Mukbang is a Korean livestream where a host eats while interacting with viewers. The eater ‘speaks’ to the viewers while eating and the viewers ‘type’ to each other and to the eater through a live chat room. Using interactional sociolinguistics along with insights from conversation analysis (CA) studies, the present study examines how sociable eating is jointly and multimodally achieved in mukbang. Analyzing sixty-seven mukbang clips, I find that mukbang participants coordinate their actions through speech, written text, and embodied acts, and that this coordination creates involvement and, by extension, establishes both community and social agency. Specifically, recruitments are the basic joint action of eating, as participants, who are taking turns, assume footings of the recruit and the recruiter. The host embodies viewers’ text recruitments through embodied animating and puppeteering. As in street performance, the viewers often offer voluntary donations, and the host shows entertaining gratitude in response. (Mukbang, footing, recruitments, agency, involvement, constructed action, multimodal interaction, computer-mediated discourse)*

This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a ‘bemoaning’ speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies ‘mean’ to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe. (Complaints, accounts, stance, technology, discourse analysis, identity)*

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

The relationship between gender and advertising has been discussed extensively. Scholarly works have often emanated from the West and have principally centred on visual advertisements, rather than radio (which plays a critical role in the lives of many Africans). Most of these studies have centred on how women are represented in traditionally stereotyped ways. However, recent studies have shown decreases in these stereotypes as ways of responding to changes in gender roles. But do gender-related adverts from Africa reflect the changing statuses and roles of African women (some of which challenge traditional gender stereotypes)? This article investigates how women are represented in Ghanaian radio commercials and indicates whether such representations reproduce, reinforce, or challenge feminine practices. An analysis of thirty-seven gender-related adverts reveals that, although women are rarely represented as challenging gender stereotypes, they are sometimes represented as using certain traditionally stereotyped roles as sources of ‘power’ to challenge other stereotypes. (Advertising, gender stereotypes, women, radio, Ghana, ideals of femininity)*

The realization of subjectivity through language use is a key concern of sociolinguistic research. We argue for examining it by juxtaposing Goffman's participation framework and Du Bois’ stance triangle. We focus on museums’ commenting platforms as ‘stance-rich’ media (Du Bois 2007:151) by examining the communicative affordances of a visitor book at the Florida Holocaust Museum and analyzing museumgoers’ texts (3,064). These texts are homogeneous in their morally indignant evaluation of the Holocaust and their alignment with the museum, but heterogeneous in positioning and participation framework. Museumgoers’ texts are highly responsive to the setting and previous discourses of the museum and include patterns of shared authorship and principalship. These patterns allow museumgoers to construct shared, institutionally mandated, subjectivities while maintaining personal commitment. These findings contribute to our understanding of the construction of subjectivity as inherently dialogic, and as involving the purposeful use of a multiplicity of contextual resources. (Participation framework, stance triangle, repetitions, principalship, commitment, Holocaust, museums, visitor books)