Linguistic Discourse Analysis Research Articles

“Learn to blend in!”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute with increased knowledge about gender in mining by exploring how women are discursively represented in texts produced by actors in the international mining arena.Design/methodology/approachThe study combines corpus linguistic methods and discourse analysis. It implies a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, where the former is used as the point of departure for the latter, and where the material analysed is chosen on the basis of certain selected search phrases. The source for the study is the web, and the search engine used for the retrieval of data is WebCorp Live, a tool tailored for linguistic analysis of web material.FindingsThe analysis reveals that although the overarching theme in the women-in mining discourse is that women are needed in the industry, the underlying message is that women-in-mining are perceived as problematic.Practical implicationsThe study shows that if mining is to change into a modern industry, the inherent hyper-masculine culture and its effects on the whole industry needs to be problematised and made evident. To increase the mere number of women, with women still heavily underrepresented, is not enough to break gender-biased discrimination.Originality/valueThe research contributes with new knowledge about gender in mining by using a method, which so far has had limited usage in (critical) discourse analysis.

Metaphor in the Construction of Gender in Media Discourse: Analysis of Metaphors Used to Describe Women in Nigerian newspapers

Metaphor in the Construction of Gender in Media Discourse: Analysis of Metaphors Used to Describe Women in Nigerian newspapers Umar Ahmed Abstract Scholars in linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis (e.g. Zubair, 2007; Mele, 2008) note how gender can be constructed through metaphor. These researchers further argue that metaphor is not just a mere rhetorical ornament or a literary device but rather, a powerful means by which people constitute their social identities and relations. In this paper I report an analysis of the complex and often subtle ways in which some female authors used metaphors to describe women in Nigerian newspapers. I also discuss the presuppositions and inferences associated with the indexing of feminine gender through metaphor, highlighting the role they play in the process. Drawing upon Lazar‟s (2005) notion of feminist critical discourse analysis, Lakoff and Johnson‟s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory and the pragmatic notion of presupposition, I analyze a total of 339 metaphors about women identified in the 100 opinion articles on gender in five Nigerian newspapers, namely: The Guardian, Daily Trust, New Nigerian, The Punch, and Vanguard from 1999 to 2014. The analysis demonstrates that Nigerian women still use metaphorical expressions, which largely kept in place a gender ideology, which upholds male dominance and female subordination. It also reveals that the underlying cognition of (some) Nigerian female authors of opinion articles indicate their consent to patriarchal hegemony. Hence, the study makes the claim that how one may perceive and describe gendred self in relation to others can be influenced or constrained by the dominant gender ideology in society. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v6n1a8

L’analyse linguistique du discours comme préalable à une démarche ingénierique : Discours de la physique

The Linguistic Analysis of Discourse as a Prerequisite to an Engineering Approach: physics discourse
 This study belongs to didactics in that it is at the heart of the teaching / learning process. It is interested in the nature of helping scientific fields’ students acquire linguistic and discourse skills in close connection with their academic discourse. Our perspective does not go in the direction of a formulation of prescriptions or didactic propositions stemming from theoretical knowledge, without experimentation in the field. It was, of course within the Discourse analysis (AD), as a first task to analyze students’ productions in their context of realization, from some theoretical references. It was first to describe these practices to understand them, and then only to eventually exploit them.

Metaphors in Media Discourse on Migration

<p>The paper deals with the problems of cognitive linguistic discourse and comparative analysis studies of metaphor as a means of representing migration in mass media. It presents the most productive metaphoric models, shaping the concept of “migration”, that function in printed and electronic media discourses of Great Britain, USA and Russia in 2016-2017. A comparative analysis of metaphorical models representing migration in British, American and Russian media discourses has shown that in media discourses on the migration of 2016-2017, regularly three high-frequency and productive metaphorical models operate: hydronymic, military and morbid. Images of these metaphorical models are united by vectors of anxiety, despair, threats to life and have negative conceptual potential.</p>

Blogging in and about the workplace: a linguistic and discursive analysis of work psychology discourse and discourse communities

Work psychology focuses on how people think and behave at work by applying psychological concepts and methods to reflect on work, the workplace and the workforce. Its relevance has increased and changed in the light of globalization, as well as the dematerialization and mobilization of the workplace and the development of new sectors, services and media. Moreover, the use of social and new media for the dissemination of knowledge regarding recent changes in employment trends and procedures have led to an open and democratizing shift in power of and over workplace discourse, allowing hitherto marginalized professional figures to voice their needs and experience to objective peers and advisors. This opening and sharing of discourse within a perpetually connected worldwide community has raised questions about where a workplace’s boundaries lie and the contexts in which a worker may be considered an employee or an individual communicating online in and out of the office. The present preliminary study therefore analyzes a significant and adaptable online genre, i.e. work psychology blogs, to observe and consider how experts on workplace mentality apply rhetorical devices and discursive and linguistic strategies to inform, encourage and influence the perception of employees within online discourse communities.

The forbidden first word: Discourse functions and rhetorical patterns of and-prefacing in student essays

AbstractThis article investigatesand-prefacing and its environments in student essays. Specifically, the focus is on those instances when a writer uses the Finnishja‘and’ as an opening element (“preface”) to the sentence. Whileand-prefacing is most commonly a single-usage feature employed by a small minority of writers in the essay genre analyzed here, the detailed functional-rhetorical analysis reveals a rich picture of these usages and the respective discourse norm that emerges and evolves in practice. This paper identifies eight micro-level discourse functions forand-prefacing in the essays: (i)rhetorical, accumulative listing; (ii)emphasizing continuity of argument; (iii)dialogical aligning; (iv)unconventional intertextual linking; (v)evaluating a narrative turn; (vi)resolution; (vii)fantasy as coda; and (viii)plain cohesive linking. Significantly,and-prefacing is not limited to the failed essays, nor to the low-graded essays more generally. The differences found in high- and low-graded (failed) essays may, however, suggest that some discourse functions and rhetorical patterns are associated with a higher institutional value than others. Methodologically, this study highlights the benefits of Rich Feature Analysis and dialogically oriented linguistic discourse analysis for exploring a relatively infrequent and yet distinctive rhetorical resource that has a complex form-function relationship in student essays.

Linguistic Analysis of a Literary Discourse for Revelation of Ideology

Linguistic Analysis of a Literary Discourse for Revelation of Ideology

‘You are stupid, you are cupid’

Whereas language and gender studies’ explorations of couples’ talk have tended to focus on collaborative versus competitive conversational style, social psychological work on couples’ intimate relationships has long been driven by an interest in expressions of affection. This paper aims to show that linguistic discourse analysis can make a significant contribution to our understanding of how affection is expressed in intimate relationships. The paper focuses on the playful switching of frames, voices, codes and personas which emerges as central to the affectionate practice in the spontaneous talk of a young multicultural London couple. It argues that quantitative interview studies based on an a priori understanding of affection are unable to capture many of the idiosyncratic and creative ways in which speakers express their affection for one another in their intimate talk.

「行為の詩」あるいは「儀礼」としての自然インタープリテーション : 環境ディスコースの言語人類学的考察

「行為の詩」あるいは「儀礼」としての自然インタープリテーション : 環境ディスコースの言語人類学的考察

Return of Afghans from Pakistan: Linguistic and Visual Portrayal in the International and Pakistani print Media

The majority of news items on Afghan immigrants in the International press refer to their arrival in different countries, and amongst them Pakistan is at the top, during and after the invasion of Soviet Union in 1979. However, the focus of this study is the return of Afghan immigrants from Pakistan in last six years. This study reports the linguistic and pictorial representation of the return of Afghan immigrants to their homeland from Pakistan. Three types of Van Leeuwen’s (2008, p.5) descriptive social network models are applied. Van Leeuwen’ models help to critically scrutinize the whole process in terms of linguistic and visual discourse analysis. It is found that in international news media tend to project superficially on the return of Afghan refugees with their own perspective, while in Pakistani print media, there are mixed reactions about the refugees. Also, the paper timely contributes to the knowledge about the Afghan refugees, who mostly do not want to go back to their homeland but they are forced to do so due to the wave of terrorism and conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan governments.

Tekst (i) obraz w lingwistycznej analizie dyskursu

This article focuses attention on the need of a semiotic look at the text in linguistic discourse analysis, which would allow for more precise — important from the point of view of development of sense and meaning — capturing of relations between the language and image in a wider social context, and, which is related to the above statement, make better use of media or mediality dimension of the analyzed objects. Therefore, the purpose of linguistic discourse analysis would be studying of social practices of construction of sense and meaning, conventionalization as well as development and distribution of knowledge based primarily on language signs, taking into consideration signs of other modalities, performed with the use of various media (cf. Meier 2011: 518).

Эпистемическая ответственность в политическом дискурсе (на материале пресс-конференции Д. Трампа)

The results of research on the linguistic marking of epistemic responsibility of the subject of political discourse are presented. The material is the speech of the elected President of the United States D. Trump at a press conference on 11 January 2017. The study was conducted using the methods of linguistic description, discourse, quantitative and content analysis. Two types of use of evidence-epistemic markers in the speech of a politician are identified. The first type of markers is focused on epistemic responsible representation of information, that is actually the marking of epistemic responsibility. It is shown that in this case there is a decrease or increase in epistemic responsibility through the use of indicators of problematic or categorical reliability, primarily predicates of views in the main part of the complex sentence and epistemic adverbs with the semantics of possibility / probability or confidence. The second type of markers involves manipulating the mind of the recipient. It is shown that in this case the markers of indirect evidentiality based on external unspecified source of information are used for the purpose of blurring of the guarantor or confirming the accuracy of statements, giving the information as included in the general fund of knowledge of the recipient and addressee, as well as presenting opinions as factual statements.

Animal Autobiography; Or, Narration beyond the Human

In engaging with acts of self-narration that cross species lines, creators of animal autobiographies also broach questions about genre, truth status, and the structure as well as the politics of narrative representation. To address these questions, the present article draws not just on scholarship on (animal) autobiography but also on ideas from the fields of linguistic semantics, politeness theory, and discourse analysis, including the “framing and footing” approach that focuses on talk emerging in contexts of face-to-face interaction and that derives most directly from the work of Erving Goffman. On the basis of this research, and using case studies that range from animal riddles to Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), a collection of life stories posthumously narrated by a variety of nonhuman tellers, I profile autobiographical acts that reach beyond the human as ways of speaking for or in behalf of animal others. Some animal autobiographies correlate with acts of telling for which humans themselves remain the principals as well as authors; their animal animators remain relegated to the role of commenting on human institutions, values, practices, and artifacts. Other examples, however, can be read as co-authored acts of narrating in behalf of equally hybrid (or “humanimal”) principals. These experiments with narration beyond the human afford solidarity-building projections of other creatures’ ways of being-in-the-world—projections that enable a reassessment, in turn, of forms of human being.

Clinical use of linguistic discourse analysis for the assessment of language in aphasia

ABSTRACTBackground: Linguistic discourse analysis is an assessment method widely applied within aphasia research literature to examine impairments as they affect the language of daily function—discourse. Although this literature suggests that clinical applications do occur, it also identifies barriers that may inhibit the translation of research to practice.Aims: This study aimed to identify the frequency of use and methods of linguistic discourse analysis application by speech pathologists when assessing their clients with aphasia.Methods & Procedures: A survey was distributed electronically to speech pathologists in five English-speaking countries using the online survey management tool Survey Monkey®. Clinical applications of linguistic discourse analysis were examined using descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation analyses.Outcomes & Results: Of 123 valid survey results, 106 clinicians reported use of linguistic discourse analysis to assess language in aphasia. Respondents collected language elicited in conversational contexts and expositional discourse samples most often, and subjected these samples to a range of linguistic measures. Most clinicians applied a judgement-based method of analysis based on clinical observation. Clinicians reported positive attitudes towards the use of linguistic discourse analysis, but were limited from widespread use by barriers such as a lack of available clinical time.Conclusions: Results revealed that speech pathologists defined and therefore implemented linguistic discourse analysis in a variety of ways. The methods used to elicit, prepare and analyse discourse varied among respondents. Further investigation is warranted to examine the effectiveness of clinical discourse analysis applications and to support the translation of evidence-based research methods to clinical practice.

Entrepreneurs need to be pitch perfect

Purpose Examines the skills needed to present a good two-minute pitch for a product or service which has been created by the “pitcher”. Design/methodology/approach Aims to analyze successful entrepreneurial pitches to provide practical pitch-related advice to entrepreneurs and to business school instructors – the people developing materials to teach the necessary skills. Findings Uses a ten-stage discourse framework to reveal the linguistic and rhetorical skills required to make good pitches. Although good pitchers will probably have an instinctive ability to use the appropriate linguistic, grammatical and syntactic features, the analysis here offers an intellectual understanding of a process which can never be entirely mastered instinctively. Originality/value The entrepreneurial pitch has, in all likelihood, never been deconstructed in this way, using rhetorical and linguistic discourse analysis.

Categorization in talk

This article seeks to advance the usage-based discourse research that investigates meanings and processes of meaning construction in interaction by elaboratingan empirically grounded interdisciplinary model. The paradigmatic and sequential analysis employed here brings together linguistic discourse analysis with an ethnomethodological perspective, and presents an innovative take on category organization in talk,explaininghow to capture knowledge resources such as asymmetrical category contrast pairs in talk. In analyzing in detail the speaker’s taxonomy constructionin a sample conversation, the papersystematicallyexploresthefollowing two topicsrelated to the speaker: what category characteristic he is orientingto as a resource for his present talkandwhat socialmeaning the speaker’s taxonomizing isconsistentlycommunicatingin the flow of talk. The proposed model captures a color binary–used to categorize people–of the ‘colored’versus the ‘white’, entailed in theexpression ‘a so-called yellowcolored people’,and reveals that the category pair is used as an organizational device in the speaker’s argument.The paper claims that taxonomy analysis in sequence is useful to examine the selected words in relation to their semiotic resources.

Expertise in Everyday Nurse–Patient Conversations

A great deal of nursing activity is embedded in what is considered to be everyday conversation. These conversations are important to health professionals because communication can affect health outcomes, and they are important to patients who want to know they are being heard and cared for. How do nurses talk with patients and what are the features of effective communication in practice? In this exploratory study, two expert nurses recorded conversations with patients during domiciliary visits. Linguistic discourse analysis, informed by contextual knowledge of domiciliary nursing shows the nurses skillfully used small talk to support their clinical work. In their conversations, nurses elicit specific information, normalize unpleasant procedures, manage the flow of the interaction, and strengthen the therapeutic relationship. Small talk can be big talk in achieving nursing goals. Critically reflecting on recorded clinical interactions can be a useful method of professional development and a way of demonstrating nursing expertise.

Politolinguistik und/oder Sprachkritik? Das Unbehagen in und an der Deskriptivität

In this article it is argued that a link between the analysis of political language use and language criticism exists. Nevertheless, there is disagreement as to how far the linguistic analysis of political language use should be critical or descriptive. The author of this article argues that the different approaches of lay linguistic criticism and critical discourse analysis are not convincing from a linguistic point of view. On the other hand, it is not disputed that linguistic analysis on a purely descriptive level is impossible. Particularly with regard to the euphemistic language use of the National Socialists in Germany, a purely descriptive analysis seems to be unsatisfactory. It is argued that linguistic discourse analysis allows to combine both – linguistic description and a critical view on political communication.

ANALIZA DYSKURSU PRAWNICZEGO PRZESŁUCHAŃ ŚWIADKA W SĄDZIE KARNYM W MIEŚCIE ADAMA (REGION OROMIA) W ETIOPII

In everyday conversation the questioners and answerers are in an approximately symmetrical relationship that questioners do not have the information that they are requesting and the answerers are not obliged to answer. On the contrary, in the rule and role governed courtroom question/answer dyad, lawyers usually have particular version of events to control the language of the respondents where witnesses are compelled to respond, and do not have the right to question. So, it may hold back the production and interpretation of the evidence, and consequently hinder the execution of the tasks of the court trial. Such types of courtroom language-related problems are unexplored by academic research in Oromia Regional State. In this regard, no or little is known about these courtroom language-related problems in the criminal courts of the region. In an attempt to fill-in the existing gap, this study investigates how widespread such courtroom linguistic problems are and contribute to the limited conceptual and methodological values of linguistic analysis of courtroom oral discourse in legal institutions of the region. The analysis of this study is based on the authentic, naturally occurring courtroom defense lawyers-witnesses dyad of some Oromia Regional State Criminal Courtrooms. The aim of the study is, therefore, to present the discursive strategies of defense lawyers questioning forms and functions in their attempts to deconstruct persuasive testimony. In so doing, based on the way in which lawyers exploit the specialized speech-exchange linguistic system of the courtroom, the study focuses on the analysis of defense lawyers question forms and functions from the pragma-dialectical discourse perspectives. The findings of the study suggest that the use of declarative question, tag question, and projection question forms are the defense lawyers’ discursive strategies to control and dominate the language of the witnesses. Such questioning forms function by potentially damaging witnesses’ admission and limiting their response boundaries and are found the influential defense lawyers’ discursive strategies through which the existing narratives of the witnesses are attacked and deconstructed.

News from the future: A corpus linguistic analysis of future-oriented, unreal and counterfactual news discourse

This article presents a corpus linguistic analysis of the development in future-oriented political journalism in four Danish newspapers in the period 1997–2013 ( N = 2954 full articles = 1,553,038 word tokens). Keyword analysis and concordance analysis are applied within a framework of grammatical-semantic theory of tense and modal verbs and semantic-pragmatic theory of time meaning, modality and speech acts. The results suggest, unexpectedly, that the newspapers – and news reports in particular – seem to have become less future-oriented in the period. At the same time, however, the articles – and particularly news commentary, in itself increasing – might have become slightly more speculative. Thus, the journalists themselves have become the main source of ‘guessing’, that is, predicting and speculating, with the keywords vil ( will) and ville ( would), including unreal and counterfactual speculations in the past tenses.