About the iMean7 conference

Panel abstract coming soon.

Language can (be used to) increase or decrease an individual’s or group’s sense of social inclusion. The history of the 21st century thus far shows little evidence of any progress made in the direction of greater equality or social justice. This panel welcomes studies on discourse markers (DMs), modal particles (MPs) and filled pauses (FPs) with a focus on their ability to help interlocutors feel included. Pragmatically, DMs can help oil the wheels of social interaction and thus smooth relations and promote harmony and a sense of inclusion. Sociolinguistically, too, DMs can be indicators, markers or stereotypes of particular social groups and using them can help speakers be included in those groups and possibly be excluded by other groups: young people use like to ‘fit in’, older speakers, parents and educators frequently deplore the ubiquitous use of this DM. Given the contradictory reaction to this very popular DM, language teachers might be forgiven for not knowing whether or how to teach such items. The panel welcomes empirical studies investigating this issue.

The need that speakers feel to be inclusive of their interlocutors is also of interest to language historians. DMs and MPs develop from more propositional lexical items, thus indicating the functional pressure that interactional concerns may have on language structure – at least, in the semantic structure of particular lexemes. Using the term Politeness-Induced Semantic Change (PISC), Beeching (2005) demonstrated how quand même (‘even though, all the same, though’) evolved from a concessive conjunction in the seventeenth century to a hedging mitigator in the 20th . Similarly comme (like) and genre (‘sort’) have developed approximating and hedging uses in some varieties of (Canadian) French. 

The panel aims to bring together scholars working on English, French and other languages, with empirical evidence of the ways that DMs enhance inclusion pragmatically or sociolinguistically in everyday spoken interaction but also in health, education and other contexts.

We also welcome historical papers showing how these items’ DM status evolves historically precisely out of a concern for appropriate social interaction and inclusion.

Please contact Dr Kate Beeching (kate.beeching@uwe.ac.uk) with any queries about this panel.

This panel invites studies of language use in relation to forensic and legal contexts, with a focus on how social inclusion is (or is not) reconciled with the legal characteristics of these situations. It is well-established that communication between representatives of the legal system and members of the public involves competing frames (e.g. Agar 1985; Tracy 1997), whereby institutional-legal goals may not align with citizens’ lifeworld needs. At the same time, better relations encourage public confidence in and cooperation with legal processes (e.g. Vallano & Schreiber Compo 2011), thereby underpinning institutional legitimacy. The panel will explore this legal-interpersonal nexus with a focus on how language use increases or hinders social inclusion. In particular, we welcome studies which explore the experiences of marginalised groups in society, when inclusion or exclusion intersects with characteristics such as race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

We aim to bring together a range of empirical studies which investigate spoken, written or multimodal communication within the legal system in any jurisdiction(s). This may include - but is certainly not limited to – research involving police investigations, courtroom proceedings, lawyer-client communication, asylum processes, prison interactions, offender rehabilitation, public relations and advertising, (social) media communications.

Please contact Dr Kate Steel (kate3.steel@uwe.ac.uk) with any queries about this panel.

References

• Agar, Michael (1985) Institutional discourse. Text 5 (3): 147-168.
• Tracy, Karen (1997) Interactional Trouble in Emergency Service Requests: A Problem of Frames. Research on Language and Social Interaction 30 (4): 315-343.
• Vallano, Jonathan P. & Schreiber Compo, Nadja (2011) A comfortable witness is a good witness: Rapport-building and susceptibility to misinformation in an investigative mock-crime interview. Applied Cognitive Psychology 25: 960–970.

There exists a huge health divide between people of more or less-advantaged groups. In tackling health inequalities, public health literature tends to focus on a broad range of social determinants of health, from individual lifestyle factors to general socioeconomic, cultural and environmental conditions. Language as a social determinant of health, however, remains largely overlooked, or absorbed into the fuzzy categories of one’s ‘ethnicity’ or ‘cultural background’. This is at least partly due to the dominance of the positivist tradition in public health research that largely defies qualitative, inductive, context-driven research. In contrast, sociolinguistic research on linguistic diversity in healthcare has been growing in the last two decades, both in Western/ Anglo-centric and non-Western/ non-Anglo-centric contexts (Zayts & Bridges, 2023), however, much remains to be done for that research to be more acknowledged in the public health domain. 

This panel aims to contribute to bringing these two research traditions together, reconciling their theoretical, methodological and empirical strength and limitations to examine linguistic equity through sociolinguistic lenses as a vital social determinant of health. Equity is a normative concept. We broadly define linguistic equity as avoidance of disparities in health based on language. Examining equity-in-context includes but is not limited to language use as a means of gaining access to and providing healthcare services, dismantling health barriers, negotiating one’s identities and social relationships in healthcare contexts, and sustaining or hindering health equities (for example through discriminatory, stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes and practices). 

The panel welcomes empirical papers that include different sociolinguistic methodologies, data from diverse cultural and healthcare contexts and in different languages. Papers that present collaborative work across disciplines and engage with the impact of the sociolinguistic research on public health policies and practice are particularly welcome. 

Please contact Dr Olga Zayts-Spence (zayts@hku.hk) with any queries about this panel.

References

• Dahlgren, G and Whitehead, M (1991). Policies and strategies to promote social equity in health. Stockholm, Sweden: Institute for Futures Studies.
• Zayts, O and Bridges, S (2023). Language, health and culture: Problematizing the centers and peripheries of healthcare communication research. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.