Mobile phone use in cars is a highly debated issue. Legislation and policy discussions flourish in many countries and coincide with an increased effort in design of new in-car technologies. The studies which influence policy and design decisions use experimental approaches and are based on a cognitive perspective. In this paper, we discuss why this is a problematic approach. Further, we provide...

Aceptado: 05/12/2013 The objective of this study is to show how conversation analysis, a sociological discipline, approaches the study of social institutions. Social institutions are conceived as the crystallization of members’ communicative, interactional practices. Two institutional domains—psychiatric interviews and broadcast news interviews —and a specific interactional practice—‘formulatio...

This study investigates the relative power and characteristics of a set of social and epistemic terms to distinguish among disciplines of research article abstracts, using a corpus of 928,572 abstracts from 13 disciplines indexed by Web of Science in 2011. Applying the machine-learning approach to discourse epistemetrics using a sequential minimal optimization (SMO) algorithm, and a feature set...

This paper explores durational aspects of pauses, gaps and overlaps in three different conversational corpora with a view to challenge claims about precision timing in turn-taking. Distributions of pause, gap and overlap durations in conversations are presented, and methodological issues regarding the statistical treatment of such distributions are discussed. The results are related to publishe...

Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions others (stance) signal they wish relate other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected extent which impoliteness is expressed resources strategies employed. This study investigates interactional two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum Gistmania. The findin...

The present study has aimed at finding out whether or not students’ language background and gender bring about a distinction between the frequency and types of metadiscourse elements occurring in their papers. To this end, a dataset of 40 student papers in four series written by native male, nonnative male, native female, and nonnative female writers was analyzed quantitatively and qualitativel...