Search results for "cours"

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…

The web-based Language and Style course, e-learning and stylistics

2006

Coercive metaphors in news headlines :a cognitive-pragmatic approach

2014

This article explores the application of metaphors in news headlines with a view to interrogating their potential for coercion. Coercion in news discourse is understood as a strategic deployment of pragma-linguistic devices, including metaphors, to foreground the representations of socio-political reality that are compatible with the interests of the news outlet rather than those that inform public debate. It is argued that coercion can be exposed through systematic discourse analysis. Methodologically, the study aims to integrate the cognitive and pragmatic approaches to metaphor in regarding it as both a conceptual building block of news representations and a strategic framing device in n…

‘La verdad (es que)’: Significado nuclear y atenuante

2017

The aims of this research are to define the attenuating function in the uses of la verdad (es que) and to evaluate the counter expectation value in the awakening of this pragmatic function. La verdad (es que) has been generally defined as a reinforcement discourse marker (Portoles, 1998; Fuentes 2009, 2012), even if some recent studies have shown that it is mostly used as an attenuating device (Gonzalez & Maldonado, 2007; Soler, 2015a). Based on this assumption, the research analyses the attenuating uses of this construction in a corpus of synchronic oral and written texts in peninsular Spanish, which cover different genres and registers, in order to explain which discourse circumstances ca…