Newspaper Commentaries Research Articles

Was ist der Gegenstand der Sprachwissenschaft? Oder: Worüber soll eine sprachwissenschaftliche Arbeit informieren?

The metaphors in a newspaper commentary about a football match are described and analysed using linguistic methods. The question should not be determined by a theory of metaphors. The metaphors are not only grasped according to their metaphorical concept, but rather their effect on the text and in the text is asked. It turns out that the ‘direct questioning of the text’, which must be theory-based, but not theory-driven, is far more productive than the initial description of the theory with a subsequent collection of confirmatory examples.

‘Learn Jafaikan in two minutes’ – Multicultural London English, enregisterment and ideology in English newspapers

This paper delves into the concept of ‘enregisterment,’ which defines processes and practices linking linguistic repertoires with social meanings, by examining meta-linguistic commentary in newspapers. Focussing on ‘Multicultural London English (MLE),’ the study analyses 200 articles from major British newspapers (2006–2022) qualitatively and quantitatively. The research uncovers recurring linguistic shibboleths, indexically linked social meanings, and prevalent language ideologies concerning MLE and other London dialects. Results reveal a consistent emphasis on specific linguistic shibboleths repeated in articles. Indexical links for ‘MLE’ are constructed through evaluative comments, alarmist metaphors employing xenophobic immigration tropes, and loaded keywords. ‘Cockney’ and ‘Estuary English’ are portrayed more favourably and, together with ‘Received Pronunciation (RP)’, serve to stigmatise MLE. This study underscores the role of media discourse in shaping the enregisterment of dialects, contributing to social stratification and the ‘othering’ of certain linguistic varieties.

Original sin or natural order: Dialogical construction of social knowledge of animal production

AbstractThis research examines the public discussion around animal production in Finland. Applying a dialogical approach to social representations theory, we elucidate the hotly debated nature of animal production by analysing news articles (N = 50) and the related reader‐produced comments (N = 1501) in Finnish newspapers. We employed qualitative methods for analysing multivoicedness and dialogue to identify ego–alter pairs constructed in the material in relation to the object of animal production. Four prevalent ego–alter pairs were identified: advocates for animal rights–animal production defenders, producers–consumers, orthodox–unorthodox Christians and provincials–urban dwellers. The study contributes to the study of everyday knowledge by showing how various contradictory understandings of the same topic are generated in public discourse. The research also demonstrates how the theoretical concept of ego–alter embedded in the social representations theory can be empirically utilised in analysing debates in contemporary media environments and to shed light on the dialogical dynamics around the discussions.

The Impact of Social-engagement, Social-support and Self-esteem on Life Satisfaction in UK Youth: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study

Significant changes in adolescent physiology and psychology have been linked to a decline in adolescents sense of well-being. Thats why its so important to study what makes people happy in order to help teenagers flourish. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the value of a correlational design and thematic analysis in revealing the underlying mechanisms at play in teenage social connection, self-esteem, and life satisfaction through the use of a mixed-methods sequential explanatory display. Our predictions that self-esteem (26%), social-support (1%) and social-engagement (1%) each accounted for a significant portion of the unique variance on the Satisfaction with Life Scale are supported by data from the Seventh-Sweep Study-Wave 7 Dataset (N=759). The quantitative results are corroborated by a thematic analysis of social-media and newspaper comments (N=126), which reveals that young people with high self-esteem are more likely to have positive school and social connections, use coping techniques, and express their true selves. Low self-esteem, on the other hand, may have detrimental effects on happiness, such as the promotion of psychological disorder and risky behaviours as well as underpinning academic and social isolation. Therefore, it may be beneficial for adolescents well-being to place an emphasis on school connectedness, social support, and positive self-perception.

Compiling a corpus of South Asian online Englishes: A report, some reflections and a pilot study

Abstract In this research article we introduce the South Asian Online Englishes (SAOnE) corpus representing four South Asian countries, i.e. Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and two native English-speaking countries, i.e. the UK and the USA. We have used semi-automatic and manual methods to collect data from three internet registers, i.e. newspaper comments, web forums and tweets, and a collection of internet sub-registers which we label as blogs and websites. Additionally, we have collected text messages using online freelance hiring platforms from each of the South Asian countries mentioned above. Each register category in the corpus consists of approximately 1 million words per register per country, except text messages, which contains around 500,000 words per country and only includes the four South Asian countries. We have verified the origin of website and blog links, authors of Twitter, and where possible of commenters and web forum users to make sure that only local content of each country is included. The corpus features some indigenous language content, which is tagged. In addition to the description of this dataset, we also present a pilot study analysing three discourse particles, namely na, neh, and yaar. The discourse particles na and yaar are native to Hindi/Urdu, while neh is based on a Sinhala negation marker. Our analysis indicates that na and neh have similarities in terms of their position in the clause/utterance. However, neh is confined to Sri Lanka while the Hindi/Urdu based discourse particles are also used in our Twitter data from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The use of these discourse particles in Bangladeshi tweets shows the influence of Indian culture through Bollywood celebrities. Of the Hindi/Urdu discourse particles yaar and na, yaar is preferred in Pakistan while na is preferred in India; additionally, yaar is used at the start of the clause more often in our Pakistani data. Lastly, we discuss the implications of the pilot study, the advantages of the type of data used for the pilot study, and future research directions.

Anti-Sexism Alert System: Identification of Sexist Comments on Social Media Using AI Techniques

Social relationships in the digital sphere are becoming more usual and frequent, and they constitute a very important aspect for all of us. Violent interactions in this sphere are very frequent, and have serious effects on the victims. Within this global scenario, there is one kind of digital violence that is becoming really worrying: sexism against women. Sexist comments that are publicly posted in social media (newspaper comments, social networks, etc.), usually obtain a lot of attention and become viral, with consequent damage to the persons involved. In this paper, we introduce an anti-sexism alert system, based on natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), that analyzes any public post, and decides if it could be considered a sexist comment or not. Additionally, this system also works on analyzing all the public comments linked to any multimedia content (piece of news, video, tweet, etc.) and decides, using a color-based system similar to traffic lights, if there is sexism in the global set of posts. We have created a labeled data set in Spanish, since the majority of studies focus on English, to train our system, which offers a very good performance after the validation experiments.

Vegetarianism in the pandemic era: Using digital media to assess the cultural politics of meat avoidance during COVID-19

Historically, individuals' rationales for vegetarianism have fallen into one or more of five categories: personal health; empathy towards animals; identity and group belonging through foodways; long-term environmental concerns regarding animal agriculture; and economic reasons related to the expense of meat. With the advent of COVID-19 and its associated social and economic changes across the globe, a sixth rationale for vegetarianism has emerged: lessening meat consumption out of a concern for the immediate health impacts on other people. We examine this emergent discourse in the digital realm through the comments in online newspapers from four countries at different levels of economic development and with variable historical engagements with vegetarianism: Argentina, France, India, and the USA. While the new argument for vegetarianism augments historical rationales of meat avoidance, discourses on vegetarianism related to the spread of COVID-19 in slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants are interwoven with pre-existing worldviews on migrants, health politics, capitalism, and market systems.

The Munich Agreement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a Tool of Russian Revisionist Propaganda

Under Vladimir Putin’s regime Russia seeks to whitewash Soviet history and promote an anti-Western narrative in order to legitimize its territorial claims and political demands in Eastern Europe. Drawing on electronic sources such as social media posts, articles from the Russian media, newspaper comments and media statements, the author demonstrates that one of its tools is the exaggerated condemnation of the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the emphasis on the historical guilt of the Western powers in the Nazi expansion, made to avoid discussion of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, signed less than a year later.

Did Brexit change perceptions of the EU and the UK in Canada? An analysis of Canadian newspaper commentaries

ABSTRACT Brexit has forced Canada to reconfigure relations with its European partners: the European Union (EU), on the one side, and the United Kingdom (UK), now on the other. This article examines whether this reconfiguration has led to debates in the Canadian news media that reassess the purpose and priorities of Canada’s transatlantic relationships. Did Canada-Europe relations after Brexit become a more prominent issue in Canadian newspaper commentary? Which policy aspects were highlighted? How did evaluations of Canada’s European partners change? Which new controversies and divisions emerged within Canadian discourse about transatlantic relations? The study is based on an analysis of almost 1,900 commentary articles from six Canadian newspapers between June 2014 and June 2021.

Great expectations and hard times:- the advent of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 and women’s entry to the legal profession

ABSTRACT The 23 December 1919 ushered in a new dawn for women: the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 (SDRA) received Royal Assent, thus finally enabling women to join the professions, and in particular the legal profession. This legislation was not a benign gift from the establishment in recognition of women’s war effort, but rather the result of a successful feminist campaign vociferously fought for by women and supportive men. Newspapers, both local and national, greeted women’s admission to the professions with both celebration and hope, and so did some women. However other women were ambivalent about the SDRA, and welcomed it because it was better than nothing. These women predicted a harder and more prolonged struggle for substantive equality lay ahead. Their foreshadowing was proved correct, as inequality is still rife in the legal profession today. This article will explore some contemporaneous newspaper commentary on the passing of the SDRA, and compare and contrast it with what is known of the legal careers of the first cohort of women lawyers. These reports provide us with an invaluable insight and understanding of the passing of the Act, the hopes and expectations, as well as the doubts and disbeliefs.

Local Community Response to Mass Asymptomatic COVID-19 Testing in Liverpool, England: Social Media Analysis.

BackgroundMass asymptomatic testing for COVID-19 was piloted for the first time in the United Kingdom in Liverpool in November 2020. There is limited evidence on uptake of mass testing, and previously where surge testing has been deployed, uptake has been low.ObjectiveThere was an urgent need to rapidly evaluate acceptance of asymptomatic testing, specifically identifying barriers and facilitators to taking part.MethodsAs part of the wider evaluation, we conducted a rapid thematic analysis of local community narratives on social media to provide insights from people unlikely to engage in testing or other standard evaluation techniques, such as surveys or interviews. We identified 3 publicly available data sources: the comments section of a local online newspaper, the city council Facebook page, and Twitter. Data were collected between November 2, 2020, and November 8, 2020, to cover the period between announcement of mass testing in Liverpool and the first week of testing. Overall, 1096 comments were sampled: 219 newspaper comments, 472 Facebook comments, and 405 tweets. Data were analyzed using an inductive thematic approach.ResultsKey barriers were accessibility, including site access and concerns over queuing. Queues were also highlighted as a concern due to risk of transmission. Consequences of testing, including an increase in cases leading to further restrictions and financial impact of the requirement for self-isolation, were also identified as barriers. In addition, a lack of trust in authorities and the test (including test accuracy and purpose of testing) was identified. Comments coded as indicative of lack of trust were coded in some cases as indicative of strong collective identity with the city of Liverpool and marginalization due to feeling like test subjects. However, other comments coded as identification with Liverpool were coded as indicative of motivation to engage in testing and encourage others to do so; for this group, being part of a pilot was seen as a positive experience and an opportunity to demonstrate the city could successfully manage the virus.ConclusionsOur analysis highlights the importance of promoting honest and open communication to encourage and harness existing community identities to enhance the legitimacy of asymptomatic testing as a policy. In addition, adequate and accessible financial support needs to be in place prior to the implementation of community asymptomatic testing to mitigate any concerns surrounding financial hardship. Rapid thematic analysis of social media is a pragmatic method to gather insights from communities around acceptability of public health interventions, such as mass testing or vaccination uptake.

Corruption Trends and Graft Control Progress in Sierra Leone: Study of Causes and Remedies

Corruption continues to affect the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans and is regarded as the greatest culprit of poverty, inequality and social cohesion. This publication shed light on corruption trends, control measures, causes, development implications and remedies for combating corruption in Sierra Leone. The data for this article was sourced from secondary/desk review. The secondary data sources were mainly from published articles, government reports, Acts, policies, workshops and conference proceedings, newspaper commentary, Transparency International Annual Reports, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports, and NGOs among others. Key words like corruption in Sierra Leone, causes of corruption, negative effects of corruption and bribery, and control measures of corruption were used to search for relevant information. Specifically, the study revealed that corruption was more prevalent from 2003 to 2018 but declined from 2018 to 2021. Most corruption cases in Sierra Leone arise from the abuse of public offices for private gains. Furthermore, systemic analysis of literature showed that corruption arises as a result of low salary wages, political ambition and other sociological factors. From 2019 to 2021, Sierra Leone has made remarkable progress and is been rated below Africa’s corruption average. This might be attributed to the various reforms and the pre-conviction corrupt asset recovery strategy adopted and the massive public outreach and awareness-raising drive adopted by the commission. It is recommended that the Anti-Corruption Commission of Sierra Leone be adequately empowered to go after any individual engaged in corrupt practices regardless of social status, ethnicity, political connection and wealth. It further recommended that the Anti-Corruption Commissioner appointment should not be political but by integrity and sound track record of citizens.

"МИРОВАЯ РЕВОЛЮЦИЯ" НА ОКРАИНАХ БРИТАНСКОЙ ИМПЕРИИ ВО ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЕ 1920-Х ГГ.: МИФ ИЛИ РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ?

Based upon the wide range of sources, including Russian and British archival documents, published diplomatic correspondence, diaries penned by some eye-witnesses and newspaper commentaries, the article dwells upon the attempts by the Comintern to bring to life the ideas of “world revolution” in the Middle East states – such as Persia and Afghanistan, as well as in the Chinese possessions – Sinkiang and Tibet, which in the period under review – the second half of the 1920s, gained a quasi-independent status. The author meticulously examines various forms and methods of exporting revolutionary practices to the British Empire Asian outskirts, where Indian subcontinent occupied a key position. As a result of the study, it was established that by the beginning of the 1930s, the concept of the “world revolution” as one of the directions of Soviet foreign policy underwent a transformation from reality into a myth, which began to perform mainly propaganda functions. Besides that, the author came to conclusion that the transformation had a serious impact on the development of Soviet-Britain relations during the second conservative government of S. Baldwin, being zigzag in nature – from the state of mutual confrontation in 1925–1926, through the rupture of 1927, to the restoration after the return to power of the Labour Party in 1929.

Old Rebellions, New Minorities: Ma Family Leaders and Debates Over Communal Representation Following the Xinhai Rebellion, 1911

ABSTRACT Following the 1911 Xinhai Rebellion, the new leadership began to stress the fundamental unity of the peoples of the new Republic of China, even as newspaper commentaries foretold the need for separate Muslim representation as the only way to buy the participation of that constituency in the new state. Influential Chinese Muslim military leaders controlled much of the northwest; their participation in the new state was crucial to its survival. However, whilst the legacies of a nineteenth century process of minoritization meant it was often assumed Muslims would want either separate representation or independence, separate representation was never a cause the northwestern leadership truly espoused. Instead, although figures such as Ma Anliang, Ma Bufang and Ma Fuxiang were recognized unofficially as ‘Muslim leaders’, they promoted themselves as experts on other minorities, and as guardians of the integrity of the old, multi-ethnic space that had been the Qing empire. This article argues that in rejecting their own minoritization, the Chinese Muslim leaders sought to ensure the place of other minorities – Tibetan, Mongolian, Turkic – in the emerging framework of the Chinese Nationalist state, often with great violence. Only then could they be afforded space within that new state as one minority among others.

Formal reporting style (Journalistic Reporting Styles)

Formal reporting style (Journalistic Reporting Styles)

Anonymity and Inhibition in Newspaper Comments

Newspaper comment sections allow readers to voice their opinion on a wide range of topics, provide feedback for journalists and editors and may enable public debate. Comment sections have been criticized as a medium for toxic comments. Such behavior in comment sections has been attributed to the effect of anonymity. Several studies have found a relationship between anonymity and toxic comments, based on laboratory conditions or the comparison of comments from different sites or platforms. The current study uses real-world data sampled from The Washington Post and The New York Times, where anonymous and non-anonymous users comment on the same articles. This sampling strategy decreases the possibility of interfering variables, ensuring that any observed differences between the two groups can be explained by anonymity. A small but significant relationship between anonymity and toxic comments was found, though the effects of both the newspaper and the direction of the comment were stronger. While it is true that non-anonymous commenters write fewer toxic comments, we observed that many of the toxic comments were directed at others than the article or author of the original article. This may indicate a way to restrict toxic comments, while allowing anonymity, by restricting the reference to others, e.g., by enforcing writers to focus on the topic.

Concession strategies in online newspaper comments

This paper scrutinizes concessive relations explicitly signalled by conjunctive (e.g. but, although, though), prepositional (e.g. despite, in spite of, regardless of), adverbial (e.g. however, yet, still) and pronominal (e.g. whatever, whoever) connectors. The study is based on 393 tokens extracted from SOCC, a corpus of online news comments (Kolhatkar et al., 2020) and it adopts a discourse-interactional perspective combining the interactional model (Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson, 2003, 2005; Barth-Weingarten, 2003) with prior research recognizing different observation levels (Sweetser, 1990; Crevels, 2000; Latos, 2009). We argue that the act of “conceding” in online news comments deploys specific concessive schemata (monadic and pseudo-dyadic) that generally realize an interpersonal function (as politeness and/or (dis)alignment strategies), although they may also work at the ideational (expressing a contrast or restricting the applicability of a claim) or textual (topic and discourse management) levels. Furthermore, the evaluative potential of concessive patterns is also teased out while simultaneously spotlighting their contribution to the degree of constructiveness and toxicity of online comments (Gautam and Taboada, 2019). In sum, our findings reveal that the capabilities of concessive relations are even broader and more manifold than previously suggested.

Social Norms and the Dynamics of Online Incivility

Online discussions are performed in the gaze of fellow users. To increase engagement, platforms typically let these users evaluate the comments made by others through rating systems (e.g., via Likes or Down/Up votes). Understanding how such ratings shape, and are shaped by, features of the underlying discussion is important for our understanding of online behavior. In this study, we focus on an increasingly concerning aspect of online discussions: incivility. We draw on the theory of normative social behavior to analyze a data set of over 6,000 online newspaper comments. We find that repeated incivility by the same person is more likely when their initial incivility was affirmed by both descriptive norms (incivility in nearby comments) and injunctive norms (Up votes). Repeated incivility receives more Up votes if nearby comments also include incivility but fewer Up votes if they do not, suggesting that injunctive norms are contextual and shaped by descriptive norms. We conclude that online incivility is a dynamic, normative process that is responsive to both positive feedback and proximate incivility.

ANYBODY LIVING A PRIVATE LIFE IS A BELIEVER IN MONEY. GERTRUDE STEIN, THE GREAT DEPRESSION, AND THE ABSTRACTION OF MONEY

The article considers Gertrude Stein’s reflections about the increasing abstraction of economics in response to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal in a number of explicitly political pieces from the mid-1930s, including “A Political Series” (1935), and her five brief newspaper commentaries on “money”: ”Money”, “More About Money”, “Still More About Money”, “All About Money”, and “My Last About Money” (1936). The article then relates them to Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the religious implications of the money system that resonate with Stein’s salute to the “believer in money” as security against contemporary authoritarian tendencies. Stein’s opinion pieces argue against taxation, unionism, and public spending, yet also demonstrate the slippery passage between her explicit conservatism, her economic liberalism and her still present radicalism and critique of patriarchal authority as they recycle crucial elements from contemporaneous works such The Geographical History of America (1935) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).

The lost men in Missing Person

For the Nobel Literature Prize being rewarded to him in 2014, Patrick Modiano is among the most popular French novelists allover the world. In Vietnam, many books of his have been translated and published, especially since the year of his Nobel Prize, leading to many reviews and comments in newspapers and social networks. In addition, his novels have been interesting subjects to many studies in universities. However, we tend to pay more attention to his ``art of memory'' and his obvious obsession to history, memories, identities, the feeling of loss, etc. without paying attention to the loss itself, which makes it hard to deeply understand both his works and his world. In this article, we try to examine the loss in one of his most well-known novels, Missing Person (original Rue des Boutiques Obscures in French, which brought him the Goncourt Prize in 1978), to get a thorough understanding of this theme in his writings. By examining the characters and their being lost in Missing Person in terms of memory, language and nationality as well as seeing their state in the relations to cultural and historic events then (in the Occupation and about ten years later in France), we try not only to completely depict their loss but also to get things clearly explained. From the lost men in Missing Person, we also expect to point out humans' close connections to their community, their mother tongue language and their nation, showing how vulnerable they are through historic events. From this point of view, Modiano's missing person is a victim of history – just like many refugees today. Therefore, his writings not only are something from the past, not only belong to the past, but also are attached to our present and towards the future.