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Becoming a professional worker involves a wide range of cognitive, social, and cultural processes that have received extensive attention over the past decades amongst various disciplines. It is also not external to language use and communication. Novices in any occupation have to learn technical terms and are expected to master specific discourse and communication genres. They also face explicit or implicit demands regarding how to deal with interactional tasks. This paper discusses the theoretical conditions under which connections between work, language use and learning can be investigated both conceptually and empirically. It illustrates some of these ideas by using empirical data, focusing on a specific educational context, that of the apprenticeship system as it exists in Switzerland. A fine-grained analysis of this material highlights some of the characteristics of verbal and non-verbal interactions between apprentices and trainers as they occur in workplaces. To finish, the paper elaborates on some practical implications and applications of these analyses for the field of teachers’ training and language teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pragmalingüística is the property of Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Cadiz and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Respectus Philologicus is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the study of discourse particles by analyzing some elements of metaoperational grammar as a starting point. Specifically, the approach will be focused on the application of three fundamental criteria for the enunciative analysis of utterances (information, the utterer's attitudes, and reference to the speaker). This perspective will help to explore the explanatory potential of this grammatical approach in the study of discourse particles in the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the help of a theoretical framework proceeding from the study of the distinction between oral and written discourse in modern languages, this paper approaches some linguistic phenomena present in the Apology of Socrates - anacolutha, discourse markers, repetitions, enumerations, etc. - as traces of spoken language, consciously placed by Plato in his literary recreation of his master's oration. Thus, the claim made by Socrates at the beginning of the speech, that he has not prepared beforehand his defence, finds support in those stylistic marks, which contribute to enhancing the sense of spontaneity of his words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines evasion and hedging in the language of parliamentary Question Time in the British House of Commons and in the Australian House of Representatives. It analyses the usage of evasion and hedging, and briefly investigates the relation between these two linguistic phenomena. Moreover, it seeks to test the methodological approach, and the conclusions reached in the previous research, especially by Alan Partington (2003) and Bruce Fraser (2010), and to provide a comparative perspective on the rhetorical culture and communication conventions in the British and Australian Question Time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lenguas Modernas is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Thematic structure plays a major role in organizing the message and in enabling it to be communicated and understood clearly. One issue in students' writing is how students tackle this cohesive device. There is a considerable agreement among linguists that theme acts as a cohesive device in the texts. This paper was centered on reviewing the status of thematic development and progression in students' writing. Reviewing previously conducted studies attest to the fact that thematic structures are greatly effective and valuable tools in writing process. Theme and rheme patterning can also be effectively applied in classrooms to help students in writing. Students will know where they are losing their effectiveness in their arguments due to problems with either thematic progression or thematic selection, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the abundance of electronic corpora now available to researchers, corpora of natural speech are still relatively rare and relatively costly. This paper suggests reasons why spoken corpora are needed, despite the formidable problems of construction. The multiple purposes of such corpora and the involvement of very different kinds of language communities in such projects mean that there is no one single blueprint for the design, markup, and distribution of spoken corpora. A number of different spoken corpora are reviewed to illustrate a range of possibilities for the construction of spoken corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Purpose: This paper presents a project whose main goal is to construct a corpus of clinical text manually annotated for part-of-speech (POS) information. We describe and discuss the process of training three domain experts to perform linguistic annotation. Methods: Three domain experts were trained to perform manual annotation of a corpus of clinical notes. A part of this corpus was combined with the Penn Treebank corpus of general purpose English text and another part was set aside for testing. The corpora were then used for training and testing statistical part-of-speech taggers. We list some of the challenges as well as encouraging results pertaining to inter-rater agreement and consistency of annotation. Results: We used the Trigrams‘n’Tags (TnT) [T. Brants, TnT—a statistical part-of-speech tagger, In: Proceedings of NAACL/ANLP-2000 Symposium, 2000] tagger trained on general English data to achieve 89.79% correctness. The same tagger trained on a portion of the medical data annotated for this project improved the performance to 94.69%. Furthermore, we find that discriminating between different types of discourse represented by different sections of clinical text may be very beneficial to improve correctness of POS tagging. Conclusion: Our preliminary experimental results indicate the necessity for adapting state-of-the-art POS taggers to the sublanguage domain of clinical text. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Academic writers leave traces of themselves in their writing which may be linked to national as well as disciplinary culture. This paper takes a doubly contrastive approach and investigates writer manifestation in three languages, English, French and Norwegian, and three disciplines, economics, linguistics and medicine, in order to see whether language or discipline is the most important variable governing the pattern of metatext in academic discourse. My corpus consists of 180 refereed research articles within these languages and disciplines. My findings suggest that the language variable is the most important one within economics and linguistics, where English and Norwegian show very similar patterns, using much more metatext than French; within medicine, all three languages display a uniform pattern of little metatext. I conclude that English and Norwegian are both representatives of writer responsible cultures, while French represents a reader responsible culture. As regards discipline, I suggest that since economics and linguistics have a less formalised research article text structure and to some extent create their findings through argumentation in the text, national culture will be more important than it is in medicine, where the IMRD (Introduction–Method–Results–Discussion) structure is globally implemented and the research data to a greater extent are given outside the text. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Centering theory is the best-known framework for theorizing about local coherence and salience; however, its claims are articulated in terms of notions which are only partially specified, such as "utterance," "realization," or "ranking." A great deal of research has attempted to arrive at more detailed specifications of these parameters of the theory; as a result, the claims of centering can be instantiated in many different ways. We investigated in a systematic fashion the effect on the theory's claims of these different ways of setting the parameters. Doing this required, first of all, clarifying what the theory's claims are (one of our conclusions being that what has become known as "Constraint 1" is actually a central claim of the theory). Secondly, we had to clearly identify these parametric aspects: For example, we argue that the notion of "pronoun" used in Rule 1 should be considered a parameter. Thirdly, we had to find appropriate methods for evaluating these claims. We found that while the theory's main claim about salience and pronominalization, Rule 1—a preference for pronominalizing the backward-looking center (CB)—is verified with most instantiations, Constraint 1–a claim about (entity) coherence and CB uniqueness—is much more instantiation-dependent: It is not verified if the parameters are instantiated according to very mainstream views ("vanilla instantiation"), it holds only if indirect realization is allowed, and is violated by between 20% and 25% of utterances in our corpus even with the most favorable instantiations. We also found a trade-off between Rule 1, on the one hand, and Constraint 1 and Rule 2, on the other: Setting the parameters to minimize the violations of local coherence leads to increased violations of salience, and vice versa. Our results suggest that "entity" coherence—continuous reference to the same entities—must be supplemented at least by an account of relational coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for East European Management Studies is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)