Devices In English Research Articles

A Cross-Sectional Study of Allegorical Devices in English and Uzbek Languages

A Cross-Sectional Study of Allegorical Devices in English and Uzbek Languages

Hedging Devices in English And Behdini-kurdish: A Contrastive Study

Hedging Devices in English And Behdini-kurdish: A Contrastive Study

Dynamic development of cohesive devices in English as a second language writing

Abstract The dearth of research examining the progression of cohesion in L2 writing through a time-series research design is evident. Therefore, the current study employs the Complex Dynamic Systems Theory to explore the evolution of cohesive devices in L2 writing. Thirty advanced-level L2 writers from a US university participated over a semester, providing 210 written samples at seven measurement points. Analysis of these samples, utilizing 40 cohesion indices from the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion, revealed significant improvement in eight cohesion indices (three local, four global, and one text cohesion indices) with large effect sizes. However, time-series analyses indicated nonlinear trends and variability. Additionally, a positive association was found between two local cohesion indices (lexical and semantic overlap) at the initial and final measurement points. The findings demonstrate the multifaceted developmental trajectories and complexities evident in L2 learners’ approaches and carry important implications for L2 writing instruction and assessment.

Cohesion-Based Equivalence in Translating English Texts into Arabic: Problems and Strategies

This paper attempts to cast light on an important issue which may pass unnoticed nearly by most student translators in the process of translating English texts into Arabic. Actually, the paper is about how to cohesively reproduce equivalent target texts. The study aims at (1) distinguishing a text from a non-text. (2) highlighting the main cohesive devices in English and how they are realized in Arabic. (3) pointing out some cohesion-related problems a translator may face when rendering English texts into Arabic. The study hypothesizes that unawareness on the part of student translators of the very nature of texts as instances of language in use rather than language as an abstract system nor a sum of its constituent parts may cause them to produce incohesive renderings where they fail to combine sentences into well-organized whole. Bad translation renders a text into a non-text in that it seems foreign even though no faulty vocabulary was found and no apparent grammatical mistakes were detected. The study concludes that nearly all the student translators failed to produce unified and cohesive texts since they transferred the cohesive devices of the source text which do not go along with the norms of writing the target text.

Attribute and reliability hedging devices in English, Czech and Slovak research articles

Attribute and reliability hedging devices in English, Czech and Slovak research articles

Eye gaze as a resource in handling trouble around mobile devices in EFL classroom interactions

This article offers an insight into how interaction is multimodally built during task-accomplishment around mobile devices in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. More specifically, it investigates eye gaze as a resource in recruiting help and pursuing response during interactional or task-related trouble sequences. The data come from videorecorded EFL lessons at Finnish comprehensive schools where mobile devices are used for learning tasks. Through multimodal conversation analysis, the article demonstrates that gaze is employed as one of the first resources to address trouble. Although tasks often require gaze to be directed at devices, it can be flexibly reoriented to peers when needed. The findings therefore highlight the need to study not only the use of technology but also the interaction around it. An emic perspective to applied linguistics is especially called for to understand how participants manage interaction in today’s technology-rich educational contexts.

Elena+ Care for COVID-19, a Pandemic Lifestyle Care Intervention: Intervention Design and Study Protocol.

Background: The current COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is an emergency on a global scale, with huge swathes of the population required to remain indoors for prolonged periods to tackle the virus. In this new context, individuals' health-promoting routines are under greater strain, contributing to poorer mental and physical health. Additionally, individuals are required to keep up to date with latest health guidelines about the virus, which may be confusing in an age of social-media disinformation and shifting guidelines. To tackle these factors, we developed Elena+, a smartphone-based and conversational agent (CA) delivered pandemic lifestyle care intervention.Methods: Elena+ utilizes varied intervention components to deliver a psychoeducation-focused coaching program on the topics of: COVID-19 information, physical activity, mental health (anxiety, loneliness, mental resources), sleep and diet and nutrition. Over 43 subtopics, a CA guides individuals through content and tracks progress over time, such as changes in health outcome assessments per topic, alongside user-set behavioral intentions and user-reported actual behaviors. Ratings of the usage experience, social demographics and the user profile are also captured. Elena+ is available for public download on iOS and Android devices in English, European Spanish and Latin American Spanish with future languages and launch countries planned, and no limits on planned recruitment. Panel data methods will be used to track user progress over time in subsequent analyses. The Elena+ intervention is open-source under the Apache 2 license (MobileCoach software) and the Creative Commons 4.0 license CC BY-NC-SA (intervention logic and content), allowing future collaborations; such as cultural adaptions, integration of new sensor-related features or the development of new topics.Discussion: Digital health applications offer a low-cost and scalable route to meet challenges to public health. As Elena+ was developed by an international and interdisciplinary team in a short time frame to meet the COVID-19 pandemic, empirical data are required to discern how effective such solutions can be in meeting real world, emergent health crises. Additionally, clustering Elena+ users based on characteristics and usage behaviors could help public health practitioners understand how population-level digital health interventions can reach at-risk and sub-populations.

The assessment of metadiscourse devices in English as a foreign language

The objectives of this paper are to identify the metadiscourse devices used by English learners at the different levels of language acquisition established by the Common European Framework of Reference and to categorise them to facilitate the assessment and learning of textual and interpersonal devices. First, a learner corpus of essays written by English learners was compiled. Then, the metadiscourse devices were classified in different levels and categories. The results showed the lists and frequencies of metadiscourse devices. The examples aim to make additional and explicit connections between levels of language proficiency and assessment of metadiscourse devices. It can be stated, as a conclusion, that metadiscourse devices portray specific ways of argumentation in essay writing in different levels of EFL proficiency.

Methodological features of graphic tools

This article discusses graphic stylistic devices in the English and Uzbek languages, the “additional” meanings expressed in them. Some similarities and differences between graphic devices in English and Uzbek have been analyzed on the basis of examples from literary works in both languages. Attention is also paid to the fact that graphic stylistic devices are represented by various punctuation marks.

Hedging in Newspaper Editorials in the English and Azerbaijan Languages

The present study has been conducted for the linguistic analysis of hedging, which is meant to be an important linguistic feature expressing tentativeness and possibility. The purpose of the study is to investigate hedging devices in English and Azerbaijan economic and political newspaper editorials and to show the frequently used hedges in these stated languages. Basing on the revealed results, it becomes clear that in English newspaper editorials hedging is observed to be more frequently used. It is necessary to underline that the English political and economic newspaper editorials are seen to be more hedged than the Azerbaijan. 
 
 The article has been focused on the lexical and pragmatic hedges. Hedges pragmatically are realized to be the markers of politeness in the newspaper editorials in the very languages.
 
 The modal verbs are considered to be the lexical hedges, and they have been dealt with from this side in the article as well. It is known that modal verbs are used to express the speaker’s attitude to the reality, and they help the speaker to express ideas indirectly as well. The article highlights the necessity of using the modal verbs in the newspaper editorials.

A Contrastive Analysis of Explicit Cohesion in English Advertising Texts and Their Chinese Consecutive Interpretation Versions

Although much research has been conducted on language features of advertising, little has been reported on the contrast between language use in advertisements, particularly advertisements in English and those in Chinese. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s theory about cohesion in text, this paper reports on the explicit cohesion devices used in advertising texts in English and Chinese. The data were derived from Singapore, a multilingual country where English and Chinese are two important languages. A total of thirty advertisements in English and their Chinese versions were analyzed for the distribution of explicit cohesive devices, i.e., lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion. The study reveals that advertisements in English used more reference and conjunction devices than those in Chinese, whereas Chinese language advertisements employed more ellipsis devices than English language advertisements. It also finds that there were no differences in the use of substitution and lexical devices in English or Chinese language advertisements. The conclusion of the study is finally drawn and the further study is suggested.

On Intensive Endophoric Devices in English

AbstractThis paper deals with the syntactic and semantic properties of a specific kind of anaphoric device (AD) in English, instantiated by Prn+SELF lexical items (himself/herself/itself…; ‘SELF’ henceforth), which do not behave like anaphors in the sense of Binding Theory either syntactically or semantically. These devices have received the name ofintensivesin the grammatical literature (Leskosky 1972; Siemund 2000, among many others). We will look at the syntactic behaviour of so-calledintensivesin different syntactic contexts, and refine the classification of these ADs taking into consideration (a) how each type of intensive is derived, (b) the kinds of syntactic rules that can affect them, and (c) their meaning.

On the production of metaphors and metonymies by Jordanian EFL learners: acquisition and implications

Abstract This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to produce English metaphorical and metonymical expressions, using a completion task. It also examines whether the use of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of the participants’ first language, i.e. Jordanian Arabic (JA) would facilitate the production task. The study adopts a contrastive model to compare and contrast figurative devices in English and JA, consisting of six types that vary in relation to the conceptual bases and linguistic expressions involved. The results reveal that even though the participants’ scores were poor, the participants exhibited a general capacity to produce metaphorical/metonymical expressions that are similar in meaning to the ones required on the test, utilizing their L1 conceptual and linguistic knowledge. It was suggested that three important factors need to be satisfied to enable EFL learners to produce English figurative devices correctly, i.e. knowledge of the conceptual bases involved, a good command of English collocational knowledge and familiarity with the concept of partial synonymy, and continuous exposure to the figurative expressions in real-life English. Based on these results, the study proposes some pedagogical implications that may assist EFL learners to familiarize themselves with metaphorical/metonymical expressions in English and it concludes with recommendations for further research.

The Frequency and Types of Hedges in Research Article Introductions by Persian and English Native Authors

This study examined the types and frequency of hedges employed by Persian and English native speakers in the introduction section of academic research articles in the field of literature. In so doing, a corpus of forty research articles published in national and international journals were randomly selected and analysed through descriptive statistics in terms of frequency. In the introduction section, hedges allow researchers to establish an early niche for their research. The results of the study indicate that English writers are more tentative in putting forward claims and in rejecting or confirming the ideas of others than Persian writers. English native writers used modal auxiliaries, evidential main verbs, adjectives and nouns in RAs more frequently than their Persian native writers’ counterparts. The present findings can be employed to design tasks and materials for teaching writing that focus not only on grammar but also on rhetorical structures and various genres of writing. The study also recommends that as hedges are used differently across languages and non-native authors mostly desire to publish their scholastic writings in prestigious journals, adequate consideration seems necessary to be paid to the descriptions of linguistic and rhetorical devices in English.

The Use of Hedging Devices in English and Persian Abstracts of Persian Literature and Civil Engineering MA/MS Theses of Iranian Writers

The present study compared and contrasted the frequency of incidence of hedges in 40 MA/MS abstracts of Persian Literature and Civil Engineering theses written both in Persian and English against the taxonomy of hedges proposed by Salager-Meyer (1994). Running Chi-square analyses, it was found that, firstly, there were no significant differences in the frequency of incidence of hedges used in the abstracts written both in English and Persian in both disciplines and secondly, discipline had no effect on the frequency of incidence of hedges. Thirdly, Iranian graduate students made relatively lower use of hedges compared with their English speaking counterparts.

Aspectuality and countability: a cross-categorial analogy

This paper expands the analogy between events and count nouns, and between states/activities and mass nouns in English to include other situation types, including iteratives, habits, and multiple situations. It explores the evidence used to make such analogies, namely, the quantificational features of deverbal nouns, as each of the deverbalizing devices in English has its own aspectual qualities. It shows further that a number of parallels can be drawn between different types of bounding and debounding in the nominal and verbal domains. Finally, the paper presents a schema of the cross-categorial analogies relating to inherent meaning (mass/count features in nouns, situation types in verbs) and the semantic operations of (de)bounding and (de)collectivizing (quantificational and aspectual modification).

'Sneak-shoes', 'sworders' and 'nose-beards': a case study of lexical innovation

Children often invent new words to express meanings for which they have learned no words or cannot recall conventional words. They do not do so randomly, but appear to utilize their knowledge of word-formation devices. The present study investigated the development of spontaneous lexical innovations during the preschool years. Instances of lexical innovations were identified in transcripts of 210 naturalistic conversations between an American English-speaking boy (2;4 through 5;0) and his parents. The boy's innovations generally support and extend Clark's findings regarding categories of innovations and provide some support for her developmental predictions based on the principle of simplicity. Many usages seem to be based on common, productive word-formation devices in English, particularly compounding, whereas others appear to be based on novel rules and language play. Various influences on the development of lexical innovation are discussed.

'Sneak-shoes', 'sworders' and 'nose-beards': a case study of lexical innovation

Children often invent new words to express meanings for which they have learned no words or cannot recall conventional words. They do not do so randomly, but appear to utilize their knowledge of word-formation devices. The present study investigated the development of spontaneous lexical innovations during the preschool years. Instances of lexical innovations were identified in transcripts of 210 naturalistic conversations between an American English-speaking boy (2;4 through 5;0) and his parents. The boy's innovations generally support and extend Clark's findings regarding categories of innovations and provide some support for her developmental predictions based on the principle of simplicity. Many usages seem to be based on common, productive word-formation devices in English, particularly compounding, whereas others appear to be based on novel rules and language play. Various influences on the development of lexical innovation are discussed.

Cohesion and coherence in theory and reading research

ABSTRACTWhat is the relationship between cohesion and coherence? Researchers in the field of Applied Linguistics have traditionally attempted to list and define the cohesive devices in English which provide the basis for coherent text. Schema theoreticians, on the other hand, have argued that coherence is primary, that readers look for coherence given their existing schemata and extra‐linguistic knowledge of the world and only then do they recognise cohesion.This paper looks at these two approaches in the light of the conflict which has grown up around the relationship between the concepts of cohesion and coherence and suggests that the positions taken are the result of a theoretically different starting point. If the researcher is primarily interested in linguistic analysis then she will begin with cohesion whereas, if human psychology in the reading process is the main focus then it will be more natural to look at coherence. However, it seems to be at least intuitively obvious that both the text itself and the reader have a part to play in the reading process, that reading is simultaneously data‐driven and concept‐driven.It is suggested that these two approaches would benefit from being a part of a larger theory of the reading process. In this context the work of Ruqaiya Hasan is reviewed as the most thorough attempt to provide a theory of text which accounts for both cohesion and coherence. Secondly, data are presented which suggest that a theory which integrates cohesion and coherence is necessary. Two studies are reported: an informal classroom experiment on the influence of pronominal reference on comprehension and an analysis of the results of a test designed to examine the relationships between theoretical constructs hypothesised to constitute (at least part of) the superordinate term “reading comprehension”.

Cohesive devices and discourse competence

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the development of cohesive discourse among second‐language learners in light of native speaker discourse norms. Previous studies of cohesion in second‐language acquisition have counted cohesive devices as a means of assessing the overall cohesion of texts. I argue that such studies have failed to measure cohesion accurately because they have neglected to consider restrictions on the distribution of cohesive devices in English. I formulate two such restrictions and demonstrate how they are relevant to the measurement of cohesion in second language learner discourse.