Discourse and Interaction

A comparative appraisal analysis of engagement in Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s speeches

2024-10-23T20:48:46+02:00

The present study analyzed Engagement strategies used in political discourse, examining how politicians construe certain stances relative to other voices and how they align or dis-align with their audience. To this end, the study employed Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory to examine the Engagement resources utilized in speeches delivered by the 46th US President Joe Biden and the 45th and 47th President Donald Trump during their campaigns for the 2024 US presidential election during their campaigns for the 2024 US presidential election. Instances of Engagement were identified, tallied, and classified into their respective sub-categories. The findings showed a consistent pattern in terms of the frequencies of the sub-categories of Engagement in the two speeches, with Heteroglossia being more frequent than Monoglossia. Results of the normalized frequencies indicated that contracted and expanded resources were more often employed by Trump than by Biden. However, a fine-grained analysis underscored distinct stylistic differences in the utilization of these resources by the two speakers. The study sheds light on the nuanced nature of political discourse and provides insights into how politicians use Engagement resources to construe certain stances and to communicate with their audience

Metadiscourse in L2 Master’s theses

2025-03-11T20:26:40+01:00

This study explores metadiscourse in English-medium Master’s theses by L2 (Czech) graduates, aiming to explain how Czech students organise their texts, express their stance towards the content and engage with their readers. It seeks to contrast L2 learner academic discourse with L1 learner and expert academic discourse in order to identify differences along the culture and level of expertise dimensions. The corpus-based analysis employs Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal framework of metadiscourse to identify the frequency, functions and realisations of interactive and interactional metadiscourse devices. The findings reveal that interactional metadiscourse is more prominent than interactive metadiscourse in all three corpora and there are significant differences in the realisation patterns and functions of specific metadiscourse markers. The results of the analysis suggest that self-mention, hedges and engagement markers vary along the expertise dimension as they are more heavily used in published research articles than in learner discourse. Cultural differences (i.e., those stemming primarily from different academic writing conventions) seem to affect the preferred degree of writer visibility, as well as preferences for specific metadiscourse markers. Variation in interactive metadiscourse seems to be influenced by text size, genre and communicative purpose. The findings allow for the drawing of several implications for L2 writing pedagogy.

Expert statements: Where science communication discourse meets peer review discourse

2024-10-23T19:24:05+02:00

With the influx of scientific publications, journalists are often challenged in putting new research into context. The Science Media Centre (SMC) addresses this issue by publishing expert statements that review and explain new studies. As such, these statements combine elements of science communication discourse, which typically seeks wide outreach, and peer review discourse, which typically seeks privacy and anonymity. To explore how these two discourses with conflicting aims work together, this study examines all publications on the SMC UK from April 2002 to January 2024. It compares them through a keyword analysis to a corpus of academic press releases and open peer reviews. A sample of 23 articles is then analysed qualitatively using the popularization framework by Sterk and van Goch (2023). The results show the important role of the expert persona and the use of strong statements employing boosters and credibility evaluations while still adapting information to the audience. Expert statements thus bridge academic and media practices and allow experts to provide suggestions for society.

Metadiscursive clauses controlled by nouns and adjectives in linguistics research papers

2024-06-26T13:08:44+02:00

This study attempted to investigate the metadiscursive function of stance complement clauses in linguistics research papers, analysing the most common metadiscursive nouns and adjectives. To this aim, twenty research papers published in two indexed journals – the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Discourse and Interaction (DI) were analysed using Biber’s (2006a) taxonomy of lexico-grammatical stance devices. The findings indicated that academics prefer epistemic nouns to attitude and communication nouns in the selected corpus, yet evaluation adjectives are preferred to epistemic adjectives in the corpus under study. Moreover, the study tries to analyse the distribution of stance complement clauses and the IMRD structure of a linguistics research paper with the highest incidence of stance complement clauses controlled by nouns and adjectives in the Results section.

Metaphors and anthropomorphism in medical discourse

2024-09-19T12:25:47+02:00

The crucial question in this study is how anthropomorphic metaphors influence medical discourse by attributing human characteristics to illnesses. We implemented the research design based on the frameworks of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis, placing emphasis on developments in the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), more recently elaborated by Kövecses (2010), Semino et al. (2017), and Gibbs (2017). In the process of analysing a manually collected corpus of communicative exchanges between patients, non-patients and medical workers retrieved from online platforms, the Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam (MIPVU) as outlined by Steen et al. (2010) was employed. We narrowed down the focus of our study to previously underexplored linguistic analysis of anthropomorphic metaphors in health and disease narratives. We hypothesized that 1) anthropomorphic metaphors are the most prevalent form of metaphors in medical communication, and 2) they are effective in bridging the experiential gap. Consequently, the research questions were formulated: What is the occurrence of anthropomorphic metaphors? What are the functions of anthropomorphic metaphors from the speakers’ and recipients’ perspectives? In what way can such language constructions influence patients’ mutual understanding and interaction? Which conceptual domains are most frequently represented through anthropomorphic metaphors? Results indicate that 40 per cent of the metaphors used in medical discussions are anthropomorphic. On the interpersonal level, they enhance both empathy and comprehension by creating a sense of shared experience. Corpus analysis further revealed that the strategic use of anthropomorphic metaphors in medical communication can potentially improve patients’ engagement and comprehension. In this sense our findings align with the current research on the impact of metaphors on speakers. More importantly, our research brings new perspectives on anthropomorphic metaphors, providing classification of direct and metaphoric anthropomorphism as well as further analysis of subtype categories.

AI and politics: Do political ideologies influence people's views on AI?

2024-10-19T20:16:48+02:00

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), with its potential to disrupt several industries, including the art industry, has been a controversial subject of discussion in mainstream newspapers. To understand the impact of political ideologies on this controversy, this study compares concerns about AI-generated art between liberals and conservatives. Data comprised comments of readers of the Daily Mail and the Guardian on a news story about an award-winning AI artwork at the Colorado State Fair, a topic that has stirred up controversies over various AI-related issues. Keyword analysis was conducted to indicate the overall concerns and to identify similarities and differences in opinions between the readers of both newspapers. A thematic analysis was then performed, and the frequencies of each theme within the two data sets were also examined to highlight the perspectives of each group of readers. Overall, in contrast to much existing literature, the findings indicate that the similarities noticeably outweigh the differences, and the differences are not immediately relevant to AI. Instead, the readers used the topic of AI as a segue to talk about other concerns, suggesting that political beliefs about AI are not yet entrenched.

Cheng, L., & Machin, D. (Eds.) (2024) The law and critical discourse studies. Routledge.

2024-10-09T18:48:43+02:00