1,721,028 research outputs found
Preface
No full textThe volume presents a collection of research papers on how to foster the learning and teaching of pragmatic phenomena, as well as on how to administer tests that assess pragmatic competence in second/foreign language education with regard to several target languages. The topics investigated include: speech acts; computer-mediated communication; conversation analysis; pragmatic, intercultural and emotional competence; native and non-native performance; data collection and instructional methods; needs analysis; and syllabus design and materials development
The Use of English in Intercultural Professional Settings: Virtual Encounters and Identities
No full textThe main objective of this publication is to raise awareness of different norms of communication and promote mutual understanding in intercultural contexts. In addition, this issue has a unique focus on virtual encounters and includes the analysis of instances of language (namely, English) connected with various semiotic forms and visual images typical of computer-mediated communication. Research findings are presented with the intent to observe the construction of identity (personal, institutional and social), the establishment of social relationships, as well as the underlying ideology. This type of approach is made possible thanks to direct collaboration between scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. Dynamics between east and west have also proved to be extremely positive and productive
Teaching, learning and investigating pragmatics. Principles, Methods and Practices
No full textThis volume presents a collection of research papers investigating how to foster the learning and teaching of pragmatic phenomena, as well as how to administer tests that assess pragmatic competence in second/foreign language education with regards to several target languages. The topics investigated include: speech acts; computer-mediated communication; conversation analysis; pragmatic, intercultural, and emotional competence; native and non-native performance; data collection and instructional methods; needs analysis; and syllabus design and materials development. The contributions will be of particular interest to linguists, language learners and teachers, teacher trainers, and communication experts
The variability of Compliment Responses: Italian and German data. Chapter XVI
No full textThis study aims firstly to analyse differences and analogies between Italian and German in terms of answering to compliments. The investigation is based on a wide corpus of Italian and German compliment responses, classified on the base of a typologization we postulated for our research. A second goal of the study is to demonstrate how compliment varies along the axes of the so-called dia-levels, because CRs are sensitive to geographical area, gender, topics, illocutionary force; for this purpose we use authentic data we have collected in these last years. We start by presenting our corpora, defining the speech act of complimenting and describing our CRs categorization framework used to analyse and classify our data. As a second step, we compare German and Italian native speakers’ reactions to compliments according to their degree of acceptance and their topic. A particular attention has been deserved to the diatopic variation in Italy. In the last paragraph we summarize the most relevant findings of our study
Tracking language change in the American government: keys in the old and new administrations
No full textThis paper is part of a larger project that investigates the language of American, British and Italian politicians, with a special focus on words and phrases, key-words and key-phrases as uttered at the government and at the opposition. The present work in particular is a diachronic analysis of keywords first and key-clusters after as uttered by the previous and by the current American administrations: thus, speeches, statements, press conferences and interviews delivered by Barack Obama are referenced against those delivered by George W. Bush to uncover the main concerns of the new government that were not prioritized in the old administration. The opposite procedure is also carried out, to unveil the concerns of the previous government that today have been overcome or that simply no longer figure at the top of the agenda, clearly signaling a change in priorities.
There are several different concepts of keywords (Stubbs 2010: 21). The procedure used for identifying keywords and key-clusters in this research is the one devised by WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott forthcoming) and is based on simple verbatim repetition. The wordlists and clusters list generated in the two administrations are analysed and then compared, and the items that emerge are those whose frequency (or infrequency) in the study corpus is statistically significant when compared to the standards set by the reference corpus (Bondi 2010: 3). The topics that both governments deal with will not surface in the comparison, and issues such as Israel or Afghanistan, for example, will not stand out as prominent, namely as key, whereas those where there is a significant departure from the reference corpus – such as Iraq, freedom, terror, war, Saddam, or health, care, Libya, to name but a few – become prominent for inspection (Scott 2008), regarded as pointers which suggest areas which are worth mining (Scott 2010: 51).
Relying on the assumption that the unit of language is “the phrase, the whole phrase, and nothing but the phrase” (Sinclair 2008), and that phrases, or aboutgrams (Warren 2010: 113), are a better means for uncovering the “ofness” of the texts, three-, four- and five-word clusters as uttered in the Democratic corpus are then referenced against those found in the Conservative corpus: the key-clusters emerging from the comparison are indicative not only of the “aboutness” of the text but also of the context in which they are embedded, relating to the major ongoing topics of debate (Partington 2003). Thus, it is unveiled that the war on terror, which was regarded as the signature in Bush’s speeches, is not the main concern in Obama, whose priorities are instead the recovery act, health care reform, clean energy economy, among others. Bearing in mind that phraseology is not fixed and that, in political discourse in particular, some phrases have a relatively short “shelf life” compared to others (Cheng 2004), the aim here is to track the language change from the old to the new administration, unveiling the aboutgrams which are prioritized today but were not an issue in the previous government.
The other piece of software used to carry out the analysis is ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves 2009)
Make Up or Made Up? Intra and Interlinguisitic Messages in the Globalised World of Cosmetic Advertising
No full textThis paper proposes to review the advertising license that has increasingly made its mark over the past century by manipulating language for purely promotional ends. In a contrastive qualitative analysis, of advertisements of the same product or kind of cosmetic product published in the country of origin (USA and the UK) and abroad (Italy), texts will be compared in both a diachronic and synchronic perspective, according to their varying message content and inherent distinguishing linguistic features.
With the aid of a small corpus of comparable English and Italian texts (collected from corporate websites and individual magazine adverts over the past two years), this contribution will provide an in depth discussion of such phenomena as lexical boosting, the coining of new words, relexicalisation and unusuality (Partington 1996), as well as word patterning in the context of advertising creativity. Significant findings will be checked by means of further investigation using the Webcorp, to discover whether recurrences are limited primarily to cosmetics or extended to other products or services, or indeed, semantic fields.
By limiting the area of investigation to the advertising of cosmetics, findings will necessarily focus in part on the synaesthetic metaphor with heavy exploitation of the senses over the years: lipsticks are luscious, delicious, juicy (taste); they are smoothie and make lips feel a certain quality (touch); ingredients of cosmetics may offer “a healthy looking dose” (sight); the name of a lipstick, e.g. Pink Giggles, implies sound; and fragrances naturally, but not only, refer to the sense of smell (Lily & Spice). Furthermore, the analysis will identify some collocation mixes again pertinent to the synaesthetic metaphor (e.g. mouth watering colours, delicious shades). Results also provide examples of unexpected semantic prosody where negative connotations become positive: the concept of plumpness moves to the confines of positive prosody when describing lips. Likewise, the dramatic effect gained with unusuality can be noted in the juxtaposition of components in the noun phrase (e.g Man-eating colours; lethal lipstick colours).
With reference to the complex structuring of information content in extended pre-modified noun phrases that describe the intrinsic quality and purpose of a product in English, the second part of the paper will provide results from a more contrastive analysis of the above phenomena in relation to the foreignising and domesticating strategies (Schaffner 1995, Venuti 195), exploited in maintaining similar yet different messages in present-day promotional cosmetic ads published in Italy, that are more or less readily understandable to a native and non-native readership in the increasingly globalised world of marketing. Thus it will focus on the mixing of languages in complex Italian noun phrases that present new hybrid compound forms (e.g. Lancôme: Nuova maschera Viso Turnaround 15-Minute Facial) at the extreme end of the scale of interpretability, and also culturally specific references in an international context (e.g. Dolce and Gabbana’s Sicily rather than Sicilia perfume).
In conclusion, taking inspiration from Bhatia’s (1993, 2002) studies regarding genre analysis as a reflection of the complex realities of the world of institutionalised communication, results from the analysis will show the extent to which flexibility, as far as comprehensibility of meaning is concerned, is permissible in the creative manipulation of promotional language across cultures in the globalised world of cosmetic advertising
Criteria for the identification of moves: the case of written offers
No full textThe paper discusses the communicative nature and typical characteristics of the act of offering, presented as partly directive and partly commissive. It also provides an extensive overview on the literature on offers. It then describes a set of offers produced in writing under controlled elicitation conditions. The analysis involves a classification of the component moves of offers, which comprises four explicit identification criteria -- content, wording, sequencing and function -- whose validity and suitability can thus be verified in further studies
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
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