Discourse Information Research Articles

STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL ASPECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

The article highlights the structural and functional features of political communication as a process of communicative interaction in the political sphere in the conditions of modern social development. It was determined that political communication is a communicative process of mutual exchange of political information and broadcasting of political discourse among political subjects, state administration bodies, civil society, aimed at achieving consensus in making political and managerial decisions, legitimizing power and maintaining the stability of the democratic political system through means mass communication, Internet social networks, informal contacts, etc. The leading functions of political communication in terms of its structural elements are distinguished: 1) subjects of political communication: citizens, state authorities and management, political parties, movements and associations, civil society institutions, associations and groups of users of social networks on the Internet etc; 2) feedback between the subjects of political communication, acting as a communicative interaction that takes on different forms of information exchange; 3) information message as a relevant political discourse; 4) channels and means of information transmission and two-way communication between subjects of political communication.

Comparison of Judgment Document Information Between China and Russia Based on Corpus

The study of legal comparisons has become particularly important as the number of foreign-related legal disputes has increased dramatically with the growing number of cross-border trade. This study discovers the differences and similarities between Chinese and Russian judgment documents and provides a linguistic basis for the academic theoretical researches and the call for linguists to enter the courtrooms by establishing a corpus of Chinese and Russian judgement documents, quantifying and analysing the Chinese and Russian judgement documents based on the Legal Discourse Information Theory. It can be found that the macro-structure of civil ruling documents is clearer but does not provide more micro-information. By adding language elements, it can be seen that there are more information points and information components in Russian criminal judgment documents. The information points in Chinese civil judgment documents are more concentrated than in Russian civil judgment documents, while they are more similar in terms of the proportion and type of information components.

Tamgas and Petroglyphs in the Kayrakkol and Karakungey Mountains (based on research materials 2022–2023)

The article presents the results of field research in South-Eastern Kazakhstan in 2022–2023. The authors introduce into scientific discourse information about seven locations of rock carvings with tamgas. Fifteen signs and the petroglyphs that accompany them are being published. The drawings are found on open vertical and horizontal planes of large and small rocky outcrops, on the tops of the southern, southwestern and southeastern slopes of the Kairakkol and Karakungey mountains. The rock carvings were made using two main techniques: picketing and surface carving. Sectors with tamgas are part of large clusters of petroglyphs of different periods, but at the same time they are located separately from other drawings. In one case, a similar sector was discovered on rocky planes located at a distance from placers of rock carvings. Figurative images are represented mainly by geometric symbols and their combinations. Diacritics – dots, lines, arcs and curls. The majority are tamgas, which find indirect analogies in the signs of the nomads of the Northern Black Sea region, Ustyurt, Southern Kazakhstan, Southern Siberia and Mongolia at the turn of eras. Among the petroglyphs that accompany the signs, there are images of snake-like and dragon-like figures, silhouette and outline figures of animals, some of which are made in an openwork manner. A new series of tamgas, identified in Eastern Semirechye, shows broad ethnocultural connections, the originality of the region’s population in the Hunno-Sarmatian period and the migration routes of nomads along the Dzungarian Alatau mountain system.

Determinants of Multilevel Discourse Outcomes in Anomia Treatment for Aphasia.

Individuals with aphasia identify discourse-level communication (i.e., language in use) as a high priority for treatment. The central premise of most aphasia treatments is that restoring language at the phoneme, word, and/or sentence level will generalize to discourse. However, treatment-related changes in discourse-level communication are modest, are poorly understood, and vary greatly among individuals with aphasia. In response, this study consisted of a multilevel discourse analysis of archival, monologic discourse outcomes across two high-intensity Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) clinical trials. Aim 1 evaluated changes in theoretically motivated discourse outcomes representing lexical-semantic processing, lexical diversity, grammatical complexity, and discourse informativeness. Aim 2 explored the potential moderating role of nonlanguage cognitive factors (semantic memory, divided attention, and executive function) on discourse outcomes. This study was a retrospective analysis of archival monologic discourse outcomes after intensive SFA for n = 60 (Aim 1) and a subset n = 44 (Aim 2). Outcome measures included lexical-semantic processing (% semantic errors), lexical diversity (moving average type-token ratio), grammatical complexity (mean utterance length), and discourse informativeness (% correct information units). Bayesian generalized mixed-effects models were used to examine changes across four study time points: enrollment, entry, exit, and 1-month follow-up. The present study found no evidence for meaningful or statistically reliable improvements in monologue discourse performance after SFA when measured using standard, general-topic discourse stimuli. There was weak and inconsistent evidence that nonlanguage cognitive factors may play a role in moderating treatment response. These findings indicate a clear need to pair theoretically informed treatments designed to facilitate generalization to discourse with intentional measurement paradigms designed to capture it. Furthermore, there is a clear need to examine how established treatments, restorative or compensatory, can better facilitate generalization to discourse-level communication. These priorities are critical for meaningfully improving everyday communication and reducing the profound communication and psychosocial consequences of aphasia. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26524081.

The division of main and subordinate discourse information in real-time comprehension

The study examines the role of discourse structure representation in real-time comprehension, with a focus on how main discourse and subordinate discourse information guides language processing. Using a web-based visual world eyetracking paradigm, we investigated pronoun resolution in two types of relative clauses: appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and restrictive relative clauses (RRCs). While ARCs were generally considered as secondary and side-commentary information, aligning with subordinate discourse, RRCs were usually construed as part of the main discourse. Making use of this distinction between ARCs and RRCs, the current study examined pronoun resolution with two possible antecedents. In one condition (RRC), the two antecedents were part of the same discourse whereas in the other (ARC), they were in distinct discourse units. We found stronger competition between the two possible antecedents in the former condition than the latter. Our findings can potentially be explained by an encoding interference, where linguistic entities encoded with similar discourse status information can lead to an interference effect.

Representation of Medical Content in Online Discourse

Introduction. The article discusses issues of representing medical information in online communities. Much attention is paid to modern areas of research on network discourse. Particular emphasis is paid to studies related to the problems of the terminology of the area. In this regard, the article presents different points of view on the typology and classification of texts in Internet-mediated communication. The area of interest for this study is medical content presented in Internet-mediated communication. The work specifies the concept of “medical content”. Methodology and sources. A study corpus is formed in accordance with the aim – to analyse the features of presenting medical information in English-language online discourse; methods of analysis are determined depending on the aim. The following criteria are used to analyse the study corpus material: pragmatic, media, structural-semantic and stylistic-linguistic parameters. The research corpus includes texts published in English, presented on the Reddit website within communities discussing issues of healthy lifestyle, health care, and pathological conditions. Results and discussion. Based on pragmatic parameters (type of addressee/type of addresser) and the topic of published information, the research material can be conditionally divided into several groups, the description of each group is given in the paper. The results obtained allow suggesting that medical content within the online community is aimed at two main population groups - healthcare professionals and lay people who are interested in issues related to the medical area. The medical information is presented based on a pragmatic and thematic principle. In terms of pragmatics, the main functions of presenting medical information are informative, ascertaining, phatic, expressive. Conclusion. The content of the research corpus consists of verbal texts with varying degrees of creolization – zero, partial, complete. They are characterised by all the features of the oral and written language typical of Internet-mediated communication.

A Literature Review of Language Characteristics in Patients with Vascular Dementia

Vascular dementia may present with language disorders due to damage to frontal subcortical circuits. This study aimed to review recent studies of language abilities in patients with vascular dementia. Sixty-nine studies were classified according to language modalities (spontaneous speech, auditory comprehension, repetition and naming). First, spontaneous speech was impaired in the ability to describe pictures, objects and in the ability to convey information in discourse. Second, the auditory comprehension was impaired in word comprehension, sentence comprehension, paragraph comprehension, and speech act comprehension tasks. Third, repetition was preserved in word-level tasks but impaired at the sentence level. Fourth, the naming performance was impaired in a generative naming task (phonemic fluency) rather than in a confrontational naming task. Therefore, when summarizing the results between patient groups, in spontaneous speech, to convey information through highly informative utterances was relatively good in vascular dementia (VaD), but the number of utterances was lower than dementia of Alzheimer’s type (DAT). In auditory comprehension, VaD’s performance was good in the task of word comprehension and speech act comprehension tasks. It is organized as in repetition, VaD’s performance was relatively good in the sentence-level task, and in naming, VaD’s performance was reported to be better than DAT in the oppositional naming and generative naming semantic category tasks. In the generative naming phoneme category, opposite result was reported. Further studies on the language abilities of patients with vascular dementia needs to consider factors such as subtype and language modality. Future studies should be evenly distributed across all language domains.

Core Lexicon analysis of spoken discourse production by Mandarin Chinese speakers with Aphasia

ABSTRACT Background Spoken discourse production has been increasingly recognised as an important source for assessing language competence of persons with aphasia (PWA). Most linguistic measures rely on transcripts of spoken discourse, so they have seldom been used in clinical practice. Thus, there is a need for standardized and norm-referenced measures that can be easily applied in clinical settings. Aims The present study aims to develop core lexicon lists for Mandarin Chinese PWA using AphasiaBank data elicited with different discourse production tasks and test their validity in detecting language deficiency. Methods & Procedures We selected seven semispontaneous discourse tasks within three major task types, i.e., picture descriptions, procedural discourse and story narrative, for core lexicon list development and for examining task type effects. Transcripts from 61 control speakers were split into two sets with age – and education matched: one set (n = 43) as a normative sample used to generate the core lexicon lists and the other (n = 18) as a healthy control group served as a baseline for comparison with PWA productions. Transcripts of 18 age- and education- matched PWA were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. We selected the top 30 words with the widest distribution in the normative sample to generate core lexicon lists. Then for both PWA and control groups, we calculated agreement percentage as core lexicon scores. Outcomes & Results Core lexicon scores of PWA were significantly lower than the control group participants for all seven tasks and positively correlated with aphasia severity for two story narrative tasks, suggesting that story narrative tasks were more effective in assessing discourse productions compared with picture and procedural descriptions. In addition, core lexicon scores also correlated with lexical diversity (R scores) and discourse informativeness (Correct Information Units) for all seven tasks. Conclusions & Implications Core lexicon scores can effectively distinguish discourse production by Mandarin PWA and healthy controls and they reflect lexical diversity and informativeness of discourse. Our findings, thus, have clinical implications in that these lists could serve as an alternative transcription-less approach in quick Mandarin PWA discourse production assessment.

Discourse Production Across the Adult Lifespan: Microlinguistic Processes.

Successful spoken discourse requires aspeaker to be informative to deliver a coherent, meaningful message. The informativeness of discourse can be conveyed by the variety of vocabularyproduced(i.e., lexical diversity [LD]), the typicality of vocabulary items used (i.e., core lexicon [CL]), and the amount of relevant content produced (i.e., information units).Yet, it is well documented that older adults produce less informative content compared to younger adults despite relatively subtle changes to LD. The typicalityof core lexicalitems has not been assessed in healthy aging.Paradoxically, these results indicate that some aspects of discourse informativeness remain stable or even improve across the adult lifespan, while other aspects decline. The purpose of the current studyisto understand howmicrolinguisticprocesses of informativeness change across the adultlifespan.The cross-sectional study included narrative language samples fromtwowordless picture books collected from420 healthy participants between 20 and 89 years old. LD and percent of correct information units (%CIUs) were analyzed, as well as CL nouns and verbs.The results indicate that %CIUs and CL nounsdemonstratea quadratic decline starting around the ages of 40and 60, respectively. LD showsa slight linear decline as afunction of age. CL verbs areresistant to age-related changes but are influenced greater by education. The differing findings across the microlinguistic measures can be explained by the weakened connections within the language system and the differential characteristics of the measures. The findings contribute to the aging literature bysystematically identifyingthe trajectory of how variables ofinformativenesschangewith age.

Conceptualizing Discussions on the Dark Web: An Empirical Topic Modeling Approach

Social networks on the Internet have become a home that attracts all types of human thinking to exchange knowledge and ideas and share businesses. On the other hand, it has also become a source for researchers to analyze this knowledge and frame it in patterns that define types of thoughts circulating on these networks and representing the communities around them. In particular, some social networks on the Dark Web attract a special kind of thinking centered around the malicious and illegal activities disseminated on websites and marketplaces on the Dark Web. These networks involve discussions to exchange and discourse information, tips, and advice on performing such business. Studying social networks on the Dark Web is still in its infancy. In this paper, we present a methodology for analyzing the content of social networks on the Dark Web using topic modeling methods. We demonstrate the needed stages for the topic modeling process, beginning with data preprocessing and feature extraction to topic modeling algorithms. We utilize and discuss the following four topic models: LDA, CTM, PAM, and PTM. We discuss the following four topic coherence measures as evaluation metrics: UMass, UCI, CNPMI, and CV, demonstrating the selection of the best number of topics for each model according to the most coherent produced topics. Furthermore, we discuss the limitations, challenges, and future work. Our proposed approach highlights the ability to discover the latent thematic patterns in conversations and messages in the common language used in social networks on the Dark Web, constructing topics as groups of terms and their associations. This paper provides researchers with a leading methodology for analyzing thought patterns on the Dark Web.

Discourse Analysis of Social Media Discourse: Construction and Deconstruction of Social Reality

With social media’s rise and widespread application, social science research has entered a new era, bringing new challenges and opportunities to the academic community on how to use social media data for high-quality social reality construction and deconstruction research. Based on the dynamic evolution of social media development, this study constructs a theoretical framework for social media discourse analysis, aiming to explain the social reality construction and development mechanism jointly generated by user- generated content (UGC) and algorithmic recommendation systems in terms of discourse dissemination mechanism and information circulation mechanism. The core goal of social media development is to provide information services that meet user expectations, while committed to continuously improving user experience quality and enhancing user satisfaction. To achieve this goal, we have proposed a series of measures, such as strengthening information control based on the internal circulation of content quality, building an interactive mechanism between users and platform quality perception, and establishing an evaluation system for user feedback and platform governance to achieve high-quality development of social media, promote the construction and deconstruction of social reality, and truly meet user needs.

The Construction and Transformation of the Discourse System of Higher Vocational Education Counselors in the Era of Information Education

Abstract With the rapid development of information media, senior counselors face many new opportunities and challenges in ideological and political education discourse. This study divides the counselor discourse modal system into linguistic and visual image modal. Adopting the advanced Transformer architecture and combining the BERT and RoBERTa algorithms, this paper profoundly analyzes the syntactic structure in the discourse. It extracts the emotional features in the text using the bert word vector model. Meanwhile, the dynamic features in the audio information of the discourse are extracted by MFCC technique. After completing the preprocessing of discourse features, we used Bayesian classifier for classification and recognition to further refine the annotation of discourse information. The study results showed that the overall sentiment of the discourse of tutor number 1 tended to be harmful during the 30 minutes, with six segments having an emotional pleasantness of more than -2. In addition, the density of positive discourse sentiment of tutor number 3 was 0.0811 higher than that of tutor number 4. In contrast, the number of discourse labeling of tutor number 5 was reduced by 74 times. Through in-depth analysis and understanding of these discourse modalities and affective features, tutors can better adapt to the information media environment and effectively carry out ideological and political education work.

Correct Information Unit Analysis in Different Discourse Tasks Among Persons With Anomic Aphasia Based on Mandarin AphasiaBank.

This study aimed to explore how well persons with anomic aphasia communicate information during discourse regarding quantity, quality, and efficiency compared to neurotypical controls, to investigate the influence of discourse tasks on informativeness and efficiency and to examine impact factors like aphasia severity and cognitive ability. Language samples of four discourse tasks from 31 persons with anomic aphasia and 31 neurotypical controls were collected from Mandarin AphasiaBank. Correct information unit (CIU) analysis measures including the total number of CIUs, percentage of CIUs, CIUs per minute, and words per minute were calculated. Group differences and the effects of discourse tasks on informativeness and efficiency were investigated. Correlations of CIU analysis measures with aphasia severity and cognitive ability were examined. Persons with anomic aphasia showed lower efficiency in conveying information than controls. They underperformed controls on all CIU analysis measures when executing story narrative tasks. Discourse tasks influenced the informativeness and efficiency of both groups. Neurotypical controls delivered the greatest quantity of information most efficiently when narrating stories. Persons with anomic aphasia exhibited reduced quantity of information during procedural discourse and displayed superior information quality in sequential-picture descriptions. Discourse information may be impacted by aphasia severity and cognitive ability, with varying effects depending on the task. Persons with anomic aphasia are inefficient in communicating discourse messages and perform poorly on all measures in story narratives. When measuring discourse information, the effects of discourse tasks and factors like aphasia severity and cognitive ability should be considered.

A Review: RC Sentence Processing

The question of whether and how native speakers and L2 learners process speech differently, as well as if transfer implications being available, may be answered by looking at ambiguity decision, one of the basic parsing procedures used in natural language processing. Studies have looked into how L1 and L2 speakers of different languages handle the RC ambiguity differently. In order to address the issues of transfer effects as well as the distinctions between L1 and L2 interpreting, differences between native speakers' and L2 learners' parsing selections, as well as some factors (working memory, animacy, discourse, syntax or semantic information, etc.) used during the experiments in ambiguity resolution, may add an entirely novel viewpoint. Although most of the studies tried to bring a solution with one-stage or two-stage models, the argument of this study is that there are definitely differences between the L1 and L2 processing and ambiguity resolving, and also, universality is impossible. Therefore, there needs to be much more evidences with the same instruments, tasks, and same sources of information conducted to vast amount of participant groups (from different ages, or different backgrounds) in order to reach a certain conclusion to state the reason behind this difference.

Non-canonical questions at the syntax–prosody interface

This special issue is dedicated to the syntax-prosody interface in non-canonical questions and originated in the international workshop Non-Canonical Questions at the Syntax-Prosody Interface, organised at the Université Paris Cité and held online in November 2020. Recent research has demonstrated that the phonology-syntax relation cannot solely account for prosodic structure, prosody being closely intertwined with discourse organisation, information structure and focus structure (Gussenhoven 1983, Féry 2001). Questions are a case in point, as they crucially call on the addressee before a proposition may be added to the common ground.

DaGATN: A Type of Machine Reading Comprehension Based on Discourse-Apperceptive Graph Attention Networks

In recent years, with the advancement of natural language processing techniques and the release of models like ChatGPT, how language models understand questions has become a hot topic. In handling complex logical reasoning with pre-trained models, its performance still has room for improvement. Inspired by DAGN, we propose an improved DaGATN (Discourse-apperceptive Graph Attention Networks) model. By constructing a discourse information graph to learn logical clues in the text, we decompose the context, question, and answer into elementary discourse units (EDUs) and connect them with discourse relations to construct a relation graph. The text features are learned through a discourse graph attention network and applied to downstream multiple-choice tasks. Our method was evaluated on the ReClor dataset and achieved an accuracy of 74.3%, surpassing the best-known performance methods utilizing deberta-xlarge-level pre-trained models, and also performed better than ChatGPT (Zero-Shot).

Impaired discourse content in aphasia is associated with frontal white matter damage.

Aphasia is a common consequence of stroke with severe impacts on employability, social interactions and quality of life. Producing discourse-relevant information in a real-world setting is the most important aspect of recovery because it is critical to successful communication. This study sought to identify the lesion correlates of impaired production of relevant information in spoken discourse in a large, unselected sample of participants with post-stroke aphasia. Spoken discourse (n = 80) and structural brain scans (n = 66) from participants with aphasia following left hemisphere stroke were analysed. Each participant provided 10 samples of spoken discourse elicited in three different genres, and 'correct information unit' analysis was used to quantify the informativeness of speech samples. The lesion correlates were identified using multivariate lesion-symptom mapping, voxel-wise disconnection and tract-wise analyses. Amount and speed of relevant information were highly correlated across different genres and with total lesion size. The analyses of lesion correlates converged on the same pattern: impaired production of relevant information was associated with damage to anterior dorsal white matter pathways, specifically the arcuate fasciculus, frontal aslant tract and superior longitudinal fasciculus. Damage to these pathways may be a useful biomarker for impaired informative spoken discourse and informs development of neurorehabilitation strategies.

Eye-tracking evidence from attachment structures favors a serial model of discourse–sentence interactivity

ABSTRACT Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In particular, dynamic accounts where readers use the discourse model to generate expectations for certain grammatical structures before and during parsing differ from serial accounts where an algorithmic first-pass processing mechanism precedes integration of sentence material into the discourse model. To test between these two theories, the current study investigates eye-movement behaviors when reading temporarily ambiguous attachment structures following discourses with biases either matching, mismatching, or neutral with respect to the attachment resolution. No evidence was found suggesting readers systematically use discourse information to generate structural expectations, in line with serial accounts of processing at the sentence–discourse interface. Scanpath analyses further highlight the confirmatory nature of rereading when participants encounter discourse continuations that do not fit with prior contexts.

북한이탈주민 유튜브 방송 담화에 나타난 반복의 기능 연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the functions of repetition in the YouTube discourse of North Korean defectors. For this purpose, 10 videos were selected by probability sampling method from the two-person broadcasts of <Yoon Seol-mi TV, a Joint Area of North and South Korea> channel. The discourse in the videos was transcribed using CLOVA Note and WaveSurfer programs. Based on the transcribed data, the functions of repetition in the YouTube discourse of North Korean defectors were analyzed by dividing repetition into self-repetition and other-repetition. The results showed that repetition performed four major functions: discourse progression, information delivery, emotional, and identity formation. This confirmed that repetition is not a simple linguistic phenomenon, but a communication strategy in the discourse of North Korean defectors. The data used in this study were collected from a limited range and scale, so there are limitations to generalize the results of the study. However this study has significance in that it provides a new perspective on the communication characteristics and strategic functions of repetition of North Korean defectors.

Лингвокультурные концепты как инструмент речевого манипулирования сознанием в современном немецкоязычном политическом дискурсе

The paper is devoted to the study of the topical issue of speech manipulation of consciousness in political communication. The paper attempts a quantitative analysis of the linguocultural concepts that influence the recipient of information in modern German political discourse. The aim of the paper is to systematise the most frequent lexemes representing linguocultural concepts that act as a tool of speech influence in modern German-language political discourse. The speeches of the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made in January-May 2023 served as the research material. The analysis of the frequency of the lexical units was carried out using the LancsBox corpus manager. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it makes an attempt to determine the discourse specifics of the use of linguocultural concepts as a speech means of manipulating consciousness in its correlation with the relevant linguistic and statistical data obtained using the automated text processing method. As a result of the research, it has been proved that linguocultural concepts act as a tool for manipulating information recipients, among these the most frequent are DEMOKRATIE/DEMOCRACY, GEMEINWOHL / COMMON GOOD, ZUKUNFT/FUTURE, WEG/PATH, STAAT/STATE.