Basic Discourse Research Articles

Intonational Commitments

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of inquisitive rising declaratives (Gunlogson 2001, Jeong 2018) within the Table model (Farkas & Bruce 2010). On this account, intonational tunes are modifiers of context update functions: rising intonation removes the speaker commitment component of a context update. This delivers a compositional account of the contributions of sentence type and intonational tune to the illocutionary mood of an utterance, showing how the semantic type of declarative sentences, the rising intonational tune, and a general-purpose utterance function (Farkas & Roelofsen 2017) conspire to derive the basic discourse effect of rising declaratives without any construction-specific stipulations. The account makes use of only the most fundamental representational primitives independently necessary to model assertions and neutral questions, showing that rising declaratives can be accounted for without recourse to projected commitments, metalinguistic issues, or explicit marking of commitment strength, evidence source, or epistemic bias (cf. Gunlogson 2008, Northrup 2014, Malamud & Stephenson 2015, Farkas & Roelofsen 2017). Inferences of bias generated by rising declaratives are accounted for with a novel pragmatics for the Table model, formalizing what is implicit in discussions of the role played in the model by speaker commitments and projected Common Grounds.

Dubrovnik’s ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’

Probably the most important rhetorical strategy of the Dubrovnik Republic, traditionally used in dealing with Christian rulers in order to defend its state interests, was the one that supported the image of Dubrovnik as a ‘wall of Christianity’. Such a rhetorical argument was not chosen by chance. It was continuously present in diplomatic documents from the Middle Ages onwards and throughout the early modern period. It is particularly represented in the framework of diplomatic communication with Papal Rome. Papal Rome was still seriously interested in supporting the existence of the Dubrovnik Republic during the 17th century. In an effort to gain the addressee’s attention and achieve an effective outcome, Dubrovnik’s diplomatic rhetoric still used different variations of the same basic discourse, which was not just a mere phrase, but also a certain reflection of real circumstances. The image of existence on the very border of Christendom, which highlighted the necessity of taking the republic‘ s needs into account, took on an additional dramatic note during the Candian War (1645–1669). Emphasizing the fragile position of the small republic located between the opposing Venetians and the Ottomans, the Dubrovnik Senate did not fail to point out the exceptional need to preserve Dubrovnik’s neutrality. Highlighting of the geostrategic importance of Dubrovnik and, accordingly, the necessity of maintaining it was particularly evident in the period after the earthquake of 1667.

Перевод аналитической статьи для массмедиа: прагматика дискурсов

The paper examines the features of analytical articles in the mass media, which appear due to the interaction of different discourses that form a specific genre of media analytics. Using the material of original analytical articles written in English and German, and their published translations, the authors investigate manifestations of such characteristics as hybridity, diffuseness, intertextuality, as well as translation problems that arise during translation. Based on the analysis of scientific works on the issues of genre hybridity and diffuseness in media discourse, the authors clarify the ambiguous interpretation of the concept of diffuseness and define its boundaries with the concept of hybridity. The research also reveals the following forms of intertextuality caused by the interaction of discourses within the genre of analytical article on legal issues: reference to another text in the form of a hyperlink, citation, allusion. The analysis of fragments from analytical articles of media discourse containing manifestations of hybridity, diffuseness, and intertextuality demonstrates that a translator who is dealing with a text with these characteristics should excellently know the terminology of the basic and projective discourse in the original and target language, be aware of the neologization processes in both discourses, master stylistic transformations, and take into account the pragmatic factors caused by the interaction of the discourses.

How do autistic adults use syntactic and prosodic cues to manage spoken discourse?

ABSTRACT Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should also include prosodic cues. This exploratory study addresses this gap by segmenting the spoken discourse of 12 ASD and NT adults using the framework of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs). BDUs result from the mapping of syntactic boundaries on prosodic units, which can coincide in different ways and are associated with different discourse strategies. We hypothesized that the discourse of ASD adults would display more atypical strategies than NT adults, reflecting a ‘pedantic’ style and more difficulties in managing ongoing discourse. While ASD adults did not produce more discourse units associated with didactic or pedantic strategies than NT adults, they did produce less units associated with strategies of interactional regulation. This study provides initial evidence that multidimensional linguistic units, such as BDUs can help differentiate speech delivery strategies of ASD adults from those of their NT peers, even based on simple prosodic cues like silent pauses.

CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AMERICANS AND UKRAINIANS

This article considers cross-cultural communication between Americans and Ukrainians. Its purpose is to stress how Americans and Ukrainians think and express their thoughts, how they act interpersonally, and how they follow the many hidden rules that govern conduct. In today’s world, it is both valuable and necessary to be aware of intercultural differences. Cross-cultural communication refers to the communication between people who have different cultural backgrounds. Misunderstandings and problems between them primarily occur because they assume that what is natural, appropriate, and acceptable for them must be natural, appropriate, and acceptable to others. Different cultural assumptions may underlie different views on what is “polite” or “rude.” The authors draw attention to the most apparent and fundamental areas of cultural understanding breakdowns, which exist at the everyday level of life between native speakers of American English and Ukrainian. They point out that it is not enough to learn the language’s vocabulary and grammar to understand and be understood by native speakers. The mentality and world view of native speakers is crucial in choosing to use a particular word and the cultural context. The article covers the most basic discourse areas where breakdowns often occur in intercultural communication. They are: addressing people, meeting someone new, meeting and parting etiquette, and receiving guests.

Regional ethnic autonomy: thinking and actions on the reconstruction of a unified multi-ethnic country by the CPC

The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established and consolidated a new type of socialist ethnic relations, and the people of all ethnic groups in China have embarked on a socialist road since then. This “had never occurred in thousands of years” in the history of China’s ethnic relations and was based on the correct path for solving ethnic issues with Chinese characteristics pioneered by the Communist Party of China (CPC), the institutional core of which is the system of regional ethnic autonomy. So to speak, the system of regional ethnic autonomy, as a fundamental political system of the country, is the reconstruction of the important content and system of ethnic relations and the reconstruction of the governance system of a unified multi-ethnic country. Around the year of 1949, the Chinese communists planned the system of regional ethnic autonomy in a systematical and comprehensive manner, and established a basic discourse guiding the ethnic work, ethnic policies and ethnic studies in the PRC. On the basis of historical literature, this paper arranges and sorts out the ethic policies and thinking context at the early stage of the governance by the CPC.

Towards a top-down approach for an automatic discourse analysis for Basque: Segmentation and Central Unit detection tool.

Lately, discourse structure has received considerable attention due to the benefits its application offers in several NLP tasks such as opinion mining, summarization, question answering, text simplification, among others. When automatically analyzing texts, discourse parsers typically perform two different tasks: i) identification of basic discourse units (text segmentation) ii) linking discourse units by means of discourse relations, building structures such as trees or graphs. The resulting discourse structures are, in general terms, accurate at intra-sentence discourse-level relations, however they fail to capture the correct inter-sentence relations. Detecting the main discourse unit (the Central Unit) is helpful for discourse analyzers (and also for manual annotation) in improving their results in rhetorical labeling. Bearing this in mind, we set out to build the first two steps of a discourse parser following a top-down strategy: i) to find discourse units, ii) to detect the Central Unit. The final step, i.e. assigning rhetorical relations, remains to be worked on in the immediate future. In accordance with this strategy, our paper presents a tool consisting of a discourse segmenter and an automatic Central Unit detector.

Проблемы формирования стратегического нарратива БРИКС

During the last decade the BRICS group of developing countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) became a noticeable phenomenon in international relations. Discussion continues among politicians and experts about the group’s perspective, its sustainability and its potential both for further institutionalization and to become a more integrated community. Many experts are pessimistic about the prospect that BRICS will gain more influence, taking account of slowing economic growth, economic asymmetry, different political goals and the distinct strategic cultures of the group’s members.Under such circumstances elaboration of a BRICS communication strategy becomes an issue of vital importance. The first step might be the design of a strategic BRICS narrative which could act as an interpretative platform framing the perception of key issues, establish the connection between the past and a vision of future, and designate the group’s identity. Such a narrative could serve as the basis for strategic positioning, which is the key component of a communication strategy. It enables the formation of a basic discourse and key messages which can be transmitted through diversified channels of communication.This article outlines the strategic narrative of BRICS, drawing from the model of strategic narrative and the concept of national biography. The narrative of the international system, the identity narrative and issue narratives are considered as key components of its strategic narrative. Similarly, parameters of national biography are exposed: myths about the birth of community, significant experiences in the past, images of the future, the spatial facet and relationships with other countries and communities. This analysis identifies those components of the strategic narrative that are sufficiently developed and describes ways to further elaborate others.A constructivist approach is used, according to which a “strategic narrative” is considered to be social construct elaborated to achieve particular strategic goals, in combination with a holistic analysis which views the different tracks of BRICS activities as intertwined. Content analysis of documents from BRICS summits (primarily of the summits in Xiamen, China in 2017 and Johannesburg, South Africa) and public speeches by the leaders of BRICS countries is undertaken.

The Existence of Pragmatic Markers in Americas’ Got Talent Judges’ Commentaries

This study attempts to explain the use of pragmatic markers in Americas’ Got Talent judges’ commentaries. The aims of the study are to analyze the existence of verbal and visual pragmatic markers and explain their relationship. The verbal pragmatic markers are categorized into four types based on the typology of pragmatic markers proposed by Fraser (1996). They are basic markers, commentary markers, parallel markers, and discourse markers. While the visual pragmatic markers divided into thinking face, pointing with gaze and hand movement and smile following the pragmatic function facial gestures from Bavelas & Chovil (2013). This research employed descriptive method with qualitative approach. The object of the study is judges of Americas’ Got Talent season 13 which consist of Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum, Mell B, and Howie Mendel. The study revealed that the judges used the basic markers to express the main message of the comment, commentary markers to express the message contains in the comment toward the main message, parallel markers to express the complement message toward the main message and the discourse markers to express the relation between the main message and the other utterance. The visual pragmatic markers performed also signals certain message related to verbal markers. The judges performed the thinking face to signal the word search, pointing with gaze and hand movement to emphasize the messages convey in utterance and smile to signal pleasure. This research could provide an understanding of EFL learners in using pragmatic markers as a way to improve communication strategy in communication.

Cultural Themes and Discourse in EMDR Therapy

This research study examined 56 eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) clinician responses to a case vignette to explore the question of how a sample of EMDR clinicians integrated the role of culture in EMDR therapy. A combination of basic interpretive and discourse analysis qualitative research methods examined participant responses to an online survey posting the vignette and several open-ended response questions. Results found that EMDR clinicians generally view the EMDR standard procedures as being flexible enough to meet client needs independent of cultural considerations. However, when prompted, the respondents were able to provide concrete examples of culture's potential influence. Furthermore, some implicit patterns of English language use suggested that there may be areas where more intentional reflection of the intersection of culture and EMDR may be warranted. The study serves as a catalyst for future inquiry on cultural issues in EMDR and validation of qualitative analytic strategies for EMDR research. The participants' responses also allowed an evaluation of how they conceptualized EMDR therapy and how they discussed EMDR with their clients. Identified themes included reflections on universality, reflections on cultural influences on treatment, individual differences in cultural identity, clinician identity interacting with treatment, EMDR process, and implicit cultural aspects of treatment.

I am uncertain, but We are not: a new subjectivity of the Anthropocene

AbstractThe concept of ‘the Anthropocene’ as a new human-induced geological epoch has made its way into IR. Debates have recently arisen between ‘post-humanists’ stressing its destruction of subject-object binaries and ‘New Anthropocentrists’ arguing that it increases the importance of the human being as planetary steward. This article moves beyond these debates to question a strange but unexplored foundation that underlies the basic discourse of the Anthropocene: the assertion that humanity must be grouped together as a collective species, ‘anthropos’, or planetary ‘We’. Using the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, it argues that the Anthropocene reveals a new and deeper shift in human subjectivity, moving from an individualistic Cartesian ‘I’ to a collective and planetary ‘We’. This argument is made in three steps. First, today's common treatment of humanity as a collective whole in Anthropocene literature is examined. Second, it details how transformations in subjectivity occur by shifting the historical boundaries of our most fundamental notion of certainty – the ‘subiectum’ – and how the technologies of Earth System Science (ESS) subtly facilitate this shift today. Finally, the article argues how this subjective transformation from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’ results from the temporal, spatial, and existential incalculability and uncertainty of the Anthropocene, thereby fostering the rise of certainty in new forms of conflictual identity politics.

Japanese EFL Learners’ Comprehension of the Basic Discourse Markers but and so

Japanese EFL Learners’ Comprehension of the Basic Discourse Markers but and so

1946년『인기학소론(人紀學素論)』의 출간과 그 의의

This study examines the authorship of the book《The basic discourse of Sinhomismo study》 published in 1946 by Sinhomismo study society and its contents and implications.BR This book was written by a co-work of the Minjok-kunyang-hoe(民族建揚會) including Park Jin, Cho Yoon-je, Kim Chang-Sook under the leadership of Lee Jong-Ryul.BR The philosophical basis of Lee Jong-Ryul`s national revolutionary theory had come from the contents of this book. Marx thought that the kingdom of nature would only be possible if the post-socialist productive forces were highly developed. In this book, however, Marx`s view is right in the advanced region, but in the backward region like Korea, it starts with the national revolution and can be accomplished as the completion of the national revolution. Based on Marx`s theory, he focused on the relative uniqueness and importance of human consciousness and tried to present a new human philosophy called Sinhomismo study.BR The publishment of this book aimed to establish ideal social order and ethics necessary for new country.

Towards Compositional Distributional Discourse Analysis

Categorical compositional distributional semantics provide a method to derive the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its individual words: the grammatical reduction of a sentence automatically induces a linear map for composing the word vectors obtained from distributional semantics. In this paper, we extend this passage from word-to-sentence to sentence-to-discourse composition. To achieve this we introduce a notion of basic anaphoric discourses as a mid-level representation between natural language discourse formalised in terms of basic discourse representation structures (DRS); and knowledge base queries over the Semantic Web as described by basic graph patterns in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This provides a high-level specification for compositional algorithms for question answering and anaphora resolution, and allows us to give a picture of natural language understanding as a process involving both statistical and logical resources.

Incorporating Drama into EFL Oral Presentations

Oral presentations are common in many English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. Because oral presentations entail multiple steps, they are ideal for project-based learning courses. Yet, it can be challenging for students to meaningfully collaborate on oral presentation projects using English. The use of drama in oral presentations allows students to explore more complex topics without being overwhelmed. A short survey of the literature related to oral presentations and project-based learning in EFL is presented in this article. Then, the basic discourse for oral presentations in English is discussed, followed by an expanded discussion about how drama can simplify this discourse for students. Finally, two examples of student presentations are presented.

Contradictions and conflicts in brain injury rehabilitation. A systematic inquiry into models of rehabilitation

<span>The approach of addressing biology as the sole process to recovery after a brain injury has been criticized since the 1980s. Based on the bio-psycho-social model (BPSM), new national guidelines stipulate that brain injury rehabilitation should be based on dynamic approaches and interactive principles. Proceeding from a Systematic Inquiry into Models for Rehabilitation (SIMREB) and Institutional Ethnography approach, we identify possible </span><em>contradictions, barriers and conflicts</em><span> hampering the implementation of the BPSM with reference to basic discourse conflicts within the field of acquired brain injury rehabilitation. We find four main barriers within practice that may hamper the implementation of the new paradigm: institutional premises that sustain biological discourses, difficulty of predicting recovery, lack of interdisciplinary collaboration and a general ignorance regarding the life-world of people with ABI. The analysis is based on fieldwork in a Danish Neuro-Rehabilitation Centre.</span>

Pragmatic Markers in Eugene O’Neill’s Ile: Discourse Coherence Relations

This study aimed to investigate the types of pragmatic markers in a drama entitled Ile. The study is based on Fraser’s theories of pragmatic markers and discourse coherence relations. This research employs a descriptive qualitative research method since the presentation of the results of the analysis is in the form of tabulation and description of the data. The present study employs one of those three kinds of triangulation suggested by Miles and Huberman that is expert triangulation. The results of the analysis of the data indicate that from 4,369 words in the drama, 415 linguistic items are identified as pragmatic markers which are distributed into four major types of pragmatic markers: basic markers (159 items), commentary markers (5 items), parallel markers (121 items), and discourse markers (130 items). Coherence relations which are found in drama Ile shows that those pragmatic markers provide the bridge between the propositional parts of the discourse that making it possible for the characters in drama to move quickly and smoothly from one topic to another

A Basic Discourse on Discipline for Novice Teachers

This paper presents a research investigation focused on creating a basic discourse on discipline in novice teachers. The qualitatively-chosen methodology identifies, for a selected sample, how length of pedagogical experience and gender influence the creation and maintenance of a teacher’s authority in the classroom. This research is a part of the project, which focuses on mapping the different approaches of education for novice teachers to PDF Palacky University in Olomouc. The aim is to highlight the possible theoretical and methodological approaches in addressing the issue of discipline than on specific statistical data.

The Phenomenon of Discipline and Its Conception for Novice Teachers—A Discourse Analysis

This study is oriented on the problems and issues relating to the conception of discipline and methods for novice teachers and presents the results of a research investigation that focuses on the phenomenon of discipline and the creation of a basic discourse about discipline and novice teachers. Discipline is a phenomenon of our time. Maintaining discipline is a routine event for teachers; however, the manner of achieving it is very complex. Every student is an individual in the educational process—and thus, it is also necessary to approach the issue of discipline in the same way. The aim of this study is, to begin with, to identify the possible terminological definitions like discipline, authority, and the professional careers of teachers and novice teachers. Further, the text focuses on the problems and issues of discipline from a variety of different perspectives and concepts; namely, the normative, educational-psychological and methodical perspectives. The whole study, as a consolidated text, based on the research can be divided into three parts; the first, already mentioned above, deals with discipline; the second part specifies the approach and perception of discipline among novice teachers. The last part is devoted to the relationship between teacher and pupil, complemented by Foucault’s philosophical perception of the concept of power.

ChemInform Abstract: Back to the Future — The Value of Single Protein Species Investigations

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