Study Of Language Use Research Articles

Three conceptual clarifications about syntax and the brain

Linguistic theories offer empirical hypotheses about the architecture of human language, which provide the basis for neurobiological investigations into the study of language use. Unfortunately, progress in linking the two fields of inquiry is hampered because core concepts and ideas from linguistics are not seldom misunderstood, making them controversial and seemingly irrelevant to the neurobiology of language. Here we identify three such proposals: the distinction between competence and performance, the autonomy of syntax, and the abstract nature of syntactic representations. In our view, confusion about these concepts stems from the fact that they are interpreted at a level of analysis different from the level at which they were originally described. We clarify the intended interpretation of these concepts and discuss how they might be contextualized in the cognitive neuroscience of language. By doing so, the discussion about the integration of linguistics and neurobiology of language can move toward a fruitful exploration of linking hypotheses within a multi-level theory of syntax in the brain.

Historical Folk Sociolinguistics

This paper shows how the canonical definition of historical sociolinguistics as the study of language use fails to consider independent evidence for language attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies (i.e., language regard).[1] One approach to avoiding this limited understanding of use might lie in a historical folk sociolinguistics, in which particular attention is paid to the nonasserted (i.e., indirect, presuppositional, implicational, perlocutionary) meanings, described in Preston (2004) as “metalanguage 3.” Interactions in drama are first justified as “good data,” and analyses of such nonasserted elements of utterances show that they approach both the social psychological goal of uncovering implicit language regard behaviors and the variationist goal of determining the subjective correlates of variation and change.
 
 [1] Language regard groups together social psychological (chiefly experimental, e.g., matched guise), anthropological (e.g., studies in language ideology), and sociolinguistic (e.g., folk linguistic and “third wave”) approaches to beliefs about and reactions to language use and language varieties. Preston (2018) reviews established and emerging relationships between these areas. The label is used throughout this paper to refer to all three areas as well as research methods derived from and combining them.

Dissertation Acknowledgements in Cameroon English: A Semantic Analysis

The acknowledgement section of a thesis is a genre within the academic discourse community. It gives the graduate student an opportunity to express their gratitude toward a number of addressees after the completion of a rather tedious research process. This genre has attracted a lot of interest in research in academic writing in English in the Outer Circle. Some of these studies have focused on their generic structure (Al-Ali, 2010, Hyland 2004), their expressions of gratitude (Hyland and Tse 2004) or their semantic structures (Cheng 2012). These features have, however, been conspicuously neglected in the literature in Cameroon English. Given that genre is the study of language use in a given sociocultural or academic context, this study examines 200 dissertation acknowledgements (herein after DAs) collected from six major disciplines in three renowned state universities in Cameroon. Our objective here was to do an in-depth analysis of all the thanking acts of the various texts that constituted our corpus in order to bring out the dominant semantic features that were used in expressing thanks. As far as semantic categories are concerned, our data revealed about 1494 thanking acts with seven categories of thanking, 1308 of which were explicit and 186 of which were implicit. These thanking strategies, however, varied greatly from one discipline to another. For the purpose of this study, the strategies were simply identified as strategy 1 to strategy 7 according to how they were semantically structured and strategy 8 comprises implicit thanking acts. The different semantic strategies were classified following Cheng’s 2010 coding scheme though with modifications depending on what our analysis revealed.

A big data study of language use and impact in radio broadcasting in China

Broadcasting more educating and language-reviving contents are ways radio stations can help revitalize the use of the English language in the Hunan province of China. The challenges faced in communicating in English in Chinese radio stations are majorly caused by the lack of language professionals and linguists in the broadcast stations. The absence of these professionals is a major constraint to the development of the community. The broadcast media can help manage multilingualism through the introduction of new words which would give little or no room for lexicon dearth but would expand the language lexicon. Using the English language during broadcast reduces language dearth, and helps reach a much larger audience, even those not in China. Programmes anchored in English in places where the language is barely spoken enhances the vocabulary, comprehension and language vitality of the listeners. This study examined the impact of the English language used in radio broadcasting using a descriptive Big Data survey research design. The study’s population comprises of the inhabitants of the Hunan province in China, from which a sample of 50 broadcast staff and 150 regular inhabitants was drawn using a stratified random sampling technique. The instrument of data collection was a structured questionnaire with closed questions and a self-structured interview. The sample employed frequency distribution tables, percentages, and charts in the presentation and analysis of data. The results revealed that majority of the respondents in Hunan listened to radio broadcast indicating that the use of English language can have massive impact on the people. The study also found that majority of the respondents use their indigenous languages in their day-to-day activities as well as their schools with English being used majorly only in schools with only English-speaking students. The study recommends, amongst others, that the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) review their policy on the allocated time of broadcast in English languages, and that more English language experts and linguists should be incorporated into the broadcast system.

The Lang‐Track‐App: Open‐Source Tools for Implementing the Experience Sampling Method in Second Language Acquisition Research

AbstractThis paper introduces the Lang‐Track‐App, a smartphone application and backend system to aid second language acquisition researchers in implementing the experience sampling method (ESM). Surveying research participants with the Lang‐Track‐App multiple times per day can yield exceptionally rich data that can be analyzed in multiple ways. This article explains the different Lang‐Track‐App components and describes workflows for both researchers and participants. To demonstrate the step‐by‐step implementation, we present a recent study of language use in study abroad as a test case in which we used the Lang‐Track‐App to collect ESM data about frequency and qualitative aspects of language use. A selection of findings from this study highlights the richness of ESM data and how they can be analyzed at various levels. Researchers wishing to use the Lang‐Track‐App to implement the ESM in their own research can access the full open‐source code and documentation via GitHub (https://github.com/HumlabLu).

Functions of dialogue in (television) drama: A case study of Indigenous-authored television narratives

While stylistics has successfully integrated the study of language use in film and television, relatively little research has tried to systematically classify the functions of television or film dialogue – i.e. to taxonomise its range of potential stylistic functions such as characterisation or the creation of consistency. Most stylistic research has also focussed on traditional US (Hollywood) or European narrative mass media, rather than culturally-diverse or Indigenous-authored film and television. This article aims to make a contribution to both of these under-examined fields by offering a case study of the stylistic functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in three successful Indigenous-authored television series. The three series ( Redfern Now, Cleverman and Mystery Road) are all important for the television canon and were broadcast in Australia as well as exported internationally. Using an existing corpus with dialogue from these series as repository, this article illustrates the different functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in its surrounding text by critically examining multiple dialogue extracts from the three narratives. Quotations from Indigenous screen creatives are interwoven with the analysis where relevant. We argue that such lexis fulfils many functions beyond characterisation and demonstrate the significance of communicating culture and identity in Indigenous-authored drama. The study has implications both for the stylistic analysis of the multiple functions of television/film dialogue and for the study of narratives that feature significant creative involvement by marginalised, subjugated, colonised, or otherwise historically excluded communities – including but not limited to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait islander people(s) in Australia.

A Pragmatic Study of Speech Acts in the Clay Poem by Elia Abi Madhi

Speech Acts are the third type of pragmatics. They refer to what is actually being done in a given context because pragmatics is concerned with the study of language in use. From Austen's point of view, they are the acts that the speaker performs with his/her own words under extralinguistic conditions. The present study will reveal the speech acts in Elia Abi Madhi’s poem, The Clay to show their types and their performing purpose depending on Searle’s classification of speech acts into informative, directive, obligatory, expressive, and declarative.

Visual pragmatics and the EndSARS movement

There is a paradigm shift in the study of language use from a purely verbal perspective to a multimodal viewpoint. This is the scope of visual pragmatics; it attempts to investigate linguistic and semiotic features from a pragmatic angle. This study is an attempt of such broadened pragmatic analysis, as it investigates the deployment of verbal and visual elements in the Nigerian #EndSARS movement. Extant researchers have also applied concepts of visual pragmatics in other multimodal discourses. This present study employs Mey‟s (2001) Pragmatic Act Theory and Hoye and Kaiser‟s (2007) Visual Act Theory to analyse the deployment of verbal-virtual elements in the 2020 #EndSARS protest. The data for this study are twenty-seven #EndSARS visual images, obtained using Google search engine. Twenty of the images are categorised into seven memes: stained flag feminism placards neo-nationalism r soke ( peak up) solidarity and analysed qualitatively. The visual practs identified in the data are of describing, informing, lamenting, hoping, charging, appealing, demanding, encouraging, associating, stating, warning, instructing, reminding, commanding, vowing, praising, saluting, condemning, and challenging. The practs identified are of charging, stating, commanding, reminding, naming, and describing. The study observed the use of visual elements such as colour, facial expression, metaphor, inference, reference, shared situational knowledge, symbolism, gesture, contrast, satire, costume, and environment. It revealed that visual pragmatic acts and pragmatic acts complement each other in multimodal communication.

A Longitudinal Study of Language Use During Early Mother-Child Interactions in Spanish-Speaking Families Experiencing Low Income.

This longitudinal study assessed continuity and stability of productive language (vocabulary and grammar) and discourse features (turn-taking; asking and responding to questions) during mother-child play. Parent-child language use in 119 Spanish-speaking, Mexican immigrant mothers and their children at two ages (M = 2.5 and 3.6 years) was evaluated from transcriptions of interactions. Child productive language significantly increased over the year, whereas mothers showed commensurate increases in vocabulary diversity but very little change in grammatical complexity. Mother-child discourse was characterized by discontinuity: Mothers decreased their turn length and asked fewer questions while children increased on both measures. Rates of responding to questions remained high for both mothers and children even as children increased and mothers decreased over time. Mothers and children showed significant rank-order stability in productive language and measures of discourse. Mothers' rate of asking questions and children's responses to questions during the first interaction predicted children's receptive vocabulary a year later. As children become more sophisticated communicators, language input remains important, with discourse features growing in relevance. Children's early opportunities to respond to parents' questions in the context of play benefit their language skills. This work extends the evidence base from monolingual English-speaking families and is interpreted in the context of prior research on parenting practices in U.S. families of Mexican origin.

Коммуникативный подход в обучении иностранным языкам

The Communitive Approach in language teaching starts from а theory of language as communication. The goal of language teaching is to develop communicative competence. Another linguistic theory of communication favored in CLT is functional account of language use. Linguistic is concerned with the description of speech acts of texts, since only through study of language in use are all the functions of language and therefore all components of meaning brought into focus. The goal of language teaching is to develop what referred to as “communicative competence”. This term is coined in order to contrast а communicative view of language and theory of competence. Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in а completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitation, distribution, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.

Reviewing and the politics of voice: peoples in the Arab world “name” their struggles “revolutions” and not the “Arab Spring”

Abstract Reviewing is an act of power and not a mere act of applying shared academic standards of rigor. As such, it is inevitably implicated in the cultural politics of “naming”. In this paper we animate this taken-for-granted statement in the context of naming the sociopolitical struggles against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Since the end of 2010, the Arab world has witnessed a relatively organized series of protests and the peoples have named them “revolutions”. Western cultural political discourse has renamed these (trans)locally constituted struggles the “Arab Spring”. If we take sociolinguistics seriously as the “study of language in use”, we should consider the peoples in the Arab world as “subjects” of their own definitions, rather than as “objects” of Western constructions. We contend that reviewers, as gatekeepers, are implicated in the politics of voice when they uncritically accept the use of Western inventions as the “only” appropriate way of naming the world, and in so doing they effectively subvert the revolutionary interests in the Arab world.

Hate Speech on Social Media: A Pragmatic Approach

This research is based on people’s behavior in communicating on social media, especially Facebook, which is currently developing without boundaries. In expressing their thoughts, a person often does not maintain ethics and provisions in communicating on social media. For personal gain, individuals or groups of people use language for the purpose of humiliating, insulting, degrading and defaming other individuals or groups of society they dislike. This phenomenon is widely known as hate speech. In line with the Pragmatic Approach, referring to the study of language use with its actual usage aspects, the utterances produced by language users have an effect that could influence the listener to grasp the meaning conveyed and take action as a result of the utterance. This study aims to reveal the types of hate speech on social media based on the criteria developed by Austin, and the meaning of hate speech spoken by individuals to other individuals on Facebook social media, using qualitative descriptive methods. The results show that hate speech on social media can be classified based on illocutionary acts developed by Austin, into verdictive, behabitives, and expositive.
 Keywords: Pragmatics, social media, illocutionary acts, hate speech

Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: Inherent Translanguaging in the Linguistic Landscape of Sarajevo

Abstract Language in the Balkan region of Southeastern Europe has a complex and turbulent history, acutely embodied in the tripartite and trilingual state of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in which Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs all make claim to their own mutually-intelligible varieties of local “languages”. This study utilizes a linguistic landscape methodology to consider language use in Sarajevo, the capital of BiH, approximately 20 years after a brutal war that led to the establishment of the country. Data originate from three municipalities within the Sarajevo Canton – namely, Old Town, Center, and Ilidža – because of their representation of the region’s diversity and history. Signs were classified according to the three primary language varieties, i.e., Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian; BCS, representing a common core among the three varieties, as well as English, other languages, and mixed languages. The application of BCS uniquely positions the present research in comparison to other studies of language use in the region and allows for a more nuanced, less politically and ethnolinguistically fraught analysis of the communicative tendencies of users. More specifically, data indicate that actors in the linguistic landscape transcend the boundaries of their national, ethnic, and religious identities by tending towards the more neutral BCS, suggesting an orientation towards more translingual dispositions than previous variety-bound approaches have indicated. Thus, instead of the divisiveness of linguistic identity politics, the linguistic landscape of Sarajevo indicates a tendency toward inclusion and linguistic egalitarianism.

The value of a pragma-functional approach to intercultural conflict discourses

Abstract Systemic functional linguistics focuses on the study of language use within its registerial context of situation. The theory offers a meaning-based approach for the analysis of discourses in generic and culture-specific settings. When it comes to the analysis of conflict discourses across cultural boundaries, SFL may be integrated into a framework that relates language use to the notions of power and ideology and the dimensions of culture and history to provide a broader picture to inform future political decision-making. This paper presents a pragma-functional approach combining systemic functional linguistics, argumentation theory, critical theory and postcolonial insights. The analytical tool is illustrated with reference to the New Caledonian independence debate through the analysis of salient linguistic patterns and discursive moves in two open letters, published in April 1988 by Kanak independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and former French President François Mitterrand.

THE SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF PROMOTIONAL LANGUAGE IN BOOK BLURBS

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the syntactic level of promotional language in fiction and academic book blurbs. The overall research objective was to identify salient syntactic features and investigate the similarities and differences in the realization of this text-in-ternal aspect of thriller, romance, and linguistics blurbs in English. The analysis shows that their formulaic language exhibits genre-specific patterns and form-function correlations in its syntactic complexity. In order to provide a positive description of a book, blurb writers regularly employ structural parallelism, ellipsis, complex phrases with multiple modification, phrasal and clausal embedding, coordination, and other means of structural reduction. However, individual instantiations also display systematic variability in text-length values and frequency of salient features, with fiction blurbs mainly replicating the conciseness of spoken language and academic blurbs closely resembling formal written language. We conclude that the generic integrity of these texts involves a degree of controlled flexibility at the syntactic level depending on the book type/genre as the defining variable. Additionally, the research confirms that the study of linguistic profiles of genres is funda- mentally important for the study of language use, both from a theoretical and applied perspective. The increasing ‘generification’ of contemporary language, and particularly English as the global lingua franca, requires the adoption of a multidimensional genre-based framework in investigating the complex linguistic realities of the 21st century.

Study of Language Use, Language Attitudes, and Identities in Two French Speaking Communities in the United Kingdom

Study of Language Use, Language Attitudes, and Identities in Two French Speaking Communities in the United Kingdom

A Diary-Based Study of Language Use During Cognitive Decline

Although the effects of dementia on language have been examined in a variety of ways, there is relatively little data available showing longitudinal effects. In the present study, we examined the effect of cognitive decline on an individual’s language use over time (from age 60-91) by assessing daily diary entries. We focused on a linguistic phenomenon commonly associated with diaries and other informal registers, i.e. subject omission, as in “∅ Made cranberry muffins.” Quantitative analysis revealed a drastic decline in the use of this feature, which is correlated with the stages of the individual’s cognitive decline. We argue that the patterns reflect a systematic reduction in complexity that affects a writing style based on literacy and acquired at a later stage than more basic writing. This corroborates previous findings, showing later-acquired linguistic features are disproportionately affected in cognitive decline and highlights the importance of linguistic analysis in aging research.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Language in Ghanaian Newspaper Editorials

The study explores the linguistic devices, approaches and styles in media discourse that are used to stake claims to knowledge, to influence attitudes and to promote critical thinking, among other functional roles of language. The study was equally interested in knowing the outcomes of the choice of these linguistic devices as far as communication is concerned. Linguistic devices such as modality, evaluative adjectives, adverbs, generic phrases, rhetoric and idioms among others, are used to state opinions, make predictions and influence attitudes. The study hypothesises that the study of language can be used in particular ways, so intended by the user, to achieve specific purposes. Eight different newspapers: The Daily Graphic, The Ghanaian Times, The Mirror, The Crusading Guide, The Insight, The Independent, The Catholic Standard and The Daily Guide, editorial excerpts were culled and used for the study of language use in newspaper editorials. The styles used and the reasons behind the choice of those devices and styles are closely looked at in the analysis. With Systemic Functional Linguistics, complemented with Van-Dijk’s theory of Media Discourse as models of analysis, the study is theoretically anchored. The study concludes that editorial writers use linguistic devices to express different shades of attitude and opinion, to influence, shape or re-shape their readers’ attitudes and to promote critical thinking of readers. Keywords: Linguistic Devices, Media Discourse, Communication, Language, Styles.

Fungsi bahasa dan makna pragmatik dalam media sosial untuk memerangi Covid-19: Kajian etnopragmatik

This article discusses the function of language and pragmatic meaning in social media to combat Covid-19. Theoretical references used are ethnopragmatics. Ethnographic studies basically examine language from a cultural aspect. Cultural aspects include knowledge, behavior, and artifacts. Meanwhile, pragmatics is a study of language use on the basis of context. This research uses data sources from Instagram, Facebook, WA, and email. Research data in the form of language use in social media above. Data from Instagram and Facebook are downloaded from the internet, while data from email is collected through the direction of researchers with guidance on the instrument. Data collection techniques are done through reading and taking notes. Concrete data analysis techniques are carried out through data identification, data classification, data interpretation, and reporting in the form of journal articles. The findings of research on language subfunctions include asking, inviting or influencing, being sarcastic, motivating and criticizing, and saying thank you. Meanwhile, the pragmatic meaning used in social media includes indirectly advising, persuading, indirectly reminding, subtly insinuating, inviting, complaining, and give advice.

An Exploratory Study of Language Use and Preferences among Nursing Lecturers and Students at Mzuzu University in Malawi

This article reports on the insights gained from multilingual nursing
 lecturers and students at Mzuzu University in Malawi on the languages
 they use and prefer in a classroom setting. Research (Setati, Chitera and
 Essien, 2009; Chowdhury 2012) has found that both lecturers and students
 in multilingual and multicultural settings favour code-switching practices
 in the classroom setting. Code-switching is, therefore, an important
 phenomenon, which researchers should continue exploring because of
 the several distinctive attributes associated with it. The study adheres to
 qualitative and quantitative designs through the use of a questionnaire
 and follow-up interviews as methods of data collection. The results reveal
 that both lecturers and students favour code-switching from English to
 Chichewa during lectures. From both lecturers’ and students’ perspectives,
 code-switching helps to translate and clarify difficult concepts. It also
 helps to prepare students for the nursing profession. The study has some
 practical and pedagogical implications. On the one hand, it contributes
 some meaningful insights for language planners and policy-makers; on
 the other hand, the study sheds important light on the need to include the
 workplace dimension during language in education and language planning
 conversations. This study is also important because it addresses the issue of
 how code-switching might effectively be exploited as a communicative and
 pedagogical resource in instruction.