Search results for "Cognitive"
showing 10 items of 10389 documents
Playing with accents
2020
While certain ways of speaking or varieties of English – such as American English or British English – evoke associations of modernity, higher education and urbanity in Uganda, others – such as Ugandan English with strong northern or western accents – stand for backwardness, social strata remote from education and ‘village identities’. Yet concepts of backwardness or modernity are not only based on linguistic criteria but also associated with a specific worldview, contributing to complex signs of higher-order indexicality. In contrast, speakers’ practices of enregisterment reveal how fluid and contextual these indices of urbanity and rurality actually are. Considering diverse repertoires of…
Indigenous Identity in Print: Representations of the Sami in News Discourse
2003
This article examines news representations of the indigenous Sami people in the Finnish news discourse and the role of the representations in the politics of Sami identity. Through critical discourse analysis of Finnish newspaper texts collected from the leading daily Helsingin Sanomat, I analyse the representations by examining how the journalists utilized textual and linguistic resources available to them, how journalistic practices limited and enabled choices made and, finally, how the textual choices contributed to the representations. The study suggests that a combination of the minority position of the Sami, journalistic practices and an unawareness of or insensitivity towards the re…
Too good to be true: The effect of conciliatory message design on compromising attitudes in intractable conflicts
2019
The aim of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the use of experimental methods challenges the implicit assumption of progressive discourse analysts that ‘inspiring’ messages will have a positive effect on political attitudes and trust regardless of the recipients’ early political dispositions, and second, to examine the power of conciliatory message design to change political attitudes in favor of a peaceful solution to intractable conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. By employing the conceptual frameworks of progressive discourse analysis and experimental critical discourse analysis, we examined the most comprehensive hypothesis formulated thus far in the lit…
“Holding Grudges Is So Last Century”: The Use of GenX So as a Modifier of Noun Phrases
2020
This article focuses on the X is so NP-construction in American English, as exemplified by “Holding grudges is so last century” (SOAP, As the World Turns, 2002). Drawing on the Corpus of American Soap Operas (Davies 2011-), the aim of this study is to provide an account of the distributional pattern of noun phrase modification with so, including preferences in modified noun phrase (NP) types and concomitant differences in the meaning of so. The analyses reveal that, in line with subjectification theory on intensification (Athanasiadou 2007), so is expanding its functional range from intensification to emphasis. The findings suggest a near-complementary distribution of these meanings, with …
Translating Teacher Funds of Identity into Curricular Proposals for the EFL Classroom: A Model for Student-Teacher Innovation and Professional Develo…
2019
This article describes the progress and findings of a research project, organized in the context of a university Masters course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), which aimed at translating the student-teachers' (STs) funds of identity into worthwhile curricular proposals for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) subject. The first part of the research involved 38 STs in three workshops through which they became aware of their own funds of identity, expanded their own teacher identity, and finally designed curricular proposals that incorporated their funds of identity as valuable pedagogical resources. The second part of the research took place during the two-month practicu…
Training the translator trainers : an introduction
2019
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in [The Interpreter and Translator Trainer] on [09 Oct 2019], available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1750399X.2019.1647821
Is «Social language variation» an operational category for language corpus planning?
2019
Hem constatat les dificultats d’aprofundir les relacions conceptuals entre la variació social i la funcional, que comencen quan ens preguntem quins factors socials són pertinents per descriure el col·loquial. Creiem que cal tenir en compte, en ordre decreixent, les «adscripcions identitàries» que Block (2014) analitza: capital lingüístic, capital cultural, edat, gènere, activitat habitual, «habitus/ideologia/actituds», «classe social», ètnia i religió. En aquest context d’incertesa conceptual, no és estrany que la variació social sigui una dimensió sociolingüística tractada inadequadament en la normativa catalana: Badia (1994) confon els termes diastràtic i diafàsic i llegint els textos nor…
Why Digital Games Can Be Advantageous in Vocabulary Learning
2021
Vocabulary learning is an integral part of language learning; however, it is difficult. Although there are many techniques proposed for vocabulary learning and teaching, researchers still strive to find effective methods. Recently, digital games have shown potentials in enhancing vocabulary acquisition. A majority of studies in digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) literature investigate the effectiveness of DGBVL tasks. In other words, there are enough answers to what questions in DGBVL literature whereas why questions are rarely answered. Finding such answers help us learn more about the structure of the DGBVL tasks and their effects on vocabulary learning. Hence, to achieve this…
A Mission for MARS: The Success of Climate Change Skeptic Rhetoric in the US
2020
Radio and television broadcasters accuse climate scientists of “promoting a global warming hoax”, recommending that they be “named and fi red, drawn and quartered” (Rush Limbaugh); commit “hara kiri” (Glenn Beck); and be “publicly flogged” (Mark Morano). Conservative media are crucial in promoting climate skepticism. Likewise, climate skepticism resonates well with white middle-class men. But why does the middle class continue to support “radical” positions? This article focuses on Anti-Intellectualism to explain why climate skeptic rhetoric resonates with “Middle American Radicals” (MARS).
Whyvery goodin India might bepretty goodin North America
2019
AbstractSituated at the interface of several sub-disciplines (corpus linguistics, World Englishes, variationist sociolinguistics), this study investigates patterns of adjectival amplification (very good,so glad,pretty cool) in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). It highlights regional distributions/preferences of amplifier-adjective 2-grams and the idiosyncratic status of certain bigrams according to their frequency status. Globally, clear regional preferences in amplification patterns as well as possible trends concerning change are identified. Regionally, L1 varieties contrast starkly with some regions (Africa, Indian subcontinent) but – maybe unexpectedly – not with others (…