Churchill’s reflection discourse

This study presents the results of a cognitive analysis of Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs at the textual, lingual and conceptual levels in order to interpret the implicatures of Churchill’s reflection discourse. The scope of the present research covers Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs as one of the most fruitful types of literary text with regard to the realization of reflection, which is organically interwoven into his texts. The study is done by means of complex analysis with the application of discourse, textual, semantic, cognitive, and conceptual analyses. In the process of the investigation, it was found that Churchill’s reflection discourse represents a special form of language use that discloses a cognitive personality type, which is characterized by the prevalence of logical, deductive and cause-and-effect reasoning. The conceptual space of Churchill’s reflection discourse is constructed as a network model which represents different types of relations among the reflection concepts (subordination, identity, spatial, associative, subjective-and-causative, opposition, causativeand-resultative, attributive, qualitative, attributive-and-possessive, attributive-and-appositive, partitive, functional, reversive-and-functional, paradoxical, and dependency). The verbalization of the reflection concepts actualizes the implicatures of Churchill’s reflection discourse and helps determine the dominant messages implied in Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs.

Self-mention in the academic discourse of ELF writers

English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca in the international environment and in no environment is this more true than in the academic one. Self-mention, especially in academic settings, has been studied extensively; however, not so in written ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) academic discourse, as the prevailing focus of ELF studies has been on the spoken form. In this corpus-based study, I choose Walková’s (2019) three-dimensional model of self-mention and apply it in the self-mention analysis in the SSH category of the SciELF corpus, a corpus of unpublished research articles written by ELF users. The results are compared with the reference corpus CSSH compiled to be comparable to the SSH corpus in terms of discipline. Features related to self-reference are chosen to represent each dimension. The results are tested for statistical significance using the Log-likelihood test. Some data proved to be of greater statistical significance (the use of personal pronouns) while other data did not carry any (the use of boosters).

“You’re too thick to change the station” – Impoliteness, insults and responses to insults on Twitter

This paper aims to propose a typology of replies to insults based on data retrieved from Twitter, which is ripe with offensive comments. The proposed typology is embedded in the theory of impoliteness, and it hinges on the notion of the perlocutionary effect. It assumes that what counts as an insult depends primarily on whether or not an utterance is evaluated as offensive by the insultee. The evaluation can be signalled behaviourally or verbally and includes expressed replies as well as so-called silent replies. The insults, regardless of the presence or absence of an insulting intention of the insulter (potential insult), that are not rendered as offensive by the target are only attempted insults, while those that are experienced as offensive amount to genuine insults. The analysis has illustrated select types of reactions and has shown that potential, attempted and genuine insults may be further divided into: in/direct insults, explicit/implicit, non-/pure, and non-/vocatives, whilst reactions can be subsumed by three overarching strategies: agreeing, attacking and rejection.

Make leave, not war. Intertextual references in the British press coverage of Brexit

In the so-called Brexit referendum which took place on 23 June 2016, a slim majority of British citizens voted in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the EU. Following this decision, the United Kingdom officially withdrew from the European Union on 31 January 2020. On both occasions, British newspapers responded with a series of articles and front pages where they elaborated on various arguments for and against Brexit and declared sides in the Brexit campaign. The following study, which focuses on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, is based on Brexit-related front pages and articles from print and online editions of British newspapers published in both June 2016 and late January/early February 2020. The analysed periodicals represent diverging viewpoints: some argued against Brexit, whereas others backed the Leave campaign. The main points of interest are the intertextual techniques implied in the analysed media texts, ranging from direct quotation to (visual) allusion. They are viewed and discussed as means of (1) revealing the stance of the analysed newspapers; (2) extending the meaning of a given text; (3) attracting attention; and, last but not least, (4) “infotainment”, i.e. involving and entertaining the readership. The conducted analysis proves visual allusions based on British and European national symbols as well as structural allusions to films, songs and works of literature, proverbs and fixed phrases to be a widely applied journalistic strategy in the British media coverage of Brexit. Carefully targeted by producers of media and appropriately decoded by the readership not only do they fulfil a meaning-making and evaluative function but first and foremost provide entertainment, enhance the attractiveness and thus maintain and/or increase the circulation of the newspaper in question.

Prosodic entrainment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder

Entrainment is the tendency of people to behave similarly during an interaction. It occurs on different levels of behaviour, including speech, and has been associated with pro-social behaviour and increased rapport. This review paper outlines the current understanding of linguistic entrainment, particularly at the speech level, in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a disorder that is associated with social difficulties and unusual prosody. Aberrant entrainment patterns in individuals with ASD could thus contribute to both their perceived unusual prosody and their social difficulties. Studying the relationship between speech entrainment and ASD holds great potential for applied benefits in utilizing this knowledge for pre-screening or diagnosis, monitoring progress longitudinally, and intervention practices. Our findings suggest that research on entrainment in ASD is sparse and exploratory, and the ecological validity of experimental paradigms varies. Moreover, there is little consistency in methodology and results vary between studies, which highlights the need for standardized methods in entrainment research. A promising way to standardize methods, facilitate their use, and extend them to everyday clinical practice, is by implementing automatic methods for speech analysis and adhering to open-science principles.

Sentence-structure errors of machine translation into Slovak

The study identifies, classifies and analyses errors in machine translation (MT) outputs of journalistic texts from English into Slovak, using error analysis. The research results presented in the study are pioneering, since the issue of machine translation – with its strong interdisciplinary character and novelty – has not yet been studied in the Slovak academic environment. The evaluation of the errors is based on a framework for classification of MT errors devised by Vaňko, which was arranged for the Slovak language. The study discusses and explains the issues of sentence structure, including predicativeness, syntactic-semantic correlativeness, and a modal and communication sentence framework. We discovered that the majority of the errors are related to the categories of agreement, word order and nominal morpho-syntax. This fact clearly correlates with features of journalistic texts, in which nominal structures and nouns in all realizations are used to a great extent. Moreover, there are some serious differences between the languages which limit and affect the quality of translation.

The skill of natural interpreting in a trilingual child

The present work seeks to contribute to the fields of translation and bilingual acquisition focusing on the particular case of natural translation/interpreting of a single Slovak/English/German balanced trilingual child between 0;03 and 8;01 years. Natural interpreting is a strategy used by bilinguals whereby a message expressed in one language (source language = SL) is reproduced in another (target language = TL). Our study is based on two premises: 1. Translation in a bilingual child is an innate skill which can be acquired without formal training and is developed through guidance and practice (Harris, 1978); and 2. Natural interpreting can occur within different combinations of languages. We address the issue of bilingual competence and in particular the relationship that exists between linguistic competence and performance in the process of interpretation activity in the bilingual child. The first aim of the study is to reveal the social-academic context and the main sources of linguistic input, which had an important effect on the speech development of the child. The second aim of the study is to show that a trilingual child was able to become a sophisticated interpreter as she gradually moved through stages of pre-translation, autotranslation and transduction to more complex forms of interpretation (Harris and Sherwood, 1978; Harris, 1976 and 1978). The third aim of the study is to document the types of errors produced by the child and through error analysis and statistical data reveal whether these errors may hinder the communication of accurate meaning in the TL. The translation competence of the bilingual child is analysed via different types of spontaneous, elicited and experimental data gathered from the child’s longitudinal production recorded by the researcher in diary annotations, audio recordings and video recordings. Examples of the child’s interpretations presented in this paper are transcribed in the CHAT format. The results of our study demonstrate that a trilingual child acquiring three languages in a bilingual community with the bilingual-monolingual interaction strategy used by parents at home can become a competent interpreter by the age of 8;01 years and deliver messages quite accurately in the TL regardless of the directionality of interpretation. The results of error analysis show that the type of errors produced by the child in the process of interpretation are mainly morphological and occasionally syntactic or intrusion errors, which do not lead to misinterpretation of the meaning of original message in the TL.

Stance complement clauses controlled by verbs in academic research papers

This paper explores stance complement clauses in the genre of academic discourse, analysing stance complement clauses controlled by verbs in economics research articles written in English by non-native writers. Following Biber’s taxonomy (2006) of common lexico-grammatical features used for stance analyses, the results of the study show that epistemic verbs of certainty and likelihood are an important means of communicating knowledge in this genre and thus, form an inseparable part of academic research writing. Moreover, the study seeks to analyse the contrast between stance to-infinitives and stance that-clauses in the studied corpus. While stance that-clauses relate mainly to the category of certainty; on the contrary, stance to-infinitive clauses are consciously or subconsciously chosen to lessen the risk of a face-threatening act and typically refer to writers’ sensory experience (e.g. verbs such as seem, appear, etc.). The findings suggest that research papers from the field of economics demonstrate a clear preference for factive verbs over non-factive verbs.

The relationship between speech and gestures in persons with aphasia: Evidence from the Czech perspective

In my research, I replicate two fundamental hypotheses established by Jakob et al. (2011): 1) Persons with aphasia (PWA) produce more gestures than healthy control persons (HCP) during interpretation of texts; 2) The more speech-restricted a person with aphasia is, the more gestures he/she produces during the interpretation of a text. I work with 6 persons with diagnosed aphasia and 10 healthy control persons (or persons with no evident speech deficiency). From a methodological point of view, I point out the necessity to include a description of non-verbal elements in language description and, at the same time, to describe the data of the damage in persons with aphasia. I also introduce some possible perspectives for exploring the categories and the extent of speech damage in persons with aphasia and various ways in which they compensate for verbal deficiency with the aid of gestures. From the viewpoint of data processing methods, on the one hand, I explore the speech parameters: among others, quantity of words, and, on the other hand, the gesture parameters: quantity of gestures, diversity of gestures, etc. I find that Czech aphasic persons do use gestures to support their restricted verbal production and to substitute for verbal production where they do not have access to any given lexical items. My data also correlate with the general assumptions on speech production when considering different types of aphasia.

Modalized speech acts in a spoken learner corpus: The case of can and could

This paper examines the use of the modal auxiliaries can and could in speech acts produced by university students of English. Its aim is to explore syntactic patterns, semantic features and pragmatic functions of utterances containing can/could in Corpus of Czech Students’ Spoken English. Taking account of pragmatic factors, including broader linguistic and extralinguistic context, the analysis attempts to identify the illocutionary forces conveyed by the modalized speech acts excerpted from the corpus dialogues. The findings indicate that the modal verbs are commonly employed as a modifying device in indirect speech acts, particularly in conventionalized directives. As for their frequency of occurrence, can proves to be a widely used modal auxiliary in spoken learner discourse, whereas the more remote could appears in the corpus much less frequently in that it is associated with a higher degree of diffidence.