This chapter applies the notion of dual character concepts, which were originally proposed by experimental philosophers and cognitive psychologists (Knobe et al., 2013; Del Pinal & Reuter, 2017; Reuter, 2019), to discuss how racist and xenophobic hate speech could be more easily identified, especially for the purpose of raising public awareness about it and persecuting it by law enforcement bodies. This type of research has not been followed extensively so far, except for few studies which delve into the reality of blacks who suffer from racism and white racists, e.g. Shelby (2002), Ikuenobe (2011&2018). Most terms and concepts are either descriptive or normative in character. A descriptive word refers to something observable or experienced, whereas a normative one bears an evaluative content, that is, its meaning derives from norms or standards. In this sense, a cat is a descriptive term while terrific is a normative one. Although this seems a neat delineation, some terms and concepts do not fall easily into it. This is so not only because norms and standards are socially agreed upon and dependent on individual features, e.g. one’s background, intelligence, education. In fact, the normative dimension very often represents certain abstract values associated with the corresponding descriptive elements (Knobe et al., 2013). This means that some terms and concepts are “part descriptive, part normative” and these parts are “related but independent” (Reuter, 2019: 1). Some of such combinatory concepts also contain the idealized social function which the person, object or notion fulfils (Leslie, 2015). Finally, when a normative term denotes human attributes, it often includes the component of “the commitment to fulfil the idealized function associated with that role” (Reuter, 2019: 4). The complex nature of dual character concepts can be exemplified by the word mentor. This word denotes a colleague who assists a less experienced person in their job (the descriptive content). However, social expectances which a mentor needs to fulfil are value- and norm-driven as well. For example, being somebody who leads a mentee through meanderings of professional and personal development means that such a person should also be trustful, patient and supportive. Personal commitment is also expected – such a person should show emotional involvement in assisting the other to develop. All in all, a person can officially be called a mentor, but if they do not conform to social expectances, they are not true mentors and are not perceived as such. Concepts like mentor are of a dual character, which means that they “they encode not only a descriptive dimension but also an independent normative dimension for categorization” (Reuter, 2019: 1). What I intend to illustrate in this chapter is that individuals who spread hate speech argue that discriminatory terms which they use should be treated as only descriptive in character and thus they try to avoid judicial or social responsibility for propagating it. Additionally, as Wodak (2015) posits, public personas, including politicians, tend to argue in favour of their innocence or ignorance, claiming that they are not aware of the value-ascribing potential which their hateful words bear. This way they escape not only public contempt and, what is worse, they are often acquitted at courts. Studying hate speech messages from the normative standpoint could not only increase our knowledge and awareness of the essence of hate speech but primarily could provide law enforcement personnel (police officers, judges) with a more precise terminological apparatus for their daily functioning, especially argumentation of cases (Domselaar, 2018).

Language research of the so-called discursive turn has incorporated the analysis of human narratives as a legitimate narrative knowledge (Jameson, 1984: xix) pertaining to the way of data collection, data itself and a method of data analysis. Hence, the methodology of social sciences and humanities postulates the notion of the “narrative turn” (De Fina, 2009). Yet much of narrative based research is still executed according to structural tenets, e.g. a remarkable body of conversational analysis. The assumption of human agency and activity, typical for the “post perspective” necessitates knowledge building paradigm to de-vest the researcher from his/her centrality and scientism requiring the application of recognized scientific methods informed by normativity and the rigor of Occham’s razor parsimony. Additionally, face validity of any research entails the need to account for the dynamic nature of phenomena to integrate the observer and the observed. To counteract the indeterminacy principle, it is important to approach any problem via participatory action research. One type of research methodology promoting active experimentation is focal research groups based on discussions and interaction among selected individuals moderated by the researcher. The role of a researcher as a “facilitator” or “moderator” makes this method markedly different from traditional interviews and allows obtaining data different form traditional one-to-one interviews, even if one applies the technique of open questions. This method or technique, as it is inconsistently referred to, has been known since the 1940’s in sociology or psychology but has become very popular across other disciplines such as education, communication and media studies, feminist research, health research and marketing research (cf. Nyumba, Wilson, Derrick, & Mukherjee, 2018: 21). The rationale for this methodology is very much compatible with ecolinguistic research to account for the phenomenological orientation of any research endeavor since, as Kramsch (2002) metaphorically puts it, it is impossible “to tell the dancer from the dance”. Such an approach helps maintain ecological validity and postulates an inherently critical/ethical stance towards doing academic research (van Lier, 2004: 168). We apply it into the study of critical language awareness of L2 users with regard to the notion of legitimization of translingual processes of bi- and multilingual language users and resulting from it empowerment of the L2 user (Lankiewicz et al. 2016). The application of qualitative data analysis techniques, such as discourse analysis (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), content and ethnographic analytic techniques (Morgan, 1988) as well as critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995), offers invaluable insights into critical language awareness of L2 users. The findings highlight a very (inter)subjective and dynamic nature of the method and its data analysis techniques. The chapter ultimately presents an array of methodological advantages derived from the application of this methodology to this kind of research. It, among others, underscores a non-reductionist way of data collection and their analysis and, on the other hand, helps to delve into language awareness of L2 users, envisioned as an attitudinal and perceptional continuum in which the linguistically uncritical mind believes that language is a structurally fixed monolith, geographically defined, communicatively neutral and unambiguous as well as normatively unequivocal. Alternatively, the critical mind presupposes that language is unfinalizable, transformative in nature and perceives it more as a way of an activity, i.e. posits languaging in the place of language.

The chapter takes a look at the projective techniques and their application across disciplines. It goes back to the psychoanalytical foundations of the concept and traces its historical development. Various types of projective techniques are presented, followed by a critical discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of their employment in research. The very concept of “projection” is attributed to Sigmund Freud (Breuer and Freud, 1895). It involves transferring (projecting) unconscious and frequently suppressed beliefs to another person or object in order to protect one’s ego. The term “projective techniques”, advanced by Frank (1939), might be basically defined as questioning techniques “that depersonalize the question to the respondent thereby desensitizing the respondent to the answer they give and deactivating their conscious defences about the answer they give” (Das, 2018: 10) The first applications of the techniques took place within the field of clinical psychology, where they were mostly used in psychoanalysis or personality assessment. Within a decade they were adopted to management and marketing research. In fact, nowadays their usage in consumer and marketing communication research has its heyday and is often considered to be superior to other research methods (cf. Kaczmarek et al., 2013). To some extent, projection techniques have been also adopted to linguistic research (e.g. Labov attitude research), however, contemporarily their use in this field is rather marginalized. This could be explicated by certain controversies surrounding their application in psychometric testing as well as a massive paradigm shift towards the quantitative research approach in the last decades of the previous century. The main premise of this chapter, however, is that their use in linguistic research should be revisited as they offer a unique potential for obtaining deep, meaningful responses from respondents. This is particularly valid in the case of research on sensitive issues such as e.g. one’s ethnic, cultural or family background. The full potential of the projective techniques will be exemplified by a study on the language portraits (Busch, 2018; Kusters and Meulder, 2019) of plurilingual language learners at the tertiary level of education in order to show how they can and enhance reflection and self- expression through verbal and visual modes and reduce social desirability bias.

This chapter rests on the idea that the phenomenon of collaborative research belongs to the most prolific and versatile research methods in our times. This method owes its universality to the contemporary imperative for networking, professional flexibility, and, in the first place, the growing conception of studying and learning as a social and cultural process. Rooted in pedagogical studies, the term collaborative research has become prevalent across a variety of scientific disciplines including cognitive psychology (Dillenbourg, 1999; Mercier, 2010), business and management (Blundo, Simon, 2016; Loon, 2016 ), music and music education (Westerlund, 2013), information and communication technologies (Adams, 2005; Anastasiades, 2009; Dillenbourgh, 1999; Dimarco, 2010), and healthcare (Croker, Smith, Fisher, 2016; Raney, Lasky, Scott, 2017). This chapter will explore the applicability of the collaborative research model in humanities, in the field of translation studies, and teaching translation in particular. The theoretical part of the chapter is indebted to the seminal works by Lev Vygotsky, who introduces collaborative learning as a socio-cultural phenomena shaped by interactions with others (1978), and to Johnson and Johnson and their concept of five principles for successful group work (1975, 1999). Apart from these early examples of research in the area of collaboration in pedagogy, this chapter builds its theoretical foundation on the latest publications redefining contemporary education through the prism of collaboration as its prerequisite (Rutherford, 2014; DiMarco, Luzzatto, 2010; Adams, 2005; Frey, Everlove, Fisher, 2009). In the practical part of the chapter, the collaborative research method will be applied so as to analyse the process of increased linguistic and non-linguistic competences of the translator (Małgorzewicz, 2004) among a group of students trained in the area of translation studies. The didactic aim of the research is to establish one well-informed rendition of the text, while the methodological aim is to determine the moment of the increased translation competence (PACTE, 2003) in the act of translation communication by means of microgenesis, the analysis of the students’ conversation.

Despite advances in linguistic study and the relational turn which we observe in research and description of the phenomenon of language mainstream research is, as before, (more or less heavily) tinted with Written Language Bias (cf. Linell 2019). Despite perspective shift which occurred in the late 20th century towards spoken and interactional aspect (also referred to by an increasing number of scholars as ‘languaging’) these new approaches adopted the old monologistic paradigm. Communication is viewed as a series of actions exchanged between individuals who act according to their individual intentions and are subject to conditions such as gender, age, background, status, etc. as contextually stable properties. Discourse in monologistic take (even in Discourse Analysis or Conversational Analysis) is understood as a process in which mentally functioning individuals and social structures are autonomous and mutually independent entities (Linell 1998: 7). By placing emphasis on structural organisation of linguistic interaction (‘talk-in-interaction’) monologism overlooks the fact that when individuals language together they display mutual dynamic interdependencies as “actors-in-specific interactions and contexts […] invoked by and emergent with (inter)actions”. (Linell 1998: 8). This is why in this chapter we intend to give more attention to what makes language special: its ontogenetic contingency on interaction between speakers and its essential value as an experiential, enacted and maintained flow that is changed by the real-time activity of interacting human agents. By so doing we will be able to turn towards active situated processes (e.g. conversational interactions or sense-making activities) instead of analysing a set of ‘linguistic products’ or static structures. As a consequence we will follow Rączaszek-Leonardi’s postulate “language must be viewed as radically heterogeneous and as spread across space, time and bodies” (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2009: 178) and we go to investigate people as they “do language” rather than “use” it. As people connect the past, the present and the future, the different time scales enable their bodies to talk to each other, to listen to talking others (and selves), and to read and write texts. Apart from such obviously “linguistic” activities, human beings also become engaged in language-based activities such as task solving, thinking aloud, doing self-talk, giving and interpreting signs, etc. In short, they “do” language. This also accords with the view that the most important things in human lives happen between persons, rather than within or without them (cf. Sidorkin 1999: 11). If so, it follows that the effectiveness of being an effective communicator is contingent upon how conversing agents create an interactional dialogical space and ‘language’ in it. On this view, we find that the epistemic results conversing agents enjoy are not yielded by the “use” and “processing” of symbolic forms but by their agency, interactivity and languaging. We therefore claim that language is an activity: as such, it is not “a rational item of knowledge that the mind deploys to express inner rationality” (Evans 2018, 10) but, rather, dynamical, embodied (non-abstract), existing on different timescales (multiscalar) (Steffensen and Cowley 2010) and partly non-local (Love 2004; Thibault 2011). Thinking and language emerge through the interactivity, or sense saturated coordination (Steffensen 2013) that couples agents to their social and physical environments. The term ‘languaging’ direct attention to the fact that bodily and situational processes in the here-and-now and their organization across different spatial and temporal scales are fundamental in communication and sense-making (e.g. Love 2017). In order to illustrate these claims we will conduct a series of experiments in which a group of students will be video recorded as they play a board game Codenames whose mechanics is based on linguistic interaction. When analysing the recordings we will be interested in the contingencies the participants hinge on in their dialogical exchanges to build consensual domains in which they establish meanings and strategies for making them explicit to other players. By applying Multimodal Event Analysis we will address the pico-scale of dialogical interactional dynamics of the participants cooperating in a problem space reaching an insight into the nature of a linguistic task. As language is distributed by nature (e.g. Cowley 2011, Steffensen 2016) these dynamics will include the synchrony of physical setting, material artefacts, interbodily dynamics between the participants (especially in relation to gaze and the manual handling of objects), and verbal patterns that prompt them to simulate themselves and each other towards the satisfactory outcome. Our interest will be in the way the players as languaging agents organise their interactivity (sense-saturated coordination) and how languaging as prompted by the situational conditions of the game facilitates their sense-making processes. Unlike in the game itself, in our study we focus on participant’s efficiency, not effectiveness. In this way the goals of participants in the experiment and those the researcher will be radically different which should allow for fairly objective view of what happens. In this study we aim to put to test Van den Herik’s claim that “linguistic knowledge should be conceived of as practical knowledge – or knowing-how – rather than theoretical knowledge – or knowing-that” (Van den Herik 2019: 60). On a more theoretical level this should find echo in Mulcaster’s 500-year-old insight that “languaging enables us to understand” and, in so doing, enables humans to engage actively with each other.

All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life (Bakhtin, 1981:293). The quoted passage from Bakhtin brings to the fore a very essential property of language, namely its socially established ties. Ahearn (2013) strongly contradicts the long-held belief about language as a neutral means of communication and offers a view on it as a conglomerate of socially-determined practices. Reversing the situation, the author notes, we can view human interactions as affected by the functioning of language which mediates the sphere of communication between its users. This is not to say, however, that the study of language systems should cease (Ahearn, 2013). Quite the contrary, the contribution of formal linguistics to the study of language systems still holds its value, yet, as Duranti (1997) claims, now the scholarly focus should be on the touch points between grammar and the sphere of society, politics and emotions. With this in mind, we may seek to embrace research methods which offer opportunities to study socially and culturally-interfaced language properties. The proposed research method, known as duoethnography, encourages people of different stance to reconceptualise their understanding of particular phenomena in the course of interaction (Werbińska, 2018). Although the method is traditionally associated with the realm of researchers, its application may extend to encompass a collaborative researcher-student context. Once people gain the opportunity to interact in dialogic circumstances, they discover the need to reflect upon their past experiences and attitudes. This, in the word of Pinar (2004), may evoke self-reflection which in turn yields a transformative result. The present study focuses on the issue of education, a topic that seems to occupy the attention of students, however with varying intensity and to a different degree. Hence it would be interesting to learn how students define and evaluate this notion. More importantly, through dialogic interaction we will try to examine whether its participants develop deeper reflection about the notion. The main thrust of the current chapter is directed towards the reconstruction of a commonsensical picture of education in the narratives of third year students of linguistics. The data for analysis will be collected in the course of student-student interactions (approx. 7 B.A. seminar students will be involved) that will take the form of short, recorded interviews with peer students in which the participants will try to respond to a basic question: “What does education mean to you, personally?”.

In the times when more people than ever before are able to publicly share their knowledge, express their opinions, make commentaries and share pieces of information on every subject possible, researchers in the field of linguistics interested in this kind of output might feel they are faced with too much data to be able to work with. At the same time, the diversity and size of data might still be tempting to be dealt with, as it offers hope for larger trends or important results being hidden somewhere in there. One of novel possibilities is brought by sentiment analysis, also termed as opinion-mining, a notion which refers to “the mining of opinions of individuals, their appraisals, and feelings in the direction of certain objects, facts and their attributes” (Pawar et al. 2016). In an exemplary application of sentiment analysis, answers to open-ended questions are processed with the help of purpose-oriented language ontologies. As a result, information about, e.g. attitude of employees towards their company is successfully inferred. There are a few highly-specialised companies which offer “intelligent” high-quality sentiment analysis to business and governmental customers (e.g. Chenope or Clarabridge). The chapter presents methodological input of sentiment analysis to the field of applied linguistics and discusses problems pertaining to its applications ranging from doing research (also by people without a degree in computational science) to training of future linguists. In particular, the language users (L1 and L2) taking part in the experiment are asked to assess numerous text samples with regard to different criteria pertaining to their textual complexity (e.g. Štajner & Mitkov 2012). The online survey being filled has form of open-ended questions – to enable the participants to give any answer they reckon is appropriate. The answers are processed with the use of a free online tool for sentiment analysis. The obtained results are discussed and compared with a control sample – the surveys which have been assessed by the Author in a purely qualitative, manual way only.

Numerous studies conducted so far in broadly understood healthcare communication which have drawn on the theories from the neighbouring disciplines such as the sociology of medicine, social psychology, philosophy of medicine, medical anthropology or medical ethics, have proven to be effective in tapping into the construction of professional and lay identities as well as into the very nature of communication in this particularly sensitive context (Watts 2008, 2010). In the current chapter, the four perspectives model, originally developed for streamlining the construction of case formulations in psychology and psychiatry, will be applied as a tool in studying the language of clinical-diagnostic case reporting. A case report as a written medical genre discusses unknown diseases, their new aspects or anything novel about a specific treatment or drug use. On the other hand, case formulations, psychological/psychiatric equivalents of clinical-diagnostic case reports, “involve turning a patient’s narrative and all the information derived from examinations, interviews with parents and teachers, and medical and school reports into a coherent and not necessarily lengthy story that will help to develop a treatment plan” (Henderson and Martin 2015). The four perspectives model outlines four elements key to the complete description of a patient, their condition and following treatment, namely disease, dimensions, perspective and the life story (Winters et al. 2007; Havighurst and Downey 2009). What lies at the heart of this approach is that it views psychological and social factors as integral elements of each case, thus emphasising the differentiating features of psychology and psychiatry as disciplines. “[P]sychiatrists for the most part cannot use a stethoscope or the variety of tests (such as bloodwork, electrocardiograms and blood pressure readings) that other kinds of physicians routinely use as sources of information in making their diagnoses” (Berkenkotter 2008: 2). Although primarily content-related in its original milieu, the model may be applied to the study of the discourse of clinical-diagnostic case reporting. Since the model features guidelines which help to discursively construct a complete case not only from the biomedical (Wade and Halligan 2004) but also from the patient-centred (Balint et al. 1970) perspectives, it may provide useful categories of information to be included in clinical-diagnostic case reports. It may also aid the identification or choice of the corresponding linguistic resources to express the information required and help to differentiate between these two perspectives. Data for the present analysis will constitute a collection of medical case reports derived from professional medical journals. It will be demonstrated that the texts written from the clinical-diagnostic perspective can be understood better and potentially constructed more effectively with reference to particular conceptualisations of various social and mental phenomena as routinely utilised in psychology and psychiatry.