Discursive Phenomena Research Articles

What does data literacy means for you (as an educator)nowadays?

Despite progress in data literacy frameworks associated with a critical discussion of datafication, educators are still perplexed when it comes to working with these issues in their everyday teaching practice. In part, this is due to the complexity of the data infrastructures that permeate educational practice itself. In this context, it seems particularly appropriate to understand the discursive phenomena, the construction of professional practise and therefore the educators’ positionings around the issues of datafication in general, and the development of critical data literacy, namely, “postdigital positinings”.
 This paper proposes a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of the professional experiences of the three authors, as educators.
 As women with complex migrant identities, with roots in the Global South and at the same time, bearers of European métisages, our pathways meet at the crossover of an international project in which we develop materials and design educational activities. Our history lies on an intersectional basis that allows us to express rich positionalities, full of examples and resources that can be resounding notes for the construction of agentic educational practices in this field of post-digital forces.

Multilingual writing in a marketised university: a critical multimodal study of student service advertisements

ABSTRACT The global marketisation of higher education has been evidenced by a wide range of discursive phenomena. This article examines how several sets of student service advertisements in a Hong Kong university employ multilingual writing to promote tailored services and experiences to different groups of student ‘consumers’. It draws on approaches from critical discourse studies, multimodality and research on language and the market to unpack and critique the semiotic and discursive mechanisms through which several deliberately designed multilingual texts help the advertisements pursue specific marketing goals. The analyses show that the examined multilingual writing practices (help) promote consumerist and hierarchical ideological approaches to multilingualism and multiculturalism in a higher education institution under the continuing influences of its Western colonial history and a globalised, Asian neoliberal knowledge economy.

Apresentação

This is another issue of the magazine Ágora Filosóficafica. It is composed of nine articles, whose subjects concern issues that underlie and underpin ethical, political and humanist values. In the first article, entitled "Dialogue and dialogism", we find a particularly productive theoretical focus on discourse analysis, which seeks to demonstrate that, in the context of dialogic studies, everyday dialogue not only has a prominent position as a classic form of linguistic activity, but also plays the role of a matrix that generates fundamental analogies for conducting the analysis of discursive phenomena, the formulation of theoretical propositions and the establishment of specific terminology...

КОГНІТИВНА МЕТАФОРА ЖИТТЯ/СМЕРТЬ КРІЗЬ ПРИЗМУ МОВНОЇ КАРТИНИ СВІТУ ВАСИЛЯ ШКЛЯРА

The anthropocentric approach to studying of language and speech causes linguists’ turn to literary discourse, since at the present stage of linguistic science development, it is relevant, in our opinion, there are researches of discursive phenomena, verbal conceptual models and their infl uence on the functioning of language units. This is manifested in the fact that the study of metaphorical mod-els in the cognitive and discursive structure is of particular interest. Attention to the problem of metaphor, certain aspects of its studying, is pri-marily due to the complexity of the speech phenomenon, the desire of linguists to fi nd hidden mechanisms that control the metaphorical process, the laws of its existence. In the system of linguistic structures, metaphor is considered as a dynamic linguistic phenomenon, which is characterized by such concepts as dis-course, dialogical discourse in cognitive-discursive, systemic-active and func-tional-communicative approaches, which is based on a dual orientation towards the author, the creator, who is considered as a universal language personality, and on the society represented by the addressee, the reader.Such an approach to the study of metaphor based on the formation of a com-municative-discursive paradigm indicates the need for theoretical and practical study of metaphor in a cognitive-discursive context aimed at substantiating the implementation of the language system taking into account lingual and extralin-gual factors. This is the relevance of scientifi c research, the purpose of which is to investigate the cognitive counter-metaphor LIFE / DEATH in the discursive dialogic structures of Vasyl Shkliar’s text «Zalyshents. Chornyi Voron». The study of cognitive metaphor makes it possible to make generalizations about the functioning tendencies of ideas about life and death, the embodiment of the ethnic uniqueness of world perception and the conceptual presentation of the analyzed metaphor through the prism of archetypal manifestations. The interpretation of LIFE / DEATH as a natural phenomenon is motivated by human empirical experience.In the Ukrainian picture of the world, the researched metaphors have a strong connection with archetypes, which is explained by paganism, the tradi-tions of which are deeply rooted in the Ukrainian linguistic consciousness. Prospective directions for further research should include revealing and de-termining the scope and content of the cognitive metaphor LIFE / DEATH in other works of this author.

Emotion in Informal Learning as Mediated Action: Cultural, Interpersonal and Personal Lenses

Emotion and affect are important but undertheorized and under researched elements of learning in informal contexts such as science centers, museums, zoos, and aquariums. An interactional and discursive approach to emotions as mediated action was used to develop a three-part framework for documenting and exploring the place of emotional expression among family groups (n = 10 groups; 33 individuals) visiting an ocean exhibit in an interactive science museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Among our results, we observed that the most commonly expressed emotion was surprise, excitement, amusement and curiosity; the most frequently occurring categories of emotional expression among the families in interaction were those associated with being actively engaged in positive emotional interaction. Transcripts of interaction are presented to illustrate the framework and examined in light of emotional expression as a mediator of 1) active, collaborative, meaning making; 2) learner agency and protagonism; and 3) empathy. Results from the entire data set are interpreted using the Core Affect Model of Engagement. We present examples of and discuss how and why a mediated action approach to emotion as a social, distributed, interactional and discursive phenomena may be helpful both for advancing the study of emotion as an aspect of informal learning and exhibit design.

Epistemically exploitative bullshit: A Sartrean account.

This paper presents a novel conceptualization of a type of untruthful speech that is of eminent political relevance but has hitherto been unrecognized: epistemically exploitative bullshit (EEB). Speakers engaging in EEB are bullshitting: they deceive their addressee regarding their unconcern for the very difference between truth and falsity. At the same time, they exploit their discursive victims: they oblige their counterparts to perform unacknowledged and emotionally draining epistemic work to educate the speakers about the addressees' oppression, only to discredit their epistemic trustworthiness. I argue that EEB is irreducible to various recently discussed untruthful speech, and in particular to Frankfurtian bullshit, as well as to epistemic exploitation or other epistemic injustices. Taking inspiration from Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitic discourse, where bullshitting and epistemic exploitation are essentially interlinked, I instead suggest that recognizing the distinctiveness of EEB allows for a more refined conceptualization of these discursive phenomena. Specifically, I show how bad faith and the ensuing collective diffusion and delegation of epistemic responsibility play a so far neglected but key role here. I ultimately demonstrate that with Sartre's help, we can grasp how the existential, interpersonal and institutional dimensions involved in the negotiation of truth seamlessly intersect better than we would with the lens of analytic or critical epistemology alone.

Mechanism of Theme-Formation in a Text as it was Represented by Boris Tomashevsky and Georgij Shengeli (Based on the Works of 1925)

In the mid-1930s, linguists began to spot problems, which cannot be solved without analysis of textual and discursive phenomena. Up to that moment some of such problems have been already pointed out and considered in the adjacent fields of Humanitarian theory and practice. The article deals with one of such anticipations made simultaneously by prominent Russian theorists Boris Tomashevsky and Georgij Shengeli in their studies of literary composition. They discovered that theme-formation in a text is based on the unity of meanings in neighboring sentences (Tomashevsky) or on semantic interaction of consecutive utterances (Shengeli).

О разграничении коммуникативных практик медиации и перевода

The article is devoted to the discursive phenomenon of mediation, which is often identified with the phenomena of linguistic, cultural and intercultural mediation. The author shows that the social communicative practice of mediation is a special type of communicative interaction. The author distinguishes between the terms "mediation" and "translation" and defines the essential characteristics of two different discursive phenomena based on the comparison parameters traditionally used to compare mediation and court. The article considers the differences between the two communicative practices on the following grounds: free / non-free choice of mediator; the purpose of mediated communication; the mediator's role in communication; the possibility/impossibility of terminating negotiations; confidentiality of communication; the duration of communicative interaction; the language of communication; the removal of psychological tension in communication. As a result of the analysis, it turns out that the coincidence of the parameters of mediation and translation is possible only in an interlingual situation of conflict dialogue.

A discursive study of the reception of Lacanian ideas and their relation to Kleinianism (Uruguay, 1955–1982)

ABSTRACT This research addresses the initial reception of Lacanian ideas in Uruguayan psychoanalysis. Lacanian ideas arrived in Uruguay in the 1960s in a context in which Kleinian thought prevailed. This paper studies the relation between Kleinianism and Lacanianism by analyzing discursive phenomena. The corpus used for this study was built from a variety of sources: theoretical-doctrinal papers, clinical cases, media publications, seminars transcripts, and institutional documents. The discursive materials presented here show the different controversies, crossroads, compromises, and demarcations that characterized the reception of Lacanian ideas in a context of Kleinian predominance.

Referentiality of event in postmodern fictional discourse: pragmatics and semantics

The article is devoted to the study of postmodern fictional discourse referentialism in terms of pragmatics and semantics. Postmodern fictional discourse eliminates the oppositions of different narrative perspectives, which entails a non-distinction of the author’s narrative and the characters’ speech. The relevance of the article arises from the need to identify the communicative parameters of the creator of fictional discourse and its recipient from the standpoint of the cognitive and discursive linguistic paradigm, but it should be noted that both sides of fictional communication are free in the choice and interpretation of language elements outside the fixed conventional meanings. This feature of fictional discourse results in a set of conventions adopted by both sides of aesthetic communication. Metaphorically polysemantic images, which conflict with the definitions of formal logic and affirm the variability of the world and consciousness, are characteristic of postmodern fictional discourse. Pastiche, irony, collage, allusions, citations, direct derivations have significant pragmatic potential. The aim of the article is to identify and describe the pragmatic and semantic features of structuring the referentiality of an event in postmodern fictional discourse on the material of Sasha Sokolov’s novel “School for Fools”. The semantic space of the novel creates the dialogicity of the characters’ consciousness, pragmatically marked by dialogization of speech, which emphasizes the recipient’s attention to the imaginary event. The text fragments become independent discursive phenomena, thus contributing to the perception of the novel as a complex of macrocontexts. Markers of narrative polyphony, as well as intertextuality and precedent phenomena serve as pragmatic markers of the special referentiality of an event in S. Sokolov’s novel.

English immigration discourse in the scientific paradigm of critical research: review of the monograph by M.S. Matytsina

The reviewed work is the monograph written by M.S. Matytsina, the Associate Professor of Foreign Languages Department, Lipetsk State Technical University. In the book the author describes the development trends of the English immigration discourse in the scientific paradigm of critical research. The author focuses on establishing the relationship between discourse and society, and the connecting link in this interaction is cognitive structures, which are a subjective mental construct of participants in the communicative situation. The aim of the study is to analyze and systematize the existing knowledge about the problem of immigration in dynamically developing societies of Great Britain and the USA, assess the state of development of language processes that occur as a result of observed trends, and also identify the place and role of the language content of the discourse in social relations building. The study broadens and deepens the existing knowledge about various techniques of modern political rhetoric and discursive phenomena. The monograph is addressed to specialists in the field of discursive analysis, language theory, political linguistics, doctoral students, graduate students, applicants, teachers and students of institutes and departments of foreign languages.

De la créativité lexicale à l’hybridité générique et vocale: une analyse stylistique de Le-fils-de-lafemme-mâle de Maurice Bandaman

Stylistics is a science born from the works of Charles Bally at the start of the 20th century. It centers on literary texts. To decipher them, stylistics focuses on methods and concepts from the language sciences. It is therefore effective in bringing to light the various subtleties of the African novel which continues to regenerate from the resources of African language and linguistic heritage. This regeneration results in an Africanization of the writing language. It follows that re-lexicalization is at the heart of verbal praxis. It is materialized by the embedding of oral ethno-texts in the novel. This creativity is a form of discursive subversion which is characterized by a polyphonic and transgeneric aesthetics. Le-fils-de-la-femme-mâle by Maurice Bandaman conforms to this standard. The typographical configuration shows that the enunciative foundations of the work rests on the structure of the traditional African tale. As a result, the novel resists the norms of traditional storytelling. Furthermore, the insertion of the African tale into the structure of the novel is not based on any stable rule. The discourse is based on an intertextual practice that upsets the architectonics of the classic novel. It breaks with the canon and imposes another reception modality which provides obvious enjoyment to the reader. This work highlights all of the enunciative, linguistic and discursive phenomena that contribute to the authenticity of this work.

The Typology and Social Pragmatics of Interlocutor Reference Across Asian Speech Communities

The study of honorific pronouns largely grew out of work on European languages (Brown and Gilman 1960; Friedrich 1966; Paulston 1976; Slobin 1963) and has developed into a prodigious, and in many ways, fertile literature on so-called ‘address systems’ (Brown & Ford 1961; Braun 1988). Nevertheless, some 60 years after the publication of Brown and Gilman’s (1960) foundational essay, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity,” it is perhaps time to imagine how the same discursive phenomena would have been framed with a different empirical point of departure. Here we reconceptualize this domain by focusing on the social pragmatics of speaker- and addressee-reference in Southeast Asian, as well as some East Asian, languages. Reimagined from this vantage point, pronominal address emerges as but one half of a more encompassing domain – the social pragmatics of interlocutor reference. Southeast Asian languages provide speakers with a much wider range of formal resources and functional mechanisms for signaling the relationship between speech act participants (and between these participants and third parties) than do European languages. Formally, Southeast Asian languages are notable for the range of non-pronominal, open-class nouns which can be employed in speaker- and addressee-reference. Functionally, the social indexing of the relationship between speaker and addressee is not only grammaticalized in forms that are employed to refer to the addressee. On the contrary, these languages are notable for elaborating social pragmatic distinctions in speaker-reference as well as addressee-reference. Because Southeast Asian languages recruit a much more expansive range of forms in denoting speech act participants, and because they are not functionally restricted to addressee-reference in activating social pragmatic alternations, they offer the kind of maximally differentiated systems which enable the construction of typological generalizations and implicational universals.

A violência da palavra em ausência no processo discursivo de representação das mulheres: uma análise do Projeto de Lei n. 01-00352/2019

A partir do campo epistemológico do Círculo de Bakhtin, Medviédev e Volóchinov – CBMV, doravante –, em diálogo com aspectos da filosofia foucaultiana, almejamos, aqui, estabelecer uma análise dos processos discursivos de representação das mulheres no Projeto de Lei n. 01-00352/2019 da Câmara Municipal de São Paulo, pelo qual se instauram atos simbólicos de violência contra a autonomia e contra o corpo da figura feminina, à qual, consequentemente, não se concede margem para representar-se pela sua própria voz. Para realizá-lo, nos fundaremos, preferencialmente, nos conceitos de palavra em ausência, de enunciado, de arquitetônica, de dialogismo, de gnosiologismo e de monologismo de Mikhail Bakhtin (2010, 2011, 2017, 2019), articulando-nos, quando necessário, no interior dos domínios filosóficos de Michel Foucault (1999, 2002) para, assim, compreender certas faces dos fenômenos discursivos.

Factors Influencing Quality of Team Discussion: Discourse Analysis in an Undergraduate Team-Based Learning Biology Course.

Group activities as part of active-learning pedagogies are thought to be effective in promoting student learning in part because of the quality of discussion they engender in student teams. Not much is known, however, about which instructional factors are most important in achieving productive conversation or how these factors may differ among different collaborative pedagogies. We explored what provokes meaningful group discussions in a university physiology course taught using team-based learning (TBL). We were most interested in discussions that evoke explanations that go beyond statements of basic facts and into disciplinary reasoning. Using transcribed conversations of four randomly selected teams three times throughout the semester, we analyzed three distinct discursive phenomena—conceptual explanations, re-evaluations, and co-construction—that occurred in productive conversations. In this paper, we provide examples from student discussions showing the role of each of these elements in moving students toward conceptual understanding. These phenomena were more likely to occur in response to higher-order questions in Bloom’s taxonomy. Preclass preparation and student accountability as part of TBL may be important factors in this finding. We share implications for practice based on our results.

Discourse as a language contact phenomenon: evidence from Mexican-American bilinguals

This article is the result of a study conducted within the theoretical framework of ethnography of communication. One of the main purposes of this study was to examine discourse strategies among Mexican-American bilinguals residing in the Los Angeles area. The examination of strategies used in oral and written conversations demonstrates the existence of numerous stylistic features. Mexican-American bilingual discourse is characterized by the use of code-switching, culturally-motivated borrowings from English and, in general, the dominance of the English language in conversation. Undoubtedly, these discursive phenomena stem from socioeconomic and cultural forces and the prestige of English as the dominant linguistic system of the American society.

A Methodological Framework for Organizational Discourse Activism: an Ethics of Dispositif and Dialogue

In the article, we elaborate an interdisciplinary methodological framework that enables us to study and prepare the grounds for the development of organizational practices through discourse perspectives. The framework differs from mainstream monological and complexity reducing tendencies within organizational studies in that it argues for an approach that takes in historical, broad, and situational power relations and discourses into consideration when we engage in ethical organizational development. We place the framework within organizational discourse studies (ODS) and discuss how the intersection of Bakhtinian and Foucauldian ideas and concepts, as well as their diverse analytical strategies and focuses, contributes to the field. The combination entails taking a dissensus approach to organizational discursive phenomena that we view as dynamic features that are historically and locally (re)created through battles of unifying (centripetal) and diversifying (centrifugal) force relations. Following similar ideas of Deleuze and Bakhtin, we argue that dialogue and every (organizational) situation is seen as a plurivocal, open-ended, and unique time-space in which subjects have agency to change and transform the power relations and lines of subjectification that they are embedded in. We arrive at a methodological framework that bridges the gulf that often exists between discourse perspectives that tend to either focus on situated or more abstract and historical discursive dimensions. Furthermore, the frame involves an ethics of dispositif and dialogue that insists that organizational discourse scholars engage in organizational discourse activism furthering local change processes.

The Language of Robots: The quest for a human essence and the re-invention of ethics

The present essay aims at investigating the elements and characteristics of robotic discourse within the context of a broader moral question about the nature of the relationship between humans and humanoids in the possible event of their future coexistence in society. Specifically, the data drawn consist of a Q&A session with Sophia the Robot, manufactured by Hanson Robotics, and are analysed in such a way in order for the sameness of the two ‘species’, humans and humanoids, to be highlighted. By locating certain discursive phenomena in Sophia’s discourse and fleshing out the underlying cognitive mechanisms that these phenomena presuppose when observed in humans, the sameness between humans and humanoids is illuminated as constructed in the intersubjective level of their linguistic interaction. The perplexed condition facing humans of simultaneously knowing and forgetting the otherness of their fellow humanoids allows for crucial ethical questions to be raised.

Theoretical Perspectives of Discursive Phenomena: DA and Ethnomethodologically DA

The aims of this paper try to discuss and present various theoretical perspectives of discursive phenomena, in specific the different research techniques widely known as, as well as the theories. Having presented the main assumptions of the approach the paper, then discusses and analyze discursive interactions’ phenomena, technologically mediated interaction or face-to-face. By concentrating on the pragmatic aspects of discourse, an ethnomethodologically approach of Discourse Analysis (DA), this paper may contribute important ideas and information in media interaction studies.

État civil: Michelle Grangaud on Language Unrest

While Oulipian writing has generally been regarded as divorced from the militant causes espoused by twentieth-century avant-gardes, Michelle Grangaud’s work foments with politically conscious forms. One of the few women members of the group, she made anagrammatic composition the fulcrum of her procedural poetics, a close-up scrutiny of embodied and discursive phenomena. État Civil: Inventaires (1998) is exemplary for prying open the discourse of power (the registry of vital statistics), reclaiming its language, and releasing the potentiality of the inventory (an Oulipian topos amply explored by Georges Perec) as form. Taking hold of the categories used to index each resident (birth, marital status, and death), Grangaud’s text deploys a repertoire of tactics such as the anagram, serial disposition, and disfluency to unravel the matrix of life events and displace them alternatively onto social and linguistic relations. This essay focuses on understanding the use of Situationist détournement in Grangaud’s writing, not in the manner of memorial restitution—as Alison James has shown in her study of Perec’s infra-ordinary—but rather, as a means of contesting the power differentials that maintain the social order and its emphasis on private property, the patronym, and the law.