Prominent Discourses Research Articles

Third Person Pronoun and Demonstrative Resolution in Mandarin Chinese and Discourse Prominence

Introduction: The third person pronoun and demonstrative resolution are influenced by multiple factors in Mandarin Chinese. The factors influencing reference choice and the relations between discourse prominence and pronoun resolution are discussed. It suggests discourse prominence is an essential organizational principle in reference resolution. The factors that influence pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese might be studied and explained from the perspective of discourse prominence.
 Methodology: A formal operational scheme with conditional inference recursive partitioning tree and random forest analysis analyzing discourse data collected from a picture-sequence-based narrative elicitation method is provided.
 Results: The results confirmed the idea that the discourse prominence-lending cues, including thematic role, animacy, grammatic role, topic, referential distance, and mentioned number, influence pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese. Animacy and reference distance might be involved in the important variances, and reference distance relates to topic maintenance, discourse dynamicity, and structural attracting.
 Conclusion: The findings demonstrated that the discourse prominence-lending cues influence pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese. The third person pronouns often signal topic maintenance and high discourse prominence, while demonstratives often signal topic shift and low discourse prominence. Moreover, demonstratives often signal focus reinforcement. Therefore, topic and focus are also considered as the two crucial elements affecting pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese.

MARITIME DIPLOMACY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN: WAY FORWARD FOR PAKISTAN

The Indian Ocean has gained prominence in the international geopolitical discourse. It is becoming a showground for major competition between the new and existing great powers. Maritime Diplomacy, in this regard, is a valuable instrument for averting conflict. The range of options available are from the cooperative ones to persuasive and coercive selection for the maritime forces. It is helpful not only to those utilizing it but also to academicians who are trying to decipher the more extensive ramifications of the utilization of sea-based strategy. Mahan documented, the most powerful state of the maritime realm is generally also richest and economically prevalent most in the international order. The study uses qualitative method to analyze the existing literature comprising of primary and secondary set of imperatives to provide structured insight that would be useful to policy-makers and academicians. The Pakistani perspective and interplay in the changing geopolitics is assessed in the region termed as “pivotal of the world”.

Multiple constraints modulate the processing of Chinese reflexives in discourse

This study investigates the real-time processing of Chinese reflexives ziji and ta-ziji in discourse when multiple constraints are involved. Our primary goal is to examine the time course of syntactic and non-syntactic constraints in reflexive resolution. The Syntactic Filter Hypothesis argues that syntactic cues are prioritized at the early stages of processing, in contrast to the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis which posits that at this stage all streams of information can be recruited. The results of two self-paced reading experiments show that in neutral contexts where no antecedent is discourse-prominent, syntactic locality and verb semantics immediately impact real-time processing of ziji and ta-ziji. Crucially, participants’ processing patterns are also influenced at an early stage by the discourse topical status of the non-local antecedents. Overall, these findings suggest that syntax, verb semantics, and discourse prominence all play important roles at an early stage.

Navigating Detransition Borders: An Exploration of Social Media Narratives

Detransition, a relatively recent phenomenon within academic discourse and mainstream media, refers to individuals who transition from the gender they transitioned into. Experiences of detransition, including those shared on social media, are poorly understood. Drawing upon narratives of gender detransition as shared on a global social media site, this analysis explores and seeks to better understand how detransition experiences are shared; and the effect of detransition narratives on gendered embodiment and belonging. Employing Butler’s (Undoing gender. Routledge, 2004) notion of livable lives and Crawford’s (Seattle J Soc Justice 8(2):515–539, 2010) conception of trans architecture, this analysis theoretically extends trans conversations to include discourses and narratives of detransition. A total of 130 archival posts by 36 contributors relating to detransition were collected from a popular global social media site where the engagement of reflexive thematic analysis contributed to the development of three themes: Contemplating transformation; Experiences of detransition; and Prominent discourses for detransition. Study findings suggest that detransition narratives expressed on this social media site demonstrate the multifaceted and complex ways in which non-normative gendered lives are rendered unlivable. In response, this analysis problematizes gender by conceptualizing detransition as a transformation toward a trans space outside a cisnormative frame contributing to making gendered lives more livable.

Explaining the development policy implementation gap: A case of a failed food sovereignty policy in Bolivia

The food sovereignty concept has gained prominence in public policy discourses in the global South during the last decades. However, food sovereignty has contested definitions and is interpreted differently by conflicting societal interests. Consequentially, the translation of food sovereignty concepts into concrete policies and practices is often characterized by conflicts and controversies rooted in different institutional logics guiding the involved actors. In this article, we analyse how the logics of the corporatized agro-food system affected the local implementation of top-down state-induced public food sovereignty-based policies in Bolivia. We conducted a multiple-case study of public food procurement markets for school feeding programs involving three rural municipalities and small-scale producers in the Altiplano region. The data consists of 53 interviews conducted during 2011–2015. We found that corporate food regime logics influence the local policy implementation process in three ways. First, by framing the chosen policy design as neoliberal individualistic and transaction-based market-orientated. Second, by envisioning for the Aymara subsistence peasants a socially and culturally undesirable identity and class transformation; and thirdly, indirectly through the dependency of the school feed program on adjacent field-level institutions shaped by the corporate food regime logics. We conclude that the corporate food regime logics shaped the notion of what was considered legitimate practices and processes required for smallholders to access the public food procurement market, whereas their own conceptions aligned with food sovereignty principles were disregarded.

Prevention of Identity Politics Through Multicultural Education

The importance of multicultural education for journalists to serve as a capital in perceiving the reality of facts to shape media reality to build the opinion of the electorate. The research method used is qualitative research with Entman framing analysis. The data collection method uses documentation in the form of news text published by Pacitanku.com and Lintas7.net regarding candidates in the 2020 Pacitan Pilkada. Data analysis uses Entman framing analysis with emphasis, prominence, definitions, explanations, moral reasons, and text recommendations in news discourse. The results of local online media research with emphasis and prominence using identity politics such as; the brother of SBY, Nahdatul Ulama, Gagarin, a member of Nahdatul Ulama, the struggle of clerics with inspiration to build Pacitan, SBY founding father of the Democratic Party, Indrata Nur Bayuaji is similar to Indartato 2020. Local online media framing in perceiving the candidates for regent and deputy regent of Pacitan still uses identity to build public opinion. Increase electability and vote support of candidates. The need for multiculturalism education, especially in local online media as agents of reality construction, by prioritizing the construction of work performance and the quality of candidates. Local online media must become guardians of information to provide useful messages for the welfare of citizens to maintain the integrity of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia by upholding diversity.

Exploring Residual Profit Allocation

Residual profit allocation (RPA) schemes have come to prominence in discussions of international tax reform but with almost nothing known about their economic impact. These schemes tax multinationals by allocating their “routine” profits to source countries and sharing their remaining “residual” profit across countries on some formulaic basis. This paper explores the implications, conceptual and empirical, of moving to some form of RPA. Residual profits are estimated to be substantial and concentrated in relatively few multinational enterprises. The impact on tax revenue appears beneficial for developing countries. Aggregate production efficiency is unlikely to increase unless routine profits are lightly taxed. (JEL F23, H25, H87, L25)

Mapping the state of the art of creative cluster research: a bibliometric and thematic analysis

ABSTRACT The notion of creative clusters has become the focus of a growing number of policy initiatives aimed at revitalizing economies by means of creativity. However, despite their prominence in policy discourse, creative clusters are still a ‘fuzzy’ concept, defined and treated differently in different strands of research. To address these disparities, this paper presents a systematic literature review of creative cluster research (CCR), with the aim of: (1) exploring the state of the art in the field, (2) pointing out some important limitations, and (3) outlining a future research agenda. A total of 355 articles published between 1986 and 2019 were analysed, drawing upon a combination of manual coding, bibliometric analysis, and text mining techniques. This multi-method approach allowed us to provide both a meta-analysis of CCR and an exploration of its thematic content. In so doing, our paper contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how creative clusters have been studied over time, both broadly and in relation to different creative sectors and geographical contexts. Moreover, through the identification of research gaps and boundaries of knowledge in the field, it points to key methodological and conceptual development issues to be addressed in future studies.

Políticas públicas de educação financeira: do processo histórico às ações práticas em Instituições de Ensino Superior

Abstract In current times, the importance of financial education has gained prominence in discussions held within multilateral organizations and governments around the world, with the purpose of building a society that is aware of the impact of their actions as individual financial agents in global society, through education. In this environment, the general objective of this article is to discuss the conception of financial education as public in Brazil, tracing a mapping of the main practical actions in higher education, after the implementation of the National Strategy for Financial Education (ENEF). As for the methodology, a bibliographical survey is carried out of the scientific works published and made available on the Capes Portal and SciELO-Brasil platforms, in the period between 2011 and 2021, which address financial education as a public policy in the context of higher education. As a result, it is perceived that higher education students have largely been excluded from public policies related to this topic and Universities have acted timidly as disseminators of financial literacy and production of scientific knowledge, through academic publications that can contribute to the enhancement and expansion of ENEF's reach.

εmbɔsì Definiteness: A Pragmatic Approach

This contribution examines the pragmatic approaches of definiteness in εmbɔsì language. The analysis reveals that εmbsì definiteness interacts with the pragmatic principles of familiarity as regards the second mention of the entity in the discourse, and identifiability with the hearer ability to uniquely identify the entity. In addition, the study shows that the contextual use of εmbɔsì definite description is subject of different functions. It refers to anaphora or situational reference, including the immediate and larger situations. εmbɔsì definiteness also plays the role function and, used with a post nominal demonstrative, it expresses the discourse prominence.

‘I try to be true to myself but other people have to fit you into a box’: Exploring how voluntarily childfree women discursively negotiate their sense of self in a pronatalist society

Women who have consciously remained free of having children, also known as voluntarily childfree (Blackstone, 2019), occupy liminal spaces created for them by dominant social discourses that valorise reproduction and vilify childfreedom (Gotlib, 2016). Reproductive desire is socially constructed as biologically innate (Franke, 2010) and pronatalist discourses construct voluntarily childfree (VC) women as making an ‘unnatural’ choice (Gillespie, 2003). This research aims to explore how socially constructed positions about voluntarily childfree women have impacted their sense of self. Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (Thompson et al., 2018) was used to listen for contrapuntal voices within VC women’s negotiation of identities. Through semi-structured interviews with six women, three prominent discourses were heard: Negotiating Identity in a Pronatalist Society; Still Being a Woman Whilst Not Being a Mother; and Political Implications of Being Voluntarily Childfree. Contrapuntal voices heard within these discourses highlighted that VC women skilfully negotiate complex and conflicting subject positions to create space for their identities as women. The complex nature of VC women’s subjective experience of selfhood serves as a challenge to the homogenised view of women’s identity perpetuated by the patriarchal discourses prevalent in political structures of social policies, healthcare and workplace settings.

Humans of Instagram

Instagram has become a contemporary platform for presenting our digital identity. In this study, the Instagram influencer phenomenon is investigated from an identity, self-presentation, and impression management perspective. By focusing on the language of Instagram that enables this identity, its navigation and manifestations are explored. In-depth interviews were conducted with 8 fashion, beauty and lifestyle influencers, and the obtained data was analysed through the approach of discourse analysis, rooted in discursive psychology. Prominent discourses include a critical discussion on the ideas of aesthetic influencer identity, ‘handle names’, ‘follower’s gaze’, ‘stories’, ‘posts’, and ‘filters’. The findings provide an exploratory and critical perspective on the ways in which Instagram is creating and shaping identities. By offering an understanding of the facets of the influencer identity, this pioneering study highlights the different negotiations, conflicts, and resolutions in the performance of this identity.

Relating agent prominence to discourse prominence: DO-clefts in German

Abstract The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).

Lesbians in Modern Day Britain: A Corpus-Based Study of The Discourses Surrounding Lesbians in the Spoken BNC2014 and the British Press

This paper explores the language used to discuss lesbians in both informal spoken British English and written British news media. The research draws on two data sources: the Spoken BNC2014 and a specialised corpus of 1.2 million words from newspapers written between January 2017 and December 2017 inclusive. Discourses (re)produced in both informal conversations and the mass media are ways of sustaining and maintaining ideological stances towards groups marginalised due to their sexuality (see Baker, 2014; Gupta, 2016). In this paper, I argue that the discourses surrounding lesbians found within both corpora are problematic and archaic. I discuss two prominent discourses in spoken British English (that lesbians are typically seen as masculine, which in turn is judged negatively, and that lesbianism is a choice), two prominent discourses in written British English (that lesbians are a threat to children and that lesbianism is a marked identity which is delegitimised), and one discourse which overlaps across both corpora (that all gender, sexual, and romantic minorities are a homogenised group). The discourses in both corpora appear to be damaging to how lesbians are viewed in general society and tend to mask underlying homophobic ideologies.<br /><br />

A genre-based approach in the secondary school English writing class: Voices from student-teachers in the teaching practicum.

While the genre-based approach (GBA) has assumed increasing prominence in discussions of writing pedagogy for diverse classrooms, little is known about how secondary school student-teachers understand and adopt genre pedagogies in the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing class. Based on the data from semi-structured interviews and teaching materials, this study examined Chinese EFL student-teachers’ knowledge and use of genre-based writing instruction (GBWI) during the teaching practicum and explored the challenges they encountered in enacting it. The findings demonstrated that teacher informants showed some familiarity with genre pedagogies, especially in terms of scaffolding the linguistic features and semantic patterns in the focused genres. However, they were generally confused over the connection between language, content, and context, and their GBWI practice scarcely involved the explicit teaching of the linguistic and semantic choices for a specific audience and context, which gave rise to some perceived tensions in the teaching reality. Further probing has revealed the complex interplay between Chinese EFL student-teachers’ professional knowledge, perceived difficulties, and genre instructional practice in the secondary school writing class. The study concludes with practical implications for the student-teachers’ professional development of effective GBA.

Destigmatizing The Occupation: Role of Occupational Branding and Collective Identity Work

By questioning the fundamental nature of the occupation and targeting the occupational members as 'dirty' and 'immoral,' occupational stigma is a big concern still plaguing our employment landscape worldwide. It threatens employees' identity, develops the feeling of being unvalued, and lowers their dignity. However, by focusing only on coping rather than stigma removal, existing studies fall short of offering a solution to the issue. In the current study, we address this gap by proposing how destigmatization of the occupation can be achieved by changing the existing societal narratives about occupation and by building occupational branding. We empirically explore our idea by conducting a qualitative study on the Indian beauty occupation to understand how they have achieved the destigmatization of their occpation. We employ the method of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as it helps understand the discourses of social wrong and unravels various means of eliminating the social wrong. Accordingly, we propose that by using collective identitiy work, occupational members brand 3Ps of the occupation i.e. people, process and purpose to achieve destigmatization. Our study contributes by exploring how the prominent discourses of stigma on the professions get modified into stigma-free legitimate discourses with the help of occupational branding.

Race as supplement: Surfaces and crevices of the Asian feminine body

ABSTRACT In the wake of COVID-19, the violence toward Asians has prompted many to reconsider how Asian femininity is rhetorically configured in the US racial landscape. In this article, I argue that the ongoing Othering of Asians as “perpetual foreigners” is sustained through ostensibly positive valuations of Asian feminine aesthetics, particularly related to skin texture and sexual prowess, as supplements for white bodies. The Asian feminine is most legible when enacting stereotypical embodiments that evoke sensory/sensual stimulation. Analysis of prominent discourses related to wellness and beauty products demonstrates how the rhetoric of racial supplementation, the aesthetic fetishization of racialized anatomical features as augmentation for the white consuming body, renders Asianness as most rhetorically legitimate when performing stereotypical embodiments. Beyond the one-dimensional nature of these stereotypes, they normalize the substitution of aesthetic performance for ontological motivation, which constrains the range of available opportunities for Asian and Asian American rhetors.

Discourse Prominence and Antecedent Mis-Retrieval during Native and Non-Native Pronoun Resolution

Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent’s discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irrespective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent’s discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing.

Semantic-role prominence is contingent on referent prominence in discourse: Experimental evidence from impersonals and passives in Polish

The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann &amp;amp; Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).

Introduction to a special section on the supervisee's perspective of reflective supervision/consultation.

The definition and implementation of reflective supervision/consultation (RS/C) in the infant early childhood mental health field (IECMH) has largely been driven by expert supervisors, researchers, and leaders in the field. The voice of the frontline practitioner, the most likely recipient of RS/C has had less prominence in the scholarly discourse, leaving unclear supervisees' perspectives on the meaning and value of RS/C. This special section addresses supervisees' experiences with RS/C across five studies. In the first two papers, researchers examined supervisees' perspectives on essential components of RS/C and perceived impacts of RS/C on their work. In paper 3, researchers report on perceived associations between RS/C and professionals' well-being. The fourth paper addresses experiences in RS/C and professionals' use of reflective practices. Finally, researchers in the fifth paper present the psychometric properties of an observational tool that focuses on the interaction between supervisors and supervisees. Collectively, the studies promote understanding about supervisees' perspectives and experiences that may benefit future research studies aimed at investigating the role of RS/C in well-being and practice and provide information for program administrators considering the inclusion of RS/C in professional development efforts.