While the desire for “One Nation, One Language” has played a key role in language policies around the world, I argue that it is not really what drives the English-only movement in the United States. Some previous work on language and power oversimplifies how power works, since a policy seeming quaint and innocuous (and therefore impervious to criticism) can be just as powerful as a policy framed in terms of nationalism or globalization. Instead, drawing on Jan Blommaert’s theory of “upscaling,” I argue that downscaling plays just as pivotal a role in the English-only movement, and I examine examples that cut across my interviews, archival research, observations, and policy documents. I begin by analyzing examples of downscaling on its own, then turn toward situations where people engage in both upscaling and downscaling in a single text or interaction. Ultimately, scaling in either direction can be a way to claim linguistic authority. At the same time, sometimes policymakers do not walk this tightrope successfully, and there can be discursive dissonance. I argue that this sort of dissonance played a role in the eventual downfall of Frederick County’s Official English ordinance.

Chapter 4 provides the theoretical framework for suspects’ invocations for counsel in the book’s corpus. The analysis will focus on the discursive features of suspects’ invocations for counsel during custodial interrogation, as well as the sequences of talk that follow the suspects’ invocations. This part of the analysis will use applied game theory, specifically hypergame theory, to describe police-suspect exchanges after a suspect invokes counsel. The model of the invocation game of police interrogation extends signal analysis from simple signaling games into extended conversations based on strategic objectives. This application of game theory to the invocation stage of an interrogation shows how an interrogator can manipulate a custodial suspect to change their preference to invoke counsel due to the ambiguities created by case law, which designates interrogators as arbiters of what constitutes an unequivocal invocation of the right to counsel, and stylized by formal training that encourages interrogators to engage in strategic discourse with suspects to maintain the possibility of obtaining statements.

The notion of “context” is currently being deployed in Discourse Analysis within approaches that subscribe to its constitutive nature. Rather than being extraneous to talk and text, context is conceptualized as an integral part of discourse, in a mutually constitutive text-context relationship. This chapter will cover key insights from three influential and affiliated ways of analyzing context: context as dynamically and interactionally achieved; context as rooted in metapragmatic awareness; and context as historicized and multidimensional. The chapter will then illustrate how these three key insights manifest themselves in the framework of small stories research. After presenting these three features of context, the chapter will focus on two core issues at the forefront of current concerns, namely ambiguity in delineating “context,” and occurrences where what can be postulated as “relevant context” is not readily retrievable from textual data. Picking up on these issues, we argue that future research will need to address discourses and contexts becoming ever more fragmented, dispersed, and even disintegrated through new communication technologies. In this respect, an analytical focus on metapragmatic awareness may aid the identification of interactionally relevant features of context as well as of the (re)affirmation of participants’ shared meanings.

This opening chapter first discusses the important position politeness research holds in pragmatics. Four areas of research are selected for the purpose: speech acts, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and interaction on the Internet, with the overarching aim to show that politeness offers insights for how meaning is made and transmitted in each of these areas. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the discussion on the important role Chinese politeness plays in politeness research in general. Since the notion of Chinese face is a pillar of Brown and Levinson’s notion of face, an in-depth understanding of Chinese face and, subsequently, Chinese politeness, stands to benefit the understanding of Brown and Levinson’s thinking in their theory. In addition, research on Chinese face has been drawing an increasing amount of attention from scholars of politeness in recent decades, accumulating a literature the size of which few other languages can parallel and offering insights to the understanding of politeness that are unique and significant, a thorough exploration of Chinese politeness can inform the field about politeness theorizing.

The epilogue reflects on the nature of essay collections and the distinctive contribution they make to intellectual debate and to wider society. It considers the risks we take when we make and accept academic arguments, and explores some of the specific questions these essays raise for the contemporary world.

6. Moscovici’s great creativity and capacity to combine ideas from natural and social sciences, literature, and philosophy had a high impact on adopting the theory of social representations and communication internationally, and on the pursuit of Moscovici’s aim to develop a truly ‘social’ social psychology. At the same time, many features of the theory were criticised for their incoherence and for being underdeveloped. Dialogues between Moscovici, his supporters, and adversaries had limited success because the participants followed their own lines of thinking without attempting to understand the other party. In their efforts to apprehend the theory, researchers and students searched for links with other social psychological theories. The search for such bridges was beneficial when it compelled researchers and professionals to reflect on their own perspectives in relation to those of others, to reflect on the use of theoretical concepts, and on methods applied to solving problems. Other bridging attempts were based on less fundamental connections, such as similarities in terminology used in various approaches, or on superficial resemblances. Still other attempts simply used the phrase ‘social representation’ as a substitute for already established notions, for example, ‘attitude’ or ‘opinion’, and so contributed to the routinisation and trivialisation of the theory.

In this chapter, we will discuss the “big four” approaches to qualitative analysis – qualitative content analysis, thematic analysis, grounded theory, and discourse analysis – before briefly describing four additional commonly used approaches. Some of these approaches are empirical, either theory-driven or inductive, identifying observable concepts in the data. In others, research is from a social constructionist perspective, incorporating the researcher’s interpretation as an essential part of the analysis. Some methods, such as thematic analysis, can be used for either approach. This epistemological range means that, as with quantitative analyses, it is essential to select the appropriate method for analyzing the data, and the rigorous procedures involved in qualitative methodology must be followed meticulously.

This chapter provides an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of methods used to study the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. After a discussion of the political use of science and the complex relations between science and politics, the chapter showcases a selection of different methods that are employed to trace the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. Selecting the most suitable method for a particular research question requires understanding their main characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The chapter highlights that all methods and tools need to be combined to comprehensively assess the political impact of the goals, the progress towards their achievement, and their overall transformative potential. As data gaps and unequal geographical coverage still hamper a broader understanding of the political impact of the globalgoals, we need to build bridges across language communities, disciplines and methodological camps, which still work very much in isolation.

After a brief overview of the advent of functional approaches to language in the mid– and late 1900s, stressing the importance of investigating pragmatic, i.e. implicit aspects of language use, and of simultaneously approaching language from different perspectives, this overview stresses the importance of understanding – rather than of finding some definite truth about language. The analysis of pragmatic particles (you know, like, well) in the mid–1960s showcased a plethora of challenges for investigations of language function and use that had previously not attracted scholars’ attention. This strand of research has fruitfully continued, especially so within the DiPVaC community, and constantly opens up new avenues of research. This overview lastly offers a reinterpretation of the author’s 1981 study of you know in terms of aspects of responsibility, suggesting that precisely responsibility – and its various facets – need to be given a more central task in future studies of language function and use, discourse, and pragmatics.