scholarly journals A Cross-Cultural Study on Hedging Devices in Kurdish Conversation

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Biook BEHNAM ◽  
Salam KHALILIAQDAM

Hedges are words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. Truth and falsity are a matter of degree, and hedges make natural language sentences more/less true or more/less false.  The purpose of the study is to investigate hedging devices in Kurdish spoken language. The aim is  to know how hedging devices are used in Kurdish spoken discourse. Also the researchers are willing to know whether Kurdish speakers use hedging devices to indicate a lack of complete commitment to the truth of the proposition, and a desire not to express the commitment categorically, or to lessen the impact of an utterance. The data needed for the study was collected through observation, tape recording, and interviews. The dialogues of 35 people were recorded by the researchers as well as the researchers have interviewed with 21 people from different social classes.15 classes and meetings which Kurdish language was the means of communication were observed. The research showed that hedging as a mitigating device is extensively employed in different conversations. The study shows that hedging devices have the same roles  in Kurdish as they have in English. They are used to reduce the certainty and sureness of the utterances. It indicates that some pragmatic devices modify the epistemic strength of the statement in Kurdish language just as they do in English and Arabic.

Author(s):  
Maite Soto-Sanfiel

Despite claims that “cinema is dead” or that it only interests nostalgic old-timers, statistics indicate a global increase in theater attendance. Not only is moviegoing still one of the favorite forms of entertainment, but it especially appeals to young people. Moreover, communication research seems to have neglected cinema, but the relationship between modern-day teenagers and the silver screen needs to be observed. This chapter reports the results of a cross-cultural study based on the uses and gratifications paradigm with youngsters from eight European countries. It presents their cinematographic uses and consumption, their motivations for going to the movies, and their preferences and conceptions regarding different movie traditions. The study also performs cross-cultural contrasts to reveal more about the impact of regional, national, and global forces on the psychological relationship between today’s teenagers and cinema.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-767
Author(s):  
Tomas Jungert ◽  
Rickard Östergren ◽  
Nathalie Houlfort ◽  
Richard Koestner

Purpose Perceived support from co-workers and managers is important for many organizational outcomes. However, the benefit of competence support from colleagues and school management on personal teacher efficacy has not been investigated. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the impact of competence support from colleagues and the school management on growth in teacher efficacy and second, to investigate cultural differences (Canada and Sweden). Design/methodology/approach The authors administered an inventory measuring support for competence and personal teacher efficacy to over 400 teachers in Canada and Sweden at 27 schools, at two times. Time 1 took place at the first week of a fall semester and Time 2 at the end of the same semester. Findings Structural equation modeling revealed that competence support from colleagues predicted growth in teacher efficacy, whereas competence support from school management did not. No differences in these relations emerged between Canadian and Swedish teachers. Practical implications The findings have implications for how schools organize teachers in teacher teams so that competence support from co-workers is promoted. Originality/value This study is the first cross-cultural study to empirically show that teachers’ self-efficacy is significantly benefitted by competence support from their teacher peers.


SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824401986581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariem Khadhraoui ◽  
Michel Plaisent ◽  
Lassaad Lakhal ◽  
Bernard Prosper

Previous studies considered entrepreneurial orientation as a determinant of firms’ growth and performance. In this research, we are interested in spin-offs. Indeed, we aim to study the relationship between their entrepreneurial orientation and their performance. Therefore, we carried out a cross-cultural study in three different countries; Tunisia, Canada, and Morocco. We opted for a personal survey. We addressed our questionnaire to 180 managers of spin-offs and we analyzed the research variables using SPSS 20.00 (Statistical Packages for Social Sciences) and Smart PLS 3 (Partial Least Squares). Our findings highlight a positive correlation between entrepreneurial orientation and performance of spin-offs within the three samples.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2095983
Author(s):  
Crystal Abidin ◽  
Jin Lee ◽  
Tommaso Barbetta ◽  
Wei Shan Miao

As COVID-19 broke out across the Asia Pacific from December 2019, media coverage on its impacts proliferated online. Among these discourses, coverage on influencers was prominent, likely as many of the issues arising from COVID-19 contingencies – such as digitalization, public messaging, and misinformation – are cornerstones of this digital economy. In response, this cross-cultural study draws on a corpus of Australian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean online news articles published between January and May 2020, to understand how local news ecologies were parsing the impacts of COVID-19 on influencers. From the coding of 150 news articles guided by Grounded Theory, this article focuses on the impact of the pandemic on influencers, and influencers’ engagements with and reactions to the pandemic. Our study of individual governments’ past engagements with their influencer industries suggest that local backstories and contexts are crucial to decipher why news angles tend to pitch particular stories on influencers.


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