1,720,959 research outputs found
From Green Hype to Green Action: An Integrated Discourse Analysis of Sustainability Reports
No full textOn the strength of the ever-increasing discourses surrounding environmental crises and the growing collective awareness of the climate challenges faced by individuals across the board, corporations are reshaping and readjusting their identities accordingly, with corporate environmental policies becoming a benchmark for gauging business efficiency, viability and sustainability. This shift has resulted in the rise of a new genre, in some respects similar to the financial report, namely, the sustainability report, which illustrates the strategies and moves devised by companies not to fall short of required environmental standards. Though potentially addressing a wider and less specialised audience than that of financial reports, sustainability reports still employ hard-to-read language and patterns not entirely digestible to lay readers (Smeuninx et al., 2020; Kang & Kim, 2022). In light of this, and building on the theoretical frameworks of Ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2015), Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 2017) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), my study aims to combine a quantitative and qualitative research approach to the investigation of a 455.269-word Corpus of Sustainability Reports (SRC) produced between 2022 and 2023 by 9 multinational corporations including Coca Cola and Johnson & Johnson, among others. The results show interesting common linguistic patterns across the corpus investigated: (i) a disproportionate use of first-person pronouns, analysed from the perspective of engagement (Martin & White, 2005); (ii) the occurrence of verbs and structures carrying a positive semantic prosody (i.e., support, advance, enhance, among others) to outline the environmental policies implemented by the companies; (iii) the self-construction of the company as a ‘leading example’ in inspiring ecologically-minded behaviour; (iv) the emergence of destructive frames (Stibbe, 2015); (v) the use of quantitative verbs (i.e., increase, reduce, among others) and evaluation verbs (i.e., assess, prioritise, among others); (vi) the occasional reference to ‘science’ as an abstract entity; (vii) the development of company-specific narratives to project an environmentally friendly image. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide a better understanding of the linguistic devices employed in sustainability reporting, including the construction of solidarity with the putative reader and genre-specific features
Cutting through Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA): The Role of Perfectionism and Teacher Traits
No full textTranslating Cultural Milkscapes: A Corpus-Based Cross-linguistic Analysis of Breastfeeding Discourses in Italian and English News
No full textMothers are increasingly seen as ‘risk managers’ (Furedi, 2002 / Reese, 2005 / Lee, 2008) responsible for mitigating potential dangers for their children, thus leading to a rise in seeking expert guidance in parenting decisions (Knaak, 2006). Due to societal pressures and judgments, decision-making concerning childbirth and breastfeeding is heavily influenced, with pro-breastfeeding organisations sometimes adopting a judgmental tone to dissuade formula feeding by appealing to women’s conscience and instilling guilt. In this respect, scholars (Kukla, 2006 / Avashai, 2007 / Wolf, 2007 / Lee & Bristow, 2009) have noticed a shift in the discourse surrounding breastfeeding, emphasising its moral dimension over health-related issues. This moralisation has resulted in the redefinition of breastfeeding as a benchmark for ‘good motherhood’, precipitating feelings of shame and self-blame among women who do not breastfeed and impacting on their psychological well-being. Into the bargain, multiple challenges, including medical conditions, work constraints and societal pressures, contribute to what is described as a ‘culture of pressure’ surrounding breastfeeding (Knaak, 2006), affecting women’s decision-making and experiences. In view of this, this pilot study sets out to uncover the predominant linguistic patterns used in the discursive (mis)representation of breastfeeding across a sample of Italian and English newspapers, aiming to facilitate a cross-linguistic comparison, shedding light on the practices and sub-discourses that emerge in the corpora investigated and reflecting on the challenges translators can encounter in dealing with them across languages. To this end, two corpora were compiled to look into the discourse on breastfeeding in Italian and English news media, each containing 100 articles published between November 9, 2021 and November 9, 2023. The Allattamento Corpus, focusing on Italian news outlets, and the Breastfeeding Corpus, incorporating contributions from national and international English news sources enabled a preliminary quantitative and qualitative analysis of linguistic patterns in breastfeeding discourse. This study turns to Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis (CBDA) (Baker & McEnery, 2015 / Egbert & Baker, 2019 / Egbert et al., 2020 / Baker, 2023) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) in data analysis and interpretation, where CBDA helps to unearth linguistic patterns shaping public perceptions, while Appraisal Theory reveals evaluative components like judgment and engagement levels. Therefore, this paper will illustrate i) how pervasive societal discourses surrounding breastfeeding influence and restrict the dialogic space, perpetuating normative attitudes towards women who cannot or choose not to breastfeed; ii) the manners in which Italian and English linguistically construct and reproduce breastfeeding discourses and practices
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
Breaking the Bias: Reimagining Inclusive Public Health Policies for the Monkeypox (Mpox) Outbreak and Challenging Scapegoating Representations
No full textThe Monkeypox (MPOX) outbreak, which manifested in Europe and North America (May 2022), has been a cause for concern due to its potentially serious health consequences. The defining feature of this condition is its visible and superficial nature in that the eruption of contagious pustules all over the skin renders the infection unmistakable and easily recognisable. In other words, it might be argued that MPOX makes the body transparent (Sontag, 2001), for the external observer can see through the patient’s body and promptly come to a diagnosis. Ever since its onset, MPOX, similarly to HIV in the 1980s, has been disproportionately associated with a category of people defined by medical international organisations and the media as gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM), as a higher percentage of infections has been reported among this cohort. Inevitably, the phenomenon has fuelled stigma and discrimination against the LGBTIQ+ community, leading to incidents of violence and ostracism (März et al., 2022). However, it was with the rollout of the vaccine in the UK and the US that MPOX-related social exclusion soared to a dramatic extent, thereby reinforcing the false myth that sexual orientation can determine susceptibility to the virus (Damaso, 2023). In this regard, official accredited sources like the UK NHS website and the GOV UK website recommend that vaccine should be primarily administered to GBMSM “who have multiple partners or participate in sex groups or attend sex-on-premises venues”, thus publicly constructing this category as more vulnerable to contracting the disease. Taking all this into consideration, the dangers of approaching MPOX from such a biased perspective are mentioned as follows: (i) non-publicly LGBTIQ+ individuals may feel discouraged from seeking medical help or vaccination for fear of being outed, thereupon unknowingly spreading the virus and further exacerbating the epidemic; (ii) openly LGBTIQ+ people might be reluctant to apply for vaccination lest they might be stereotyped as sexually promiscuous; (iii) heterosexual individuals infected with MPOX may delay the testing process, diagnosis and treatment because they are not typically identified as a high-risk population.
In light of this, the present study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore the discourses underpinning the (mis)representation of MPOX. In particular, the methodology will involve corpus-based approaches (Baker, 2006, 2014; McEnery et al., 2006; McEnery and Hardie, 2012; Baker and McEnery, 2015; Egbert and Baker, 2019; Egbert et al., 2020; Stefanowitsch, 2020) to analyse a large dataset of newspaper articles and institutional documents. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1992, 1995, 2023; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; Weiss and Wodak, 2003) will also be adopted to gain a deeper, more qualitative understanding of the data to: (i) unearth the discursive strategies whereby media representations and, above all, official medical guidelines have fed marginalisation and stigma against LGBTIQ+ individuals; (ii) analyse the deleterious impact of prejudiced language use in formal documents and international media coverage on health-seeking behaviour; (iii) call for a more inclusive and evidence-based approach to public health policies and communication so as to avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes and prejudices
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