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Abstract Self-mention in academic writing has been studied extensively, especially from the point of view of rhetorical functions. In this paper I argue that rhetorical functions represent only one dimension of self-mention. Adding the dimensions of grammatical forms and of hedging and boosting, I propose a three-dimensional model of self-mention. I then employ the model in the analysis of three types of writing in the field of linguistics – L1 English, L1 Slovak (a typologically different language), and L2 English writing by Slovak authors. The study shows that authors employ various degrees of the three dimensions of self-mention to meet expectations of their readers while maintaining a balanced power of self-mention. The results suggest that some, but not all, discourse practices related to self-mention might be transferred to L2 English from one's L1. Highlights • Argues for a three-dimensional view of self-mention in academic writing. • Explores how writers exploit the three dimensions to meet readers' expectations. • Contrasts self-mention in L1 and L2 research articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The complexity of communication presents challenges for clinical assessment, outcome measurement and intervention for people with acquired brain injury. For the purposes of assessment or treatment, this complexity is usually managed by isolating specific linguistic functions or speech acts from the interactional context. Separating linguistic functions from their interactional context can lead to discourse being viewed as a static entity comprised of discrete features, rather than as a dynamic process of co‐constructing meaning. The ecological validity of discourse assessments which rely on the deconstruction of linguistic functions is unclear. Previous studies have reported assessment tasks that preserve some of the dialogic features of communication, but as yet, these tasks have not been identified as a distinct genre of assessment. We suggest the term 'co‐constructed communication' to describe tasks which are specifically designed to capture the dynamic, jointly produced nature of communication within a replicable assessment task. Aims: To identify and summarize how co‐constructed communication has been assessed with individuals with non‐progressive acquired communication disability regarding task design, measures and psychometric robustness. Methods: A scoping review methodology was used to identity relevant studies. Systematic database searches were conducted on studies published before July 2021. Studies in the yield were assessed against eligibility criteria, with 37 studies identified as eligible for inclusion. Main contribution: This is the first time that co‐constructed communication has been defined as a genre of discourse assessment for stroke and traumatic brain injury populations. Co‐constructed communication has been assessed for 144 individuals with aphasia and 111 with cognitive–communication disability. Five categories of co‐constructed communication tasks were identified, ranging in complexity. Variability exists in how these assessment tasks are labelled and measured. Assessment measures require further psychometric profiling, specifically regarding test–retest reliability and validity. Conclusions: Co‐constructed communication is a discourse genre which offers researchers and clinicians a replicable method to assess language and communication in an experimentally rigorous way, within an ecologically valid context, bridging the gap between experimental and ecological assessment approaches. What this paper adds: What is already known on this subject: Standardized assessments of language skills and monologue offer reliable, replicable ways to measure language. However, isolating language from an interactional context fundamentally changes the behaviour under study. This raises questions about the ecological validity of the measures we routinely use to determine diagnoses, guide treatment planning and measure the success of treatment. What this study adds to the existing knowledge: This review highlights studies that conceptualize, and often quantify, interaction by combining experimental rigour and aspects of everyday dialogue. This is the first time this genre of discourse assessment has been identified. We propose the term 'co‐constructed communication' to describe this genre and provide an operational definition for the term. What are the practical and clinical implications of this study?: Co‐constructed communication assessment tasks require refinement, particularly regarding aspects of psychometric robustness. In the future, these tasks offer pragmatic, meaningful ways to capture the effect and impact of aphasia and cognitive–communication disability within interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introductory paper to the special issue summarises key aspects of contact-related linguistic dynamics such as the communicative interfaces of modern complex societies, the multi-layered textual and discoursal repertoire of their speaker groups and the role of the speakers' cognitive mechanisms, social identity, and interactional strategies in settings of language contact. Giving an overview of the contributions, it aims to connect classic topics of language contact research with recent theoretical and methodological approaches investigated in the papers, and to highlight interconnections and interdisciplinary links that can stimulate further research on linguistic variation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newer forms of racism in the context of right-wing extremism are characterised by an apparent distancing from overt racist devaluations. In addition or even beyond biological features, it is now cultural characteristics attributed to social groups which serve as grounds for practices of othering and social exclusion. This paper analyses racist discourse in the comment sections of the influential far-right blog pi-news.com where these practices can be observed in detail. With reference to discourse analytical approaches to racism and using corpus-linguistic, data-driven methods, especially word embeddings and collocations, it is shown how racism is linguistically and discursively expressed. Next to both overt and more implicit racist nominations and predications, the notion of Heimat ('homeland') is analysed; it is used to draw racist demarcations without relying on overtly racialising terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g. "may," "often") in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in representing behavioral pathology focusing, in particular, on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD diagnosis requires reports of non-practitioners (e.g. carers and teachers); an effective understanding of behavioral descriptors by the lay community is thus of paramount importance. The study combines qualitative linguistic discourse analysis and a corpus approach to study the presence and functions of modality, adopting a Systemic Functional perspective toward language. The study argues that in the DSM-5 modality is an important linguistic resource for conveying clinical significance, inferred from graduations of recurrence and probability. However, adopting features of professional discourse in representing behavioral pathology for non-experts, especially when those resources are inherently evaluative, stresses the need of health literacy among the lay social community and accessibility in health communication materials, particularly when non-practitioners are involved in the diagnosis practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been renewed interest in the intersection of identity and epistemics in social interaction, yet epistemics has still rarely been analyzed in political identity construction. This paper combines research on identity from a sociocultural linguistic perspective with epistemics using Conversation Analysis. The focus here is on understanding how a small group of student activists construct their shared political identities through epistemic stances towards their academic majors and career goals. Through a discourse analytic study of conversational data among these activists, I demonstrate the validity of the relationality principle of identity in accounting for how identities are constructed as related to one another. Furthermore, I examine the relational process of authentication in epistemic stances to legitimate claims to knowledge regarding political and academic identities, as well as alignment of stances in building group solidarity and shared political identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Narrative discourse is central to effective participation in conversations. When discourse is assessed in people with communication disability, structured tasks (e.g., picture descriptions) provide experimental control, while unstructured tasks (e.g., personal narratives) represent more natural communication. Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology may provide a solution by creating standardized experiences for narrative retell, therefore balancing ecological validity and experimental control in discourse assessment. Research is needed to understand how VR immersion affects narrative retell, first for adults with no communication disability, before application with adults with aphasia or related communication disability. Aims: To assess (1) the effects of VR immersion on the linguistic content and structure of narrative retells in a healthy adult population; and (2) whether VR immersion can influence the way a narrative is retold so that the speaker conveys their own experience, rather than the experience of the characters they are watching. Methods & Procedures: In this pilot cohort study, 13 healthy adult participants with no reported communication disability watched an animated short film and a comparable immersive VR short film in a randomized order. Participants were asked to retell the events of the story after each condition in as much detail as possible. Outcomes & Results: Mean length of utterance (in morphemes) was significantly higher in the video condition compared with the VR condition. Significantly more first‐person pronouns were used in the VR condition compared with the video condition. No other measures of linguistic content or structure were significantly different between the VR and video conditions. Conclusions & Implications: Increased morpho‐syntactic length and complexity in the video condition may suggest effects of elicitation stimulus on the narrative produced. The larger number of first‐person pronouns in the VR condition may reflect that participants experienced a sense of presence in the virtual environment, and therefore were able to retell their communication experience rather than narrating the experiences of characters from an external perspective. Given the increasing need for more functional assessment of discourse in people with communication disability, further research is needed to validate these findings. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject: As an ecologically valid tool, discourse analysis is often used to assess daily communicative exchanges in adults with acquired communication disability. Clinicians and researchers using narrative discourse assessment must balance the experimental control and diagnostic reference sample capabilities of structured tasks with the ecological validity and real‐life transferability of unstructured personal narratives. What this study adds to existing knowledge: This study explores the use of immersive VR technologies to create standardized, replicable, immersive experiences as a foundation for narrative discourse assessment. It highlights how the 'sense of presence' in a virtual world can prompt healthy adult speakers to retell a narrative of a personal experience that can be replicated for many different participants. The results suggest that immersive VR narrative assessment for adults with communication disability may balance ecological validity with measurement reliability in discourse assessment. What are the potential or actual clinical observations of this work?: Immersion in VR resulted in the production of narratives with morpho‐syntactic features that aligned with typical narrative generation, rather than retell. Participants used more first‐person pronouns, suggesting retelling of personal experience. Though further study is needed, these preliminary findings suggest clinicians can use immersive VR stimuli to generate structured story generations that balance experimental and diagnostic control with ecological validity in narrative discourse assessment for adults with communication disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article used a critical discourse approach to understand how linguistic practices in the South African media construct international immigrants of African origin. We created an 88 000-word corpus of online South African news articles on immigrants from 2008 to 2020, which we then uploaded onto a corpus analysis software, Sketch Engine. Through the software, we were able to generate patterns of language use in the construction of immigrant identity and subject position in the media. While most literature on South Africa has focused on the violence associated with xenophobia, this paper zeroes in on 'the language of xenophobia' to provide a good reflection of the sociological construction of 'self' and 'other' in the country. By examining the discursive practices of the media on foreign nationals, the paper maps out not only the circulation but also the reproduction of power, social relations and other sociologies behind the prejudices that inform xenophobia in all its various forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Evaluation in academic discourse has received considerable attention from researchers. Much of the work on evaluation has focused, however, on written genres, and less attention has been paid to how evaluation unfolds in spoken academic genres. In our present research, we are interested in disclosing how the interpersonal meaning of evaluation is expressed in the discussion session (hereafter DS) that follows conference paper presentations, since DS has already been defined as an “evaluative forum”, when comparing its phraseological patterns with those of the presentation. Though the study of evaluation in spoken genres has been developed focusing exclusively on linguistic aspects, we assume the non-linguistic message that accompanies the linguistic message has an effect on the interpersonal meaning of the communication. Therefore, the aim of our research is to analyse the evaluative meaning conveyed in DSs that follow paper presentations in an applied linguistics conference. In the study, we draw on a social semiotic theory of language and of kinesics and paralanguage to frame a multimodal exploration of this interpersonal meaning. The comparative analysis between linguistic evaluation and multimodal evaluation reveals the significant contribution of non-linguistics features which are used to intensify linguistic evaluation or to express the speakers’ attitude. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the characterization of multimodality of digital texts, more specifically to the understanding of the functioning of the modes of representation in the construction of the reader's positioning in an interactive digital narrative. We present a multimodal discourse analysis of the meanings constructed in a storyapp, which goal is the promotion of intercultural dialogue among children. The analysis is supported by categories from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and visual narrative analysis; it focuses on the description of interpersonal meanings represented in verbal, visual, and aural and the intermodal meaning relations established. The results reveal that the representation of interpersonal meanings in this interactive digital text, of which the promotion of positive feelings of acceptance towards the represented culture stands out, constitutes a multimodal complex. The results allow the discussion of this storyapp as an instantiation of central assumptions of the Theory of Multiliteracies and highlight the need for a new pedagogy aligned to the inherent characteristics of the interaction between language and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback is a term used so frequently that it is commonly taken that there is a shared view about what it means. However, in recent years, the notion of feedback as simply the provision of information to students about their work has been substantially challenged and learning-centred views have been articulated. This paper employs a corpus linguistics approach to analyse the use of the term 'feedback' in research articles published in key higher education journals on the topic over two five-year periods: 2009–2013 and 2015–2019. Analysis focused on the most common noun modifiers of 'feedback' and nouns modified by 'feedback', verbs with 'feedback' as the object, possessors of 'feedback', and prepositions representing an action or concept on or with 'feedback'. Whilst the analysis demonstrated that transmission-focused conceptions dominate publications on feedback, linguistic signifiers of a shift over time in representation of feedback away from a transmission-focus towards a learning-focus were evident within each grammatical relation category. The data indicate that the term 'feedback' is used by different authors to refer to very different representations of the concept, and the paper proposes that greater clarity in the representation of feedback is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the effect of focus-marking on the immediate and delayed recognition of referents in Samoan. Focus-marking on a word can imply the presence of alternatives to that word which are relevant to the interpretation of the utterance. Consistent with this, psycholinguistic evidence is growing that alternatives to focus-marked words are selectively activated in the immediate processing of an utterance and longer term memory. However, most of this research is on Western Germanic languages which primarily use prosodic prominence to mark focus. We explore this in two experiments using immediate and delayed probe recognition tasks in the under-studied language Samoan, which primarily uses syntactic focus-marking. Participants heard short narratives ending in a critical sentence in which the object word was either focused or not, using a cleft-like construction. In the first experiment, probe recognition, alternatives to the object word which were either mentioned or unmentioned in the narrative were responded to more slowly if the object was focus-marked. In the second experiment, delayed recognition, participants were faster to correctly recognize mentioned alternatives, and slower to reject unmentioned, if the object was focus-marked. Both results are consistent with immediate and longer-term activation of focus alternatives. There was no significant effect of focus-marking on recognition of the object word itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how linguistic research can contribute to the field of interspecies studies through an ethnographic study on human-goat communication. It addresses two research questions: whether traditional discourse analytic theory can be used to analyze non-human communication, and whether the specific concepts of communicative events, purposes, and move structure within genre theory can be applied in these contexts. The data show that genre theory can be applied, and that both the humans and the goats attempt to make their communicative goals salient to the recipients. The results illustrate the possibility of applying traditional linguistic theory to non-human contexts, and it is argued that discourse analytic theory should include interspecies interactions to gain new insights in general communicative paradigms. • Paper contributes to the fields of interspecies studies & posthumanist linguistics. • Discourse analysis of interactions between humans and capra hircus goats. • Linguistic ethnographic methods were used to gather non-human communication data. • Analysis through genre concepts of communicative events, purposes & move structure. • Study provides insight into power structures and animal agency at petting farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to develop the description of move systems in Systemic Functional Linguistics based on dynamism in knowledge exchanges, that is, the possible move options made available at different points in an exchange concerned with the negotiation of information. Using conversational interactions in Khorchin Mongolian as examples, the paper argues that at different points in a knowledge exchange, both the speaker and the addressee's knowledge of the information are at stake. The speaker may be positioned either as knowing or as not knowing the information; at the same time the addressee may be positioned either as knowing or as not knowing the information. It is also possible for the interlocutors not to be positioned either way. The move systems developed make it possible to discuss the options preselected and activated at different points in a knowledge exchange and the way interlocutors are dynamically positioned as an exchange unfolds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) direct close-air-support during NATO operations, however, non-native speaker JTACs struggle to meet the NATO English proficiency requirement. This paper examines the effects of including more "military flavour" (Green & Wall, 2005) in the oral proficiency interview (OPI) for JTACs, developed in accordance with NATO Standardisation Agreement (STANAG) 6001. The new test format, called the "OPI+" included linguistic tasks associating military content domains with the linguistic functions traditionally elicited in the OPI, allowing for comparisons to be made between the two. The test was tried on the Norwegian JTAC selection course (N = 25). Test-taker performance was holistically rated in accordance with STANAG 6001, and candidate output on four OPI+ tasks later transcribed and analysed using discourse analytic measures. Findings suggest that while adding more professional flavour to the test of speaking will improve face validity, test-takers' qualitative and quantitative performance will not be significantly affected, as long as the language functions elicited remain the same. Moreover, when it comes to testing the professional language JTACs need in the target language use situation, the standard STANAG 6001 OPI test format apparently leaves something to be desired. • Effects of including military content in an oral proficiency interview were measured. • Discourse analytic measures were performed in addition to holistic ratings. • A general proficiency rating scale was used. • Inclusion of professional, domain-specific content increased face validity. • Professional, domain-specific content did not improve qualitative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2020 was the year of COVID‐19. In this paper we seek to identify the changing concerns of the international press to unfolding events of the COVID pandemic throughout 2020. Based on a 12.3‐million‐word corpus, we explore keyword nouns and verbs and frequent noun phrases to understand the central concerns of the public reflected in its news media. Results show that news in the early months was dominated by the symptoms of the virus, with items relating to controlling the disease such as guidelines, protocols and, eventually, vaccine, becoming increasingly prominent. Dominant keyword verbs base, infect, and announce concerned different activities associated with reporting the pandemic. This corpus‐assisted linguistic description helps guide our reading of the changing public interest in the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aimed to describe the use of Education Linguistic Model in teaching English as a Second Language using discourse analysis. The study focused to the four (4) ESL teachers' process in teaching English as a second language to the different groups of ESL learners in Koronadal National Comprehensive High School for the school year 2017-2018. The participants were selected based from the inclusion criteria formulated by the researcher: a) A participant must be a graduate of Bachelor in Secondary Education major in English; b) A participant must have an at least fifteen (15) years of experience in teaching English as a second language; and c) A participant must be one of the top ten (10) performing teachers as based from the Individual Performance Commitment and Review Form (IPCRF). Furthermore, classroom observation method was used to record classroom proceedings through field notes and voice recorder. Also, qualitative discourse analysis was employed to interpret and understand on how the four (4) ESL teachers utilize the seven (7) ELM categories which are building rapport, acknowledging success, modelling, addressing challenging behaviors, scaffolding the learning, responding to the individual learner and self-monitoring the teaching. The findings entail that the manifestations of ELM categories are evident in the process of teaching as a second language as reflected by the four (4) ESL teachers, but the process of exhibiting the ELM categories is unique and different compared among the ESL teachers. However, some of the categories are not consistently used in every class proceeding. Thus, modelling is not manifested by Teacher C and scaffolding the learning is not manifested by Teacher D. Moreover, both Teacher C and Teacher D do not manifest self-monitoring the teaching. Therefore, the study suggests that selfmonitoring the teaching should be observed by the ESL teachers to enhance the process of teaching English as a second language in an ESL classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coherence is the quality that distinguishes discourse from a random collection of sentences. People with aphasia have been reported to produce less-coherent discourse than non-language-impaired speakers. It is largely unclear how coherence is established in natural language and what leads to its impairment in aphasia. This paper presents a cross-methodological investigation on coherence in the discourse of Russian native speakers with and without aphasia. The purpose of this study was to examine the connection between language impairments in aphasia and different aspects of discourse coherence in order to determine the linguistic mechanisms that could be involved in establishing and maintaining it. Coherence was operationalised as a combination of four aspects: informativeness, clarity, connectedness, and understandability. Twenty participants were asked to retell the content of a short movie. The retellings were annotated using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), a formalistic framework for discourse-structure analysis. Next, they were evaluated for coherence on a four-point scale by trained raters. The ratings were compared between groups. A classification analysis was performed to determine whether the ratings could be predicted based on the macrolinguistic variables collected from the RST annotations and several microlinguistic variables previously linked to coherence. Retellings produced by speakers with aphasia received lower ratings than those of control participants on all aspects of coherence. The results indicate that different combinations of microlinguistic and discourse-structure variables play a role in establishing each of the coherence aspects. Our results provided supporting evidence on coherence impairment in aphasia. Perception of a discourse as more or less coherent was associated with both microlinguistic and macrolinguistic variables, with different combinations of variables relevant for each of the aspects. Furthermore, we found that discourse structure plays an important role, especially for understandability. We speculate that pragmatic knowledge shared by interlocutors may boost the coherence of aphasic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverse and productive ways of studying the word have been instituted in the field of language sciences. In this paper, the objective is to delineate epistemological and theoretical-methodological considerations regarding the study of the word as an ideological sign, from the writings of today called Bakhtin Circle and, more specifically, M. Bakhtin, V. Volóchinov and P. Medviédev. Therefore, the paper revisits the set of these works and returns to the main considerations developed there, centered on the constitutive relation existing among sign-ideology-word. The study aims to contribute to the understanding of the word as a semiotic-ideological dimension, placing the relevance of this discussion for idiom/language studies in the enunciative-discursive perspective and in the consolidation of the discursive studies, which in Brazil are called Dialogical Discourse Analysis (ADD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Covid-19 was not the first pandemic, it was unique in the scale and intensity with which societies responded. Countries reacted differently to the threat posed by the new virus. The public health crisis affected European societies in many ways. It also influenced the way the media portrayed vaccines and discussed factors related to vaccine hesitancy. Europeans differed in their risk perceptions, attitudes towards vaccines and vaccine uptake. In European countries, Covid-19-related discourses were at the centre of media attention for many months. This paper reports on a media analysis which revealed significant differences as well as some similarities in the media debates in different countries. The study focused on seven European countries and considered two dimensions of comparison: between the pre-Covid period and the beginning of the Covid pandemic period, and between countries. The rich methodological approach, including linguistics, semantic field analysis and discourse analysis of mainstream news media, allowed the authors to explore the set of meanings related to vaccination that might influence actors' agency. This approach led the authors to redefine vaccine hesitancy in terms of characteristics of the "society in the situation" rather than the psychological profile of individuals. We argue that vaccine hesitancy can be understood in terms of agency and temporality. This dilemma of choice that transforms the present into an irreversible past and must be taken in relation to an uncertain future, is particularly acute under the pressure of urgency and when someone's health is at stake. As such, it is linked to how vaccine meaning is co-produced within public discourses. • Vaccine hesitancy is co-produced by media discourses. • Covid-19 caused a shift in European vaccine discourses. • Discursive shift from prevention (future) to effective vaccine distribution (now). • Vaccine hesitancy is mediated through temporal structures in agents' orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze online discussion threads related to national belonging in Finland, Denmark, and France. These discussions are all related to immigration and the definition of 'legitimate' citizens. Our approach is empirical: the goal is to show how in-groups and out-groups are construed linguistically and discursively in the data and how the interactants negotiate membership categories and express their opinions regarding them. The most important in-group in the datasets consists of the nationals born in the country, whereas the out-group par excellence is formed by Muslims. The data show how the boundaries of national communities are performatively constructed through the everyday discourse of online fora, which constitute an important arena of societal debate today. This discourse draws its force from the reiteration of stereotypical generalizations and the power attached to the written word in a communication environment enabling an efficient dissemination of ideological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relations between technodiscourse, interactivity and support in Instagram media in a theoretical intersection between Digital Discourse Analysis (Paveau, 2017), Communication Sciences (Jensen, 1998; Kiousis, 2002) and Textual Linguistics (Marcuschi, 2003, Gonçalves, 2013). The corpus is composed of screen copies of stories from the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã and the Brazilian newspaper Diário Catarinense published on Instagram. In this investigation, we verified that some aspects of technodiscourse, such as composition, delinearization, augmentation, and relationality are directly related to two levels of interactivity, the dialogic character and content control. Therefore, a degree of engagement of interlocutors in interactions with Instagram media are increased. We also verified that some variables of interactivity, such as the control of content and the dialogical character, change depending on the type of support through which the Instagram media is accessed, in order to stimulate the interlocutor to more direct and active actions in the construction of meanings. This research seeks to show the relevance of observing the characteristics of technodiscourse combined with the investigation of interactivity and support in the construction of meanings of Instagram stories. With this contribution, we seek to expand the studies that relate technodiscourse to modes of interaction with digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media coverage of dementia can influence public and professional attitudes towards the syndrome, shaping societal knowledge of dementia and impacting how people with dementia are cared for. This paper reports on a study of news articles about dementia published in the British press in the years 2012–2017. The analysis combines the tools of corpus linguistics, a methodology for quantitatively surveying a vast amount of electronic linguistic data, with the qualitative perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis, which seeks to uncover dominant discourses and ideologies. The most salient discourse that emerged from this analysis was the portrayal of dementia in biomedical terms, with a particular focus on the pathological processes of dementia, and pharmaceutical treatments and research. Keywords relating to this discourse are interrogated in detail, illuminating the linguistic strategies through which the pathology of dementia and people with dementia are depicted. This study highlights the challenges that this type of reporting presents to people living with dementia and their families, and points to the relevance of a discursive approach to understanding societal perceptions of dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine a 12-min video-recorded interaction among a patient (KN) in a disordered state of consciousness (DOC) and a speech language pathologist clinician (CL) that takes place in a medical rehabilitation setting. The video is a demonstration of how caregivers could use a clinical assessment to observe their loved one's behavior to communicate potential behavioral changes to healthcare professionals. The purpose of this paper is to make visible the communication practices used by participants that may not be obvious to researchers, medical rehabilitation practitioners, and clinical assessment developers. We use phenomenological, linguistic and conversation analytic approaches to analyze the interaction. We found that KN demonstrates multiple conversational competencies, some (but not all) of which are acknowledged by CL, and most of which are not directly addressed by the assessment scoring criteria. For example, KN demonstrates conversational competency by responding non-verbally to CL's prompts from the assessment protocol and following along with the unspoken rules of discourse. He does this primarily through gaze, which broadcasts the focus of his attention and actively signals his participation in the conversation. Though KN does not always respond correctly to CL's questions, he nevertheless demonstrates implicit conversational competencies during turns of talk such as returning to 'neutral' position which signals the completion of a turn of talk. KN's conversational competencies may be missed by CL and the assessment protocol but we argue that they are important in understanding KN's capacity. Our analyses show that competency is not simply a performance by one person who appropriately and correctly responds to a series of questions in a prescribed time frame. Competence is a collaborative achievement among participants, co-produced in situ , and influenced by linguistic and cultural habits of talk and epistemic norms that privilege clinical knowledge and expertise. • Competency is a collaborative achievement grounded on participants' conversational strategies. • Analytic pluralism allows for analyses using multiple perspectives. • Clinical assessments have unacknowledged epistemic privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to approach the methodology for description of genres in the frame of systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) in Spanish. The purpose of this work is to contribute to fields of discourse analysis and its application to genre-based pedagogies to teaching reading and writing in that language. To do this, SFL is treated as an appliable linguistics (Halliday, 2008), related to its context, as a mode of intervention in critical social practices. The theoretical and methodological base utilized is from Martin (1992a), developed afterwards by Martin and his disciples over time up to nowadays. As this proposal has been established for English, here it is adapted to Spanish when necessary, departing from research done in the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a critical overview of proximization theory (Chilton, 2004; Cap, 2006, 2013). I argue that the original model should be extended to include proximization as interpreted by the audience. The paper indicates some challenges to implementing the proximization-as-reception component, related in particular to data sampling and identification of the relevant markers. Using Web-based user-generated content is suggested as a solution in the former case; a test case study is proposed to address the second problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognised that the delivery of services across health-care sectors faces multiple challenges related to incoherence in patient pathways. There are multiple reasons for this incoherence, which are often dealt with through national legislation and policy-making. This paper discusses policies as powerful actors and explores how effects of a concrete policy are adapted for intersectorial collaboration in Danish health-care. The paper is based on a critical discourse analysis of a central policy document in Danish health-care known as the 'Health Agreements'. Using Fairclough's three-dimensional model for discourse analysis, we explored the document to clarify the construction of actors participating in intersectorial collaboration. The analysis revealed the Health Agreement as a 'negotiated text', appearing as an overriding document legitimising one possible discourse regarding the premises of intersectorial collaboration. The premises of intersectorial collaboration are maintained through a specific presentation of actors leaving little room for discussion, where professionals are constructed as actors who are expected to develop ways of collaborating according to the Triple Aim approach in order to promote productivity and efficiency. Furthermore, this presentation constructs citizens and patients as active, participating individuals who consciously prioritise and act with the purpose of controlling their life situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Engineers increasingly work and advance their careers in international business settings. As technical managers, they need management and technical skills when working with different stakeholders with whom they may not share a common first language. Studies have revealed that informal oral communication skills are of prime importance for global engineers who face challenges in building shared meaning and formulating clear messages in meetings with non-native speakers of English. This article proposes that studying the use of multimodal resources (spoken language, gaze, gestures, and objects) in meetings can unpack how work tasks are accomplished in business through different communicative strategies. Literature review: This paper focuses on engineers’ and technical managers’ needs and challenges in professional and intercultural communication where English is used as a business lingua franca (BELF) in multimodal meetings. While multimodal conversation and discourse analytic studies highlight the dynamic nature of meeting interaction, previous technical and professional communication and BELF research on multimodality is limited. Research questions: 1. How do technical managers use multimodal resources to articulate their ideas in BELF meetings with their peers? 2. How does the use of multimodal resources contribute to the construction of shared meaning in explanatory, consensus-seeking, and solution-finding communication? Methodology: This study reports on two case studies and multimodal discourse analysis of video-recorded meetings among technical managers and their peers in four companies. The use of multimodal resources is analyzed in explanatory, consensus-seeking, and solution-finding communication. Results and conclusions: In BELF meetings, assemblages of spoken language, gestures, tools, whiteboard, and documents contribute to constructing shared meaning. This study has implications for global professional and engineering communication. Future research should further examine multimodality in BELF meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes traces of masculinity by examining Malaysian sports news, centralizing the discussion on emotions in sports news discourse. Specifically, it compares the depictions of male and female athletes in newspaper texts and (co)-construct masculinity and varying notions of emotion through corpus-assisted discourse analysis, including the ways in which these depictions on 'emotion' can help social workers in sport. By extracting a specialized corpus known as Malaysian Sports News, manual qualitative analysis paired with corpus linguistics techniques is used. The results will reveal sporadic examples of emotion-centered expressions that describe sports as a depiction of stereotypes of masculinity. We begin by locating past studies and making their connections, adapting some of the many research rigors by paying attention to specific findings that have been reworked in other important, global perspectives of social work. By focusing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis of athletes in newspapers, convergence and divergence between male and female athlete reporting highlighting implications of masculinities on social workers in sports and the recent 2018 APA Guidelines on Boys and Men can be established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the political discourse of presidents establishes an understanding of the factors that influence word choice and communication. Most notably, the context provided by presidents in their political discourse conveys the meaning intended by the speeches, which then influences the way the public reacts to what they have to say. Through knowledge of these factors, linguists can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between language and the perceptions of American presidents by both Americans and non-Americans. The purpose of this paper is to examine the political discourse of two American presidents – George W. Bush and Barack Obama – in order to identify the overall message intended by their speeches and the factors that influence their discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lately, discourse structure has received considerable attention due to the benefits its application offers in several NLP tasks such as opinion mining, summarization, question answering, text simplification, among others. When automatically analyzing texts, discourse parsers typically perform two different tasks: i) identification of basic discourse units (text segmentation) ii) linking discourse units by means of discourse relations, building structures such as trees or graphs. The resulting discourse structures are, in general terms, accurate at intra-sentence discourse-level relations, however they fail to capture the correct inter-sentence relations. Detecting the main discourse unit (the Central Unit) is helpful for discourse analyzers (and also for manual annotation) in improving their results in rhetorical labeling. Bearing this in mind, we set out to build the first two steps of a discourse parser following a top-down strategy: i) to find discourse units, ii) to detect the Central Unit. The final step, i.e. assigning rhetorical relations, remains to be worked on in the immediate future. In accordance with this strategy, our paper presents a tool consisting of a discourse segmenter and an automatic Central Unit detector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading original texts can be a very difficult endeavor for students of modern languages. Courses in literature or linguistics often come short due to poor reading and comprehensive skills of the students. This paper presents a new approach to reading techniques using a simple grammar analysis of texts. It aims to show how two apparently different fields of study can converge in order to simplify understanding, to enhance creativity of expression and augment academic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video-based self-reflection and annotation is receiving increasing attention within the education literature. The importance of such technologies in education relate, in part, to the interactive nature and functionality these tools bring to aid learning engagement. In particular, these tools are well aligned with the need to promote and develop student meta-cognitive skills through the use of self-reflection activities. However, in the context of video-based learning environments, the nature of a students' self-reflective process is not well understood. We attempt to address this gap in the literature in two main ways. First, we developed a coding instrument to assess the depth of a students' self-reflection captured through the use of a video annotation tool. We then explored the linguistic and discourse properties of the student self-reflections using Coh-Metrix, a theoretically grounded computational linguistics facility. The adopted approach applies comprehensive analysis of language and discourse features associated with the specificity of students' internal self-feedback , which is externalized as self-reflections in video annotations. The results suggest that levels of self-reflection have characteristically different linguistic properties, and these differences align with the underlying cognitive mechanisms associated with distinct reflective activities. The paper provides a detailed discussion of the findings in the context of the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications associated with video-based self-reflection and video annotation. • Self-reflection and annotation are important strategies in video-based learning. • We develop a coding instrument to assess the depth of a students' self-reflection. • We explore the linguistic and discourse properties of the student self-reflections. • The levels of self-reflection have consistently different linguistic properties. • The findings also highlight the importance of effective learning design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate from a discourse analytic perspective task authenticity in the speaking component of the Occupational English Test (OET), an English language screening test for clinicians designed to reflect the language demands of health professional–patient communication. The study compares the OET speaking sub-test roleplay performances of 12 doctors who were successful OET candidates with practice Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) roleplay performances of 12 international medical graduates (IMGs) preparing for the Australian Medical Council clinical examination. The premise for the comparison is that the OSCE roleplays can represent communication practices that are valued within the medical profession; therefore a finding of similarity in the discourse structure across the OET and the OSCE roleplays could be taken as supporting the validity of the OET as a tool for eliciting relevant communication skills in the medical profession.The study draws on genre theory as developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in order to compare the roleplay discourse structure and the linguistic realizations of the two tasks. In particular, it examines the role relationships of the participants (i.e. the tenor of the discourse), and the ways in which content is represented (i.e. the field of the discourse) by roleplay participants. The findings reveal some key similarities but also important differences. Although both tests inevitably fall short in terms of authentic representation of real world interactions, the findings suggest that the OET task, for a range of reasons including time allowances, training of test interlocutors, and the limits of contextual information provided to candidates, constrains candidate topic exploration and treatment negotiation, compared to the OSCE format. The paper concludes with proposals for mitigating these limitations in the interests of enhancing the OET’s capacity to elicit more professionally relevant language and communication skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper examines teaching practices in three first-grade primary classrooms (age range from five years and nine months old to six years and nine months old) in Greek Cypriot public schools, exploring whether the wider changes in critical literacy education declared on a policy level are influencing classroom literacy practices. Greek Cypriot public education has followed the language policies developed in Greece since the island gained independence in 1960. However, from 2010, there has been a full-scale educational reform in Cyprus at all levels of education, and for the first time, a critical literacy model has been implemented. Drawing data from research conducted into classroom practices and discourse, the current paper analyses literacy teaching in three Greek Cypriot classrooms, focusing on the materials used, the idea of textuality, the role of metalanguage and the notion of language legitimacy produced in the classroom. The overall aim is to document how the model of critical literacy is applied (or not) in these classrooms, and to explore the limitations and difficulties encountered, especially in the first grade of primary school where students need to move from emerging to developing literacy, i.e. they need to acquire the mechanisms of reading and writing. The methodology adopted follows the methods used in micro-ethnography, focusing in this case on participant observation of literacy classes and interviews with teachers in three classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports findings of a case study of the networked language practices of two young users of the social networking site Facebook. Theoretically informed by sociolinguistics and computer-mediated discourse analysis, this paper contributes to the study of language and participation in social media by developing an empirical approach to sharing and by focusing on the relation between sharing practices and linguistic repertoires. The paper proposes an understanding of sharing as an interactional practice of entextualizing significant moments for a networked audience. Data collection and analysis follow a mixed-methods approach. The primary data consists of the participants’ public Facebook timelines during a period of one year. It is complemented by qualitative interviews and systematic observation of the their digital literacy practices on Facebook. The analysis distinguishes three stages of sharing – selecting, styling, and negotiating – and then moves on to individual case studies, which illustrate how the two participants mobilise linguistic resources in order to share moments of transnational mobility with their audience. The findings show how subtle shifts in the selection, combination and negotiation of linguistic resources index participants’ transnational trajectories and their orientation to particular subsets of their audience, and how the audience takes an active role in negotiating the modes and meanings of sharing in social networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an approach to the discourse analysis applied to the media under the Cognitive Linguistics. This qualitative research aims to analyze the conceptual metaphors related to the public education found in the opinion pieces. A content analysis for conceptual metaphors was carried out in two opinion pieces posted in 2017 in two Chilean cyber-media. The results show that the metaphors allow to conceptualize and characterize accurately the viewpoints communicated in the opinion pieces. In particular, the conceptual metaphors analyzed show the complex nature of the concept Public Education by associating it mostly with two source domains, loot and building, which emphasize some characteristics and valuation. Likewise, both opinion pieces coincide that the current situation is due to the policies adopted by the Chilean State, which is characterized negatively in those pieces by using the metaphor to attribute it some human traits like the cowardice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of big data, linguistic studies with quantitative methods have gained momentum. Ever since the approval of the project ‘Quantitative Linguistic Research of Contemporary Chinese’ in 2011, the research group led by Professor Haitao Liu has continued to investigate quantitative features of Chinese texts as well as other languages from four aspects, that is, quantitative research on a lexical level, on a syntactic level, and on other levels like phonemic, discourse, and semantic levels, as well as quantitative research based on the complex network approach. This group aims to explore universal laws of all languages while still paying attention to differences across different languages. In this project report, the main research papers published in the past five years are reviewed. Through these studies, we can find that the quantitative method has attracted the attention of Chinese linguists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at discussing the relationships of turn construction, interactional units and projectability with especial regard to projections triggered by TCU-initially placed items, for instance discourse markers. Supported by data taken from contemporary spoken French, the main purpose of this piece is to theorize and describe these patterns of projection and to elicit from them constructional convergences. The theoretical statement is complemented by the exemplary analysis of a French talk-show conversation in which the turn-initially placed items feature prominently in the interlocutors’ discussion. This can be demonstrated through the study of certain linguistic mechanisms of coherence on different hierarchical levels. Special focus is placed on the implicit argumentative relations that the analyzed projection patterns establish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes some morphosyntactic and lexical aspects in the translation into Spanish of John L. Austin's How to do things with words, with the aim of studying its degree of deviation from the original text and in order to verify its situation between foreignization and domestication, that is usually the preferred choice in philosophical translations. Conclusions will be used to evaluate the convenience of a new translation of this work for the hispanic academic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the key elements of ethos, pathos and logos linguistic strategies as some main features of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks, popularizing speeches aiming at Knowledge Dissemination. Through a comparison between the TED Talk 'HIV - How to fight an epidemic of bad laws', by Shereen El-Feki (2012a), and another speech held by the same author at the 2012 Symposia The Global Commission on HIV and the Law, addressed to specialists, the paper analyses TED Talks as an innovative tool of popularization, which breaches the typical triangularisation 'scientist-mediator-audience', bringing scientists directly into contact with their audiences. Drawing upon Aristotle's three pillars of rhetoric, the paper analyses the strategies used to establish the ethos of the speech, by proposing a topic as morally worth of spreading; pathos, by creating a direct contact with the public; and logos, investigated through an analysis of the elements used to recontextualise scientific discourses into popularized speeches. The analysis suggests that TED Talks are a recodification, not a mere translation of texts; they are a means to disseminate knowledge reducing the asymmetry between audiences and scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliaments are important and complex institutions. However, they are notably under-researched within linguistics and related fields. This is certainly the case with the European Parliament (EP). Drawing both on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and prior, manual research on parliamentary communication, this paper proposes and applies an analytical protocol to examine EP speeches. Although these are disseminated in various forms and through dissimilar means (e.g., live at the EP; the audiovisual format via streaming or recorded videos; or published as parliamentary proceedings), here we focus on proceedings – one of the EP’s main sources of official representation. Following the EP’s (unique) practice, where official proceedings do not distinguish between original and translated speeches but consider all texts of equal (legal) status, this study delves into all speech production in English, without separating source and target texts. In the most orthodox of CADS traditions, analysis proceeds from micro and macro-levels of texts into the macro-context (unlike other academic approaches, in which it proceeds in the opposite direction). This direction forces us to move from tangible, specific data to the enveloping setting in which these data are exchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes to analyse the mechanisms of quarrels from a theoretical perspective largely informed by linguistics, and more specifically, by pragmatics. It connects with some of Jean-Jacques Lecercle's argument in the current issue, but takes the analysis in different directions. Looking at a number of examples of quarrels, this paper purports to identify the different participants and parameters in the development of a quarrel. These include speakers (authors), texts (more often than oral discourse), institutions that (might) adjudicate, an audience and rules, as well as material conditions under which disputes develop. These parameters provide a framework, rather than a rigid construction, within which speakers may change positions. Special attention is given to the beginnings of a quarrel (what counts as the start of a quarrel?) and to the ends of a quarrel (do they end, or simply cease to be of interest?). The essay concludes on the dynamic of quarrels, which precludes modellization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Codeswitching and discourse markers are proposed as potentially compensatory means to promote fluency in bilingual people diagnosed with nonfluent aphasia. Aim: This paper examined four linguistic markers of aphasia and fluency—grammaticality, complexity, codeswitching, and discourse markers—in the narratives of a bilingual speaker, in order to assess whether and to what extent these phenomena are manifested in the two languages of a person with aphasia. Methods & Procedures: Sixteen narratives per language were collected, using a cue word procedure, from a 59-year-old Yiddish–English bilingual with diagnosed moderate nonfluent aphasia. Analyses of frequency and locus of ungrammaticality, sentence complexity, codeswitching, and discourse markers were conducted as well as motivations for codeswitching. Outcomes & Results: Findings showed more ungrammaticality in English (L2) than Yiddish (L1), relatively similar levels of complexity, and very similar use of discourse markers in both languages. Codeswitching was more prevalent in Yiddish (L1), motivated by lexical access difficulties, whereas in English (L2), codeswitching was motivated both by lexical access and cross-linguistic lexicalization differences. Conclusions: Differential use of codeswitching across the languages of a bilingual person with nonfluent aphasia shows that different strategies are used to enhance fluency and compensate for ungrammaticality in each language. Clinically, the study shows the importance of assessment in both languages, and suggests that intervention in both languages should be considered pending further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses a set of narratives on critical episodes by people affected by migraine. The voice of patients has acquired higher relevance in recent years, after being long postponed in the field of medicine. Linguistic research on patients' discourse can contribute to the knowledge on and understanding of this disorder, and even to its diagnosis, as shown among others by the researches on cardiac and convulsive illnesses carried out by German and British teams (Gülich and Schöndienstt, 1999; Schwabe et al., 2008; Schwabe et al., 2007). In this article I present, from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory and of discursive production theory, an analysis of a corpus of patient narratives in which people explain their migraine attacks: I am interested in expanding the knowledge on how these patients conceptualize and transmit their illness and its main symptom, i.e. headache. The analysis of patients' contributions focuses both on the qualitative aspects of pain and on the description of its intensity, which is particularly rich as regards expressive procedures and resources and leads, occasionally, to the thematization of feelings of fear and panic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current context of urban schools, strict curricula and rigid teaching practices are often used in schools with high linguistic and cultural diversity. To understand how teachers can use more equitable teaching methods in classrooms, it is important to explore how teachers make sense of multifaceted student identities and how those identities play a role in making instructional decisions. Drawing on a discursive understanding of identity, this paper reports on a study that seeks to analyze two cases of teachers who employed discourse analysis with classroom transcripts in a community of practice and how this may lead to new understandings of student identity, particularly in multilingual contexts. As teachers appropriated the research practices of discourse analysis, they began to shift in the way they understood their students’ identities, from initially viewing them through institutional lenses to understanding the agentive positions that students took up in classroom discourse. This study yields implications for teacher development as well as furthering understanding about the relationship between language and identity in urban schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary retheorisation of affect is impacting on an increasingly wide range of disciplines/inter-disciplines in the human sciences. Of particular relevance for this paper are, on the one hand, the emphasis on embodiment and, on the other, the ideas of “flow”, “intensity” and “contagion”. Together, these challenge traditional views of affect as equivalent to emotion, emanating from the self and ending at the boundary of the self. Discourse studies has not yet been significantly influenced by the “affective turn” now taking place within social and cultural theory. It has largely maintained, albeit implicitly, the traditional view of affect. Yet, if all human interaction is inflected with affect, in the sense indicated above, a different model of discourse seems called for. This paper aims to make a contribution to the development of a new “affect-ed” discourse analytics by identifying a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena that could contribute to such a project. We draw primarily on the work of linguistics, bringing to notice a range of phenomena that may be unfamiliar either because of their technicality or because of the problematic status of linguistics in much cultural theory. The paper proceeds via a brief genealogical account of current affect theory to note a range of language phenomena that have been or can be read in terms of individual feeling and suggests an analysis of several forms of interaction re-read in terms of affective contagion. This section of the paper constitutes a preliminary inventory of components of an affect-ed discourse analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]