This article offers discourse analysis of young transgender people's interaction, in which they describe being rendered powerless through misgendering or misrepresentation. It argues that the young people's collective responses to these moments enable them to challenge the ideologies underpinning their marginalisation, and to recontextualise the language used by others to describe their bodies. Stance-taking, the production of affect, and constructed dialogue are shown to be key tools in their production of an agentive, mutual identity. The article thus provides close analysis of dialogic embodiment, a process by which the body is quite literally spoken into being. By critiquing the cisnormative structures which inform and enable the young people's marginalisation, the article responds to the call for a trans linguistics (Zimman 2020) and reflects upon the author's positionality as a cisgender researcher. (Embodiment, affective stance, agency, trans identity, cisnormativity, trans linguistics)*

This study merges sociocultural linguistic work on identity construction in interaction with the study of epistemic management in conversation analysis (CA). While some CA scholars have examined identity without relying on epistemics, and others study epistemics without a focus on identity, I hope to contribute to a renewal in the exploration of identity and epistemics in interaction, building on a few recent studies. I examine the discursive processes through which an individual actively and assertively constructs his identities as a New York City resident, a Jewish person, and an actor. I focus on epistemics in the relational identity processes of authentication and denaturalization. I show how a speaker uses authenticating epistemic stances to legitimize his claims to knowledge and related identities, while also denaturalizing others’ rights to knowledge, constructing their identities as inauthentic relative to his own. I argue that epistemics and relational identity processes may be fundamentally intertwined. (Epistemics, identity, conversation, discourse analysis, place, religion, ethnicity, actors)*

Neoliberalism has permeated every sphere of social life, including education and language learning, seeking to produce a particular kind of subject, homo economicus, with the dispositions required to manage the self as an economic project. This article unravels the workings of the unfulfilled promise of neoliberal English education and its damaging consequences on a high-achieving female university graduate in the context of contemporary Hong Kong. Combining Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, while simultaneously drawing on Goffman's concepts of stigma and spoiled identity, our analysis is informed by positioning theory and captures the impact of what we have termed the English language gaze on our informant's sense of self. Seen through a Foucauldian lens, the data reveal the extent, but also the limits, of her assimilation of neoliberal governmentality, while the Marxist lens allows us to account for her plight in terms of alienation and the resulting stigma of a spoiled identity. (Neoliberalism, governmentality, alienation, stigma, spoiled identity, English learning, English language gaze)*

This study illustrates how speech features that emerged from language contact and acquisition in a pluralistic society can accrue diverse social-indexical meanings over time. The social perceptions towards three variants of coda /l/ in Singapore English—namely dark-l, the variant associated with prescriptive norms, and clear-l and vocalised-l, which are variants that arose through language contact—are examined. The findings show that clear-l and vocalised-l are associated with specific ethnic groups and have equally diverse meanings, but their meanings have evolved differently; vocalised-l is an emerging local standard, whereas clear-l remains largely stigmatised. Their diverse meanings are shown to be connected by social factors within a network of interrelated signs, and their interpretations are dependent on the hearer's experiences, such that we are observing different parts of the sociolinguistic reality. Restricted experiences with the social world and regulation of social perception are also shown to potentially contribute to accent-based prejudices. (Indexicality, language contact, ethnolect, lateral consonant, new Englishes, social perception)*

With the spread of English in Bahrain, ‘chicken nugget’ emerged as a term aimed at English-dominant, typically private-school-educated youth. Drawing on data from Bahraini youth, I show how participants orient to different timespaces as they negotiate their identities relative to the ‘chicken nugget’ figure of personhood. Applying discourse analytic methods to participants’ metacommentaries, I demonstrate how they utilize scaling to elevate this label to a fractally recursive bundle of discursive processes, deeming a wider range of people as chicken nuggets depending on the chronotopic conditions of different timespaces. I further show how speakers evoke different exogenous and endogenous styles of English to allow for complex identification processes: the English of chicken nuggets is excessive and exaggerated, as opposed to English as a necessary communication tool in neoliberal contexts. Thus, this article has implications for our understandings of fractal recursivity, English use in globalized contexts, and the sociolinguistics of identity. (Scales and scaling, chronotope, center-periphery, English/Englishes, authenticity, bilingualism, Bahrain, Arabic)*

In this article I focus on the formation and evaluation of chronotopes in social media. More specifically, I analyze the case of a ‘chronotope of the balcony performance’ that emerged in Italy in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. The corpus of the study is constituted by 125 top postings resulting from a Twitter search based on the words Italy, lockdown, and balcony. In line with other scholars (see Goebel 2020), I argue that chronotopes in mass-mediated environments are formed through repetition and recycling of the same or similar semiotic material. I show how in social media expanded participation and the use of trans-semiotic and trans-medial resources ensure wide circulation of images and texts. I also point to the central role of stance taking by users in the constitution of the chronotope as a cultural object, particularly through generalizations and upscaling. (Chronotopes, Covid-19, discourse circulation, stance, scales)*

The pandemic has exacerbated moral panics about conspiracy theories. Yet defining what conspiracy theories are is just as fraught as figuring out what to do about them. This article provides the first empirical demonstration of how the categories ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ are used in social interaction. We examined comments from a New Zealand politician about a Covid-19 outbreak at the start of the election period. Using conversation analysis, membership categorisation analysis, and discursive psychology, we tracked how his talk was built and interpreted by participants. The findings show how a conspiracy theory was made recognisable through the machinery of storytelling and how its status as a conspiracy theory was accomplished and challenged through categorisation. We argue that conceptualising conspiracy theories as social actions offers a way to move beyond definitional debates to examine how participants understand and use conspiracy theories in everyday life. (Conspiracy theory, social interaction, categorisation)