Linguistic Markers Research Articles

Genre of “Promise” as a Reflection of Intentional and Linguistic Organization in Virtual Pedagogical Discourse

This research is situated within the context of contemporary discourse studies. It examines the genre of “promise” functioning within virtual pedagogical discourse. The study explores the genre features of a speech act, considering their potential determination by the pragmatic properties of discourse. Drawing on existing models of speech genres in contemporary genre theory (models by Т. V. Shmeleva, N. B. Lebedeva), two types of genre features of promises are identified. The first type includes invariant characteristics of the genre “promise”: a) the communicative goal of the utterance, linked to a voluntary commitment by the subject to fulfill something; b) linguistic markers of the genre — syntactic constructions containing performative “I promise,” predicates “I swear” / “commit” / “give (<my word>)” with direct objects or explanatory clauses indicating the object of the promise. The second group of features comprises genre characteristics of the text, determined by its discursive nature: a) the dictum content of the genre (theme of “Education”), b) the status roles of participants in institutional-pedagogical discourse; c) properties of the speech act determined by the structural-functional features of the messenger (interactivity, media files). Ultimately, a promise emerges as a genre realization of shared and simultaneously adapted speechthinking intention and discursive means.

Examining Linguistic Differences in Electronic Health Records for Diverse Patients With Diabetes: Natural Language Processing Analysis.

Individuals from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds experience pernicious and pervasive health disparities that have emerged, in part, from clinician bias. We used a natural language processing approach to examine whether linguistic markers in electronic health record (EHR) notes differ based on the race and ethnicity of the patient. To validate this methodological approach, we also assessed the extent to which clinicians perceive linguistic markers to be indicative of bias. In this cross-sectional study, we extracted EHR notes for patients who were aged 18 years or older; had more than 5 years of diabetes diagnosis codes; and received care between 2006 and 2014 from family physicians, general internists, or endocrinologists practicing in an urban, academic network of clinics. The race and ethnicity of patients were defined as White non-Hispanic, Black non-Hispanic, or Hispanic or Latino. We hypothesized that Sentiment Analysis and Social Cognition Engine (SEANCE) components (ie, negative adjectives, positive adjectives, joy words, fear and disgust words, politics words, respect words, trust verbs, and well-being words) and mean word count would be indicators of bias if racial differences emerged. We performed linear mixed effects analyses to examine the relationship between the outcomes of interest (the SEANCE components and word count) and patient race and ethnicity, controlling for patient age. To validate this approach, we asked clinicians to indicate the extent to which they thought variation in the use of SEANCE language domains for different racial and ethnic groups was reflective of bias in EHR notes. We examined EHR notes (n=12,905) of Black non-Hispanic, White non-Hispanic, and Hispanic or Latino patients (n=1562), who were seen by 281 physicians. A total of 27 clinicians participated in the validation study. In terms of bias, participants rated negative adjectives as 8.63 (SD 2.06), fear and disgust words as 8.11 (SD 2.15), and positive adjectives as 7.93 (SD 2.46) on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being extremely indicative of bias. Notes for Black non-Hispanic patients contained significantly more negative adjectives (coefficient 0.07, SE 0.02) and significantly more fear and disgust words (coefficient 0.007, SE 0.002) than those for White non-Hispanic patients. The notes for Hispanic or Latino patients included significantly fewer positive adjectives (coefficient -0.02, SE 0.007), trust verbs (coefficient -0.009, SE 0.004), and joy words (coefficient -0.03, SE 0.01) than those for White non-Hispanic patients. This approach may enable physicians and researchers to identify and mitigate bias in medical interactions, with the goal of reducing health disparities stemming from bias.

Authoritative and epistemic stance in the construction of conspiracy theories: A case study

What is central to conspiracy theories is the revelation of a hidden or manipulated truth. In addition, the speaker/writer who believes in a conspiracy theory and shares their views on it also seeks the listener’s/reader’s adhesion to the theory. As a result, the speaker/writer must solve two problems: first, the version in which they believe has to be perceived as plausible by the audience and, second, the speaker/writer must have, or gain, credit in order to appear credible. These two aspects are somewhat subsumed under what Biber and Hyland, among others, refer to as stance and stance-taking, which correspond to the positioning of a locutor towards viewpoints and interlocutors. In order to analyze these aspects and the relations between the linguistic markers and the discursive strategies (pragmatic, argumentative, or rhetoric), this study is based on a corpus analysis of online articles written by Jon Rappoport, an unequivocal conspiracy theorist. I only focus on plausibility hedges and certainty boosters so as to study the marking of authoritative and epistemic stance in his discourses and the function(s) they perform. The results show that both plausibility hedges and certainty are used to legitimize Rappoport’s theories and strengthen his authority in various ways, depending on the devices used. Plausibility hedges are mainly used to voice a dissenting interpretation of reality, presented as a possibility that cannot be ruled out, and downplay the elite’s viewpoints. Certainty boosters are used to express the author’s confidence and commitment towards his theories, by presenting his interpretation of reality as unquestionable, self-evident or consensual. Finally, the use of first-person pronouns and booster or hedge verbs are also used to strengthen the legitimacy of the theories and the authority of the author by explicitly indicating his contribution to the construction of conspiracy theories or to introduce and support a dissident viewpoint.

Indices of oral and written narratives differentiating Mandarin-speaking school-age children with and without developmental language disorder

Little evidence has been reported for narrative-related difficulties for Chinese Mandarin-speaking school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This study aimed to capture the indices from narratives that can differentiate Chinese children with and without DLD. Oral narrative and written narrative samples were collected from children with DLD ( Mage = 8.37, SD = 1.25; N = 26) and typically developing (TD) children ( Mage = 8.46, SD = 1.28; N = 26). The narrative samples were compared on a series of indices of narratives in both oral and written narratives. Results showed that at the macrostructure, Mandarin Chinese-speaking school-age children with DLD lagged behind TD children in story structures; at the microstructure, children with DLD had weaker performance in story productivity, lexical diversity, and syntax diversity. Moreover, less group difference was found in the written modality relative to the oral modality. The results suggest indices of story productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity could be potential linguistic markers in the assessment of school-age Mandarin-speaking children with DLD. The present findings advance our understanding of deficits in narratives for Mandarin-speaking children.

What prosody does when morphosyntax is absent: The case of Korean relative clauses

This study investigates the role of prosodic information in linguistic interpretation in the absence of an explicit linguistic marker to resolve ambiguity. We particularly focus on the impact of prosody on comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RRC) and non-restrictive relative clauses (NRC) in Korean, a language that lacks morphosyntactic or orthographic markers that distinguish between RRC and NRC. We hypothesize that narrow focus prosody may be associated with RRC, while broad focus prosody with NRC, which we test in two experiments through a picture selection task (Experiment 1) and an audio selection task (Experiment 2). Results showed that Korean listeners associated narrow focus prosody more often with RRC-biased pictures than NRC-biased pictures, suggesting that prosodic information has an impact on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the absence of any explicit linguistic marker. Further investigation suggests that there is variation in the impact of prosody across individuals and their sensitivity to prosody seems to be affected differently depending on the type of task.

Репрезентация категории косвенной эвиденциальности средствами стратегии уклонения в английском, русском, чувашском языках

This study conducts a contrastive typological analysis of linguistic markers of author’s and impersonal evidentiality in the English, Russian, and Chuvash languages. The research novelty lies in the systematic analysis of Chuvash indirect evidentiality markers in a comparative perspective. The study demonstrates that the “Nominative Case with Infinitive” construction, as a characteristic of author’s evidentiality in English, corresponds to Russian modal-suppositional and comparative particles, introductory words, and phrases (equivalent to the degree of certainty adverb “perhaps”), which express the speaker’s low assessment of the reported information’s reliability. In Russian, evidential particles, introductory words, and sentences (equivalent to the hearsay adverb “allegedly”) are used to indicate an unreliable source. The evidential particle “якобы” and the introductory word “мол” are common in speeches and statements. This approach to classifying evidentiality systems is also applicable to Chuvash. Modals, introductory words, and modal verb forms serve as lexical means of expressing author’s and impersonal evidentiality. The standard is to use two modal formants simultaneously. However, unlike English and Russian, evidentiality representations with negative meaning can be complex grammatical units represented by verbal analytical constructions. The findings suggest both universal and language-specific means of representing indirect evidentiality. Correlated representation of evidentiality and epistemic modality plays a significant semantic-pragmatic role in utterances as an effective evasion strategy.

Социально-психологический портрет группы советских военных моряков в произведениях К. Г. Паустовского о Севастополе

The aim of the study is to analyze some of K. G. Paustovsky’s documentary fiction works to identify the specifics of the writer’s individual style in the process of recreating socio-psychological portraits of a special group of his contemporaries, i.e., sailors of the Black Sea Fleet of the USSR in Sevastopol in the pre-war period (1930s-1940s). The study is original in that it is the first to reconstruct the portrait of a social group of Soviet military sailors as eclectic documentary and literary images in the navy during a specific historical period based on K. G. Paustovsky’s stories in the collections “The Black Sea”, “The Story of a Life”, and “Tales. Essays. Literary Portraits”. A philological analysis of various linguistic markers, psychological techniques used by the writer to understand the consciousness of military sailors, a complex set of emotions and feelings generated by the water element is given. As a result, it was found that in the process of reconstructing the socio-psychological portrait of a group of Soviet military sailors of the Black Sea Fleet of the USSR, K. G. Paustovsky uses various expressive means: synecdoche, the technique of combining the living and the non-living, zeugma, comparison, epithet, oxymoron. The writer assigns a special role to the symbolism of color, with the help of which he reveals the power of the heroes’ feelings and experiences, allowing for a deeper understanding of the psychology of military sailors.

Officers and men and fallen heroes: The discursive construction of regimented masculinity in the Nigerian Army

This paper examines the use of gendered language in the Nigerian Army's community of practice through the application of insights from language ideology and theory of masculinity. Data were generated by means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a one-year fieldwork involving representative sample of 18 personnel of the 6 Battalion, Ibawa and 2 Brigade, Uyo, both in Akwa Ibom State in South-eastern Nigeria. The findings show that the Nigerian Army maintains institutional gendered language practices used among its personnel in regimented functions and social events. The gendered registers occur in the soldiers' generic use of male address terms, adaptation to male-coded voice pattern in parades, masculinisation of Army's workout songs, and the subordination of femininity in institutional associations, all combined to construct the regimented and performative masculinisation of the profession. This practice is observed to be informed by the numerical domination of men in the profession that was originally perceived as males'; a conception that has shaped the linguistic ideology and performance of the Nigerian Army to rehearse masculine orientations. It is however recommended that the Army's language practices should capture modern ideals of a gender sensitive world that connect to the clamour for gender equality and equal social belonging through the inclusion of feminine linguistic markers in workplaces.

On the question of the authenticity of the language of the Buryat epic

The purpose of this article is to identify the basic linguistic markers of text authenticity, which is important when studying dialects and literary language. The content and form of the authentic text is determined by the narrator’s dialect transmission and the collector’s recording process. When a text is realized through language, differences appear in the lexical composition of the version of the source epic and the literary form of the language of the person recording it. As part of the observation, it was established that there is a connection between the authenticity of the text and the choice of lexical means, language norms, meaning, and function of the original source. Lexical units show differences in semantics and material sound shell.

Scammer Strategies and Social Actions in Online Filipino Transactions

As technology has developed newer and faster forms of communication, the internet has also become a convenient medium for scammers to interact with their targets. Since deception is understudied from a linguistic perspective, this paper investigated the persuasive strategies and linguistic markers of scammers and analyzed the social actions of both scammers and their targets—all of whom are users of the Filipino language. This qualitative study employed digital conversation analysis in analyzing ten conversations between scammers and their targets—all of which were failed scams. The results showed that scammers used emotion, credibility, and logic in persuading their targets. The following linguistic markers were found in their utterances: (1) pronouns that are personal, exclusive, inclusive, noncommittal, impersonal, and ambiguous; (2) negation used for denial, non-existence, refusal, discouragement, inability, loss, contrast, clarification, and correction; (3) emotion words expressing happiness, astonishment or amusement, worry, doubt or fear, shame, regret or inadequacy, and fondness, and lastly, (4) cognitive verbs indicating equivocation, and expression of knowledge or understanding. Furthermore, the social actions of the scammers and the targets were categorized into four sequences that generally involved certain actions: (1) pre-offer (asking about and providing details), (2) insert (expressing doubt and explaining), (3) offer (offering or asking for money/info, and rejecting), and (4) post-offer (insisting, showing aggression, or conceding and retaliating or interrogating). Although all conversations resulted in the targets’ rejection of the scammers’ offer, which undermines social solidarity, dispreference is seen as a beneficial response in conversations involving scams.

Practical network topology in the study of online radicalisation of youth: opportunities and limitations

The paper presents key approaches to understanding and researching radicalisation, as well as the opportunities and limitations of applying some research methods to model network topology and assess content similarity of online communities. Today, Web Mining and AI methods and technologies are often applied in research on social networks and youth participation in them. However, the question how these approaches can be effectively used to study online radicalisation remains open. The answer to this question should increase the explanatory and predictive power of computational models for detecting and predicting radicalisation in the online space. In much of the Russian research on online radicalisation, a common approach has been to reduce the task of identifying the interconnectedness of individual online communities or clusters of them to assessing the degree of similarity in terms of subscribers or linguistic markers. This approach is limited in predicting new connections between communities and justifying radicalisation pathways, but is relevant in modelling information diffusion. In this paper, the authors aim to demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of applying the tf-idf, doc2vec methods to assess the content similarity of online communities without signs of radicalisation and online communities with signs of radicalisation. This approach allowed the authors to identify communities with a significant tendency to unite (to establish direct links). The paper presents the results of the comparative study in the form of social graphs formed according to the principles of subscriber commonality, similarity of significant words, and contextual similarity based on the doc2vec model. The social graph based on doc2vec method performed better in terms of clustering of online communities as well as interpretability of the results. This is crucial for detecting and predicting radicalisation online, as it opens the prospect of exploring the nature of assortativity in the observed network.

Written Language: A Promising Gateway to Anxiety Disorders Assessment

Currently, self-report measures are the primary assessment tool for anxiety disorders. Since they have some limitations, alternative measurements, such as language-based measures, are worth investigating. This paper explores which language markers signal anxiety in fictitious stories written in response to four Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards. Participants ( n = 492) from a non-probabilistic convenience sample were asked to write a short story next to each TAT card after completing the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7. We used RoLIWC2015 to conduct the text analysis and applied the LASSO method to identify which language markers predict anxiety. The results showed that the respondents scoring high on anxiety also tend to use more words expressing negative emotions, and fewer words expressing positive emotions. Moreover, their language contained a higher frequency of words that implied semantic differentiation (i.e., but, else) and a lower frequency of words indicating leisure. In conclusion, this paper aims to shed new light on the multimethod assessment of anxiety, mainly focused on specific language signatures as reliable predictors of anxiety symptoms. Further research using more extensive text data is recommended to discover more linguistic markers and improve prediction accuracy.

Scammer Strategies and Social Actions in Online Filipino Transactions

As technology has developed newer and faster forms of communication, the internet has also become a convenient medium for scammers to interact with their targets. Since deception is understudied from a linguistic perspective, this paper investigated the persuasive strategies and linguistic markers of scammers and analyzed the social actions of both scammers and their targets—all of whom are users of the Filipino language. This qualitative study employed digital conversation analysis in analyzing ten conversations between scammers and their targets—all of which were failed scams. The results showed that scammers used emotion, credibility, and logic in persuading their targets. The following linguistic markers were found in their utterances: (1) pronouns that are personal, exclusive, inclusive, noncommittal, impersonal, and ambiguous; (2) negation used for denial, non-existence, refusal, discouragement, inability, loss, contrast, clarification, and correction; (3) emotion words expressing happiness, astonishment or amusement, worry, doubt or fear, shame, regret or inadequacy, and fondness, and lastly, (4) cognitive verbs indicating equivocation, and expression of knowledge or understanding. Furthermore, the social actions of the scammers and the targets were categorized into four sequences that generally involved certain actions: (1) pre-offer (asking about and providing details), (2) insert (expressing doubt and explaining), (3) offer (offering or asking for money/info, and rejecting), and (4) post-offer (insisting, showing aggression, or conceding and retaliating or interrogating). Although all conversations resulted in the targets’ rejection of the scammers’ offer, which undermines social solidarity, dispreference is seen as a beneficial response in conversations involving scams.

Building Rapport in an Oral Mediation Task: An Analysis of Upper-Intermediate Learners’ Use of Small Talk and Other Positive Politeness Language Formulae

This article analyses the individual responses of 20 upper-intermediate learners to an oral mediation task. Particularly, it focuses on the initial and closing linguistic resources and strategies that are displayed in each participant’s production in order to address the needs of the recipient included in the task description. With this aim, some categories of analysis are created. These categories have been designed following the descriptors of the Companion Volume of the CEFRL as well as previous literature and studies on small talk’s functionalities. Therefore, to analyse the initiation of the conversation the categories of using greetings, empathy and compassion linguistic markers and readiness to help formulae are explored. On the other hand, to inquire into the ending of the sustained-monologue, comprehension checking formulae, empathetic markers used as well as concluding and summarizing formulae have been studied. The results show that there is a lack of attention to the task’s description and, thus, to the recipient’s needs. Furthermore, additional training is needed in concluding formulae, including unimportant talk.

Языковые маркеры прецедентности имени собственного в тексте-реципиенте

The study aims to establish a typology of linguistic markers enabling the determination of the level of precedent/non-precedent status of proper names through the analysis of verbal units. The paper explores ways in which the addresser signals the precedent status of a proper name in the context of reality terminologically referred to as a “linguistic marker of the precedent status of a proper name”. The features of the linguistic environment of a precedent name in the recipient text are described and analyzed. The content of the “recipient text” concept is defined within the scientific paradigm of the theory of precedent phenomena (specifically, the precedent name), noting its indirect and direct relationship with the concept of a “source text” in a specific linguistic situation. The study is novel in that it is the first to describe a system of linguistic markers of the precedent status of proper names. A technology for determining the status of a precedent name through a comprehensive analysis of the contextual meaning of the proper name in the recipient text is presented. As a result, the study identifies and characterizes in detail the types of linguistic markers of the precedent status of proper names employed by the addresser as units to signal the precedent, connotative usage of proper names in context.

Stylometry and Deep Learning: A case study on Milan Kundera's Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli

This study aims to uncover the prototypical linguistic elements and patterns of Kundera's prose in his
 novel Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli (1979, Gallimard). The exploration employs statistical and machine
 learning techniques, including the application of Hyperbase in both its web and standard versions.
 Hyperbase provides deep learning features for text classification tasks (Savoy 2015; Tuzzi & Cortelazzo
 2018), based on convolutional neural networks (Kalchbrenner et al. 2014; Kim 2014) which go beyond
 the process of convolution and incorporate an innovative deconvolution mechanism that extracts key
 linguistic markers essential for classification purposes (Vanni et al. 2018; Mayaffre & Vanni 2021). The
 training of the Hyperbase deep learning model involves an extensive corpus containing novels by 36
 authors, including Kundera, thus encompassing the French literature landscape from 1960-2014. The
 study leads to the identification of linguistic markers related to vocabulary, morphosyntax, lexical and
 grammatical patterns, and lexico-grammatical structures. These markers are then examined to reveal
 the underlying aesthetic intentions of the author. The conclusion focuses on the contribution of deep
 learning and statistics in the context of this qualitative linguistic study of a literary text.

What lies beneath: using student reflections to study the entrepreneurial mindset in entrepreneurship education

PurposeThis research presents and evaluates a method for assessing the entrepreneurial mindset (EM) of students in higher education.Design/methodology/approachThe research considers EM a multi-variable psychological construct, which can be broken down into several conceptual sub-categories. Using data from a master course in entrepreneurship, the authors show how these categories can be applied to analyze students’ written reflections to identify linguistic markers of EM.FindingsThe research reports three main findings: analyzing student reflections is an appropriate method to explore the state and development of students’ EM; the theoretically-derived EM categories can be nuanced and extended with insight from contextualized empirical insights; and student reflections reveal counter-EM categories that represent challenges in the educator’s endeavor to foster students’ EM.Research limitations/implicationsThe commitment of resources to researching EM requires the dedication of efforts to develop methods for assessing the state and development of students’ EM. The framework can be applied to enhance the theoretical rigor and methodological transparency of studies of EM in entrepreneurship education.Practical implicationsThe framework can be of value to educators who currently struggle to assess if and how their educational design fosters EM attributes.Originality/valueThis inquiry contributes to the critical research discussion about how to operationalize EM in entrepreneurship education studies. The operationalization of a psychological concept such as EM is highly important because a research focus cannot be maintained on something that cannot be studied in a meaningful way.

Linguistic markers for major depressive disorder: a cross-sectional study using an automated procedure.

The identification of language markers, referring to both form and content, for common mental health disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD), can facilitate the development of innovative tools for early recognition and prevention. However, studies in this direction are only at the beginning and are difficult to implement due to linguistic variability and the influence of cultural contexts. This study aims to identify language markers specific to MDD through an automated analysis process based on RO-2015 LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). A sample of 62 medicated patients with MDD and a sample of 43 controls were assessed. Each participant provided language samples that described something that was pleasant for them. (1) Screening tests for MDD (MADRS and DASS-21); (2) Ro-LIWC2015 - Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count - a computerized text analysis software, validated for Romanian Language, that analyzes morphology, syntax and semantics of word use. Depressive patients use different approaches in sentence structure, and communicate in short sentences. This requires multiple use of the punctuation mark period, which implicitly requires directive communication, limited in exchange of ideas. Also, participants from the sample with depression mostly use impersonal pronouns, first person pronoun in plural form - not singular, a limited number of prepositions and an increased number of conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, negations, verbs in the past tense, and much less in the present tense, increased use of words expressing negative affects, anxiety, with limited use of words indicating positive affects. The favorite topics of interest of patients with depression are leisure, time and money. Depressive patients use a significantly different language pattern than people without mood or behavioral disorders, both in form and content. These differences are sometimes associated with years of education and sex, and might also be explained by cultural differences.

Аргументативное развертывание текста парламентских выступлений на микроуровне (на материале французского языка)

The research aims to identify functional types of semantic dependence within a fragment of the text of parliamentary speeches – the argumentative component. The paper examines the notion of an argumentative component and identifies its main elements. To establish an intentionally determined semantic dependence within this text segment, the notion of an argumentative move (AM) is introduced, which is understood as a functional unit of the addresser’s general communicative strategy and which is aimed at realizing a specific communicative intention. The relations of the functional-semantic connection, updating its argumentative moves, as well as the linguistic means that represent them are described. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that based on the material of the French language, it typologizes the relations of semantic dependence at the micro level of the argumentative construction of the text of parliamentary speeches, taking into account the functional-communicative aspect. As a result of the research, the intentionally determined semantic relations typical for the corpus of texts under study were determined: proper causation (AM ‘causal basis’), nonproper causation (AM ‘argument’), consequence (AM ‘conclusion’), concession (AM ‘insufficient basis’), disjunctiveness (AM ‘expanded alternative’ and AM ‘alternative motivation’), their linguistic markers were identified and systematized.

Linguistic analysis of health anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health anxiety, which is defined as fear of having or contracting serious physical illness, is particularly salient in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a mixed methods study in which 578 narrative samples were analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to determine linguistic markers from six LIWC categories relevant to cognitive-behavioral features of health anxiety. Broad linguistic predictors were analyzed through three backward elimination regression models in order to inform subcategory predictors of each area of health anxiety. Thus, both broad and specific linguistic predictors of general health anxiety, virus-relevant body vigilance, and fears of viral contamination were examined. Greater use of affective category words in written narratives predicted general health anxiety, as well as body vigilance and viral contamination fears. These findings represent the first direct demonstration of linguistic analysis of health anxiety and provide nuanced information about the nature and etiology of health anxiety.