Search results for "UIS"

Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites

2018

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly o…

Sharing cultural knowledge at work: a study of chat interactions of an internationally dispersed team

2015

Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan etnometodologisen jäsenkategorisoinnin analyysin avulla, kuinka kansainvälisesti hajautetun tiimin jäsenet jakavat kulttuurista tietoa Skype™ -keskusteluissaan. Tarkemmin katsotaan sitä, miten osallistujat luokittelevat itsensä ja muut tiimin jäsenet ’kulttuurisiksi tietäjiksi’ ja ’ei tietäjiksi’. Analyysissa havaittiin neljä tapaa, joilla tiimin jäsenet jakoivat tietoa samalla kun he hallinnoivat tehtävien jakelua ja suorittamista sekä rakensivat yhteisymmärrystä vuorovaikutuksessa. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että kulttuurinen tieto on dynaamisesti muuttuvaa, kontekstisidonnaista ja vuorovaikutuksessa rakentuvaa. Sen sijaan että kulttuurisuus haittais…

(Im)Politeness and interactions in Dialogic Literary Gatherings

2016

Abstract This article examines the interactions that occur in Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLG), a cultural activity in which low literate adults read and debate classic literature. To respect the principle of egalitarian dialogue, participants agree on how to communicate and reflect on their communicative patterns. We analyse the actual interactional behaviour of participants and the pragmatic traits that evidence how this principle is implemented by identifying dialogic and power interactions in connection to (Im)politeness. This study shows the influence of the situated genre (DLG) over status in the prevalence of politeness and how the participants use polite mitigation strategies that…

Online Intercultural Exchanges Through Digital Storytelling

2017

This article focuses on the affordances of a digital storytelling project in developing students' language, digital and other skills: learning and innovation, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, team working, and life and career skills. The project was undertaken by university English for Specific Purposes students and was conducted within an Online Intercultural Exchange between the Cyprus University of Technology and the University of Valencia. Its design was based on a Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology. It incorporated active learning and multimodal resources and capabilities. The need for transforming language teaching pedagogies was borne in mind, as it is necessary …

Anadeixis and the signalling of discourse structure

2018

Como anadeixis (un termino acunado por Ehlich, 1982) se entiende, prototipicamente, el funcionamiento referencialmente dependiente de determinadas expresiones ligadas al contexto para senalar entidades discursivas que o bien todavia no son topicos o bien estan a punto de perder su estatus como topicos. El tema concreto de este estudio es la funcion discursivo-estructural de los marcadores de referencia anadictica. La base de nuestra argumentacion seran dos textos cortos completos, en dos lenguas (frances e ingles). De este modo, se mostrara como determinadas referencias anadicticas stricto sensu y dictico-discursivas pueden senalar las macroestructuras (estructuras de contenido) y superestr…

Shaping subjects of globalisation: at the intersection of voluntourism and the new economy

2016

Volunteer tourism is one of the latest branches of the ever expanding globalised tourism. The initiative Workaway, an expression of this trend, was established in the late 90s with the aim of promoting “cultural understanding between different peoples and lands throughout the world”. The figure of the workawayer as a new cosmopolitan subjectivity started to take shape. With the growth of the tourism industry, the Workaway scheme has started to be of interest also to tourism entrepreneurs, especially in the global peripheries such as northern Lapland, home to the indigenous minority language community of the Sámi. By signing up as a volunteer in a heritage tourism resort, the workawayer, the…

Asymmetries of Knowledge and Epistemic Change in Social Gaming Interaction

2014

While a growing number of studies investigate the role of knowledge and interactional management of knowledge asymmetries in conversation analysis, the epistemic organization of multilingual and second language interactions is still largely unexplored. This article addresses this issue by investigating how knowledge asymmetries and changing positions with regard to knowledge impact social interaction in multilingual gaming activities. Drawing on a collection of video recordings of social gaming sessions collected over a two year period and involving the same two participants, we examine how the participants orient to knowledge and deal with knowledge asymmetries while solving game-related p…

Introduction to the special issue

2018

Other-Repetition as a Resource for Participation in the Activity of Playing a Video Game

2009

This article offers an empirically based contribution to the growing body of studies using Conversation Analysis (CA) as a tool for analyzing second/foreign language learning in and through interaction. Building on a sociointeractional view of learning as grounded in the structures of participation in social activities, we apply CA methods to examine the affordances offered by interaction during the activity of playing a video game for additional language learning. We focus on one type of interactional practice, lexical and prosodic repetition, as a recurring resource through which players attend to the game and collaboratively build their understanding and experience of game events. We arg…

On the relation of irony, understatement, and litotes

2016

The aim of this paper is to clarify the distinctive and the shared features of the three phenomena: irony, understatement, and litotes. These rhetorical figures have been defined as synonymous, distinct or overlapping in various accounts. This indicates an interrelation but also a need for clearer definitions. Here, each of these rhetorical figures is defined via two jointly necessary conditions. This approach sharpens the categories, enables clear-cut distinctions and helps to explain cases of overlap. German corpus data and examples from the literature as a basis, allow differentiating between cases of understatement as a means of irony, and cases of litotes as a means of understatement. …