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The article presents an interview with Renée Yardley, Senior Vice-president Sales and Marketing for Rolland Papers, and Robert Mannix, Creative Papers Director for Antalis. Topics discussed include energy resources and geographical proximity to a growing market in the U.S. for newsprint paper; and ways in which adoption of environmental policies becomes a wide-scale situation and the environmental shift and pollution reduction plan has led to the expanded use of recycled paper.

The article focuses on the importance of assessing interactional competence in a second language (L2). It mentions that addressed in the papers are the challenges of linking empirical and conceptual progress in L2 assessment and second language acquisition research, particularly in testing interactional competence, which is a complex task. It highlights that interactional competence is conceptualized as the systematic procedures used by speakers to accomplish actions during interactions.

This article discusses the challenges of testing Interactional Competence in large-scale language tests and classroom-based assessments. It mentions that due to practical and value-added difficulties, explicit testing of IC are not present. It highlights that validation is essential for ensuring that the performances of test takers interacting with automated dialogue systems powered by intelligent agents are comparable to their interactions with real humans, given technological advancements.

Copyright of Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

The paper examines the products of interlingual and intralingual translanguaging and qualitatively analyzes three origin-based lexical varieties in Japanese, wago (native Japanese words), kango (Sino-Japanese words), and gairaigo (foreign loanwords other than kango) in terms of how they have been complementing, competing against, or being in conflict with each other, how they engage word-formation processes as deep as morpheme-levels, and how they are perceived and manipulated by language users, including translators. This study shows that translanguaging has been practiced recursively and multi-directionally over a long period of time, yielding the phenomenon 'translanguaging sequel'. The qualitative study of a Japanese translation of a Korean poem reveals a translator's ideology-driven translanguaging practice that crosses not only interlingual but also intralingual boundaries, causing an international socio-political dispute. This study supports the view that translanguaging has been shaping and reshaping the norms of languages and language use. It also suggests the benefits of analyzing the products and traces of translanguaging in translated texts as well as the process of translanguaging during translation activities that can be promoted and implemented in language classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, most prestigious and influential academic journals are published in English, and therefore a mastery of the language is necessary to ensure engagement with the international scientific community. There is debate in the literature as to whether the dominance of English might lead to the marginalization of contributions from academics for whom English is a second language. The present study explores through interviews the insights of 11 humanities and social sciences academics working at two Japanese universities ranked in the top 50 globally. The findings indicate that most of the participants view English as the logical vehicle for reaching a wider audience for their research. Despite an acknowledgement that publishing in English presents problems from both linguistic and pragmatic perspectives, these academics do not, on the whole, believe that current standards need to be revisited. These issues are discussed in light of the changing realities of academic environments, and the need to ensure accessible pathways for those who can and should be contributing to knowledge construction in the global academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 examines the absolutive case in Modern Mandarin Chinese sentences with reversible argument structures. In these sentences, the two arguments adjacent to the verb can be interchangeable in syntactic position. Although previous research has provided partial descriptions and analyses of this grammatical phenomenon, there is still no comprehensive and systematic exploration of these reversible sentences. Employing a reductionist methodology, the study meticulously examines the interaction modes between the verb and its arguments in eight types of reversible sentence structures involving the addition or omission of argument roles. This analysis reveals a distinct pattern that highlights the centrality of an 'absolute argument' within these sentences. Building on these observations, the paper articulates the fundamental structural patterns of reversible sentences and concludes a unified explanatory framework. This research enriches our understanding of Mandarin Chinese syntax and offers valuable perspectives on the linguistic dynamics underlying reversible sentence construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on language evolution is an established subject area yet permeated by terminological controversies about which topics should be considered pertinent to the field and which not. By consequence, scholars focusing on language evolution struggle in providing precise demarcations of the discipline, where even the very central notions of evolution and language are elusive. We aimed at providing a data-driven characterisation of language evolution as a field of research by relying on quantitative analysis of data drawn from 697 reviews on 255 submissions from the Joint Conference on Language Evolution 2022 (Kanazawa, Japan). Our results delineate a field characterized by a core of main research topics such as iconicity, sign language, multimodality. Despite being explored within the framework of language evolution research, only very recently these topics became popular in linguistics. As a result, language evolution has the potential to emerge as a forefront of linguistic research, bringing innovation to the study of language. We also see the emergence of more recent topics like rhythm, music, and vocal learning. Furthermore, the community identifies cognitive science, primatology, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, and genetics as key areas, encouraging empirical rather than theoretical work. With new themes, models, and methodologies emerging, our results depict an intrinsically multidisciplinary and evolving research field, likely adapting as language itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Michael Clyne on a number of fallacies that are linked with the Australian monolingual mindset and another by Yvette Slaughter and John Hajek on the provision of various languages in Victorian schools.

The paper provides evidence that linguistic strategies based on the implicit encoding of information are effective means of deceptive argumentation and manipulation, as they can ease the acceptance of doubtful arguments by distracting addressees' attention and by encouraging shallow processing of doubtful contents. The persuasive and manipulative functions of these rhetorical strategies are observed in commercial and political propaganda. Linguistic implicit strategies are divided into two main categories: the implicit encoding of content, mainly represented by implicatures and vague expressions, and the implicit encoding of responsibility, mainly represented by presuppositions and topics. The paper also suggests that the amount of persuasive implicitness contained in texts can be measured. For this purpose, a measuring model is proposed and applied to some Italian political speeches. The possible social usefulness of this approach is showed by sketching the operation of a website in which the measuring model is used to monitor contemporary political speeches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Hubert Haider's target-article "Grammar change: A case of Darwinian cognitive evolution". I show why such an article is fascinating (and unconventional), although I will mainly concentrate on several disagreements with Haider and will suggest alternative views to those contended by this scholar. My discussion will highlight five main issues: (1) Haider assumes a purely Neo-Darwinian (i.e. genocentric) view of evolution and inheritance, lacking a more pluralistic approach; (2) Haider rejects the idea of language as a biological phenomenon, while at the same time he seems to assume several characteristics related to a biologically seated trait; (3) as opposed to Haider's suggestion, the computational system does not need to be language-specific; (4) Haider's divide between the procedural and declarative components of grammar is perhaps too strict regarding (grammatical) change; and (5) Haider considers that there is no scientific way of deciding the question of language origins and evolution and that complex grammars are too recent. However, I show that a language-like computational power (and perhaps complex grammars) already existed many thousands of years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over the difference between populism and nationalism have been at the forefront of political research on the far right in recent years. This paper aims to provide an empirical support for the claim that nationalism and populism are two distinct phenomena by analysing the articulations of both discourses in Vlaams Belang gender politics. In this perspective, this paper starts by presenting Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis's discursive-theoretical distinction of populism and nationalism (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017, 2020), before to introduce the literature on far right gender politics. The contribution then analyses Vlaams Belang's gender discourses by mobilizing this theoretical framework in order to show how this distinction can help us identifying the different dimensions underlying contemporary far right gender discourses. The article concludes by suggesting new avenues for a better understanding of the various discursive strands composing far right politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the efficacy levels of interdisciplinary teacher collaboration attained at pre-university level are well documented, research in higher education contexts is still scarce. Macaro et al. (2016) earlier reported on a quasi-experimental intervention project conducted in Türkiye with an objective to promote collaboration between nine pairs of English language specialists and content teachers from four universities, and the analyses of the pre- and post-intervention interviews suggested that this sort of collaboration can be highly beneficial. This paper, however, puts the research tool, the Collaborative Planning Tool (CPT), into perspective by describing a learning-centred approach to research design as a way to better understand interdisciplinary teacher collaboration. By re-examining the extant research data (audio-recorded discussions of 72 collaborative planning sessions), this paper presents new findings (clustered under three emerging themes: use of the CPT; interplay between language and content; and the role of feedback in lesson planning), suggesting that the CPT can provide an effective framework for interdisciplinary teacher collaboration in EMI university settings. A discussion of the concept of quality in EMI is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal (LL) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 draws lessons from security and populism studies to theorize how radical right-wing populism (RRWP) utilizes borders as a symbolic resource in crisis narratives to clearly frame an "Us" and a threatening "Them". By analyzing the Hungarian Orbán regime's evolving rhetoric on borders, the paper illustrates how populists employ crisis narratives not to mitigate, but exacerbate ontological insecurities, and thereby facilitate de-democratization by (re)shaping voter attitudes (cf. Homolar & Scholz 2019; Steele & Homolar 2019). The paper suggests that populists-in-power rely on crisis and bordering narratives beyond voter mobilization: such narratives are in fact designed to legitimize and affirm illiberal practices that undermine liberal democracy itself, and contribute to regime building. Border crises, and crisis politics, hence become a template for the manipulation of individuals' security-of-being, and thereby a tool in the politics of reassurance and control at the broader, societal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argumentation mining is a subfield of Computational Linguistics that aims (primarily) at automatically finding arguments and their structural components in natural language text. We provide a short introduction to this field, intended for an audience with a limited computational background. After explaining the subtasks involved in this problem of deriving the structure of arguments, we describe two other applications that are popular in computational linguistics: sentiment analysis and stance detection. From the linguistic viewpoint, they concern the semantics of evaluation in language. In the final part of the paper, we briefly examine the roles that these two tasks play in argumentation mining, both in current practice, and in possible future systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how life story books were used in two care settings in the UK for people with complex support needs. The context of the research was the transition of six people from a long stay hospital to a community home. Discourse analysis was used to analyse talk and texts in the care settings including staff interviews, meetings and the written text in the life story books themselves. Three uses of the books are highlighted in the analysis. They were used as a resource for: getting to know the person; defining the person; and displaying personality and uniqueness. Mutual identities of the various participants were constantly changing with reference to the life story books. It is suggested that the books encourage acceptance in the care relationships. The analysis demonstrated that despite the different uses of the life story books, highlighted by the care staff, there is an underlying assumption that what is written in the books is a direct representation of the person. It appears that once this type of information is committed to paper the identity of the person becomes reified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study explores the use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in two corpora compiled by the author. The learner corpus consists of 23 final papers contributed by 10 MA TESOL students from Taiwan while the control corpus contains 10 journal articles from two prestige international TESOL journals. On the quantitative dimension, student writers were found to slightly overuse connectors when the analysis was based on word-level. Additionally, the qualitative analysis revealed that certain CAs (e.g. besides, therefore) were used inappropriately by some of the learners. The paper ends with several teaching suggestions on how to help student writers master the complex system of conjunctive adverbials in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies related to ESP genres have been carried out lately focusing on different levels of analysis, such as internal ordering, lexico-grammatical patterns or terminology. However, there are not many studies combining different levels of analysis so as to observe how information is rendered in scientific genres. The present study intends to offer a description of rhetorical and phraseological patterns observed in medical research papers and abstracts using a semantic and functional approach. Our methodology is descriptively performed on a comparable corpus composed of research papers and abstracts in the field of diagnostic imaging and published in esteemed journals. We will determine composition strategies by means of the description of the authors' favourite structures found in our corpus. Once these favourite structures have been obtained for every genre, we will proceed with semantic analysis so as to establish their similarities and differences. Our results will, primarily, help translators, technical writers and ESP students to infer discursive strategies in these genres, as well as to better understand some of the discourse aspects of rendering scientific information in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study on term formation presented in this paper is related to the problem of determining the function of neologisms in scientific communication and to the issue of processing the concomitant variation, typical of such new denominations. Our analysis of scientific texts shows that neologisms can have quite a different role in scientific communication than they are generally credited with in terminological studies. The well-known referential role, consisting of the creation of a new designation for naming a new concept is overshadowed in scientific texts by a more rhetorical role. Here the scientist resorts consciously to variation, hence creating a “neology effect”, specifically for the reason of emphasising various novel aspects of his thought. This function of neology as a rhetorical device is generally glossed over in terminology studies, in much the same way as the analysis of variation used to be, due to the expected stability that neologism should eventually gain in line with well-established terms. Consequently, in this article, we try to place the phenomenon of neology within the framework of discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the findings of a diachronic study of 100 research paper abstracts published in four different periods (from 1943 to 2018) in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, one of the most prestigious astrophysics journals written in English. Our main results show that research paper abstracts have evolved over time in the sense that they have become longer, more informative and more precise. They also reveal an overall increase in the number of authors, active and modal verbs, self-mentions and compound groups per total number of words. Likewise, compound structures are becoming more and more complex. These outcomes may be explained in terms of a rising collaboration scenario and an attempt to increase authors' visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an editorial introducing the first special issue of Language, Context & Text. It includes a previously unknown paper on language education by Michael Halliday, introduced by Amy Tsui. The paper provides insights into Halliday's thoughts on the applicability of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to language education. Additionally, the editorial republishes an earlier paper by Halliday on the concept of "educational linguistics" from 16 years prior. The paper includes a response by Gunther Kress, which offers a valuable perspective on the development of multimodality theory and research. [Extracted from the article]

The book "Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar" edited by Lotte Sommerer and Elena Smirnova is a collection of papers that explore language change within the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG). The book is divided into three parts: "The Nodes: Creation, Change and Loss," "The Links: Vertical and Horizontal Relations," and "Beyond Existing Models." The papers cover topics such as the emergence and loss of linguistic nodes, constructional competition, and the reconfiguration of constructional networks. The book offers valuable insights into how to model constructional networks and raises important questions for future research. However, it is primarily focused on English constructions and could benefit from more diverse linguistic data. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Introduction" discusses the special issue of the journal Spanish in Context, which focuses on the study of copulas and copular sentences in Spanish and beyond. The article highlights the theoretical and empirical research being conducted on the properties of copulas, including their syntactic-semantic and pragmatic differences, as well as their variation across languages and varieties. The special issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates and provide new insights based on naturalistic data and experimental studies. The article also mentions specific papers included in the special issue that explore topics such as the pragmatic meaning of estar-copular sentences, the acquisition of estar in L2 Spanish, the behavior of aesthetic adjectives in estar sentences, and the diachronic changes in the use of estar. Additionally, the article discusses the relevance of aspectual notions and the role of syntactic variation in explaining copula selection. Finally, the article mentions a comparative study of copulas in Spanish and other non-Romance languages, which supports the idea that non-verbal predication can be accounted for based on a finite inventory of features. [Extracted from the article]

Reviewers are the largely invisible backbone of a successful journal, giving of their time to help improve the work of other scholars. This paper talks about the role of reviewers, the ways that they help authors, the importance of addressing reviewer comments in the revision process, and the process of publishing. Getting published in a refereed journal means that an author has to satisfy the editor and two or more anonymous reviewers. Because a revision almost always goes back to the same reviewers, a good revision addresses all questions or critiques raised by all reviewers. [Extracted from the article]

Achieving nativeness in L2 pronunciation is not critical, nor is it critical for writing about L2 pronunciation. Using the experience of an L2 writer whose paper was rejected because of nonnative written features, this paper argues that it is past time for editors and reviewers to reject nativelike writing as a criterion for acceptance or rejection of an otherwise well-constructed contribution to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief response I address four topics. In the first place I suggest that single-case action research has a useful contribution to make. In my view, so does action research on the smallest scale: applied to improving the practice of a single practitioner. A second topic is the difficulty of avoiding marginalisation if you are one of those who seek to keep their research practically meaningful. A third one consists of some reasons for my seemingly greater optimism. Finally I try to provide from my own experience some practical measures which can be taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the use of blogs has gained increasing popularity among second language (L2) writers, research into their role in developing L2 writing ability is yet underdeveloped. In particular, investigations into the use and effectiveness of peer feedback on L2 blogs are limited. The current study sought to fill this gap by comparing the provision of peer feedback in blogs versus on paper. Participants were a class of ESL students in a TESL university program in Quebec who produced written texts both in blogs and on paper, received peer feedback, and then revised their texts. Altogether, the findings suggest that while both blogs and paper can be influential mediums for L2 writing, they may inspire different types of errors, elicit different types and degrees of feedback, and lead to differences in subsequent revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this position paper, we provide an overview of what we regard as the most important features of the relationship between the moral order and morality in the context of language conflict and aggression. While in previous pragmatic research the concepts of morality and moral order have been rarely brought together, we illustrate that they are inseparable, in particular in the context of conflict and aggression. We propose an analytic model – with replicability in mind – which captures the dynamic relationship between these phenomena: the model is centred on the idea that perceived (a) violations of the moral order, (b) breaches of moral norms, principles and ideologies, (c) conflict and (d) aggression constitute a cluster. The explanatory power of this dynamics resides in the fact that it can account for a variety of seemingly unrelated scenarios, such as conflicts triggered by the violation of interactional norms vs. rites of moral aggression. Along with detailing the model, we explore the relationship between various methodologies through which one can examine morality and the moral order in the context of language conflict and aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributions to this Special Issue employ conversation analysis to illustrate how detailed analysis of language use can lead to the identification of assessable features of second/foreign language Interactional Competence (L2 IC) and the development of institutional testing instruments and practices. L2 IC has been the focus of much research at the intersection of social interaction and second language acquisition. It has also been treated as a construct in the field of language assessment. However, scholars in each research branch have just begun to collaborate systematically. This Special Issue furthers this collaboration, connecting research on L2 IC in diverse learning contexts with practical questions regarding the assessment of individual learners. It adopts a dialogic 'full paper–commenting paper' structure: Four empirical papers are each paired with invited commentaries that provide critical discussion and a complementary view of the topics the full papers address. The final discussion papers take a broader perspective on the complex nature of L2 IC and assessment and propose ways to productively move forward. Besides introducing the notion of L2 IC and each individual contribution, this introductory article explains the rationale behind the Special Issue in relation to current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]