and Members of the House of Lords to question government ministers on matters for which they are responsible. Disagreement is therefore part and parcel of this particular context and interaction.

However, the participants are also bound by the rules of the respective Houses and perhaps this is especially so in the House of Lords, where some of the highly formal traditions have been in place since the 14^th century and which account for the sometimes archaic language and behaviour. So, in this situation, how do the Lords ‘do’ disagreement? Researcher Jessica Robles collected around 300 video recordings and transcripts of the meetings (from the official document called Hansard) of interactions in the House of Lords, available from the United Kingdom Parliament website. 

In this paper she provides an in-depth analysis of two examples of disagreement from the oral question sessions of the House of Lords (you can read the whole article here) to support her main argument, which is that disagreement is achieved through what she calls ‘talking around the issue’. Robles argues that there are three dimensions to the practice of talking around the issue. These are: 1) institutional positioning, in which the talk itself positions the participants within their current role and within the institutional context of the government structure as well as in opposition to others. 2) display of emotionality, a way of talking around the issue by appearing to disagree but not actually specifying what the disagreement is about. The talk contains markers of ‘feelings’ that cue people to a particular attitude being presented – in one example, Robles includes such things as lack of fluent speech, use of emphatics such as ‘absolutely’ and ‘precisely’ and nonverbal expressions such as frowning, rolling the eyes and shaking the head. 3) orientation to the issue , in which talking about the focal point of an argument may be avoided explicitly but is referred to implicitly. By using these three practices, disagreement is thus carried out through indirect orientations to an implied issue.

Overall, these practices sound very familiar, not only in the House of Lords but also perhaps in political debates more generally, where speakers talk around an issue by addressing the issue through indirect strategies. These strategies appear to be shaped by the context in which they take place but Robles argues that they are not bound to this context. While talking around the issue may be considered as ‘beating around the bush’ in everyday interactions, she suggests that the strategies could be investigated as a way of dealing with disagreement in other relevant contexts. 

______________________________________________________ 

Robles, Jessica. (2011). Doing disagreement in the House of Lords: ‘Talking around the issue’ as a context-appropriate argumentative strategy. Discourse and Communication 5(2) 147-168.

doi: 10.1177/1750481310395452

This summary was written by Sue Fox