Phonetic and Phonological Transfer from Northern Vietnamese to English in Consonant Clusters and Voiceless Final Obstruents

This article studies phonetic and phonological transfer from Northern Vietnamese to English observed in the production of consonant clusters and voiceless final obstruents. The pronunciation of a corpus of words in English produced by eight Northern Vietnamese participants has been obtained by means of two reading tasks and compared to the productions of two English speakers. The material has been auditorily and acoustically analysed following a descriptive approach and using a mixed methodology. The features that conform to phonetic and phonological transfer from Northern Vietnamese to English have been identified and analysed. Finally, some applications of this study have been proposed to help intelligibility in international contexts and to enhance the teaching of English to Northern Vietnamese students.

La lucha urbana por la reconquista y la redefinición del espacio público en América Latina

Since its inception in ancient Greece, public space has played a key role in the politics and democracy of cities. Its role has been degraded in post-modernity, and reached its deepest crisis in the full maturity of the post-Fordist system (from 1990 onwards). This economic and representation depression, as well as institutional legitimacy, that States are experiencing, have promoted the emergence and resurgence of different social movements that flood cities globally. Here is where the concern of the Frente Urbano Amparo Poch y Gascón collective lies, formed by the authors, to recognize and characterize, from a socio-urban logic, these manifestations and the sustained occupation that public spaces have experienced in different Latin American cities during the last decade. This research, framed within the Virtual Latin American Meeting, Utopías Líquidas, is proposed starting from a mixed methodology of collective mapping, recognizing public spaces, and characterizing their occupation exercised by Latin American social movements, in the dispute to redefine them and regain their political character, and thus value the different Latin American social movements and their struggles, in an act that encourages resistance and solidarity.

Gendered Acquiescence and Resistance(s) to Coercive Sexual Practices Among Female Students at a Zimbabwean University

High rates of sexual coercion among female students in institutions of higher education are a global concern. Although this phenomenon is universal, female university students’ experiences and reactions to coercive sexual practices vary greatly due to differences in geo-socio-cultural milieus in universities. This study investigated the extent to which female students acquiesced or resisted gendered codes of sexual conduct during experiences of sexual coercion. Using mixed methodology, the study drew on the narratives of 341 female students and three key informants from a Zimbabwean university. The study’s findings revealed that female students showed significant levels of acquiescence to gendered sexual norms and coercive sexual practices. This suggests that normative sexual practices embedded in university cultures subordinate women’s sexuality, resulting in their vulnerability and acquiescence to coercive sexual practices. However, despite being positioned in a restrictive context which worked to instill and reproduce gendered norms of sexuality and acquiescence to coercive sexual practices, some female students demonstrated significant levels of “constrained” sexual agency, power and subjectivity. These students enacted embodied resistances and (re)negotiated gendered norms of sexuality in the form of negotiations, antagonistic reactions and (re)construction of dominant sexual practices and norms. Therefore, the study concludes that, while female university students conform to dominant sexual practices and norms, they also have the capacity to challenge them and actively resist and manage their experiences of sexual coercion

Structuring the Haystack

Large-scale online communities, such as Reddit or Quora, have emerged as promising research contexts, offering insight into an unprecedented range of real-time user discourses. However, researchers striving to access, collect, and meaningfully process such conversation data face a trade-off between capturing breadth (structures, relationships) and depth (content, meaning) of community interactions. Building on a mixed-methodology design, our contribution offers an avenue to harness and combine advantages of both approaches, first by clustering the data based on a theoretically derived dictionary (discovering structure) and second by qualitatively coding and interpreting the resulting clusters (discovering meaning). We illustrate this methodological approach with data collected from a community of online workers on Reddit where we focused on how human resource management (HRM) practices transform in the gig economy and how digital platforms use a hybrid HRM system that combines elements of high-performance and control-oriented HRM philosophies.

O funcionamento discursivo dos textos de contracapa da “Coleção Vampiro”

The present article presents a comprehensive study on the discursive functioning of the detective novels back cover texts of the Coleção Vampiro (CV), published every month in Portugal between 1947 and 2008. From a descriptive and linguistic perspective which assumes the discourse types (Bronckart 1997, 2008) as a category of analysis, they are analysed the back cover texts of 104 volumes from the CV (14,6% of the collection), adopting a mixed methodology which integrates both quantitative and qualitative methods. It is concluded that, in the first part of the collection, the book cover texts present a predominantly expositive dimension as well as a strong implication of both the speaker and the receiver, which contributes to the dissemination and popularization of the detective novel genre. In the second part, the texts present a predominantly narrative dimension and they are marked by the erasure of the speaker and the receiver, corresponding almost entirely to the synopsis of the detective novel in question