Features Of Discourse Research Articles

Characterizing the Structure of Online Conversations Across Reddit

The proliferation of social media platforms has afforded social scientists unprecedented access to vast troves of data on human interactions, facilitating the study of online behavior at an unparalleled scale. These platforms typically structure conversations as threads, forming tree-like structures known as ''discussion trees.'' This paper examines the structural properties of online discussions on Reddit by analyzing both global (community-level) and local (post-level) attributes of these discussion trees. We conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis of a year's worth of Reddit data, encompassing a quarter of a million posts and several million comments. Our primary objective is to disentangle the relative impacts of global and local properties and evaluate how specific features shape discussion tree structures. The results reveal that both local and global features contribute significantly to explaining structural variation in discussion trees. However, local features, such as post content and sentiment, collectively have a greater impact, accounting for a larger proportion of variation in the width, depth, and size of discussion trees. Our analysis also uncovers considerable heterogeneity in the impact of various features on discussion structures. Notably, certain global features play crucial roles in determining specific discussion tree properties. These features include the subreddit's topic, age, popularity, and content redundancy. For instance, posts in subreddits focused on politics, sports, and current events tend to generate deeper and wider discussion trees. This research enhances our understanding of online conversation dynamics and offers valuable insights for both content creators and platform designers. By elucidating the factors that shape online discussions, our work contributes to ongoing efforts to improve the quality and effectiveness of digital discourse.

Actor Sensemaking and its Role in Implementation of the Decentralized Drug-Resistant TB Policy in South Africa.

South Africa has a high burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB). A policy to decentralize DR-TB treatment from specialized central hospitals to more accessible district facilities was introduced in 2011, but to date implementation has been suboptimal, with variable pace, coverage and models of care emerging. This study explored multilevel policy implementation of DR-TB decentralization in two provinces of South Africa, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Applying interpretive policy analysis, this paper describes how actors across health system levels and geographies made sense of the DR-TB policy and how this shaped implementation. In an embedded qualitative case study, districts of the two provinces were compared, through data collected in 94 in-depth interviews, and analysed using Vickers' framework of reality, value and action judgements. Five district cases characterise variation in the pace of implementation and models of DR-TB care that emerged. Individual and collective attitudes for and against the policy were underpinned by different systems of meaning for interpreting policy problems and making decisions. These meaning systems were reflected in actor stances on whether DR-TB care needed to be specialized or generalized, nurse- or doctor-led, and institutionalized or ambulatory. Actors' stances influenced their actions and implementation strategies adopted. Resistance to decentralized DR-TB care related to perceived threats of budget cuts to and loss of authority of central facilities, and was often justified in fears of increased transmission, poor quality of care and inadequate resources at lower levels. New advances in diagnosis and treatment to address the growing burden of DR-TB in South Africa will have little impact unless implementation dynamics are better understood, and attention paid to the mindsets, interests and interpretations of policy by actors tasked with implementation. Deliberative policy implementation processes will enhance the quality of discourse, communication and cross-learning between policy actors, critical for reaching synthesis of meaning systems.

Defining Unique Features of Discourse in Club of Funny and Inventive: A Study of Humor in KVN Performances

This article focuses on identifying the distinctive characteristics of discourse within the "Club of the Funny and Inventive" (Russ. KVN). The primary material for this study consists of team performances from the KVN television show. Attention is given to the challenge of defining the concept of discourse, along with a review of major approaches to its interpretation. It is demonstrated that humorous performances in KVN can be analyzed within the existing scientific paradigm as a communicative figure comprising three components: "reality – text – discourse," as well as being viewed as a specific communicative event. The authors examine the ontological characteristics of humor, highlighting its basis in contradiction and its sociocultural nature. Functions such as communication, socialization, identification, and differentiation facilitated by humor are described. The relevance of this research is underscored by the significance of KVN as a cultural phenomenon in shaping and developing humorous discourse as a whole. The article posits that KVN can be regarded as a distinct variety of humorous discourse due to its thematic and stylistic coherence. It is suggested that the specific characteristics and conditions governing KVN lead to the emergence of traits similar to those found in institutional discourse. The novelty of this study lies in articulating the antinomic characteristics of KVN discourse, concluding that their existence is intrinsically linked to the foundational contrast inherent in humor itself.

Unveiling Weak Signals of Emergence in Underwater Sensing Research Trends

Detecting emerging research trends is crucial as it allows for the proactive identification and monitoring of novel and influential topics in the scientific community. Monitoring research trends aids researchers, institutions, and policymakers in allocating resources, fostering innovation, and staying competitive in rapidly changing scientific landscapes. The growing significance of underwater sensing technologies in various domains has propelled research endeavours aimed at understanding the characteristics of academic discourse in this field. In this work, we comprehensively analyzed the academic research topics related to underwater sensing technologies using advanced computational methodologies. Leveraging natural language processing, topic modelling, and weak signal detection techniques, and focusing on underwater sensing as the case technology, we dissect a large corpus of scholarly articles published between 2007 and 2021 to unveil underlying thematic patterns and emergent trends within this domain while shedding light on signals of emerging technologies. Among the eighty extracted topics, six research topics were identified and recognized as emerging weak signals, and validated by experts. Notably, deep learning for underwater imaging was the only topic that transitioned from being weak to a strong signal in the final period.

‘Like to comment on that?’

Abstract Questions are powerful interactional devices which academic lecturers may use to facilitate learning, engage students and add to a lecture’s interactivity. This contrastive and corpus-based study examines student-oriented questions, i.e. those initiating a student response, in British and Montenegrin university linguistics lectures. It aims to answer research questions regarding what forms of this question category are employed; how frequent they are, what functions they commonly perform, and whether there are any similarities and differences in these respects between the two groups of lectures. The data include 12 lectures in linguistics from several British academic corpora and a specially created corpus of 12 Montenegrin linguistics lectures. We combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to arrive at results which point to certain similarities and differences between the corpora. Some of these might be explained by the language differences between English and BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian), while others seem to have stemmed from academic lecturing style differences. The findings add to the literature on questions in academic lectures and, together with other contrastive studies, may contribute to revealing the universal and culturally-specific discourse features of academic lectures across academic cultures, as well as be pedagogically useful for lecturers, particularly novices, who are teaching linguistics in English and BCMS.

A lokális média kérdőjelei. A székelyföldi nyomtatott sajtóorgánumok néhány jellemzője

In this study, I analyze the connection between local media organizations and the rural areas these local media organizations are operating, assuming that these rural media organizations contribute to the formation of representations about the region in which the respective media organizations operate. Therefore, in the case of Szeklerland, the local Romanian and Hungarian-language media organizations contribute to the development and distribution of different images of Szeklerland. In this article, I present some features of the Romanian and Hungarian media ecosystem in Romania, an ecosystem a part of which are the local, rural media organizations, therefore the media outlets operating in Szeklerland as well. I present some of the characteristics of the media ecosystem – ownership system, demographic characteristics of journalists, professional self-image of journalists, the perception of journalism among journalists and readers, general characteristics of media discourse – based on the Romanian and Hungarian literature published in the last more than three decades in Romania.

Style of Technical Language: Oil and Gas Discourse

The present paper discusses the style and characteristics of technical language generally and oil and gas discourse particularly and shows the differences between technical and scientific language. The paper starts with providing an overview on technical language and the historical emergence. Then, it shows the difference between technical and scientific language because scads of people think they are the same, which is not the case. The paper proceeds to discuss the style and characteristics of technical language giving examples [along with the Arabic proposed translation] about each characteristic for further clarification, and it moves to discuss oil and gas language showing how this discipline is versatile and interdisciplinary. Finally, the paper recapitulates the characteristics of oil and gas discourse and provides examples [along with the Arabic proposed translations] about each. This paper might be of great benefit for specialist and non-specialist individuals who use technical language, including academics, engineers, technicians, linguists, translators and many more, as it helps to improve understanding of technical texts [which is beneficial for translators] and advance the writing skills of specialist individuals.

The metafictional depiction of burial in Son of Saul

ABSTRACT Critics have noted that the Hungarian Holocaust film, Son of Saul (2015), draws on Sophocles’ Antigone in its depiction of burial. In this paper, this depiction is shown to be rigorously metafictional, based on how it recasts Antigone’s mission and rewrites Holocaust discourse on the Sonderkommando. I argue that the film’s metafictional depiction of burial takes Antigone’s ethical stance on dehumanization forward by shifting the focus from kinship to the otherness of death. The inaccessibility of death, a fundamental feature of Holocaust discourse, is communicated via a metafictional device known as the implied viewer. That said, the co-implication of death and fiction exceeds the use of metafictional conventions. For the focus on inaccessibility underscores that death is a reality that can only be imagined, not experienced as such. The fictiveness that lines our relation to death is analyzed in the light of Jacques Derrida’s discourse on death and burial, which stresses the animality of mortals (their inability to know death).The animality that drives burial is what enables the film to give dehumanization another ethical dimension.

The critical cognitive analysis of “hyper-securitization” strategy: A case study of China’s official discourse on the “Japan nuclear contaminated water discharge incident”

On August 24, 2023, Japan began discharging nuclear contaminated water into the ocean, drawing global attention. Environmental security, closely tied to human well-being, has become a critical issue in both academic and public discourse, particularly amid recurring challenges like climate change, water scarcity, and pollution. This study employs the proximization theory and its derivative theory of distanciation to conduct a critical cognitive analysis of “hyper-securitization” in environmental security discourse, using China’s official discourse surrounding the “Japan Nuclear Contaminated Water Discharge Incident” as the corpus. The analysis focuses on the discursive strategies employed by China before and after Japan’s discharge, revealing how these strategies aim to achieve the objectives of “hyper-securitization.” The discourse features identified in this study provide new perspectives for research on “hyper-securitization” in the fields of environmental security and international politics.

국내외 교육 커먼즈 연구에 관한 체계적 문헌고찰

Objectives This study aims to identify the landscape of discussions on educational commons in domestic and international research, discover the value of educational commons, and explore its applicability. Methods A systematic literature review was conducted on 28 studies related to educational commons (5 domestic and 23 international). For data collection, various combinations of the keywords “education” and “commons” were searched on academic databases, including RISS, KISS, SCHOLA, eArticle, DBpia, domestic and international university libraries' databases, and Google Scholar. The searches were conducted twice between January 19, 2024, and January 26, 2024. The final selected literature underwent a process of planning, screening, extraction, and implementation, with frequency analysis conducted using SPSS 18. Results Research was minimal from 2008 to 2018 but increased from 2019, with the most studies conducted in 2023, sparking related discussions. All studies proposed educational commons as an alternative educational framework based on concerns about capitalist and neoliberal educational systems. The most common research methods were literature reviews and case studies. The main trend was that discussions on educational systems emerged as a key debate surrounding educational commons. Interest in educational commons is growing in various fields, such as environmental and civic education. Additionally, the discourse on educational commons is expanding beyond schools to broader social contexts, covering from preschool children to adults. Conclusions Educational commons is confirmed to be a crucial concept for reimagining and realizing new education in the post-COVID era. However, to enhance both the quantity and quality of discourse on educational commons, it is necessary to 1) reach an academic consensus on the scope of the concept of educational commons, 2) engage in more fundamental discussions on educational commons, and 3) consider the discourse within the context of a digital-based society. It is suggested that future research on educational commons suitable for domestic circumstances should accumulate both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Discourse Dynamics and Literary Essence in Text Analysis

The paper approaches the topic of discourse by performing a dual analysis of a literary excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. After suggesting a theoretical framework based on theories on discourse, discourse typology and analysis, and features of literary discourses, the study continues with a dual-layer analysis of the literary excerpt. In the first layer, the study identifies general discourse features, such as cohesion, coherence, and context. The second part of the analysis evaluates the excerpt’s literariness based on concepts derived from literary theory, including fictionality, poeticity, inquisitoriality, licence, and contemplation.

The displaced relationship between original and translated literature: a polysystem view of Nobel Literature Prize norms

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the Nobel Literature Prize award speeches from 2000 to 2023 from the perspective of polysystem studies and the framework of translational norms. Using a combination of corpus-based methods and qualitative coding analysis, it compares, describes, and interprets the discourse features and underlying norms of these speeches. It was found that the awarding institution emphasizes literary works that explore the marginalized or peripheral aspects of society, although its evaluations of original and translated literature exhibit subtle differences. The institution tends to favor niche authors from the Western original literary system, underscoring their works’ universal appeal while highlighting translated works that conform to Western literary conventions. Such a focus suggests that the Westernization of world literature helps reinforce the dominance of the Western literary paradigm. Furthermore, the current analysis indicates that translated literature included in the Nobel system often retains marginal status as perceived by the awarding body, serving primarily as a vehicle for introducing non-Western voices while still centering Western perspectives. The role of translations, while crucial in bridging diverse literary characteristics, is often overlooked, as evidenced by award speeches. They implicitly maintain the centrality of Western perspectives when presenting literature from non-Western contexts.

The Role of Audiovisuals in Counter-Framing Dynamics: A Longitudinal Experiment on Causal Responsibility Attribution

ABSTRACT Opposing the interpretation of a societal problem with a countering framing is a common characteristic of the democratic discourse. While studies on the dynamics of such counter-framing situations point largely toward recency effects, it remains mostly unclear which characteristics of the initial frame influence these recency effects. Taking current developments in news reporting into account—the trend toward audio and audiovisual news—this study suggests that news framed and presented in textual and audio and audiovisual modalities can attenuate recency effects in counter-framing environments. Building upon the long-standing research strand of responsibility framing and theories of multimodal learning, the findings of this longitudinal probability-sample experiment indicate that the recency effects of frames largely endure even if the initial frame is presented in a multi-modality mode.

Toward a computational mixed methods framework to measure online deliberative discourse

This article proposes and tests a reproducible framework for a computational method to measure social media-based deliberative discourse by analyzing commentary surrounding the Canadian convoy protests of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions. Employing a combination of analytic calculations, alongside tools such as Google Perspective and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), this article assesses the quality of online deliberative discourse using established measures of deliberation including the variables rationality, interactivity, equality, and civility. We propose computational approaches to measuring these variables, and work toward validating our approach by observing correlations between an established computational measure of online deliberation-cognitive complexity. This computational approach is tested using Twitter and Reddit commentary related to the convoy protests that took place in Ottawa, Canada, during February 2022, which influenced the emergence of similar protests around the world. In addition to testing our proposed online deliberative discourse measurement framework, this case study provides insight into the deliberative characteristics of the Twitter and Reddit social media platforms.

SUBDIALECTAL DISCOURSE AND PECULIARITIES OF ITS MENTAL CONTINUUM IN THE LENS OF THE MODERN LINGUISTIC PARADIGM

The article is devoted to the study of specific features of subdialectal discourse and its mental continuum, viewed through the prism of modern linguistic theories. The purpose of the research is to study and describe the functioning and structure features, as well as the specifics of the linguarium of subdialectal discourse. The object of the study is the subdialectal discourse, which covers speech practices recorded in the village of Pishchanyi Brid, Novoukrainskyi district, Kirovohrad region. The subject of the study is the mental continuum of the subdialect speakers, which includes knowledge, perceptions and assessments related to various aspects of their lives. The source of the study was the speech recordings of the native speakers, i.e. the textual corpus of the subdialect. The methods used in the study were modelling, hypothetical method, deductive and inductive methods, descriptive method, observation method, taxonomic method, and continuous sampling method. The peculiarity of the study of subdialectal speech in discourse studies lies in the analysis of the composition of usages, the specifics of the composition of the linguarium and its influence on the structure of discourse, expression of thoughts, interaction of speakers and the formation of the ethnographic identity of peasants who speak the subdialect. The discourse approach allows us to better understand the speech process in a specific socio-cultural and geographical setting, as well as the interaction of speakers within the dialect environment. It involves analysing the discourse of the language group in question, identifying specific lexical, grammatical and phonetic features that are characteristic of certain socio-cultural groups. The metalinguistic interpretation of discourse types in the linguistic paradigm presents dialectal discourse as a reflection of real language use, a set of idiolects and an indicator of changes in the language. The household, ceremonial, religious and existential knowledge contained in the dialect discourse is critical to the well-being and cultural integrity of rural communities. In particular, household knowledge encompasses practical skills in housekeeping, agriculture and crafts. Ceremonial and religious knowledge includes traditions, rituals and beliefs that support the spiritual life and cultural identity of the community, and existential knowledge is related to the understanding of life, death and moral values, helping community members navigate difficult life situations. Prospects for the study include a meta-analysis of dialectal discourse, which can be expressed in different ways in individual subdialects, the development of new methods for studying dialectal language in the digital environment, and the integration of interdisciplinary approaches for a deeper understanding of speech practices and cultural characteristics of speakers.

On Pushkin, Cultural Continuity and Linguistic Features of Modern Media Discourse

The article emphasizes the enormous infl uence of the work of Alexander Pushkin on the entire national culture, literature and language. It became the source of the most signifi cant socio-historical, philosophical, aesthetic ideas for all subsequent Russian literature. Personal reader observations related to the classical heritage and language of the modern media space, as well as practical experience in training journalistic personnel, prompted the author to turn to the problem of cultural continuity, which has become relevant in recent years to our society. Attention is drawn to the fact that high school graduates who have chosen the specialty of journalist and public relations specialist have in recent years come to university with a weak background of general cultural knowledge. “Digital” youth, brought up on exams, don`t always give preference to reading original literature.The purpose of the article is to understand the modern process of cultural continuity, cultural and linguistic meanings and features of modern media discourse. Society is based on communication, and communication is impossible without a common system of concepts and values. The author expresses the idea that in the context of the new challenges of our time, society has clearly formulated a request for the preservation of national roots, national culture, domestic classics, the need to preserve the intergenerational cultural code as an urgent task that determines the dynamics of the humanities in general and journalism in particular. Based on the method of theoretical analysis, as well as using the method of content analysis, the author analyzes the specifi c results of a study of the press of the big cities in the Privolzhskiy Federal District, the state of the modern media agenda and changes that have affected the language of modern media. The author concludes that these processes refl ect the transformation of both the press and society. Also, we express an opinion on the need for attention to the issues of the mission of modern media discourse, the infl uence of media on the formation of the spiritual world of modern humanity, its worldview and civic position, which was characteristic of the best traditions of Russian culture. Keywords: Alexander Pushkin, classics, cultural continuity, language of modern media, media discourse, training of journalists

Social Risks in the Era of Generative AI

ABSTRACTGenerative AI (GAI) technologies have demonstrated human‐level performance on a vast spectrum of tasks. However, recent studies have also delved into the potential threats and vulnerabilities posed by GAI, particularly as they become increasingly prevalent in sensitive domains such as elections and education. Their use in politics raises concerns about manipulation and misinformation. Further exploration is imperative to comprehend the social risks associated with GAI across diverse societal contexts. In this panel, we aim to dissect the impact and risks posed by GAI on our social fabric, examining both technological and societal perspectives. Additionally, we will present our latest investigations, including the manipulation of ideologies using large language models (LLMs), the potential risk of AI self‐consciousness, the application of Explainable AI (XAI) to identify patterns of misinformation and mitigate their dissemination, as well as the influence of GAI on the quality of public discourse. These insights will serve as catalysts for stimulating discussions among the audience on this crucial subject matter, and contribute to fostering a deeper understanding of the importance of responsible development and deployment of GAI technologies.

Revisiting Conversation Discourse for Dialogue Disentanglement

Dialogue disentanglement aims to detach the chronologically ordered utterances into several independent sessions. Conversation utterances are essentially organized and described by the underlying discourse, and thus dialogue disentanglement requires the full understanding and harnessing of the intrinsic discourse attribute. In this paper, we propose enhancing dialogue disentanglement by taking full advantage of the dialogue discourse characteristics. First of all, in feature encoding stage , we construct the heterogeneous graph representations to model the various dialogue-specific discourse structural features, including the static speaker-role structures (i.e., speaker-utterance and speaker-mentioning structure) and the dynamic contextual structures (i.e., the utterance-distance and partial-replying structure). We then develop a structure-aware framework to integrate the rich structural features for better modeling the conversational semantic context. Second, in model learning stage , we perform optimization with a hierarchical ranking loss mechanism, which groups dialogue utterances into different discourse levels and carries training covering pair-wise and session-wise levels hierarchically. Third, in inference stage , we devise an easy-first decoding algorithm, which performs utterance pairing under the easy-to-hard manner with a global context, breaking the constraint of traditional sequential decoding order. On two benchmark datasets, our overall system achieves new state-of-the-art performances on all evaluations. In-depth analyses further demonstrate the efficacy of each proposed idea and also reveal how our methods help advance the task. Our work has great potential to facilitate broader multi-party multi-thread dialogue applications.

The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse: US Primary Debates in Cross-Lingual Online Spaces

This cross-lingual project examines how social media posts of Spanish- and English-language media impact incivility in user comments during the 2020 primary political debates in the United States. We analyzed Facebook posts of news organizations that hosted the debates and used a state-of-the-art machine-learning model to analyze the corresponding comments. Our findings reveal distinct journalistic cultures on the post-level: English-language media are significantly more likely to use interpretation while Spanish-language media employ more audience-engagement and factual reporting strategies. We argue that in order to understand incivility in social media discourse during political debates, we need to consider journalistic cultures: While interpretative reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the English-language discourse, factual reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the Spanish-language discourse. We suggest that we need to consider how features of news reporting (textual and visual) impact discourse quality directly but also indirectly via emotional arousal in comments.

Transformation of the Model of State-Confessional Relations in Belarus at the End of the 19th Century – 1917

Introduction. The article describes the process of transformation of state-confessional relations in the Belarusian lands as part of the Russian Empire from the end of the 19th century to 1917. Methods and materials. To obtain verified results, the study is based on the analysis of administrative and regulatory materials, office documents of the Mogilev diocese, and domestic and foreign historiography. The study was conducted using an interdisciplinary methodology: historical-typological and historical-comparative methods, formal-legal, and the method of interpretation of legal norms were used. In addition, to identify the features of the socio-political discourse on the issue of changes in state-church relations, discourse analysis was used. Analysis. The historically established model of a religious state with the dominance of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire was established in the 19th century on Belarusian lands with a different confessional structure and traditions of state-church relations. The author noted a tendency to transition from the model of a religious state to the model of a secular state – in the period March – October 1917, the Provisional Government tried to establish an identification model of a secular state. This model corresponded to the religious system of Belarusian society with the dominance of the Orthodox Church and the expectations of socio-political actors and also ensured the implementation of religious rights and freedoms of adherents of other religions but was not fully implemented due to the transfer of power to the Bolshevik Party in October 1917. Results. Transformational processes in state-confessional relations in the Belarusian provinces took place in the direction from the model of a religious state to the model of a secular state as accompanying changes in the political system of the Russian Empire. Internal factors in the development of the state-confessional system of the Russian Empire, as well as the peculiarities of the confessional environment of the Belarusian provinces (diversification of the religious structure of Belarusian society, limitation of the rights of traditional actors rooted in the Belarusian religious environment, confessional dualism “Orthodoxy-Catholicism”), did not play a significant role in the transformation processes.