Lexical Choices Research Articles

Profanações lexicais em O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo, de José Saramago

Saramago's work was masterful in evoking and/or provoking the past and its crystallized discourses, with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) being a notable example. In this article, I propose to revisit this Saramago’s novel in order to argue that the work in question mobilizes a profanation of biblical figures at the lexical level. More specifically, and in the light of the Agambenian concept of profanation (2007), I argue that the narrator and the characters, through their lexical choices, set in motion a process of restoring certain words to a use that until then was denied to them not only by the weaving of the canonical gospels as well as by the historically constructed readings of these same texts, which, ultimately, contributes to a profanation of biblical figures.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL SLOGANS OF MAJOR PAKISTANI POLITICAL PARTIES IN ELECTION

Political slogans are used as a conduit to disseminate one’s political ideology into masses’ conscious and unconscious and to deconstruct the narrative of the opposition. This research is focused on the slogans which were chanted during the election 2018 keeping in mind the narratives of the respective political parties. The rapport of language with narrative and ideologies is intricate and influences the political power structure substantially. Words contain and shape meanings and the exploitation and distortion of the essence of the meaning can only be understood through CDA, furthermore, the use of lexical choices effects the voting pattern as well. This research is qualitative in nature, where the three-dimensional discourse model of Fairclough and socio cognitive model of Van Dijk have been used as a theoretical framework to comprehend the intricate relationship of language, power and ideology. To linguistically analyze the slogans the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) analysis which is developed by M.A.K Halliday, with specific focus on Lexicalization (Roger Fowler) has proved very instrumental. This research and analysis help the reader to comprehend the role of lexical choices, syntactic structures and metaphorization in constructing a narrative and its subsequent clout over the political power structure. Also, the significance of building one’s narrative and deconstructing opponents’ narrative through a slogan at the same time

Distribution should undo Excess: A Marxian Deconstruction of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

The study in question is descriptive in nature and confirms primarily to the qualitative parameters of the research which is triangulated by the tabulation of the frequency of the lexical items. It takes into account a short story namely Provide, Provide extracted from the collection of stories entitled In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009) by Daniyal Mueenuddin. The selected text has been subjected to Marx’s concept of class stratification, as he sees history divided into two broad classes of oppressor and oppressed. The researcher has further scrutinized the text by applying the model of lexical cohesion expounded by Halliday and Hassan (1976). The analysis has been carried out by close reading of the text and by shining light on the instances where the glaring class divide is evident. Further, the lexical cohesion is evaluated by carrying out the analysis in manual terms along with the corpus tool AntConc 3.5.9 for more clarification. The findings indicate that the characters fall into two opposing classes which highlight the Marxian perspective prevalent in the text. Additionally, the lexical choice of the author validates the same subject matter embedded in the story. This elucubration is significant in the sense that it utilizes the both literary conception and linguistic tool for the clarification of the analysis. Therefore, it paves the way for researchers to unlock the potential in social sciences by crafting a complex of theoretical frameworks.

Ambience and nature in travel writing: An ecostylistic study ofThe Old Patagonian ExpressandEastward to Tartary

AbstractThe present paper explores descriptions of natural landscapes excerpted from two travel books, namely,The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas, by Paul Theroux, andEastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus, by Robert D. Kaplan. The paper aims at analyzing how certain linguistic choices in a given stretch of text conspire to construe the ambience of descriptive passages of natural landscapes in travel writing. This will be carried out by combining insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Frame Semantics (FS). I will be focusing on the ambience of the natural depictions, that is, the sense of the natural world evoked in the reader’s mind by the language of the text. This will be dealt with by examining the lexical choices made by both authors, paying special attention to the adjectives. The excerpts under investigation have been selected since the descriptive language in them evokes frames and conceptual domains, which, in turn, yield a series of metaphors. These metaphors summarize the tone of the travel books, that is, the authorial texture and, especially, the ideological stance of the authors. Paul Theroux displays a more empathetic approach to the surrounding nature and its people, whereas Robert D. Kaplan adopts a more distant, analytical stance.

The Application of Hirschberg Maxims in Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’ and Darwish’s ‘Scenario Jaahiz’

This paper presents a study of prosodic traits and the pragmatic implications connected to them. It is suggested that there is a prosodic code in which a selection of suprasegmental elements is deliberately and consciously changed, putting it in relation to syntactic structures, lexical choices, and pragmatic meanings, is believed that a prosodic grammar works together with the linguistic and rhetorical devices in order to organize a narrative discourse firstly, and secondly to highlight the argumentative part within the narrative discourse.
 The prosodic features and the possible communicative meanings associated as well as the pragmatic effects are all described and justified. This study is the result of the analysis of two narrative poems in two different languages; English and Arabic. It is believed that the methodological procedures followed and the conclusions arrived at can be easily extended to other languages. General correlations that could be a starting point for further studies and practical employment of prosodic features are proposed.

Revision of Business Content on Corporate Social Responsibility

With more and more people interested in how sustainable and socially responsible companies are, the comprehensibility of content on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become paramount. Producing easy-to-read business content – either by writing it from scratch or revising it – is a cognitively demanding undertaking, especially for second-language non-professional writers. Both formal training and sustained practice can help writers build expertise and, in turn, be considerate of their intended audience. In particular, research on the impact of training has usually yielded positive results when examining the texts produced following specific instruction. However, the extent to which training has a positive effect on the process of writing and revision is still under-researched, especially in second language. To address this gap, we report on an experimental study that examines the impact of reader-oriented training on the cognitive effort experienced by 47 second-language university students when revising CSR content. We adopted a pre-test post-test design, and we used keystroke logging and retrospective interviews to collect data on students' pausing behaviour, use of online sources, and strategies to approach the revision task. Our training seemed to reduce the cognitive effort linked with lexical choices. Furthermore, it provided some students with procedural knowledge on how to approach the revision task in a more efficient way. We also observed a general tendency to rewrite (rather than revise) CSR content despite the higher cognitive effort required by rewriting. We discuss implications for training, limitations, and future research avenues.

Language and peace on WhatsApp and Facebook messages on the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon

This study set out to explore the promotion of peace by some social media messages related to the ongoing crisis in Southern Cameroons. Focus is on the lexical choice and style that show ways out of the warped communication out of language crisis, and the possible impacts of the messages on the readers’ minds of Cameroonians and other world citizens. The theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) guided the analysis of the data (150 messages) collected from 75 participants (45 males and 30 females) both from WhatsApp (100) and Facebook (50) posted by Cameroonians from the English-speaking part. The researcher and the field assistants used the Android phone to collect these data. Results reveal that there is an intensive war of words and words of war almost every line of the e-messages from either of the platforms. The numerous messages of peace are overshadowed and outnumbered by verbal bullying and the tense mood in the discourses. Some messages advocate national unity and push readers to think of peaceful co-existence. Therefore, readers are served with messages that feed them with bitterness about the current affairs in the country and accept war for peace to reign; in other words, the messages of peace are likely to recruit less militants than the words call for uprising. Key words: Peace, WhatsApp and Facebook messages, CDA, Anglophone crisis, ideology

Variations of Arabic Loanwords in the Perlis Malay Dialect: Geolinguistic Analysis

Perlis is a unique state because it borders a foreign country in the north which is Thailand and next to the state of Kedah. This unique position also has an impact on the Malay dialect spoken by native speakers in Perlis. While this loan word in Arabic is seen in the Malay language as having a close connection with Islam which is held by the majority of the Malay community. The Malay race is seen as synonymous with Islam, including in the aspect of language. While Islam is synonymous with Arabic, which is the language of choice for conveying the content of the Quran. This study will analyze some Arabic loanwords used in the Perlis Malay dialect. Therefore this study will try to study the distribution of dialects in Perlis. This study is one of the initial efforts to study the Malay dialect of Perlis from a dialectological point of view that focuses on loanwords in Arabic used by native speakers of Perlis. In general, the focus of the study area covers several selected villages in the state of Perlis. Some lexical Arabic loanwords that are seen to have a lot of variation will be the lexical choice in this study. Therefore, by using the generative transformation formula to see the changes that occur in lexical variants involving the lexical phonology of "kafir", "takdir" and "sahur". This study is also a continuation of previous studies that studied dialects and also focused on the pronunciation of Arabic loanwords used by residents in the state of Perlis.
 Keywords: Perlis dialect, Arabic borrowing, generative transformation formula.

Paradise lost: Cognitive grammar, nature, and the self in Diane Seuss’s ekphrastic poetry

Abstract Diane Seuss’s ekphrastic poetry collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is a celebration of life and death, imagination and reality, stillness and movement. This paper focuses on the first poem of the collection to investigate the relationship between the poetic persona and the landscape surrounding her. I employ central principles of cognitive linguistics as applied in the field of stylistics to discuss the manifestation of her mind style and examine how she constructs and situates herself in the environment. Drawing on Langacker’s notion of construal, I analyze the perspective and the degree of specificity of the descriptions. I also trace the extensive use of the container image schema that underlies the semantics of the poem. The paper demonstrates that despite her assumed idyllic existence, the poetic voice’s ornate descriptions of nature conceal a sense of uneasiness and confinement and the highly granular lexical choices and figurative expressions reveal her anthropocentric view of the environment. This gives rise to her feelings of alienation while the presence of the container image schema reinforces her sense of confinement. From an ecostylistic perspective, the analysis demonstrates how an anthropocentric view may manifest itself linguistically, highlighting textual features of anthropocentric narratives.

From football field to global politics, will FIFA discourse help Russia? A critical discourse analysis of headlines

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the FIFA World Cup 2018 headlines generated by Russia are a means to utilize and apply soft power with the aim to restore Russia’s role as one of the powerful and influential states in the global politics. Analysing the use of evaluative patterns in selected headlines, this paper scrutinizes the socio-historical influences that shape and reinforce nationalist and capitalist ideologies, and hence drive the discourse patterns within the headlines. Governed by the theories of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Appraisal Theory, the analysis revealed that the headlines were crafted to help Russia move out of global isolation. This symbolic domination was fulfilled by regaining global legitimacy while surging up nationalism and patriotism through the lexical choices applied in crafting the FIFA discourse. This study provides a model for future analyses of the socio-political and historical influences and contexts of the discourses surrounding global events like FIFA.

Measuring the Success of English Borrowings in Chinese

After entering the recipient language, many borrowings are in competition with their native equivalents, serving as an alternative lexical choice to express the designated concept. Concerning this phenomenon, questions arise as to whether some borrowings are used more frequently than others and what factors contribute to their success if we consider borrowings with a higher frequency more successful. To address these issues, this study takes an onomasiological approach, considers both borrowings and their native equivalents, and measures the relative frequency of borrowings in comparison with their native equivalents to assess their success. Raw frequencies are avoided in the study because they are subject to the popularity of topics in which a concept might be mentioned, meaning that some borrowings are frequently used possibly just because the relevant topics are popular, which thus cannot effectively reflect how the linguistic features of the borrowings affect their usage and success. Based on a dataset with data collected from Weibo, this study conducts a multiple regression analysis in Rbrul to investigate how the factors affect the success of English borrowings in Chinese, including concept frequency, concept novelty, lexical field, age of borrowing, number of competitors, and relative length of borrowings. The results of the statistical model indicate that borrowings are significantly more successful than others if they denote a new or low-frequency concept and if they fall into the rapidly-evolving fields rich in new inventions. In contrast, age of borrowing and relative length cannot significantly determine the success of borrowings. By measuring the success of English borrowings in Chinese, this study not only fills the gap caused by the rarity of studies taking an onomasiological approach on the contact-induced outcome in Chinese but also sheds light on the major motivations for using borrowings in Chinese.

"Snake flu," "killer bug," and "Chinese virus": A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of lexical choices in early UK press coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now mostly known as "COVID-19" (or simply "Covid"), early discourse around the pandemic was characterized by a particularly large variation in naming choices (ranging from "new coronavirus" and "new respiratory disease" to "killer bug" and the racist term "Chinese virus"). The current study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse studies and analyses these naming choices in UK newspaper coverage (January-March 2020), focusing on terminology deemed "inappropriate" as per WHO guidelines on naming infectious diseases. The results show that 9% of all terms referring to COVID-19 or the virus causing it are "inappropriate" overall, with "inappropriate" naming being more prevalent (1) in tabloids than broadsheets and (2) in the period before compared to the period after the virus was officially named on 11th February, 2020. Selected examples within each of the categories of "inappropriate" names are explored in more detail [terms (1) inciting undue fear, (2) containing geographic locations, and (3) containing species of animals], and the findings are discussed with regard to the contribution of lexical choices to the reproduction of (racist and otherwise problematic) ideologies in mainstream media.

The Eve of St. Agnes ve dvou novějších českých překladech

The contrastive analysis of two modern Czech translations of John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes by Jiřina Hauková (1961) and Hana Žantovská (1977) shows differences on three levels: the translators’ refashioning of the Spenserian stanza, different preferences in rendering Keats’s imagery, and different levels of deliberate archaizing in lexical choices and syntax, especially in direct speeches. Žantovská’s version is more euphonious with a higher percentage of full rhymes and, with a rhyming scheme of ababcdcdd and a final alexandrine line, keeps closer to the original rhythmical and rhyming pattern. It also keeps closer to the original in preserving the highly stylized nature of most direct speeches in the poem. Hauková’s earlier version relies more on imperfect rhyming or assonance and departs more radically from the Spenserian scheme, with a rhyming pattern of ababcdcdc, and a frequent lack of a clear caesura in the last line. It also tends to make the direct speeches less ornate and, even outside direct a dress, resorts less frequently to highly formal, poeticized or archaic lexical choices or syntax. Žantovská’s rendering of Keats’s imagery shows preference for precision and logical consistency while the poetic effects in Hauková’s version depend more often on combining seemingly disparate images and notions.

Do registers have different functions for text length?

AbstractSimilar to lexical and grammatical choices, the length of a text is also guided by situational constraints and functional needs. Consequently, texts of different lengths are associated with different communicative functions. This study explores the role of register in the functions which are associated with comment lengths on the social media platform Reddit. Since registers differ in their functional and situational makeup, the same text length may also have different functions in different registers. By analyzing variation in the frequencies of register features across comment lengths in a number of popular subreddits in a large-scale dataset of Reddit comments, I show that the functional associations of text length can differ greatly between subreddits, and that comments of the same length can even have virtually opposite functions in different subreddits. Furthermore, some subregisters are clearly differentiated not only by their feature makeup but also by the length of their comments.

Framing the pandemic in the political discourse of Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump

Employing the tools of discourse analysis, this paper seeks to investigate the framing strategies mobilized by Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump in their speeches delivered in response to the announcement of the global pandemic of COVID-19 on March 11, 2020. The author contrasts the frames of war and the frames of rational positivistic reaction to the challenge, exploring lexical choices, topoi, and larger discursive structures such as myths and ideologies to restore the storylines underpinning both texts. The analysis reveals the deeply instilled divergence of the vision of a nation, history, and the role of public institutions in both speeches.

О механизмах речевых сбоев в интернет-коммуникации

This research aims at discovering deviations of speech mechanisms that cause errors and mistakes in blogs and online media publications. The deviations of the speech mechanisms are revealed in lexical mischoices, grammatical and discourse errors. We apply semantic and discourse analysis to uncover the errors and mistakes in our dataset (5500 words) of erroneous sentences from Russian blogs and online media. We offer the classification of the mistakes based on the relations between the appropriate and erroneous word forms. We compare the errors and mistakes from our dataset with the deviations from norms in the texts from Corpus of Russian Students Texts. The comparison allows for clarifying the peculiarities of the computer mediated communication norms. We uncover the causes of the mistakes thanks to psycholinguistic analysis of speech production. The bloggers are susceptible to contextual priming. They made wrong lexical choices under the influence of erroneous anticipation of the following element in word combinations. Their underdeveloped skills of verbalizing complex content bring in wordiness, distortion of propositions and logical connections. In the computer-mediated communication, syntactical errors regularly occurs in blogs because of the trend to choose overcomplicated structures. The mistakes in the blogs are mainly caused by hypercorrection and diminished inhibitory control.

APPRAISING TWITTER USERS’ ATTITUDE ON “WRITING LAST LINE STORY”: SFL APPROACH ON CLOSING STATEMENT IN CYBER LITERATURE

Twitter, an online platform that is said to have a more constructive and meaningful response to the issues, is also where people are creative writers of cyber literature. Lately, there has been a trend of Twitter users to write fiction lines that have a premise of “what is your last line if you in the ending of a relationship.” This research intended to seek the attitude of Indonesian writing fiction in English. This paper analyses a short written online discourse called ‘tweet’ using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This analysis focuses on appraising attitudes that are feeling on reacting to emotion, putting the judgment, and evaluating things. The data is taken from a Twitter account, namely @literarybase, by shorting 100 popular tweets taken to seek the trend and 20 tweets among them to be classified on its appraisal criterion. The results show that a relationship's trend ends with a sad ending rather than a happy ending. However, positive affection holds the most significant shares of lexical choice, followed by judgment and appreciation the least. That means the users mostly used ironic writing that contrasts expectation with reality. Linguistic research also implied that tragedy plot is favorable in online discourse. The study has identified the practical way of assessing attitudes in short-writing fiction on online platforms and the tendency of a community to see value in a relationship and how they express themselves in a foreign language.

Socialist Challenge! A snapshot of leftist language and discourse in the UK, 1977-1983

This paper is based on close lexical and semantic analysis of a collection of newspaper texts stored in the Marxists’ Internet Archive which, in effect, constitute an opportunity sample of Leftist language. The texts run to approximately ten million words. The purpose of the paper is to identify key linguistic features that appear to be typical of Leftist discourse during the period (1977–1983) when the paper (Socialist Challenge) was sold on the streets of Britain. There is a particular focus on lexical choices made by the text producers, and it is argued that a significant number of these involve the selection of what might be termed inflammatory or provocative words and phrases over those of a similar meaning but more neutral connotations. The discourse that emerges from the analysis is shown to involve portraying society as divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups (workers and capitalists), and it is demonstrated that the use of words in the semantic fields of “war”, “flighting” and “struggle” underpins and sustains this discourse. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship between language, discourse and ideology, as well as with several suggestions for future research.

Interactional Competence in the Heritage Language during a Study Abroad Service-Learning Program: A Case Study

Abstract This case study describes the interactional competence of one U.S. Spanish heritage language learner (HLL), during a five-week study abroad program in Spain that included service-learning. Data were drawn primarily from audiotapes, reflection essays, and an exit interview. The audiotapes included “Mía’s” conversations at the service-learning site, a summer camp for young children. The three resource categories in Young’s (2019) model of Practice Theory of identity, linguistic, and interactional resources facilitated the analysis of Mía’s intercultural competence. The qualitative analysis describes, first, Mía’s resources during discursive practices with children and peer teachers at the camp, reflecting the construction of her identity as an educator. Second, we examine possible connections between Mía’s resources and her Spanish learning history. We show that the linguistic and interactional resources observed in her interactions are congruent with her HLL background, as seen in her lexical choices and flexibility interacting with diverse interlocutors. These findings of one HLL’s linguistic activity shed light on her interactional competence in this context, thus contributing to the literature on HLL s in study abroad.

Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production.

The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually presented sentence fragments (e.g., "You are at the sea and you see a . . .") with spoken nouns (e.g., "dolphin," "palm tree"). The words were presented consecutively in an ascending or descending direction, starting from the centre of the screen. These physical spatial cues did not influence lexical choices. However, the produced nouns met the spatial characteristics of the broader sentence contexts such that the typical spatial locations of the produced noun referents were predicted by the location of the situations described by the sentence fragments (i.e., upper or lower sphere). By including distributional semantic similarity measures derived from computing cosine values between sentence nouns and produced nouns using a web-based text corpus, we show that the meaning dimension of "location in space" guides lexical selection during speaking. We discuss the relation of this spatial meaning dimension to accounts of experientially grounded and usage-based theories of language processing and their combination in hybrid approaches. In doing so, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the many facets of meaning processing during language production and their impact on the words we select to express verbal messages.