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Our paper, theoretically anchored in functional and systemic grammar, focuses on a relatively marginal type of focus formulas (FFs), referred to by Schmid (2001) as ‘N-bethat- constructions’ or constructions with shell-Nouns (cf. The trouble/problem/fact… is that people have short memories.). When we used corpus data (BNC, COCA) to verify the role of FFs in information packaging in text/discourse, we were faced with their two seemingly contrary manifestations: they occurred either (i) as relatively stable utteranceinitial templates or (ii) as looser configurations, co-occurring with various discourse markers (DMs). Our hypothesis is that in the latter case, namely when interlaced into clusters of DMs, the FFs tend to adapt to the communicatively regulative (Leech 1983) roles of surrounding DMs, and extend their role as focalising devices by an additive role, i.e. to participate in overt language manifestations of a number of pragmatically-based communicative strategies associated with facework. Our aim is to verify the validity of our hypothesis by authentic language data.
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This paper aims at extending the analysis of ELF discourse to the domain of intimate interactions and to explore how partners with different linguacultural backgrounds accomplish their “coupleness” through English as a lingua franca with a focus on the hybrid features of couples’ ELF. For this purpose five European couples with different first languages were asked to audio-record their ELF home interactions and comment on selected excerpts of their recordings so as to gain some insights about how these interactions were perceived from a participant viewpoint. The investigation of the data suggests that ELF partners use hybrid forms to activate and ratify particular contexts (schematic constructs), and to achieve a particular pretext (an interactive purpose) of domestic intimacy and togetherness.
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Since recent studies on academic English have shown considerable cross-cultural variation in texts written by non-native speakers (Clyne 1987, Ventola & Mauranen 1991, Čmejrková & Daneš 1997, Duszak 1997, Chamonikolasová 2005, Stašková 2005, Mur- Dueňas 2008, Wagner 2011, Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012, Povolná 2012), the paper investigates a corpus of diploma theses written by Czech and German students of English with the aim of finding out how novice non-native writers from different discourse communities (Swales 2004) use causal and contrastive discourse markers (DMs) associated with hypotactic and paratactic relations in order to build coherence relations (Taboada 2006) in academic texts. In addition, the author attempts to find out whether there is any variation in the preferences of novice writers depending on the different fields of study, i.e. diploma theses written in the areas of linguistics and methodology, and whether the use of selected DMs by Czech and German students differs from the writing habits of native speakers of English.
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This paper takes the view that varieties of writing represent agreed ways of mediating content that are recognized by discourse communities such as the academy who constitute their expectable readerships. These mediations make use of language-specific default affordances that are not only syntactic but also pragmatic and represent thinking for speaking categories (Slobin 1996) which, I argue, have greater explanatory power than the more abstract concept of virtual English (Seidlhofer 2011). In this context, I make a few preliminary comments on what appear to be the pragmatic affordances identifi able in parallel English texts generated by two native Chinese and a native English student writer faced with the same academic task, and make some consequent observations about teaching academic writing.
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The aim of this paper is to focus on one aspect of English learners’ pragmatic competence which can be efficiently developed through threaded discussions, i.e. on the dispreferred speech act of disagreement. The author shares her experience of using online discussion fora in Practical English classes designed for third-year students. She comments on the linguistic resources used by the students to express mitigated disagreement and, further, she discusses the role of the instructor in facilitating interactional coherence. The author reaches the conclusion that asynchronous discussion fora can be useful in developing English learners’ pragmatic strategies, provided that online collaboration is carefully and wisely planned, and encouraged by a dedicated and enthusiastic instructor.
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Language plays a crucial role in political speech. The use of a particular language can reflect or be influenced by the speaker’s ideology, power, cultural/social background, region, or social status. This paper is concerned with the relationship between language and power, specifically as manifested in the language used by an Indonesian president in international forums. It aims to uncover the power relations that were projected through the linguistic features of the president’s speech texts, particularly the use of modal verbs. Data for this paper are the speeches on the topics of peace and climate change delivered by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) in international forums during his first and second presidential terms. This paper’s analysis of linguistic modalities uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to answer its research questions. The results show that, in projecting his power, SBY used several linguistic modal verbs. From the context of the modality used it can be understood that the president conveyed his strategic desire to be himself as he tried to relate to the audience (as he assumed it to be) and construct an image of himself, of his audience, and of their relationship. The president produced discourse that embodied assumptions about the social relations between his leadership and the audience and asserted both his legitimate power as president and his expert power. Through the language used, SBY created, sustained, and replicated the fundamental inequalities and asymmetries in the forums he attended.
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The paper provides a cross-cultural analysis of selected linguistic realizations of persuasion in technical manuals as typical representatives of technical discourse. It aims to identify differences and similarities between the ways persuasive power is expressed in this type of specialized discourse in English and Czech L1 texts. The data comprises manuals to various technical devices and amounts to slightly more than 200,000 words. This specialized corpus (15 manuals in English and 15 in Czech) is assumed to enable the comparison of the ways in which technical communicators express persuasion. The investigation, which is conducted from the perspectives of corpus analysis and discourse analysis, focuses on the ways in which the interactive and dynamic process of persuasion is explicitly manifested: 1. directly (i.e. using directives expressed by imperatives of full verbs, modals of obligation, necessity, prohibition, and predicative adjectives expressing the writer’s judgement of the necessity to perform an action) and 2. indirectly (i.e. using other language means than directives, such as other modals than those related to obligation, necessity or prohibition, conditional clauses, rhetorical questions). The findings are expected to be relevant and applicable in the education domain to raise technical writers’ awareness of directives as useful persuasive strategies suitable for the production of effective well-written technical manuals since their quality including the appropriate degree of persuasiveness can influence prospective consumers to make a purchase of a particular technical device.
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This article examines modal resources in the mediatised discourse of social transformation in Nigeria with a view to showing how they are strategically used to code interpersonal meanings for enhanced and impactful delivery of messages of social transformation in the nation. Data for the study comprises texts on aspects of social transformation campaigns in Nigeria in the context of democracy, anti-corruption crusade, insecurity and domestic violence compiled as small corpora. The data comprises texts produced by government and non-governmental actors consisting of speeches, radio commentaries, jingles, printed texts, interviews, tweets and online newspaper comments and covers the period from March 2013 to March 2018. The five-year span was informed by the wide gamut of negative realities in the nation during the time frame which led to increased mediatisation of social transformation messages. Corpus-assisted critical discourse approach was employed for data analysis, using Fairclough’s (1989, revised 2015) dialectical relational approach, the corpus linguistic tool of Antconc, chi-square test on R-Studio and normalised relative frequencies. Data analysis revealed that the different participants in the discourse characteristically used different modal resources to reflect their power on the one hand and resistance on the other and to capture the intensity of their views and feelings on the actions required for Nigeria to experience genuine social transformation. The study concludes that even though the discourse is largely ideational, modal resources are deployed for emphasising the urgency and seriousness of the issues in the ideational contents of the discourse.
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Academic literacy includes the learners’ ability to use their language knowledge to form articulate texts. In communicative competence models this ability is subsumed under the notion of discourse competence which includes the concepts of cohesion and coherence. Starting from the premise that constructing a coherent text entails efficient use of metadiscourse (i.e. means of explicit text organisation) this study focuses on elements referring to discourse acts, text sequences or stages called frame markers, i.e. items providing framing information about elements of the discourse and functioning to sequence, label, predict and shift arguments, making the discourse clear to readers or listeners (Hyland 2005). It analyses patterns of L2 learners’ use of frame markers, compares them to English native speakers’, and explores the relationship between frame markers and coherence. The corpus includes 80 argumentative essays written by early undergraduate Croatian L2 learners of English at B2 level. The results indicate that foreign language learners’ argumentative essays are characterized by an overuse of a limited set of frame markers. Finally, implications are drawn for teaching and further research.
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The study investigates the communicative strategy ‘Making the first impression’ within the communicative style and tradition of Masculine Romantic Discourse at the stage ‘Initiation of Romantic Relationship’. The masculine communicative strategy ‘Making the first impression’ is aimed at achieving the communicative goal – to impress a female addressee for a limited time. The research demonstrates the potential of the complex approach to the study of interpersonal communicative effectiveness and the causes of communication failures. It comprises interdependent variables such as the objective and the subjective integrative features, as well as the strategic ways, namely what should be said (semantics) and how it should be said (discourse features via verbal means). The initial dyadic interaction was implemented by masculine communicative moves within pragmatic communication models. The masculine communicative moves were sourced from an American dating and relationship reality television series The Bachelorette US released from 2012 to 2018. The results revealed that the successful pragmatic communication model included relevant and variable masculine communicative moves, providing the pragmatic foundations of the relationship.
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According to Alo and Mesthrie (2008), Nigerian English (NigE) becomes increasingly more influenced by American English (AmE), due to contact with American-trained professionals among other factors (cf. Gut 2008, Jowitt 1991). The online micro-blogging service Twitter offers potential communication with a vast number of English natives around the globe, using English in a vernacular usage domain, among other domains (or genres such as a news tweet vs a private tweet). With its foundation in 2006, Twitter is a new communication technology, which may indicate that it is used predominantly by “younger” urban people, and which may influence linguistic choices. The question I attempt to answer is whether Twitter influences NigE such that the British English (BrE) heritage of the country is contested by AmE influence. In this paper, I focus on the usage of prepositions and orthographic realizations of lemmata ending in -o(u)r, which can be categorized as BrE and AmE origin, respectively, in a NigE Twitter Corpus compiled in 2016-17 (13 mill. words). These features’ frequencies are contrasted with those of the Nigerian component of GloWbE (Davies 2013). Results from chi-squared tests suggest that AmE prepositions increasingly enter NigE Twitter discourse. Differences in spelling tend towards American English, but are not statistically significant. The only exception is the lemma labour, which is more often used in its British English spelling variant (χ2 = 26.30; df = 1; pone-tailed < 0.001).
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Research article (RA) abstracts are not mere shortened versions of the research article content but constitute a separate genre of academic discourse with its own specific features, one of them being its interactional nature. This paper explores interactional metadiscourse markers occurring in RA abstracts from the diachronic perspective. The main focus is therefore on variation and change in the use of these linguistic means since it may be expected that their distribution could evolve over time, even though scholars follow specific writing conventions when writing RA abstracts. Connected with this is the question whether growth in the mean length of RA abstracts has led to any rhetorical change. Providing an answer to this question is another aim of this paper. The study is based on a corpus of 96 RA abstracts from the field of Applied Linguistics published in a prestigious linguistic journal entitled Journal of Pragmatics over the course of the last 35 years. The theoretical framework followed here is the taxonomy of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland (2005a), which is particularly convenient as it offers a pragmatically-grounded method of analysing interactional metadiscourse markers in academic texts. As the results suggest, the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers has undergone diachronic changes, e.g. in the use of hedging and boosting devices, confirming the dynamic character of this often overlooked genre of academic discourse with regard to its interpersonal aspects.
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Religious discourse represents an area of human communication in which persuasion plays a vital role; religious texts seem to be essentially related to the ultimate objective of religion: to create, mediate and legitimise ideology in order to persuade the reader of the veracity of the religious doctrine (Fairclough 1989, Cotterell & Turner 1989: 26-33, van Dijk 1998: 317). The paper seeks to investigate the persuasive strategies and linguistic means employed to convey persuasion in English Protestant sermons. The analysis focuses on the rhetorical role of pathos, which is purposefully evoked by the preacher via wilful employment of affect and emotions. Attention will also be paid to the blurred borderline between the intentional use of sentiment and sentimentality, and manipulation.
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The present study looked closely at the niche establishments in the introduction sections of English research articles written by Thai authors and published in local Thai journals and compared them to those found in introduction sections written by non-Thai authors published in international and high indexed journals. Each of the two corpora contains forty introductory sections. The analysis was based on the frameworks of Swales (2004) and Lim (2012). It was found that the use of niche establishments in the international corpus was higher than that in the Thai corpus. In the Thai corpus, “Stressing insufficient research” was the highest strategy, but “Revealing methodological limitations” was completely absent. It is expected that the results will provide practical guidance for novice writers to write their research introduction sections with informative and convincing niche establishments and, to some extent, the results should also benefit English writing classes, especially in Thailand.
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This paper explores how hybrid discourse, instantiated in talk and interaction, can be shaped not only by a situational context (TV panel show) and cultural context (TV’s increasing democratisation of laity), but also by human volition in pursuit of recognizable to others and allowed within the confines of the setting. It does this by examining the emergence of context in light of a non-mainstream hybrid and reflexive activity. Specifically, it examines a non-normative interview format that has arisen in contemporary broadcasting through the analysis of three transcribed segments which were taken from two key episodes of the BBC’s flagship political program: Question Time. Using a range of analytical concepts from symbolic interactionism, pragmatics, and conversational analysis, such as frames and footings, activity types, discourse types, and turn-taking, the analysis shows how institutional (political) and non-institutional (normative) practices can come together in the pursuit of individual goals and contemporary media’s goal for increasingly partisan journalism and confrontainment. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of a multidimensional approach to context, whereby meaning both emerges from and is constitutive of the forms and functions of an activity’s discourse, whilst further highlighting the role of hybridity in contemporary discourse.
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As one of the official languages of the Philippines, English predominantly figures in the domains of education, government, and the judiciary. This reality has always put English at the top of the linguistic ladder, relegating local languages to lower ranks. This scenario appears to be evident also in the domain of the church. In this paper, I investigate signs posted within the compound of a major Catholic church located in the Philippines in terms of types and language use. Informed by linguistic landscape concepts pioneered by Landry and Bourhis (1997), Spolsky and Cooper (1991), and Ben-Rafael (2009), I analyzed over a hundred signs in the religious linguistic landscape, which I call ‘churchscape’. Findings show that English dominates in the churchscape as a language of communication and language of tourism while local languages such as Filipino and Pangasinan assume a secondary role in the churchscape. This study affords us an interesting view and alternative understanding of multilingualism as a phenomenon through the churchscape in question.
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Introduction. Using new lexical units such as aspi or aspergerowiec helps to express the intention of breaking negative stereotypes associated with people with Asperger syndrome. The aforementioned terms appear in contexts both postulating equal chances for intellectually impaired people and presenting these people in a neutral light. Objective. The aim of the article is to discuss the pragmatic function of statements containing the lexemes aspi and aspergerowiec, and to highlight the role of these neologisms. Materials and methods. The research materials consisted of web-based texts, which were built based on monitoring corpus MoncoPL, and supplemented with an analysis of content from Google search and Google Graphics. Both the meaning and collocations of the lexemes aspi and aspergerowiec were analyzed. Online dictionaries of the Polish language were used to systematize the definitions of the researched words. An analysis of the pragmatic function was conducted on the basis of the typology of pragmatic acts by Zbigniew Nęcki and Aleksy Awdiejew. Results. The observations presented in this article may serve as inspiration for researches on the relationship between the motivation of creating words associated by meaning with defining disability and the purpose and intention of those using them.
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The transfer of humorous elements in audio-visual texts is a challenging task as verbalexpressions heavily rely on witty wordplay and are visually bound. To overcome such achallenge, the translator has to have two particular skills: creativity and a thoroughunderstanding of the context and/or intended meanings. This paper aims at investigating therealisation of humour in dubbing animation vis-à-vis register variation and creativity bycomparing the Egyptian dub with the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) re-dub of Disney’sMonster’s Inc. Drawing on House’s (2015) translation quality assessment model, the dataanalysis reveals that resorting to colloquialism as a covert translation strategy provided afunctionally adequate, nuanced leeway for the translator to capture the essence situationalhumour of the source text by relying on the on-screen visuals. Therefore, the translator quasiassumesthe role of an author to communicate interpersonal meanings as effectively andhumorously as possible. Meanwhile, resorting to the standard variation as an overt translationstrategy significantly deflated and sacrificed verbal humour due to the translator’s literal styleand Al-Jazeera’s ideological orientation that shuns functional equivalence for the sake oflinguistic homogenisation.
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