I didn’t say that! Uses of SAY in mediation discourse

Abstract

While several taxonomies of meta-discourse exist, none clearly explains speakers' strategies in mediation. Mediators, however, seem to rely a lot on meta-discourse to manage the argument while preserving their neutrality. This article proposes corpus analyses to detect mediation participants' discourse strategies and highlight the role and function of a meta-discourse element-the verb 'to say'. This paper is a first step towards the elaboration of a taxonomy for the analysis of argumentative meta-discourse, and brings new insights in meta-discourse in argumentative dialogues and mediation discourse in general.

‘I (don’t) want X/Y’: Formulating ‘wants’ in Chinese Mediation Resources

“…In contrast to civil trial activities in China, which emphasize the judge’s authority and dominance, court-related civil mediation practices pay special attention to both sides of the disputants’ mediation willingness to negotiate on the disputes (Childs, 2012; Janier and Reed, 2017; Shi, 2012). That is, how they express their mediation willingness and go through the whole mediation-appeal processes while the mediators act as only the neutral, third-party mediating roles.…”

‘It was Never Just About the Statue’: Ethos of historical figures in public debates on contested cultural objects

“…In this paper, we establish a hybrid methodology that combines a set of data over 7500 words with comparative discourse analysis of argumentation which associates ethos with objects. To our best knowledge, a similar approach was employed only in (Janier and Reed, 2017; Musi, 2018) to analyse, respectively, discursive functions of lexeme ‘say’ in mediation discourse and concessions in argumentation. Still these works consider neither the connection between discourse and society nor the comparison across dimensions of discourse.…”