Nová česká knížka o diskurzu
This article is a review of Soňa Schneiderová: Analýza diskurzu a mediální text. Praha: Karolinum, 2015. 164 s.
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This article is a review of Soňa Schneiderová: Analýza diskurzu a mediální text. Praha: Karolinum, 2015. 164 s.
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This article analyses differences in lexical expressions of epistemic modality between Czech and German in the correspondence of Karel Havlíček. The main focus is on modal particles. Many Czech particles do not have an analogical manner of expression in German, i.e. the modality is expressed in another way. For example, in Havlíček’s German correspondence, the opinion of others is expressed only using a modal verb and a lexical phrase, and not using a modal particle as in Czech. The article discusses the consequences of these irregularities in the domain of transition between word classes.
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The article presents the genre model of the letter to the press based on a comparative study of 140 Polish and English readers’ letters. The analysis encompasses structural, pragmatic, semantic and stylistic matters. The discussed texts are assigned their place within the letter genre, grouped into different types depending on their propositional content and further characterized as marked by a repertoire of genre signals. Additionally, the controversy over their genre membership (editorials vs. letters) is resolved and they are recognized as genuine research material, notwithstanding some degree of editorial bias involved in the publication process.
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The article aims to introduce the fundamental features of the communicative conception of argumentation based on rhetorical and pragmalinguistic argumentation theories. Argumentation is defined as (linguistic) action grounded in accounting for a controversial position with the purpose of convincing listeners of its acceptability or in order to defend it when it is challenged. The basic form of the argumentation process is described using a three-component model which consists of the argument itself, the justified opinion and the warrant represented by the relationship between the previous components allowing the “plausibility transfer” from the argument to the disputed opinion (cf. Toulmin 2003). The article also deals with the conditions that must be met by convincing arguments, with stable content schemes of argumentation (topoi), and it seeks to answer the question of what the rationality of argumentation is based on, i.e. what the sources of its plausibility are.
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The study reported on in this article shows that the -ing participial adjuncts are used differently by native speakers of English depending on the genre they occur in. A comparison of data from written re-narrations of a film with the data from argumentative essays shows that these constructions are more frequent in narrative texts. The -ing participial adjuncts are typically used to express temporal succession (e.g. Anteriority) in narrative texts, whereas Means is the most frequent function of these constructions in argumentative essays. The native speaker data is then compared to that of Norwegian learners of English. The non-native-like patterns in the L2 data are attributed to L1 transfer and lack of knowledge about the genre-specific uses of the -ing clauses.
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The paper looks at the differences in syntactic and information structure in four types of discourse produced by a single author, the British cosmologist and astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees: a written academic text, a text from a book of popular science, unprepared spoken discourse, and an academic lecture, i.e. a text written to be presented orally. The analysis of the variation in one speaker/writer is expected to highlight systematic differences between the separate types of discourses and to eliminate possible variation across different authors. The paper aims to show how, perhaps even subconsciously, competent language users modify the structure of discourse to fulfil their communicative goals in different types of communication.
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Certain rules are observed taking place during conversation openings in a synchronous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) interaction. It is recognized that through openings a chat participant gives the main impression and positive or negative signal to other participants in a chatroom. However, it is assumed that opening techniques known from face-to-face communication will play a smaller role in the overall interaction and their violation will not be viewed so sternly. The question thus remains whether politeness/impoliteness strategies on IRC differ from those in a standard face-to-face conversation and what counts as polite/impolite in a chatroom. The politeness theory of Watts (2003) has been chosen for its novel approach. The article briefly outlines a body of research carried out in IRC openings and shows results of the analysis of various methods of openings found in the corpus.
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One of the well-established sociolinguistic stereotypes is the concept of woman as a gentle and delicate creature whose language tallies with this notion. Women are brought up to mind their manners and be in command of their choice of vocabulary markedly more than men. Recent studies indicate that the correlation between gender and taboo language is context-dependent. Research shows that both men and women use more crude expressions in the same-sex conversation and that the usage of swear words decreases in mixed-sex conversations. In narratives, however, women tend to increase the use of taboo language in order to accommodate to the male norm, in contrast with men who tend to use fewer profanities. The paper wishes to present partial results of an ongoing survey into computer-mediated communication (CMC). As the most anonymous and fleeting CMC environment, chat accentuates the virtues and vices of the cyberspace communication – it lessens the pressure of social expectations and gives the impression of impunity. The present study adopts the community of practice framework and examines how this specifi c context influences the use of taboo language in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in terms of gender differences.
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With a few honourable exceptions (most recently Chamonikolasová 2007, 2009 and Headlandová Kalischová 2009, 2010), within the research in the fi eld of the Firbasian theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP), the interplay of factors operating in spoken discourse seems to play a somewhat marginal role. It is its written counterpart that wins the scholars’ attention most of the time. The present paper deals with a functional comparison of the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism (CD) and that of the degrees of prosodic prominence (PP) in spoken discourse, their interplay, and its possible (aesthetic) effects. Drawing above all on the fi ndings presented by Firbas, the author discusses the results of his own investigation into the area of FSP based on an authentic short text sample. Research has shown (Firbas 1995, Svoboda 2006, Adam 2009, Hurtová 2009) that the author’s communicative purpose is typically related to the aesthetic function carried by the text and determines the communicative strategies employed.
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Participial adverbial constructions have received a lot of attention as means of complex condensation – a function associated in particular with their use in academic prose. Here the choice of a participial clause1 (as opposed to a fi nite clause) is governed by interplay of a number of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. The corpora of spoken academic English make it possible to investigate the way participial constructions are employed in academic spoken monologue. Their occurrence seems to be influenced here by a strong tendency to use fixed lexico-grammatical bundles comprising participles, which perform the functions of the expression of stance, discourse organization as well as the referential function.
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This article analyses please as it occurs in 300 private (social) letters written between 1990 and 1996 in Cameroon and Kenya. Findings show that please functions to mark politeness in private (social) letters but with extended modifiers, a strategy that is perhaps largely influenced by perceived social distance between the writers and the addressees. Please is also found to occur in contexts where a direct interpretation of politeness is not very evident. In both instances, however, the study argues that Cameroonian and to a lesser extent Kenyan private (social) letter writers appear to have clear choices and strategies of their own on how to make requests. These choices/strategies could be summarized essentially as the over-use of the form and function of please.
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Budoucnost naratologie je v hybridizaci: rozhovor s Janem Alberem / The Future of Narratology is in Hybridization: An Interview with Jan Alber
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The article discusses the origin, occurrence and use of terms referring to syntactic phenomena marked by a lower level of their categorical specialization. While the terms polosponové sloveso (‘semi-copula’) and polopredikativní konstrukce (‘semi-predicative construction’) can be considered as traditional, the term polovedlejší věta (‘semi-subordinate clause’) was introduced relatively recently. All of these polo- terms have in common their not entirely clear conceptual background, as well as the fact that they refer to a wide and diverse range of phenomena in Czech syntactic treatises. The present article suggests terminological simplification based on formal, propositional and pragmatic criteria.
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The present paper is a study of idioms in cognitive linguistics in an attempt to account for the prevailing trends and prospective directions of research in the field. First, I look at idiomatic expressions from the standpoint of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, with a special emphasis on socio-cognitive and pragmatic aspects of idiom use and comprehension. For this purpose, idioms used in an American legal drama series – Suits, are analysed. I then proceed with the discussion of the motivational aspect of idioms. In the final analysis, the perspectives for future research of idioms within cognitive linguistic framework are outlined.
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The article reflects on the evolution of Polish word-formation research conducted over the last two decades. The authors present the scope of using structuralist word-formation methodology to answer the question of its solidity. To this end, they analyse its conceptual framework, issues that are investigated and described in linguistics as well as the application of this methodology in interdisciplinary research.
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Considering the revitalization of Romanian bilingual lexicography with German, the aim of the article is to explain how some of the requirements of contemporary meta-lexicography are implemented in the Romanian-German Dictionary (RGD), currently in the editing phase by the Romanian Academy. The RGD aims not only to include an expanded inventory of lemmas, but also to conduct a lexicographical processing of a selection of fixed word combinations, which is adapted and improved from the point of view of the potential user group and the specifics of the coded material. This is expressed in the presentation of user-friendly and reliable information, even if this reference work, as a general dictionary, is not specialized in the compilation of phraseological units. Taking current findings into account, the explanations present some lexicographic considerations on a selected phraseographic subarea, which should be considered in future reference works for Romanian and German. In addition to equivalence information, the RGD strives, as active dictionary, to deliver information on the semantic-syntactic connection and pragmatic evaluation of the codified language material.
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The article is dedicated to studying communicative and pragmatic evidential constructions in newspaper political narrative. Based on the assumption that a communicative subject is represented as chain cooperation (“orderer” – editor – journalist – source – journalist), markers of evidentiality are matched with reference to the information about the events described on behalf of the source of relevant information. Correlation between an evidential discourse marker and an indication of the source of information in the narrative, as well as the possibility of indirect deictic reference to second-hand information with the help of modal verbs and lexical markers have been identified. Using evidential constructions in newspapers is determined pragmatically and connected with the narrator’s desire to distance him- or herself from unreliable or axiologically negative factors.
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The paper examines whether rhetorical questions (RQs) with insulting content or implications soften or intensify the insulting content that they express, as compared to corresponding direct statements with similar insulting content. The analysis is based on the results of two online surveys conducted among 276 Bosnian university students (182 and 94, respectively), who evaluated, in regard to their offensiveness, two sets of RQs and corresponding statements with insulting content or implications. Three types of insulting RQs were included in the surveys: insulting RQs without explicitly offensive terms, insulting RQs that incorporate derogatory words, and sarcastic RQs with insulting implications. The expected results were that: a) in line with Frank’s (1990) account of strengthening effects of RQs as their primary function, insulting RQs, with or without derogatory words, will function as amplifiers, and sound more offensive than corresponding declaratives; and b) sarcastic RQs, following Dews and Winner’s (1995) account of softening effects of sarcastic utterances, will function as mitigators, as compared to non-sarcastic declaratives with insulting content. The obtained results indicate that the first hypothesis cannot be verified (in spite of some indications that slight amplifying effects do exist), and the second hypothesis is completely rejected, with some likelihood that the opposite could be true.
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Based on theories in pragmatics, rhetoric, argumentation and discourse analysis, the genre of “journalistic film review”, relatively little examined, has been analysed in this paper as a discourse reflecting a justified assessment. Our analysis, presented as a case study, concerns the persuasive function of the titles of 53 French and francophone film reviews. In this analysis, the act of persuasion, anchored in Perelman’s (1971) concept of argumentation, corresponds to the rhetorical structure of public discourse. For the act of persuasion, we focus on discursive and stylistic parameters related to the rhetorical principle of “movere” as the basis of the film review’s deliberative (advisory and justifying) dimension. The role of this dimension is to invite the addressee to co-create the meaning of the discourse through the process of co-schematisation, implemented with the help of emotional argumentation in the form of appraisive and affective lexemes. These stylistic devices also constitute a mechanism of persuasion typical of advertising discourse.
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