Context Of Discussion Research Articles

Word Formation Processes in the Context of Social Media Discourse: A Case of Chuka University Students

The social media discourse is a hybrid of both written text and spoken discourse and therefore exhibits unique linguistic features that researchers can explore. This paper reveals the new dynamics of word formation processes in the social media discourse context, which is apparently a new genre. Morphological processes have in the past been analyzed in the context of spoken and written discourse. However, due to the evolution of the social media discourses that emanate from the communications that is mediated by divergent media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagrams and twitter, there is a need to shed light on how language is used in social media. This paper focuses on one aspect of such usage; how words are formed in the social media milieu. This paper therefore analyses the morphological processes drawing from Chuka University students’ social media discourse on WhatsApp platform. Students exhibits similar language usage due to the fact that they share a lot in common as a speech community. The paper therefore utilizes the social network theory to show how the interactants exploits the linguistic artifacts available at their social media network to interact meaningfully. Particularly, the focus is on the morphological processes that are evident in their interactions. The research design used is descriptive and the approach to data analysis is qualitative. The data used to inform this paper is drawn from the researcher’s thesis (2019). The findings revealed that students’ social media discourse results in the formation of new lexical items, use of symbols, Arabic numerals and letters to represent morphemes or words that are used in their day-to-day interactions. Similarly, morphological processes such as compounding, blending, clipping, borrowing, abbreviations and acronyms are common in the students’ social media discourse.

Linguistic variation in mediated diplomatic communication: a full multi-dimensional analysis of interpreted language in Chinese Regular Press Conferences

The integration of corpus linguistics within translation studies has revolutionised our understanding of mediated language. This study endeavours to advance this burgeoning field by employing a full multi-dimensional analysis to investigate linguistic variation in interpreted language within the specialised context of diplomatic discourse. Specifically, the research examines the co-occurring patterns of linguistic features in interpreted diplomatic language vis-à-vis its non-interpreted counterpart. Employing a multivariate statistical technique, this investigation conducted a factor analysis of 113 linguistic variables, yielding five distinct linguistic dimensions: (1) Involved vs. Informational Production, (2) Objective vs. Addressee-focused Narration, (3) Literate-Oral Continuum, (4) Information Elaboration, and (5) Narrative vs. Non-narrative Concerns. The resulting patterns demonstrate that interpreted diplomatic language tends to be more informative, objective, less elaborated, non-narrative, and aligns more closely with formal registers compared to its non-interpreted counterpart, although both navigate the literate-oral continuum. This study delineates the prevailing co-occurrence patterns in interpreted and non-interpreted diplomatic languages and seeks to elucidate the potential factors shaping these linguistic variations by situating these patterns within the context of diplomatic communication. In doing so, it contributes to a nuanced understanding of how specialised contexts influence mediated language use. The findings have significant implications for corpus-based interpreting studies, shedding light on the multi-dimensional nature of interpreted language and informing the development of targeted pedagogical approaches for diplomatic interpreter training.

African Indigenous education in the postcolonial period: A critical reflection

This article examines African Indigenous education in the precolonial period in Southern Africa, focusing on its key elements, characteristics, and educational significance within the broader context of the decolonial education discourse. By delving into primary forms and practices of Indigenous African education, we aim to shed light on how these systems contribute to understanding the educational landscape and the challenges faced in the wake of colonialism. Additionally, we explore the transformative role played by Indigenous education in Southern Africa in addressing the hegemonic influence of Western education during the postcolonial era. Drawing on existing literature and critical analysis, we critically reflect on the nature of a decolonial turn in African Indigenous education. The examination aims at contributing to the ongoing discourse on decolonising education and providing insights into the potential benefits of embracing Indigenous knowledge systems in contemporary African societies by recognising the importance of valuing diverse knowledge systems in fostering inclusive and relevant educational practices.

How e-book vendors attract publishers and academic libraries to their platforms: A critical discourse analysis of vendors’ websites

Academic libraries primarily obtain access to e-books through vendors, rather than individual publishers. These vendors work as intermediary by connecting publishers as the content providers with academic libraries as consumers. Many LIS studies examine how libraries select e-book vendors, and a few research explore how publishers choose vendors to disseminate their e-resources; however, much less is known about vendors’ strategies used to attract both publishers and academic libraries. We have collected over 150 webpages related to e-book products from six major e-book vendors in humanities and social sciences—EBSCO, ProQuest, ProjectMUSE, JSTOR, ACLS, and De Gruyter, and grouped them based on three categories: 1) webpages without targeting a particular group of audience; 2) webpages designed for academic libraries/ librarians; 3) webpages designed for publishers. We then adopt Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis, by moving beyond the examination of the literal meanings of the text, to explore how meaning is constructed at local, institutional, and societal levels. Specifically, we will examine three dimensions of the text: micro (description of the text), meso (interpretation of the meaning of the text), and macro (explanation of the relations between discourse and social context). This discourse analysis will systematically focus on these vendors’ self-identifications and how they market and communicate their missions and distinctions from other vendors to both publishers and libraries. We will present preliminary findings from the critical discourse analysis.

Straight enough: Deriving imprecise interpretations of maximum standard absolute adjectives

While maximum standard absolute adjectives (such as straight) typically have a precise meaning (e.g., ‘perfectly straight’), they are also regularly used imprecisely (e.g., to mean ‘straight enough’). The current study investigates how contextual expectations of precision and a visual referent’s conceptual distance from an ideal maximum standard influence the processing effort of precise and imprecise interpretations of these adjectives. In three experiments, we showed native speakers of English images depicting objects that could be referred to precisely or imprecisely via an absolute adjective and asked them to select the image that best matched the written sentence (Experiments 1 and 2) or to read sentences containing maximum standard absolute adjectives (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 presented no discourse context, and participants accepted, on average, only a small degree of imprecision; and when they did, they took longer, relative to cases in which the same adjectives were used precisely, which is in line with existing empirical findings. Experiment 2 contrasted two kinds of discourse contexts (raising high or low expectations of precision) before the presentation of the test sentences. When expectations of precision were high, participants tolerated only a small degree of imprecision, and when they did, it came at a cost, as in Experiment 1. When expectations of precision were low, much larger degrees of imprecision were tolerated but, critically, participants were still, overall, faster to reach precise, relative to imprecise, interpretations in supporting contexts, suggesting that accessing the precise meaning is less effortful. Experiment 3 supported these findings by showing how the cost of understanding imprecision is also present in a self-paced reading task. Our results lend support to the view that maximum standards are part of the encoded meaning of these adjectives.

Sharing Stories Versus Explaining Facts: Comparing African American Children's Microstructure Performance Across Fictional Narrative, Informational, and Procedural Discourse.

Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American children's microstructure productivity and complexity across three discourse contexts: fictional narratives, informational discourse, and procedural discourse. The study also examined whether there were age-related differences in microstructure performance by discourse type. Participants were 130 typically developing African American children, aged 59-95 months old, enrolled in kindergarten through second grades in a Midwestern U.S. public school district. Wordless children's books were used to elicit fictional narratives, informational, and procedural discourse. Indicators of microstructure performance included measures of productivity (i.e., number of total words and number of different words) and complexity (i.e., mean length of communication unit and complex syntax rate). The effects of genre and age on microstructure performance were assessed using linear mixed-effects regression models. Children produced longer discourse and used a greater diversity of words for their fictional stories compared to their informational or procedural discourse. Grammatical complexity was greater for fictional narratives and procedural discourse than informational discourse. Results showed greater productivity and complexity among older children compared to younger children, particularly for fictional and informational discourse. African American children exhibit variation in their microstructure performance by discourse context and age. Understanding this variation is key to providing African American children with support to maximize their oral language competencies.

Autistic and non-autistic adults use discourse context to determine a speaker's intention to request.

The current study focuses on how autistic adults utilize context to determine whether ambiguous utterances (e.g., "I'm thirsty") are intended as indirect requests or as literal comment/questions. Two questions are addressed: (1) How do autistic adults compare to neurotypical adults in using context to interpret an utterance's intention as either literal or a request? (2) What cognitive mechanisms correlate with indirect request interpretation, and are these different for participants in each group? Twenty-six autistic and 26 neurotypical college students participated, engaging in an online experiment where they read narratives that ended with utterances open to literal or request interpretations, based on context. After each narrative, participants selected the best paraphrase of the utterance from two options, literal versus request. Following this task, participants completed two mentalizing measures (a false belief and emotion-identification task) and several executive functioning tests. The best model for predicting paraphrase choice included scores on the emotion-identification task and context as main effects, along with the interaction between both. Participants with higher emotion-identification test scores were more likely to provide correct paraphrases. Models including group as a main effect and/or interaction were not better at fitting the data, nor were any models that included executive functioning measures as main effects or interactions. Emotion-identification test scores, but not autism diagnosis, predict how adults infer whether an utterance is a request. Findings suggest that autistic adults use context similarly to neurotypical adults when interpreting requests, and that similar processes underlie performance for each group.

The controller-first constraint beyond the Basic Variety: how do instructed learner varieties solve contexts of competition?

Abstract The Basic Variety has been described as a fully fledged system that is developed in second-language acquisition. It is guided by a small number of interacting phrasal, semantic, and pragmatic constraints. This article is devoted to the semantic controller-first constraint, which says that “the NP-referent with highest control comes first” in discourse contexts where this constraint comes into conflict. The Basic Variety, as described by Klein and Perdue, relates to migrant learners that were exposed to target languages in naturalistic contexts and situations outside the classroom. Our study also deals with learners living in the target language’s country at the time of the data collection, but our learners were benefiting from foreign language teaching at university. The goal of this study is twofold. The first part of the article discusses the origins of the key notion of ‘controller’ and introduces related theoretical underpinnings, such as argument hierarchies of transitive verbs and crucial factors determining argument realization. Our analysis shows that the controller-first constraint overlaps with two key concepts of the description of L1 functional grammars – i.e., control asymmetry and the Actor-Undergoer Hierarchy – suggesting that it does not only pertain to the Basic Variety but broadly speaking to the human language capacity. The second part of this study presents some preliminary results on the L2 grammars of Spanish-speaking learners of French in a context of ‘competition’. Our results show the pervasiveness of the controller-first constraint on L2 grammars beyond initial, non-instructed learner varieties, suggesting that this semantic principle is not totally independent of (a) the specifics of the source language and (b) the target constructions of the foreign language classroom.

П. Л. Лавров о социальной истории революционных идей в России и Северной Америке в конце XVIII в.

The research aims to reveal the interconnectedness between socio-historical analysis and reconstruction within the context of the history of ideas regarding the revolutionary events of the late 18th century in Russia and North America, as presented in the works of P. L. Lavrov, a prominent theorist of Russian populism. The article examines Lavrov’s views as a social historian of ideas, focusing on the intellectual content of liberation ideas in the late 18th century. The scientific novelty lies in the specific research perspective that combines approaches from social history and the history of ideas in analyzing the theoretical legacy of representatives of Russian populism, exemplified by Lavrov’s works. As a result of the research, the author concludes that P. L. Lavrov interprets the social history of liberation ideas within the context of the populist discourse about the societal ideal. Lavrov highlights the egalitarianism of Ye. Pugachev’s slogans, while presenting the liberation ideas of the Enlightenment as being geared towards the interests of the few.

Exploring Iranian ESP teachers’ emotion labor: a critical perspective

Despite the growth of research on English for specific purposes (ESP) teachers over the past two decades, the scope of research that focally examines ESP teachers’ emotions is limited. The present study explored 10 Iranian ESP teachers’ emotion labor. Collecting data from questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews, we show how contextual discourses, policies, and expectations of ESP instruction interact with the teacher participants across four areas of pedagogy, assessment, materials, and curriculum and culture. Our findings indicated that content featured as a significant factor in the teachers’ emotions, agency, and identity directly, indirectly, and specifically through content-related discourses and participants. More specifically, it is not necessarily the content itself that along with language shape ESP teachers’ professional sense-making; rather, the way content manifolds in institutional work and interacts with language through various contextualities, modalities, and participants functions more profoundly in ESP teachers’ work. We provide implications for ESP teachers to draw on their collegial potentials to form communities of practice that positively contribute to their professional growth and transform their negative emotions into mutual emotionality.

Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings

ABSTRACT Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses. How, then, do children acquire these fine-grained adjectival meanings? In this research, we hypothesize that as with verbs, the linguistic environments in which these adjectives appear provide surface-level distributional cues that narrow the space of meaning. In a proof-of-concept experiment with adults following in the footsteps of the Human Simulation Paradigm, we provide empirical evidence that surface-level linguistic patterns support the acquisition of different subclasses of subjective adjectives. Adults were presented with scripted dialogues featuring novel words in controlled linguistic environments manipulating grammatical subjects, adverbial modifiers, standard phrases, syntactic complements, and evidence of faultless disagreement among speakers. Participants were then asked to guess the word meaning (either incrementally after each ‘frame’ or after multiple frames) and rate their confidence. Results, as measured by the percentage of category-consistent, frame-compliant guesses, paired with an increase in confidence levels, indicate a sensitivity to this surface-level information, thereby highlighting the role of the linguistic environment in supporting the acquisition of adjective meaning.

What Silent Pauses Can 'Tell' Us About the Storytelling Skills of Autistic Children: Relations Between Pausing, Language Skills and Executive Functions.

Silent pauses may serve communicative purposes such as demarcating boundaries between discourse units in language production. Previous research has shown that autistic children differ in their pausing behavior from typically-developing (TD) peers, however, the factors behind this difference remain underexplored. The current study was aimed at comparing the use of silent pauses in the narrative production of autistic children and age-matched TD children, and also to identify possible relations between pausing behavior and the children's language and executive function abilities. According to the study's findings, the autistic children did not differ from their TD peers in the use of grammatical pauses, however, the former tended to produce significantly less syntactically complex narratives than the TD group, which increased the likelihood that the autistic group would pause appropriately at phrasal boundaries. Thoughwe have found low rates of ungrammatical silent pauses and omitted pauses in obligatory discourse contexts across both groups, autistic children with lower cognitive flexibility tended to use more ungrammatical pauses than their peers with higher cognitive flexibility scores. Also, the autistic group tended to omit obligatory silent pauses more often as their narration became more complex. The results demonstrate that syntactic complexity in narrative production modulated autistic children's pausing behavior, and that structurally simple narrations boosted the autistic group's appropriate use of grammatical pauses. The overall findings also demonstrate the importance of studying silent pauses in the narrative discourse of autistic children, and also highlight the links between silent pauses and the children's syntactic and cognitive skills.

An Ecological Inquiry into Transnational English Language Teachers’ Emotional Vulnerability and Agency

ABSTRACT In this study, we propose an ecological model of teacher agency and emotional vulnerability that draws on epistemological roots of these two constructs to capture historico-personal, socio-organizational, and prospective levels of teacher professionalism. We then ontologically apply the model to exploring transnational language teachers’ agency and emotional vulnerability in the context of Turkey. Framing the study within a narrative inquiry methodology, we collected data from open-ended questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews. Data analyses revealed that the teachers’ personal emotions, embodied agencies, and vulnerabilities were profoundly shaped by individual histories, contextual discourses, and sociocultural particularities. The findings unpack novel dimensions of teachers’ agency and emotional vulnerability, attesting to their interconnection, especially within the context of transnationalism. We conclude the study with implications for teacher educators to reduce the pressure on transnational teachers and render their agencies as rooted in effective professional growth, rather than being defined by excessive vulnerabilities that in turn restrict teacher agencies.

Negative politeness and no worries in Australian English

AbstractThis paper explores how a distinctive politeness token can establish itself in a variety of world English by virtue of its pragmatics. It examines the usage of no worries as a negative politeness thanking response in a large multigenerational corpus of informal dialogues by men and women recorded at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Data from this UWA corpus reflect the steady evolution of no worries, from its indexical association with Australian men's talk to be taken up by younger Australian women. Though rooted in laconic spoken exchanges, the data also show extended uses of no worries in quoted speech as well as narrative reconstructions of spoken encounters to highlight their outcomes. In its further linguistic evolution, it works as a stance adverbial in dramatized interior monologues. It thus acquires new functions in various discourse contexts where a modicum of negative politeness adds value to the narrative or argument.

Translating Metaphors in Political Speeches from English to Arabic: Strategies and Procedures

This study investigates the metaphors’ translation from English to Arabic in political speeches, with the aim of identifying the metaphor translation procedures employed. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the research analyzed the translation of 82 English source language (SL) metaphors into Arabic target language (TL), employing Newmark's Metaphor Translation Procedures as a framework. The findings reveal that while certain SL metaphors have direct equivalents in Arabic, the Arabic translator introduced two new variants or procedures (H1 and H2). Appropriate metaphors’ selection in the TL is found to be affected by all of cultural as well as linguistic factors, in addition to text type and metaphor class. The study sheds light on how translators in the TL effectively address linguistic and cultural challenges during metaphor translation, offering valuable insights into the process of English-Arabic translation. Accordingly, Future studies are is recommended to comprehensively analyze metaphor translation in the political discourse context.

A historical and geometrical analysis of the Sansalvador villa by SfM-MVS photogrammetry

Delving into the essence of the Sansalvador villa requires a meticulous juxtaposition of its original architectural blueprints with a newly formulated planimetry. Conceived by Josep Maria Jujol, this architectural work in Barcelona serves as a prime example to explore his conceptual framework. Its unfinished state, scarcity of planimetric archives of the construction process, and the amalgamation of modernist and organic architectural forms and styles, give this project a distinctive character, exemplifying the architect's singular way of working. This paper undertakes a comprehensive examination of its historical evolution and conceptualization through an exhaustive analysis of primary source materials alongside the realization of a new detailed photogrammetric survey of the existing construction. By overlaying the emergent planimetry, derived from precise point cloud data collected on-site, onto the original hand-drawings, this meticulous comparative analysis unveils nuanced insights into the project's fundamental principles and the evolutionary trajectory of Jujol within the context of Catalan architectural discourse.

Analyzing modality-mediated ideology in translated Chinese political discourses: an ideological square model approach

This study investigates the correlation between textual ideology and the English translations of political discourse. It focuses on how the translation shifts of modality relate to the socio-political and socio-cultural context of Chinese political discourse using the modality system of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theoretical framework. Three main types of translation shifts between should and will, and their corresponding items are identified. First, the addition of modal items should and will in the TTs; second, downgrading the modality value of Chinese modality items to the lower-valued should and will in the TTs; third, upgrading the modality value of Chinese modality items to a higher-valued will in the TTs. The study attributes these findings to van Dijk’s ideological square model and the variable of tenor (the social distance between the speaker and the addresses and the social distance between the official translators of Chinese political discourse and the international audience.

The coproduction of a multilevel personal narrative intervention for people with aphasia in a community communication support group—A pilot study

IntroductionPeople with aphasia (PWA) face challenges in sharing personal stories due to communication difficulties. Discourse treatment in aphasia focusing on personal narrative macrostructure has yet to receive the attention this warrants of researchers and clinicians. Emerging person-centered approaches involve coproduction and codesign with PWA for meaningful discourse treatments. Few studies explore discourse treatment's impact on functional communication. This pilot study aims to explore whether the use of the coproduction approach in the development of a multilevel personal narrative intervention at the group level increased the production of macrostructure elements in trained and untrained narrative discourse contexts, improved aphasia severity and functional communication skills, and advanced quality of life of the participants with aphasia.MethodsAn ABA design was followed featuring a pre-treatment baseline assessment phase, a treatment phase, and a post-treatment assessment phase immediately after treatment was completed. Three people with chronic stroke-induced aphasia, three communication partners, and a moderator took part in the study. All participants were members of a university-led community aphasia communication group. The research protocol consisted of eleven, two-hour, weekly sessions over an 11-week block. Nine treatment sessions were carried out following codesign and coproduction methods that focused on participants with aphasia producing words, sentences, and total communication strategies to express macrostructure elements in their personal stories. Assessment measures were collected at baseline and post-treatment to evaluate improvements in trained and untrained narrative abilities, aphasia severity, functional communication, and the impact of aphasia on quality of life.ResultsMultilevel personal narrative therapy improved the narrative skills of the participants with aphasia at the macrostructural level of narrative discourse. Improvements were also observed in functional communication and quality of life post-treatment.DiscussionThe involvement of participants with aphasia in the codesign and coproduction of the treatment content for the group intervention facilitated improvement in narrative skills, functional communication, and overall quality of life with aphasia. It is recommended that researchers and clinicians consider using content from the personal narratives of clients with aphasia to build discourse treatment and adopt codesign and coproduction approaches, when designing interventions for people with chronic aphasia, to improve communication outcomes in everyday life.

Intertextual Context in Kurdish Political Discourse, with Reference to Referendum Discourse

This study is entitled "Intertextual Context in Kurdish Political Discourse, with Reference to Referendum Discourse". Intertextual context is Norman Fairclough’s perspective in critical discourse analysis which is concerned with explaining the sources of discourse production. It highlights what these sources are and where they relate to other texts. This subject is at the second level of critical discourse analysis which is known as discourse interpretation level. It is a significant part which aims at reaching the common knowledge sources of discourse participants via interpreting the intertextual context of a given discourse. The aim is to achieve a common interpretation, for, in this regard; any discourse or linguistic act is in a deep relationship with some other texts. The current study is an attempt to interpret and to a large extent identify the sources of the referendum discourse (the whole face to face speeches of Massoud Barzani, Chairman of the High Council for Referendum). This study employs the descriptive analysis method. It, first, presents Fairclough’s view on intertextual context. Then, the depicted examples of this are presented in the referendum discourse.

The Spoken and “Unspoken” Political Agenda in the Virtual Space of Russian Muslims

ABSTRACT The article is devoted to the analysis of Russian Muslims’ communications in social networks. I show a unique mode of interdependence of online and offline, which takes shape in the special context of the dominant discourse of traditional Islam and the securitization of Islamic activism. The construction of “right” and “wrong” Islam determines the special structure of media consumption of Russian Muslims and the content of the political agenda. In addition to verbalized political agendas, I describe the phenomenon of an “unspoken” political agenda hidden beyond religious messages and identified precisely only through background by actors transmitting it.