Search results for "Discourse"
showing 10 items of 925 documents
Domestic violence and public participation in the media
2013
Recent research suggests that as a social public problem, domestic violence is sustained in a number of social contexts that naturalize violence against women through gendered discourses and ideologies of male violence. This paper examines domestic violence vis-à-vis public participation in the media. In doing so, it seeks to explore the social public aspects of domestic violence and to investigate whether the gendered discourse of male violence is also sustained through the new electronic spaces of public participation. To this end, a corpus of unsolicited digital comments – a form of ‘citizen journalism’ – to a British online newspaper was compiled and analysed. This paper draws from rese…
Evidential al parecer: Between the physical and the cognitive meaning in Spanish scientific prose of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries
2015
Abstract Some of the evidential particles and adverbs in Spanish are believed to have developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. This also coincides with the consolidation of scientific writing in Spanish, a genre that holds a special relation with the expression of sources of information. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to study the evolution of the Spanish evidential discourse particle al parecer (‘seemingly, apparently’) in scientific texts of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Our analysis shows that in the period under review the occurrences of the evidential particle al parecer were dominant, but they were not the only uses of this construction. It coexisted…
Análisis pragmático y fonoprosódico del aproximativo "más o menos"
2018
espanolEste estudio se ocupa del analisis pragmatico de la particula mas o menos en relacion con la caracterizacion prosodica. Este aproximativo funciona en ciertos contextos como mero modificador semantico, si bien en la conversacion se emplea con frecuencia como recurso al servicio de la atenuacion. Con el analisis de la correlacion prosodia y funciones (no) atenuantes, se pretende testar la hipotesis de que los valores pragmaticos tienden a manifestarse en algun rasgo prosodico de manera recurrente. Para este fin, se ha recabado una muestra con ejemplos procedentes del corpus de conversaciones coloquiales de Briz/Grupo VAL.ES.CO. (2002), Cabedo/Pons (eds.) y de C-ORALROM (Cresti/Moneglia…
Barack Obama's South Carolina speech
2010
Abstract In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from the perspective of pragmemes. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin, 1981 , Bakhtin, 1986 ) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of ‘personification’ 1 ( The Economist , December 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just …
Cognitive status and referential acts in functional discourse grammar
2018
In Functional Discourse Grammar, both Ascription and Reference are characterized as actional processes and are captured at the Interpersonal Level of linguistic description. Additionally, the temporal sequencing of Discourse Acts seems relevant to establishing dependency relations among them. However, the remainder of the levels of representation in the theory contain static descriptions of linguistic structures and not of processes. In this paper, I will argue that this is the result of an inherent contradiction between FDG’s characterization as a static grammar and the dynamicity of verbal interaction, which is best solved if the theory commits itself to the procedural nature of the Inter…
Fixing meaning
2012
This contribution looks into a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin after the terrorist attack against a high school in the Northern Caucasian town Beslan in September 2004, widely seen as marking the end of the liberal hegemony in the Russia of the post-soviet period. However, a closer look reveals the many possible readings that are made of the speech. According to the reactions found in a corpus of press articles, the speech activates both “internationalist” and “sovereignist” readings in media discourse. By pointing out the polyphonic organization of discourse, I make the case for a productive exchange between the French tradition of discourse analysis, interactionism and critical…
Discourse Markers of French: Multifaceted Look at a Controversial Category
2021
In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign la…
Negotiating digital surveillance legislation in post-Snowden times : An argumentation analysis of Finnish political discourse
2019
Abstract In the digital era, when security agencies world-wide have been challenging basic democratic principles with massive data gathering, Finland has had a different approach: it has conducted no large-scale surveillance of citizens’ online activities. Now, however, the country is planning such a vast expansion of state surveillance that the constitution itself must be altered. The present article examines one key point in this legislative process to see how the new surveillance measures are argued for and criticized, and how the differing points of view are negotiated to ultimately enable political action. Drawing particularly on Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) approach to argumenta…
Parental discourses of language ideology and linguistic identity in multilingual Finland
2018
Finland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents’ talk. The parents of three families in which at least Finnish, Swedish and English were used on a daily basis were interviewed. A discourse nexus approach showed that the concept of ‘mother tongue(s)’ played a central role and that although all family members were in practice multilingual, there was a strong tendency across the couples to identify themselves and …
Contrasting the form and use of reformulation markers
2007
This article deals with the form and use of reformulation markers in research papers written in English, Spanish and Catalan. Considering the form and frequency of the markers, English papers tend to prefer simple fixed markers and include fewer reformulators than Spanish and Catalan. On the contrary, formal Catalan and Spanish papers include more markers, some of which are complex and allow for some structural variability. As for use, reformulation markers establish dynamic relationships between portions of discourse which can be identified in our corpus with expansion, reduction and permutation. The analysis of the corpus shows that English authors usually reformulate to add more informa…