Radio leaks: Presenting and contesting leaks in radio news broadcasts

his paper analyzes the discursive construction and contestation of ‘leaked’ stories in news broadcast programmes. Drawing on a sample of BBC Radio 4 news programmes recorded between May and June 2000, we analyze four items of news presented as leaks about upcoming events. We suggest that these examples highlight the leaking of information as a valuable newsworthy commodity in that it not only allows news organizations to report what is going to be news before it happens but also enables speculative discourse as to the meaning of the event yet to happen. However, in order for a story to be accepted as a leak it must be seen to fulfil a number of criteria. With this in mind, we identify four features accompanying the introduction of the news items as leaks in the process of authentification: secrecy, authorship/ownership and future orientation. The article then discusses how these features are used when contesting the status of a news story as a leak, and how temporal play contributes to downgrading the content of the leak and, hence, its relevance, immediacy and newsworthiness.

Agency as discursive practice: From nobody to somebody as an international student in Australia

As more and more students pursue an international education, there is a need to investigate how these students deal with the demands of their study programs in the new academic context. This paper introduces one such student, a Thai English teacher named Woody,2 and looks at the ways that he engaged with a Master of Education program in Australia. I analyse the transcripts of two interviews that I conducted with Woody in his first semester using Fairclough's model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The analysis is interested in the social and institutional demands that Woody identified as impacting on the course, and the strategic action that he took in response to them. I argue that by undertaking this action, Woody was “working” as an agent of his own change. The analysis highlights a proactive and strategic engagement on Woody's part, a point that has been missed in much of the literature on the international student experience in Australia.

Motivations for second position: Evidence from North-Central Australia

It has long been observed that many languages from all over the world require that certain grammatical categories (e.g., person, number, tense, modality) occur in the "second position" of a clause. Much of the research into second position has developed formal explanations for this recurring pattern, based on interactions between morphosyntax and phonology. In this article I explore how pragmatics of information packaging interacts with these other features in the development of such morphosyntactic architecture in three North-Central Australian languages: Warlpiri, Wambaya, and Garrwa.

Parsing Arabic relative clauses: A paninian dependency grammar approach

We present an approach to parsing rehive clauses in Arabic in the tradition of the Paninian Grammar Frumework/2] which leads to deriving U common logicul form for equivalent sentences. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of resumptive pronouns in the retrieval of syntuctico-semantic relationships. The analysis arises from the development of a lexicalised dependency grammar for Arabic that has application for machine translation.