Explicit Discourse Research Articles

La Prose poétique comme Philosophie du Langage ?

Avec les Sophistes, puis Platon et Aristote, les grands philosophes de l’Antiquité classique ont démontré un intérêt marqué pour la question du langage, que ce soit dans ses parties constitutives ou dans sa dimension pragmatique. En revanche, les traces d’une réflexion explicite remontant aux corpus archaïques sont, elles, plus diffuses. Dans le cadre de mon article, scindé en deux parties, je proposerai, tout d’abord, une présentation synthétique des fragments explicites d’Héraclite d’Éphèse – lesquels reposent sur le lexique du λόγος et de l’ὄνομα –, avant que de plonger dans l’analyse détaillée de trois séquences implicites – à savoir B25, B48 et B121 –, ce afin de démontrer que, (1) d’une part, il existe, chez ce penseur archaïque, une perception plus ou moins aiguë des structures de la langue, que (2), d’autre part, celle-ci se déploie chez lui non pas en une réflexion autonome, mais au travers même de l’usage pratique qui en est fait et que (3), finalement, cette réflexion enclose dans son objet se révèle au moins aussi intéressante que celle reposant sur le vocabulaire précité. La lecture ciblée de ces séquences permettra de démontrer que, dans une époque antérieure aux grandes formalisations des philosophes et des grammairiens grecs, les structures éminemment complexes mises en place par le poète suggèrent, et parfois démontrent, une compréhension profonde de l’unité de la langue comme organe coordonné et des articulations qui la composent.

Disrupting colorblind teacher education in computer science

ABSTRACTAs new efforts seek to expand computer science education across the globe, there has been a widespread effort to prepare school teachers for teaching computer science to culturally and racially diverse students. This effort to center diversity and equity is notable as computer science courses are typically homogenous in terms of race and gender, making the need to center diversity in teacher education spaces. This paper reports on an ethnographic study in the United States that describes how teachers dialogue around issues of race and computer science education in a residential week-long professional development workshop. Drawing from the dialogue of a geographically, racially, and culturally diverse group of teachers, this article describes how teachers evade, deflect, center, and reflect on racially explicit discourse around teaching computer science. Grounded in vignettes from two teacher classrooms, this research study considers how culturally responsive computing and critical race theory can illuminate the ways in which teachers discuss race and culture in computer science professional learning environments. The study’s findings demonstrate features of long-term professional preparation that can surface colorblind ideologies and help teachers move toward a culturally responsive pedagogy to teaching computer science.Abbreviations: CS - computer science; PD - professional development; CRT - critical race theory

Variability in the formal and informal content instructors convey in lectures

This paper investigates the variability in the content of lectures by different university mathematics instructors teaching concurrently in the same course. The instructors enacted a shared lesson-plan and coordinated their teaching to ensure students in different sections of the course will receive equivalent academic preparation. However, classroom observations and interviews with the instructors indicate that while explicitly discussing the same definitions and theorems and working out similar examples, the instructors were implicitly trying to convey different informal content. An analysis of the instructors’ mathematical discourse during the lectures and the interviews reveals that the instructors coordinated with each other content corresponding with object-level learning, while implicitly orienting their lectures towards fostering meta-level learning. This found gap highlights miscommunication between the instructors and points to the need of a shared and explicit discourse on meta-level learning at the collegiate level.

When the Past Is in the Present: The Paradox of Educational Opportunity and Social Inclusion in South Africa and Rwanda

The legacies of a racial and ethnocentric past continue to have implications for the present in South Africa and Rwanda, particularly within the realm of education. Although in both societies, the governments have addressed their repressive and violent histories through the implementation of color-blind (or nonracial/ethnic) policies that espouse national unity and reconciliation, these very same policies inadvertently reinforce old divisions. They suppress candid discussion about past and current intergroup tensions, resulting in a paradox of social inclusion. In this article, the authors interrogate how historically ascribed identities, which were used for the purposes of oppression and social divisions in South Africa and Rwanda, are reconstituted in the postapartheid and postgenocide eras. The authors draw on empirical evidence from case studies of contemporary schools in both countries and argue that the nations’ two approaches—nonracialization and nonethnicization, respectively—aim to mute explicit discourse and language about racial and ethnic differences though the spread of “color-blind” ideologies. However, everyday behaviors and attitudes of individuals—students and educators—who are inculcated with ideas of past racial/ethnic ideologies remain rigid and continue to affect micro-level and school-level interactions that undermine the legitimacy of either color-mute or color-blind ideologies and contribute to boundary maintenance.

Graphic organizers as a teaching strategy for improved comprehension of argumentative texts in English

The University of Costa Rica seeks to prepare students for understanding academic texts in English by requiring reading comprehension courses in numerous degree programs. In this context, this paper aimed to assess the effectiveness of graphic organizers as a strategy to promote reading comprehension by focusing on the identification of rhetorical functions in argumentative texts. The paper followed an explanatory-sequential design within a mixed-methods approach with a group of 20 students at the Western Branch of UCR. To apply the strategy, three argumentative texts and their corresponding graphic organizers were used. The data consisted of performance scores and of answers to questionnaires. After the cycle of applications, the results showed a gradual improvement in the identification of rhetorical functions, particularly of arguments and counterarguments. Support for the author’s arguments, rebuttals to counterarguments, and the author’s overall claim were slightly more difficult to identify. The participants found graphic organizers helpful to better understand the parts of an argument in a text and its overall organization. At the same time, they found that the lack of explicit discourse markers and of familiarity with the content made understanding the connections between rhetorical functions difficult in spite of the help provided by the organizers. The study concluded that repeated implementation of graphic organizers has a positive impact on reading comprehension by helping students to read more strategically. However, accompanying strategies such as summarizing and discriminating main ideas from supporting details are necessary to complement the work with graphic organizers and improve their effectiveness.

How to gauge banal nationalism and national indifference in the past: proletarian tweets in Belgium's belle époque

AbstractMichael Billig's theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect the discourses of ‘ordinary people’. Recent historical research of ‘national indifference’ in imperial Austria has inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of nationalist discourses and their impact in society. This article assesses these conflicting frameworks and refutes AD Smith's critique of everyday nationalism research as necessarily ahistorical and presentist. This case study of the rank‐and‐file of the social‐democratic Belgian Workers' Party at the close of the nineteenth century uses a unique source of working‐class voices: the so‐called ‘propaganda pence’ or ‘proletarian tweets’ from the Flemish‐speaking city of Ghent. Hot, explicit nationalism was absent from these sources, which begs the question: is this proof of banal nationalism or national indifference? A historically contextualized analysis of the absences shows that workers expressed national indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. In Rogers Brubaker's terms: Flemish ethnicity was a relevant social category, but only in a very restricted number of social contexts could it become a basis for ‘groupness’ or political mobilisation in daily life.

Explicit Discourse Marker Instruction to Improve Coherence and Cohesion in Academic Writing

This quasi- experimental study examined the effects of explicit discourse marker (DM) instruction on ESL learners’ academic writing performance. Two intact groups of pre-degree students enrolled in an academic writing class at a public university were involved in the study. One group was assigned as the experimental group and the other was assigned as the control group. Both groups went through similar academic writing instruction employing the process-writing approach. However, the experimental group was also subjected to intensive instruction on the use of DMs. The study hopes to address the following research questions. RQ1: What are the effects of DM instruction on the subjects’ use of discourse markers in their Academic Essay Test (AET)? RQ2: What are the effects of DM instruction on the subjects’ AET scores for the three writing sections; ‘content’, ‘language’ and ‘organization’? It can be concluded that explicit teaching of DMs is beneficial in encouraging the use of DMs in the subjects’ academic essays. The experimental group was found to perform significantly better than the control group in the post AET. DM instruction does not only improve the ‘organization’ section of the essay but also the ‘language’ and ‘content’ sections as well. The effect size of the treatment on the post AET is medium in relation to ‘organization’ but large for ‘content’ and ‘language’.

Leveraging Hierarchical Deep Semantics to Classify Implicit Discourse Relations via a Mutual Learning Method

This article presents a mutual learning method using hierarchical deep semantics for the classification of implicit discourse relations in English. With the absence of explicit discourse markers, traditional discourse techniques mainly concentrate on discrete linguistic features in this task, which always leads to a data sparseness problem. To relieve this problem, we propose a mutual learning neural model that makes use of multilevel semantic information together, including the distribution of implicit discourse relations, the semantics of arguments, and the co-occurrence of phrases and words. During the training process, the predicting targets of the model, which are the probability of the discourse relation type and the distributed representation of semantic components, are learned jointly and optimized mutually. The experimental results show that this method outperforms the previous works, especially in multiclass identification attributed to the hierarchical semantic representations and the mutual learning strategy.

El socialismo aragonés, entre la obediencia territorial, el federalismo y el posibilismo autonómico (1976-1983)

In the transition towards democracy, two models of socialism fought for leadership in the Aragonese Left. The federalist Socialist Party of Aragon (PSA), with solid arguments for self-management and autonomy, nourished high expectations before the first democratic elections. With a poorer structure and support, though sheltered by its history, the alternative option, represented by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), won that “battle” on June 15, 1977. This triggered the PSA crisis, with the transfer of supporters to PSOE, and a process of unification that became in fact a takeover. Thus the Aragonese PSOE assumed a more explicit territorial discourse, embodied by some former PSA members. From 1979, they would lead the regional executive. In 1983 they became the first elected Aragonese government, after a process towards autonomous government in which PSOE evolved from possibilism to protagonism.

Cause and Effect Extraction from Biomedical Corpus

The objective of the present work is to automatically extract the cause and effect from discourse analyzed biomedical corpus. Cause-effect is defined as a relation established between two events, where first event acts as the cause of second event and the second event is the effect of first event. Any causative constructions need three components, a causal marker, cause and effect. In this study, we consider the automatic extraction of cause and effect realized by explicit discourse connective markers. We evaluated our system using BIONLP/NLPBA 2004 shared task test data and obtained encouraging results.

Signalling Implicit Relations: A PDTB - RST Comparison

Describing implicit phenomena in discourse is known to be a problematic task, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The present article contributes to this topic by a novel comparative analysis of two prominent annotation approaches to discourse relations (coherence relations) that were carried out on the same texts. We compare the annotation of implicit relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0, i.e. discourse relations not signaled by an explicit discourse connective, to the recently released analysis of signals of rhetorical relations in the RST Signalling Corpus (RST-SC). The intersection of corresponding pairs of relations is rather a small one, but it shows a clear tendency: unlike the overall signal distribution in the RST-SC, more than half of the signals in the studied intersection are of semantic type, formed mostly by loosely defined lexical chains. Our data transformation allows for a simultaneous depiction and detailed study of the two resources.

Colorblindness as Identity: Key Determinants, Relations to Ideology, and Implications for Attitudes about Race and Policy

Colorblindness is often conceptualized as a set of deeply held but unrecognized ideological tenets. However, we believe that colorblindness has also now become an explicit cultural discourse involving self-conscious claims and specific convictions. To illustrate this point—which has both conceptual and empirical implications—we introduce the notion of colorblindness as identity. We define this concept as subjectively meaningful, self-asserted identification with colorblindness. We use data from a nationally representative survey to explore the social determinants of colorblind identification and assess its relationship to both colorblind ideologies and standard attitudinal measures. We find that a relatively large percentage of Americans across racial lines identify as colorblind. Furthermore, such identification is connected to racial ideologies but not all tenets of colorblind racism. For white Americans, colorblind identification is associated with decreased perceptions of social distance, but not support for policies designed to ameliorate the effects of racial discrimination. We conclude that colorblind identification is a unique social phenomenon, connected to views on race but not always in the ways that existing research would predict. We also suggest directions for further exploration of the depth of colorblindness as an identity form and implications for theorizing colorblind discourse more generally.

The Aesthetics and Politics of Belonging: National Poets between “Vernacularism” and “Cosmopolitanism”

Abstract Jameson’s concept of modern third-world literature as national allegory is also pertinent for the 19th-century peripheries of the first-world literature. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, the protagonists of (semi)peripheral national movements longed for the recognition of their nascent collective identity by the lawgiving Other – the symbolic order of ‘universal’ tradition. The figures of “national poets” (Nemoianu) were invented to represent their respective nations to the gaze of the Other, symbolized by the emerging world literature and empowered through the inter-state system dominated by the core countries. In a secular parallel to the canonization of saints in the Catholic Church, “worlding” (Kadir) a national poet was crucial in the (unfulfilled) longing for his/her universal acknowledgment as belonging to the hyper-canon. While several national poets involved in national movements showed a “vernacular” tendency (Terian), Schiller and Goethe represented the more “cosmopolitan” model of a national classic. Such ‘affiliation’ to the universal aesthetic canon is also characteristic of the politics of Slovenian romantic movement and its poet, France Prešeren. Although Prešeren’s poetry, which was exposed to Austrian censorship, only sparsely employs an explicit political discourse, his imaginary worlding and intertextual transfer of universal aesthetic repertoires from the established literatures into a Habsburg periphery fashioned a cosmopolitan strategy of cultural nationalism. Prešeren has been venerated in Slovenia since the late 19th-century as the singular national classic whose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical and modern traditions in Slovenian and deserves to be recognized worldwide.

Leveraging bilingually-constrained synthetic data via multi-task neural networks for implicit discourse relation recognition

Recognizing implicit discourse relations is an important but challenging task in discourse understanding. To alleviate the shortage of labeled data, previous work automatically generates synthetic implicit data (SynData) as additional training data, by removing connectives from explicit discourse instances. Although SynData has been proven useful for implicit discourse relation recognition, it also has the meaning shift problem and the domain problem. In this paper, we first propose to use bilingually-constrained synthetic implicit data (BiSynData) to enrich the training data, which can alleviate the drawbacks of SynData. Our BiSynData is constructed from a bilingual sentence-aligned corpus according to the implicit/explicit mismatch between different languages. Then we design a multi-task neural network model to incorporate our BiSynData to benefit implicit discourse relation recognition. Experimental results on both the English PDTB and Chinese CDTB data sets show that our proposed method achieves significant improvements over baselines using SynData.

Co-training for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition Based on Manual and Distributed Features

Implicit discourse relation recognition aims to discover the semantic relation between two sentences where the discourse connective is absent. Due to the lack of labeled data, previous work tries to generate additional training data automatically by removing discourse connectives from explicit discourse relation instances. However, using these artificial data indiscriminately has been proven to degrade the performance of implicit discourse relation recognition. To address this problem, we propose a co-training approach based on manual features and distributed features, which identifies useful instances from these artificial data to enlarge the labeled data. In addition, the distributed features are learned via recursive autoencoder based approaches, capable of capturing to some extent the semantics of sentences which is valuable for implicit discourse relation recognition. Experiment results on both the PDTB and CDTB data sets indicate that: (1) The learned distributed features are complementary to the manual features, and thus suitable for co-training. (2) Our proposed co-training approach can use these artificial data effectively, and significantly outperforms the baselines.

Towards a European policy discourse on compulsory education: The case of Sweden

The aim of this article is to show how the European Union (EU) and the Swedish government have recently become co-producers of education policy that increasingly emphasises compulsory education. The paper draws on the following two kinds of empirical material: 1) an analysis of central official policy documents produced by the EU and the Swedish government; and 2) documents related to the development, communication and implementation of country-specific recommendations within the EU, using Sweden as the national policy arena. Theoretically, the paper is inspired by discursive institutionalism and uses critical discourse analysis for the systematic analysis. The result shows that beginning around the mid-2000s, both the EU and the Swedish government have demonstrated an increased interest in compulsory education as a solution to a wide range of societal and individual problems. Initially, the coordination of policy concerned with compulsory education was communicated implicitly, discursively embedded into a variety of policy areas. From 2013 onwards, however, the result shows the emergence of a new and more explicit European policy discourse on compulsory education, which is discussed as an interesting area of research still in its infancy.

A direct discourse-based approach to the study of language attitudes: The case of tussentaal in Flanders

In this paper, the results are reported of a perception study conducted in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. 80 informants were subjected to an interview in which direct language-related questions were asked about intralingual variation in Flanders in general, and the omnipresent variety tussentaal (lit. in-between-language) in specific. These interviews were analysed by means of a qualitative discourse-based approach, both looking at the explicit metalinguistic discourse of the respondents and at their implicit metalinguistic awareness. The study shows that tussentaal is not denounced (as is the case by many linguists), but instead characterised as a quite neutral and even desirable variety. On the basis of this case-study, the approach used is evaluated, and considered valuable for explaining patterns of language use, in this case the omnipresence of tussentaal in Flanders.

Speaking through Silence: Racial Discourse and Identity Construction in Mass-mediated Debates on the “War on Drugs”

As a set of criminal justice policies and practices, the “war on drugs” is a contested social issue linked to specific racial meanings and structures and political logics. As the legitimacy and value of the “war on drugs” has increasingly become a topic of public discussion, how such debates are shaped by both media communication and contemporary racial discourses warrants rigorous sociological analysis. In this article, we use a content analysis of newspaper manuscripts and online comments on “war on drugs” news stories to examine (1) the racial discourse within mass media agenda-setting and framing and (2) patterns of discursive identity construction in the context of digital and mass-mediated social commentary. Our findings show how “racial silence,” implicit and explicit racial discourse, and identity construction via racialized subject-positions assist to rationalize and legitimate racial inequality. We also outline the theoretical implications of these findings and avenues of future research.

Eldercare Service Redesign in Finland: Deinstitutionalization of Long-Term Care

ABSTRACTDeinstitutionalization is an important trend in the redesign of long-term eldercare in Finland. It refers to a process where traditional institutional care is partly replaced by home care services and the creation of homelike housing units. The first part of this article provides an overview of eldercare service redesign by using national statistics. The second part consists of qualitative analysis of the deinstitutionalization of eldercare. The data consist of 27 interviews conducted among municipal care administrators and is analyzed using thematic and discourse analysis. Main findings show a deep policy change taking place in eldercare deinstitutionalization discourse lying at its center. A distinction between explicit and implicit deinstitutionalization discourse is made. The former clearly states that institutional care needs to be cut back making it possible for all older people to live at home or in homelike housing facilities. Implicit deinstitutionalization discourse is underpinned by comments of a different type, more critical and problem-centered. Within intensive service housing, for instance, fee policy is reformed. The main results include the observation that explicit deinstitutionalization discourse is in line with the national policy aims of putting home first, while implicit discourse deals with hidden or unexpected consequences. The article discusses future research in the conclusion.

Identifying with the Nation: Spain's Left-Wing Citizens in an Age of Crisis

This study analyses the extent, sense, and strategies employed by sympathisers with Spanish state-wide left-wing parties to ‘reconstruct’ their affective ties with the Spanish nation after the ‘monopolisation of patriotism’ by Franco's regime. Such an undertaking is further complicated within the context of economic crisis and intensified peripheral nationalism found in Catalonia and the Basque Country. This article applies qualitative analysis to the discourse of left-wing participants from 11 focus groups held in March 2012 amidst the economic (and political) crisis. As expected, this context of crisis favoured the emergence of explicit discourse on the Spanish nation, providing an opportunity to gain a better understanding of its nature. Findings show that welfare nationalism and social patriotism define the kind of attachment developed by the interviewees towards Spain better than the concept of constitutional patriotism, or any kind of ethnic-cultural feeling of belonging.