Discourse Corpus Research Articles

The interpersonal semantics of rhetoric

Abstract Different from previous linguistic studies on rhetoric, which primarily concern the ideational semantics and the logic of sentences, this article attempts to deal systematically with the interpersonal semantics of rhetoric by drawing on the comprehensive appraisal framework of systemic functional linguistics (Martin and White 2005) and explores the mechanism of rhetorical persuasion in science communication via appraisal through a case study of the gene-modification (GM) debate in China. It first examines the rhetorical appeals of the subsystems of appraisal and then based on a self-constructed and coded corpus of GM debate discourses, it compares how institutional (the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and the Greenpeace Organization) and individual stakeholders (Cui Yongyuan and Fang Zhouzi) of different ideological interests in the GM debate mobilize the interpersonal semantic resources to rhetorical effects to persuade the audience of the safety/danger of the GM technology and products. The analysis reveals that while the opinion leaders choose ‘soft’ persuasion by heavily using affect and judgement resources, the institutions opt for ‘hard’ persuasion by utilizing more appreciation resources. The four parties all prefer contracting resources over expanding resources of engagement, which restricts the space of negotiation. Their communicative motives are interpreted through the lens of the rhetoric theory, and the implications and consequences for science communication in the post-truth era are discussed. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding the persuasion mechanism of appraisal and to understanding the science vs. society, and government vs. citizens relationship.

Using Ideological Conflict to Create Carcinogen Risk in Arabic Scientific Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study

Many Arabic scientific debates are devoted to disputes on cancer and its causes. Scientists tend to inform people about the danger of consuming and being exposed to carcinogens. The paper aims to explore the proximization strategy that Arab scientists rely on to construct carcinogen risk to promote people’s preventive actions against carcinogens. The paper intends to answer the main question: how does the Arabic scientific discourse employ ideological conflict to construct carcinogen risk? It is hoped that the paper can provide insights into the linguistic construction of concepts through the ideological conflict between two different poles in the Arabic scientific discourse. It provides insights for Arab scientists by promoting their awareness of the potential of Arabic for presenting a fully intellectual reflection of scientific knowledge. It focuses on the construction of carcinogen risk that generates tension between the values held by people and the opposing values ascribed to carcinogens. This aim is achieved by employing Cap’s (2013) cognitive pragmatic theory of proximization. The theory comprises three proximization strategies: spatial, temporal and axiological. The axiological proximization strategy is applied to a corpus of Arabic scientific discourse. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the analysis to produce more objective results. Anthony’s AntConc (2019) corpus linguistics software is used for conducting mathematical calculations through corpus linguistics. The paper has arrived at some conclusions that show how axiological proximization is employed to construct carcinogen risk which encourages people to take preventive actions.

The Print Media and the Evolution of Third-Generation Nigerian Poetry

Previous literary scholarship and critical allusions to the evolution of Nigerian literature have unanimously acknowledged the emergence of a third generation of Nigerian poetry. This development which gained accentuation between 1980 and 2000, threw up an avalanche of successors to the second-generation poets, notably: Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, Niyi Osundare, Okinba Launko, Catherine Acholonu and Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie. Despite the visible numerical strength of this new generation of writers; their aggregate prolificity and their gross contribution to our national creative output, adequate seminal attention has not been paid to the role of the print media in the catalysation of this milieu. This study, therefore, situates the third generation of Nigerian poets and their works, within the context that they are bonafide products of the print media. They sprouted and flourished in an era where creative activity, triggered by national socio-economic realities, bloomed without collateral and commensurate outlets for the expression of this creative outburst. They have continued to sustain the richness and robustness of Nigeria’s poetic traditions. Their continuing commitment to socio-political engagements has reinforced the enterprise of preceding generations. This study will constitute a veritable reference material on the emerging corpus of critical discourse on the evolution of Nigerian poetry, deriving from the pages of Nigerian newspapers, en route to the 20th century.

English-language media discourse in the era of digitalisation: Special mission and functional potential

The article addresses the problem of the functional potential of the present-day English-language media discourse and its role in English-speaking societies and other countries where English does not have official national status. The purpose of the research is to holistically understand key functions that the English language media discourse is performing in the 21st century. The theoretical framework of this study includes mutually influencing and complementary research doctrines of Halliday’s systemic functional approach, Stuart Hall’s cultural studies approach, and the pragmatic approach of Jeff Verschuren. The findings are based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of scientific works dedicated to the English-language media discourse and a massive media discourse corpus of leading English-language print and online media resources. Overall, the research has proved that the English-language media discourse may perform seven key pragmatic functions (political and economic function, educational function, environmental protection and sustainable development function, integration function, innovative function, cultural diplomacy function, and the social function of sport), which help promote a ‘missionary’ world of democracy and sustainability, affordable education and breakthrough innovations, multiculturalism, national identity and race-free ideology, healthy sport and well-being. Moreover, it is proved that modern English-language media discourse acts as a single holistic information management system whose goal is to become a global influencer and mediator navigating between English-speaking nations and non-English world communities.

Czy czas to pieniądz? Koncepcja czasu w mentalności współczesnego dorosłego Polaka

The aim of the paper is to enquire how a modern Polish man comprehends time . Taken from the cognitive linguistics perspective, the study evolves around time metaphors, extracted from the definitions and the language corpus in Polish. Metaphor is recognised as a useful tool within Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) to learn about motives, believes and ideologies. The results obtained in the research yield quantitative data. The metaphors Time is money, Time is a value and Time is a doctor and the best cure can be called ‘shared metaphors’, since they underlie both the dictionary definitions and corpus discourse. We may conclude that these metaphors are conventional, well-grounded in the awareness of contemporary Poles and inspire their ideological motives. Other time metaphors refer to moral and religious values (within the MORALITY and RELIGION frame) and an identity search (within the IDENTITY and PSYCHOLOGY frame). Finally, a few time metaphors derive from everyday functioning and duties of present people (within the DAILY LIFE frame).

Translation, politics, and development

China’s rise to global prominence has been coupled with a development aid approach and narrative that contradicts long-standing Western-oriented models and discourses. Despite the existence of tangible development projects that bear testimony to Chinese aid to developing countries and which clearly espouse the principles upon which the aid is founded, critics continue to allege that the aid is a façade that enables China to advance its political ideology and vision. Using a corpus-based approach, we investigated the extent to which China’s political discourse finds its way into the development aid discourse either by senior party officials or through a government-managed collaborative translation mechanism. To do so, we designed a monolingual corpus of the speeches of top-ranking CPC party officials presented at party-organized events and bilingual (Chinese–English) corpora of the discourse used by Chinese government officials during development aid exchanges. We extracted political terms, based mostly on their frequency of use, from the monolingual corpus and verified the extent of their presence in the bilingual corpora of the development aid discourse. Furthermore, we studied the terms and their contexts of use in the bilingual corpora to determine whether translation served as a medium through which China’s political discourse was possibly being introduced into its development aid discourse. Our investigation led us to conclude that China’s development aid discourse contains an insignificant amount of political terminology mirroring China’s own development path. We also concluded that translation did not constitute, in any tangible way, a means by which the presence of China’s political discourse in its development aid discourse could be enhanced. However, we uncovered issues related to terminology management, literal translation, and machine translation which suggest that China was struggling to cope with preserving source text and, presumably, target text linguistic and cultural elements, while taking advantage of current advances in translation technology. We propose both structural and translational modifications that could help China curb anti-development aid criticism while enhancing its development aid discourse.

Językoznawstwo korpusowe w badaniach medioznawczych – ujęcie historyczne i praktyczne

The aim of this paper is to present the benefits and risks of implementing corpus linguistics for discourse analysis. The authors describe the origins and development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools in a historical perspective and provide examples of their application in social sciences, particularly in the methodology of Social Communication and Media Sciences. Fragmentary findings of studies carried out at the Institute of Journalism, Media and Social Communication at the Jagiellonian University in collaboration with the CLARIN-PL consortium illustrate a practical approach to the topic. The article presents the application of NLP tools in the analysis of the corpus of parliamentary discourse from 1989-2019 in terms of determinants for the institutionalization of civic dialogue in Poland and also in the comparative analysis of ulticulturalism in the city council discourse and media discourse in Krakow between 2014–2018 (7 th term of the Krakow City Council). The authors indicate in which phase and at which stage of communication research the use of computational linguistics can support the conclusion.

Corpus-based analysis of shifts in China's diplomatic stance across seven decades (1949-2018).

This study investigates the changes in China's diplomacy in the past seven decades based on the diachronic corpus of Chinese diplomatic discourse from 1949 to 2018 using corpus based critical discourse analysis theoretical insights. The study examines the targeted keywords used in the seven periods of Chinese diplomatic discourse and their significant collocations. The results show that China has worked with the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and some Asian, Latin American, and African countries to safeguard world peace while opposing war, establish good relations with these countries, and promote mutual development through cooperation. In addition, China's diplomacy has experienced politics-oriented and economy-oriented eras and is now in an era of global sustainable development. Therefore, Chinese diplomatic discourse is the linguistic representation of China's diplomacy, fundamentally determined by its national interests and changing social and historical situations domestically and internationally.

An Exploratory Analysis of TED Talks in English and Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish Translations

Abstract This paper contributes to the question of how discourse relations are realised in TED talks. Drawing on an annotated, multilingual discourse corpus of TED talk transcripts, we examine discourse relations in English and Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations by concentrating on three aspects: the degree of explicitness in discourse relations, the extent to which explicit and implicit relations are encoded inter- or intra-sententially, and whether top-level discourse relation senses employed in English differ in the target languages. The study shows that while the target languages differ from English in the first two dimensions, they do not display considerable differences in the third dimension. The paper thus reveals variations in the realisation of discourse relations in translated transcripts of a spoken genre in three languages and offers some methodological insights for dealing with the issues surrounding discourse relations.

Corpus-informed instruction of the pragmatic marker I mean

ABSTRACT Pragmatic markers perform important communicative functions, but they can be difficult to learn in a second language because of their multifunctionality and lack of salience during communicative events. This study has two goals: (1) to describe the communicative functions of the pragmatic marker I mean in academic discourse; and (2) to provide instructional activities for teaching the multiple functions of the pragmatic marker I mean. Bottom-up corpus-linguistics techniques were used to discover frequent functions of I mean in a corpus of interactive classroom discourse. The results revealed three main communicative functions: (1) argumentation management, (2) communication management, and (3) interaction management (cf. Fant. 2016. Pragmatic markers in high-level second language use. In Advanced Proficiency and Exceptional Ability in Second Languages, ed. K. Hyltenstam, 15–42. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). The results also revealed a range of subfunctions, including self-correction, elaboration, rapport building, and pause filling while holding the floor. These findings provided an empirical basis for the creation of pedagogical materials. We present instructional tasks that draw on awareness-raising and explicit-inductive teaching techniques to support L2 learners in gaining a richer understanding of the multifunctionality of I mean, as well as the importance of context in interpreting and creating meaning.

Multiagent Culture Algorithm-Based Interactive Design of College English Online Teaching Process.

Traditional educational techniques and conceptions no longer match the need of the society for talent training. It is due to the fact that educational reforms are deepening and more open interactive teaching models have begun to be gradually implemented in college English instruction. The method's innovation and reform can not only fully respect the students' dominating position but also entice students to devote themselves to the English classroom with greater zeal which is helpful in allowing for deeper knowledge discovery and thinking. This study has the motive to examine the interactive teaching mode's application tactics in college English classrooms, particularly with the goal of improving the effectiveness of English classroom teaching and promoting the high-quality growth of today's college students. Furthermore, in order to improve the interactivity of online English teaching in colleges and universities, this research proposes an intelligent conversation system based on multiagents to aid in the improvement of online teaching. Finally, using a public discourse corpus dataset for implementation, the proposed model proves to have better performance than existing state of the art approaches.

THE ROLE OF SEMANTIC REFERENTIAL DEFICIENCY IN CABO-VERDEAN CREOLE SUBJECT EXPRESSION¬: VARIABLE CHOICE OF THIRD PERSON REDUCED REFERRING DEVICE

This study examines the influence of ‘semantic referential deficiency’―consisting of nonhuman, nonspecific, and indefinite reference―in variable third-person subject expression in a corpus of naturalistic Cabo-Verdean Creole discourse collected from respondents from the islands of Santiago and Maio. The methodology follows the Probabilistic Linguistics program (CLAES, 2017) in combining variationist sociolinguistics with cognitively-oriented discourse analysis, whereas the notion of semantic referential deficiency is adopted from Generative Grammar and from research on Brazilian Portuguese argument expression. The coded corpus data were submitted to a suite of descriptive and inferential statistical analyses in R (R CORE TEAM, 2021). Results show a promoting effect from nonhuman and collective referents on the selection of zero or null subjects, alongside other predictors related to referential coherence and accessibility.

Funktionale und stilistische Merkmale gesprochener fortgeschrittener Lerner:innensprache: Methodische und konzeptionelle Überlegungen am Beispiel von GeWiss

AbstractThis article discusses some methodological and conceptual issues arising from the analysis of advanced-level spoken language corpora. This discussion is based onGeWiss,a corpus of spoken academic discourse comprising L1 and L2 data of German collected in academic settings in Poland, the UK, Bulgaria, and Germany, as well as L1 data of Polish, English, and Italian. The data were collected using an ethnographic comparative approach; a range of speech events with comparable institutional and functional features in the philologies (student presentations, research papers, and oral examinations) were identified, recorded, transcribed, and tagged. In addition to POS tagging and lemmatisation, in selected sub-corpora some pragmatic features were also annotated. These include metadiscursive actions as well as references and quotations. The corpus therefore comprises ‘natural data’, derived from various contexts, of speakers with varying degrees of academic socialisation and competence in academic German.The paper discusses the various factors that have to be taken into account when analysing and evaluating the GeWiss L2 data with regard to style and register of metadiscourse as well as references and quotations in L2 student presentations. It is argued that any attempt to assess these data needs to reflect upon the concepts of ‘norm’, ‘appropriateness of usage’, (stage and context of) academic socialisation, and the context of the speech event. This also applies to the evaluation of the L1 data, which is why they cannot be used as a simple reference point for the purpose of a (mainly quantitative) ‘contrastive interlanguage analysis’ (Granger 2015). A qualitative approach needs to be used at least initially to identify and assess specific features of L2 data. This is shown using examples of metadiscursive and referencing speech actions. While there seem to be some stylistic and register features that can be regarded as inappropriate irrespective of the context of the speech events, others seem to be more context-sensitive. The paper argues that in addition to linguistic analysis and the intuitions of the L1 researcher, some kind of rating procedure would help to establish better concepts of ‘norm’ and ‘appropriateness’ of such natural corpus data originating in different academic contexts and traditions.

Clausal Adjuncts of Romance Languages. A Corpus-driven Comparison

"Clausal Adjuncts of Romance Languages – a Corpus-Driven Comparison. Continuing the traditional comparative analysis of Romance languages, the present paper brings evidence for the fact that the syntactic configuration (the word order) of a Romance complex sentence (henceforth CS) with clausal adjuncts is the result of many competing forces. The analysis is based on an original media discourse corpus, collected from three Romance varieties (Romanian, Italian, and French), and the focus will be both on the word order of the temporal, causal, and concessive adjuncts (their occurrence in sentence-initial, in sentence-final position, sometimes even in sentence-middle position), and on the comparative analysis of the results. What I intend to prove is that the ordering of a CS in the three Romance languages is motivated by three types of factors: discourse pragmatics, semantics, and parsing. Keywords: clausal adjuncts, morphosyntactic analysis, word order, Romance languages "

The Stages of Love, Songs, and a Band: A Corpus Discourse Analysis of One Direction’s Pop Albums

This study investigates the linguistic dimensions of the songs made popular by One Direction– the British-Irish boy band that captivated young fans around the world in the 2010s. The tailored corpus output was based on One Direction’s five albums (65 songs, 21,566 words). Using Voyant Tools (Sinclair & Rockwell 2016) and discourse analysis framework (Fairclough 1995, 2001), we examined the word frequency, collocation patterns and semantic references found in the lyrics. Further analysis was grounded on the 5-stage model of love and relationships by Levinger (1983). The results suggest that the lexicogrammatical associations found in One Direction’s songs show that words may have similar meaning but carry a different illocutionary message in terms of use patterns within a contextual structure. The semantic and pragmatic references in the lyrics also tell an emotional narrative of a roller-coaster-kind-of-young love and the challenges they face i.e., exhilaratingly titillating and painfully short-lived. From Oh yeah, baby to Oh, love, goodbye, love is indeed like a song; its own rhythm has a beginning and an end– a story that ironically reflects the band’s own fate. This study has major implications for corpus discourse research, particularly in analyzing the semantic references and implicatures of the lyrics and the story behind them.

An exploration of the structural and colligational characteristics of lexical bundles in L1–L2 corpora for English language teaching

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational possibilities have received little attention in English language teaching (ELT). This study examined lexical bundles, a type of multi-word expressions, to understand their structure and co-occurrence possibilities with other syntactic elements. It was aided by an automated frequency-driven approach using two corpora, the British component of the British National Corpus – a first language (L1) corpus – and a purpose-built Nigerian Media Discourse corpus – a second language (L2) corpus. Two items of lexical analysis software were used to extract three-word lexical bundles with a minimum of 50 frequencies per corpus. The syntactic structures of the identified lexical bundles were determined, and their in-corpus usages were analysed for their colligational characteristics. Results showed that both corpora had instances of general and genre-specific lexical bundles (LBs) with varying frequencies. Five categories of lexical bundles with different structural patterns and peculiar colligational characteristics were identified in the study. Since lexical bundles are more frequently found in both L1–L2 texts, mastering how they are used will further enhance the teaching of English as a second language. The teaching of lexical bundles as a multi-word expression is therefore recommended in ELT as a way of enhancing learners’ proficiency and naturalness in English.

ToD4IR: A Humanised Task-Oriented Dialogue System for Industrial Robots

Despite the fact that task-oriented conversation systems have received much attention from the dialogue research community, only a handful of them have been studied in a real-world manufacturing context using industrial robots. One stumbling block is the lack of a domain-specific discourse corpus for training these systems. Another difficulty is that earlier attempts to integrate natural language interfaces (such as chatbots) into the industrial sector have primarily focused on task completion rates. When designing a dialogue system for social robots, the user experience is prioritized above industrial robots. We provide the Industrial Robots Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (IRWoZ) to overcome these challenges, a fully-labeled discourse dataset covering four robotics domains. It delivers simulated discussions between shop floor workers and industrial robots, with over 401 dialogues, to promote language-assisted Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in industrial settings. Small talk concepts and human-to-human conversation strategies are provided to support humanlike answer generation and give a more natural and adaptable dialogue environment to increase user experience and engagement. Finally, we propose and evaluate an end-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue for Industrial Robots (ToD4IR) using two types of pre-trained backbone models: GPT-2 and GPT-Neo, on the IRWoZ dataset. ToD4IR’s performance in a real manufacturing context was validated through a series of trials. Our experiments demonstrate that ToD4IR outperforms three downstream task-oriented dialogue tasks, i.e., dialogue state tracking, dialogue act generation, and response generation, on the IRWoZ dataset. Our source code of ToD4IR and the IRWoZ dataset is accessible at https://github.com/lcroy/ToD4IR for reproducible research.

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation—understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs—contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women’s magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. Ultimately, the regime’s initiatives to politicize women through including them in mass campaigns and radicalizing their traditional household tasks were relatively successful, but cultural backlash against women’s increasing presence in the labor force prompted the institutionalization of a gendered division of labor in the economy that traditionalized their initially radical entry into the workplace. Analyzing how political elites confront and manage social differences within political blocs promises to contribute to a better understanding of the political production of social solidarity and its downstream effects on categorical inequalities.

Lexical and Grammatical Errors in Developmentally Language Disordered and Typically Developed Children: The Impact of Age and Discourse Genre.

Persistent lexical and grammatical errors in children’s speech are usually recognized as the main evidence of language delay or language disorder. These errors are usually treated as a sign of a deficit in language competence. On the other hand, some studies have revealed the same kinds of grammatical errors in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in typically developed (TD) children. Quite often, DLD children use grammatical markers properly, but sometimes they do this erroneously. It has been suggested that the main area of the limitations in DLD children is language performance but not language competence. From the perspective of the resource deficit model, the error rate in DLD children should be influenced by the cognitive demands of utterance and text production. We presume that different genres of discourse demand a different number of cognitive resources and, thus, should differently impact the error rate in children’s speech production. To test our hypothesis, we carried out an error analysis of two corpora of child discourse. The first corpus contained longitudinal data of discourse (personal narratives, fictional stories, chats, and discussions) collected from 12 children at four age points (4 years 3 months., 4 years 8 months., 5 years 3 months., and 5 years 9 months. years). Another corpus contained discourse texts (fictional stories and discussions) collected in the framework of a cross-sectional study from 6-year-old TD and DLD children; the DLD children had language expression but not comprehension difficulties. A comparative analysis between different discourse genres evidenced that the genre of discourse and age of assessment impacted the error distribution in the DLD and TD children. Such variables as the lexical and morphological error rates were impacted the most significantly. The results of the two studies confirmed our hypothesis regarding the probabilistic nature of lexical and grammatical errors in both DLD and TD children and the relationship between a cognitive loading of the genre and the error rate.

Communicating Racism and Xenophobia in the Era of Donald Trump: A Computational Framing Analysis of the US-Mexico Cross-Border Wall Discourses

Trump’s disruptive presidency has created predictable schisms in international politics, relations, trade relations, cultures, and social structures worldwide. His campaign promises and subsequent executive orders have constructed a 200-mile wall across the US and Mexican borders. The Wall project has cost about $20 billion and has incurred criticisms about its anti-immigrant, racism, and xenophobia implications domestically and internationally. In this cross-national computational framing study, we examined the corpus of English-language media discourses of 967 articles to describe, compare, and interpret how international media organizations and journalists have framed this monumental architecture during Trump’s Presidency (2017–2020). Our text mining analyses have identified six news frames and confirmed home country’s existing racism and xenophobia account for variations in the framing practices of the Wall project among media organizations and journalists around the world. Discussions and implications were provided.