Discourse Structure Research Articles

The #PantamiMustGo political activism: A textual analysis of narrative agency in protest discourse

This study analyses the narrative structure of the #PantamiMustGo hashtag activism in Nigeria. Applying qualitative textual analysis, the study examines the issues that were made salient in the protests and how they were constructed. Through the analysis of narrative agency, the study finds that activists constructed Ali Pantami as a threat to national security and called for his resignation. Two discourse structures were salient in the discursive construction of Ali Pantami and the Buhari government, namely the use of comparison to link the past with the present and the use of labelling as means of constructing social and political insecurity in Nigeria. This study contributes to stressing the role of social media in political activism through narrative agency analysis in the process of negotiating change by people who feel threatened by the apparatus of the state.

Dynamics of American Political Discourse of the 20th – Early 21st Centuries

The article addresses dynamics of conceptual space and communicative organization of the American political discourse in the 20 th – early 21 st centuries. The research objective is to identify transformations in the content of universal and nationally-marked concepts, as well as verbal modification of communicative strategies and tactics in the American political discourse of the periods under study. The main research methods applied are discourse, conceptual, semantic, and contextual analysis. The sampling corpus incorporates 662 public speeches of American presidents. The speeches under analysis belong to the ritual, orientational, and agonal genres of the political discourse. The main discourse-forming and nationally-marked concepts, features of the communicative structure of the American political discourse are established. The analysis of the metaphorical system as a way of realizing the intention in the American political discourse is carried out. The main types of conceptual metaphor, representing the discourse-forming concepts of the American political discourse are considered. The American political discourse conceptual space is more prone to transformations than its communicative structure in the studied timeframe. The nationally-marked concepts tend to be more dynamic than the universal discourse-forming concepts. The conceptual dynamism of the nationally-marked concepts manifests itself in the prevalence of the dominant features and the lacunarity at different stages of the American linguo-cultural community existence. The nationally-marked concepts components related to the historical and socio-cultural aspects of the speaking community life are brought into the open in the speeches of American presidents as transmitters of the national cultural values and role-status configurations in the political discourse of the 20 th – early 21 st centuries.

Research on the structure function recognition of PLOS.

The present study explores and investigates the efficiency of deep learning models in identifying discourse structure and functional features and explores the potential application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques in text mining, information measurement, and scientific communication. The PLOS literature series has been utilized to obtain full-text data, and four deep learning models, including BERT, RoBERTa, SciBERT, and SsciBERT, have been employed for structure-function recognition. The experimental findings reveal that the SciBERT model performs outstandingly, surpassing the other models, with an F1 score. Additionally, the performance of different paragraph structures has been analyzed, and it has been found that the model performs well in paragraphs such as method and result. The study's outcomes suggest that deep learning models can recognize the structure and functional elements at the discourse level, particularly for scientific literature, where the SciBERT model performs remarkably. Moreover, the NLP techniques have extensive prospects in various fields, including text mining, information measurement, and scientific communication. By automatically parsing and identifying structural and functional information in text, the efficiency of literature management and retrieval can be improved, thereby expediting scientific research progress. Therefore, deep learning and NLP technologies hold significant value in scientific research.

Highways to Silence Revisited: A History of Discourse Coalitions around Traffic Noise

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the density of road traffic in the Global North decreased considerably. For those enjoying the resulting tranquillity, it prompted the hope that this experience would raise public noise awareness and alter mobility culture. Now that Global North economies are returning to pre-pandemic levels, however, not much appears to have changed. This article aims to contribute to understanding the persistence of the status quo by historically tracing discourse coalitions around traffic noise in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Discourse coalitions are connections between groups of actors that have opposing interests but share a specific set of storylines concerning a public problem. As we will show by focusing on the issue of traffic noise in the Netherlands, the long-term results of these discourse coalitions -in terms of discourse structuration, institutionalization and destabilization- tend to shift attention away from structural interventions in traffic flows.

DiscoLQA: zero-shot discourse-based legal question answering on European Legislation

AbstractThe structures of discourse used by legal and ordinary languages share differences that foster technical issues when applying or fine-tuning general-purpose language models for open-domain question answering on legal resources. For example, longer sentences may be preferred in European laws (i.e., Brussels I bis Regulation EU 1215/2012) to reduce potential ambiguities and improve comprehensibility, distracting a language model trained on ordinary English. In this article, we investigate some mechanisms to isolate and capture the discursive patterns of legalese in order to perform zero-shot question answering, i.e., without training on legal documents. Specifically, we use pre-trained open-domain answer retrieval systems and study what happens when changing the type of information to consider for retrieval. Indeed, by selecting only the important parts of discourse (e.g., elementary units of discourse, EDU for short, or abstract representations of meaning, AMR for short), we should be able to help the answer retriever identify the elements of interest. Hence, with this paper, we publish Q4EU, a new evaluation dataset that includes more than 70 questions and 200 answers on 6 different European norms, and study what happens to a baseline system when only EDUs or AMRs are used during information retrieval. Our results show that the versions using EDUs are overall the best, leading to state-of-the-art F1, precision, NDCG and MRR scores.

Realitas Kemanusiaan dalam Naskah Feature “Cermin Kehidupan Pejuang Penyu” pada Buletin Pro 1 Radio Republik Indonesia Bengkulu

This study analyzes and describes the reality of humanity in the feature script "Mirror of the Life of Turtle Fighters" in the pro 1 bulletin RRI Bengkulu, with three discourse structures, namely macrostructure, superstructure, and microstructure. Data collection techniques use text content analysis and literature studies relevant to this study. With data analysis and processing techniques using Critical Discourse Analysis (AWK) model Teun A.van Dijk. The results of Teun van Dijk's Critical Discourse analysis found that from the elements of macrostructure, superstructure, and microstructure this feature script wants to explain a warrior's struggle regarding changes that have occurred in turtle populations in recent years that continue to decline and can cause damage to marine ecosystems, but in the feature script there is a lot of lack of information about how important sea turtles are for the sea and humans also there is no definite information What bad possibilities will happen if Extinct sea turtles.

Izpustnost in elipsa

The article presents the theoretical relationship between the understanding of omission and ellipsis. Of all of the types of elliptical constructions, the most frequently analysed are gapping and verbal ellipsis. It would seem that ellipsis and other procedures involving omission require a certain similarity or parallelism obtaining between the reduced member and an antecedent in the discourse, which also grants the integration of the ellipsis into the structure of the discourse. Defining topicality with a referent and selecting the form of the referent is, on the one hand, determined as an information structure and, on the other, as a discourse structure; both are manifest as information organising principles – as a visible and structured expression of order. Thus there is a need to examine the phenomenon of omission, and within this the place of ellipsis.

"'n Koningin volg hom": Volkome vrou (1976) as antifeministiese agent

Marabel Morgan's book Total Woman (1973) is an international bestseller that appeared in Afrikaans as Volkome vrou (1976). In the book, the author provides advice to women on achieving a more fulfilling marriage, but the underlying principles seem to be antifeminist. This article examines the text as a possible tool for a specific social agenda, namely the preservation of patriarchy. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse the text, while referencing theoretical frameworks on Christian self-help literature and propagandistic texts. A two-fold hypothesis is proposed and confirmed through the examination: (i) The text exhibits the typical structure of a self-help book, which, combined with Christian and propagandistic elements, helps convey a pro-patriarchal message; and (ii) certain discourse structures, including questionable argumentative structures, are put in place to construct specific antifeminist ideas and present them as attractive to readers. Ultimately, it is possible to highlight the harmful consequences of this type of text for society-both past and present-as it perpetuates patriarchy by influencing readers' social cognition.

Технологическая метафора и коммуникативные модели в новейшей русскоязычной поэзии

The article investigates the functioning of technological metaphor and communication models in poetic discourse. The aim of the study is to explore contemporary Russian poetry in its relation to digital technologies, employing cognitive-discursive and media-cognitive ap­proaches. Technological metaphor is an implicit property inherent in both technical objects and poetic texts, which manifests itself on two levels: lexical-semantic and cognitive-communicative. The article proposes an approach to the study of technological metaphor in three aspects: the examination of a technical object as containing its own metaphorical sub­strate, the thematization of a technical object in a poetic text and metaphorization strategies, and the implicit functioning of a technological metaphor at the level of the whole text, which affects the communication structure of poetic discourse. The key parameters of the new com­munication models in poetic discourse include the transformation of the prototypical space of the poetic text, changes in the principles of poetic framing, semantic and syntactic compres­sion, multiple integration of mental spaces, referential uncertainty, the functioning of com­puter terms as metaphors in poetic discourse, and their secondary metaphorization/deme­ta­pho­rization. The active interaction of poetry and technology leads to the creation of communi­cation aesthetics, with a key parameter being the formation of hybrid cognitive-communi­ca­tive zones in poetic discourse.

A Study of Modern Poetry Translation under the Perspective of Discourse Function: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in Multiple Translations as an Example

From the discourse function perspective of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper compares and analyzes two Chinese translations of The Waste Land by Zhao Luorui and Zha Liangzheng (Mudan), exploring how the different translations creatively interpret and reconstruct the original text in accordance with the cultural context and aesthetic preferences of the target language. It further investigates how this reconstruction impacts and shapes the target readers' understanding and acceptance process. The study reveals that the translators' distinct orientations in translation strategies lead to significant differences in the translations regarding expressive effects and readers' experiences. Zhao's translation effectively maintains the discourse structure and linguistic style of the original text through a conservative and traditional translation approach. Conversely, Mudan's translation notably enhances the readability and acceptability of the translation with a flexible and innovative translation style. Overall, the latter translation is better suited to the aesthetic habits and cultural background of Chinese readers.

Study of Discourse Analysis Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Case Study of "The Middle Eastern Bazaar"

Systemic functional linguistics holds that language has three metafunctions: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction. This paper studies discourse “The Middle Eastern Bazaar” and analyzes it from ideational metafunction and textual metafunction. Ideational function refers to the use of language to express the objective external world in language users’ minds and their subjective judgments of the objective external world, reflecting the experiential and logical functions of language. Ideational metafunction analysis consists of the analysis of six types of processes as well as the analysis of voice. Textual function of language refers to the actual use of language as a discourse that expresses relatively complete ideas, rather than grammatical units such as words or sentences. Textual metafunction analysis is carried out from the aspects of macro discourse structure, theme-rheme structure and discourse cohesion. Discourse “The Middle Eastern Bazaar” describes a bazaar in the Middle East with very typical local characteristics. The analysis finds that more material process and verbal process are applied than mental, behavioral, relational and existing processes. More non-middle voice is applied than middle voice in the discourse. The theme-rheme structure and different cohesive devices make the thematic information flow naturally and smoothly.

A Study on High School English Teacher’s Feedback Based on Conversation Analysis Theory: Taking Listening and Speaking Class as an Example

The English Curriculum Standards for Ordinary High Schools puts forward that teaching should focus on the improvement of students' language ability. The interaction between teachers and students is an important part of the classroom and one of the most important ways to improve learners’ language ability. English teachers’ classroom discourse is an important medium for English teachers to organize classroom teaching and impart knowledge. Classroom turn-taking can reflect the fluency, quantity and style of classroom communication. Based on the theory of conversation analysis, this research takes one of the 15th National High School English High-Quality Classes as the research object, listening and speaking lessen as the research class type, and transcribes and analyzes classroom teaching video. Through the research, this research aims to find the types of teachers’ classroom feedback used frequently in classroom and the influence of teachers’ discourse pattern on students’ turn-taking. And the writer finds that teacher tends to use single positive feedback most frequently in classroom, and IRF discourse pattern is the major discourse structure in the classroom. So students have a little chance to get the turn from their teachers and most of the time the class is still dominated by the teacher，and students don’t need to open a new turn.

The guild system as an ethnolinguistic marker of identity in Ẹdo

Over the last four decades, several studies have originated on the premise of social identity, ideology and discourse structure. Based on the pioneering efforts of Tajfel (1974, 1975), Giles et. al. (1977), Tajfel and Turner (1986), (Gumperz (1982), the different dimensions of situated talks and social constraint on language use have been explored. The present paper demonstrates some aspects of these linguistic situations in the Ẹdo society through the social institution of established crafts (trade professions) which we refer to as the ‘guild system’ in this study. The paper employed primarily the qualitative method of data collection and analysis due to the nature of the objects of investigation. The method of content analysis was used to analyze the data obtained through interviews (with a view to portraying the linguistic identity and ideology characteristic of the guilds) while the performative translaton methods were employed to analyze the data obtained through the non-participant observation. The study revealed that the guild system as practiced in the Ẹdo society constitutes a viable social group with its own variety of the Ẹdo language employed in the course of group interaction/discourse.
 
 

Cancelling “Effeminate” Men: Discursive Constructions of the Masculinity in Mainstream Media Coverage in China

In response to the trend of Chinese men becoming more “effeminate”, the Chinese government has successively introduced relevant policies to promote masculinity, accompanied by extensive media coverage. Against this background, the study takes the mainstream news media’s portrayal of masculinity as the research object, attempting to deconstruct the discourse concerning masculinity in China. The study draws on coverage of masculinity in mainstream media as data, utilizing the method of critical discourse analysis. It is found that the discourse structure surrounding masculinity in China’s mainstream media mainly concentrates on three aspects. First is the diversification of Chinese masculinity, reflecting the influence of neoliberalism on males, and a call for an understanding of diversified masculinity. Secondly, masculinity in China is also constructed on the discourse of gender conflict, primarily based on the gender binary and the ideology of maintaining traditional gender roles. Lastly, there is a tendency towards politicization of masculinity in China, where it is utilized in the service of national security and strength. By examining how and what kinds of discourses of “masculinity” are constructed, this research can contribute to the studies of masculinity in China, and further explain the issue of societal acceptance of effeminate men.

Teacher and Students’ Oral Interaction in EFL Classroom: A Structural Discourse Analysis

This study aims to examine and discuss the interaction structure of teacher and student oral discourse in class MI As-Syafi'iyah 06 Kab. Bogor. This study uses a qualitative approach using a descriptive methodology. The participants in this study were 30 students and one teacher in class 5 MI As-Syafi'iyah 06 Kab. Bogor. The instrument used in this research is documentation by recording. The results of the study show that the interaction between teachers and students in class is based on the theory put forward by Ramirez (1988). The structure of the oral discourse of teacher and student interaction shows that interaction in the classroom has three layers of exchange, action, movement, and exchange. The results of this study are more focused on one of the discourse structures proposed by Ramirez, namely action. Existing agreements are small interactions involving two or more participants. The agreement is formed in a series of turns consisting of triggering from the teacher, responses from students, and feedback from the teacher. The structure of the Interaction action shows the exchange which is formulated as opening, responding, and following up.

THE HOCKEY COLLECTIVE IDENTITY: COGNITIVE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (Verbal and Multimodal Aspects)

The associative and interpretative analysis of speech units is a traditional practice in discourse analysis that is involved in discourse studies to demonstrate how participants of communication mutually agree on the meaning they structure during the discourse. The controlled experiments are held under conditions that are relatively unusual for the natural discourse practice as in the real-time discourse the process of meaning structuring and reconstruction is due to deep involvement in the situational context. That is why the purpose of our study was to complete the experiment’s results with the mental models or situation models reflecting the categories of thinking during structuring hockey discourse in order to develop the idea of collective hockey identity that arises from the discourse because of some typical discourse structures and typical language behaviour in the process of discourse. The purpose of the research enabled several tasks to be solved. The first one was to define whether there are any peculiarities of the hockey discourse. Secondly, to reconstruct a collective hockey identity according to the discourse they construct during communication. These tasks helped us to characterize the participants of hockey discourse as the ones with the status of “in-group” members and gives them a special level of trust from other members of the social group. The methods of the discourse analysis together with the cognitive modeling compose the basis of the research. In experiments 1 and 2, we found that the “in-member” and “off-member” statuses are drawn and ascribed by the participants according to the ability to correctly structure the meaning in hockey discourse. The cognitive analysis enabled us to build a cognitive model of collective hockey identity that is based on the representations of the hockey world drawn from the discourse in social media (Instagram pages of the NHL teams). Results of the experiments and cognitive modeling of the dominant concepts of the hockey collective identity prove several hypotheses. We found social effects of status demonstration via the construction of meaning in the process of discourse and the importance of being “in-member” for effective communication and satisfaction of the participants. Differences in hockey-oriented conversation between in-group members and off-group members are proved as we assumed in the hypothesis. We provide some evidence that in-group members` and off-group members` reconstruction of the meaning in communication can differ in conversations that are focused on a specific collaborative goal, though their verbal behavior is moderated by the employment of clear general vocabulary.Though the methods of the study introduce literal and statistical noise, putting people into more naturalistic contexts and examining discourse between interlocutors who have various levels of the English language competence can reveal differences that are hidden or discouraged in the laboratory.

Discourse Structure Analysis of Making Request in Japanese Conversation

Making requests (irai) is a genre of spoken interaction that is taught from the basic level of learning Japanese as a foreign language. A request is one of the speech acts that may raise face-threatening potentials. Understanding the stages of request appropriate to Japanese culture is thus essential for Japanese learners to achieve successful conversation. Therefore, conversation pedagogy by using a discourse approach is essential. This study investigates a potential structure gap in Japanese making-requests conversations realized in actual settings and textbook conversational models. By employing genre theory and interpersonal discourse of “Negotiation” as a qualitative discourse analytic method from the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective, this paper describes the gaps and some factors that potentially influence the structure of Japanese making-request conversation. Data were obtained from conversational texts in the Japanese language corpus named Japanese Natural Conversation Corpus and Japanese textbooks for elementary and middle adult learners. Regarding the structure, the results show no difference between conversations in textbooks and authentic ones at the stage level, but both differ at the phase level. There is no introduction to the problem, additional explanation, and confirmation phases in textbook conversational models. In addition, the absence of the phases, the differences in pre-condition content between textbook and authentic conversations, also the length of the reasoning phase, are assumed to be influenced by relational status between participants (tenor) as well as the imposition degree of the requested object.

Move analysis of Hungarian English majors’ academic oral presentations

The academic oral presentation (AOP) is an important aspect of English majors’ academic training. Besides a sound knowledge of the field, the AOP requires complex linguistic, sociocultural, pragmatic and discourse competences in the foreign language, of which the present study focuses on discourse competences comprising the ability to create coherent texts complying with the discourse community’s genre-specific expectations. While the discourse structure of written academic genres has been widely researched based on Swales’s (1990) Move Structure Theory, interest in oral academic genres including the AOP, an important educational tool to foster the disciplinary socialisation of university students, has been more modest. The present study aims to contribute to this field by mapping out the move structure of the Introduction and Conclusion macrostructure components of Hungarian English majors’ AOPs. The analytical framework of the investigation is Chang and Huang’s (2015) move structure model, adapted for the investigation of TED talks, so it also provides an opportunity to compare the discourse structure of TED talks and that of AOPs. The results suggest that the Introduction components of the AOPs and TED talks tend to be similar both in terms of their move structure and the proportion of text devoted to them. However, the characteristic moves of the Conclusion and the implementation of moves both in the Introduction and Conclusion demonstrate several differences deriving from the differing context of the two lecture types and experience of speakers, which the study will discuss in detail.

Verum, focus and evidentiality in Conchucos Quechua

Abstract For most Quechuan languages, the discourse enclitic =mi has been described as a (contrastive) focus marker and/or as a marker of direct evidentiality. In this paper, I argue that these claims do not seem to apply to Conchucos Quechua (Ancash, Peru). To challenge the association between =mi and focus, I offer a quantitative analysis that strongly suggests that this connection is not categorical in nature. To contest the association between =mi and direct evidentiality, I offer a qualitative analysis based on a question-under-discussion (QUD) model of discourse structure, using naturalistic data. I will argue that this enclitic is better characterised as an assertion operator, whose function is to bring closure to the current QUD (be it explicit or implicit). In this sense, the use of =mi is reminiscent of what has been called verum in the literature, and I thus explore how this characterisation fits within this discussion.

Ideological Framing and Polarization in Imran Khan’s Speech at UNGA on 27th September 2019: A Political Discourse Analysis

The aim of this study is to critically analyze the components of the speech given by Imran Khan, the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan, during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 27, 2019. Van Dijk's (1997) Political Discourse Analysis framework was employed to examine how politicians persuade their audience, propagate their ideologies, and construct in-group and out-group divisions in their speeches. The study sought to achieve its objectives by analyzing both macro and micro structures in the speech and exploring the underlying agenda behind the utilization of these discourse structures. The qualitative data consisted of the English transcript of the speech, totaling approximately 2,577 words. NVIVO software and Dijk's Political Discourse Analysis framework were employed for the analysis of the speech. The findings of the study revealed that the macro elements in the speech provided an overview of national, regional, and global issues such as climate change, money laundering, Islamophobia, and the Kashmir conflict. Through the use of microstructural elements, the speaker effectively expressed his ideological and political beliefs regarding these aforementioned issues. In summary, this research examined Imran Khan's UNGA speech through the lens of discourse structures, shedding light on the macro and micro elements utilized by the speaker to convey his perspective on various socio-political topics.