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SCOPUS_ID:85052600097

“Learn to blend in!”: A corpus-based analysis of the representation of women in mining

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute with increased knowledge about gender in mining by exploring how women are discursively represented in texts produced by actors in the international mining arena. Design/methodology/approach: The study combines corpus linguistic methods and discourse analysis. It implies a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, where the former is used as the point of departure for the latter, and where the material analysed is chosen on the basis of certain selected search phrases. The source for the study is the web, and the search engine used for the retrieval of data is WebCorp Live, a tool tailored for linguistic analysis of web material. Findings: The analysis reveals that although the overarching theme in the women-in mining discourse is that women are needed in the industry, the underlying message is that women-in-mining are perceived as problematic. Practical implications: The study shows that if mining is to change into a modern industry, the inherent hyper-masculine culture and its effects on the whole industry needs to be problematised and made evident. To increase the mere number of women, with women still heavily underrepresented, is not enough to break gender-biased discrimination. Originality/value: The research contributes with new knowledge about gender in mining by using a method, which so far has had limited usage in (critical) discourse analysis.

SCOPUS_ID:85137361432

“Learning English Differently in the Same Way”: Discursive Representations of Language Coaches

Based on studies on trans/indisciplinary applied linguistics and on discursive theories of language, this paper investigates discursive representations of English teaching & learning by language coaches. To this end, this study investigated enunciative regularities in a corpus of utterances of English coaches on YouTube videos, delineating four main representations: (1) one does not learn English by formal methods; (2) one learns English by avoiding their mother tongue; (3) one learns English by believing in their own potential; and (4) one learns English by establishing goals. The analyses indicate a neoliberal interdiscursivity that is updated in the supposed novelty brought by the profession and reinforces the imaginary that teaching and learning a second language is a natural and spontaneous process that can be controlled and mastered, thus exempting any conflicts and tensions inherent to the subject of language.

SCOPUS_ID:85023579859

“Lenin is the stalin of today”: A deictic approach to the cult of the leader

The cult of the leader was one of the main characteristics of Soviet culture — it marked its strict hierarchical structure, and, more importantly, the head of that structure. In this article I elucidate the mechanisms of the cult of leadership from the point of view of language theory. In the first part I will focus on the development of the cultural origins of the cult of leadership in Russia. The second part, drawing on Émile Benveniste’s theory of deictics, Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony and Tartu-Moscow School’s semiotics of culture, concentrates on the expression that characterized the cult of the leader during the Stalin era — “Stalin is today’s Lenin”. I claim that the expression “Stalin is the Lenin of today” was, in Stalin’s era, equivalent to the expression “Lenin is the Stalin oftoday”, for only Stalin’s own act ofutterance created the time of the utterance. And it was the time of Stalin’s utterance that determined the conditions of the situation of the utterance — the canonized way that prescribed to the “Soviet people “ how to view and interpret Lenin. But the totality of Stalin’s “I” makes it plausible to suggest that there was only a cult of one leader — that of Stalin’s. Accordingly, Stalin’s “I” made it possible to maintain the ideological view of the society as a coherent system of meaning. © 2011. The Author(s).

SCOPUS_ID:85099396050

“Les copains *Dit au revoir”: On Subject–Verb Agreement in L2 French and Cross-Linguistic Influence

This study focuses on the production of subject–verb (SV) agreement in number in L2 French and investigates the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in this particular morphosyntactic domain. CLI is a well-known phenomenon in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research but it has rarely been investigated systematically in relation to SV agreement in French. The participants of the study are 114 learners with Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish as L1. The source languages are all inflectional languages but they vary in terms of morphological richness in the verb paradigm, ranging from very poor (Swedish) to very rich (Italian). The participants performed an oral narrative task contrasting singular and plural contexts of SV agreement. Results indicate a significant difference between L1 groups in terms of correct SV agreement but they also show that the overall presence of rich verb morphology in the L1 does not, on its own, result in a more correct SV agreement. It is when comparing learners at two different proficiency levels that we observe differences in the rate of L2 development, which may be explained as an effect of CLI. Overall, results indicate a complex interplay of different factors, where the role of CLI must be further investigated in future studies in relation to L2 French.

SCOPUS_ID:85034650854

“Less is More” in Bayesian word segmentation: When cognitively plausible learners outperform the ideal

Purely statistical models have accounted for infants’ early ability to segment words out of fluent speech, with Bayesian models performing best (Goldwater et al. 2009). Yet these models often incorporate unlikely assumptions, such as infants having unlimited processing and memory resources and knowing the full inventory of phonemes in their native language. Following Pearl, et al. (2011), we explore the impact of these assumptions on Bayesian learners by utilizing syllables as the basic unit of representation. We find a significant "Less is More" effect (Pearl et al 2011; Newport 1990) where memory and processing constraints appear to help, rather than hinder, performance. Further, this effect is more robust than earlier results and we suggest this is due a relaxing of the assumption of phonemic knowledge, demonstrating the importance of basic assumptions such as unit of representation. We argue that more cognitively plausible assumptions improve our understanding of language acquisition.

SCOPUS_ID:85052012836

“Let me ask them to clarify if you don't want to”—A clarification agent for nonnative speakers

When non-native English speakers (NNS) encounter messages they do not understand, they are often reluctant to ask native speakers (NS) for clarification. In this paper, we explored whether a conversation agent that asks clarification questions would increase NNS’ willingness to ask questions. We compared two agents: one that asked for clarification about specific message elements and one that asked general clarification questions. NNS and NS rated how disruptive the agent was, the quality of the conversation, and whether they would feel embarrassed to ask their own questions. NNS found both types of agent less disruptive than NS did, but both found the specific agent more disruptive than the generic agent. NS rated the conversations higher in quality than NNS, but there was no effect of agent condition. We discuss potential of using conversational agents to boost NNS’s confidence in conversation.

SCOPUS_ID:85117438153

“Let me tell you what we already know”: Collective memory between culture and interaction

This article presents the results of a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute conversation between a research participant and a researcher. The talk in the interaction concerns the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and concepts from interactional sociology and linguistic ethnography, the article demonstrates that people know different cultural narratives about the same past event and are able to move between those narratives when the interactional context requires them to. The combination of micro-discourse analysis with ethnographic detail provides an insight in the entanglement of general cultural meanings and specific interactional dynamics when people attribute meaning to the past. The findings and methodological framework presented in this article also engage in a dialogue with some fundamental critiques on the field of memory studies. These include, among others, the need to connect the micro, meso, and macro, and the individual with the social, and the urge to actively develop and think through methods in memory studies research.

SCOPUS_ID:85063796047

“Lifestyle instruction” as an internet genre in consumer culture: A communicative-pragmatic perspective

The aim of the article is to explore the linguistic features of the so-called lifestyle instruction (LI) vis-à-vis the sociocultural practice it is embedded in. To this end, a text from a popular men’s online magazine was analyzed in terms of its lexicogrammatical properties. The text is an instance of fashion/style advice ubiquitous in lifestyle media, and discusses several rules that a man in his thirties is highly recommended to follow. The analysis draws on a theoretical framework, primarily associated with Fairclough’s version of Discourse Analysis, where genre and discourse are seen as two complementary categories informing two sets of textual meanings – actional and representational respectively. It is contended that one distinctive variation of the LI are texts that draw, as it were, on the instructive generic “form” and consumerist discourse “content”. Methodologically, the study relies on the analysis of the text’s schematic structure, its patterns of transitivity, as well as the analysis of presuppositions, and attitudinal and stance-taking locutions. Results of the analysis show that, as regards actional meanings, the most salient features of the text in question and similar texts found in lifestyle media are their well-defined generic structure and sentence speech function. The text starts with an introduction, which is then followed by several numbered paragraphs. Each paragraph instantiates an almost identical pattern of semantic relations and comprises a descriptive, motivational, and instructive phase. The most salient speech function used in the text is that of demand, which is realized either (congruently) by the imperative or (incongruently) by the declarative mood. Both these features and the tentative communicative purposes of the LI can be traced back to more traditional types of instructions. In terms of representational meanings, this and similar texts arguably draw on consumerist discourse. This is primarily manifested in ways the “appropriate” identity of a man in his thirties is constructed vis-à-vis consumer goods. Lexicogrammatically, the first participant of most processes is the addressee. This makes the addressee the main social subject of the practices referenced by the text, with consumer products being positioned as indispensable tools for the realization of these practices and enactment of the identity. Important resources in such positioning are attitudinal locutions, which are primarily used to evaluate consumer goods as “befitting” the referenced identity. The results contribute to the exploration of contemporary (Internet) genres in terms of linguistic features, the study of contextual embeddedness of genres, and the role of discourse in social practices at large. Specifically, the actional textual features can be seen as primarily reflecting the professional practice of lifestyle journalism with its distinctive set of communicative goals, while the representational features may be seen as manifestations of consumer culture and the role it plays in shaping people’s identities in today’s world.

SCOPUS_ID:85114165505

“Looking at” Negation: Faster Processing for Symbolic Rather Than Iconic Representations

Many studies have shown the double processing of negation, suggesting that negation integration into sentence meaning is delayed. This contrasts with some researches that have found that such integration is rather immediate. The present study contributes to this debate. Affirmative and negative compound sentences (e.g., “because he was not hungry, he did not order a salad”) were presented orally in a visual world paradigm while four printed words were on the screen: salad, no salad, soup, and no soup. The eye-tracking data showed two different fixation patterns for negative causal assertions, which are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands. One indicates that negation is integrated immediately, as people look at the explicit negation (e.g., no salad) very early. The other, in which people look at the alternate (e.g., soup) much later, indicates that what is delayed in time is the representation of the alternate. These results support theories that combine iconic and symbolic representations, such as the model theory.

SCOPUS_ID:85078448417

“Love Is as Complex as Math”: Metaphor Generation System for Social Chatbot

As the wide adoption of intelligent chatbot in human daily life, user demands for such systems evolve from basic task-solving conversations to more casual and friend-like communication. To meet the user needs and build emotional bond with users, it is essential for social chatbots to incorporate more human-like and advanced linguistic features. In this paper, the usage of a commonly used rhetorical device – metaphor – is investigated for social chatbot. Our work first designs a metaphor generation framework, which generates topic-aware and novel figurative sentences. Human annotators validate the novelty and properness of the generated metaphors. More importantly, we evaluate the effects of employing metaphors in human-chatbot conversations. Experiments indicate that our system effectively arouses user interests in communicating with our chatbot, resulting in significantly longer human-chatbot conversations.

https://aclanthology.org//W12-1603/

“Love ya, jerkface”: Using Sparse Log-Linear Models to Build Positive and Impolite Relationships with Teens

SCOPUS_ID:85148346280

“Luxe, calme et volupté” Matisse and Baudelaire – a Particular Form of transposition d’art

Around 1800 at the latest, the traditional aesthetic of representation was replaced by an aesthetic of effect. This had consequences for literature and art alike and thus at the same time for the interconnecting theorem Ut pictura poesis. Image and text no longer competed in the arena of subject matter, but rather in that of form, both visual and textual. Using the examples of a painting by Matisse (“Luxe, calme et volupté”) and a poem by Baudelaire (“L’Invitation au voyage”), the historically altered criteria of a transposition d’art will be presented.

SCOPUS_ID:84978229454

“Mahoshadha”, the Sinhala tagged corpus based question answering system

“Mahoshadha” the Sinhala Question Answering Systems aims at retrieving precise information from a large Sinhala tagged corpus. This paper describes a novel architecture for a Question Answering System which summarizes a tagged corpus and uses the summarization to generate the answers for a query. The summarized corpuses are categorized according to a set of topics enabling fast search for information. K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithms is used in order to cluster the summarized corpuses. The query will be tagged, the tagged query will be used to get more accurate results. Through the tagged query the question will be identified clearly with the category of the query. Support Vector Machine is used in order to both automate the summarization and question understanding. This will enable “Mahoshadha” to answer any type of query as well as summarize any type of Sinhala corpus. This enables the Question Answering System to be more useable through many applications.

SCOPUS_ID:85064819091

“Majorly adapted translator”: Towards major adaptation in ITS

Culturally Aware Learning Systems are intelligent systems that adapt learning materials or techniques to the culture of learners having different “country, hobbies, experiences, etc.”, helping them better understand the topics being taught. In higher education, many learning sessions involve students of different majors. As observed, many instructors tend to manually modify the exercises several times, once for every major to adapt to the culture, which is tedious and impractical. Therefore, in this paper we propose an approach to making learning sessions adaptable to the major of the learner. Specifically, this work introduces an Artificial Intelligent system, “Majorly Adapted Translator (MAT)”, which aims at translating and adapting exercises from one major to another. MAT has two main phases, the first identifies the parts of an exercise that needs changing and creates an exercise template. The second translates and adapts the exercise. This work, highlights the first phase, the Feature Extract phase, which relies on our own relation extraction method to identify variables which extracts relations specific to named entities by using dependency relations and shallow parsing. Moreover, we report the performance of the system that was tested on a number of probability exercises.

SCOPUS_ID:0026592875

“Man's Words" and Manly Comradeship

Critical assessments of Walt Whitman's works either emphasize his sexual themes while ignoring his political ideas or they focus on the poet's politics but ignore his poetics of corporeality. Recent studies that do discuss both politics and sexuality in Whiteman's works do not devote much attention if any to the poet's theory of language as it appears in his An American Primer. This essay explores the complex intersections among sexuality, politics, and language in Whitman's works, illustrating how the poet consistently correlated his linguistic, sexual, and poltical metaphors, constantly relating the health and the sexual potency of the male body with the power of language, the efficacy of literature, and the strength of the states in the United States. Underlying these multiple metaphors and poetic intentions is the poet's homosexual vision. It constitutes the basis of his linguistic theory, his hope of an ideal democratic union, and his plea for sexual equality. To Whitman, America needed male-to-male friendships to free it from materialistic vulgarities and to ensure its perpetuation. © 1992 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

SCOPUS_ID:84984688883

“Maniacal slaves:” normative misogyny and female resistors of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Iran

Feminist scholars the world over are increasingly aware of the importance of analyzing popular discourse, especially regarding women’s involvement in proscribed violence. Yet few have looked at Middle Eastern organizations, and fewer still at the Mojahedin-e Khalq Iran (MEK), a longstanding resistance group whose all-female leadership and sizeable female membership present a compelling challenge to prevailing gender norms. How do popular media portray female MEK resistors and what might these representations signify for our gendered conceptions of violence? In examining the MEK’s female leadership, this article undertakes a close reading of western and Iranian news coverage in an attempt to analyze the degree to which these women are painted as willful political agents or, as is often assumed, irrational actors incapable of autonomous political participation. Following Sjoberg and Gentry, I develop four cognitive frames to describe female resistors, while also challenging the media’s victimizing and sexualizing gaze. I thus problematize these women’s portrayals as “maniacal slaves,” and explain how such gendered rhetoric operates to preclude the notion that members of the MEK might practice legitimate political resistance worthy of analysis or understanding.

SCOPUS_ID:85145088489

“Matching Learning”: Profiling and Clustering Users on Tinder Based on Emotion and Sentiment Analysis

Emotion and sentiment analysis tools offer the possibility of detecting emotion in several ways. In this paper, we study IBM Watson’s Natural Language Understanding (Emotion and Sentiment), and CoreNLP’s Sentiment Analysis accuracy levels against an annotated dataset, so as to observe any difference when comparing a discrete emotion classification approach (Watson’s Emotion) versus a one-dimensional approach (Watson and CoreNLP’s Sentiment). We have found that one-dimensional approaches were more accurate (85.5% for Watson, 62.7% for CoreNLP) than the discrete approach (37.6%). Being aware of those accuracy rates, and how they classified those emotions, we use those same services to analyse Tinder biographies, and observe how users present themselves, and finally applying clustering algorithms to analyse any trends between the emotion and sentiment of their biographies and other markers, such as age, gender, location, etc. After analysing the biographies, we have observed a tendency for more Neutral presentations (45–70%), followed by Positive (15–38%) presentations, though IBM Watson’s sentiment over classified joyful presentations (73%). In terms of clustering, we observe three distinct groups according to the emotional tone of their biographies, and the information provided. With this, we aim to contribute a better understanding on how two widely used emotion and sentiment analysis tools compare against each other, and how users can be classified according to the emotional/sentiment tones of their biographies.

SCOPUS_ID:85137986480

“Meanspo Please, I Want to Lose Weight”: A Characterization Study of Meanspiration Content on Tumblr Based on Images and Texts

Past research has demonstrated a linkage between social media usage and disordered eating habits and body dissatisfaction. Trends relating to eating disorders develop around specific hashtags in communities in social networking sites such as Tumblr. One of these trends is #meanspiration, a tag that is used to request and give mean messages from/to social media users to inspire them to lose weight. In this study, images and texts of Meanspiration posts are automatically analyzed based on colorfulness, the images’ emotional measures pleasure, arousal and dominance, whereas the textual information of the posts is evaluated based on sentiments, emotions and readability. These characteristics are used in a classification task to distinguish Meanspiration from regular content on Tumblr with 81% accuracy.

SCOPUS_ID:85104722820

“Measuring the Mix” of Policy Responses to COVID-19: Comparative Policy Analysis Using Topic Modelling

Although understanding initial responses to a crisis such as COVID-19 is important, existing research on the topic has not been systematically comparative. This study uses topic modeling to inductively analyze over 13,000 COVID-19 policies worldwide. This technique enables the COVID-19 policy mixes to be characterized and their cross-country variation to be compared. Significant variation was found in the intensity, density, and balance of policy mixes adopted across countries, over time, and by level of government. This study advances research on policy responses to the pandemic, specifically, and the operationalization of policy mixes, more generally.

SCOPUS_ID:85127731460

“Men are not raised to share feelings” Exploring Male Patients’ Discourses on Participating in Group Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Existing literature on the psychology of men and masculinity indicates that men face specific mental health difficulties. Overall, men seem more reluctant to seek out mental health services than women. This study explores the ways in which seven male patients talk about their experiences of participating in cognitive-behavioral group therapy in the context of outpatient Danish mental health services. Employing a discourse analytical approach, this study investigates how traditional masculinity ideals affect the men’s accounts of participating in cognitive behavioral group therapy. The analysis indicates that traditional masculinity informs the interpretative repertoires men apply to describe their preconceptions of therapy and engaging in therapy. In turn, these common-sense understandings make certain subject positions available, which may be gendered. The relevance of the findings for future gender sensitive psychotherapy practice with men is discussed.

SCOPUS_ID:85138244655

“Mobs” or “Pro-democracy Protesters”: A Comparative Analysis of US and Chinese News Discourses of Domestic and Foreign Protests

This article comparatively analyzes discourses that U.S. newspaper, The New York Times, and Chinese news outlet, The Global Times, constructed about the Hong Kong and Black Lives Matter protests. It finds that as Sino-U.S. relations have deteriorated to the lowest point in this century (Usher 2020), the selected U.S. news coverage of the domestic and international protests appeared to correspond to the tense relations. Nonetheless, the chosen Chinese news media’s negative portrayal of the overseas protesters suggests that in addition to international relations, a country’s racial background and national ideologies might also contribute to how news discourses about domestic and international protests are constructed.

SCOPUS_ID:85150367720

“Molière amoché”: Discourse on the quality of English-speaking Canadian politicians’ French in Canadian news media coverage of the 2020 conservative leadership debate

“In the course of a federal electoral campaign in Canada, the French language ability of the candidates is widely discussed in both French-language and English-language media. This article proposes a discourse analysis of a representative sample of articles recovered in both French-language (20) and English-language (15) online news publications targeting the French language proficiency of candidates who have participated in the 2020 Conservative leadership French-language debate. Through an examination of representations of the French language and French language ability, the study develops a comparative analysis of the evaluation of French language ability of English-speaking Canadian politicians in the French-language and English-language Canadian media in a comparative perspective, demonstrating that the divergent language representations and the ideologies they underpin condition a number of differences between the two respective discourses: the overwhelmingly negatively constructed commentary in the French-language corpus, the construal of French language ability as an acquirable skill and a tool of communication by English Canadian journalists and as an intrinsic faculty by French Canadian journalists, and the positing of a monolingual educated native speaker as a standard in French Canadian journalistic metadiscourse on language, with no such standard discernible in the English Canadian discourse. Crucially, in examining the ways in which the two discourses interact, and, potentially, influence one another, the analysis shows the reproduction of discourse to be unidirectional, with French-language discourse influencing its English-language counterpart. This finding suggests an important role of language ideologies circulating in the French-language press in judging French language ability in Canada, which can be problematic for bilingual speakers and adult learners of French, such as English-speaking Canadian politicians.”

SCOPUS_ID:85087569842

“Mongering Is a Weird Life Sometimes”: Discourse Analysis of a Sex Buyer Online Community

The purpose of this study was to examine the narrative of sex buyers in an unmoderated online forum. Using a feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) and intersectionality approach, we investigated overt and subtle ways power inequalities were present in the discourse of men who bought sex in Chicago. Four main themes emerged: (a) toxic masculinity; (b) violence against women; (c) intersectionality of sexuality, race, and age; and (d) the need to maintain the community. Our findings imply that johns’ self-described monger identity is closely associated with maintaining, perpetrating, and minimizing violence against women.

SCOPUS_ID:85126042334

“Multimodal Sensory Marketing” in retailing: the role of intra- and intermodality transductions

The objective of this article is to show how sensory marketing can benefit from taking a multimodal and social semiotic perspective. For this purpose, the framework of “Multimodal Sensory Marketing” is suggested. Important pillars for the scaffolding of this framework are intra–and intermodality transductions. Based on the understanding of retail environments as spatial texts, this article distinguishes between store exterior texts, store interior texts, and customer texts (movements and interactions). The originality of this article resides in the demonstration of how retailers may choose and combine different sensory modes in their meaning making of theme-based retail texts. Intermodality transductions are of particular importance, since they increase the co-occurrence of sensory modes, the intensity of their interplay, and ultimately, may enhance favorable consumer behavior. Transductive links support such transduction processes. Managerial implications and directions for future research are provided.

SCOPUS_ID:84926392940

“My Family Isn’t Racist—However…”: Multiracial/Multicultural Obama-ism as an Ideological Barrier to Teaching Intercultural Communication

We analyzed via critical discourse analysis undergraduate essays from multiple sections of an introductory intercultural communication course to interrogate underlying ideology/ies that influence intercultural communication education. “Multicultural/Multiracial Obama-ism (MMO)” is coined to expose the reconfiguration of multiracial/multicultural Americans as new signifiers of a “post-racial” utopia under the Obama presidency. The dominant ideology of MMO is constructed and reinforced through three central frames: (1) meritocracy: achieving the American dream through hard work; (2) individualism: identity as self-chosen, not born into; and (3) universalism: equality of opportunities despite privilege. We conclude with theoretical and teaching implications of MMO in a “post-racial” society.

SCOPUS_ID:85100895799

“My Stutter Has Put Me on the outside”: Young South African Muslim Men Who Stutter Talk about Masculinities and Religion

Presently, limited studies have explored how disabled Muslim men construct their masculinities. The present article examines how five young adult Muslim men in the Western Cape, who stutter, talk about their masculinities. A series of semi-interviews were conducted with these men. These semi-structured interviews were analyzed according to Edley’s guide to discourse analysis. The findings showed that Islam played an instrumental role in men’s discourses of masculinities. At the same time, participants indicated experiencing disablism as men who stutter, which resulted in them either resisting or reformulating dominant forms of masculinities. Implications for future research is discussed.

SCOPUS_ID:85087927121

“My hair, my crown”. Examining black Brazilian women’s anti-racist discursive strategies on social media

For a long time, Brazil has fostered the image of a post-racial society; however, data reveals that: a) racism against black women remains strongly ingrained in the collective mind-set, b) social media has become a breeding ground for the construction and dissemination of racist ideologies, and c) black women encompass the predominant target of racist discourses on social media. Thus, this qualitative study explores anti-racist discourses fostered by black Brazilian women on social media. Employing critical discourse analysis in a selection of publicly available Facebook posts, the study reveals that narratives praising an Afro hairstyle embody a relevant political positioning resisting Brazil’s deep-seated gendered racism. They aim, first, to challenge Brazil’s hegemonic “whitened” beauty standard; second, to convey a renewed perception of black esthetics as a legitimate source of ethnic identity; and, finally, they represent a strong symbolic element to manifest black women’s agency and empowerment.

SCOPUS_ID:85067383961

“My pen is in my hand”: An investigation of lexical activation in English-Afrikaans general bilinguals, professional translators and professional interpreters

Ample psycholinguistic research has been done into the activation of the mental lexicon of the bilingual person and especially whether this activation is language selective (when only the language in use is activated, whilst the other language is completely deactivated) or language nonselective (when the language not in use is not completely deactivated, but merely inactive).1 Researchers who have studied this phenomenon employed three kinds of words to test their hypotheses, namely interlingual homographs (words with the same form, but different meanings), interlingual cognates (words with the same form and meaning) and interlingual neighbours (words with very similar yet not the exact form, but different meanings). These methodologies typically embed these words in otherwise unilingual sentences (sentences that are grammatically and syntactically possible in only one language). The need has been expressed, however, to use a more natural context. This article describes the methodology that De Bruin (2018) designed to determine whether language-selective or language-nonselective activation occurs in general (non-professional) bilinguals, professional translators and professional interpreters. To achieve this, the methodology employs two of these word types, namely interlingual homographs and interlingual cognates, but extends these to sentence level, i.e. interlingual homographic sentences and interlingual cognate sentences in Afrikaans and English. In the former, the sentences have the same form and order in both languages, but they differ in meaning; in the latter, the sentences display the same word order, form and meaning in both languages. In this way, De Bruin (2018) attempts to enrich the research context from a word to a sentence level, i.e. from lexeme to sentence level, thereby satisfying the need for a more natural context. This methodology is further designed to incorporate different types of bilinguals (general bilinguals, professional translators and professional interpreters) to investigate whether professional translators and professional interpreters present with a higher level of language-nonselective activation than general bilinguals. An experimental task consisting of five sentence groups with four sentences each in a specific order forms part of the research design. Respondents are required to read these sentences aloud, which are displayed in a particular sequence one after the other on a computer screen. The first sentence group starts with a unilingual sentence to ensure that the respondent is primed in a specific language. This sentence is followed by a perfect cognate sentence (which, it is assumed, the respondent would also read in the same language). The third sentence, which serves as the target sentence, is in the opposite language than the first sentence, but in such a way that it closely resembles the primed language but violates the grammar rules of the primed language. The reaction of the respondent points to either language-selective or language-nonselective activation. If, for example, respondents do not recognise the newly-introduced, “correct” language by correcting their error (either by rereading or completing the sentence in the “correct” language), this can be taken to point to language-selective activation because the “correct” language had not been activated. However, if the “correct” language is recognised and used, this can be regarded as language-nonselective activation. Whenever the researcher experiences difficulty in clearly establishing either types of activation, the result is recorded as undetermined. An important component of the research methodology is the identification and inclusion of respondents. To clearly define and delineate the three respondent groups – general bilinguals, professional translators and professional interpreters – strict inclusion criteria and minimum requirements are applied that respondents must meet. These are based on ethical considerations, as well as criteria relating to language proficiency, language skills and language use. The professional translators and professional interpreters are furthermore subject to strict requirements to ensure their professionalism, which are based on experience, income, language proficiency and language use, as well as membership of and accreditation with professional language organisations. The results obtained by applying this novel methodology complement existing evidence to support theories of language-nonselective activation of the mental lexicon of the bilingual person (Dijkstra, Timmermans & Schriefers 2000; Nakayama & Archibald 2005; Kerkhofs et al. 2006; and Szubko-Sitarek 2015) and can be explained in terms of current theories and models of lexical activation in bilinguals, most notably the BIA (1998) and the BIA+ (2002) models of Dijkstra and Van Heuven. Moreover, it provides evidence that professional translators and professional interpreters may demonstrate a higher level of language-nonselective activation compared to general bilinguals. However, as a result of the relatively small sample sizes the results of the study are not generalisable to larger populations.

SCOPUS_ID:85065675542

“My right-hand man” versus “We barely make use of them”: change leaders talking about educational scientists in curriculum change processes—a Membership Categorization Analysis

Health professions education scholarship units (HPESUs) are increasingly becoming a standard for medical schools worldwide without having much information about their value and role in actual educational practices, particularly of those who work in these units, the educational scientists. We conducted a linguistic analysis, called Membership Categorization Analysis, of interviews with leaders of recent curriculum changes to explore how they talk about educational scientists in relation to these processes. The analysis was conducted on previously collected interview data with nine change leaders of major undergraduate medical curriculum change processes in the Netherlands. We analyzed how change leaders categorize HPESUs and educational scientists (use of category terms) and what they say about them (predicates). We noticed two ways of categorizing educational scientists, with observable different predicates. Educational scientists categorized by their first name were suggested to be closer to the change process, more involved in decisional practices and positively described, whereas those described in more generic terms were represented in terms of relatively passive and unspecified activities, were less explicit referenced for their knowledge and expertise and were predominantly factually or negatively described. This study shows an ambiguous portrayal of educational scientists by leaders of major curriculum change processes. Medical schools are challenged to establish medical curricula in consultation with a large, diverse and interdisciplinary stakeholder group. We suggest that it is important to invest in interpersonal relationships to strengthen the internal collaborations and make sure people are aware of each other’s existence and roles in the process of curriculum development.

SCOPUS_ID:85095782671

“My tutor doesn’t say that”: The legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices

In the construction of teachers’ professional knowledge, reflective practices are a fundamental tool that responds to the need to connect theoretical principles with practical resources and to the improvement of teaching by means of critical analysis. The Practicum, as a dialogic structure for the explanation and interpretation of teaching practices, provides teachers in training an opportunity to build their own understanding based on dialogue and reflection. Invocation is one of the resources used to legitimize scientific or disciplinary knowledge in joint reflection. Qualified voices are called and made present in classroom discourse to validate descriptions or explanations. We are interested in defining the profile of the invocations introduced in dialogic reflection, as sources of legitimation of knowledge, and identify the patterns in the sequence of the invocations' appearance. This work consists of an exploratory study of multiple cases, in which each case is a classroom unit composed of a tutor and her student teachers. Two cases from the Practicum in a Primary Education Teacher Degree were selected. A category system was developed for the analysis of invocations and organized into four dimensions: academic or professional knowledge, experiential knowledge, invocation of truth, and invocation of ideology or values. Results allow us to highlight some relevant conclusions. Invocations are a widespread resource in a process of dialogic reflection to legitimize the interpretation of educational practices. The participation of student teachers in dialogic reflection is possible and abundant thanks to the experience of the Practicum, which provides a validity criterion for their arguments, supported by the invocation to the authority of teaching experiences. In this study, tutors’ efforts to connect pedagogical principles with personal experiences in the Practicum have not clearly translated into student reflections in the same direction. The paper finishes paying attention to the competencies and training that Practicum tutors need.

SCOPUS_ID:84968188641

“Nature’s Silent Eloquence”: Disembodied Organic Language in Shelley’s Queen Mab

This article is a close reading of Shelley’s Queen Mab in light of the tensions between theories of language as organic-the pervasive view of the English Romantic poets-and theories of language as arbitrary, which can be allied with Locke and the empiricists. The paradox of linguistic expression is recast as a dialectic between free utterance (parole) and language as code or law (langue), because for Shelley freedom is equated with organicism and tyranny with arbitrary linguistic structure. Rousseau’s doubling of Prometheus into two antithetical characters-the bringer of language and the prophet of linguistic doom-in order to preface and explain his Discours sur les sciences et les arts, functions as a commentary on the paradoxical combination of the organic and the conventional, the free and the restricted in verbal communication. Queen Mab, set against the backdrop of this Rousseauvian paradox, is analyzed for the ways in which it thematizes language through various explicit comments about arbitrary or conventionalized language and imaginative or organic uses of language, and also through certain figures for different kinds of verbal expression and reception. The apparent disjunctions in Queen Mab between imagination and reason, affective and rational discourse, are crucial to the aims of the poem: the bringing of reform without the institution of new dogma. © 1993, The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

SCOPUS_ID:85136505135

“Needs to Put in More Effort”: How Teacher Deficit Beliefs Frame the Moral Worth of Latinx Children and Families in School-based Discourses

This article presents an ethnographic case study of how deficit beliefs shape the ways teachers call upon Latinx emergent bilinguals and families to engage in the schooling process. Informed by theories of language socialization, this study examines how one second-grade bilingual teacher called upon students and families of Mexican origin to demonstrate moral responsibility for schooling. Findings indicate how the teacher invoked a neoliberal moral discourse to critique student and parent effort and attempted to remediate the “low” literacy levels of three students by emphasizing the importance of hard work for success. In their homes, the students and families used various strategies to fulfill the teacher’s raciolinguistic expectations for the display of hard work but remained marginalized from engagement in school-based routines.

SCOPUS_ID:85070209802

“Never fry carrots without chopping” Generating Cooking Recipes from Cooking Videos Using Deep Learning Considering Previous Process

Research on deep-training captioning models that modify the natural-language contents of images and moving images has produced considerable results and attracted attention in recent years. In this research, we aim to generate recipe sentences from cooking videos acquired from YouTube. We treat this as an image-captioning task and propose two methods suitable for the work. We propose a method that adds a vector of a sentence already generated in the same recipe to the input of a captioning model. Then, we compare generated and correct sentences to calculate scores. We also propose a data-processing method to improve accuracy. We use several widely used metrics to evaluate image-captioning problems. We then train the same data with the simplest encoder-decoder model, compare it with correct recipe sentences, and calculate the metrics. The results indicate that our proposed methods help increase accuracy.

SCOPUS_ID:85147575345

“No Bare Bottoms”: The Responsibilization of the Good Gay Citizen in Icelandic Media Discourses 1990–2010

This article explores how gay men in Iceland were constructed as good responsible citizens through neoliberal discourses from 1990 to 2010. Drawing on interviews with gay men in Icelandic magazines, we focus on three discursive formations of responsibilization that reveal the technologies of agency at play in transforming the men into good, responsible gay citizens capable of self-management. The discursive formations focus on the good gay citizen who (a) has a positive mind-set, (b) transforms himself, and (c) displaces responsibility for personal harm. They reveal how gay men are constituted as neoliberal subjects through discursive practices linked to responsibility, happiness, and national progress. These practices enable a normalization process devoid of confrontation, anger, or blame where gay men are not only made responsible for their own lives but also the marginalization they experienced in the past.

SCOPUS_ID:85150238788

“No one is talking about food”: making agriculture a “business” in Ghana

At the turn of the 21st century,a collection of donors created the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa(AGRA) to spark a "new" Green Revolution on the African continent. Since its inception, AGRA's mission has revolved around a series of interventions designed around the idea of making agriculture a "business". In this paper, I ask how AGRA puts such discourses into practice with a particular focus in Ghana. To do so, I Draw on a television show produced ny AGRA called kuapa, organizational literature, and to a lesser extent, interviews, to assess how AGRA materializes its goals in Ghana. Ultimately, I argue that a focus on discourse not only provides inisight into hoe AGRA conceptualizes agricultural transformation, but also how AGRA pursues agronomic, political, and social changes in the countries in which it intervenes.

SCOPUS_ID:84992027303

“Nobody Told Me They Didn’t Speak English!”: Teacher Language Views and Student Linguistic Repertoires in Hutterite Colony Schools in Canada

This article presents a qualitative study of five monolingual teachers’ understandings of the linguistic repertoires of their multilingual students. These teachers deliver the Saskatchewan provincial curricula in English to Hutterite colony students who are users of three languages: (a) spoken Hutterisch as a home and community language, (b) written High German as a language for religious worship, and (c) spoken and written English for school and for communication outside the colony. Findings from this study demonstrate that the teachers report having had limited or inaccurate understandings of their students’ linguistic repertoires prior to beginning their teaching positions. Secondly, the teacher participants’ awareness of the students’ language resources was, and is, an ongoing process. Finally, the willingness and ability to cultivate hybrid language use of Hutterisch and English varies from teacher to teacher. The article concludes with discussion of considerations for teacher education and in-service teachers working in Hutterite communities.

SCOPUS_ID:85141728897

“Not Our Revolution”: A Thematic Review of Fourth Industrial Revolution Criticism

This article offers a thematic review of criticism directed at high-level public discourse surrounding the South African Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) agenda. While the South African adoption of the World Economic Forum's 4IR strategy for economic growth and skills development has been met with widespread enthusiasm, it has also attracted considerable criticism. This article thus seeks to offer insight into the debate surrounding the legitimacy and contextual propriety of the South African 4IR agenda. Insofar as the local criticism directed at the 4IR agenda reflects international criticism of the concept, the first part of this article draws on global critiques to explore objections raised against the 4IR's constitutive legitimacy. The second part of the article identifies critical themes surrounding more locally specific rejections of the 4IR agenda, such as it being an imported and contextually inappropriate framework for addressing local problems. Finally, I analyse an editorial cartoon that captures the various grounds on which the South African 4IR agenda is commonly critiqued. While this article provides insight into a particular public policy controversy, it also elucidates some general oppositional values as expressed by critics in their assessment of development rhetoric.

SCOPUS_ID:85128859112

“Not by Our Feeling, But by Other's Seeing”: Sentiment Analysis Technique in Cardiology—An Exploratory Review

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a novel branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that measures emotions or attitudes behind a written text. First applications of SA in healthcare were the detection of disease-related emotional polarities in social media. Now it is possible to extract more complex attitudes (rank attitudes from 1 to 5, assign appraisal values, apply multiple text classifiers) or feelings through NLP techniques, with clear benefits in cardiology; as emotions were proved to be veritable risk factors for the development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Our narrative review aimed to summarize the current directions of SA in cardiology and raise the awareness of cardiologists about the potentiality of this novel domain. This paper introduces the readers to basic concepts surrounding medical SA and the need for SA in cardiovascular healthcare. Our synthesis of the current literature proved SA's clinical potential in CVD. However, many other clinical utilities, such as the assessment of emotional consequences of illness, patient-physician relationship, physician intuitions in CVD are not yet explored. These issues constitute future research directions, along with proposing detailed regulations, popularizing health social media among elders, developing insightful definitions of emotional polarity, and investing research into the development of powerful SA algorithms.

SCOPUS_ID:85134892178

“Note Bloat” impacts deep learning-based NLP models for clinical prediction tasks

One unintended consequence of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) implementation is the overuse of content-importing technology, such as copy-and-paste, that creates “bloated” notes containing large amounts of textual redundancy. Despite the rising interest in applying machine learning models to learn from real-patient data, it is unclear how the phenomenon of note bloat might affect the Natural Language Processing (NLP) models derived from these notes. Therefore, in this work we examine the impact of redundancy on deep learning-based NLP models, considering four clinical prediction tasks using a publicly available EHR database. We applied two deduplication methods to the hospital notes, identifying large quantities of redundancy, and found that removing the redundancy usually has little negative impact on downstream performances, and can in certain circumstances assist models to achieve significantly better results. We also showed it is possible to attack model predictions by simply adding note duplicates, causing changes of correct predictions made by trained models into wrong predictions. In conclusion, we demonstrated that EHR text redundancy substantively affects NLP models for clinical prediction tasks, showing that the awareness of clinical contexts and robust modeling methods are important to create effective and reliable NLP systems in healthcare contexts.

SCOPUS_ID:84945231547

“Now we are going on a Journey”: Meaning-Making with a Healthcare Game during Toddlers’ Medical Treatment

This study explores how toddlers and caregivers make meaning with an interactive healthcare game on a tablet during medical treatment. The data material consists of video recordings of six nebuliser treatments of two children. Using a social semiotic perspective and a multimodal analysis, the study identifies how children and caregivers make meaning with the game, defined as a multimodal text, through creating text events. The findings illustrate how the participants’ meaning-making in the text events appears to have a narrative and an analytical orientation. It is suggested that the potential of healthcare games lies in the creation of text events where the game constitutes a shared focus. When children and caregivers share their meaning-making orientations, the medical treatment can be brought into the background.

SCOPUS_ID:85096975579

“Now, What Exactly is the Problem?“ Media Coverage of Economic Inequalities and Redistribution Policies: The Piketty Case

Abstract: A clear sign of the heightened interest in economic inequality was the surprising popularity of Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty‐First Century, presenting a dense synopsis and major contribution to the economics of inequality. This article investigates discourses on inequality in news media, through the highly controversial debate raised by Piketty's best‐selling book, in selected print media in four European countries. We conceive of the media as having an impact on the perceptions and knowledge of economic processes #thus influencing preferences of the public for economic policy making. This is in line with Veblen #who terms the press an “educational system.” Regarding the topics of inequality; we will show that media coverage leads to a biased picture of both inequality and the role of redistribution policies to possibly curb such a development.

SCOPUS_ID:85047378499

“Objection, Your Honor”: Use of Social Media by Civilians to Challenge the Criminal Justice System

Social media constitute useful and effective platforms for miscarriage of justice campaigners to challenge state authorities and decisions taken by the criminal justice system. To characterize such endeavors, this study analyzes the activity in such a major group dedicated to the murder case of Tair Rada and the trial of Roman Zadorov, one of the most controversial legal cases in Israel’s history. Using digital data extraction and linguistic analysis tools, we focus on five themes: (1) the central role of group administrators in directing the discourse and setting the group agenda; (2) correspondence of group activity with off-line events and mainstream media coverage; (3) skewed distribution of post publications per user and engagement measures per post; (4) prominent topics in group discussions, revolving around key figures, institutions and officials, making justice, considering alternative theories and examining investigative and forensic materials; and (5) the framing of key figures, institutions, and values in portraying a somewhat dichotomous image of a corrupted justice system, an innocent man wrongly convicted and a Facebook group in the search for the truth.

SCOPUS_ID:85084189424

“On the left side, there’s nothing right. On the right side, there’s nothing left:” polarization of political opinion by news media

Political opinions as expressed by the news media have created the phenomenon of polarization in the United States. Modern news agencies have always considered objectivity as being of primary importance. When opinions inadvertently color the facts, the resulting information manipulation can create confusion, and chaos. This study attempts to understand the language differences as expressed by the U.S. news media in the conveyance of political opinions, and to identify predictive language-action cues that can differentiate writing styles of right-wing news media from those of left-wing news media on Twitter. Original tweets from news media agencies were collected and analyzed using logistical regression analysis during September 2019. The study identifies a statistical significance with regards to cognitive loads, analytical thinking, and political sentiment profiles of tweets to allow for better ways of differentiating political opinions between the news media, from right-wing to left-wing. This suggests that news media of the left-wing and right-wing could employ more neutral writing styles to reduce political polarization. The study contributes to our understanding of the language strategies employed by the news media in terms of influencing the public opinions.

SCOPUS_ID:84991769459

“Orbiting the core”: Politics and the meaning of dialect in Chinese linguistics, 1927-1957

In 1956, the Chinese Communist state launched its official language policy, which included the promulgation of a standard spoken language, called Putonghua. Their justification for this policy and their methods for implementation were guided by intellectual and ideological frameworks that formed during decades preceding the policy’s rollout. In particular, Communist language reform was predicated on the conceptualization of Putonghua as a holistic language meant to serve the national body—and of local dialects, called fangyan in Chinese, as dependent on Putonghua for their very definition. This article interrogates the history of this framework. Focusing on dialect surveys from the 1930s, Chinese interpretations of Marxist linguistic theory in the early years of the Communist state, and methods of Putonghua promulgation in the late 1950s, this article reconstructs the epistemological regimes that gave meaning to the concept of independence and autonomy as they related to language in modern China.

SCOPUS_ID:85021662605

“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.

SCOPUS_ID:0642314261

“Ourselves Among Others”: A New Metaphor for Business and Technical Writing

Business and technical writing grows out of a need to “build bridges” between ourselves and others. With today's diversifying readerships and increasingly global marketplace, business and industry face a new challenge that is reshaping our conception of business/technical writing and the metaphors of the genre. The metaphors of “selling” and “reader-centeredness” demand especially to be recast and subordinated to a new metaphor of interculturalism/ internationalism—“ourselves among others.” Grounded in a social theory of language and communication, this new metaphor signifies that “bridge-building” across differences will be the key in contexts becoming at once more heterogeneous and global. © 1992, (publisher). All rights reserved.

SCOPUS_ID:85113815957

“Oya let's go to Nigeria” a corpus-based investigation of bilingual pragmatic markers in Nigerian English

This paper examines five bilingual pragmatic markers: oya, ke, ni, walahi, and ba, loaned from indigenous Nigerian languages into Nigerian English, with a view to investigating their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling stability, positions, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data for the study were obtained from the International Corpus of English-Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the Global Web-based English corpus. These were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, using the theory of pragmatic borrowing. The results show that oya, ke, and ni are borrowed from Yoruba, walahi is loaned from Arabic through Hausa and Yoruba while ba is borrowed from Hausa. Oya serves as an attention marker, ke and ni function as emphasis markers, walahi serves as an emphatic manner of speaking marker while ba functions as an attention marker and agreement-seeking marker. The study highlights the influence of indigenous Nigerian languages on the discourse-pragmatic features of Nigerian English.

SCOPUS_ID:85131305462

“PERSONAS IN DISCOURSE”. CREATING AND DEFENDING CINEMATIC IDENTITIES: THE CASE OF TROPIC THUNDER

The purpose of this paper is to identify the strategies resorted to by a specific individual to defend their identity in discourse. The individual focused on in this paper is an actor, Robert Downey Jr., and the discourse events analyzed are the speeches produced on the public occasions in which the actor intervened in defence of the fictional character he had chosen to portray for Tropic Thunder, a 2009 action comedy. In the movie, in fact, Downey Jr. plays a pretentious method actor who decides to undergo a controversial pigmentation alteration surgery to darken his skin in order to play an African American character. I study, through a sociolinguistic analysis, how Robert Downey Jr. defended his persona from the accusations of blackface and racism. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of four manually transcribed interviews, in which the actor appears to have used three main strategies to protect himself: the use of narration, the use of direct speech and the use of the first person singular, which are – according to recent developments in identity studies – the main strategies the individual puts in place to shape and defend the self. In the last part of the study, I compare the case of Robert Downey Junior with a very similar one regarding the actress Scarlett Johansson, accused of yellowface and whitewashing for playing an Asian role in the 2017 movie Ghost in the Shell.

SCOPUS_ID:85143129170

“PRIMER BOOK FOR VOTYAK CHILDREN OF THE SARAPUL DISTRICT”: GRAPHIC, SPELLING, AND PHONETIC FEATURES

The article describes the vowel and consonant features of the “Primer book for Votyak children of the Sarapul district” (1913). It is practically impossible to consider the phonetic isoglosses of this written record without taking into account its graphic and spelling system; therefore, the article also pays special attention to the graphics and orthography of the source material. The phonetic features are described by comparing the vowel and consonant system of the primer with the vowel and consonant system of the modern Udmurt literary language, adding, whenever available, correspondences from the dialect dictionary by Y. Wichmann [Wichmann 1987], the materials for which were collected at the end of the 19th century. Furthermore, corresponding modern forms from the audio dictionaries based on 2013 field data are also indicated. Such a comparison makes it possible to try to determine the archaic or innovative nature of each identified feature. The analysis shows that most of the phonetic features of the primer, both innovative and archaic, are characteristic of modern dialects of the Southern dialect zone. It follows that this record was most likely written in one of the dialects located on the border of the Middle and Central-Southern dialects of the Udmurt language, i. e. its present-day counterpart would be the dialect of the northern part of the Malopurginsky district of the Udmurt Republic. However, it turns out to be difficult to locate it more precisely at the moment as, unfortunately, this area is described by dialectologists rather poorly today.

SCOPUS_ID:84924981461

“Paradigm Change” or No Real Change At All? A Critical Reading of the U.N. Principles for Responsible Management Education

Proponents of the transformative potential of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) claim that their adoption could lead to a “paradigm change” in business schools, thus addressing many of the sustained critiques of the sector in recent years. However, this claim and the PRME themselves have to date not been subjected to systematic scrutiny from a Critical Management Education perspective. Applying a critical discourse analysis methodology, this article evaluates how business schools and management education are positioned in key PRME documentation and the Sharing Information on Progress reports of U.K. business school signatories to the PRME. A key finding is that the PRME discourse assumes and promotes a problematic understanding of management education that includes a positioning of business schools as servants of the corporate sector. The impact of this and other assumptions undermines any “paradigm change” claim. Conclusions identify potential discursive and organizational strategies to nurture a more critical, learning-centered PRME discourse.

SCOPUS_ID:85009477112

“Part of speech tagging – A corpus based approach”

POS tagging, an ideal way to augment a corpus is an imperative abstraction for text mining. However with an increase in the amount of linguistic errors and distinctive fashion of language ambiguities, the data filtered by POS tagging is noisier. In this paper, probabilistic tagging and tagging based on Markov models are combined to estimate the association probabilities. Based on this combined approach, error estimation model is defined. Comparison study is made on different corpus available in NLTK such as Crubadan, Brown and INSPEC. The results obtained by the proposed methodologies show a drastic increase in the accuracy rate of about 98% when compared to the existing algorithms which shows an average of 96% accurate. The performance measure is plotted to calculate the error ratio across the maximum-likelihood estimation.

SCOPUS_ID:84960824948

“Paying tax is part of life”: Social norms and social influence in tax communications

A number of studies on taxpayer interaction, from large-scale surveys to field experiments, reveal that people's tax compliance attitudes and behavior change after they discuss tax with other taxpayers. However, we know very little about the content of these communications and the processes by which they produce changes in tax compliance. To address this knowledge gap, we employed an in-depth analysis of naturally-occurring online discussions about income tax among software developers. Using a discourse analytic framework, we report an empirical analysis of 120 online interactions between taxpayers, providing a categorization of these interactions. Interactions ranged from asking for information about tax regulations and receiving such information, to a variety of interactions aimed at persuading defiant individuals to comply with tax laws. These persuasion techniques varied from stating the benefits of compliance, to threats of severe economic and reputational consequences. Overall, this study is the first in-depth empirical investigation of social influence processes in taxpayer communication. We discuss how the results inform research into social norms and tax compliance, tax communication in social networks, and persuasive messaging in tax compliance campaigns.

SCOPUS_ID:85076607847

“People”, “popular”, “(do) povo”: Minorizing and reading easing effects on the so-called popular encyclopaedias

In this article, we make efforts to investigate the meaning effects of the signifiers “povo” and “people” (among others related to them) present in encyclopaedias and in interaction with some adjectives. Our aim is to analyse how ideology works on them, constituting evident effects over them in instruments that validate—or may do so—dominant ideologies. Thus, we keep on a tradition of works that analyse how the meanings of the significant (and category) “people” (e. g. Orlandi, 2003; Lima, 1990) constitute themselves, formulate themselves and also circulate, since we understand there’s still so much to produce about it on the intersection of language studies and other areas. Trying to comprehend what “povo” means when an encyclopaedia calls itself “popular”, we chose as corpus two encyclopaedias written in different languages, though published at the same decade: 1871’s Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: a Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People, volume I, and 1879’s Encyclopedia popular. Pêcheux’s Discourse Analysis is our theoretical framework, namely, the notions of archive and imaginary. Still, we refer to the definitions of “povo” on Dicionário Aurélio and “people” on Cambridge Dictionary Online. Finally, we verify that the discourse about the “povo”/ “popular”, about what Chambers’s Encyclopaedia call “common people”, operates as a single meaning regularity, as a kind of paraphrasis that divides States in social classes that end up being associated not only to capital power, but also to intellectual capacities.

SCOPUS_ID:85105364704

“Picture this!”: The educational value of illustrations in the process of teaching l2 to young learners

The significant role that picturebooks play in early L2 education and materials development has been thoroughly discussed in recent years (e.g., Dean & Grierson, 2005; Roser, 2012; Mourão, 2016; Wang & Lin, 2019). One of the most apparent differences between a textbook and a picturebook is the changing dynamics of text and image. One of the major aims of this chapter is to explore the educational potential hidden in the visual aspects of four picturebooks (i.e., Goodnight Moon, The Giving Tree, Little Beauty, and Home). The picturebooks were analysed from a multimodal perspective, which emphasises the multi-layered and interconnected relationship between text and image. The checklist used in the analysis focuses not only on the different roles and functions the analysed images serve in a given picturebook, but more importantly on the possible educational value those visuals could add to an L2 classroom. The paper ends with some more practical considerations on how the analysed illustrations could serve as alternative teaching resources.

SCOPUS_ID:85099450247

“Picturephone in My Home”: Actor-Network Theory and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis on Northern Finnish Older Adults Starting to Use a Video Conferencing Service

Technology has been considered an important means to deliver services in a cost-effective manner in societies that are aging and implementing austerity policies. In this article, we analyze older adults’ use of assistive technology, the picturephone, in home care by combining actor-network theory (ANT) and Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA). We also apply Foucault’s concepts of technologies of the self, regimen, and resistance. Our research materials consist of interviews with eight Northern Finnish older adults and observation data. According to our results, technological translation takes place when users associate picturephone technology with the discourses on health and safety, connectedness, and/or learning. When the technology discourse collides with or deviates from these discourses, it disrupts the technological translation, and older adults do not include the picturephone technology in their regimen, their daily life. In Finland, care policy favors technology and pursues its adoption in older adults’ care. In our case, private companies, care workers, technology advisers, family members, and older adults are recruited to join this effort. Older adults’ position in their social-material networks varies strongly in the different phases of the translation, and their technologies of the self have a significant effect on its outcome. This should be considered when designing and utilizing ICT technologies in elderly care.

SCOPUS_ID:85079374539

“Pig” or “Fig?”: Grimm’s Law, Phonemic Difference, and Linguistic Agency in ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

SCOPUS_ID:85115216772

“Please Connect Me to a Specialist”: Scrutinising ‘Recipient Design’ in Interaction with an Artificial Conversational Agent

This paper explores how callers formulate information enquiries for an artificial conversational agent in a call centre and compares it with the way enquiries are addressed to human operators of the same call centre. It includes 60 call recordings with human operators and 103 call recordings with the artificial conversational agent, transcribed and analysed using the method of Conversation Analysis. We show that people formulate and reformulate their enquiries differently to an artificial agent, even though the goal in both cases is to get an answer to the same enquiry. When talking to the artificial conversational agent, callers produce short enquiries, similar to web searches. When connected to human operators, callers formulate longer enquiries which include many details. By analysing the differences in the way callers formulate their enquiries to robots and human operators, we show what callers expect artificial conversational agents to process. These expectations affect the way the enquiry is formulated and, as a result, operators and artificial agents encounter different types of problems they have to repair to understand the question correctly and find an answer to it. Our findings have interesting implications for Human Computer Interaction both in terms of “robot-recipient design” and “user-recipient design”.

SCOPUS_ID:85084313939

“Popular tribunes” and their agendas: topic modelling Slovak presidents’ speeches 1993–2020

Since its birth as an independent republic in 1993, Slovakia has been served by five different presidents. Due to limited competences, the presidents' have often relied on political speech as their principal tool to influence political developments. However, text as a source of data has been largely neglected in existing scholarship on Central European presidents. In this exploratory study, I classify the content of presidential speeches using a topic model and analyse topical patterns over time and across different presidents. I find that topical variation can provide useful insights into relevant issues such as agenda shifts or intra-executive conflict.

SCOPUS_ID:85062453213

“Producing Human Capital”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)

Historical and legislative evolutions of education policy have repurposed federally funded adult education programs in the United States. The 2014 passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) has considerable repercussions for everyone involved in the field because it controls the funding, assessment, and structure of these programs. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines the public law and a Program Memorandum from the federal government. It demonstrates how the language used in the documents characterizes Title II of WIOA (the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act), the goals of adult education, eligible adult learners, and the process by which programs are held accountable for federal funding. The findings show the ways in which Title II tactically legitimizes the U.S. government’s neoliberal capitalist desire within a democratic society: The idealistic language of opportunity acts as a camouflage for the further infiltration of market-oriented practices into the public sector.

SCOPUS_ID:85044919430

“Put It in Your Shoe It Will Make You Limp”: British Men’s Online Responses to a Male Pill

This article analyzes online interactions between British men and other online readers’ comments in response to two news articles focused on a male contraceptive pill. The aim of the study was to explore how British men’s online accounts construct a male pill as a potential contraceptive option for family planning. The two online articles reported the scientific innovations, as well as the production and marketing, of a nonhormonal, plant-based pill for men. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the online comments, from which two discourses emerged: (a) “Men as responsible health consumers” and (b) “‘Killing sperm’ and other side effects on semen.” When provided with the opportunity to take future responsibility for family planning, male readers were found to be unlikely to use a contraceptive pill. The men expressed the need for new options of contraception but, overall, felt a male pill was not the solution.

SCOPUS_ID:84919784132

“Rape Culture” language and the news media: Contested versus non-contested cases

The American news media has recently reported on several rape and sexual assault cases in various cultural settings, sparking public conversations about rape culture in different cultural contexts. The article is focused as a Critical Discourse Analysis that compares the language use in news articles from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over a six months period in order to more clearly understand the way the news media uses language in regards to gender and sexual assault and creates a spectrum of valid versus contested reports of sexual assault in different cultural settings.

SCOPUS_ID:85142201719

“Reduced to My Race Once Again”: Perceptions about Underrepresented Minority Medical School Applicants in Canada and the United States

Phenomenon: To increase racial diversity in medical school classes, many institutions have created underrepresented minority (URM) application streams. However, many URM students experience overt and passive marginalization throughout their training and this may be related to how matriculants from URM streams are perceived by their peers. Approach: We conducted a discourse analysis of online discussion forums to explore how URM streams across Canada and the United States are perceived. We analyzed 850 posts from 13 discussion threads published between 2015 and 2020. We used inductive content analysis to develop a data-driven coding scheme from which we identified common themes. Findings: Despite an overall appreciation of the benefits of a diverse workforce, participants engaged in prominent discussions surrounding the merits of URM streams. We identified perceptions that students admitted from URM streams are less academically and clinically competent, with URM applicants reporting feeling unworthy for admission in the eyes of non-URM applicants. Users felt that the influence of socioeconomic status was under-appreciated, and that admissions officers inadequately addressed this barrier. There were some applicants who perceived the admissions process as “broken” with non-URMs displaying a fear of social change, and URMs fearing that the system defines them by their racialized status. Insights: Online discussion forums provide unique insight into perceptions surrounding URM streams. We identified potentially harmful misconceptions about URM students applying to these streams and highlight that actionable measures to reduce marginalization against URM matriculants must begin before medical school.

SCOPUS_ID:85079403297

“Reporting on climate change: A computational analysis of U.S. newspapers and sources of bias, 1997–2017”

News organizations constitute key sites of science communication between experts and lay audiences, giving many individuals their basic worldview of complex topics like climate change. Previous researchers have studied climate change news coverage to assess accuracy in reporting and potential sources of bias. These studies typically rely on manually coding articles from a handful of prestigious outlets, not allowing comparisons with smaller newspapers or providing enough diversity to assess the influence of partisan orientation or localized climate vulnerability on content production. Making these comparisons, this study indicates that partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and vulnerability to climate change correlate with several topics present in U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change. After assembling a corpus of over 78,000 articles covering two decades from 52 U.S. newspapers that are diverse in terms of geography, partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and objectively measured climate risk, a coherent set of latent topics were identified via an automated content analysis of climate change news coverage. Topic model results indicate that while outlet bias does not appear to impact the prevalence of coverage for most topics surrounding climate change, differences were evident for some topics based on partisan orientation, scale, or vulnerability status, particularly those relating to climate change denial, impacts, mitigation, or resource use. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive study of U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change and identifies specific topics where outlet bias constitutes an important contextual factor.

SCOPUS_ID:84994086933

“SEN’s completely different now”: critical discourse analysis of three “Codes of Practice for Special Educational Needs” (1994, 2001, 2015)

Regardless of the differing shades of neo-liberalism, successive governments have claimed to champion the cause of “special educational needs and/or disability” (SEND) through official Codes of Practice in 1994, 2001 and 2015. This analysis and comparison of the three Codes of Practice aims to contribute to the debate by exploring aspects of the documents themselves. Each Code of Practice aims, or at least claims, to overcome past barriers and the 2015 version explicitly heralds a radical overhaul of the SEND system. In this article, elements of critical discourse analysis (CDA) are used in exploring the three documents, with particular emphasis on the 2015 Code. The conclusion is reached that while the fundamental stance on SEND remains unchanged in 2015, radical change is present and is all the more radical for being hidden in plain sight, delivering commissioning and procurement and a potentially arms-length approach to provision. As an integral part of the overall school system, the 2015 context for SEND is one of school diversity and choice and the model is of private sector competition and entrepreneurship in a context of austerity.

SCOPUS_ID:85147270090

“Safety Is Elusive:” A Critical Discourses Analysis of Newspapers’ Reporting of Domestic Violence During the Coronavirus Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated incidences of domestic violence (DV). The framing of DV within media sources contributes to the public's understanding of DV. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper explores representations of safety within newspapers’ reporting of DV during the pandemic. The sample included newspaper articles (n = 31) from U.S. newspapers. The analysis involved multiple rounds of coding and employing “structured questions.” These articles depicted limited courses of action for DV survivors and represented safety as unattainable. Safety was constructed in four ways: homes are unsafe, social services are overburdened, government failures, and the elusiveness of safety. These discursive formations provide insight regarding “idealized” social responses to DV.

SCOPUS_ID:85112598639

“See you soon! ADD OIL AR!”: Code-switching for face-work in edu-social Facebook groups

Despite a rich body of research on face-work, how it is performed in online edu-social groups remains under-explored. Drawing on posts and comments of Facebook groups created for courses at a university in Hong Kong, together with interviews with students, tutors, and the lecturer, this article examines how code-switching is deployed as a powerful discursive resource in the performance of face-work. Notwithstanding English being the medium of instruction of the courses, code-switching is noticeable. Focusing on these participants' practices, our analysis discovers that code-switching serves primarily to signal the breakdown of the expectedly formal academic participation frame and the switch to an informal frame. Multiple layers of action frames are collaboratively and constantly designed and redesigned in these ‘social network-educational spaces’ (Chau and Lee, 2017), where the formal-informal, public-private, and academic-social boundaries become indistinct. Closer analysis within and across the spaces further reveals that norms of appropriateness of code-switching to achieve informality and solidarity may vary depending on a combination of individual, contextual, and temporal factors. In addition to contributing to existing literature on code-switching and face-work on Facebook, the article offers practical implications for understanding the increasingly informalized discourses in institutional contexts.

SCOPUS_ID:84893238487

“Sergey Brin is Batman”: Google’s Project Glass & the Instigation of Computer Adoption in Popular Culture

The emergence of Google Glass, a prototype for a transparent Heads-Up Display available for the everyday consumer, is the first public conceptualization of a mainstream augmented-reality wearable eye display. Google's promotional material frames Glass as the brainchild of company co-founder Sergey Brin, who, by being associated with a state-of-the-art development lab, has been compared by the popular press to the iconic comic book character Batman. We contend that the hype surrounding Google Glass and the resulting social responses to "Brin-as-Batman" is a phenomenon that warrants attention. Using a humanities focus, we argue that Glass’s birth is not only a marketing phenomenon heralding a technical prototype, we also argue and speculate that Glass’s popularization is an instigator for the adoption of a new paradigm in human-computer interaction, the wearable eye display, operating very much in mainstream and popular culture discourses.

SCOPUS_ID:84941141973

“Sharia on a Plate?” A critical discourse analysis of halal food in two Norwegian newspapers

Purpose – This study aims to explore how two Norwegian national online newspapers, Dagbladet and Aftenposten, have framed halal food in the past 6 years (2008-2014), a period conflating with a rise in Muslim demographics in Norway. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed-methods approach is used. Employing among others a Hallidayan transitivity analysis and other approaches from critical discourse analysis (CDA), clausal semantic structures, collocations and nominalizations were explored with a view toward fleshing out ideological significance. Particular attention was given to the neologism – “covert-Islamization” – popularized by the populist right-wing Progress Party. Findings – The findings reveal that Dagbladet refracts halal food through a discourse of crime and other dubious frames tapping into topoi of Islamophobia. Halal is, in this manner, transformed into a synecdoche for deviance. This is contrasted with Aftenposten’s more “halal-friendly” gaze which inter alia is attributed to greater access for Muslim contributors (over 40 per cent), with nearly all authorship penned in the aftermath of the Breivik massacre of July 22, 2011. Research limitations/implications – As a comparative research that explores two newspapers – albeit with substantial national circulation – there are obvious limitations. Future research could explore the contents of Verdens Gang, the biggest newspaper in Norway, and perhaps incorporate iconic semiotic content. Social implications – The prevalent media discourse on halal in Norway casts a shadow over a fundamental aspect of the identity construction of Norwegians who adhere to Islam, thus highlighting issues of belonging and citizenry in the “new” Norway. National discourses of identity and belonging impact upon the Muslim consumer’s perception of self and ethnicity, and how these perceptions are negotiated in the interstices of a skewed media coverage of halal certainly serves to undermine this self-perception. Originality/value – Several recent studies have broached the subject of the manifold representations of Muslims and Islam in the media using a CDA, but there is a dearth in studies with a specific focus on halal food. This study contributes to the lacuna in the literature in an area of growing importance, not just as a socio-political and religious phenomenon, but a lucrative commercial project in a Scandinavian context.

SCOPUS_ID:85148497353

“She Must Be Experimental, Resourceful, and Have Sympathetic Understanding”: toxic white femininities as a Persona and Performance in School Social Work

In this paper, we theorize toxic white femininities as a performance and persona in school social work. To develop the theory and analytic tool of “toxic white femininities,” we used critical discourse analysis to analyze school social work professional association materials from 1906 to 1936. Our analysis isolated three performances of toxic white femininities in early 1900s school social work: (1) the exclusionary social and material gains of “her” professionalization, (2) “her” reinforcement of racial-gender-class hierarchies, and (3) “her” strategic use of helper identity to mask social control. We trace how these performances coalesced into a collective professional persona, operating beyond the scope of individual practitioners. This persona institutionalized a racialized-gendered professional identity, presented in the archives as a universal “she”—white, middle class, and feminine. With private funding from white elites in the early 20th century, school social workers—constructed discursively as white women—would become the “right” profession to shape the lives of young people and guard the privileges of whiteness. We close with a discussion of “her” long shadow and contemporary performances, outlying the ways toxic white femininities operate as a form of incremental violence impacting the profession and social services.

SCOPUS_ID:85072999451

“She Thinks of Him as a Machine”: On the Entanglements of Neoliberal Ideology and Misogynist Cybercrime

The “manosphere” is a constellation of masculinist social media communities loosely unified by an anti-feminist worldview. Although extant journalism and social media scholarship successfully delineate the manosphere as a significant social problem by associating it with misogynist cybercrime and cyberhate, the resulting narrative simplistically pathologizes manosphere discourse while leaving its misogyny undertheorized. In this article, I complicate this emerging narrative by demonstrating how a certain central manosphere discourse qualitatively overlaps with a broader neoliberal ideology. I do so by further developing a critical discourse analysis of quasi-representative manosphere documents drawn from “The Red Pill,” a sub-forum of Reddit.com. Although this forum is explicitly devoted to discussing heterosexual seduction strategies, I find that it also produces a discursive means for fiscally conservative men to reconcile their pro-capitalist economic beliefs with apparent evidence of capitalism’s destructive tendencies and contradictions. This forum’s anti-feminist discourse implicitly parallels Marxian theory while explicitly supporting free market capitalism and denigrating women, thereby providing men with a linguistic and conceptual framework to scapegoat women for economic problems while leaving neoliberal ideas and assumptions unchallenged.

SCOPUS_ID:85122463130

“She’s Very Known in the School”: Black Girls, Race, Gender, and Sexual Violence in Ontario SchoolsRashelle V. Litchmore

Discourse on the experiences of Black adolescents in Ontario schools is largely centered on achievement statistics and disciplinary experiences. Much attention has been given to the negative experiences of Black boys, particularly their increased likelihood of being pushed out of school, and as being outperformed by their female counterparts and students of other racial backgrounds. However, failing to engage the perspectives of Black-Canadian female students results in an incomplete understanding of Black students’ experiences, and the actions that are needed to support their social and academicwell-being. This article presents an analysis of the narratives of three Black-Canadian girls from an ethnographic study in a Toronto high school focused on Black identities and inclusive education. Feminist poststructuralism and Black feminist theoretical frameworks were used to explore the discursive field that shaped these young women’s narratives, specifically in relation to incidents of gender-based violence. Findings demonstrate that their understandings of these incidents were constructed through traditionally sexist and racist discourses. These students also employed various discursive strategies to avoid being positioned as victims, while also invoking “rape myths” and postfeminist discourse, in assessing their own, and other young women’s experiences. The research emphasizes the need for educators and policy makers to address harmful school cultures, and the intersecting ways in which race and gender leave Black girls vulnerable in North American schools.

SCOPUS_ID:85088406431

“She’sapproachdead!” – Nursing simulation practices: A discourse analysis

Background: The literature on nursing education has revealed a growing wave of interest in the use of simulation sessions to promote undergraduate nurses’ learning experiences. This high prevalence of simulation practices in nursing programs has led to opportunities to research this topic from various angles, including its impact on students’ skill performance, self-efficacy, self-confidence, self-satisfaction, and clinical knowledge acquisition. Design and Methods: Participants in this qualitative study included 54 senior female undergraduates enrolled in a critical care nursing course in Saudi Arabia. Recordings were made of six authentic, acute care simulation sessions. One of these sessions was examined in depth using discourse analysis approaches to gain insights into communication in simulation sessions, examining the way students linguistically managed this critical communication, exhibiting their logical, reflective, decision-making, problem-solving, and collaborative work skills and use of communicative strategies. Results: The analyses revealed various training and communication issues including the lack of harmony among the team members (e.g., regarding understanding and performing their assigned roles as well as delegating and conducting delegated tasks) and the students’ inability to effectively communicate with the patient as a valuable source of information and to make appropriate and timely clinical decisions regarding patient assessment. Conclusions: Simulation sessions have been shown to be a promising instructional tool to support nursing education, allowing students to practice in a safe and controlled environment. However, for more effective sessions and to avoid poor simulation sessions, students need to be thoroughly briefed regarding the sessions prior to implementation.

SCOPUS_ID:84926665283

“She” and “He” in news media messages: Pronoun use reflects gender biases in semantic contexts

Abstract Previous research has shown a male bias in the media. This study tests this statement by examining how the pronouns She and He are used in a news media context.More specifically, the study tests whether He occurs more often and in more positive semantic contexts than She, as well as whether She is associated with more stereotypically and essential labels than He is. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) was applied to 400 000 Reuters’ news messages, written in English, published in 1996–1997. LSA is a completely data-driven method, extracting statistics of words from how they are used throughout a corpus. As such, no human coders are involved in the assessment of how pronouns occur in their contexts. The results showed that He pronouns were about 9 timesmore frequent than She pronouns. In addition, the semantic contexts of He were more positive than the contexts of She. Moreover, words associated with She-contexts included more words denoting gender, and were more homogeneous than the words associated with He-contexts. Altogether, these results indicate that men are represented as the norm in these media. Since these news messages are distributed on a daily basis all over the world, in printed newspapers, and on the internet, it seems likely that this presentation maintains, and reinforces prevalent gender stereotypes, hence contributing to gender inequities.

SCOPUS_ID:85097856941

“Similar query was answered earlier”: processing of patient authored text for retrieving relevant contents from health discussion forum

Online remedy finders and health-related discussion forums have become increasingly popular in recent years. Common web users write their health problems there and request suggestion from experts or other users. As a result, these forums became a huge repository of information and discussions on various health issues. An intelligent information retrieval system can help to utilize this repository in various applications. In this paper, we propose a system for the automatic identification of existing similar forum posts given a new post. The system is based on computing similarity between two patient authored texts. For computing the similarity between the current post and existing posts, the system uses a hybrid strategy based on template information, topic modelling, and latent semantic indexing. The system is tested using a set of real questions collected from a homeopathy forum namely abchomeopathy.com. The relevance of the posts retrieved by the system is evaluated by human experts. The evaluation results demonstrate that the precision of the system is 88.87%.

SCOPUS_ID:85064517019

“Single, seventies, and stuck”: A discourse analysis of the “Leftover women” or Sheng Nu in China in the blogosphere

The government of China introduced the lexicon of “leftover women,” or sheng nu, to publicly signify the “eligible but unmarried women between age 27 to 35” in 2010. Although it was a derogatory lexicon against women, but some researchers have argued that sheng nu is a sign of women’s emancipation because these women usually have successful careers. The diverse perceptions in Chinese society about the issue of “leftover women” have become a thought-provoking subject for investigating the debate on positive and negative framing of women and continue to assess the unexplored gender perspective on the discursive construction of women in China through the pervasive growth of digital media. This research examined the blogosphere related to the issue of leftover women in China in order to understand how the blogger negotiate the meaning of sheng nu in the digital community. This study provided insight to explore the discursive construction of women in China by investigating the dynamics of the depiction of unmarried women. The discourse analysis was chosen to answer the main research question on how the bloggers negotiate the meaning of sheng nu, or the leftover women, in China using blogs as a platform of resistance. As a result, the blogger evaluated the sheng nu as the dilemmatic problem of the A-class of women. Also, upon the hegemonic power to suppress women, the bloggers can potentially identify the conflict and negotiate the issue of leftover women under a system of knowledge by shifting the meaning of sheng nu and by using the freedom of creation in the blog.

https://aclanthology.org//2022.inlg-main.3/

“Slow Service” ↛ “Great Food”: Enhancing Content Preservation in Unsupervised Text Style Transfer

SCOPUS_ID:85143347238

“Snake flu,” “killer bug,” and “Chinese virus”: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of lexical choices in early UK press coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic

Now mostly known as “COVID-19” (or simply “Covid”), early discourse around the pandemic was characterized by a particularly large variation in naming choices (ranging from “new coronavirus” and “new respiratory disease” to “killer bug” and the racist term “Chinese virus”). The current study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse studies and analyses these naming choices in UK newspaper coverage (January–March 2020), focusing on terminology deemed “inappropriate” as per WHO guidelines on naming infectious diseases. The results show that 9% of all terms referring to COVID-19 or the virus causing it are “inappropriate” overall, with “inappropriate” naming being more prevalent (1) in tabloids than broadsheets and (2) in the period before compared to the period after the virus was officially named on 11th February, 2020. Selected examples within each of the categories of “inappropriate” names are explored in more detail [terms (1) inciting undue fear, (2) containing geographic locations, and (3) containing species of animals], and the findings are discussed with regard to the contribution of lexical choices to the reproduction of (racist and otherwise problematic) ideologies in mainstream media.

SCOPUS_ID:85086912977

“So begins the demise of #Superman from Metropolis”: Consumers’ Twitter reactions to an athlete's transgression

When athlete transgressions occur both on and off the field, there can be negative impacts on stakeholders. Therefore, it is essential to explore how consumers react to transgressions to gain a better understanding of how they can be successfully managed. The purpose of this study was to explore consumers’ Twitter reactions to an athlete's transgression using a homophobic slur, drawing on critical discourse studies as a conceptual framework. Using Visual Twitter Analytics (Vista), tweets were collected over the 2017 Toronto Blue Jays’ season. For this study, the subset of tweets related to the incident were isolated. We found a duality in discourses, in that consumers shared perspectives for and against the use of homophobic language in sport. Practically, many consumers supported the idea of athletes being assigned a punishment for this type of language use. While consequences may satisfy some consumers, a cultural change within the organization and fan base is required to create an inclusive sport environment regarding language use.

SCOPUS_ID:85149886538

“So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts for organisations, society, and individuals. Offering multi-disciplinary insight into some of these, this article brings together 43 contributions from experts in fields such as computer science, marketing, information systems, education, policy, hospitality and tourism, management, publishing, and nursing. The contributors acknowledge ChatGPT's capabilities to enhance productivity and suggest that it is likely to offer significant gains in the banking, hospitality and tourism, and information technology industries, and enhance business activities, such as management and marketing. Nevertheless, they also consider its limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and consequences of biases, misuse, and misinformation. However, opinion is split on whether ChatGPT's use should be restricted or legislated. Drawing on these contributions, the article identifies questions requiring further research across three thematic areas: knowledge, transparency, and ethics; digital transformation of organisations and societies; and teaching, learning, and scholarly research. The avenues for further research include: identifying skills, resources, and capabilities needed to handle generative AI; examining biases of generative AI attributable to training datasets and processes; exploring business and societal contexts best suited for generative AI implementation; determining optimal combinations of human and generative AI for various tasks; identifying ways to assess accuracy of text produced by generative AI; and uncovering the ethical and legal issues in using generative AI across different contexts.

SCOPUS_ID:85102210852

“So, what’s this cerita all about?” Functions of Indonesian-English code switching in a novel

This qualitative research intends to examine the functions of code switching of Indonesian to English employed in an Indonesian novel, Antalogi Rasa (The Anthology of Taste). The code switching identified in the novel was categorized, analyzed and described accordingly. The function of code-switching is coded based on experts in the field provided in the literature. The findings of the research revealed that the three most used functions are talking about a particular topic, interjection and quotation. Since the novel presents the main character to be a fluent speaker in both Indonesian and English, therefore to converse with her friends and family who may not be as fluent as her in the foreign language would need these three functions most to have her utterances clearly understood by her interlocutors. Meanwhile, the three least used functions are expressing group identity, repetition and excluding other people. Likewise, the group identity of the characters is narrated throughout the story so it is not indispensable for her to point it out too much in the novel. Then, the function of excluding other people from conversations also appeared least because most of the conversations in the novel only involved two people. Hence, the form of language being investigated is the written form in a novel, therefore, the writer does try to be sparing with its length, and this also affects her choices of code switching in this fictional work. Moreover, the paper further discusses the description for each of these functions in the novel.

https://aclanthology.org//W15-4610/

“So, which one is it?” The effect of alternative incremental architectures in a high-performance game-playing agent

SCOPUS_ID:85072647613

“Some other’s text”: Dan beachy-quick, moby-dick , and the poetics of reading

In both Spell (2004) and A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), Dan Beachy-Quick participates in a long tradition of experimental writing about Moby-Dick, revising the novel as a book about writing poetry. In his deep reading of Melville’s text, Beachy-Quick discerns a “poetics of reading,” or a model of the lyric poem conceived as an intersubjective, even ethical circumstance, which I argue continued to inform Melville’s writing, especially his later poetry. For both authors, this model is used to create poems in which speakers navigate the impersonality of written language toward a recognition of other persons. I provide an interpretation of Melville’s John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), demonstrating how it makes use of a poetics that only becomes legible in light of Beachy-Quick intervention, which refracts Moby-Dick through postmodern theories of language set forth by literary critics like Maurice Blanchot and Paul de Man. Specifically, Beachy-Quick helps me discover a poetics of reading at work in Melville’s sea-pieces that troubles the legibility of written or literary language, foreshadowing some aspects of postmodern and deconstructionist theories of inscription. In John Marr, Melville redeems the instability of the page as an epitaphic surface on which to descry meaningful, significant relations between others.

SCOPUS_ID:85106666439

“So… introductions”: Conversational openings in getting acquainted interactions

As research has shown, the interactional practice of getting acquainted in initial encounters can play a crucial role in the construction of interpersonal relationships. This exploratory paper focusses on one aspect of the getting acquainted discourse, i.e. how conversational openings are constructed in dyadic and multi-party interactions between previously unacquainted interlocutors. These interactions are examined in a specific context – the launch night episode of the reality television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012. The findings indicate that, while some conversational openings follow the canonical structure, including preference for self-identification, in most conversational openings in our data, the interactants tend to request other-identification, which, importantly, is not treated as problematic. In addition, this study further confirms that introducing sequences are discursively constructed as essential in conversational openings. This becomes visible when the lack of identification at an early stage is treated as problematic by the interlocutors who orient to resuming or initiating introducing, whether prompted or unprompted, while engaging in the first instances of getting acquainted.

SCOPUS_ID:85089865921

“Stammering Less so That I Can Be More of a Man”: Discourses of Masculinities Among Young Adult Men in the Western Cape, South Africa, Who Stutter

The past 3 decades have seen researchers increasingly examine masculinity within the context of disability.However, there remains a gap in impairment-specific research. The present study seeks to examinethe discourses of masculinities among young adult men in Western Cape Province who stutter.Semistructured interviews and focus groups were used to collect data from 15 men who stutter. In analyzingthe data, a combination of discursive and applied psychological perspectives was used. Specificattention was given to the emotional processes that men experience ascribing to, resisting and challenginghegemonic ideals of masculinity. The findings revealed that men predominantly drew on hegemonicnorms to construct their masculinities, emphasizing the importance of occupying a position of powerand control, especially when interacting with other heterosexual men and potential dating and sexualpartners. Men at times also presented contrary and competing subject positions, simultaneously acceptingand rejecting certain practices of dominant masculinity in their daily lives, specifically in relation tofemale figures (such as mothers and friends) and homosexual men. It was evident that the process ofnegotiating these multiple versions of masculinity was not easy. At times, men indicated struggling tonegotiate their stutter with dominant masculine ideals, which led to reduced self-esteem and self-confidenceand negative emotions and feelings of shame, weakness, emasculation, and inadequacy. In instanceswhere participants resisted hegemonic ideals, they formulated affirmative masculinities in line with,and accepting of, their impairment. Implications for future masculinities research in the context of disabilityare discussed

SCOPUS_ID:85106215798

“Start-up Nation” vs “the Republic of Samsung”: power and politics in the partner choice discourse in Israeli–Korean business collaboration

Purpose: This paper aims to propose to politicize partner choice as a discourse that rationalizes, legitimizes and justifies the choice of partners by underlining economic, cultural and institutional differences to (re)create power relations. By reconceptualizing partner choice as a discourse, the paper challenges the established view of partner choice according to international business and management studies as a rational and strategic behavior based on resource complementarity, best practices and win–win situations. Design/methodology/approach: Based on the longitudinal study of Israeli–Korean business collaboration, which includes in-depth interviews, observations and media texts, this paper uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to demystify partner choice as neither a neutral nor an objective behavior to unveil its discursive construction and embeddedness in power relations. Findings: The actors on both sides of the Israeli–Korean business collaboration evoke resource complementary discourse between “Israeli innovation” and “Korean productivity” to rationalize their partner choice as a win–win situation. CDA demonstrates how both sides are engaged in a “borrowing” process from east-to-west and head-to-hands postcolonial images to (re)produce hierarchy between the parties. While east–west mapping remained almost unchallengeable, the reversal, crossing and blurring of the Israel-to-Korea knowledge transfer direction provides a counter-narrative to resource complementarity discourse. Originality/value: The resource complementarity discourse supported by east–west mapping and “head–hands” justifications for partner choice reveals the lingering presence of postcolonial images, imagery and imagination. By taking two nations without substantial troubled memories, histories and relations, the paper broadens the picture beyond national contexts, emphasizing the importance of borrowing and translation from postcolonial vocabulary to non-colonial situations.

SCOPUS_ID:85088646227

“Sure I'll help—I've just been sitting around doing nothing at school all day”: Cognitive flexibility and child irony interpretation

Successful peer relations in older children depend on proficiency with banter, which in turn frequently involves verbal irony. Individual differences in successful irony interpretation have traditionally been attributed to theory of mind. Our premise was that the key factor might in fact be cognitive flexibility, that is, the ability to switch between different perspectives (here, on the same utterance). We also wished to extend the focus of previous irony studies, which have almost exclusively examined simple irony, where the literal meaning conflicts with observable physical evidence (e.g., “Great day for a picnic” when viewing a downpour). Therefore, we also examined how children interpreted more complex irony, where listeners must consider at a deeper level the common ground shared with the speakers (e.g., general knowledge/cultural common ground or information about the particular speaker). In Study 1, we found that for 6- to 8-year-olds, both cognitive flexibility and theory of mind contributed unique variance to simple irony interpretation while statistically controlling for nonverbal reasoning and structural language standardized scores. Neither inhibitory control, nor working memory, nor general knowledge correlated with irony interpretation. The 6- to 8-year-olds were at floor for complex irony. In Study 2, we found that cognitive flexibility contributed unique variance to how 10- to 12-year-olds interpreted complex irony while controlling for nonverbal reasoning, structural language, and specific knowledge required. We are the first to examine the relationship with cognitive flexibility and conclude that it must be taken into account when investigating the relationship between theory of mind and irony interpretation.

SCOPUS_ID:85111310162

“Swallowing the red pill”: the coronavirus pandemic and the political imaginary of stigmatized knowledge in the discourse of the far-right

Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames. Far-right political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decision-making processes, active stakeholders in the current crisis. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Our study seeks to map, compare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various far-right actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: The United States and France. We aim to shed light on how entrenched far-right mythologies and tropes—which appear increasingly transatlantic—are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemology. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely anti-systemic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus, in the response of the Euro-American far-right to the COVID-19 crisis, the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic”.

SCOPUS_ID:85129216153

“THE BEAUTIFUL THEORY OF LANGUAGE” THE HUMBOLDTIANISM OF ALEXANDER POTEBNYA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NAME BY ALEXEY LOSEV

Τhis paper is aimed to trace the reception of A. A. Potebnya’s philosophy of language in the writings by A. F. Losev (primarily in the treatise “Philosophy of the Name”) and to prove based on the testimony of the Russian philosopher himself that it was the linguistic philosophy by Potebnya that lay at the foundation. Of course, it was not copied, of the original philosophy of Losev, undoubtedly lying in line with the reception of late Antique and New European philosophy. The circle of sources of the “Philosophy of the Name” is outlined, which Losev speaks about in a note to the treatise “Dialectics of Artistic Form”. What Losev declared on each of the “sources” of his philosophy is compared with the essential elements of Losev’s philosophy of the name itself, with the conclusion on which of the sources was more important and which was secondary. The outcome received is that the significant part of elements of Losev’s philosophy of the name is found in the treatise “Thought and Language” by Potebnya, to which Losev primarily refers. From the point of view of Losev, Potebnya’s philosophy of language contains the thesis that language structures or organizes the process of understanding a thing, produce a thought that is ideally identical to the thing, reproducing the structure of the thing. Also, the quotes from Potebnya in the article “The Birth of a Myth” by Losev are analyzed, which are built into a coherent system, in my opinion, received and reinterpreted in the treatise ’Philosophy of the Name’. The key difference between the systems of Potebnya and Losev lies in the sphere of philosophical method: whereas Potebnya builds the “history” of the name from an indistinguishable sensory array to a selfconscious idea, its phenomenology, the Russian philosopher dialectically deduces the elements of the name from the already present idea.

SCOPUS_ID:85125914462

“THE CURSE OF BABEL”. JOURNALISM CHRONICLES OF SPANISH LINGUISTIC NATIONALISM

One of the issues that is most controversial and that has the greatest social and cultural impact with regard to languages in Spain has been the so-called linguistic conflict, which has had a constant presence in the press and the media in general since the end of the 1970s. The press, as one of the most influential institutions in contemporary society, has been and remains a forum on linguistic issues, in all its facets. Based on the hypothesis that the metalinguistic texts in the press are a prime source for studying the creation and propagation of ideologies around language, we analyse the role of opinion articles covering language issues in the construction and reproduction of an ideological vision around Spanish which pits it, socially and linguistically, against the other languages of Spain. We study a corpus of 154 texts from a sociolinguistic and critical discourse-based standpoint, and analyse the foundations that provide the base for the construction and reasoning for the discourse on the languages of contemporary Spain and their relationship with the myths of language.

SCOPUS_ID:85150029897

“THERE IS NO NEED FOR ANYONE TO BE CONCERNED”: THE DISCURSIVE LEGITIMATION OF COERCIVE POLICE POWERS DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC¹

A number of countries have placed police officers in charge of policies aimed at suppressing the transmission of COVID-19. While scholarly attention has been paid to the legitimacy of a law enforcement response to the pandemic, less attention has been paid to the discursive techniques used by state officials when attempting to represent controversial policies as uncontroversial. This article examines the role of discourse in the rationalization of a law enforcement approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in NSW, Australia. I conduct a critical analysis of the language of policing officials in press conferences, interviews, and media releases to identify discursive strategies of authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization, as described in Van Leeuwen’s analytical framework of legitimation (2007, 2008). I argue that the use of discursive techniques to depict punitive sanctions as desirable and effective, and public health rules as clear and of equal application to all, helped to naturalize a coercive response in the application of public health measures. The naturalness of this police-led approach is deconstructed by drawing on alternative accounts to show how COVID-19 rules were complicated and poorly communicated, and policed in an uneven, and at times, overzealous fashion.

SCOPUS_ID:85138604828

“THEY ARE SEXUAL OBJECTS”: CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE RAPE VICTIMS IN SELECTED NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS

Following the assumption that there is a particular way newspapers often use language to represent female rape victims (FRVs) and the insufficiency of existing studies on the linguistic representation of FRVs in Nigerian newspapers, this study critically discusses the linguistic and discursive tools that are deployed by selected Nigerian newspapers to represent FRVs in their reports. Aspects of Halliday’s transitivity system and Lazar’s notion of feminist critical discourse analysis served as framework. The framework was complemented with the use of Voyant tools to determine the preponderance of word choice in news reports. Rape reports published between January, 2020 and December, 2020 by The Punch, The Guardian, Vanguard and Daily Trust were purposively retrieved and constituted the data for this study. Data engagement revealed that FRVs were imbued with five representations: patriarchal preys, object of sexual gratification, anonymized and pseudonymized victims, objects of pity and victims of dual jeopardy. The social implications of these representations aligned with patriarchal practices such as androcentrism, incest, mental abuse and sexual assault while the gender biases implicated in the representation included the projection of female as inferior, powerless and emotional beings.

SCOPUS_ID:85147676361

“THEY REGARD IT [GRAMMAR] AS NEARLY HERETICAL” HEBREW GRAMMAR AND PHILOLOGY IN THE BEIT HAMIDRASH, BEIT HASEIFER, AND BEIT HAK’NESET

Describing his own work as “the first attempt since the Mikhlol to record, explain, and arrange the tradition of grammatical knowledge systematically,”2 Zalman Hena (1687–1746), one of the outstanding Hebrew grammarians of his era, built a theoretical linguistic edifice (a youthful opus was even called Binyan Sh’lomo) on a combination of the critical analysis of his predecessors and considerable original, even radical, thinking. If one of the accomplishments of the Haskalah was the renaissance of Hebrew, then it appears that Zalman Hena bears significant responsibility for that achievement,3 even though it is likely that he would have dissociated himself from that movement as did most of the Orthodox communities of Central Europe in which he lived. Yonatan Wormser, a professor of Hebrew language at the College of Efrata, provides us with a comprehensive portrait of Hena’s theories on phonology, including vocalization and the nature of the letters, and morphology, including the construction of Hebrew roots, verbal stems (binyanim) and conjugations, and the classifications of nouns. The book also covers matters of syntax, semantics, and rhetoric, such as the use of particles, the definite article, gender and number, absolute and construct states, parts of speech, and word order. Another chapter describes Hena’s attempts to formulate new rules, or recast old ones, to account for many of what his predecessors saw as exceptions and anomalies. Because he was dedicated to the proposition that Hebrew is a God-given language and, hence, perfect, he sought to limit the number of grammatical exceptions to those that were crafted deliberately to draw attention to (unspecified) esoteric meanings. A final chapter details Hena’s application of his grammatical theories to standard Ashkenazic liturgical texts to correct what he saw as numerous mistakes in vocalization and punctuation. This effort met with considerable resistance and had a patent impact on Hena’s life and reputation. Herein, we shall endeavor to place Hena’s work, and Wormser’s informative and functional guide, into a larger historical and cultural context, exploring the role and impact of formal grammatical study in three dimensions: the beit hamidrash (representing traditional religious scholarship), the beit haseifer (Jewish education), and the beit hak’neset (apropos of Hena’s liturgical emendations).

SCOPUS_ID:85109935979

“TIED TO THE LAND”: PIPELINES, PLAINS AND PLACE ATTACHMENT

Since first proposed, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines have been extensively covered by the media, shaping readers’ perceptions of the pipelines, as well as perceptions of the places and peoples impacted by them. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the media coverage, their Plains descriptions, and expressions of place attachment. Through the media’s use of “place talk,” it presents a hybrid Plains: placeless, yet with a strongly place-attached population who are “tied to the land.” As conflicts over environmental and energy projects become increasingly contentious, place and place attachment are important for understanding the conflicts and potentially mobilizing resistance.

SCOPUS_ID:85089163437

“Talking” Triples to Museum Chatbots

The paper presents recent work on the design and development of AI chatbots for museums using Knowledge Graphs (KGs). The utilization of KGs as a key technology for implementing chatbots raises not only issues related to the representation and structuring of exhibits’ knowledge in suitable formalism and models, but also issues related to the translation of natural language dialogues to and from the selected technology for the formal representation and structuring of information and knowledge. Moreover, such a translation must be as transparent as possible to visitors, towards a realistic human-like question-answering process. The paper reviews and evaluates a number of recent approaches for the use of KGs in developing AI chatbots, as well as key tools that provide solutions for natural language translation and the querying of Knowledge Bases and Linked Open Data sources. This evaluation aims to provide answers to issues that are identified within the proposed MuBot approach for designing and implementing AI chatbots for museums. The paper also presents Cretan MuBot, the first experimental KG/Ontology-based AI chatbot of the MuBot Platform, which is under development in the Heracleum Archaeological Museum.

SCOPUS_ID:85131195678

“Tarred with the Same Brush”: Racist and Anti-racist Constructions of Muslim Asylum Seekers in Australia

Despite Australia's longstanding reputation as a multicultural nation, xenophobic and integrationist ideas remain embedded within political, media and public discourse surrounding migration, especially within discussions of Muslims and asylum seekers. Existing literature indicates that within arguments that oppose refugee resettlement in Australia, Islam is routinely constructed as incompatible with Australian society. Some research, however, has highlighted resistance to these ideas, yet few studies have explored how these narratives of resistance are constructed. This paper, presents a Critical Discourse Analysis of semi-structured interviews with 24 Western Australians who discussed their perspectives concerning asylum seekers. Participants who supported restrictive asylum policies reproduced integrationist attitudes toward Muslims, however those who expressed welcoming asylum views routinely challenged these ideas. I discuss the discursive and rhetorical features of these opposing takes on Australia's asylum debate, outlining some important implications for democracy and political communication, as well as for critical race analysis and sociological scholarship.

SCOPUS_ID:85052658251

“Thank bloody God it’s Friday”: A Local Grammar of Thanking

This paper presents a local grammar of thanking in English, aiming to further demonstrate the feasibility of using a local grammar approach to account for speech acts and also to contribute to the on-going development of corpus pragmatics. The corpus used for the study is compiled of those texts categorised as ‘Spoken—conversation’ in the British National Corpus. Conventionalised realisations of thanking are identified and used as search terms to retrieve automatically instances of thanking. The retrieved instances are then manually examined to make sure that all instances to be analysed have the illocutionary force of thanking. The subsequent analyses suggest 7 functional labels that are needed for a local grammar description of gratitude expressions and identify 29 local grammar patterns. The implications and applications of research on local grammars of speech acts are discussed. It is concluded that local grammars can contribute substantially to the description of speech act realisations, and therefore more research on local grammars of speech acts are desirable and valuable.

SCOPUS_ID:85075588729

“That Looks Hard!”: Effects of Objective and Perceived Textual Complexity on Factual and Structural Political Knowledge

Communication of political information is vital for a well-functioning democratic system, and texts are one of the main mediums of politics. Most studies dealing with political text consider how such texts communicate content, rather than the structural characteristics of texts themselves. The current study focuses on complexity as one of the focal structural characteristics of political text. Previous research showed that different types of textual complexity affect learning processes. Such prior studies are, however, limited both conceptually and empirically. This study addresses these gaps by employing a large-scale experimental design (N= 822), investigating how different dimensions of textual complexity affect factual and structural political knowledge, and whether such relationships are mediated through perceived complexity. Results indicate that different levels (high vs. low) and different dimensions of textual complexity (semantic vs. syntactic) influence reader’s perception of text, as well as their factual and structural knowledge. Only semantic complexity has an effect on one’s perceived complexity, which in turn negatively affects factual and structural knowledge. Syntactic complexity directly lowered one’s factual knowledge acquisition, while there was no direct effect of syntactic complexity on structural knowledge. The results suggest that text complexity indeed plays an important role in political information acquisition, and our findings also highlight the importance of perception in mediating the structural effects of the text.

SCOPUS_ID:84945944140

“That’s not something I was, I am, or am ever going to be:” Multimodal self-assertion in digital video production

Issues of representation and identity are paramount in youth media. These issues are further complicated when youth draw on popular culture and other media resources as vehicles to interpret and represent themselves (Alvermann, 2008, Jenkins et al., 2006). While youth-produced media often draw on popular culture resources and are frequently accused of reproducing dominant stereotypes, many young media makers are often acutely aware of their audiences and deliberately use media resources to establish social connections that will enhance and manipulate audience reception. Using mediated discourse analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005), this paper examines the documentary video production process of one such group of youth, exploring their process of purposeful selection and assemblage of popular culture and media resources. Findings reveal nuanced patterns of multimodal combination to establish and maintain attention of key audiences while asserting alternative social positions.

SCOPUS_ID:84910145098

“The Biggest Problem”: School Leaders’ Covert Construction of Latino ELL Families—Institutional Racism in a Neoliberal Schooling Context

This critical discourse analysis focuses upon the discursive construction of Latino English language learners (ELL) identity within a Texas neoliberal schooling context. Qualitative content analysis was used to examine the construction of Latino ELL identities in the discourses of Texas school leaders practicing under the aegis of neoliberal schooling. Important to this construction was the context of the discourse. School leaders’ discourse was colorblind and largely silent about both ELL status and ethnicity/race. Instead the dominant Discourse constructed economically disadvantaged families as deficit. However, in the discursive context Latino ELL families were disproportionately economically disadvantaged; thus, they were covertly constructed as deficient. The covert nature of the deficit construction makes it difficult to identify and thus resist. Given the other negative effects of neoliberal policies and practices, the implication of these findings is that neoliberal school policies are a manifestation of institutional racism, as they induce multiple forms of covert oppression for Latino ELLs. Yet the data also revealed a counter-Discourse that contested and resisted deficit low-income families, and therefore deficit Latino ELL identities, by drawing from a subordinated discourse of systemic inequities and social justice.

SCOPUS_ID:84975159403

“The Forestial Interior”: The Dislocation of Language in Walter Benjamin's Early Writings

This essay places Walter Benjamin's early work at the center of a linguistic turn that differs fundamentally from the one commonly associated with the term. Rather than a theory of language, Benjamin makes the dislocation of language in human thought the central concern of a new topology of critique. Tracing this topology through the canonical early texts as well as their accompanying fragments and notes, especially Benjamin's unconventional solution to the Liar's Paradox, the essay argues that Origin of the German Mourning Play, culminating in the critical terms of allegory and symbol, is as significant an intervention in the theory of logic and language as the Tractatus and Being and Time. The concluding part of the essay, as a demonstration, attempts to reconstruct Benjamin's central insight into the theory of the symbol, seizing on the topological image, also from the Mourning Play book, of the symbol's “forestial interior” (waldiges Innere).