Everyday Discussions Research Articles

Kielivalinnat ja kielenvaihtaminen ensikielisten ja ei-ensikielisten suomenpuhujien keskusteluissa – Kyselytutkimus

Immigration into Finland has increased in recent years. Learning Finnish is essential for integrating into Finnish society. We investigated L1 Finnish speakers’ language choices and language switching in everyday conversations with L2 Finnish speakers, and their reasoning for these choices. The data were gathered in an online survey with 358 respondents. The majority of L1 Finnish speakers reported starting conversations with L2 Finnish speakers in Finnish. However, 95% of respondents also reported switching the language of the conversation to English. The reported reasons were efficiency, speed, politeness and the desire to help. Most respondents also assumed that L2 Finnish speakers would react positively to the language switch. The results outline the need for mutual agreement on language choice and switching in everyday discussions. L1 Finnish speakers should understand the importance of offering possibilities to speak Finnish speakers should understand the importance of offering possibilities to speak Finnish to facilitate language learning and to ensure equality in discussions and aid participation in Finnish society.

MECOS: A bilingual Manipuri–English spontaneous code-switching speech corpus for automatic speech recognition

In this study, we introduce a new code-switched speech database with 57h of Manipuri–English annotated spontaneous speech. Manipuri is an official language of India and is primarily spoken in the north–eastern Indian state of Manipur. Most Manipur native speakers today are bilingual and frequently use code switching in everyday discussions. By carefully assessing the amount of code-switched speech in each video, recordings from YouTube are gathered. 21,339 utterances and 291,731 instances of code switching are present in the database. Given the code-switching nature of the data, a proper annotation procedure is used, and the data are manually annotated using the Meitei Mayek unicode font and the roman alphabets for Manipuri and English, respectively. The transcription includes the information of the speakers, non-speech information, and the corresponding annotation. The aim of this research is to construct an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system as well as offer a thorough analysis and details of the speech corpus. We believe that our research is the first to use an ASR system for Manipuri–English code-switched speech. To evaluate the performance, ASR systems based on hybrid deep neural network and hidden Markov model (DNN–HMM), time delay neural network (TDNN), hybrid time delay neural network and long short-term memory (TDNN–LSTM) and three end-to-end (E2E) models i.e. hybrid connectionist temporal classification and attention model (CTC-Attention), Conformer, wav2vec XLSR are developed for Manipuri–English language. In comparison to other models, pure TDNN produces outcomes that are clearly superior.

Leveraging a Sturdy Norm: How Ethicists Really Argue

Abstract Rarely do everyday discussions of ethical issues invoke ethical theories. Even ethicists deploy ethical theories less frequently than one might expect. In my experience, the most powerful ethical arguments rarely appeal to an ethical theory. How is this possible? I contend that ethical argumentation can proceed successfully without invoking any ethical theory because the structure of good ethical argumentation involves leveraging a sturdy norm, where the norm is usually far more specific than a complete ethical theory. To illustrate this idea, I present the argumentative structure of five powerful articles in the ethics literature. I further argue that the present model of ethical argumentation is consistent with the coherence model of ethical justification, but the former need not--and usually should not--invoke the latter explicitly for various practical reasons.

“This is Part of Everything that is Wrong with the World” – A Comparative Analysis of Sustainability Framing in Social Media Discussions About Food in Five Countries

ABSTRACT Current western food systems are attested to be clearly unsustainable – but are people aware of this in their everyday life as they deal with the food offerings of their preferred supermarkets? To discover which links people actually make between the ecological, economical, and social impacts of the food systems and their personal food choices, our comparative, qualitative content analysis looks at everyday discussions on Facebook pages of supermarket chains in Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa (n = 1.775 comments). Our findings reveal that the term “sustainability” is never explicitly mentioned. Yet, people in UK and Germany, which rank high on the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), do link food closely to a number of very concrete sustainability issues (e.g. CO2-emissions, biodiversity, plastic waste) and intra-generational justice (e.g. fair wages). They discuss a broad variety of problems, even though these discussions do not get political (e.g. promoting political activism, petitions, or buycotts). In the samples from Canada and the US, countries which rate lower on the Environmental Performance Index, sustainability issues and food get rarely linked. The findings indicate that higher ambitions in sustainable development on a policy level go hand in hand with higher awareness in everyday life discussions.

Brexit як ключове слово британського політичного дискурсу

This case study examines the neologism Brexit, defined in OED as "the (proposed) withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union and political processes associated with it." Coined in May 2012, this word quickly gained media currency in the United Kingdom and abroad. The political coinage has become an internationalism, i.e., it has achieved global recognition and entered other languages in its original meaning and form. After an unprecedented surge in use (by astronomical 3 400%), Brexit was declared the 2016 word of the year by Collins Dictionary and gained entry to the Oxford English Dictionary. This study explores the word's characteristics and use in the media. The data were collected from British internet magazines and newspapers and the NOW corpus (News on the Web) for the time period from May 2012 to January 2023. The study argues that the word Brexit has the following features of a keyword: social significance, high frequency, wide use in various contexts, occurrence in strong media positions, metaphorical creativity, and neological productivity. Brexit appears on magazine covers, newspaper front pages, and in headlines. Reflecting heated debates on the British exit from the EU, the word has acquired new and controversial meanings and become a rich source of word formation, thus giving rise to numerous neologisms collectively referred to as Brexit glossary or Brexicon. This glossary of Brexit terms includes "old" English words and expressions that have acquired new meanings and political terms used in everyday discussions about Brexit. The most significant contribution of the word Brexit to present-day English is the new productive suffix -exit that, transcending the boundaries of political discourse, has come into use in various other domains.

ТРУДНОВОСПИТУЕМЫЙ ПОДРОСТОК И СОЦИАЛЬНЫЕ СЕТИ: «ГАЗЕТА ДЛЯ СВОИХ» (Культурологическое исследование в лингвистическом аспекте)

It often happens that a community of regular respondents on certain forums is formed in social networks. Visitors, usually referred to as persons with deviant behavior in educational institutions, often settle in such anonymous communities. They are attracted in electronic communication by the opportunity to correspond with an opponent (often with everyone at once), without restraining their emotions, and to use rude words and expressions, up to the most extreme. It is especially difficult, almost impossible, to draw such an interlocutor out and to frankly talk about anything, be it sports, politics, education, or any other topic of everyday discussions. A person (let's call him a subject) only pretends to be interested in a particular topic, but his real purpose is to get involved in a conversation, briefly, quickly and roughly covering as many respondents as possible with an answer. Thus, he constantly brightens up his loneliness. As a rule, the respondent of this type does not linger on any one interlocutor: his method is “self-affirmation by mass character”. However, we managed, with the help of patient explanatory work, to continue correspondence with “I.G.” until the moment of full understanding of the young man's inability to have a healthy discussion: the source of swear words has dried up, and the subject simply did not maintain other types of communication. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly is worldly-wise: he tries not to discuss those areas in which rude judgments can be fraught with prosecution, in general, he avoids reporting at least some data about himself, hiding behind rudeness and swearing the fear of giving them away accidentally. But people who have been visiting the same social media pages for years, against their desire, give indirect hints about their personality and their lifestyle. Actually, the study is about the fact that, despite the respondent's desire (unwillingness), his language (spontaneous speech presented in the form of an electronic text) can tell a lot.

Understanding the underestimated: Occurrence, distribution, and interactions of microplastics in the sediment and soil of China, India, and Japan

Microplastics (MPs) are non-biodegradable substances that can sustain our environment for up to a century. What is more worrying is the incapability of modern technologies to annihilate MPs from om environment. One ramification of MPs is their impact on every kind of life form on this planet, which has been discussed ahead; that is why these substances are surfacing in everyday discussions of scholars and researchers. This paper discusses the overview of the global occurrence, abundance, analysis, and remediation techniques of MPs in the environment. This paper primarily reviews the event and abundance of MPs in coastal sediments and agricultural soil of three major Asian countries, India, China, and Japan. A significant concentration of MPs has been recorded from these countries, which affirms its strong presence and subsequent environmental impacts. Concentrations such as 73,100 MPs/kg in Indian coastal sediments and 42,960 particles/kg in the agricultural soil of China is a solid testimony to prove their massive outbreak in our environment and require urgent attention towards this issue. Conclusions show that human activities, rivers, and plastic mulching on agricultural fields have majorly acted as carriers of MPs towards coastal and terrestrial soil and sediments. Later, based on recorded concentrations and gaps, future research studies are recommended in the concerned domain; a dearth of studies on MPs influencing Indian agricultural soil make a whole sector and its consumer vulnerable to the adverse effects of this emerging contaminant.

Everyday talk: self-directed peer focus groups with diverse youth

ABSTRACT This article reviews the use of self-directed peer focus groups – a qualitative participatory strategy developed to reduce the influence of an adult researcher and enhance diverse young people’s everyday talk. While similar to youth peer-led interview methodologies, this strategy differed as it did not appoint peer interviewers, but instead encouraged self-directed group discussions, lightly structured through task-based activities and question prompts. This strategy considerably reduced the role and power of the researcher by enabling participants to engage in everyday discussions about potentially sensitive issues with familiar peers. The informality of peer discussions also captured dynamic, emergent understandings about complex ideas and concepts. The strategy, however, did not entirely remove aspects of power within peer relationships that resulted in some participants being silenced while others dominated conversations. The article critically reflects on the potential this strategy holds to open up dialogic space for diverse groups to consider complex topics.

Capturing quality. Educational quality in secondary analyses of international large-scale assessments: a systematic review

ABSTRACT The discourse of quality has permeated everyday discussions about education, yet the concept as such remains complex. Moreover, during the constant struggle to improve educational quality, governments have increasingly devoted attention to the results of international large-scale assessments. As those results are used to inform policy decisions to improve countries’ educational quality, it is important to understand how this concept of quality is appropriated. As a synthesis of how quality is conceptualised and operationalised in this body of research is lacking, the current paper seeks to fill that gap by presenting a systematic review. Our analysis identified definitional patterns and explored the corresponding methods for measuring quality. Based on this analysis of the reviewed studies, a framework of four approaches towards quality emerged to render the concept more accessible. In light of these results, benefits and limitations of the concept’s complexity are discussed, and implications for research are forwarded.

Conspiracy theories in digital environments: Moving the research field forward.

In the past few years, the discussion of conspiracy theories has embroiled researchers, politicians and the public alike. During the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ became a buzzword in the news media, public communication and everyday discussions. The pandemic also demonstrated that conspiratorial narratives disseminated online are not benign, obscure and eventually harmless ideas, but can mislead policy making, hinder crisis relief and public health efforts, or undermine trust in institutions and science. Factors contributing to the prevalence of conspiracy theories are complex and include psychological as well as socio-political factors. This special issue focuses specifically on the role of digital media and how they shape the dissemination and mitigation of, as well as research on, conspiracy theories. The special issue includes 13 research articles by authors from 11 countries and regions, which provide timely insights into the phenomenon of conspiracy theories with cross-cultural and cross-platform advances.

Labour History and the “Neoliberal Era”: Context and Conceptualisation

This study examines the concept of neoliberalism with specific reference to labour history, focusing on the “neoliberal era” of the past four decades. During this period, the term “neoliberalism” has increasingly permeated not only academic research but also political debates and everyday discussions. This proliferation, though, has often been accompanied by growing confusion and inconsistency regarding the meaning and application of the term. To address this problem, a single question is posed here: how might neoliberalism be reconceptualised more coherently and consistently with respect to labour history and the “neoliberal era”? Aotearoa-New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act 1991 (ECA), the most dramatic historical example of neoliberal employment relations legislation in the predominantly Anglophone nations, provides the initial example from which to address this question. The location of the ECA towards the libertarian end of a libertarian-authoritarian legislative spectrum underpins an examination of the methodological value of neoliberalism with respect to labour history. Citing the distant, profoundly authoritarian example of the 1791 Loi Le Chapelier, the term “reliberalisation” is introduced to illustrate the historical continuity from the earliest manifestations of “free” wage labour to the present “neoliberal era.”

Preventing data leakage by securing chat session with randomized session ID

Messaging applications have become one of the largest and most popular smartphone applications. It includes the capacity for the users to communicate between themselves via text messages, photos and files. It is necessary to safeguard all messages. Privacy is one of the biggest issues which most individuals in the world of instant messaging ignore. Although several instant messaging applications offer varying security for users, the weaknesses and danger of data assault are increasing. Not just business discussions, our data must also be safeguarded during everyday discussions since data is very sensitive for everybody, and data protection is very crucial to prevent undesired loss of information. To address these types of weaknesses and hazards associated with data attacks, we require an encrypted messaging protocol and also hide IP address method for a safe interaction. This paper's goal is to protect conversations from targeted attacker by securing the communication between user and hide IP address from unauthorized access.

Negotiating the Role of Anthropological Evidence in Medical Research during Health Emergencies

The 2014–2016 West African Ebola outbreak is often cited as a watershed moment for the social science of epidemics. Anthropologists played a key role in clarifying the social, economic and political dimensions of the epidemic, highlighting both how outbreak control measures were disrupting social practices and how they could be adapted to reflect local realities and experiences. Whilst undoubtedly significant, this narrative of anthropology’s successful integration risks obscuring the fraught position of the anthropologist within the Ebola response. Taking debates about public anthropology and the balance of action and critique as a starting point, we offer reflexive considerations from our work in the Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone. We look at the involvement of social scientists in HIV clinical trials, which led to the inclusion of a social science component in the Ebola trials, through to the everyday discussions on how to integrate ethnographic insights into the running of operations. In so doing, we highlight the importance of foregrounding participants’ and communities’ voices, and confront what gets lost in translation. Keeping this tension in focus, we consider the consequences of this complex position for the possibility of a ‘critically embedded’ anthropology of clinical research in health emergencies.

Preventing data leakage by securing chat session with randomized session ID

Messaging applications have become one of the largest and most popular smartphone applications. It includes the capacity for the users to communicate between themselves via text messages, photos and files. It is necessary to safeguard all messages. Privacy is one of the biggest issues which most individuals in the world of instant messaging ignore. Although several instant messaging applications offer varying security for users, the weaknesses and danger of data assault are increasing. Not just business discussions, our data must also be safeguarded during everyday discussions since data is very sensitive for everybody, and data protection is very crucial to prevent undesired loss of information. To address these types of weaknesses and hazards associated with data attacks, we require an encrypted messaging protocol and also hide IP address method for a safe interaction. This paper's goal is to protect conversations from targeted attacker by securing the communication between user and hide IP address from unauthorized access.

An Ethnographic Perspective of Well-Being, Salutogenesis and Meaning Making among Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Gambia and the United Kingdom

Research on refugees and asylum seekers largely focuses on the negative impacts that forced migration has on well-being. Though most individuals do not experience poor long-term mental health because of forced migration, less attention has been given to what factors promote positive well-being. Using an ethnographic approach, I elucidate how the concept of salutogenesis can be applied to African refugees and asylum seekers living in the greater Serrekunda area of the Gambia and in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the United Kingdom. Specifically, I explore what resources impact on the sense of coherence construct and its three components—comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness—and how these are embedded in everyday discussions and understandings. In total, I spent twenty months conducting ethnographic fieldwork between the two sites and conducted forty individual interviews. Amongst my interlocutors, the three most common resources that people spoke positively about, particularly as it relates to meaning making, are work, education and religion. Further research in this area is crucial in order to identify, promote and strengthen those factors facilitating positive well-being amongst those who have been forcibly displaced.

“We’re all here for the money”: solidarity and divisions in a worker-owned company

ITAS, a Croatian machine tool company, is arguably the best-known example of worker ownership in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In the context of rising commodification of everyday life, I trace how blue-collar workers in ITAS discussed their salaries. I reveal divisions among them, despite great similarities in their predicament as a group and as individuals. Workers used the generational division as the main emic concept to make sense of the relationships on the shop floor. I offer a reflection on their perception of belonging to different generations with different interests. I show how talking about “old workers” and “young workers” was tied to a host of other social factors, such as attitudes towards labor, historical experience of dispossession, and relationship to space and mobility, which did not neatly map onto the generational division. Everyday discussions on the shop floor correctly described differential inclusion of workers of different generations into the labor market, which broadly reflected transnational forces at work in the global market for metalworking. However, constant focus on divisions in everyday discussions prevented workers in ITAS from engaging in political work that could harmonize their interests across generational and other lines.

Memeing and Speaking Vernacular Security on Social Media: YouTube and Twitter Resistance to an ISIS Islamist Terror Threat to Marseille, France

AbstractThis article intervenes in critical terrorism studies and conceptions of vernacular security to argue that social media has become an important arena for everyday constructions of terrorism and (in)security. Rich, multimodal, social media data provide important means to understand digital forms of everyday constructions of (in)security that discuss, subvert, and parody dominant terrorism and security narratives in the wake of the rise of the Islamic State group. Methodologically, this argument is pursued through a thematic analysis of a YouTube video authored by a French Muslim that defies an ISIS threat to his hometown of Marseille and the resulting, multiauthored Twitter response. By tracking this vernacular discussion of (in)security across social media platforms, this article demonstrates that, while some intertextuality exists, the crossing of platforms changes both the form and substance of security discussions. Within this, symbols, features and properties of the local urban environment of Marseille are the dominant symbolic resources that are utilized, reconstructed, and deployed to structure and subvert everyday discussions of (in)security. The dominant theme that crosses both YouTube and Twitter is that users perceive the French security services as impotent, and that resistance to ISIS can paradoxically only come from local vectors of insecurity, crime, and violence linked to the ongoing proliferation of organized crime in Marseille. This demonstrates not only that the ability of political satire to enable the powerless to resist the powerful applies in the context of (in)security but also that it enables the powerless to resist “powerful” coercive nonstate actors.

ПОВСЕДНЕВНЫЕ ЧУДЕСА АВАДХА (СЕВЕРНАЯ ИНДИЯ): ВСТРЕЧИ С ИЗВЕСТНЫМ И ТАЙНЫМ

The sphere of the unknown, supernatural and miraculous is one of the most popular subjects for everyday discussions in Ayodhya – the last of the provinces of the Mughal Empire, which entered the British Raj in 1859, and in the distant past – the space of many legendary and mythological events. Mostly they concern encounters with inhabitants of the “other world” – spirits, ghosts, jinns as well as miraculous healings following magic rituals or meetings with the so-called saints of different religions (Hindu sadhus, Sufi dervishes),with incomprehensible and frightening natural phenomena. According to the author’s observations ideas of the unknown in Avadh are codified and structured in Avadh better than in other parts of India. Local people can clearly define if they witness a bhut or a jinn and whether the disease is caused by some witchcraft or other reasons. Perhaps that is due to the presence in the holy town of a persistent tradition of katha, the public presentation of plots from the Ramayana epic in both the narrative and poetic as well as performative forms. But are the events and phenomena in question a miracle for the Avadhvasis, residents of Ayodhya and its environs, or are they so commonplace that they do not surprise or fascinate? That exactly is the subject of the essay, written on the basis of materials collected by the author in Ayodhya during the period of 2010 – 2019. The author would like to express his appreciation to Mr. Alok Sharma (Faizabad) for his advice and cooperation.

Прагматичні функції політологічних квазітермінів і політичних терміноїдів

Ukrainians demonstrate an intense interest in the domestic and foreign policy of their country, as well as in what is going in geopolitical processes. Social and political discourse in Ukraine is highly politicised which results in a great variety of lexical elements found in everyday publications and discussions. There are many political terminoids, politological quasiterms or quasitermini, political jargonisms, and pseudoterms of political realm that are extensively used both in Ukrainian and international discourse. Examples may vary from a term Trumpism, which bears a significant emotional load with pejorative connotations, to a more neutral term Thatcherism that became a part of political and economic reference books. Russian military aggression against Ukraine brought a new meaning to the terms Putinism, that resembles the term Hitlerism, as well as Rushism – a combination of Russia and fascism, which denotes an imperialist, chauvinist, aggressive, militant foreign policy of Russia, especially to its close neighbours. Different terms like that constitute a vibrant interdisciplinary field that is not paid sufficient attention to. This article suggests approaching analysis of pragmatics functions of these lexical elements by analysing their role in more general course of terminologisation of political and social discourse. A number of different examples of such lexemes are listed and their use is commented by placing them into a broader context of lexicological studies. In the English language tradition such lexemes are studies within the discipline of language for special purposes, in this case – the language of politics. The German terminological tradition speaks of Fachjargonismen and Halbtermini, the latter may be regarded as a sort of an equivalent to the concept of quasiterms used in our terminological studies. Some examples of pejorative and metaphorical lexical elements used in political discussions are also described and commented briefly, like the terms Porokhobot as an example of a pejorative terms used to describe those who support the president of Ukraine Mr. Poroshenko and his politics, or the terms related to the revolutionary events in Ukraine in 2014 – Euromaidan – a term widely used outside of Ukraine, together with the term Leninopad to describe the removal of the monuments of Lenin as a part of the policy of de-communisation. It is claimed that this terminology allows broader public to participate in political discussions since it simplifies the discourse but also sets some terms of reference for placing opponents and proponents of certain political actors, ideologies, or parties according to lexical delimitation lines. In the European Union those who criticize the policies of the Union and see a threat in the increased German influence go as far as to suggest a term Merkelreich to combine the name of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German word Reich to imply a rather brutal reference to the Third Reich. On the other hand, such a term provides a great simplification to the discussion about the nature of political processes within the European Union. By comparing Germany’s economic potential in the common market to the imperialistic ambitions it also sets discursive boundaries for a certain type of political debate. It is also stated that such lexical elements can indicate a shift in political and social developments since such pseudoterms have potential to transform into full-fledged political science terms in the future. It might be the case the militant and aggressive foreign policy of today’s Russia would one day named Putinism and become part of university textbooks in politics. As it is almost impossible to predict the future of a particular quasiterm, it is suggested that the current process of nomination of terms within the socio-political discourse should be studied with a particular attention. Some discursive practices may reveal the mechanisms behind the logic of how certain terms are used. For example, a political expert or a political scientist would hesitate to use a terminoid with pejorative connotations in official lecture or in a peer-reviewed article, but he or she can use it in an emotionally heated discussion or, with some reservations, even on a TV-show. These terms are all around and the ways and rules of their application should be paid more attention to. The article concludes that these elements should be researched from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Losing the One, Caring for the All: The Activism of the Peace Mothers in Turkey

This article focuses on the political activism of the Peace Mothers in Turkey, a group of Kurdish mothers whose children were either Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK) guerrillas or political dissidents during the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK. The peace activism of the Mothers is a distinctive case that speaks to the tension between the domains of the familial and the political—a tension that appears in everyday discussions as well as in feminist literature. In this article, I suggest that the Peace Mothers’ struggle to bridge national and local peace-making ideals is a subtle effort to resolve that tension and to transform the realms of family and politics. The mobilization around “motherhood” aims at peace on the national scale, but has led to an unexpected form of activism in the Kurdish community, where the Mothers now mediate local family conflicts in the wake of war. While the Mothers’ activism has not been successful in achieving its main goal of securing a national peace settlement, I argue that it transforms both the political and the familial spheres to a significant extent. The Mothers conceive of motherhood broadly: as the state of being an agent with the capacity to connect to the All via a sense of loss and care. In engaging with feminist debates on motherhood, activism, and care, this article presents a novel framework for understanding the persistent boundary between the political and the familial and calls attention to the role of gendered politics and maternal activism in understudied local settings.