What makes narratives acceptable and understandable by the audience? It is the shared knowledge and expectations that are regarded as a common denominator in the given community. That means. by investigating the social and cultural context where narratives are produced beyond the text level, one can manifest the shared expectations and reality imbedded in the social structure of the society. In this study, I positioned race not as a theme but as a frame that actuates people's everyday narratives in the American discourse. By analyzing the narratives produced by Barack Obama, the study explores the various restrictions "frame of race" presupposes, expects and cultivates in the mainstream American discourse as well as sub-discourse within. The frame of race will be the scope to reveal the unsymmetrical race relationship and ideology in American society.

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It is said that language reflects and implies its culture, and people convey ideas of the language from generation to generation, which form a part of the beliefs, values, and thoughts which the people have. In doing so, they develop their own culture and knowledge. From this point of view, it is claimed that language and some culture are closely connected, and cultural aspects can be clarified by analyzing the language.
In this paper, the inseparability of language and culture is mainly discussed. Especially, some aspects of "commitment" and the related words including "responsibility" are examined. The Japanese words equivalent to "commitment" and "responsibility" are also explored in order to see the differences between the English and Japanese cultures.
It is concluded that "commitment" containing a sense of "responsibility" in English can imply group action, accountability, engagement, involvement, and blame, which is strongly influenced by the cultural context based on contract and personal responsibility while "commitment" and ''responsibility" in Japanese can imply harmony and consideration, which is affected by the cultural context that emphasizes joint responsibility more than personal responsibility. To pursue this aim, a corpus-based approach is applied and a variety of articles are derived from American and Japanese college papers.

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This study aims to identify and interpret representations of parenting (especially paternity) in FQ, a British parenting magazine for fathers, in terms of the approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) put forward by Fairclough (1992, 2003). Specifically, the aim of this analysis is to illustrate what discourses on fathers ' role are constructed and thus what ideologies on paternity are represented in FQ. The analysis shows that there are two conflicting discourses in FQ: "Part-time father/Mother as main parent" and "Father as main parent," though the former are the main discourses. However, there is a difference between these conflicting discourses in terms of their collocation with the content of childcare. The former collocates with discourses on childcare such as "changing a baby's nappy" and "milk feeding," whereas the latter collocates with discourses on discipline and education. Therefore, the assumption represented is that fathers and mothers do not share parenting equally and that they are assigned different types of childcare related roles. This is problematic because prejudiced perspectives on differential roles of fathers and mothers are presented to readers despite the fact that FQ claims to be targeting all fathers and men.

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Norman Fairclough, one of the leading theorists in critical discourse analysis (CDA), attempts to make an analysis of a certain discourse in terms of a concept of 'difference' and　'dialogism' which originated from M. Bakhtin's theory of language. Fairclough proposes a scale which consists of two different orientations: one shows a tendency to open 'difference', in other words, a diverse sense of values or various ideas, by incorporating other 'voices' into a text; the other brackets such difference and potential conflict by assuming common ground. This study, placing reliance on the concept of 'dialogism' or intertextuality, aims to discuss Fairclough's methodology of CDA critically.
The current study examines a recent news text about dolphin hunting of Taiji Town, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. Through this investigation, we discuss how other voices are brought into a text. In addition, depending upon the assumption that once we distinguish a difference, a particular representation begins to form and eventually (re) produce a particular text, we attempt to analyze the way representations of the practice of hunting dolphins and whales are produced in discourse. We finally discuss the significance of focusing on how a particular text is produced or consumed.

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