Search results for "construct"
showing 10 items of 3723 documents
Assessments and the social construction of expertise in political TV interviews
2012
AbstractThis paper investigates how rights to knowledge and opinion are negotiated through assessments embedded in questioning sequences in political news interviews. The focus is on describing how assessments index epistemic positions and evaluative stances embedded in the turns through which the institutional goals of the interview are achieved. The analysis shows how assessments combine with other turn-constructional resources to build a critical or opposing position toward the interviewee's actions, deeds, status, views, or attitudes. It also sheds light on the strategies through which interviewees (IE) engage with and resist the positions displayed by interviewers (IR). Findings show t…
Serial Verb Constructions
2009
The present article aims to give a survey of the typology of serial verb constructions (SVCs) and the criteria that are needed for defining them. For that purpose, it starts with a detailed account of Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006) and their comprehensive cross-linguistic account of SVCs. In a critical discussion of this approach, this article will then address the following three issues. (i) The concept of single eventhood is a more general concept from which a number of Aikhenvald and Dixon's (2006) criteria can be iconically derived. The macro-event property and time-positional operators (Bohnemeyer et al. 2007) provide a good basis for a more coherent definition of what makes an event as f…
A new approach to the identification of cognitive conflicts in the repertory grid: A nomothetic study
1994
Abstract Two separate but related investigations are reported. In the first, a score was derived from a construct correlation matrix obtained by grid data processing. This score, the Correlation Test (CT) score, expresses the percentage of unbalanced triads in the construct correlation matrix and is considered to assess logical inconsistency. It is discussed as being qualitatively different from other scores derived from construct correlation matrices, such as cognitive complexity scores. It is suggested that the CT score refers to cognitive integration, whereas other scores usually refer to cognitive differentiation. The second investigation was an attempt to trace the clinical implication…
The use of demonstratives and context activation in Catalan parliamentary debate
2014
Context is crucial in analyzing parliamentary debate, a field which has recently attracted attention from various perspectives. However, not many contributions focus on specific linguistic markers that shape and are simultaneously influenced by the context of production. The present article aims to partially fill in this gap by analyzing the demonstratives used in parliamentary debates and highlighting how they contribute to activating different aspects of context. After summarizing the features of parliamentary debate as a genre and the importance and complexity of context considered as a subjective and dynamic mental construct, the pragmatic functions of demonstratives are presented and …
Variation in the use of constructed action according to discourse type and age in Finnish Sign Language
2022
This paper presents a study of the use of constructed action (CA) in the stories and conversations of adult Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) signers of different ages. CA is defined here as a type of depiction in which a signer enacts the actions, feelings, thoughts and utterances of discourse referents with different parts of their body. Most studies on CA in sign languages have been done on the basis of signed storytelling, and little is known about how the use of CA varies in different discourse types. The use of CA has also been noted to vary between individual signers, but we do not yet know much about the socio-individual phenomena that may be linked to this variation. In the present stu…
Voices in discourses: Dialogism, Critical Discourse Analysis and ethnic identity
2006
In this article we attempt to combine the Bakhtinian, dialogical philosophy of language and critical discourse analysis (CDA) with our analysis of ethnic identity. The data we discuss are an interview with a Sami journalist who works in the Sami media. We analyse the interview from the points of view of dialogism and CDA to illustrate how identity must be understood as something which is both individual and social in nature. We reject the earlier essentialist interpretations of identity which see it as purely individual and psychological in nature. At the same time, we argue that those views of identity that see it as exclusively socially constructed can be misleading as well. We aim to il…
Heteroglossia as a resource for reflexive participation in a community of Christian snowboarders in Finland
2013
This paper addresses the ways in which linguistic heteroglossia is mobilized to construct participation in a youth cultural community of practice. The analysis focuses on spoken interaction among Christian snowboarders in Finland, and specifically on how the community members create social meanings by using their shared linguistic resources (e.g. religious register or snowboarding terminology). These socially indexical resources gain new meanings when the snowboarders engage in debates concerning gender, expertise and literal versus non-literal interpretations of the Bible. During specific interactive events, they reflect on their responses to different Biblical discourses, thus aiming to r…
The Lithuanian "have" - resultative - a typological curiosum?
2012
ABSTRACT Björn Wiemer. The Lithuanian HAVE-resultative - A Typological Curiosum? Lingua Posnaniensis, vol. LIV (2)/2012. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences. PL ISSN 0079-4740, ISBN 978-83-7654-252-2, pp. 69-81. This article presents the Lithuanian possessive resultative construction with the verb turėti ‘have’ and discusses its place in a typology of forms of resultative constructions. While possessive resultatives with a past passive participle (as in Polish Kolację mamy już przygotowaną lit. ‘We have the dinner already prepared’) are found in areally related as well as other languages, Lithuanian stands out in using an active participle (more precisely: a part…
Agent defocusing in two-participant clauses in Finnish Sign Language
2019
This article investigates what strategies are used for defocusing the agent in two-participant clauses in FinSL. The question is approached by analyzing a set of data that consists of videotaped informational texts. Several strategies for agent defocusing were found. First, the agent can simply be omitted. Second, the agent can be expressed with a pronominal pointing sign used non-referentially. Pronominal pointing signs that can be used non-referentially include at least the non-first person plural pronominal pointing sign and the first person singular pointing sign, possibly also the first person plural pointing sign. This study also suggests that constructed action is an additional, opti…
The simultaneous development of receptive skills in an orthographically transparent second language
2014
Learning to read in an orthographically very shallow language may seem easy. However, for adults who are non-literate in their first language (L1), have no experience of formal education, and have to acquire literacy in a new language (L2), learning to read at all can be a formidable task. In this article, the results of a case study of the outcome of the first 10 months of Finnish literacy training for five immigrant women (24–45 years of age) are presented. Relationships are sought between the participants' achieved reading skills, their oral receptive vocabulary, their knowledge of letters, their phonological working memory and their visual memory. The results of the study show that even…