Discourse and Interaction

English in the mallscape:

Birendra Bhujel — 2024-12-05

India has only recently witnessed LL-based studies, where gaps are still evident. Shopping malls are mushrooming in urban and semi-urban neighborhoods, providing fertile grounds to witness LL-based phenomena from the vantage point of English. An LL-based case study of shopping malls in the city of Siliguri has been attempted with the analysis of 170 photographic data that constitute the “mallscape” of the city. Findings reveal that English dominates the mallscape as a language of symbolic capital while indigenous languages assume an associate role in the mallscape. The prominence of English has negatively impacted the visibility of native languages, whereas the former occupies a more prestigious position. This has not only led to cultural erosion but has also hampered the identity of the indigenous communities.

Chinese reporting on the Ukraine war.

Ruth Breeze — 2024-12-05

During the first months of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the attitude of the Chinese authorities was the object of much speculation. This paper sheds light on the Chinese official position by examining how the Chinese global channel CGTN presented the main actors and actions in the conflict over the first three months. By conducting a corpus assisted discourse study of all the reports published about the conflict on CGTN from February to May 2022, and comparing them with two similar corpora from international news providers Al Jazeera and Euronews, we identify the main trends in representation of nations, leaders and actions in all three channels. We trace how CGTN negotiated the discursive dilemma posed by China’s neutral position and consider how it used reporting on this conflict to pursue certain strategic goals, possibly with a view to influencing public opinion in areas of the world where audiences may be receptive to stances that are not overtly pro-Russian yet are sceptical of the West.

And the wolf said: "How a tasty pig!":

Elena Ciprianova — 2024-12-05

The study investigates the linguistic and natural interpreting competence of two balanced Slovak-English bilingual children (siblings) while comparing the lexical and morphosyntactic production of The Three Little Pigs story through an interpreting activity in both language directions. Our research lies on the assumption that bilingual children are also natural interpreters who possess a bi-directional third competence (Harris 1976). The main objectives are to examine how children perform interpreting tasks, what types of errors they commit and what instances of cross-linguistic influence occur during these activities. From a broader perspective, the results of our research confirm that bilingual children can faithfully interpret the story in both language directions from Slovak to English and from English to Slovak. Both respondents demonstrated a high level of linguistic (lexical and morphosyntactic) and pragmatic competence in interpreting, which was done without any additions or omissions that would alter the meaning of the source message in the target language. Errors occurred mainly on the structural level, most of them were developmental errors and errors resulting from cross-linguistic influence. The presented data shed more light on the nature of bilingual language acquisition in children and their interpreting skills which constitute a natural part of this process. The findings
move the field forward through building a better understanding of the capabilities of simultaneous bilinguals, to support the hypothesis that in an encouraging environment they can become proficient communicators and successful interpreters.

A critical multimodal analysis of the representation of rape in pornographic novels published between 1970-1990

Carmen Gregori-Signes — 2024-12-05

Rape remains a current and frequent topic in media products such as advertisements, films and television series, in social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and in new virtual spaces such as the metaverse. As Brownmiller (1975: 13) claimed, examining the
history of rape may help us “learn what we need to know about our current condition”. Doing so may entail the study of representations of rape in pornographic novels published between 1970-1990, a period that partly coincided with the Second Wave of Feminism (1960-1980s) and the Golden Age of Porn (1969-1984). In such a context, book cover design was not merely an art, but a crucial factor in attracting potential customers. Building up upon Brownmiller’s assertion, this paper provides a multimodal analysis of 51 covers which contain the lemma RAPE, published between 1976 and 1990. The analysis adopted a social semiotic approach (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) in conjunction with the principles of Feminist critical film analysis (Mulvey 1975) to document how rape scene fantasies were portrayed in the covers. Exploring these representations can help us understand many of the still prevalent myths surrounding rape nowadays, which perpetuate violent misogynistic behavior as a form of entertainment for their audience.

Breaking the conspiracy of silence:

Oluwabunmi Oyebode — 2024-12-05

This paper explores discursive strategies Nigerian victims of rape deploy in narrating their traumatic experiences. Data for the study comprise purposively selected online narratives of two major Nigerian rape victims circulated on Pulse.ng and Nairaland in 2018 and 2019 respectively. The data are analysed qualitatively using van Leeuwen’s social actors’ model, a framework that describes how participants of social practices are represented in discourse. The analysis reveals that the rape survivors deployed different mechanisms of representation of social actors, such as nomination, categorisation, beneficialisation, and honorification in their narratives to assert themselves, construct power, expose perpetrators and contest specific institutionalised forces that suppress them. These are done to challenge repressive traditions thus, breaking the culture of silence and revealing the dynamic nature rape discourse is assuming in Nigeria. The paper concludes that the discursive strategies highlighted in the selected narratives evince self-representations of rape victimhood.

Conducting classroom research:

Alexey Tymbay — 2024-12-05

The study posits that mid-sized groups of phonologically trained non-native speakers of English can collect prosodic data that are equivalent to English native-speakers’ annotations. The hypothesis is supported by the results of a classroom experiment
involving an experimental group of English-proficient Czech (L1) learners annotating prominence and boundaries in English monological texts before and after additional phonological training aided by Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT). The annotation
results received before the experimental group had the training demonstrate deficiencies of their prosodic annotation occurring under the probable influence of the learners’ mother tongue (Czech). The analysis of disagreements between the experimental group’s and the control group’s (native speakers) annotations demonstrates that non-native listeners rely on slightly different cues when identifying the prosodic structure of an English utterance. Thus, it is concluded that Czech (L1) speakers of English require mandatory annotation practice focused on the differences between their mother tongue and English to perform annotation tasks successfully. The experimental group’s RPT annotations, conducted after a learning intervention, produced much better results and were recognized as statistically equivalent to native speakers’ RPT annotations. The high alignment of the readings obtained by the experimental and control groups on key prosodic parameters demonstrates that crowdsourcing prosodic information from phonologically trained non-native speakers with the help of the RPT method can be employed as an alternative means of validating intonation research when attracting native speakers to research participation is problematic.

Pípalová, R. (2024) Investigating Aspects of Academic Discourse. Charles University: Karolinum. 174 pp.

Radek Vogel — 2024-12-05

A review of the monograph Investigating Aspects of Academic Discourse (2024) by Renata Pípalová.