Tag Questions in English Spoken Discourse: Corpus-Based Linguistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Based on an integrative methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the authors consider grammatical forms, syntactic types and pragmatic functions of the tag question in British spoken discourse. The research material included samples of dialogues with tag questions taken from British contemporary fiction and the Spoken BNC2014. Drawing on the theory of linguistic metarepresentation and using corpus analysis tools the authors presented the model under study in structural-syntactic and functional-pragmatic perspectives and obtained reliable data on discourse realization of tag question models, specified their standard and common usage polarity status, distinguished bi- and monopolarity variations. An analysis of the tag question types that are distinguished as the combinations of the predicative and auxiliary parts shows that the most frequent type of tag question is the one formed with an affirmative predicative part and a negative tag. The corpus-based approach allowed obtaining quantitative data on frequencies of tag questions in British spoken discourse, retrieving the repertoire of tag questions with their grammatical representation. It is shown that in the corpus under study the most frequent form of the tag question is the form isn't it?. The least frequent forms of tag questions are the ones formed with the have verb, as well as the modal verbs will, may, can, which supports the thesis that tag questions are losing ground in British spoken discourse. Discourse-pragmatic analysis of utterance contexts with tag questions highlighted its discourse value in the British tradition of conversation, as they perform the following communicative functions: informational; etiquette; interpersonal-relation-corrective (focus-positive or focus-negative).

Generating Science Buzz: An Examination of Multidimensional Engagement With Humorous Scientific Messages on Twitter and Instagram

This study investigates the types of humor embedded in funny scientific posts on social media and their effects on engagement. We mapped the landscape of such posts on Twitter and Instagram through content analysis of their message attributes. Regression analyses were then conducted to examine how different humor types, communicative functions, and visual attributes were associated with liking, retweeting, and commenting. On Twitter, wordplay and satire were found to be positively related to posts’ engagement levels, while anthropomorphic humor was negatively associated with the presence of comments. On Instagram, humor had no relation to engagement.

LANGUAGE ORIENTATIONS OF THE POPULATION OF BASHKORTOSTAN ACCORDING TO ETHNOSOCIOLOGICAL SURVEYS

The problems of language preferences of the population of the multinational Republic of Bashkortostan are considered. Despite the widespread use of the communicative functions of the Russian language, national languages are also used on a fairly large scale in the republic, including in the field of education, mass media and in everyday life. As the data of ethnosociological surveys show, the linguistic guidelines of the population of the republic are aimed at further preservation and multiplication of national languages. It has been established that non-Russian peoples in the republic are interested in teaching and learning their native languages in the schools of the republic. In a market economy, despite financial and economic difficulties, the population writes out and reads periodicals in their native language.

Stylistic variation in email

This study explores how email is partly shaped by writers’ positions within a corporate structure. This stylistic variation is measurable at scale and can be described by messages’ rhetorical organizations and orientations. The modeling was carried out on a subset of the Enron email corpus, which was processed using the dictionary-based tagger DocuScope. The results identify four stylistic variants (Trained/Technical Support, Decision-Making, Everyday Workplace Interaction, and Engaged Planning), each realizing distinctive combinations of features reflective of their communicative functions. In Trained/Technical Support emails, for example, constellations of words and phrases associated with informational production and facilitation are marshaled in fulfilling routine guidance-seeking and guidance-giving tasks. While writers’ positions motivate stylistic tendencies (e.g., members of upper-level management compose a majority of their messages in the Decision-Making style), all writers avail themselves of a variety of styles, depending on audience and purpose, suggesting that learners might benefit from developing adaptable communicative repertoires.

The Problem of Mental Development in Children with Autistic Disorders

The clinical-psychological-pedagogical picture of autistic personality disorders of a child is highly complex and diverse compared to other mental development disorders. The divergence of researchers' views on the autism clinic leads to a scientific discussion on the problem of conceptual and terminological base of definitions and concepts, so, as a consequence, the problem has a conceptual and diagnostic orientation. Summarizing the research of scientists, we highlight the characteristic manifestations of autism in older preschool age: lack of mental activity; violation of the interaction of mental functions; unevenness, partialness of intellectual development; gross violations of purposefulness and arbitrariness of attention; lack of lively interest, interest in the new, environmental research; the tendency to perceive information as if passively absorbing it into whole blocks; the reaction of departure from the influences of the environment directed on the child; adverse reaction or no reaction at all when trying to draw attention to the objects of the surrounding reality; rapid exhaustion and oversaturation with any purposeful activity; difficulty concentrating; difficulties in symbolization, transfer of skills from one situation to another; impaired formation of social and communicative functions. Having analyzed many scientific studies, we can determine the number and variety of speech disorders in children with autistic disorders: challenging to interpret crying; limited barking; lack of imitation of sounds; phonography of speech; mutism; echolalia; words-stamps, phrases-stamps; neologisms; limited use of pronouns; lack of speech in speech; speech autonomy; speech disorders; inability to form words; violation of the semantic, syntactic, grammatical structure of speech; violation of speech melody; violation of prosodic components of speech; inability to engage in dialogue; specificity of the development of monologue speech.

Form-function dialectics in the analysis of irony in political discourse

In this paper, I analyze the construction of the trope of irony in a political interview, more specifically the interview with a Spanish politician on television in 2013. Its context is the emergence of the 15M, a citizen’s protest movement against the cuts imposed by the European Union and the Spanish Government. From a theoretical-methodological point of view, I adopt a holistic perspective, inspired by Halliday’s approach of jointly analysing the form-function relationship and White’s constructivism. I also review the different definitions and explanations of irony. After analysing the formal resources that construct irony, I give an account of the cognitive frameworks that are opposed in this discourse, and finally describe their narrative disposition and the communicative functions that those resources fulfill.

Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao (“You Know”)

This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker ni zhidao (“you know”) in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of ni zhidao were found. Ni zhidao mainly fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of ni zhidao in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F0, and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of ni zhidao. These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of ni zhidao. This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of ni zhidao in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning.

TRANSCREATION AS A NEW APPROACH TO TRANSLATION OF ADVERTISING TEXTS AND SLOGANS

The commercial success of any business enterprise in the age of globalization and internationalization depends on the choice of marketing strategy. To remain competitive, all industries must follow new trends and face new challenges. In the context of the current market requirements, a new strategy for translating advertisements and slogans called transcreation has been attracting more attention and is an emergent trend for the Ukrainian market. In this study, we examine the phenomenon of transcreation and present an analysis of texts resulting from the application of the translation strategy. The problem of advertisement translation has been attracting attention of the modern linguists as the main task of a translator is 1) to choose the appropriate translation strategy so as 2) to clearly convey to the recipient the intended information of the original text considering all implicit as well as explicit shades of original message. One of the challenges in translating advertisements is the preservation of the communicative functions embedded in the original text or slogan. In our work, we covered the concept of "transcreation", analysed the translation of advertising slogans of world-famous German companies, as well as conducted a psycho-linguistic experiment using an online Google Forms questionnaire. Fifty-two informants evaluated nuances of the meanings on which advertising slogans and their translations were focused by transcreation. The results of our study can be used in training programs for future translators. Key words: translation, translation strategy, translation of advertising texts, advertising slogans, transcreation, adaptation, psycho-linguistic experiment.

Rhetorical Structure of Ghanaian Tourist Destination E-Brochures

Currently, Ghana‘s economy seems to be relying on income generated from the tourism industry to support national growth. However, interest in tourism appears unattractive as compared to developed countries. It is in the light of this that this research focused on conducting an investigation into one of the main means of persuading potential tourists. This research, therefore, used purposive sampling to select 20 Ghanaian tourist destination e-brochures from the website of the Ghana Tourism Authority. The texts were analyzed using the English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Swales' (1990) genre analysis approach. The purpose was to explore the rhetorical structure of the tourist destination brochures. The results showed that the Ghanaian tourist destination e-brochure could be constructed with seven different communicative functions which constitute its Moves (Identifying Tourist destination, Providing Background Information, Detailing Tourist Destination, Providing Service Information, Soliciting Response, Providing Extra Information, and Urging Action). However, their frequency of occurrence showed that only three of the Moves (Identifying Tourist Destination, Providing Background Information, Providing Service Information) occurred in all the texts. The first four Moves constituted the commonest sequencing pattern of the texts. In terms of length of the texts or textual space given to the Moves, the second Move occupied the largest space of the tourist e-brochures studied. This research has implications for the Ghana tourism industry in improving the rhetorical structure of its brochures and also academic research.

The Role, Status and Style of Workplace Email: a Study of Two New Zealand Workplaces

<p>This thesis discusses ethnographic research carried out in two very different workplaces, one a manufacturing plant, the other an educational organisation, to explore the relationship between the organisational or workplace culture and the role, status and style of email. The research was concerned with looking at the specific functions of email alongside other means of communicating at work and how it was perceived by its users and receivers compared to these other means of communication. It also investigated when and why email was the preferred medium of workplace communication and some of its distinctive stylistic features. In addition to relating these latter to the workplace culture, the effect on email style of sociolinguistic variables was also explored. Pragmatic theories provided the framework for analysing the data which was interpreted from a social interactionist, social constructionist perspective. A combined corpora of 515 email messages provided the primary linguistic data. This was supplemented by quantitative survey data and qualitative data from observations, two diaries of reflective practice, interviews, and recordings of four people's communicative interactions over one workday. The messages were coded initially for communicative function and then, in order to explore the affective aspect of email communication, for mitigational and boosting elements. In addition to the above, a qualitative analysis of a thread of email messages was undertaken to demonstrate how email communication is used in knowledge creation. The study found that there was little difference between the two organisations in the communicative functions for which email is used. In both, the transmission and seeking of information is its predominant use followed by the making of requests. However, the two workplaces differed considerably in the use made of email which is shown to be essentially a whitecollar mode of communication. But even in the educational organisation where email is used extensively, face-to-face remains the preferred form of communication and dominates communication time. The type of organisation also seems to affect the way in which email messages are written. Email messages from the manufacturing plant displayed more features of solidarity than those from the educational organisation. There was a much higher use of greetings in these messages and more direct language forms. The messages were also longer. There was also a difference between the two workplaces in male and female style. Women in the educational organisation wrote longer messages and used more affective features in their emails than their male counterparts. The converse was true in the manufacturing plant. Stylistically, email directives were seen, in general, to lie midway between the mainly direct forms of spoken communication and the mainly indirect forms of other types of written communication. The study also found that as part of its communicative functions, email plays an important role in organisational knowledge creation, and that in addition to being a useful communication tool assisting in the functional work of an organisation, it does considerable relational work. This has implications for the way in which email messages are written.</p>