Search results for "DISCOURSE"
showing 10 items of 925 documents
Distance crossing and alignment in online humanitarian discourse
2018
Abstract This article analyzes multimodal genres of current online humanitarian discourse such as mission statements, annual reports and photo galleries to find how the construals of beneficiaries and humanitarian organizations align with the motives, values and emotional dispositions of prospective donors. The discursive reduction of distance between the donor and the beneficiary is likely to produce solicitation effects and enable self-legitimization. First, based on extant literature, the article develops a method to account for the pragmatic operations of textual ‘proximization’ and visually simulated ‘co-presence’ in humanitarian communication. Then it applies it to a sample of multimo…
The Marginalisation of Finely Tuned Semiotic Practices and Misunderstandings in Relation to (Signed) Languages and Deafness
2014
AbstractWhen people draw on the available modal resources (e.g. gestures) in specific contexts over time, those resources come to display regularities. The more a community uses and regulates those resources, the more fully and finely articulated their regularities and patterns become. Modes, organised by regular means of representation, are constantly transformed by users, depending on what the community needs. This paper discusses the way semiotic resources and practices, i.e. social actions with a history, used by sign language signers in visually oriented communities, as well as the research in such domains, have been marginalised. The paper reflects some of the main reasons for such ma…
Manipulation of teenagers through advertising: a critical discourse approach
2011
[EN] The possible harmful effects of advertising in magazines aimed at teenagers have not lost relevance.Thus the aim of this article is to explore the linguistic characteristics used as foregrounding devices in a corpus of English advertisements aimed at teenagers. My underlying premise is that some linguistic messages or images convey information which is picked up by teenagers creating in them the desire to obtain certain products. In my analysis I attempt to ascertain, if any, what kind of linguistic control and what linguistic devices advertisers use to achieve their goal. Additionally, I try to find out to what extent the power of advertising has something to do with social problems r…
The 'terroridiom' principle between spoken and written discourse
2008
This paper focuses on phraseology used within the domain of politics, both in written and spoken discourse. We concentrate on the lemma TERROR and on the recurrent sequences in which it is embedded, reflecting how native speakers, both American and British, tend to use it in preferred environments making routinized blocks of language. The data come from two corpora: the spoken corpus includes speeches of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and the written corpus is made up of articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2008), our attempt here is to uncover which of the two varieties lends itself more willingly to…
Encapsulació i estructura informativa en el debat parlamentari. Una anàlisi contrastiva (català – espanyol – anglès)
2016
Parliamentary debate (PD) as a specific genre of parliamentary discourse exhibits a hybrid nature: part oral and part written discourse. It is performed orally, but planned ahead and formal. From the point of view of lexical cohesion, encapsulation by means of abstract and unspecific nouns (e.g. factor reason) is an indicator of the informative density and the underlying written natureof PD.With the tools provided by Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics, this paper aims at describing and characterizing cross-linguistically lexical encapsulation’s potential to define the information struc-ture of PD. In this regard, encapsulation is analyzed in relation to the notions of topic and fo…
Focal social actions through which space is configured and reconfigured when orienting to a Finnish Sign Language class
2018
Abstract This paper focuses on how signing students organise themselves spatially in social interactions in a university lecture hall. One may view space as a concrete location, a social construct, and a normative actor with historical trajectories. The study addresses the question, ‘What are the mediated actions through which the students and teacher (re)configure space for participating in a class?' Following a methodological framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis and multimodal interaction analysis, I approach this question by examining the social actions occurring when entering a lecture hall. The primary data includes video recordings, photos, and participatory observations, document…
Discovery-learning in grammar education:a study on anaphoric pronouns
2022
En les darreres dècades, en el context educatiu portuguès, com en altres països, la gramàtica ha estat un tema central de debat en l’educació L1. L’any 2001, amb la publicació del Currículum Nacional d’Educació Bàsica, la gramàtica, que es va anomenar «coneixement explícit de la llengua», es va considerar un dels components bàsics del currículum de L1 portuguès. Des d’aquesta perspectiva, inspirada en les propostes del moviment anglosaxó de consciència lingüística, l’objectiu principal de l’educació gramatical és desenvolupar els coneixements implícits que els infants ja tenen i utilitzen en un coneixement cada cop més reflexiu i explícit. En aquesta concepció, en què se suposa que «la majo…
Use of Tense-Aspect Forms in Cordis Project Reports
2019
For several recent decades the Council of Europe and various European authorities have been encouraging various European universities and other institutions to unite research activities resulting in the creation of partnerships with a conventialised genre network of calls for projects, guidelines for proposals and databases of project documentation. Along with Latvia acting in political, economic and social arenas of the European Union, it has also been actively involved in research consortia as coordinator and participant, therefore, setting new objectives for communicative competence development of scholars and project managers in order to reflect the discursive practices. In view of this…
Discourse about the end of the world
2015
Abstract The increased prevalence of discourse concerning the expected end of the world was observed in various countries and manifested in various genres especially in the years 2000 and 2012. Some of the discourse was conducted in a serious manner, whereas other instances included humorous motifs and were used for commercial purposes. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at the typical motifs prevailing in the discourse concerning the end of the world, with special emphasis on the humorous aspect - both universal and culture-specific. Texts found on Polish, German, English and Russian websites were analyzed. In the studied material, the end of the world was understood literally …
What is meant by hybridity? An investigation of hybridity and related terms in genre studies
2014
AbstractThis article is an investigation and a discussion of hybridity and related terms as used in linguistic studies of genre. The theoretical points that are made are illustrated with data from empirical research done by others and with the authors’ own data. The focus is on written texts but hybridity in spoken interaction is also discussed. The article defines the notion of genre and discusses (proto)typicality in relation to genre and hybridity. Recontextualization is also discussed. This is followed by a discussion of terms that have been used to talk about the processes of hybridity, firstly, as used in research that has mainly been done on spoken interaction. The focus then turns t…