26 research outputs found
An Interdisciplinary Study of Narrative Structure in Dash Akol as a Short Story and Dash Akol as a Movie
No full textThis paper undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie adapted from it. “Dash Akol” is a short story written by a famous Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat in 1932. Hedayat’s “Dash Akol” was made into a movie in 1971 by Masoud Kimiai. There are some discrepancies between the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie, triggering a number of significant implications. This article discusses these discrepancies along with Hedayat’s and Kimiai’s narrative techniques. To this end, it applies Genett’s (1988) Narrative Discourse and his three main narrative methods: narrating, characterization, and focalization. Meanwhile, it brings in Rimmon-Kenen’s (2002) strategy to study characters, and Stam and Burgoyne and Flitterman-lewis (2005) to show the ways in which the movie has deviated from the story. In terms of characterization, it studies traits such as, action, speech, naming and setting
An Applied Linguistics Look at the Linguistic Comparison of Nominal Group Complexity between Two Samples of a Genre
No full textThe roles and effects of changes in syntax on comprehension and processing effort, and the relationships between these two, comprise a large and separate field of inquiry, with the general belief now in place that such changes and variations bring about varied psycholinguistic and discursive implications for comprehension, manifesting themselves differently in different genres.The current study is a brief attempt at bringing out the differences in the complexity of the noun groups in two novels, one of which is a 19th century novel, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and the other is a 21st century one, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. Each novel was analyzed for the ten longest nominal groups used in them, representative also of the complexity inherently evidenced by a long nominal group. It turned out that there is little difference between the size of noun groups in the two novels. Thus, the added complexity and challenge in processing and comprehending 19th century prose fiction can be explained by the generic tendency in such genre towards the deployment of a higher rate of rank-shifted embedded structures in the noun groups and more varied qualifiers that employ more non-finite clauses as post-nominal qualification. There is need to look into processing difficulty and interpretation challenge posed by different literary genres for different groups of learners, because, in line with a now common SLA understanding, full and conscious comprehension, parsing and interpretation of syntactic components play a marked role in rich and native-like writing for learners
Bringing the Attitudinal System of Affect to the EFL/ESL Classroom as a Way of Further Critical Education and Reflection: An Analysis of Affectual Language in Two American Presidents’ Inauguration Speeches
No full textAppraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or dis-align themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of Affect in lucid and teacher-friendly ways, this paper aims to smoothly invite ESL/EFL teachers into possible employment of this model in classes of intermediate levels and above, to align themselves with and avoid losing sight of the constant need to maintain a critical pedagogical atmosphere in foreign language literacy and education. To this end, we provide a simple analysis of the affectual language of two inauguration speeches delivered by two American presidential candidates, geared to equipping teachers with some quick tools of reflective and critical pedagogy and use the exploration and display of different categories of Affect in the classroom to engage students in critical reflection on the world and everyday events
Exploring the Metaphors of Loyalty, Courage and Friendship in Harry Potter Novels and their Turkish Translations
No full textIn studies on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Metaphor Master List scholars have come
up with over the years, the metaphors (target domains) of loyalty, courage and friendship
figure among very important ones. In this study, we undertake to explore these three
metaphors in the Harry Potter series, as these three conceptual domains also happen to
constitute three underlying themes in these novels. Cross-linguistic work in this regard is in
its infancy and would benefit from ongoing research, because our knowledge of metaphors
is only useful insofar as we can determine if a domain is universally and cross-linguistically
also used to conceptualize a given target concept similarly in another language, or if it is
found to be subject to some variation between the two languages being compared. We look
at how these three generic-level concepts are conceptualized in English and their translations
into Turkish, and if the cross-domain mappings are similar/different in the two languages,
offering further insights into how far cognitive reality and its metaphorical realization differ
between English and Turkish from a Cognitive Linguistics vantage point
Systemic Functional Linguistics as Interpersonal Semantics: Appraisal and Attitude in the Stylistic Analysis of an English Novel
No full textDiscontinuous Residue and Theme in Higher-Order Semiotic: A Case for Interlocking Systems
No full textThe fallacy persists in discourse analysis research to explore lexicogrammatical phenomena detached from any adjacent plane of the meaning potential. In an attempt to dispel this and toss out some preconceived notions about what a modern SFG vantage point should involve, this study homes in on one aspect of SFG within prose fiction in particular, which is very revealing in terms of how separate system networks are actually in synergistic simultaneity, and how SFG allows one , phenomenally well, to bring such synergies out, getting to the heart of the fact that language pervasively operates on multiple planes of textuality simultaneously. Thus, building upon Halliday’s 2004 work, the quest is if it is interpersonally significant when the Residue is split into two parts; more importantly, if it is also laced with some lexicogrammatical quality on the textual plane, in light of the fairly well-entrenched assumption that there is always Theme at work when the Residue is split. Halliday is the only scholar to touch upon the topic of Discontinuous Residue and its relationship to Marked Theme in the culmination of his groundbreaking career, i.e. his 2004 work. Having driven home the proposal to make into a watchword the ubiquity of interlocking macro-semantic system networks, some pedagogical and research implications and suggestions flowing from this are brought up
The System of Engagement in a Sample of Prose Fiction and the News
No full textEmerging within Systemic Linguistics, Appraisal/Evaluation is a framework for analyzing the language of evaluation, providing techniques for the systematic analysis of evaluation and stance as they operate in whole texts and in groupings of texts. There are three systems in the Appraisal framework: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. This study sets out to analyze the use of the system of Engagement within a sample of English Literature (prose fiction) and the News (news articles). Engagement is a medium through which the speaker or the writer engages dialogistically with others (i.e., the addressees, within the process of evaluation). A corpus of 20,000 words was selected from each genre, involving five cornerstones of short fiction and a collection of news articles from CNN, Reuters, BBC, Daily Mail and Yahoo News. The study sheds light on the fact that both genres are strikingly close in using the four subsystems of Engagement, and both are inclined towards dialogic expansion, albeit for different generic reasons, with dialogic contraction taking a backbench. Appraisal as a whole is a promising model to explore texts in different genres, paving the way for richer more illuminating analyses of the interpersonal semantics operating in them
“I am Well-versed and Skillful in Teaching English”: Self-praise Strategies on Instagram Bios of Iranian English Language Teachers
No full textLooking at self-praise through the lenses of face-to-face (hereafter FTF) conversational norms and social etiquette, one can find solid evidence that it has been severely censured for its potential to pose a threat to the positive face of the audience. However, with the dawn of technology and social networks, self-praise has enjoyed an often-occurring practice online considering that people make use of Social Networking Sites (hereafter SNSs) such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to share favourable information about themselves; hence, casting their achievements and skills in a positive light. This study attempts to identify the self-praise strategies Iranian English language teachers employ to present themselves as skilful and experienced on their Instagram bios. To do so, 120 Instagram accounts belonging to English language teachers from Iran were randomly selected. Subsequently, their bios were read carefully to analyze the self-praise-carrying utterances and the employed strategies. The results of the analysis point to the predominant use of various indirect strategies by the users to form a positive image of themselves. The scarcity of direct self-praise hints at the existence of awareness on the part of the users of the potentially risky and delicate nature of the speech act in question
Linguistic Devices Used in Newspaper Headlines
No full textNowadays mass media plays crucial roles in people’s lives. Online newspapers constitute a
part of media discourse, which makes for extremely important bodies of text for the purposes
of research in discourse analysis. In news headlines, careful and sensitive use is made of
linguistic devices in order to make the headlines unique and different, influence the readers,
create trust for the newspaper, and, most importantly, invite and encourage the reader to
proceed to the whole story and the main body of the report/news report. In this spirit, this
study is a linguistic analysis of headlines in the political section of established online
American newspapers. The data for this study comprises 50 headlines collected from 5 online
newspapers revolving around the theme of Donald Trump. It aims to explore the linguistics
structure of newspaper headlines in the sample articles from these 5 most widely read
newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles
Times, and Washington Post. In this qualitative-quantitative study, use is made of the model
by Montgomery (2007) that takes account of a comprehensive picture that pays due respects
to linguistic, semantic and discursive properties of headlines alongside each other in a
complete package. The findings are mapped out in the form of figures and charts. The results
of the frequency analysis showed that newspapers mostly used ‘full sentence’ and ‘ellipsis’
in their headlines. The qualitative analysis revealed that most of the semantic, linguistic and
discursive strategies used in headlines are geared to the ‘tactical incompleteness strategy’, a
helpful notion and a part of Montgomery’s model
Revisiting Common Source and Target Domains in Conceptual Metaphors in a Sample of English Fiction: Implications for Literacy Practices and Advanced EFL Pedagogy
No full textMetaphor research has always been conducted with various purposes in mind, among which the diachronic analysis of metaphor variation in discourse is outstanding. The current work followed a qualitative research mould to analyze the use of conceptual metaphors within the two novels Persuasion and The Fault in Our Stars, belonging to 19th and 21st centuries, respectively. To this end, a framework of common source and target domains proposed by Zoltán Kövecses was adopted. The analysis was conducted using the Metaphor Identification Procedure, a reliable method for marking metaphorically used words (Pragglejaz Group, 2007). The majority of the identified source and target domains in the two samples were identical, supporting the common domains in the framework, although some novel domains were also identified. With the support found for these common source and target domains and their being expected to repeat prominently in different advanced literary and semi-literary genres, the present analysis resonates with important implications for upper-intermediate and advanced EFL pedagogy, as well as teachers and syllabus designers, when literature-text, as part and parcel of the upper-intermediate EFL context, is introduced to the classroom
