For this chapter, we examine everyday interactions involving a person diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; pseudonym Trudy). Drawing on the methods of conversation analysis, our specific research focus is placed on how knowledge is solicited, displayed and resisted in contexts of viewing family photos. Our data are taken from video recordings of Trudy at home in the presence of family, caregivers and two researchers. We found that looking at family photos comprised three different activities, each aiming to elicit a response from Trudy: ’Who are they?’; ’Who is that?’; ’Find X!’. Epistemic stances taken up by the participants were found to index Trudy’s ‘reduced’ epistemic domain with respect to her ability in recognizing family members in photos. On the other hand, it was also found that she was able to take up a position of epistemic authority when asserting who is not in the picture. To conclude, although Trudy was at times able to take up a position of epistemic authority to reveal her biographical knowledge, the conversational agenda mainly involved testing Trudy on what she knew, with the unfortunate result being that it was often made clear where she was lacking in knowledge.

This chapter considers the circumstances when EU law provisions can be invoked in national courts. The doctrine of direct effect enables an EU law provision to be invoked in a national court when it grants entitlements to individual parties in a sufficiently precise way. Directly effective provisions of the EU Treaties and Regulations can be invoked against both the State and private actors. By contrast, directly effective provisions of Directives can only be invoked against the State. The doctrine of indirect effects requires any national law or procedure to be interpreted so far as possible to comply with all EU law. However, this cannot be done if the interpretation would contradict the wording of the national law or aggravate criminal liability. The doctrine of State liability allows individuals to sue the State for damages for breach of an EU law which grants them individual rights in a number of circumstances: if the State has failed to transpose a Directive, it has not complied with an order of the Court of Justice, it has failed to follow settled case law of that court or it breaches a clear provision of EU law.

In this concluding chapter, the analysis throughout this book reveals that both Disney and Pixar have a problem with their representation of women, primarily with underrepresentation of women both in speech and total number of characters. Other key points are that female characters are “disproportionately polite”: even though they speak less, they use more of the various markers that highlight a concern with maintaining the social fabric. This chapter also examines the “progress” that Disney and Pixar have made in terms of gender representation. The authors see some promising changes in representation and in talking time. The split between male and female speech in the New Age era is almost exactly 50-50% and some films even have female majority speech (Brave, Frozen II). Unfortunately, most of the other linguistic patterns tracked have not changed at all. Female characters continue to mitigate and apologize while male characters continue to insult and order people around, both in Disney and Pixar films. Finally, this chapter ends with where the authors hope both the future of Disney and Pixar will go, including: a wider range of characters (major and minor) who represent different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, a wider range of gender identity, more diverse linguistic styles associated with masculinity, and other progressive movements.

This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of directives and the variation in their syntactic forms as related to gender and power. Directives are defined as speech acts in which a speaker attempts to get the recipient to carry out or refrain from action. This chapter focuses on who gives and receives directives, and more specifically on the function of linguistic mitigation strategies and how they correlate with the gender of the speaker and addressee in Disney and Pixar films. The issuing of directives is very common in Disney and Pixar films; because they are an essential plot element, their frequency is unrelated to gender. However, the use of mitigation as a politeness strategy is strongly correlated with gender in both Disney and Pixar, independent of other important contextual variables such as urgency and institutional power (p < .01 for both data sets). In the films, male authority is shown as hierarchical, direct, and aggressive; female authority is shown as subtle, and based on persuasion, suggestion, and collaboration — a pattern which echoes research findings on real-life behavior across a number of contexts.

The chapter endeavours to extend the search for politeness rituals in non-literary sources where some dialogue interaction is represented. Significant dialogic interaction is preserved in Roman juridical texts, a source hitherto neglected in studies of ancient politeness. Transcripts of political meetings, of magistrates’ and emperors’ hearings and, above all, of court sessions have been preserved both in papyrus documents and in medieval manuscripts; they enable scholars to widen their knowledge of the forms of linguistic interaction in court debate beyond the little that is known anecdotically about Roman advocacy, and also to observe the evolution of politeness formulae across time.

Using previously untapped Chinese sources, this chapter builds on recent scholarship to provide additional insight into Deng Xiaoping’s handling of relations with the United States in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown of June 1989. Confronted with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as well as with Western sanctions, Deng had the tough job of balancing between conservatives and reformers in China’s leadership circle. Unlike the conservatives, who were ascending, and who blamed the United States for all of China’s troubles and would not have hesitated to break relations with Washington, Deng wanted to “keep the US door open.” But at the same time, Deng did not want to show any softness in dealing with Washington. Deng’s foreign policy directive, “avoiding the limelight, and getting some things done,” saved communist rule in China. After three years of dedicated diplomacy, China gradually broke Western sanctions and regained international acceptance, including a White House welcome for the Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen. Had the Bush administration been tougher on China after the Tiananmen crackdown, it might have delayed China’s economic rise, but it wouldn’t have brought down the Chinese communist regime.

What caused MCP strategy to radically change in October 1951, and to what effect? This chapter shows the MCP believed it had to change as geodemographic control tightened, and how it switched to a ‘long war’ strategy with lower force and incident levels but more determined subversion and greater use of the deep jungle. It then traces how that new strategy played out over 1951–4, until by the latter date the headquarters had retreated to south Thailand, numbers were falling slowly but inexorably and the MCP had started to contemplate negotiation. Above all, this chapter threads together the story from the communist perspective, both above with Chin Peng and colleagues, and from below in its struggles in the New Villages.

Chapter 3 looks at three pragmatic properties of royal correspondence: metacommunication, self-reference and regulative speech acts. Each feature reflects how royal correspondence constructs the relationship between sovereign and subject, and the extralinguistic context in which the letters operate. The evidence for metacommunication indicates that royal correspondence draw attention to their processes of composition, their material worth, and the intended nature of their reception. Scribal letters foregrounded their legal legitimacy, whereas holograph documents point to the personal investment of the author. Self-reference highlights the pragmatic affordances of royal we as a distinctive pronominal option of royal correspondence, particularly in scribal letters. The discussion of regulative speech acts, such as directives, illustrates the formulaicity of these pragmatic acts, with different degrees of directness operating in scribal and holograph letter types.

This chapter discusses the Court’s 1974 judgment, Van Duyn, where the Court declared that provisions of Directives could enjoy direct effect in the national legal order. This judgment is often recognized as the landmark judgment on the ‘direct effect of Directives’, and remains a controversial decision. This chapter demonstrates that the direct effect of Directives was a logical consequence of the Court’s use of direct effect as a substitute for inter-state retaliation, and shows that this understanding of the direct effect of Directives can be found in the early writings of judge Lecourt.