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We examine turn-taking in collaborative dyadic conversations in which one player described the position of a target object with respect to other fixed objects on her laptop screen, while the other tried to move his representation of the target object to the same position on his own screen. We concentrate on two issues: the role of filled pauses (FPs) such as /um/ or /uh/ in the system of turn-taking, and the strategies for establishing dominance in the dialogues. A quantitative analysis of FP use supports the descriptive observations in the literature that filled pauses mostly function as pre-starts, floor-holders, and to some extent also as floor-yielders. Turn-taking behavior quantifi ed with turnlatencies and the distribution of turn-types also varies with the gender of the interlocutors and the role they perform in the communicative task, and may signal dominance in the conversations.
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Aspects of the Formulating Process in the Interaction in Exolingual Academic Context. On the Basis of an Oral French Corpus. In this article I present a summary of my PhD thesis, with the same title. The ample research is about a series of heterogeneous phenomena that appear in the spontaneous speech as traces of its making such as: euh of hesitation, repetitions, reformulations, etc. The corpus that I used is made of interactions between native and non-native French speakers in an academic context. The corpus analyses lead us to original conclusions relevant both for the field of linguistics and that of French language teaching.
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This study falls in the area of cross-cultural pragmatics because it compares how speakers of American English and speakers of Italian refuse a request. We used a guided conversation protocol to elicit refusals to a request. The results show marked differences between the two groups. Speakers of American English tend to rely on Positive face strategies (praise, encouragement) to mitigate their refusals. In contrast, speakers of Italian tend to use Negative face strategies: lengthy explanations combined with apologies. Both groups used avoidance strategies, but speakers of American English were less likely to offer detailed explanations that require the disclosure of personal information. These findings show that pragmatic strategies to perform speech acts might vary significantly even when we compare groups from two different Western countries.
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Simón Bolívar was the president of Colombia in 1819 and between 1821-1830. The Liberator led the fight for independence in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela. In this paper we will analyze from the point of view of pragmatics and rhetoric the following speeches: “The inaugural address as President of Colombia” (1821), “To the attention of Colombians” (1827), “Message to the Constituent Congress of the Republic of Colombia” (1830) and “Final Proclamation of the Liberator (1830). In all the speeches, the ethos of the orator is construed in a detailed manner, as Simón Bolívar tries to persuade the audience, by highlighting his moral character and everything he had done for the Colombians. We can notice how directive speech acts and commissive speech acts (Bach and Harnish, 1979) are reinforced by informal fallacies (Bordes Solanas, 2011) and metaphors. Antitheses, personifications and anaphoras are salient in his speeches. Simón Bolívar presents himself as the leader of the heart of the people, the son of war and he mentions in his inaugural address that he would like to be a good citizen and give up on the title of Liberator, as “the former emanates from laws, while the latter emanates from war”.
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There is probably no doubt that English is a lingua franca of academia nowadays. Previous research has shown that one of the tendencies observed in academic English as Lingua Franca (ELF) speech is enhanced explicitness (Mauranen 2012). A common manifestations of explicitation is discourse reflexivity (Mauranen 2017), making discourse organisation more visible and enhancing the clarity in the contexts where interlocutors do not share a common linguistic and/or cultural background. Drawing on these findings this paper aims to investigate reflexive phenomena in written academic ELF, namely in the SciELF corpus. The corpus consists of research articles written by L2 users of English, which have not undergone any professional proofreading. The paper focuses on one reflexive category, code glosses, which “supply additional information by rephrasing, explaining or elaborating what has been said” (Hyland 2005: 52). The findings are compared with the corpus of published research articles written by Anglophone writers, which has been designed on the basis of SciELF. The results reveal significant differences in the frequency and functions of several code glosses, but at the same time show the importance of discourse reflexivity in both corpora.
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This contribution looks at modern discourse from two perspectives. It tries to show that the term ‘discourse’ has been expanded over the last few decades to include more phenomena and more disciplines that use it as a basis for their analyses. But it also tries to show that discourse in the sense of effective interaction has met its limits. The fundamental question is: When is discourse real discourse, i.e. more than a series of unrelated utterances and when is it coherent interactive communication? This paper does not intend to provide a new overall theoretical-methodological model, it uses examples from political discourse to demonstrate that popular discourse is often unfortunately less interactive than seems necessary, examples from academic discourse to illustrate that community conventions are being standardised more and more, and from humanoid-human discourse to argue that it is still difficult to construct agents that are recognised as discourse partners by human beings. Theoretical approaches to discuss these limits of discourse include coherence and intentionality. They can be applied to show where lack of cohesion in discourse indicates lack of cohesion in society.
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This study revisits the usage of "I think" in courtroom interaction based on transcripts from a murder trial. The analysis focuses on the structural diversity of "I think" and some of its variant forms, and it demonstrates pragmatic functions associated with the individual patterns. As the data reveal, "I think" performs the roles reported in earlier studies (discourse marker, hedge, booster, face-saving device, opinion marker, mindsay marker) as well as increases epistemic distance and decreases the degree of imposition in courtroom questioning. The findings obtained in the current research are also compared with Kaltenböck’s (2013) results documenting various uses of "I think" and other comment clauses in diachronic spoken data. This comparison demonstrates that, on the one hand, well-established patterns involving "I think" are frequent in the courtroom data and, on the other, that the recent trends with variant forms of "I think" – which have been identified in non-specialist settings – are scantily represented.
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This study sets out to examine the British Prime Minister Theresa May’s speeches delivered through her premiership. It aims to unveil the ideological discursive formation of Brexit after the referendum, and to investigate the way May squares the rhetoric to persuade the general public and the British/European political Elites to deliver the Brexit deal, though she campaigned pro-European Britain. I conduct a corpus-assisted discourse study approach, using discourse analysis methods and corpus linguistics tools for a case study of a purpose-built corpus of the Prime Minister speeches (2016-2019). The analysis revealed that the Brexit representation eschewed any identification with ‘Europe’ and boosted Eurosceptic sentiments by (1) rationalizing the decision to leave the European Union; (2) proposing a better future after Brexit; (3) appealing to the British people’s emotion to support the Brexit deal.
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The abstract is one of the most important sections in a research article (RA) because it is the first section researchers read to determine whether it is relevant to their research. The abstract provides an overview or summary of the entire article. In the dentistry discipline, the RA abstract can either be structured using headings or written as a summary. However, subdisciplinary investigations of intradisciplinary (within the same discipline) variations of move structures in dentistry RA abstracts are lacking. This study aimed to investigate the prototypical rhetorical move structure realizations of 119 English RA abstracts in eight dentistry disciplines: Oral Sciences, Periodontics, Restorative Dentistry, Endodontics, Operative Dentistry, Prosthodontics, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, and Orthodontics. It also aimed to investigate whether there are any intradisciplinary variations and/ or similarities between the eight dentistry subdisciplines in terms of move sequence and length. The findings showed a lack of intradisciplinary variations in the rhetorical four-move structure (Purpose-Method-Result-Conclusion) across the eight dentistry subdisciplines. The Introduction/Background move was not present in all the dentistry subdisciplines; therefore, it is optional in five subdisciplines but conventional in the Oral Sciences, Endodontics, and Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery subdisciplines since its occurrence exceeded 60 per cent of investigated RA abstracts of those subdisciplines. The analysis of the move lengths indicated the importance of the Methods and the Results moves in dental research discourse because each move constituted over 25 per cent of text space. The findings revealed the importance of drawing learners’ attention to the research gap when establishing the context for a study. Future studies may employ the proposed move-analysis model for RA abstract analyses in other academic disciplines.
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This paper addresses how the Wikipedia community has debated the existence of an EU culture on a Wikipedia discussion site between 2001 and 2019. That is, a corpus of discussions among Wikipedia editors (‘Wikipedians’) was examined to shed light on how the Wikipedians involved argue for/against the idea that an overarching EU culture exists at present. This, combined with an examination of debates about concrete cultural elements associated with the EU, permits an insight into Wikipedians’ conception(s) of the union. Drawing on argumentation analysis shows that the data examined indicates that cultural commonality across EU member states is not necessarily ascribed to the EU but to their being European countries. Additionally, even Wikipedians who argue that an overarching EU culture exists do not necessarily actually subscribe to this view but argue for reference to cultural elements in the Wikipedia article on the EU in order to signal to Wikipedia readers that the EU is “more than a set of treaties”.
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Given the importance of stance expression in the writing of abstracts, this study adopted a corpus-based comparative approach to investigate the stance expression in abstracts of the Translation Practice Report (TPR) and the Interpretation Practice Report (IPR), which are two newly emerging reporting genres in Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) in China. Based on a set of corpora composed with 30 TPR abstracts (8,738 tokens) and 30 IPR abstracts (8,699 tokens) collected from 30 universities located in 16 provinces in China, the stance expression was examined in terms of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention by employing the stance framework in Hyland’s (2005) interactional model. The findings revealed a genre-specific convention in utilizing the four categories of stance in both the TPR abstracts and the IPR abstracts, which is different from that in the abstracts of the empirical studies. The analysis also found discipline-specific variations of stance expression between the two corpora due to different disciplinary conventions and practice of the two subdisciplines. Then, the interviews with the insider informants were conducted to clarify and to enrich the research findings. The results in the study may be taken as a useful reference to expressing attitude in writing the abstracts in the MTI field of China, and possibly in other fields.
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The present study investigates evidentiality in its broadest sense (Chafe 1986) in PhD dissertations as a genre of academic writing. For this purpose, Chafe’s taxonomy (1986), revised by Ifantidou (2001), has been used as a framework in order to analyze three different groups of datasets, including one group of native speakers of English and two groups of non-native speakers: a group of Turkish speakers of English and the other non-native speakers with different L1 backgrounds. The texts of these three groups are examined in order to find out whether the native language of the participants is a factor in the choice of evidential markers. The results show that the native speakers of English use evidential markers more frequently compared to the non-native authors. In terms of the Native Language/Interlanguage comparison in Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger 1996, 1998), the overall use of evidentiality reveals that non-native authors do not show native-like features in the use of evidentiality. In terms of the Interlanguage/ Interlanguage comparison, Turkish authors of academic texts differ from the authors with various native language backgrounds in terms of the use of evidentiality.
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A growing body of literature suggests that the world's languages can be classified into three rhythm classes: mora-timed languages, stress-timed languages, and syllable-timed languages. However, scholars cannot agree on which rhythmic measures discriminate rhythm classes most satisfactorily and whether the speech rate factor should be considered. In this study, we analyze speech production by bilingual speakers, and compare their production with that of monolingual speakers and ESL speakers. Our rhythmic metric measure results show that when speech rate is taken into consideration, a combination of the two metric measures for vowels, Varco∆V and vocalic nPVI, is most reliable in discriminating different rhythm classes, while consonants do not seem effective, whether the speech rate factor is included or not.
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In university syllabuses Discourse analysis and Interpretation appear as separate courses. Nevertheless, as our teaching experience showed us, they are quite complementary and rely on a conceptual basis that nourish our students’ knowledge of discourse and the practice of it. As this paper aims at showing, the analysis of one of Emmanuel Macron’s discourses on the Gilets jaunes brought us to the understanding that being familiar with some discursive strategies may help future interpreters’ performance especially when knowledge is transferred from one discipline to the other, in an integratedapproach.
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Youssef A. Haddad . (2018). The Sociopragmatics of Attitude Datives in Levantine Arabic . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. x + 169 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-3407-2.
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In this discussion note we explore why and how we need a pragmalinguistic and speech act-anchored approach to systematically study a key pragmatic phenomenon: phatic interaction. By so doing, we aim to draw attention to a special issue which we plan to publish in Acta Linguistica Academica. First, we present a general model through which phatic interaction can be replicably studied across different data types and linguacultures, by breaking it down to speech act types occurring in different slots of an interaction. Second, we provide a case study involving Chinese learners of English as a foreign language, in order to illustrate how the proposed framework can be put to actual use.
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Apologies appearing in postcard texts have not been the subject of linguistic studies so far. Therefore, the aim of this article is to examine and compare the acts of apology in Polish and Russian postcard messages. The conducted analysis concerns the location of apologies in the structure of messages, their pragmatic and formal characteristics, speech acts which co-constitute apology formulas and actions that cause speakers to perform acts of apology. The results of the study show that there are differences between both languages in terms of the number and frequency of acts of apology. It is difficult to clearly indicate the reasons for this state of affairs, but it can be presumed that they should be sought, among others in cultural differences.The fact that Russians use acts of apology less frequently than Poles might be the result of less individual autonomy and greater power distance. Also, differences in the location of acts of apology in the structure of messages and the type of actions that cause senders to apologize have been identified. Moreover, it has been shown that in both languages the senders of apologies are mainly women. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the examined acts of apology are formulaic, which is the result of conforming to the convention of postcard messages.
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This paper examines the concept of micropoliteness or sympathetic politeness as a type of verbal politeness different from normal courtesy or strategic courtesy that have been used to explain some uses of forms of address in Spanish. This concept allows for a common explanation for some uses of Hispanic address forms, usually conceived as exceptional cases (the so-called: affectionate usted (Sp. usted de cariño/de coqueteo), patrician usted (Sp. usted Patricio), festive usted (usted festivo), affective su merced (Sp. su merced afectivo) or meliorative vosotros (Sp. vosotros meliorativo)). The analysis of the data provided in the bibliography and some of our own shows how these treatments described in the literature are not fully explained neither through the classic concepts of power and solidarity nor through other parameters that extend and complement the previous ones.
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