This chapter reviews ways of analyzing interactional and grammatical regularities of spoken, dialogically organized language in a constructional framework. The basic tenet is that grammatical constructions, when used in talk-in-interaction, are housed in interactional sequences, and it is the constructions’ positions in certain sequential locations that motivates their use and shapes their form. Therefore, aspects of sequence and discourse organization are potentially distinctive features of constructions, and reflections of the interactional contingencies that generate them. Four types of construction are examined: receipt questions, second assessments, a construction of meaning negotiation, and pseudo-clefts. All these patterns can be said to be responsive in one way or another, thus lending themselves well to a dialogically sensitive analysis. The analytic examples highlight the necessity of abstracted interactional information for a fuller understanding of the workings of grammatical constructions in talk-in-interaction and for how an interactional perspective can enrich constructional approaches to analyzing linguistic structure.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of how emoticons and emojis are a human adaptation to online written conversation to compensate for the absence of non-verbal cues and physical context, but also an affordance of most written conversation to promote affiliation, creativity and play. The analysis highlights the role of emojis as ‘attendant activities’ (Jefferson, 1987) which express politeness (and impoliteness) and other pragmatic functions, including prosocial and anti-social behaviours, identities, contextualizations (physical/virtual), irony and meaning enhancement. By analysing the multiple, often overlapping interactional functions of emoticons and emojis, this chapter provides original insights into the unique role of emojis in children’s written conversation, highlighting some major differences between spoken and written interaction. Findings indicate that emojis fulfil interactional functions which go beyond simply replacing fundamental non-verbal, voice and contextual resources which are available to speakers in phone and face-to-face interaction. While further research in this area is required across different age groups and genders, the various categories of emojis identified in this chapter provide a comprehensive account of how children are likely to deploy and respond to these symbols in online interaction, and how multiple meanings are possible depending on the interactional context

This chapter explores the role of emoji in the negotiation of meaning in exchanges in TikTok comment feeds. It draws on a model of affiliation, together with the emoji text relations of concurrence, resonance, and synchronicity developed in the three previous chapters, to undertake detailed analysis of the social bonds at stake in these exchanges. Affiliation is a framework developed within social semiotics for describing how language and other semiotic resources support both social connection and disconnection, and aid in the construction of social relations more generally. The corpus used for the analysis undertaken in the chapter is a specialised dataset of TikTok comment threads made on a video series reviewing the food delivered during hotel quarantine in New Zealand in 2021. The TikTok comment exchanges featured users negotiating social bonds about food, daily life, and the pandemic. Most exchanges involved convivial alignments around shared values, with the occasional heated discussion about whether quarantine was a justifiable approach to the pandemic.

This chapter summarises the model developed for exploring emoji-text convergence in this book. It reviews the system network for describing this convergence which was built up progressively throughout, covering textual synchronicity, ideational concurrence, and interpersonal resonance. The chapter also consolidates the book’s exploration of the role of emoji in negotiating and communing around social bonds through affiliation. The chapter works through a full analysis of an extract from a Twitter thread to show how the various kinds of analysis developed in the book might be deployed, drawing on the complete convergence network as well as the affiliation networks. The chapter concludes by underscoring the crucial role that linguists might play as emoji and other forms of digital paralanguage increase in cultural prominence

How can we judiciously tell the many continuous, discontinuous, overlapping, persistent, and simultaneous, tales that constitute German history?Taking as an example James J. Sheehan’s engagement with the question: “what is German history?”, the introduction argues that the conceit inherent in the question is the belief that a unitary history must exist, even when the decades of scholarship Sheehan inspired indicated that it does not.In actuality, German history can only ever be regarded as an aggregate of Germans’ histories, and it is critical that we begin by recognizing that a great many of the people who lived those histories did so without regarding difference and unity as antinomies or hybridities as problems. Adopting that position has a number of advantages.It not only allows us to better understand the actions of the great variety of people who thought of themselves and were regarded by others as German during the modern era, it also helps us to gain a better understanding of the roles Germans and German things have played in the history of the modern world.

The one feature of a paper that needs to draw attention of potential readers is its Title. The importance of this being very carefully worded is stressed. The chapter also covers the small sections of a paper that give information about the authors, their affiliations, which author is dealing with correspondence, the contributions of co-authors, any conflicts of interest, who to acknowledge and how to prepare reference lists. It mentions how in this electronic age papers can be tagged using a 'DOI'.

The capability approach gives rise to the question of how capabilities are developed. In this chapter I look at the idea of ‘social patterning’ by which children and adolescents may well develop some capabilities but neglect others. In particular, I argue that individuals typically become acculturated into patterns of affiliation and behaviour, and those patterns can be very fateful for other aspects of their lives. The behaviours and unconscious attitudes that children and adolescents may need to follow in order to fit in with those they most care about can stunt their opportunities to develop other capabilities, or, at least, damage their ability to take advantage of other opportunities. Hence it is critical that capability theorists pay attention to the conditions of capability development.

Chapter 7 describes how 3D printing technology will disrupt trademark law’s core function of indicating the source or origin of manufactured goods. The technology dissociates product design from product manufacturing. Design is embodied in a 3D printable file, while manufacturing is commoditized and democratized. When 3D printable files, as opposed to manufactured goods, are offered for sale, symbols appearing “inside” of the digital files (i.e., on the digital object) do not indicate the source of the file. Rather, source indicators are found “outside” of the file, on the websites that offer the files for sale. 3D printing technology will also radically disrupt the doctrine of post-sale confusion. At the same time, current, expanded theories of trademark law condemn uses of symbols that might dilute a trademark or suggest a connection to a trademark owner. These stronger versions of trademark protection, which are widely criticized, would give trademark owners to the right to control most uses of their marks “inside” of files. This would inhibit innovation and creative expression without a clear benefit to the public. Therefore, I recommend against these stronger protections for DMFs.