Self-referential Language Research Articles

Managerial Self-References in Corporate Disclosures: An Analysis of MD&A

This study examines strategic pronoun usage in the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) section of annual reports. Through automated textual analysis of a large sample of MD&As, we find that managers of firms with higher earnings growth tend to use more self-inclusive pronouns(e.g., “ we, ” “ us, ” and “ our ”) and fewer self-exclusive words (e.g., “the company ”). This self-referential language pattern is associated with a higher likelihood of future financial restatements. Our findings contribute to the literature on corporate narrative disclosures and identify a potential new indicator of financial misstatements. The results have implications for investors, analysts, auditors, and regulators.

The many faces of the Liar Paradox

The Liar Paradox is a classic argument that creates a contradiction by reflection on a sentence that attributes falsity to itself: ‘this sentence is false’. In our paper we will discuss the ways in which the Liar sentence (and its paradoxical argument) can be represented in first-order logic. The key to the representation is to use first-order logic to model a self-referential language. We will also discuss several related sentences, like the Liar cycles, the empirical versions of the Liar and the Truth teller sentences.

Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Chrystal Ann Chemris. <i>The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation</i>

Hero, adventurer and advocate volunteers: A visual analysis of volunteer tourists’ identities on Instagram

ABSTRACT When the hybrid business of volunteer tourism (volunteer service coupled with leisure touristic activities) meets the self-referential language of Instagram, travel photography intertwines with the identity construction process. Accordingly, this article examines the visual and textual narratives used to build voluntourists’ identities in their posts from their experiences abroad. Authors highlight the recurrence of a political/apolitical spectrum across which users perform the identities of hero, adventurer, and advocate volunteers. We argue that each identity corresponds to a different approach to the interaction with the local “other.”

Depression, neuroticism, extraversion and pronoun use in first and foreign languages following mood induction

Previous studies have noticed that depression, neuroticism, extraversion, and mood can leave linguistic fingerprints, particularly on pronoun use. The first aim of the present study was to examine the linguistic associations and impacts of these psychological constructs among Iranian native speakers of Farsi. Secondly, the linguistic correlates of depression, neuroticism, and extraversion were investigated in English, as a foreign language. For these goals, 220 Iranian adults (58.2% female, Mage = 25.2; SD = 5.19) participated and were assigned to four different groups (positive, neutral, and negative Farsi mood groups and a neutral English group). As expected, depression correlated with I-talk in Farsi (r = 0.217, p < 0.05). It was also associated with more negative emotion words (r = 0.355, p < 0.05), less positive emotion words (r = 0.421, p < 0.05), and less we-talk (r = 0.22, p < 0.05). Nonetheless, the results were not supportive of the association between I-talk and neuroticism or extraversion. Consistent with former observations, induced negative mood decreased self-referential language. The English responses showed that speaking in one's foreign versus native language can strongly diminish the linguistic effects of the psychological constructs.

Talk from the Top: Leadership and Self-Legitimation in International Organizations

AbstractHow do leaders create legitimacy in international organizations (IOs)? It is widely acknowledged that legitimacy matters to IOs, but little research examines internal self-legitimation—the creation of legitimacy for staff, rather than for external audiences—and who specifically undertakes these self-legitimation activities in IOs. This paper fills these gaps by examining the particular role of leaders in self-legitimation and I develop a theoretical framework that shows (1) how leaders have a unique role to play as legitimators due to their high social status within the IO and their access to discursive resources for legitimation, (2) how leaders create internal legitimacy through the introduction or reintroduction of narratives and the creation of self-referential language, and (3) how leader-led self-legitimation entails three potential risks. I illustrate these points with three case studies, one from the World Bank and two from the United Nations. I conclude by proposing a new research agenda for this underexplored area of IO and legitimacy scholarship.

1076 Self-referential Language In Trauma Narratives Predicts Shorter Sleep Duration In Women With Ptsd

Abstract Introduction The use of self-referential language, defined as first-person singular pronouns (e.g. I, me, my), in trauma narratives has been found to predict post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity. Additionally, taking a self-immersed perspective correlates with higher blood pressure reactivity than a self-distanced perspective. Given this relationship between self-immersed perspectives and physiological processes, we investigated the relationship between self-referential language and sleep in people with PTSD, as dysfunctional sleep is a major treatment target in this disorder. Methods Seventy-five participants (49 females; Mage=31.8, SDage=8.8) meeting DSM-5 criteria for PTSD were administered the PTSD Checklist for the DSM-5 (PCL-5) and the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Sleep duration was assessed with the PSQI. Participants provided typed descriptions of their traumatic event, which were then analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 software to count instances of first-person singular pronouns (“I” words). Linear regression, with PCL-5 scores and “I” words entered stepwise, was used to predict scores on the PSQI sleep duration subscale. Use of “I” words between the sexes was also compared. Results For females but not males, PTSD severity significantly predicted sleep duration (R2=.207, p=.001). Additionally, the number of “I” words in the trauma narratives predicted an additional 8% of the variance in sleep duration for females (R2 change=.083, β=.288, p=.029) but not males. Females used significantly more self-referential language in their narratives (M=11.84, SD=8.42) compared to males (M=5.25, SD=6.10, p=.001). Conclusion After controlling for PTSD severity, self-referential language in trauma narratives significantly predicted shorter sleep duration in females. While speculative, this finding suggests that treatment approaches for PTSD may benefit from a focus on targeting self-referential processes to improve sleep and PTSD in females but not males. As dysfunctional sleep is a hallmark of PTSD, further investigation into this relationship may illuminate a new treatment avenue for this disorder. Support W81XWH-14-1-0570

Depression, negative emotionality, and self-referential language: A multi-lab, multi-measure, and multi-language-task research synthesis.

Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression-I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for negative emotionality. Further, the depression-I-talk effect was substantially reduced when controlled for negative emotionality but this was not the case when the negative emotionality-I-talk effect was controlled for depression. These results suggest that the robust empirical link between depression and I-talk largely reflects a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk. Self-referential language using first-person singular pronouns may therefore be better construed as a linguistic marker of general distress proneness or negative emotionality rather than as a specific marker of depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Depression, Negative Emotionality, and Self-Referential Language: A Multi-Lab, Multi-Measure, and Multi-Language-Task Research Synthesis

Supplemental Material for Depression, Negative Emotionality, and Self-Referential Language: A Multi-Lab, Multi-Measure, and Multi-Language-Task Research Synthesis

La construcción retórica de la argumentación jurídica.

Abstract. The legal argument is a rhetorical procedure in which the interpreter constructs the meaning of the law by performing language actions on the self-referential language of the legal statement and on the language of the various narrative versions of the fact at trial. The rhetorical construction of the meaning in the argumentative discourse of the parties is submitted at trial as the exact meaning of the rule, and the strict implementation of the legal statement. This article proposes rhetorical resources that enable the construction of the meaning of the argumentative discourse in the lawsuit.

Jacob Edmond A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative LiteratureA Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. Jacob Edmond. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xv+272.

<i>Jacob Edmond</i> A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature<i>A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature</i>. Jacob Edmond. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xv+272.

A formal approach to evolution as self-referential language

Abstract The recursive, self-referential, character of evolutionary process can be restated through a ‘language’ model in which genes, gene expression, and environment are represented as interacting information sources. The approach uses the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to provide powerful necessary conditions for punctuated evolutionary transitions that can themselves be expressed as highly structured large deviations having their own grammar and syntax. The methodology defines, in a sense, the riverbanks that constrain, but do not determine, the self-dynamic stream of evolutionary process.

Digression, Ethical Work, and Salinger's Postmodern Turn

Many contributors to Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature’s 1963 special issue on J.D. Salinger found themselves dealing with the sticky fact that his writing after The Catcher in the Rye (1951) had grown increasingly unconventional and, for numerous readers, off-putting. In the lead essay, for example, Ihab Hassan focused on ‘‘certain peculiarities of form in these stories, a form that is so asymmetrical, so tolerant of chance and digression, as to warrant the name of antiform’’ (5). Salinger’s asymmetries and digressions were of interest to Hassan because they exemplified a ‘‘new conception of form, particularly suitable to their vision, which is becoming rife in current literature’’ (6). Although today any critical attention paid to Salinger is centered almost exclusively on The Catcher in the Rye, it is worth asking how his later work could be representative of a new antiform becoming ‘‘rife’’ in American literature. This later work is indeed significant because its digressive sensibility can be read as a response to the influence of New Critical attitudes toward narrative fiction, which held that to be successful, fiction must exhibit a unity (‘‘The sense of wholeness or oneness’’) which digression would disrupt (Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction 608). 1 Salinger’s aesthetic, on the other hand, emphasized that far from being a rhetorical device that merely distracts from the main point of the work, digression could be significant in and of itself. In fact, insofar as his highly digressive work disrupts the sense of unity described by the New Criticism, it encourages readers to re-evaluate how they assign meaning and significance in and for the work, a task that amounts to what I will term ethical work. In its interest in antiform more broadly and digression specifically, Salinger’s later work, dismissed though it has been by those critics working from New Critical standards of evaluation, actually anticipates the postmodern turn of the later 1960s and beyond. This essay first describes a New Critical Steven Belletto is assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College. His essays on postwar American literature and culture have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, ELH, Clio, and Criticism. His book, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

In Praise of Modest Men: Self-Display and Self-Effacement in Nineteenth-Century France

Nineteenth-century France underwent a process of individuation, or self-affirmation, that was at once political (elections), socio-economic (market forces and social promotion), and cultural (autobiographical writings). While some contemporaries embraced this evolution and others rejected it, numerous individuals sought to enjoy its benefits while shielding French society from the threat of ambition and dissolution. Many male elites, this article argues, did so through a prescriptive and self-referential language of modesty. Indebted to ancient Christian and secular vocabularies, modesty acquired a new resonance as compensation for aspirations and lifestyles that could prove both seductive and distressing. This article focuses on provincial learned societies, speeches given at school awards ceremonies, and the career of celebrated doctor Jean-Louis Alibert. At every juncture, it finds individuals who employed an idiom of modesty when speaking of themselves, fellow elites, or workers and peasants. Vis-à-vis themselves, they sought less to erase individuation than to make it socially innocuous and conceptually pleasing. Their twin aspirations to self-affirmation and self-effacement capture a broader effort to resolve contradictions between, on the one hand, individual merit, initiative and opportunity and, on the other, equality, duty and community.

Trees for truth

This papers aims to analyse sentences of a self-referential language containing a truth-predicate by means of a Smullyan-style tableau system. Our analysis covers three variants of Kripke's partial-model semantics (strong and weak Kleene's and supervaluational) and three variants of the revision theory of truth (Belnap's, Gupta's and Herzberger's).

Gwendolyn Macewen’s “The Nine Arcana of the Kings” as Creative Myth and Paradigm

G W E N D O L Y N M A C E W E N ’ S “ T H E N I N E A R C A N A O F T H E K I N G S ” AS C R E A T I V E M Y T H A N D P A R A D I G M R. F. GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL Surrey, B.C. firp -Lhe Nine Arcana of the Kings” provides a synecdochic structure or para­ digm for the creative vision that develops throughout MacEwen’s poetry.1 Here I build on the insights of Margaret Atwood in “ MacEwen’s Muse,” in which that critic develops the idea of a muse-lover who inspires the poetspeaker with a vision of the truth. Also, I make use of the related theory of a poetic creation myth at the centre of MacEwen’s vision. This theory, of course, has recently been re-elaborated by Jan Bartley in Invocations,2 By discovering such a paradigm in “Nine Arcana,” we establish a poetic context for reading MacEwen’s other poetry, especially that written prior to The Shadow-Maker when the muse-lover is still a dominant figure in her poetry.3 As a preliminary step, I will briefly make note of the poem’s origin in Mac­ Ewen’s writing experience of King of Egypt, King of Dreams in order to distinguish generically “The Nine Arcana of the Kings” from the pseudo­ history and as a way of placing the poems in the category of the “creative” as opposed to the “borrowed” myth of history or legend. Finally, I will locate a basic mythological paradigm in “The Nine Arcana of the Kings,” since it contains the thematic core for other structures in MacEwen’s creative vision. MacEwen as a post-modern is essentially deconstructive in her reluctance to maintain a borrowed or fixed mythological apparatus and in her compulsion to disassemble and rearrange elements of several eastern mythologies. Never­ theless, the shifting kaleidoscope of mythologies in her poetry does assume a kinetic and very interesting structure of its own making that repays a close examination of her work. Accordingly, “The Nine Arcana of the Kings” with its Egyptian source finds structural parallels in her poems using Sumerian, Assyrian, or other mythological/historical material. Although the “borrowed myth” builds on traditional material by recon­ structing or deconstructing it, the “creative myth” (which inevitably borrows from mythic or story elements as the understructure of literature) typically reduces its material to archetypal essentials. The invented story of the “crea­ tive myth,” moreover, goes beyond realism, since it is distanced and a specu­ lative element is paradigmatically presented. Although the earlier part of the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , 2, June 1988 novel King of Egypt, King of Dreams is primarily borrowed history or myth, the culminative section fictionalizes events in the interest of the spirit of truth rather than historical fact. The poems, which focus on the fictional extension of the pseudo-history, simplify and idealize the story by emphasizing certain underlying archetypal structures. Central to the poems is an incestuous love relationship between the sup­ posedly historical Smenkhare and Meritaton of the novel, which represents a natural drive towards integration. Destructive in its consequences, the royal relationship dramatizes MacEwen’s linguistically and poetically derived theory of the destructive synthesis. According to this theory, which is an extension of the creative word or Logos that shapes reality, an essentially self-referential language becomes inverted so that distinctions are eliminated and an absence remains. The perfect word which articulates reality’s quintessential quality would hypothetically replace that reality, since word or idea and reality would finally coincide. As almost algebraic figures in a poetic equation, therefore, the lovers are simply the prince and the princess in the poems and bear little resemblance to the realistic portraits of MacEwen’s projected history.4 In King of Egypt, King of Dreams, this destructive and incestuous love relationship between the half-brother and sister marks a symbolic outcome of their father’s, the influential pharaoh Wanre...

Beyond cognition: The voices in inner speech

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code