Features Of Discourse Research Articles

Речевой акт призыва как компонент англоязычного политического дискурса (на материале специального обращения Урсулы фон дер Ляйен, Давос, 2023 г.)

The aim of the research is to reveal the features of the functioning of direct, indirect and hidden appeals in English-language political discourse on the basis of the statements of the speech act theory. The scientific novelty of the study consists in disclosing the essential characteristics of different types of appeals in a socially significative political speech in English. The differentiation of direct, indirect and hidden appeals is revealed when being investigated in juridical and linguistic aspects. An appeal, inducing the addressee to perform a socially political action, is treated as part of social-political communication. This property turns appeals into an important tool that is often used in speeches by Western political leaders in order to influence the opinion and actions of the addressee. The results showed that indirect and hidden appeals are used in the studied political text, in which the illocutionary force of motivation is transmitted by formal means expressing other functional semantics. The use of indirect and hidden appeals is a feature of modern English-language political discourse, which is especially evident in the speeches of politicians calling for action against Russia.

ПОСТАТЬ МОВОЗНАВИЦІ В ОБ’ЄКТИВІ НАУКОВО-АКАДЕМІЧНОГО ДИСКУРСУ

The article presents reflections on the ideological and linguistic characteristics of the iconic figure of the collective portrait of the Ukrainian Language and Literature Department of the Sumy State Pedagogical University, named after A.S. Makarenko, in the second half of the XX - first decade of the XXI century, Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor Nataliia Pavlivna Deinychenko in the institutional, in particular, scientific and academic discourse. The scientific and teaching activity of the linguist, who worked at the Ukrainian Language Department for more than 40 years (1973-2015), is devoted to the formation of language stability, language sense and language taste of students and pupils, as well as to the development of language culture of teachers in the Sumy region. The source base is the texts of various genres of Ukrainian scientific and academic discourse of teacher-researcher of linguistic (dialectological, cultural), linguo-methodological orientation, represented in written (scientific and popular articles, abstracts, dissertation abstracts, methodological instructions, manuals) and oral (scientific communication with researchers of Ukrainian dialectology, lectures for students, speeches to students of the Sumy Branch of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, teachers of the Sumy Regional Institute of Postgraduate Pedagogical Education, the All-Ukrainian Society "Prosvita" named after Taras Shevchenko) forms, researched by means of general and specific scientific methods: analysis of scientific sources, descriptive generalisation (for general characteristics of the features of scientific and academic discourse), systematisation; biographical method - to clarify the facts of life and creative achievements, portrait method - to highlight the ideological and linguistic features of the linguistic personality of N. Deinychenko. The characteristics of scientific and academic discourse as an institutional form of communication, the functional basis of linguistic personality based on both scientific and linguistic, teaching and educational activities of the linguist are specified. The author emphasises the multidimensionality of the personality with a fine sense, understanding of the Ukrainian word, its origins, educational influence on the personality of young people and mastery of the whole complex of linguistic, communicative, moral and ethical norms of research. The scientific interests of the researcher include Ukrainian dialectology, history of the Ukrainian language, language culture, Ukrainian language teaching methods. The article pays attention to the formation of the researcher, professional on-scientific, teaching and educational activities and features of the linguistic personality: Ukraine-focused, dignity, diligence, versatile education, modesty, philosophical optimism, sense of humour, tact, professionalism, dedication, helpfulness, which corresponds to the mission of the Ukrainian-focused Department of the Pedagogical University, which is approaching its centenary. Key words: linguistic personology, linguistic personality, linguist, scientific and academic discourse, Nataliia Pavlivna Deynychenko, scientific activity, teaching activity, Ukrainian dialectology, teaching methods, culturally and linguistically diverse personality.

Measuring the linguistic similarity of discourse from open-world role-playing games to the real world through an additive multidimensional analysis

Abstract Digital games can provide rich sources of second language (L2) input; however, the extent to which gaming discourse is similar to real-world discourse has been a topic of debate in the computer-assisted language learning community. To quantitatively measure the extent to which gaming discourse shares linguistic similarity with real-world discourse, this study reports the findings of an additive multidimensional (MD) analysis comparing registers in open-world role-playing games to real-world registers using Biber’s (1988) Dimension 1: ‘Involved versus Informational Production.’ Results indicate that gaming discourse provides extensive language exposure that shares much linguistic similarity across a wide range of real-world contexts. Importantly, however, these similarities only become salient when the situational characteristics of gaming discourse are considered and parsed appropriately into register categories.

Russian culture through the prism of English, Finnish and Japanese languages: Reflections or refractions?

Thinning borders in the modern world result in intense translingual/transcultural communication. Yet, a language is originally fit to describe its own culture, while cultural reorientation requires considerable adaptation. The paper aims at researching the mechanisms of languages’ cultural reorientation as exemplified by the Japanese-, English- and Finnish-language Russia-centred discourse. The cultural reorientation of a language is seen as a mode of translation – translation of culture. Research questions are: What linguistic techniques to introduce exocultural context are preferred by the focus languages? What elements of the source culture are selected for constructing the Russia-centred discourse in the focus languages? The research is based on data in three unrelated languages. The data is organised in manually annotated corpora of culturally loaded texts of book titles. The analysis of translation techniques employed by different languages in the process of cultural reorientation revealed (a) the specificity of the strategy of translating culture as contrasted to that of traditional translation; (b) the features of the exoculture-centred discourse as affected by language-specific linguistic factors. The study of xenonyms, selected to represent the source culture, shows a considerable variation in the choice of representatives, while the types of xenonyms are largely comparable. The cross-linguistic research of Russia-centred discourse is crucial for understanding established discursive canon, which must serve as guidance for presenting and promoting Russian culture in intercultural dialogue.

Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine: Envisioning the Post-War Security Order

The article deals with the issue of security in Europe in the effect of the war between Ukraine and Russia from the point of view of Kyiv. Main features of the current security discourse in Ukraine are presented. Ukrainian initiatives in the security sphere are thoroughly analyzed. Special attention is given to Zelenskyy’s Peace Plan and Peace summit. The article discloses peculiarities of the Kyiv Security Compact, which is supposed to become the footing for the new security order in the region. The article ends with the analysis of NATO’s role in Kyiv’s vision about the post-war security order.

Literature and art as political discourse: adapting The White-Haired Girl in the communist context of China

ABSTRACT It is not only political actors but also the contexts, which make a text political discourse. This nuanced understanding turns political functions and implications into defining features of political discourse. Using the Chinese revolutionary work The White-Haired Girl as a case study, this paper argues that the constant adaptations of the work, in its various literary and artistic forms, are intrinsically political. Born out of a folktale, the work first assumed the form of literary non-fiction in 1940. Aligning with Chinese Communist Party’s evolving political agendas in the next few decades, The White-Haired Girl migrated across medial borders to take the form of a movie in the 1950s and a ballet in the 1960s. The highly ideological adaptations transformed the work into political discourse, with its life sustained not primarily by artistic merits but by political functions. The adaptation history of The White-Haired Girl reveals that intersemiotic translations of a work tend to complement their source text(s), and they also bear (intertextual) traces of their sociohistorical contexts.

Hubris occurrence, management and accountability in higher education institutions in Australia

Hubris refers to an individual's display of self-assurance, pride or excessive confidence and has been presented in the extant literature to describe the language used by hubristic leaders. Therefore, this research explores the characteristic features of hubristic discourse in higher education and its potential link to the organisation's financial outcomes. By using computational linguistics to analyse written discourse samples of 20 Australian Vice-Chancellor's Addresses in the university's annual reports for the 10-year period, this research identifies linguistic markers of Vice-Chancellor hubris (increased use of negations, discrepancy words, power and achievement-oriented language) and their link to financial outcomes. As the role of the Vice-Chancellor has been compared in literature to that of the CEO, exploring if and how hubris’ symptoms manifest in language use can contribute towards explaining agency problems, accountability issues and the ongoing ethical debate over pay for performance in higher education. This research has implications for university key stakeholders such as government bodies, for standard setters who oversee the preparation of university financial reports and those who assume leadership roles within tertiary institutions.

Integrating discourse features and response assessment for advancing empathetic dialogue

Empathetic response generation is a crucial task in natural language processing, enabling emotionally resonant machine–human interactions. In this paper, we introduce the InfRa (Integrating Discourse Features and Response Assessment) model to address limitations in traditional methods for this task, such as the lack of deep dialogue comprehension and response control. InfRa integrates discourse features to augment structural dialogue understanding, with a novel edge pruning and mutual information learning module to further refine the representation. The model also employs a response evaluation module for dynamic optimization, ensuring emotional and semantic consistency between the generated response and its context. Our experiments demonstrate that InfRa outperforms existing baselines, reducing the Perplexity (PPL) score by approximately 9 points and excelling in all three fine-grained aspects of human evaluation. This research not only advances the development of empathetic chatbots but also provides valuable insights for broader text generation tasks.

#AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets

Abstract As social media use continues to increase its presence in our lives, so does the language of such platforms. One of the most salient features of social media discourse is the hashtag. Starting its life on Twitter (X) about 15 years ago, the hashtag has seeped from online to offline communication. Yet, it is not clear whether hashtags are words, tags, or something else altogether, nor is it clear what morphological process gives rise to them. This study presents an extensive analysis of 3,423 hashtags from 1,216 English-language tweets, each manually coded for various linguistics features, including position in the tweet, grammatical function, and syntactic integration. Our findings suggest that hashtags are extremely varied and we propose that they are indeed words, arising through a process of hashtagging (which is distinct from compounding). We also argue that some hashtags are syntactically integrated while others constitute parenthetical material.

IMPOLITENESS IN ONLINE DISCOURSE: ANALYSIS OF READER COMMENTS ON SERBIAN NEWS SITE

Online discourse represents an important part of human communication. When ex- pressing their opinions in an online environment, people are empowered to be more direct, often without considering other people’s face. In certain situations, they may even be offensive or impolite. The focus of this study is the manifestation of impoliteness in reader comments on Serbian news sites. The study adopts Bousfield’s (2008) extended framework of Culpeper’s model of impoliteness strategies (1996, 2005) in order to examine and classify different manifestations of impoliteness. It relies on the analysis of a small specialized corpus which consists of the data collected from reader comments on Serbian online news articles related to Novak Đoković being denied entry into Australia in January 2022 due to the men’s number one tennis player not being vaccinated, which was one of the most vigorously debated topics in both mass media and social media in Serbia amid the coronavirus pandemic. The data were analyzed qualitatively. This study reflects how Serbian language users engage in impolite communicative behavior by identifying the most common impoliteness strategies, as well as their functions, and indicating distinctive features of Serbian impolite online discourse.

Process-Genre Approach: Iranian EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing as an Example

Comparing the effect of implementing process versus process-genre approach on Iranian EFL students’ argumentative writing was the primary aim of the study. Three discourse features were selected for analysis (i.e., organizationpattern, coherence, and cohesion). In a quasi-experimental design, ninety-two EFL learners (from a subject pool of 117) were selected based on the BABEL test at upper-intermediate level in the age range of 18-36. The chosen participants were randomly allocated to an experimental group (N = 47) given process-genre approach instruction and a control group (N = 45) that was instructed utilizing the process approach. Then, two post-tests were taken: one right away and the other later. The results showed that the distinction between the two groups regarding three discourse features was statistically significant and the effects of process-genre approach retained in delayed post-test. The findings suggested that the integration of genre with writing processes can enhance Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing. The pedagogical implications of the study are also discussed. Keywords: Argumentative Writing, Coherence, Cohesive devices, Organization patterns, Process-Genre Approach.

Debating the Vulnerability Zeitgeist: Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Trialogue

The article serves as an introduction to the special section “Vulnerability: An Interdisciplinary Trialogue,” which brings together three researchers who have made important contributions to the field of vulnerability studies from different perspectives and in different disciplines: Elodie Boublil, Kate Brown, and Erinn Gilson. At the outset, the article discusses some characteristic features of the current discourse on vulnerability, in particular the question of why the concept of vulnerability is not only very popular but is also often used in such a diverse and vague manner. In addition to an increased multidisciplinary interest, transdisciplinary conflicts over fundamental epistemological, ontological, and methodological positions are identified as an essential factor; furthermore, the plurality and vagueness of the notion are attributed to an increasing “duplication” of vulnerability as an academic concept on the one hand and as an element of cultural semantics and political discourse on the other. The special section discusses this peculiar mixture of popularity, plurality, and vagueness of the vulnerability concept in an interdisciplinary, reflexive, and critical manner. The introduction outlines key aspects of the three contributions to the trialogue and highlights some convergences and common themes. At the end, the three authors are also briefly introduced.

Representations of the Native Space in Alexandru Popescu's Novels

The article investigates the way in which the native space is artistically represented in the novels Montana (2022) and Adâncuri incolore (2023) by Alexandru Popescu. Starting from the fact that, in these two works, the native space (the Transnistrian area (Bender) and the Bessarabian village named Molda) is illustrated in contrast to the idyllic images proposed by the Bessarabian prose of other periods (I. Druță, Vl. Beșleagă etc.), being a dystopia, a space of identity mutilation, crises and human degradation, the article highlights both the distinctive features of the epic discourse and the artistic ways of reflecting human destiny in a negative chronotope.

Reporting cybersecurity to stakeholders: A review of CSRD and the EU cyber legal framework

The purpose of this article is to explain, through a doctrinal review of the EU sustainability and cybersecurity legal framework, how the cybersecurity obligations contribute to the cybersecurity content and quality of the sustainability reporting. Previous studies are limited to voluntary cybersecurity disclosure in annual reports because they date back to before the adoption of CSRD. The CSRD harmonized sustainability reporting in the EU and introduced the ESRS, the standards for sustainability disclosure. As stated in the ESRS S4, the sustainability reporting should now address how the company manages the risks linked to data usage and data collection. Therefore, cybersecurity measures must be included in the sustainability report. This information can be used by stakeholders to assess the risk appetite and the potential long-term profitability of the company. The cybersecurity measures adopted by companies must comply with the cybersecurity obligations of the EU legal framework. While it is out of the scope of these cybersecurity obligations to inform ex ante the stakeholders of a company of how the company is managing cyber risks, these same obligations can improve the quality and content of the sustainability discourse.

The main features of English academic and professional medical discourses

The main features of English academic and professional medical discourses

Painting the Nation in its Native Colours: John Leland’s Antiquarian Projects in the Context of Imperial and National Building of England, 1530–1540

In this article, the author concentrates on the intellectual projects of John Leland (1503–1552), the first antiquarian of early modern England. The origins of a certain tradition of English antiquarian historiography are connected with the name of this poet and polemicist. Today, researchers see heuristic potential in studying the political and socio-cultural foundations that led to the emergence of antiquarian discourse in the first half of the sixteenth century. The aim of the article is to define the role of John Leland’s intellectual thought within two interrelated and most relevant processes for his time, namely the imperial and nation-building of England during Henry VIII’s reign. In order to achieve his research goal, the author, firstly, identifies the peculiarities of the genesis of the imperial idea in the Middle Ages and its transformation during the reign of Henry VIII; secondly, analyses Leland’s creative projects aimed at legitimising the Tudor dynastic rights to “recreate” the ancient composite monarchy of the British Isles; thirdly, drawing on the Swiss historian Caspar Hirschi’s theory of pre-modern nationalism, identifies the characteristics of the proto-national discourse and the signs of the participation of the English antiquarian in it. The article is based on an analysis of John Leland’s “New Year’s Gift”, a letter in which the sender informs the monarch of his plans to produce a series of works on the history and geography of Britain. The study shows that the envisaged projects were aimed not only at creating an image of the Tudor empire fulfilling dynastic political ambitions, but also at consistently glorifying the “British” collective subject.

Conversion to Judaism and Hostility toward Jews in the Roman Empire

Abstract Hellenistic texts on Jews hardly ever refer to people converting to Judaism. Roman authors’ criticism and condemnation of people who had converted to Judaism thus appears as a new feature of anti-Jewish discourse. The relative prominence of references to Judaizers and converts in Roman literary texts may be explained by the number and visibility of proselytes in Rome, but also perhaps by the perception, within certain Roman circles, of conversion to Judaism as a betrayal of Roman values. Tacitus best illustrates this trend. This article seeks to shed light on his hostile remarks on converts through a comparison with Philo’s highly positive comments on proselytes. The comparison reveals surprising points of agreement between the two authors and helps us understand what was at stake in the phenomenon of conversion and how it could generate tensions between proselytes and their native environment.

A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese and American News Coverage on Climate Change

As the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) convened, the climate issue remained a focal point of coverage in both Chinese and American mainstream media. This paper seeks to explore the linguistic features of news discourse of climate change in China and the United States and the discursive strategy applied to strengthen national ideologies. Taking the reports on climate change in China Daily and Los Angeles Times within 2 months after COP27 as the research corpus, this paper examines the language features, the discursive processes of the text and possible social factors through a combination of corpus linguistics(CL) and critical discourse analysis(CDA) under the framework of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse. The finding suggests that both countries enhance national ideologies by constructing a responsible national image through objective climate reporting. Chinese media tends to focus on national efforts to improve ecological environment and global cooperation, while US newspaper attaches importance to climate security and pursues a leading position in global ecological governance.

Coherence and comprehensibility in second language speakers’ academic speaking performance

AbstractThis study examined the role of discourse organization in second language (L2) comprehensibility ratings. Twelve English for Academic Purposes teachers listened to 60 L2 speech samples elicited through a TOEFL–type integrated speaking task, evaluating each sample for comprehensibility and coherence (perceived interconnectedness of ideas). The samples were analyzed for the occurrence of discourse features at micro and macro levels. Results revealed a strong association between coherence and comprehensibility (r = .70). Whereas L2 speakers’ use of additive connectives (e.g., and) uniquely predicted comprehensibility, ordering of ideas and source–speech similarity in speakers’ performances predicted coherence. Lexical overlaps predicted both constructs. Findings underscore the importance of coherence to comprehensible academic L2 speech demonstrating that the two constructs include partially overlapping yet distinct characteristics.

Emotionalized Social Media Environments: How Alternative News Media and Populist Actors Drive Angry Reactions

ABSTRACT This study employs a comparative analytical framework to enhance our understanding of the conducive opportunity structures that foster emotionally charged political discourse. We examined 175,539 Facebook posts characterized by variations in content (in terms of themes and populist rhetoric), authorship (including populist politicians, traditional news, and alternative media), and geographic context (Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, UK, US). We then analyzed 360,000 emotional responses from Facebook users to determine which posts create the most conducive conditions for eliciting angry emotions. Our key findings show that posts from alternative and hyperpartisan media, as well as those from populist politicians and parties, tend to elicit elevated levels of angry reactions. These posts often use anti-elitist and exclusionary language. This finding has significant implications, as the anger generated by such accounts can propagate incivility and polarization and facilitate the spread of ideologically driven misinformation. A particular case is Donald Trump, who, as a populist governing figure, manages to elicit positive emotions, including “love,” despite delivering seemingly antagonistic messages. To strengthen the robustness of our findings, we conducted a replication analysis with 67,620 Facebook posts from three of the six countries and examined two different time periods. This analysis confirmed the persistence of our findings over time. Our opportunity-structure framework offers valuable insights for designing targeted strategies to improve the quality of public discourse and promote informed and constructive political engagement in diverse societies.