Greg Myers
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674158 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Greg Myers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Greg |
| FAMILY NAME | Myers |
| SIGNATURE | MYERS G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 242 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Everyday oracles: Authors on Twitter
Most authors participate, reluctantly or enthusiastically, in a cycle of promotion, including book tours, literary festivals, interviews, and now social media. Some authors make regular use of Twitter to post updates about professional activities, comments on events in their everyday lives, news of readings, statements of opinions, photos, links, or retweets. This study examines tweets by 10 authors, using corpus linguistic tools to find stylisti…
Laughter, non-seriousness and transitions in social research interview transcripts
Laughter is the most frequently transcribed paralinguistic feature in social research interview transcripts, occurring even where the transcriber gives no other indication of how words were said. It is thus a useful starting point for reconstructing aspects of interaction from the traces in standard social science research transcripts. First, we examine the practices of a transcriber in recording laughter by comparing transcripts from one project…
What place references can do in social research interviews
Place is central to many research projects in the social sciences, but it is often taken by researchers as a given. Recently, discourse analysts have devoted more attention to the construction of place in interaction. We focus on one aspect of this construction, the process of drawing inferences from place categories and place names, in transcripts of oral history interviews. We apply membership categorization analysis (MCA) to descriptions of ho…
Welcome to Discourse, Context & Media
English. Whose English
Impersonal you and stance-taking in social research interviews
Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs
Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is self-presentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been cal…
Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives edited by Alexandra Jaffe
Analyzing Interaction in Broadcast Debates
Enabling talk: How the facilitator shapes a focus group
Contemporary democratic politics involves, not just constitutions, elections, and representative bodies, but complex processes of more direct consultation with the public. The value of these processes depends on their openness to voices, topics, and styles of expression that might be excluded from other forums. In this paper I analyze focus group discussions, one of the genres used for public consultation, and the ways that discussions are framed…
Commonplaces in Risk Talk: Face Threats and Forms of Interaction
Talk about risk is problematic for interaction; it can involve the speaker or hearer saying things that threaten participants' ‘face’, the ways they want themselves to be seen by others. One way of dealing with these threats to face, and to keep the conversation going, is the use of commonplaces. Commonplaces, generally applicable and generally known arguments, play an important role in interaction, invoking shared, taken‐for‐granted perspectives…
La terreur spectacle
Where are you from: Identifying place1
Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place-related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passage…
Applied Linguists and Institutions of Opinion
Public opinion research is not an area that has received much attention from applied linguists. But language lies at the heart of the procedures used to define, elicit, and report opinions, whether through such methods as polling, interviews, and focus groups, or through the less obvious channels of vox pop interviews, letters to the editor, radio phone-ins, or public hearings. In this paper I consider ways in which work in language studies—by li…
Discourse Studies of Scientific Popularization: Questioning the Boundaries
This article critiques the `dominant view' of the popularization of science that takes it as a one-way process of simplification, one in which scientific articles are the originals of knowledge that is then debased by translation for a public that is ignorant of such matters, a blank slate. Recent work is surveyed in several disciplines that questions the boundaries of scientific discourse and genres of popularization: who the actors are, how the…
Entitlement and sincerity in broadcast interviews about Princess Diana
Vox pop interviews were used extensively in British broadcast coverage of the death and funeral of Princess Diana. They were one of several ways that public expression of emotion was defined as an important part of the events of the week. Some commentators criticized this attention to the public response, rather than on new information and formal events, as an excessive and sentimental part of a loss of proper perspective. This criticism raises t…
Can Focus Groups Be Analysed As Talk?
Facts, Thinking and Talk
In reviewing these books together, it is only fair to note that the two authors, who are colleagues and sometimes co-authors,1 have written different kinds of books and taken on different kinds of topics. Potter provides a very accessible (and footnote-free) textbook that seems to be aimed at introducing a range of social science approaches, and then showing how they relate to fact construction.2 Edwards outlines very complex specialist debates o…
Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-Up and Application
List of Acronyms List of Contributors Editor's General Introduction Part A: Issues and Practices Introduction 1. Principles and alternative systems in the transcription, coding and mark-up of spoken discourse 2. Theoretical issues: transcribing the untranscribable 3. Adequacy, user-friendliness, and practicality in transcribing 4. Whole-text analysis in computerised spoken discourse 5. The text encoding initiative: an overview 6. The approach of …
Displaying opinions: Topics and disagreement in focus groups
Focus group discussions are now widely used for gathering data, in social science as well as in commercial marketing and public opinion research. One appeal of focus groups is that in some ways they seem like everyday talk, but their effectiveness depends on a tension between the moderator's constraints and participants' interaction. The moderator introduces and defines topics, but participants can shift, close, and interpret them. The moderator …
Scientific language inside out
The Scientific Voice, by Scott L. Montgomery, (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1996), 460 pages, $44.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)
Biology and the Queen's English
From Discovery to Invention: The Writing and Rewriting of Two Patents
Research articles and patents are claim-making texts that work in different social arenas. They have in common a process of enrolment, by which diverse interests are incorporated textually to support a claim. But the evaluation of a patent draws on different assumptions about the nature of a claim, the relation to other texts and the account of future effects. One way to bring out these differences is to look at the experience of researchers who …
Words in Ads
Preface - new! improved!! not tested on animals!!! introduction - the air in your Aero 7 shades whiter beanz meanz Heinz - what makes slogans stick? it is. are you? - sentence types and sentence structure players pleas - puns, associations, and meanings you in the shocking pink shellsuit - pronouns and address bread wi' nowt taken owt - languages and varieties as signs do we have time for a coffee? - conversations and everyday life shall I compar…
Playground poetry
An analysis of the rhymes and linguistic tricks used by schoolchildren
Displaying opinions: Topics and disagreement in focus groups
Focus group discussions are now widely used for gathering data, in social science as well as in commercial marketing and public opinion research. One appeal of focus groups is that in some ways they seem like everyday talk, but their effectiveness depends on a tension between the moderator's constraints and participants' interaction. The moderator introduces and defines topics, but participants can shift, close, and interpret them. The moderator …
Where are you from: Identifying place1
Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place-related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passage…
Texts as Knowledge Claims: The Social Construction of Two Biology Articles
The procedures of review and revision of a scientific article can be seen as part of the negotiation of the status that the scientific community will assign to the text's knowledge claim. This study locates some textual features of this negotiation by considering two articles by two biologists, the comments referees and colleagues made on them, and the authors' responses to these comments. The articles illustrate contrasting problems in the creat…
Impersonal you and stance-taking in social research interviews
Discourse Studies of Scientific Popularization: Questioning the Boundaries
This article critiques the `dominant view' of the popularization of science that takes it as a one-way process of simplification, one in which scientific articles are the originals of knowledge that is then debased by translation for a public that is ignorant of such matters, a blank slate. Recent work is surveyed in several disciplines that questions the boundaries of scientific discourse and genres of popularization: who the actors are, how the…
From Discovery to Invention: The Writing and Rewriting of Two Patents
Research articles and patents are claim-making texts that work in different social arenas. They have in common a process of enrolment, by which diverse interests are incorporated textually to support a claim. But the evaluation of a patent draws on different assumptions about the nature of a claim, the relation to other texts and the account of future effects. One way to bring out these differences is to look at the experience of researchers who …
Words in Ads
Preface - new! improved!! not tested on animals!!! introduction - the air in your Aero 7 shades whiter beanz meanz Heinz - what makes slogans stick? it is. are you? - sentence types and sentence structure players pleas - puns, associations, and meanings you in the shocking pink shellsuit - pronouns and address bread wi' nowt taken owt - languages and varieties as signs do we have time for a coffee? - conversations and everyday life shall I compar…
Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs
Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is self-presentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been cal…
Lexical cohesion and specialized knowledge in science and popular science texts
Scientific journal articles written for specialist audiences and popularized accounts of the same research differ in their cohesive patterns. This difference can be related to different uses of readers’ knowledge in the two kinds of texts. In general, readers of scientific texts must have a knowledge of lexical relations to see the implicit cohesion of the text, while readers of popularizations must see the explicitly marked cohesive relations to…
Commonplaces in Risk Talk: Face Threats and Forms of Interaction
Talk about risk is problematic for interaction; it can involve the speaker or hearer saying things that threaten participants' ‘face’, the ways they want themselves to be seen by others. One way of dealing with these threats to face, and to keep the conversation going, is the use of commonplaces. Commonplaces, generally applicable and generally known arguments, play an important role in interaction, invoking shared, taken‐for‐granted perspectives…
Laughter, non-seriousness and transitions in social research interview transcripts
Laughter is the most frequently transcribed paralinguistic feature in social research interview transcripts, occurring even where the transcriber gives no other indication of how words were said. It is thus a useful starting point for reconstructing aspects of interaction from the traces in standard social science research transcripts. First, we examine the practices of a transcriber in recording laughter by comparing transcripts from one project…
Entitlement and sincerity in broadcast interviews about Princess Diana
Vox pop interviews were used extensively in British broadcast coverage of the death and funeral of Princess Diana. They were one of several ways that public expression of emotion was defined as an important part of the events of the week. Some commentators criticized this attention to the public response, rather than on new information and formal events, as an excessive and sentimental part of a loss of proper perspective. This criticism raises t…
The double helix as icon
What place references can do in social research interviews
Place is central to many research projects in the social sciences, but it is often taken by researchers as a given. Recently, discourse analysts have devoted more attention to the construction of place in interaction. We focus on one aspect of this construction, the process of drawing inferences from place categories and place names, in transcripts of oral history interviews. We apply membership categorization analysis (MCA) to descriptions of ho…
Politeness and Certainty: The Language of Collaboration in an Al Project
Collaboration in scientific groups can be investigated through analysis of linguistic features associated with politeness strategies. Disagreements, especially, can carry possible threats to colleagues' face. The strategies for redressing these threats can be seen in choices of pronouns or impersonal constructions, and uses of `hedges' — modifications of the force of an assertion. These features indicating politeness overlap with the features use…
Centering: Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Research Center
Governmental organizations funding science m several nations are creating large research centers that draw on several disciplines and that focus research on an area of immediate use to industrial concerns. I analyze eight proposals for a U.K. center devoted to human communication. I argue that the boundaries that such a center seeks to cross- between areas of knowledge, between disciplines, between academic and nonacademic research-are constructe…
History and Philosophy of Science Seminar 4: 00 Wednesday, Seminar Room 2 "Fictions for Facts: The Form and Authority of the Scientific Dialogue
Persuasion, power and the conversational model
Several lines of study in the humanities and social sciences have drawn on the systematic analysis of the craft of persuasion given by texts in the rhetorical tradition. This review considers the usefulness of this tradition to a critical approach to relations between discourse and power. The books under review use rhetoric in literary study, in social psychology, and in studies of argument in a variety of social sciences, with varying degrees of…
A Night with Saturn
Translator's Abstract]: The flight of Voyager 1 past Saturn in 1981 provides an occasion for a semiotic comparison of reports in French newspapers (Le Monde and Libération), a popular science article (in La Recherche), and specialized scientific articles in Nature. The texts differ in the distance supposed between reader and writer, in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, in characterization of the event and assumptions about readers' inte…
Sociology of Science Without the Sociology
Whatever readers of Social Studies of Science think of Lawrence J. Prelli's attempt to bring together rhetoric and science studies, they will probably approve of his reading; the case studies on which he bases his argument are almost all by science studies researchers associated with this journal. But I think that A Rhetoric of Science is likely to offer more to rhetoric than to science studies. For the rhetoricians, it provides modern examples f…
Postscript: Conversation over Dinner, on the Usefulness of Paradox in Controversies
Steve Woolgar is Project Director at the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture & Technology and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Brunel University. He is currently writing an 'ethnography of computers' and working on several projects designed to develop social perspectives on software. His recent books include Science: The Very Idea (London: Routledge, 1988) and an edited collection Knowledge and Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988). Author's a…
Texts as Knowledge Claims: The Social Construction of Two Biology Articles
The procedures of review and revision of a scientific article can be seen as part of the negotiation of the status that the scientific community will assign to the text's knowledge claim. This study locates some textual features of this negotiation by considering two articles by two biologists, the comments referees and colleagues made on them, and the authors' responses to these comments. The articles illustrate contrasting problems in the creat…
Writing about Writing about Scientific Writing: Books on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Every picture tells a story: Illustrations in E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology
Postscript: Conversation over Dinner, on the Usefulness of Paradox in Controversies
Steve Woolgar is Project Director at the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture & Technology and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Brunel University. He is currently writing an 'ethnography of computers' and working on several projects designed to develop social perspectives on software. His recent books include Science: The Very Idea (London: Routledge, 1988) and an edited collection Knowledge and Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988). Author's a…
The figural and the literal: Problems of language in the history of science and philosophy
Persuasion, power and the conversational model
Several lines of study in the humanities and social sciences have drawn on the systematic analysis of the craft of persuasion given by texts in the rhetorical tradition. This review considers the usefulness of this tradition to a critical approach to relations between discourse and power. The books under review use rhetoric in literary study, in social psychology, and in studies of argument in a variety of social sciences, with varying degrees of…
The double helix as icon
Sociology of Science Without the Sociology
Whatever readers of Social Studies of Science think of Lawrence J. Prelli's attempt to bring together rhetoric and science studies, they will probably approve of his reading; the case studies on which he bases his argument are almost all by science studies researchers associated with this journal. But I think that A Rhetoric of Science is likely to offer more to rhetoric than to science studies. For the rhetoricians, it provides modern examples f…
Scientific Speculation and Literary Style in a Molecular Genetics Article
The Argument Stylistic analysis of an admittedly speculative scientific article can suggest what is involved in the social act of speculation. Walter Gilbert's influential paper “Why Genes in Pieces?” serves as an example of the conflicting demands of the need to display politeness and the need to display the urgency and excitement of the issues. Socially significant stylistic features emerge in comparison with another paper Gilbert co-authored, …
Politeness and Certainty: The Language of Collaboration in an Al Project
Collaboration in scientific groups can be investigated through analysis of linguistic features associated with politeness strategies. Disagreements, especially, can carry possible threats to colleagues' face. The strategies for redressing these threats can be seen in choices of pronouns or impersonal constructions, and uses of `hedges' — modifications of the force of an assertion. These features indicating politeness overlap with the features use…
Lexical cohesion and specialized knowledge in science and popular science texts
Scientific journal articles written for specialist audiences and popularized accounts of the same research differ in their cohesive patterns. This difference can be related to different uses of readers’ knowledge in the two kinds of texts. In general, readers of scientific texts must have a knowledge of lexical relations to see the implicit cohesion of the text, while readers of popularizations must see the explicitly marked cohesive relations to…
Narrative Experiments: The Discursive Authority of Science and Technology . Gayle L. Ormiston , Raphael Sassower
‘In this paper we report …'’: Speech acts and scientific facts
Out of the picture
Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America since 1840, by Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence (New York; Greenwood, 1988), 357 pages, hb £45/$55
A Night with Saturn
Translator's Abstract]: The flight of Voyager 1 past Saturn in 1981 provides an occasion for a semiotic comparison of reports in French newspapers (Le Monde and Libération), a popular science article (in La Recherche), and specialized scientific articles in Nature. The texts differ in the distance supposed between reader and writer, in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, in characterization of the event and assumptions about readers' inte…
History and Philosophy of Science Seminar 4: 00 Wednesday, Seminar Room 2 "Fictions for Facts: The Form and Authority of the Scientific Dialogue
Science as Writing . David Locke
Centering: Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Research Center
Governmental organizations funding science m several nations are creating large research centers that draw on several disciplines and that focus research on an area of immediate use to industrial concerns. I analyze eight proposals for a U.K. center devoted to human communication. I argue that the boundaries that such a center seeks to cross- between areas of knowledge, between disciplines, between academic and nonacademic research-are constructe…
Playground poetry
An analysis of the rhymes and linguistic tricks used by schoolchildren
From Discovery to Invention: The Writing and Rewriting of Two Patents
Research articles and patents are claim-making texts that work in different social arenas. They have in common a process of enrolment, by which diverse interests are incorporated textually to support a claim. But the evaluation of a patent draws on different assumptions about the nature of a claim, the relation to other texts and the account of future effects. One way to bring out these differences is to look at the experience of researchers who …
Words in Ads
Preface - new! improved!! not tested on animals!!! introduction - the air in your Aero 7 shades whiter beanz meanz Heinz - what makes slogans stick? it is. are you? - sentence types and sentence structure players pleas - puns, associations, and meanings you in the shocking pink shellsuit - pronouns and address bread wi' nowt taken owt - languages and varieties as signs do we have time for a coffee? - conversations and everyday life shall I compar…
Biology and the Queen's English
Scientific language inside out
The Scientific Voice, by Scott L. Montgomery, (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1996), 460 pages, $44.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)
Facts, Thinking and Talk
In reviewing these books together, it is only fair to note that the two authors, who are colleagues and sometimes co-authors,1 have written different kinds of books and taken on different kinds of topics. Potter provides a very accessible (and footnote-free) textbook that seems to be aimed at introducing a range of social science approaches, and then showing how they relate to fact construction.2 Edwards outlines very complex specialist debates o…
Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-Up and Application
List of Acronyms List of Contributors Editor's General Introduction Part A: Issues and Practices Introduction 1. Principles and alternative systems in the transcription, coding and mark-up of spoken discourse 2. Theoretical issues: transcribing the untranscribable 3. Adequacy, user-friendliness, and practicality in transcribing 4. Whole-text analysis in computerised spoken discourse 5. The text encoding initiative: an overview 6. The approach of …
Sociology (31 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Linguistics (20 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (10 works)