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Adendorff, Ralph (Prof)
No full textDepartment of English Language and Linguistics Ralph Adendorff </a
SA Hunt
No full textThis thesis reports on an analysis of the discursive construction of female and male
physical identity in children’s literature and explicitly combines corpus linguistic
methods with a critical discourse approach. Based on three novels from each of the
Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series, it shows clear gendering of body
parts, not only in terms of the purely quantitative preferences for certain body parts to
be associated with one or other gender, but in terms of discourse prosody, or the uses
to which the body parts are put. Human body parts in these series are mostly used in
the following four ways, all of which show differences in realisation in terms of
gender:
· to describe individuals, physically, in order to distinguish one from the other;
· to convey emotion, unintentionally as well as consciously;
· for physical interaction between people and
· for interaction with the world more broadly: responses to danger and agency,
i.e. the ability to act on the world and the nature of what is achieved.
The use of body parts by characters to express emotion and act agentively on the
world is revealed to be strongly gendered in the two series. I characterise the most
prominent patterns in terms of the bodily products blood, sweat and tears, of which
the last is strongly connected to female characters, who are generally associated with
emotion. The other two, referring to active participation in fighting and injury, as
well as agency, are almost exclusively reserved for males, with female characters
rendered unable to act on the physical world as a result of overwhelming feelings.
The females’ response to danger suggests stereotyped discourses of inequality which
see women and girls as requiring protection and being physically incapable. Thus
gender is still a particularly salient aspect in these widely-read examples of children’s
literature, despite plots which appear to be fairly positive towards women. The
strength of the inclusion of a corpus approach in this study lies in its capacity to reveal
objective, and often fairly covert, trends in language use. These in turn enrich the
critical analysis of discourses in these influential texts, which facilitates social change
through linguistic analysis
The role of APPRAISAL in the National Research Foundation (NRF) rating system evaluation and instruction in peer reviewer reports
Full text linkThis thesis reports on two aspects of interpersonal meaning in peer reviewer reports for eleven researchers in the Animal and Veterinary Sciences awarded NRF ratings in A1, B1, C1 and Y1 rating categories. These aspects are the evaluation of the researcher applying for a rating, and the instruction to the NRF as to the rating the researcher ought to receive. A full APPRAISAL Analysis (Martin & White 2005) complemented by an investigation of politeness strategies (Myers 1989) is used to analyse the reports and show how the various systems of interpersonal meaning co-function and to what effect. The analysis reveals that there are clear differences between the evaluative and instructive language used in the reports. Those for the A1 rated researchers are characterised by only positive evaluations of the applicant, frequently strengthened in terms of Graduation and contracted in terms of Engagement. Overall there is less Engagement and politeness in these reports rendering them more ‘factual’ than the reports for the other rating categories. The A1 rated researcher is therefore construed as being, incontestably, a leader in his/her field of research, worthy of a top rating. The reports for the B1 and C1 rated researchers are characterised by the increasing presence of negative evaluations. In addition, there are more instances of softened/downscaled Graduation, dialogic expansion and deference politeness, showing that there is more perceived contention about the evaluations made. The reports for the Y1 rated researchers (a category for young researchers) focus on the applicant’s demonstrated potential to become a leader in the field. In addition to a high incidence of negative evaluations, downscaled Graduation, dialogic expansion and deference politeness, the Y1 reports are also characterised by a high incidence of advice and suggestions from the reviewers concerning the applicant’s work and standing. At a broader level, the analysis reveals that the language used in the reports has a profound influence on the outcome of the rating process. The reports are crucial, not only for evaluating the applicant but, also, more subtly, in directing the NRF towards a specific rating category. It offers insights into what is valued in the scientific community, what is considered quality research, and what leads to international recognition. The research also adds uniquely to current thinking about the language of science and, more particularly, highlights the nuanced understanding of evaluative and instructive language in the reports that is possible if one draws on the full APPRAISAL framework, and insights into politeness behaviour
For the people : an appraisal comparison of imagined communities in letters to two South African newspapers
Full text linkThis thesis reports on the bonds that unify imagined communities (Anderson 1983) that are
created in 40 letters prominently displayed on the opinions pages of the Daily Sun, a popular
tabloid, and The Times, a daily offshoot of the mainstream national Sunday Times. An
APPRAISAL analysis of these letters reveals how the imagined communities attempt to align
their audiences around distinctive couplings of interpersonal and ideational meaning. Such
couplings represent the bonds around which community identities are co-constructed through
affiliation and are evidence of the shared feelings that unite the communities of readership.
Inferences drawn from this APPRAISAL information allow for a comparison of the natures of
the two communities in terms of how they view their agency and group cohesion. Central to
the analysis and interpretation of the data is the letters’ evaluative prosody, traced in order to
determine the polarity of readers’ stances over four weeks. Asymmetrical prosodies are
construed as pointing to the validity of ‘linguistic ventriloquism’, a term whose definition is
refined and used as a diagnostic for whether the newspapers use their readers’ letters to
promote their own stances on controversial matters. Principal findings show that both
communities affiliate around the value of education, and dissatisfaction with the country’s
political leaders, however The Times’ readers are more individualistic than the Daily Sun’s
community members, who are concerned with the wellbeing of the group. The analysis
highlights limitations to the application of the APPRAISAL framework, the value of subjectivity
in the analytical process, and adds a new dimension to South African media studies, as it
provides linguistic insights into the construction of imagined communities of newspaper
readership
Clem Sunter's transformational leadership discourse
No full textSince the 1970s, two distinct leadership styles have been recognised in the fields of
business and organisational research - transactional and transformational leadership.
Transactional leadership is seen to resemble managerial-type leadership where followers
fulfil their duties in return for rewards that satisfy their self-interest, such as payor
promotion. Transformational leadership, as the label suggests, is leadership that is seen
to transform followers from their everyday selves to their better selves (YukI 1998).
Transformational leaders motivate followers hy appealing to their higher-order needs,
offering incentives for compliance such as feelings of personal empowerment, a sense of
moral self-actualisation and an emphasis on the individual's contribution to the
community at large (Harvey 2004). These leaders have been observed to emerge and
thrive within contexts fraught with socio-political and economic turbulence, where they
maximise the uncertainty of the environment to instigate change. Transformational
leaders are seen to be especially adept at using discourse to foster strong, persuasive
interpersonal relations with their followers.
This research reports on, particularly, the interpersonal dimension of Clem Sunter's
transformational discourse; he being a prominent South African scenario planner and
business leader. It is essentially a qualitative study that describes Sunter's discourse in
three of his texts written in 1996. The end to Apartheid in 1994 and transition from
White to Black governance meant that the socio-political climate of 1996 South Africa
was conducive to the rise of a transformational leader like Sunter. Although the country
was, ostensibly, a democracy in 1996, much social transformation was still needed at the
time Sunter produced his texts.
The analyses are grounded mainly in Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically
APPRAISAL theory and, to some extent, Critical Discourse Analysis theory. However,
the analyses do not follow a classic CDA analysis approach, but draw rather from more
recent CDA work (cf. Fairclough 2003), such as the analysis of value assumption types
within the texts. This analysis clearly demonstrates that Sunter's discourse is congruent
with the principal insights oftransfonnationallcadership. More than this, it is argued that
these findings suggcst a close link betwecn transformational Ieadership and the goals of
the latest social order of new capitalism, a link not made in the relevant research to date.
The analysis of modes of operation of ideology in the texts (cf. Thompson 1990), also
deriving from CDA, reinforces this, indicating that Sunter's transformational discourse
promotes and maintains the kinds of power inequalities that underpin new capitalism.
The APPRAISAL analysis of Affect choices in the tcxt reveals a high frequency of
disquiet, i.e. Sunter's discourse is seen to generate feelings of insecurity and fear. This
feature, interestingly, is completely inconsistent with current transformational leadership
theory, but would have been an effective motivational technique given the instability of
the South African socio-political context in 1996. In addition, the APPRAISAL analysis
of Judgement reveals that Sunter evokes high levels of tenacity and appeals to readers'
morality, ethics and feelings of group-efficacy - all higher-order needs. The argument
here too is that the socio-political context enabled Sunter to stimulate disquiet and
tenacity in an effective configuration to mobilise change in his reader and promote the
goals of new capitalism. The thesis concludes with a reflection on the limitations of the
study and makes various recommendations for future researc
Literacy, orality and recontextualization in the parliament of the Republic of South Africa : an ethnographic study
Full text linkIn parliaments, the tasks of drafting legislation and conducting oversight are accomplished by
means of complex chains of spoken, written and multimodal texts. In these genre chains,
information is recontextualized from one text to another before being debated in sittings of the
houses of parliament. This study employs the point of view afforded by linguistic ethnography to
investigate critically the ways in which meanings are recontextualized in one section of such a
genre chain, namely the process by which committees of South Africa's National Assembly oversee
the budgets of government departments and state-owned entities. It does this to identify possible
sources of communication difficulties in this process and suggest ways in which these can be
minimized. In so doing, it develops a theoretical model of the discursive effects of
recontextualization informed by Latour's (1987) notion of black-boxing as well as Maton's (2011)
Legitimation Code Theory. This model uses Interactional Sociolinguistics and elements of
Systemic Functional Linguistics, including APPRAISAL and Transitivity as tools to describe the
realization of these effects in language. This study finds that ideational and interpersonal meanings
are condensed and decondensed at particular points in the genre chain in ways that lead to some
MPs’ voices being recontextualized more accurately than others’. It also shows that common
sources of communication difficulties in the committee process include differences in political
background and understandings of committee procedure and participant roles. It recommends that
representatives of departments and entities reporting to the committees should receive a fuller prebriefing
on their roles; that MPs should receive training on asking clear, focused questions; and that
the role of committee secretaries as procedural advisors should be strengthened
The role of planning time in inducting preschool children into aspects of schooled literacy.
Full text linkThesis (M.A.-Linguistics) - UnIversity of Natal, 1996.This dissertation describes a microethnographic study of the induction of preschool children
into the practices of schooled literacy at an ex-Natal Education Department,
Anglican-affiliated preschool. The sources of data are participant observation and
audio-recordings of planning time interaction; interviews with key informants; and site
documentation.
The principal finding of the study is that planning time, a seemingly inconsequential
preschool event, differentially inducts children into literacy practices that anticipate
expository reporting. Such literacy practices carry high prestige in Western capitalist
society, being the recognised convention for presenting and contesting information.
Planning time was originally designed as an intervention program to facilitate
nonmainstream literacy acquisition by making the conventions explicit, thus minimising
cultural and linguistic discontinuities between home and school-based literacy practices.
However at Church Preschool, an essentially closed environment with access controlled by
mechanisms such as waiting lists, this event has been co-opted to further maximise
mainstream advantage. The data reveals that, despite a rhetoric of openness in making the
norms explicit, planning time only inducts nonrnainstream children into elementary literacy
practices. Beyond that point, the conventions become increasingly implicit and depend on
shared knowledge of mainstream norms.
Planning time functions as a covert gatekeeping event that effectively maintains the status
quo by guarding access to powerful literacy practices. The tension between the rhetoric of
openness and the reality of who gains mastery of the literacy practices suggests that planning
time restricts access not on the level of entry, but at the point of acquisition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Positions on the mat : a micro-ethnographic study of teachers' and learners' co-construction of an early literacy practice
Full text linkThis thesis reports on research into micro-interactions within the reading literacy event Reading on the Mat in three Grade One classrooms. This event is the core of literacy learning in Foundation Phase classrooms in formerly ‘white’, government-funded primary schools in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, and takes place daily for every child. It is literacy practice resembling Group Guided Reading. The research focused on teachers’ identity-forming decisions, actions and discourses as a way of examining micro-interactions within the literacy event. Hymes’s work on the ethnography of communication provided categories for the investigation. Using an ethnographic approach, I entered the sites of the study as a participant observer. There I focused on the central literacy event, in which a group of children and the teacher sit in close proximity. I made field notes, video recordings and audio recordings in three sets of visits spanning the full school year. These were supplemented by teacher interviews, consideration of reports and assessments, and an analysis of the text types used on the Mat, for example, graded readers, flash cards and phonics primers. Beginning with Hymes’ S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G. mnemonic, cycles of analysis using multiple instruments foregrounded the data. The central finding of this research is that in Reading on the Mat children are offered identities through strong normative work and embedded practices. Teachers promote positive identities for children as successful readers and create positive affect for reading activities. This positive positioning work is however undercut by three factors: first, the fact that activities on the Mat focus on decoding text fragments rather than interrogating whole texts. The resultant identity offered to children is one of code breakers alone. A finding subsidiary to this, but important for pedagogic practice, is that teachers’ choice of text types is the most powerful determinant of children’s code breaker identity. A second
factor that undercuts children’s identity as successful readers is that, although they are active, they have little agency. This derives from the strong assessment focus of teachers on the Mat and their questioning practices. A third factor which undercuts the positive identity children are offered in this literacy event is that, by focusing primarily on decoding fragmented text and on assessment opportunities, teachers avoid engaging with issues of differentiation and disregard cultural and linguistic differences. Teachers’ choices, therefore, while creating a positive climate in the classroom and developing emergent readers who are effective decoders, construct children as limited literate subjects. The same choices enable teachers to ignore learner diversity
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