Creating versatility in Thai demonstratives

Beyond their basic function to index exophoric and endophoric referents, Thai demonstratives have a host of pragmatic functions to encode concerns regarding discourse organization, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. Based on a detailed analysis of demonstratives used in conversation, we attempt to uncover the pattern of grammaticalization for this class of words in Thai, and to propose a mechanism that allows them to develop multiple functions. Since demonstratives are indexical signs and are qualitatively distinct from content words, we must view the grammaticalization process of demonstratives differently from that of content words. In this paper, we use the model of the joint attention triangle based on Diessel’s earlier work and the functional utterance frame based on the “attractor position” analysis for grammaticalization of nouns and verbs advanced by Bisang (1996) to analyze how exactly demonstratives come to acquire pragmatic functions.

Deteção de linguagem tendenciosa em decisões judiciais

The linguistic expression of subjectivity is a complex phenomenon that has been the object of reflection by several sub-areas of Linguistics and, more recently, of Computational Linguistics. Linguistic subjectivity, in terms of the linguistic expression of the speaker's opinions and attitudes, affects all levels of discourse organization and is present, to different degrees, in diverse textual genres. Subjectivity and bias are connected, in the sense that the presence of bias in discourse has been related, both in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, to the occurrence of signs of subjectivity. Court decisions are an argumentative text genre that may convey traces of subjectivity but should not be biased. As a discourse that represents the State’s position on social matters, it should reflect the principle of Equality. Nonetheless, a preliminary analysis of cases of gender violence reveals that this is not always the case. The research proposed in this paper aims to study the linguistic formulations that convey subjectivity and bias in court decisions on gender violence against women. The goal is to develop a linguistic model to detect these instances of bias, with a future possibility of application in a tool for automatic detection of gender bias in discourse, fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. A corpus of court decisions on gender violence has been extracted from the public access database of Instituto de Gestão Financeira e Equipamentos da Justiça (IGFEJ), and has been subject to analysis. A set of examples has been compiled in the analytical section of this study, demonstrating the possibility of connecting certain linguistic features, such as mitigation and intensification mechanisms, evidential expressions and counter-argumentative movements, to the presence of subjectivity and bias in discourse.

Mot ett bredare arketextualitetsbegrepp: den augustinsk-lutherska diskurstypen i Birgitta Trotzigs Dykungens dotter

This article has three aims, all of them related to the theory and practice of intertextuality. Firstly, the article makes an attempt to reconstruct the Augustinian-Lutheran type of discourse. A number of modern theologians and historians of philosophy have observed that the main currents within Christian theology have their basis in a specific discourse organization of textual utterances. With reference to these observations, the article maps out some dominant features of Augustine’s and Luther’s discoursive practices. The type of discourse thus reconstructed contains grammatical, logical-argumentative, narrative and rhetoric-figurative characteristics, and – as a matter of fact – it manifests a high degree of applicability in the field of literary studies. Secondly, the article applies the reconstructed type of discourse to analyze a masterpiece of Swedish twentieth-century literature, the novel Dykungens dotter (The Marsh King’s Daughter, 1985) by Birgitta Trotzig (1929–2013). In several interviews, Trotzig makes evidently contradictory remarks on Augustine and Luther. She dissociates herself from their anthropology at the same time as she hints that their view of human conditions has made a deep impression on her. The article’s application intends to throw light on this precarious hermeneutic situation. The intense presence of the Augustinian-Lutheran type of discourse in the novel made apparent through the application indicates that an interpretation of Trotzig’s writings by means of Augustinian-Lutheran intertexts is hermeneutically motivated in spite of her own negative declarations. Thirdly, the article makes use of the reconstructed type of discourse in order to examin Gérard Genette’s notion of architextuality. There is a theoretical incongruence in his notion. On an explicit definitory level, architextuality includes all types of discourse and modes of enunciation. On a conteptual level, however, the notion of architextuality is constructed on the pattern of literary genres. The article’s application demonstrates that Genette’s notion requires some corrections to live up to its definitory commitments. The Augustinian-Lutheran architext comes into conflict with some of Genette’s linguisticly construed structuralistic categories and demands a more discoursive and hermeneutic way of thinking.

A developmental study of expressing simultaneous events in film-based narratives

This study examines the expression of simultaneity in the film-based oral narratives of 100 English monolinguals in the following three age groups: preschoolers (4–6 years), school-aged children (7–10 years), and adults (19–48 years). Participants told a story of what happened in the film, in an off-line task, to an interviewer who had not seen the film. The film was rich in simultaneous events at various sites through the episodic structure. Focus was on quantitative and qualitative aspects of simultaneity, from the perspective of forms and functions. Quantitative results showed very little simultaneity at preschool and almost similar expression at school age and adulthood. Qualitative analyses revealed that perceptual, semantic, and discourse factors affected the profiles of development. Preschool children expressed local simultaneity between situations in adjacent clauses, more frequently between unbounded situations that are implicitly simultaneous. Besides, they tended to express more simultaneity in scenes that were perceived in a single screen shot. From age 7, children became more able to express simultaneity across larger stretches of the text, covering a wider scope on situations on parallel timelines. Top-down knowledge of narrative organization guided older narrators to take temporal perspectives that go beyond the semantic properties of events, giving way to discourse-motivated simultaneity where causality plays a substantial role. Language forms to express simultaneity showed a long developmental route – through verb semantic and tense-aspect alternations as the widest, basic usage to specific lexical forms like conjunctions (e.g. while), adverbs (e.g. meanwhile), and more sophisticated syntactic configurations. The form-function analyses enabled an exploration of the cognitive and language abilities in the production of simultaneous relations under the constraints of narrative discourse organization. The study reinforced the results of previous developmental studies of temporality, shedding further light on the relatively unexplored topic of simultaneity expression.

Character’s Inner Speech as Effective Way of Literary Discourse Organization (Novel “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro)

The article examines the protagonist’s verbalized inner speech in the literary text of the novel “The Remains of the Day” as a way of literary discourse organization by English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. The relevance of the study is explained by the interest in the analysis of the inner speech of characters in a literary text, which differs from the natural inner speech of an individual in the ways of linguistic expression, the specifics in the structure of the narrative. It is shown that the study of the inner speech of a character of literary discourse using such parameters of its measurement as structural-compositional, semantic-conceptual, communicative, allows us to identify the features of the functional role of this type of speech. The novelty of the research lies in the substantiation of how the character's inner speech (introspection), being a significant unit of composition, correlates with prospection and retrospection of the text, acting as the main form of narration. The article elicits four basic concepts that organize the content of the character's inner speech. The authors of the article offer a close analysis of the rheme-theme correlation of the title of the novel and the main text as the basis of the author’s literary discourse. Particular attention is paid to the modality of the character's inner speech from the point of view of the pragmatic orientation of this type of speech towards the addressee-reader and discourse markers that influence the process of discourse interpretation.

The Haredi Scholar-Society and the Military Draft in Israel

This chapter examines the phenomenon of deferments of army enlistment in Israel of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men studying in yeshivas. The author claims that counter-nationalist argument enables us to understand the progress that the haredi scholar-society has made from a sectorial entity that kept itself removed from the nation-state, and viewed the state as an undesired political fact, to an entity that maintains its own counter-nationalism. This social cultural religious entity regards itself as a symbiotic or active partner in the national endeavor, specifically through the insular haredi ethos. The author employs the term counter-nationalism to describe an approach that takes a critical view of nationalism, but has in effect adapted it to the structure of the discourse, organization, and aims of the hegemonic national ideology. This perspective raises the possibility that the ultra-Orthodox are beginning to view themselves as maintaining a complementary partnership with the Israeli culture, and to a considerable extent have even constructed a similar cultural structure, a sort of mirror-image of the militaristic one. Moreover, this study even suggests that the haredi mainstream seeks recognition for itself as the spiritual elite troops of the State of Israel.

Formuły rutynowe i ich dydaktyzacja w podręcznikach do nauki języka niemieckiego jako języka obcego w gospodarce i biznesie

Routine formulas represent an essential challenge for foreign language teaching as a compound of typical communicative situations due to speech acts (in maintaining new and old business contacts, expressing emotions, and discourse organization), and as an important element of pragmatic language competence. The main subject of the reflection is the selection and presentation of formulaic expressions in selected course books for business German as a foreign language which are used in the academic context. In particular, the fields of business correspondence, business phone calls, and other common communicative situations were analyzed, as well as exercises and other didactic activities aimed at developing business foreign language skills.

Gesture, prosody and verbal content in non-fluent aphasic speech

Non-fluent aphasia is characterized by frequent word search and a much slower speech rate than non-aphasic speech. For patients with this type of aphasia, communication with those around them is therefore made difficult and is often severely impaired. One of the therapeutic proposals to improve the quality of life of these patients is to re-educate them with more multimodal alternatives. This of course assumes that gestures represent possible alternative means of communication for patients, and that their gestures are not affected in the same way as their speech. This article therefore proposes to study the gestures of 4 aphasic people and to compare them to the gestures performed by non-aphasic people, but also to establish correspondences between those gestures, intonation contours and the way people with aphasia develop their discourse. Results show that although gesture rate is not different in the two groups of participants, the gesture-to-speech ratio is higher for people with aphasia (PWA) than for non-aphasic people (NAP). Considering the fact that PWA also gesture more than NAP during silent pauses, which are longer but not more frequent than in NAP’s speech, and the fact that their gestures coincide less often with a lexical word, we believe that PWA use their gestures as compensation strategies for deficient speech. Yet, their speech impairment is also reflected in their gesturing: more gestures are prepared but abandoned before the stroke in this group and pre-stroke holds are longer, which means that PWA hold their gestures in the hope that they will better coincide with the word they are supposed to accompany and which takes more time to be uttered than in non-pathological speech. Their gestures are also less linked to each other than in the NAP group which goes hand in hand with the fact that they tend to utter independent syntactic phrases with no cohesive marker between them. This is also reflected in their less frequent use of flat and rising tones in intonation, which generally indicate that two sentence parts are dependent one upon the other, as well as their less frequent use of gestures showing discourse organization. In terms of gesture types, the PWA in this study perform many rhythmic beats and rely much on conventional gestures to compensate for their speech impairment rather than on their own creativity. Globally, this means that if multimodal therapies may benefit PWA to improve their communication with other people, speech therapists nevertheless need to be aware that life-long habits of gesture-speech alignment and synchronization may not be so easy to overcome for patients.