Discourse analysis is paramount in the negotiation and construction of meaning of the social world. Discursive psychologists believe that truth is a discursive construction and that the world can be represented in an unlimited number of ways. This paper discusses the importance of context and culture in discursive interactions. The paper discusses knowledge as situated and contingent and thus a...

One of the most effective means for re-establishing trust in negotiations and disputes is by making an apology. However, the function and meaning of an apology (and thus its effectiveness for negotiators) may differ across cultures. We hypothesized that people from an individual-agency culture (such as the United States) understand apologies as analytic mechanisms for assigning blame and re-est...

Efficient agent communication in open and dynamic environments relies on the agents ability to reach a mutual understanding over message exchanges. Such environments are characterized by the existence of heterogeneous agents that commit to different ontologies, with no prior assumptions regarding the use of shared vocabularies. Various approaches have therefore considered how mutually acceptabl...

In this paper, we explore the process of interorganizational ontology engineering. Scalable ontology engineering is hard to do in interorganizational settings where there are many pre-existing organizational ontologies and rapidly changing collaborative requirements. A complex socio-technical process of ontology alignment and meaning negotiation is therefore required. In particular, we are inte...

For the past two decades linguists working within the framework of systemic functional linguistics have been developing appraisal theory as a tool for analysing evaluation in discourse. In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current model and then move on to address a number of the challenges that have arisen over the years including distinguishing inscribed from invoked attitude, ...

This paper reports a 3-month study investigating engineering students’ Communication Strategies (CSs) in a mobile-assisted course. 67 Chinese learners of English in this course volunteered to participate in the study. The instruments included oral communication sessions, stimulated recall interviews, WeChat exchanges, etc. Results showed that the participants used a variety of CSs when completi...