1,720,994 research outputs found
'Getting engaged: dialogistic positioning in novice academic discussion writing'
Get PDFThis chapter builds on a proposal put forward in Swain (2007a), that in effective academic argumentation, a very important role is played by the ENGAGEMENT system (White, 1998, 2003; Martin & White, 2005) of appraisal theory (Feez et al, 2008; Martin, 2000; White, 2005; Martin & White, 2005). The analysis for engagement of a corpus of non-native speaker undergraduate discussion writing in English showed that engagement resources are key to successful writing. Engagement resources are implicated in evaluative coherence; the degree to which the writer engages with the referenced arguments, coherently with the authorial position adopted; the inclusion of other viewpoints, and the mediation of attitude. From this it follows that the engagement framework has implications for EAP course content and methodology. The framework includes expressions and structures either ignored in traditional EAP programmes or taught with little attention to their dialogic, rhetorical functionality. Focus on engagement enables awareness of a fuller range of resources for persuasion and of their dialogic functions than is traditionally envisaged, providing help with perhaps one of the most challenging forms of academic writing for students
A Journey to Resia and an analysis of Resian melodies and dance airs
No full textElla von Schultz Adaïewsky – a pseudonym for Sophia Christine Gertrud Elisabeth von Schultz (1846-1926) - was a nineteenth Russian composer, pianist and musicologist. Her French language manuscript 'Un Voyage à Résia' is a hybrid text, with a first part (about one third) in the genre of travel writing and the second and third parts in the genre of an academic musical analysis. The whole constitutes one of the earliest ethnomusicological studies, based on her 1883 visit to the Resia Valley in north-eastern Italy (with the Polish linguist Baudouin de Courtenay), which for reasons unknown remained unpublished during her lifetime. The manuscript was discovered in 2009 in Venice by the author’s niece, Elsa Geiger, who gave it to the Italian musicologist and critic Quirino Principe. Recognising its historical and scientific importance, Principe gave the manuscript to the Friulian Associazione Musicale Sergio Gaggia, which, with the help of local government funding had the manuscript transcribed (by Giuseppe Frappa) and translated into Italian (by Frappa and Christine Canci); the transcription and Italian translation were published in 2012 by the Libreria Musicale Italiana (Lucca, Italy) in Voyage à Résia: Il Manoscritto di Ella Adaïewsky del 1883 e la Nascita dell’etnomusicologia in Europa.The English language translation was inspired by the wish to make Ella Adaïewsky’s highly original and far-sighted contribution to the field of ethnomusicology available to a wider, international audience. The translation aims to convey the historical and idiosyncratic stylistic features of the original French text as far as possible, whilst providing some supplementary information in the form of footnotes and occasional in-text paraphrases to facilitate and enhance the modern reader’s understanding. I have opted for a literal, semantic, source-based translation that seeks to capture as many as possible of the features that make this text unique, whilst accommodating the contemporary English-speaking reader with some supplementary information in the form of a limited number of footnotes and in-text paraphrases or synonyms. The ‘work in progress’ feature and textual layering of the revisions is rendered by mirroring (with some adaptions in the case of grammatical corrections) the differently coloured annotations in the original manuscript. I have maintained in translation the sometimes haphazard, idiosyncratic use of punctuation and with it the spontaneous and spoken feel which this and other features confer on the source text (ST), such as the frequent authorial interpolations. I have often prioritised the ST word order over a more natural English word order, with a view to imparting an unfamiliar feel – ostranenie - already present in the French language discourse of the ST (that the writer was not a French native speaker is apparent from the French text). And I have maintained the wordiness of many formulations particularly in the more academic, argumentative part of the work, which in English recalls the slow paced, slightly pedantic (to modern readers) academic prose of the nineteenth century. One major technical difficulty of this translation was the extensive reference to Ancient Greek musical theory, using both ancient Greek and French or German transliterations of terms for which it was necessary to find the corresponding transliterations in English. For this task I used the reference works Barker, A (1989) 'Greek Musical Writings 1: The Musician and his Art'. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press' and West, M. (1992) 'Ancient Greek Music'. Oxford: Oxford University Press. For translation theory in general I drew on my previous research in the field of translation studies (Swain, 2001, 2014)
Parlando tra di noi. Tenore interpersonale nei documenti interni del Foreign Office nel dopoguerra
No full textThis article adopts a sociolinguistic perspective on a small corpus of written documents produced by the British diplomatic service for internal use in the post war years. The focus on internal documents is novel: most studies of language and diplomacy to date focus on interstate communication (Cohen-Wiesenfeld, 2004; 2009) or on forms of public diplomacy (Chilton, 1990; Donahue & Prosser, 1997; Wodak & Vetter, 1999; Vasta, 1999; Kurbalija & Slavik, 2003). The article is concerned with aspects of interpersonal meaning that shape the identity of a small community of diplomatists as they manage behind the scenes at the Foreign Office and Whitehall two historical events in the demise of the British empire: the Persian oil crisis and the independence of Kuwait. The language used in the continuous written exchange of information and opinions to this end is analyzed using Halliday et al’s (1964) distinction between register and dialect and Martin’s (1992) elaboration of the three components of Halliday’s (1985) situational variable of interpersonal tenor: status, contact and affect. The analysis shows how tensions between social, professional and discourse roles are resolved in linguistic choices that realize a generally high degree of contact, affect and solidarity, and which express a shared social background, ideology of empire, and level of personality dissonant perhaps with the official status of these documents as government property. These interpersonal choices include a strong presence of social dialect within a professional register, informing a distinctive language variety which tends to confirm the view of the diplomatic service at that time (Bromhead, 1985:22; Hughes & Platt, 2015) as amateurish and adopting recruitment procedures based on class and gender rather than on merit
‘Sizing up the enemies and allies: evaluation in British foreign policy documents 1938-39’
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Hate speech or legitimate satire? Drawing the line in cartoons.
Get PDFControversial cartoons appearing in contemporary news and social media are periodically denounced by consumers for hate speech, and argued over in blogs, reader comments and news articles. Visual and verbal discourse analysts could contribute useful insights to such debates and to awareness raising programmes for addressing hate speech issues in cartoons, but to date have produced little work on the topic. This paper addresses the difficult question of how we distinguish between legitimate satire and hate speech in controversial cartoons about real events featuring public figures belonging to groups with a history of discrimination. The paper proposes that key considerations in this endeavour are the distinction between conceptual and narrative representations and the relevant participant role(s) assigned to the public figure in question (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006). The latter’s construal as being, doing or undergoing in the visual structure constrains the options for their evaluation. The evaluations are analysed using visual analogues of the verbal appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005; Economou, 2009; Swain 2012; White, 2014). It is argued that negative evaluations based on representations of the public figure’s real-life behaviour may more plausibly pass for legitimate satire, whereas those based on the public figure’s appearance alone may be more susceptible to a hate speech interpretation
‘When a rose by any other name might not smell so sweet: names and their informativity in translation’
No full textThresholds and Potentialities of Systemic Functional Linguistics: Multilingual, Multimodal and other Specialised Discourses
No full textThe chapters in this volume discuss and apply both well-established descriptive tools and new developments in systemic functional linguistic (SFL) theory to a wide range of contexts, confirming the theory's versatility, adaptability and potential for growth. The section on languages other than English is representative of the ever-widening appeal of SFL for functional grammatical description across the world, and focuses on aspects of the grammatical description of French, German, Spanish and Slovenian, also in a contrastive perspective. The section on multimodality confirms and extends the applicability of SFL to image, film and music as well as verbal text, in advertising contexts. The section on specialized discourses contains a chapter arguing for the integration of SFL grammar with theories of time from physics; another chapter uses the SFL grammar of transitivity to test the validity of evaluative models of speech in psychotherapy. One applies SFL theory on language and context in stylistics to literary text analysis, and one other uses recent developments in appraisal theory or the language of evaluation to analyse academic writing in higher educational contexts for the purpose of proposing new priorities in university writing pedagogy programmes
Analysing evaluation in political cartoons
No full textThe paper uses appraisal theory to map some of the richly complex visual and verbal resources for making evaluative meanings in political cartoons, and to capture how distinctive patterns of those resources create different interpersonal styles, or evaluative keys. In this it addresses a gap in the cartoon literature, where claims about point of view, persuasive effects and style are often intuitive, rather than based on systematic analysis. The tools of verbal and visual appraisal and the concept of evaluative key are explained. Some proposals are offered concerning visual-verbal interaction. In-depth appraisal analyses and discussion of three cartoons illustrate the different configurations of appraisal resources realising the evaluative key of each, and how evaluative meanings and viewer alignment depend on multiple interactions between visual and verbal appraisal and ideation. Three types of evaluative key are proposed: observer voice, jester voice and indicter voice
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