1,720,973 research outputs found
Conceptualisations of substance misuse and their potential consequences
Full text linkMy undergraduate cognitive stylistic research demonstrated how conceptualisations of addiction exist on a continuum and are constantly influenced by embodied experiences. This continuum moves from choice to illness and is dependent upon social norms, which are formed by an individual’s understandings of whether a person who uses drugs needs them to function. Addiction is a complex and multi-faceted area of research which encompasses several unfamiliar strands of interdisciplinary work which need further attention. This thesis investigates how professionals, who frequently come into communication with substance misusers, conceptualise addiction and the potential consequences that these conceptualisations can engender. The data will be analysed through a linguistic lens from a cognitive poetic viewpoint in order to answer the following research questions:
1. What are the emerging dominant conceptual metaphors used by professionals working in the field of addiction?
2. What do utterances reveal about how professionals conceptualise the different phases of addiction?
3. What are the potential consequences of such conceptualisations?
The application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory will enable me to analyse how metaphor is used in key passages of the discourse. By employing a cognitive stylistic approach, I will be able to combine detailed linguistic analysis with a theoretically informed consideration of how cognitive structures and processes motivate professionals’ production of language and subsequently treatment and therapy for substance misuse - an essential procedure if we are to gain a true insight into how healthcare professionals think about addiction
Debating Migration: the Brexit referendum in newspaper opinion pieces
Full text linkOn the 23rd June 2016, the UK public voted to Leave the EU in a close contest, with 51.89% advocating Leave and 48.11% optioning to Remain. In the aftermath of the vote, a rise in hate-crime was revealed signalling the fractious political climate at the time. Therefore, this paper reviews the discursive contribution of the UK online newsprint media during the EU referendum - with an emphasis on how migration-related arguments featured at different stages of the campaign. Political deliberations are supported by the media, who publish argumentative pieces in support of a certain outcome. Focusing on the comment pages of The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Mirror, this study provides an overview of how each campaign developed migration-arguments to support a Remain/Leave vote. This paper will demonstrate how the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis can be used in conjunction with argumentation theory to examine how the representations of the circumstances surrounding an argument support a conclusion. Due to the influential capacity of the media, examination of what representational and argumentative strategies were relied upon will provide an insight into how the media contributed towards the public debate of the EU referendum and describe how migrants were objectified for political success
(Mega-) metaphor in the text-worlds of economic crisis: towards a situated view of metaphor in discourse
Full text linkBuilding on Werth’s (1994) notion of ‘megametaphor’, in this thesis I examine the discourse-level conceptual effects of metaphor in five op-ed articles about the 2008 British financial crisis. I use these analyses to offer three contributions to debates in metaphor studies. Firstly, I attempt to offer a more detailed specification of megametaphor. I argue that whilst megametaphor is a useful concept to start an investigation of discourse-level metaphoric conceptual effects, Werth (1994) does not sufficiently differentiate it from the notion of ‘conceptual metaphor’ (see Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). I define megametaphors as text-driven discourse-level conceptual structures comprised of multiple metaphors. Secondly, I argue that megametaphors are situated within the broader cognitive environments generated in the minds of discourse participants as they take part in a discourse. Analysts therefore have to account for the relationship between megametaphors and the conceptual contexts in which they appear. I argue that Text World Theory (see Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) provides the best account of this conceptual context, and suggest that the text-world structures created in the minds of readers scaffolds the integration of individual clause-level metaphors into megametaphors. Finally, drawing on Werth’s (1977, 1994) notion of ‘double-vision’, Steen’s (2008, 2011a, 2011b) notion of ‘deliberate metaphor’ and Stockwell’s (2009) attention-resonance model, I propose a framework for describing the ways in which megametaphors ‘texture’ (Stockwell, 2009) the text-worlds in which they are situated
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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