Discourse and Interaction

Kristin Davidse, Ngum Meyuhnsi Njende and Gerard O’Grady (2023). Specificational and Presentational There-Clefts: Redefining the Field of Clefts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

2026-03-23T15:16:54+01:00

A book review.

Putnam, M. T., & Natvig, D. (2025). An introduction to language attrition: Linguistic, social, and cognitive perspectives. Routledge. 190 pp.

2026-02-23T09:56:48+01:00

The development of disfluency strategies in L2 English: A pragmatic analysis of discourse marker use by school-age Arab learners

2025-10-01T17:53:55+02:00

Discourse markers (DMs) play a significant role in spoken communication, assisting in coherence and fluency in first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Understanding the use of these markers as disfluency strategies can inform language teaching by highlighting the significance of real-world communication skills. Researchers often focus on studying the use of these markers to unveil their various functions in spoken discourse and as signals of speakers’ pragmatic competence. However, there is little research on how L2 children employ speech management strategies such as DMs or filled pauses to overcome disfluency in their interactions. This study aims to explore how school-age Arab children learning English as an additional language employ DMs with other disfluency strategies (i.e., filled pauses and repetition) to manage disfluency in their speech by analyzing natural spoken data in a corpus of children’s speech. Results show that school-age Arab children employ the five most frequent DMs in the corpus (like, yeah, okay, so and oh) in co-occurrence with filled pauses and repetitions to serve primarily disfluency functions. The study contributes to the field of disfluency studies by offering insights into how Arabic-speaking child learners of English use discourse markers along with other strategies to manage disfluency and develop L1-like interactional patterns, thereby shedding light on the acquisition of pragmatic and interactional competence in L2 children.

Establishing a presence: Self-mention in L2 (Czech) doctoral writing and expert writing in linguistics

2026-03-09T09:19:58+01:00

Self-mention clearly establishes the writer’s presence in the text and may enhance the persuasiveness of their arguments. Although widely researched in L2 student and expert academic writing, relatively little attention has been given to self-mention in doctoral writing in European contexts. This corpus-based study compares the use of self-mention in 30 English-medium PhD theses by Czech doctoral students and 30 published research articles by Anglophone scholars in linguistics. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the frequency, forms and functions was conducted in Sketch Engine. Overall, self-mention occurred approximately twice as frequently in the student corpus and was more frequent in every rhetorical section. While students primarily employed self-mention to organise the discourse and project a confident stance, experts tended to use self-mention to put forward claims and justify their methodological decisions. The findings may inform future academic writing instruction for L2 doctoral students in similar contexts aiming to publish their research internationally.

Hate speech as a conflict communication tool: The case of Donald Trump

2025-04-27T15:31:50+02:00

Hate speech is a crucial tool in Trump’s conflict communication, which helped him win the 2024 presidential election. This study aims to investigate hate speech in Trump’s political discourse, focusing on the role and functions of hate speech as a conflict communication tool. The research demonstrates that hate rhetoric in Trump’s political discourse aimed at positioning himself as the best choice and, simultaneously, forming an extremely negative image of his political opponents. The expression of Trump’s hate speech encompasses negative stereotypical and non-typical nominations within the threat domain which are targeted at three main addressees: the presidential candidate Kamala Harris, then President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Discursive diplomacy: Constructing Russia and Ukraine in the English-language press of East Asian democratic nations

2025-04-27T15:20:22+02:00

This article examines how the public diplomatic, English-language press in East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – constructed Russia and Ukraine in the first year of the war. Drawing on a 2.06-million word corpus of news coverage from The Japan News, The Korea Herald, The Korea Times, and Taiwan News, we undertake a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the most frequent collocate variations of identity construction terms for both national actors in the data, focusing specifically on referential and predication strategies, as well as the discursive construction of transitivity. Our findings suggest that these outlets’ public-diplomacy patterning aligned with a U.S.-led bloc: Russia is cast as economically central yet norm-violating and is positioned as a legitimate target of condemnation and sanctions, often alongside China. By contrast, Ukraine is cast as a sovereign state and productive economy and represented transitively as the object of Russian attack and the beneficiary/agent of allied support and rebuilding. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how public diplomati press outlets function toward geopolitical bloc identity-building and polarisation during times of international conflict.

Citation practices in the discussion sections of Vietnamese and international economic research articles

2025-09-19T11:36:49+02:00

This study examines the similarities and differences in citation practices within the discussion sections of 60 English and 60 Vietnamese economics journal articles. Utilizing Thompson and Tribble’s (2001) citation forms and Samraj’s (2013) citation function framework, citations were identified and analyzed using AntConc (version 3.5.6). The findings indicate that Vietnamese scholars tend to employ fewer citations overall, demonstrating a marked preference for integral citations that emphasize authorial presence and establish credibility. In contrast, international authors predominantly use non-integral citations, which aligns with the impersonal and objective tone characteristic of English academic discourse. Additionally, international research articles demonstrate a higher citation density, indicating extensive engagement with prior literature and a stronger reliance on intertextuality. Analysis of citation functions further indicates that international authors incorporate citations more rigorously in theoretical discussions, thereby situating their work within broader scholarly discourse, whereas Vietnamese researchers tend to favor self-explanatory reasoning and practical recommendations. These insights contribute to an in-depth understanding of how citation practices are shaped by various scholarly traditions and academic conventions. The study offers valuable implications for educators, researchers, and academic institutions by highlighting the need for tailored strategies to enhance research writing practices in diverse cultural contexts.

Effectiveness of brief prompting instruction in AI-assisted communicative practice in foreign language classes

2026-02-21T11:16:15+01:00

The case study, conducted in September 2024, investigates the impact of prompting instruction on the communicative skills of Czech learners of English. The main goal of the experiment was to see how pre-taught pragmatics-based prompting strategies affect human-chatbot interaction efficiency. The findings show that brief instruction in prompting significantly improves task completion, reduces misunderstandings and turn-taking, and enhances communicative outcomes, especially in complex tasks (such as synthesis, analysis, and emotional response). However, the study also evidences learners’ dissatisfaction when comparing chatbot to human interaction, citing a lack of shared context, cooperation, and non-verbal cues.