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Abstract: This study explores six borrowed discourse-pragmatic features – koraa/kraa, saa, paa, yoo, wai/wae, and waa,– which are borrowed from indigenous Ghanaian languages into Ghanaian English, in order to investigate their sources, meanings, frequencies, positioning, syntactic distribution, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are obtained from the Ghanaian components of the International Corpus of English, the corpus of Global Web-based English, and News on the Web corpus are analysed within a postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The results show that most of the discourse-pragmatic features occur in clause-final position and are usually attached to declaratives. Koraa/kraa, paa, and saa function as emphasis pragmatic markers and emotive interjections, yoo as attention, agreement, and emphasis pragmatic markers, waa as an attention marker, emphasis pragmatic marker, and emotive interjection, and wai as a mitigation and interrogative marker. Thus, the paper highlights the contributions of indigenous Ghanaian languages to the discourse-pragmatic aspects of Ghanaian English. PubDate: 2023-05-17
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Abstract: In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms such as Twitter have been of great importance for users to exchange news, ideas, and perceptions. Researchers from fields such as discourse analysis and the social sciences have resorted to this content to explore public opinion and stance on this topic, and they have tried to gather information through the compilation of large-scale corpora. However, the size of such corpora is both an advantage and a drawback, as simple text retrieval techniques and tools may prove to be impractical or altogether incapable of handling such masses of data. This study provides methodological and practical cues on how to manage the contents of a large-scale social media corpus such as Chen et al. (JMIR Public Health Surveill 6(2):e19273, 2020) COVID-19 corpus. We compare and evaluate, in terms of efficiency and efficacy, available methods to handle such a large corpus. First, we compare different sample sizes to assess whether it is possible to achieve similar results despite the size difference and evaluate sampling methods following a specific data management approach to storing the original corpus. Second, we examine two keyword extraction methodologies commonly used to obtain a compact representation of the main subject and topics of a text: the traditional method used in corpus linguistics, which compares word frequencies using a reference corpus, and graph-based techniques as developed in Natural Language Processing tasks. The methods and strategies discussed in this study enable valuable quantitative and qualitative analyses of an otherwise intractable mass of social media data. PubDate: 2023-04-30
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Abstract: This piece of research explores language use in a sample of unprecedentedly studied discourse which is that of climate change communication by influential Spanish politicians via Twitter. For that purpose, we created a specialized corpus composed of tweets tackling climate change that were posted by influential Spanish politicians during the past decade. Our aim was to reveal prominent linguistic patterns that are susceptible of conveying a specific worldview (i.e.: the wording of reality) of climate change to Twitter users. Our analysis started with keywords analysis in order to gather quantitative data about the lexical choices deployed in our corpus, then by means of qualitative analysis based on semantic classification of keywords and the examination of their concordances we were able to point out distinctive features of our corpus’ discourse. Our results have revealed the prevalence of specific linguistic patterns, metaphors and frames that contribute to create a narrative of climate change as a villain and the human race, specifically political leaders, as the saviour. PubDate: 2023-04-29
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Abstract: This study investigates Saudi patients’ verbal complaints using recorded conversations in the General Directorate of Contact Centres (937), a medical institution run by the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH). More preciously, it investigates the recurrent verbal complaint strategies and modifications that Saudi patients use when complaining. The data comprise 80 naturally occurring interactions via phone calls made by Saudi patients (40 males and 40 females) to complain about various medical and non-medical issues between October 2021 and February 2022. The data was transcribed verbatim by the principal researcher, imported into MAXQDA for qualitative analysis of codes categorizations, and then into SPSS for statistical analysis. The findings reveal that Saudi patients avoid open-face threatening acts and use less direct complaint strategies. They also care about the positive and negative face needs of the addressee by establishing rapport and maintaining social harmony, politeness, and autonomy using interpersonal strategies with mitigating devices. Despite their complaint, they demonstrate a strong tendency to use downgraders than upgraders. These findings reveal some practical implications that could support the quality team of the Complaint Unit (CU) in providing their employees with effective communication training and premeditated responses that align with patients’ complaint strategies. PubDate: 2023-04-10
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Abstract: Arabic corpora have existed since the last decade of the past century. Although they are constantly increasing, more advanced tools and morpho-syntactically annotated Arabic corpora are still needed for research and teaching. Likewise, parallel and specialised corpora are rare despite the growing need to use them in empirical linguistic investigations of authentic Arabic texts and for language and translation teaching. Therefore, building legal corpora will pave the way for more research in Arabic legal translation, an area which is under-researched worldwide. This paper aims to discuss the building of a collection of specialised parallel and monolingual legal corpora. In particular, it will discuss the building of diachronic corpora, which include all available constitutions of 22 Arabic countries. The aim of building all available versions of these constitutions is two-fold: (1) interdisciplinary corpus-based and socio-cultural investigations and (2) research-led and blended-learning pedagogical approaches to translation teaching and learning. Thus, these corpora are of great value to translation trainers and researchers, law academics and professionals, and governmental, non-governmental and international organisations. The paper will demonstrate the process of building these specialised complex corpora and the challenges encountered throughout this process. Among the challenges faced during the data collection and processing phases are (1) limitations of finding the original constitutions for each Arabic country since some of them date back to 1922; (2) file conversion and the difficulty of choosing one Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool to rely on for the Arabic language since many lack accuracy, efficiency as well as encoding issues in Arabic. PubDate: 2023-04-07
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Abstract: In classroom lectures, lecturers alternate roles to present appropriate disciplinary ethos to students. Hence, this corpus-based study examines lecturers’ roles through self-referential personal pronouns (SRPPs) across disciplines to further emphasize PPs as key rhetorical features for participant positioning in academic lectures. Lectures from L2 lecturers, who were all Ghanaians, were recorded from two Ghanaian public universities. The recorded lectures were manually transcribed and processed into a computer-readable format. Afterward, the concordance tool in AntConc was used to search for all instances of I, we and you. The PPs that explicitly referred to the lecturers were analyzed to determine their discoursal roles. Drawing on the modified version of Tang and John’s (Engl Specif Purp 18:23--29, 1999) model of the discourse functions of SRPPs, the study found specificities and differences in the roles across the three broad knowledge domains (i.e. Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences). The findings support the common core and specificity positions on disciplinary variation, which respectively assert that disciplines share similar and different lexical and rhetorical choices. PubDate: 2023-03-30
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This study aims to assess the pragmatic competence of Filipino ESL learners along comprehension and production through pragmatic assessment tools that are contextualized to the local needs of Filipino ESL learners. The tools were developed in several steps such as generation of speech acts situations, likelihood investigation, organization of situations, checking for content validity, and checking for reliability. The developed research instruments were a multiple-choice tool for the pragmatic comprehension test and a WDCT for the pragmatic production test. The situations for the pragmatic tools were contextualized to Filipino ESL learners. The tools were administered to 70 AB English majors. The results revealed that the Filipino ESL learners’ level of pragmatic comprehension is high while their pragmatic production is slightly off but acceptable as rated by American English native speakers. The results imply that there is still a need to promote Filipino learners’ pragmatic competence as a crucial part of their communicative competence. PubDate: 2023-02-27 DOI: 10.1007/s41701-023-00137-y
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Abstract: Despite its high frequency, simile usage is often overlooked in both linguistic research and English language teaching. In the current study, I address this lack of research and focus, by exploring simile usage with the BE like construction across genres as reflected in five sections of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Two main data sets were used for this study: 500-concordance-line samples of BE like, one from each section of the COCA, followed by a narrowed-down examination consisting of 100-concordance-line samples of NOUN BE like NOUN from each COCA section. Results show, that while similes are found in all five sections of the COCA, the frequency of simile usage varies across the different genres. Additionally, it was found that similes of different types may be favoured in different genres. And, despite differences among genres regarding frequency of usage and preferred simile types, the majority of similes can be categorized into a small number of very common general topics. Finally, the data show that similes are often used for giving opinions and for elaboration. Taken together, these findings provide a rich source of corpus-based data for both researchers of figurative language and ELT materials designers. PubDate: 2023-02-27 DOI: 10.1007/s41701-023-00135-0
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This article presents how a pilot study for automatically POS-tagging a corpus of orthographic transcriptions of film dialogues (Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue) was dealt with and the related issues solved. The software CLAWS4, which is freely available on UCREL’s website, was used for the sake of comparability with reference corpora such as the BNC (both 1994 and 2014) and all the English corpora available on english-corpora.org (former BYU interface). The study highlights that automatic POS-tagging needs readjusting when applied to film dialogue and the accuracy of the tagging greatly benefits from the introduction of tags for pragmatic categories. This integrated approach of grammatical and pragmatic automatic tagging was realised through the writing of a Python script which post-processes the data output of CLAWS4. PubDate: 2023-01-11 DOI: 10.1007/s41701-022-00132-9
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Abstract: This study explores relational work in telephone interpreting interaction (English-Spanish) at the call center of an insurance company in Spain. Analysis focuses on the discursive construction of (im)politeness oriented to personal and professional face in a complaint call by an English-speaking customer, estimating its impact on rapport. The intensity of face threats and face-enhancing acts has been gauged on the basis of the amount of face-change predicated and the amount of face at stake in the interactive situation, considering the role played by behavioral expectations, face sensitivities and interactional wants, drawing on a rapport management model of (im)politeness. Results show that face change, i.e., the occurrence of inconsistencies between FTAs and claimed self-image, seems to depend less on formal linguistic aspects and more on interactants’ consideration of what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior, based on the frames that individuals have constructed through their own histories of social practice. Professional face overrides personal face for both the operator and the interpreter, whereas the customer orients to both their personal and professional faces, enhancing personal face and attacking professional face, in an attempt to achieve his goals. PubDate: 2022-11-26 DOI: 10.1007/s41701-022-00130-x
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Abstract: The paper explores media representations of Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium that causes severe plant diseases, using data from online sources in English which reported on the developments in the bacterium spreading and treatment from 2015 to 2020. Two directions of analysis are pursued, the quantitative and qualitative one. Quantitative analysis reveals that the bacterium and its effects are described via the terms belonging to the lexical fields of fear, diseases, change, the supernatural, hostility, destruction, killing and war, with the latter three being the most dominant statistically speaking. Further, qualitative analysis attests that some of these terms are used metaphorically as instantiations of the war metaphor, which is generally effective in communicating the severity of the X. fastidiosa induced diseases and mobilising the necessary support. Based on the results, it may be argued that the language used in the media for describing X. fastidiosa fits into the prevalent “catastrophe discourse”, with the purpose of raising awareness of the gravity of the threat the bacterium poses, as well as justifying the severe measures undertaken to contain it. PubDate: 2022-11-02 DOI: 10.1007/s41701-022-00129-4
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Abstract: Laughter is used strategically in conversational discourse to accomplish pragmatic functions. While other researchers have investigated how contextual features such as cross-linguistic differences, group dynamics, and conversation topic influence the use of laughter, this study is among the first to examine the interplay of laughter and communicative purpose. Using the annotated Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Egbert et al. in Text & Talk 41:715–737, 2021), the frequency of laughter instances and laughter types (isolated, reciprocated, and coactive) were calculated across communicative purposes. The pragmatic functions of laughter in each communicative purpose were then analyzed qualitatively. Although laughter is most frequent within the communicative purpose of joking around, it occurs in over 35% of the discourse units in each of the communicative purposes, suggesting that laughter performs pragmatic functions beyond indicating humor. Each individual communicative purpose is also characterized by differential functions of laughter. This finding provides further evidence that the pragmatic functions of laughter and the communicative purposes of discourse shape each other in English conversation. PubDate: 2022-10-30 DOI: 10.1007/s41701-022-00128-5
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