Rhetorical pattern of the Indonesian EFL undergraduate students’ writings

The present research aimed to study the rhetorical patterns in students’ writings, whether they follow a deductive pattern or an inductive pattern, and whether the pattern is similar when writing in English and the Indonesian language. The sample for this study was 20 undergraduate students from the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education majoring in English Education in several universities in Indonesia. Participants were requested to write two essays and two email-format letters, one of each was written in English, the other in the Indonesian language. The results showed that all students preferred the deductive pattern for their two types of essays. However, for the letter writing, students preferred the inductive pattern more than the deductive one, with 12 students using the inductive pattern in their letters in English and 16 students using the inductive pattern in their letters in Indonesian. It is suggested that the Indonesian culture and the teaching instructions received in the classrooms may influence students’ choice of the patterns they use in different types of writings. The findings should give valuable information for the design of teaching writing courses in English Education majors in Indonesia.

Potential factors influencing the rhetorical patterns of research article discussion sections

The present study reports potential factors influencing the rhetorical patterns of research articles (RA) discussion sections. The study was conducted by utilizing descriptive qualitative research. The researcher purposefully focused on investigating 10 bilingual writers who wrote both one English and one Indonesian research article. The selected writers were those who had an educational background in language and language teaching. The interviews covered the interviewees’ background information, current activities, writing activities, and their rhetorical patterns of discussion sections. The interviews were conducted by utilizing the snowball technique to search for more information. The interview data were analyzed into some steps namely, transcribing the interview data, organizing data, summarizing data, and interpreting data. All data transcription was then categorized and coded. Research findings revealed that the writers’ choice of move structure could be as a result of learning from other people’s rhetorical patterns, believing themselves, having high self-confidence, having high writing frequency, and having high awareness in the micro and macrostructure of writing discussion sections. The Indonesian writers have opened their minds to learn and read other researchers’ articles and then determine whether the patterns are suitable for them or not. The writers’ starting point of experiencing to have their RA published made them believe in themselves and felt self-confident. Thus, the more they wanted to write RA, the higher they had writing frequency and awareness in the micro and macrostructure of writing discussion sections.

Semiotic and Rhetorical Patterns in Dance and Gestural Languages

The body is the crossroad of the biological and cultural (representational) experience of human being. It has a basic rhetoric potential, which is exploited, in various cultures, through ’s concept of “orientation metaphor”, able to transpose certain concepts into space, as well as Fontanier’s “metonymies of the physical”, or Greimas“ ’metonymic actors” identified in the bodily segments and acting each “in the name of an actant” (Greimas). Therefore, the body is an “expressive space” (Merleau-Ponty), the symbolic value of its segments being deeply involved in choreographic significations.

Artistic peculiarities of the philosophical works of S. S. Vasilyev-Borogonsky

The goal of this research lies in the description of artistic uniqueness of the philosophical lyrics of S. S. Vasilyev. The author reviews the problem of the poetic language of Vasilyev’s philosophical poems from the perspective of determination of the role and function of poetic images, as well as the techniques of rhetorical patterns, stylistics and syntax as method of expressing the original philosophical views. Examination of the philosophical lyrics of S. S. Vasilyev required an overview of the context of philosophical poetry of the Yakut classics – A. E. Kulakovsky, A. I. Sofronov – the forerunners of S. S. Vasilyev.  It is worth noting that the poet scrupulously adhered to the experience and traditions of his forerunners. The lyrical works of S. S. Vasilyev were oriented towards the poetics of philosophical works of the first poets. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the poetics of the philosophical lyrics of S. S. Vasilyev is examined on the basis of literary studies for the first time. The author determines the main ideological content of the poet's philosophical lyrics: he enhanced the semantic meaning of poetic images borrowed from the folk lyrics. The designated by the poet symbolic images are comprehensible and effective means of artistic reproduction of the philosophical concepts. The rhetorical references, questions that are specific to the philosophical lyrics overall, served as the main techniques of developing the theme of the philosophical works of S. S. Vasilyev, described his personal reflections, as well as the author’s idea of the lyrical works.

Gratitude communication in academic written acknowledgement

In the existing literature, no attempt has been made to inspect how men and women rhetorically manage their gratitude communications in the academic written discourse. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present article examined how students of different gender construct their thanking acts in the acknowledgements of their M.A. theses. Discrepancies between male and female postgraduates’ employment of linguistic patterns and gratitude themes were compared. The results showed that student writers’ gratitude communications to a certain extent are conditioned by the conventional rhetorical patterns of the academic genre. Remarkable gender variations were evidenced in the students’ selections of lexical items for encoding the thanking expressions, thanking modifiers, and gratitude themes of their acknowledgements. These gender discrepancies in gratitude communications are highly pertinent to the social expectations of masculinity and femininity, the students’ psychological orientations toward the emotion of thanking and their own value priorities.

‘Doing One’s Bit’

This chapter focusses on the war-time discourse of the volunteer, recruiting, and the eventual move to conscription, while exploring the rhetorical patterns of patriotism and identity (and identity politics) which result. As Clark records, in war-time use, to do one’s bit was to be both prominent and remarkably polysemous, spanning collective and individual agency on the Home Front (a new collocation in its own right) alongside the diction of recruiting and active service. The volunteer and voluntary enlistment (and the conflicted semantics that these and related words reveal) were, on one level, presented as a prime means by which one’s bit was done in the early years of war. Nevertheless, the diction of identity, hegemonic masculinity (and its failure or rejection) were further key elements, evident in the over-lexicalisation and gendered usage of the stay-at-home, slacker, Cuthbert, or knut (and the targeted semantic shifts that these and other words reveal). The shift to conscription, and the stigmatization of those who chose not to fight, presents, as Clark records, still other conflicted forms.

MOLECULAR INCOHERENCE, CONTINUITY, AND THE PERFECTION OF THE LAOZI

The Laozi is a well-loved and oft-translated ancient text, whose popularity with interpreters and translators seems to have hardly ebbed in over two thousand years. This is attested in part by the number of bamboo and silk manuscript versions of the text unearthed in recent years from the Warring States (475–221 b.c.e.) and Western Han (221–206 b.c.e.), such that few transmitted Chinese texts have so many corresponding manuscript versions. The Laozi's popularity and relative abundance have also made the text instrumental in shaping theoretical approaches to book formation in early Chinese manuscript culture. In particular, the Laozi has been central to the study of how books were assembled out of pre-existent, stable, coherent molecules of text, or zhang 章 (chapters). Emerging from a case study of Laozi chapter 13, in which interpretive problems of the written commentarial tradition are shown to be continuous with those in manuscript culture, this article re-examines the theory of molecular coherence in the Laozi's formation, showing ultimately that the textual and rhetorical patterns by which zhang cohere internally are created by the same forces that deposit zhang in proximity to one another. Moving from the molecular to organismic level, the article also examines the use of conjoining phrases in Peking University's Laozi manuscript to demonstrate how editors, compilers, and interpreters may sacrifice coherence at one level of organization to achieve perfection at another.

Reshaping Authorial Presence in Translations of Research Article Abstracts

In multilingual settings, the abstract is the only part of the research article that is regularly translated. Although very brief, abstracts play an important role in academic communication, as they provide immediate access to research findings. Contrastive research has revealed considerable cross-linguistic differences in the rhetorical patterns of abstracts. The present paper focuses on how this variation is bridged in translation, by addressing an important rhetorical dimension of academic discourse, authorial presence. Specifically, it examines how authorial presence is reshaped in translated abstracts. An analysis of a small corpus of 150 Slovene research article abstracts from five disciplines and their English translations reveals several interesting types of recurring translators’ interventions, most notably the tendency to replace personal authorial references with impersonal structures. Data collected in interviews with four experienced translators of academic texts is used to shed light on potential reasons for interventions with authorial presence in translation.

The Role of the Coronavirus Pandemic in State-Level Abortion Restrictions

In response to COVID-19, many state governments chose to halt elective or nonessential procedures to free up personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline medical workers. To help guide and inform state health policies, an emerging body of literature developed which contextualized the role of abortions as time-sensitive, essential medical procedures. Despite this, Texas, Indiana, and Iowa issued executive orders restricting elective or nonessential procedures, and included abortions among the medical services being banned. This content analysis analyzed executive orders and subsequent communications from officials in all three states to identify rhetorical patterns and the language that was used to connect the coronavirus pandemic to abortion care. The major themes that emerged were the expansion of gubernatorial powers due to the declaration of an emergency, connecting abortion services to PPE shortages, classifying abortions as “elective” procedures, differentiating medical and surgical abortions, and purposeful avoidance of the actual term “abortion.” The findings indicate that governors in each of these three states used COVID-19 to further restrict abortion access, and they were able to use rhetoric to create a distinct narrative and justify their policies.

Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.