SENTIMENT(ALITY) AS A MEANS OF PERSUASION: ON THE THIN ICE OF MANIPULATION IN PROTESTANT SERMONS

Religious discourse represents an area of human communication in which persuasion plays a vital role; religious texts seem to be essentially related to the ultimate objective of religion: to create, mediate and legitimise ideology in order to persuade the reader of the veracity of the religious doctrine (Fairclough 1989, Cotterell & Turner 1989: 26-33, van Dijk 1998: 317). The paper seeks to investigate the persuasive strategies and linguistic means employed to convey persuasion in English Protestant sermons. The analysis focuses on the rhetorical role of pathos, which is purposefully evoked by the preacher via wilful employment of aff ect and emotions. Attention will also be paid to the blurred borderline between the intentional use of sentiment and sentimentality, and manipulation.

ENGLISH IN THE CHURCHSCAPE: EXPLORING A RELIGIOUS LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE IN THE PHILIPPINES

As one of the official languages of the Philippines, English predominantly figures in thedomains of education, government, and the judiciary. This reality has always put English at the top of the linguistic ladder, relegating local languages to lower ranks. This scenario appears to be evident also in the domain of the church. In this paper, I investigate signs posted within the compound of a major Catholic church located in the Philippines in terms of types and language use. Informed by linguistic landscape concepts pioneered by Landry and Bourhis (1997), Spolsky and Cooper (1991), and Ben-Rafael (2009), I analyzed over a hundred signs in the religious linguistic landscape, which I call ‘churchscape’. Findings show that English dominates in the churchscape as a language of communication and language of tourism while local languages such as Filipino and Pangasinan assume a secondary role in the churchscape. This study affords us an interesting view and alternative understanding of multilingualism as a phenomenon through the churchscape in question.

A COMPARISON OF NICHE ESTABLISHMENTS IN ENGLISH RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS PUBLISHED IN INTERNATIONAL AND THAI JOURNALS

The present study looked closely at the niche establishments in the introduction sections of English research articles written by Thai authors and published in local Thai journals and compared them to those found in introduction sections written by non-Thai authors published in international and high indexed journals. Each of the two corpora contains forty introductory sections. The analysis was based on the frameworks of Swales (2004) and Lim (2012). It was found that the use of niche establishments in the international corpus was higher than that in the Thai corpus. In the Thai corpus, “Stressing insufficient research” was the highest strategy, but “Revealing methodological limitations” was completely absent. It is expected that the results will provide practical guidance for novice writers to write their research introduction sections with informative and convincing niche establishments and, to some extent, the results should also benefit English writing classes, especially in Thailand.

USING SFG TO ANALYZE AUTHORIAL EMPHASIZERS AND PROPOSITIONAL INTENSIFIERS: A COMPARISON OF ALBANIAN AND ITALIAN ACADEMIC WRITING

Modality expresses high probability and total degree through boosters (Halliday 1985,Holmes 1990). Through them, writers reinforce statements with the assurance of reliableknowledge (cf. Hyland 1998b). This study compares the usage of boosting emphasizers (e.g. certainly) and intensifiers (e.g. completely) (cf. Quirk et al. 1985) and their orientation and manifestation (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) in Albanian and Italian student academic writings in L1 and English as an L2. I compiled an Italian and an Italian English corpus (around 3 million words each) as well as an Albanian corpus (around 2.2 million words) and Albanian English one (around 700,000 words). The corpora are comparable in terms of genre, disciplinary domain, gender and the division of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. Since very little research has been conducted on academic writing in Albania (Toska 2015), it is essential to initiate research in this field. The results showed that boosters were significantly favored in Italian and Italian English and less favored in Albanian. Conclusively, Italians show more commitment than Albanians.

HYBRID DISCOURSE AND THE EMERGENCE OF CONTEXT IN BBC’S QUESTION TIME

This paper explores how hybrid discourse, instantiated in talk and interaction, can be shaped not only by a situational context (TV panel show) and cultural context (TV’s increasing democratisation of laity), but also by human volition in pursuit of recognizable to others and allowed within the confi nes of the setting. It does this by examining the emergence of context in light of a non-mainstream hybrid and refl exive activity. Specifically, it examines a non-normative interview format that has arisen in contemporary broadcasting through the analysis of three transcribed segments which were taken from two key episodes of the BBC’s fl agship political program: Question Time. Using a range of analytical concepts from symbolic interactionism, pragmatics, and conversational analysis, such as frames and footings, activity types, discourse types, and turn-taking, the analysis shows how institutional (political) and non-institutional (normative) practices can come together in the pursuit of individual goals and contemporary media’s goal for increasingly partisan journalism and confrontainment. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of a multidimensional approach to context, whereby meaning both emerges from and is constitutive of the forms and functions of an activity’s discourse, whilst further highlighting the role of hybridity in contemporary discourse.

RECURRENT LEXIS AND PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH RESTAURANT REVIEWS: A DATA-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of recurrent vocabulary and phraseologyin written English food discourse. More specifi cally, it focuses on the use and discourse functions of keywords, key multi-word terms and lexical bundles in a specialized corpus comprising 200 professional restaurant reviews that were published in online editions of selected British and American newspapers. The results of the study indicate that the most distinctive lexical feature of the analyzed texts is the frequent mention of ingredients and the limited presence of stance devices. The most frequently mentioned aspects of the referential content also show that what is evaluated is the total experience of eating and dining at a restaurant. These fi ndings contribute to the area of English forSpecific Purposes, off ering pedagogical potential that can be exploited when developing purpose-made teaching materials for students in food-related programs who need to learn the specialized vocabulary of their target profession.

INTERPERSONALITY IN RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS: A DIACHRONIC CASE STUDY

Research article (RA) abstracts are not mere shortened versions of the research article content but constitute a separate genre of academic discourse with its own specific features, one of them being its interactional nature. This paper explores interactional metadiscourse markers occurring in RA abstracts from the diachronic perspective. The main focus is therefore on variation and change in the use of these linguistic means since it may be expected that their distribution could evolve over time, even though scholars follow specifi c writing conventions when writing RA abstracts. Connected with this is the question whether growth in the mean length of RA abstracts has led to any rhetorical change. Providing an answer to this question is another aim of this paper. The study is based on a corpus of 96 RA abstracts from the fi eld of Applied Linguistics published in a prestigious linguistic journal entitled Journal of Pragmatics over the course of the last 35 years. The theoretical framework followed here is the taxonomy of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland (2005a), which is particularly convenient as it off ers a pragmatically-grounded method of analysing interactional metadiscourse markers in academic texts. As the results suggest, the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers has undergone diachronic changes, e.g. in the use of hedging and boosting devices, confi rming the dynamic character of this often overlooked genre of academic discourse with regard to its interpersonal aspects.

ATTITUDE IN ABSTRACTS: STANCE EXPRESSION IN TRANSLATION PRACTICE REPORTS AND INTERPRETATION PRACTICE REPORTS BY CHINESE STUDENTS

Given the importance of stance expression in the writing of abstracts, this study adopted a corpus-based comparative approach to investigate the stance expression in abstracts of the Translation Practice Report (TPR) and the Interpretation Practice Report (IPR), which are two newly emerging reporting genres in Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) in China. Based on a set of corpora composed with 30 TPR abstracts (8,738 tokens) and 30 IPR abstracts (8,699 tokens) collected from 30 universities located in 16 provinces in China, the stance expression was examined in terms of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention by employing the stance framework in Hyland’s (2005) interactional model. The findings revealed a genre-specific convention in utilizing the four categories of stance in both the TPR abstracts and the IPR abstracts, which is different from that in the abstracts of the empirical studies. The analysis also found discipline-specific variations of stance expression between the two corpora due to different disciplinary conventions and practice of the two subdisciplines. Then, the interviews with the insider informants were conducted to clarify and to enrich the research findings. The results in the study may be taken as a useful reference to expressing attitude in writing the abstracts in the MTI field of China, and possibly in other fields.

CONTRASTIVE INTERLANGUAGE ANALYSIS OF EVIDENTIALITY IN PHD DISSERTATIONS

The present study investigates evidentiality in its broadest sense (Chafe 1986) in PhD dissertations as a genre of academic writing. For this purpose, Chafe’s taxonomy (1986), revised by Ifantidou (2001), has been used as a framework in order to analyze three different groups of datasets, including one group of native speakers of English and two groups of non-native speakers: a group of Turkish speakers of English and the other non-native speakers with diff erent L1 backgrounds. The texts of these three groups are examined in order to fi nd out whether the native language of the participants is a factor in the choice of evidential markers. The results show that the native speakers of English use evidential markers more frequently compared to the non-native authors. In terms of the Native Language/Interlanguage comparison in Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger 1996, 1998), the overall use of evidentiality reveals that non-native authors do not show native-like features in the use of evidentiality. In terms of the Interlanguage/Interlanguage comparison, Turkish authors of academic texts diff er from the authors with various native language backgrounds in terms of the use of evidentiality.

THE DISCURSIVE FORMULATION OF BREXIT: DECISION, OPPORTUNITY AND NEEDFUL AGREEMENT

This study sets out to examine the British Prime Minister Theresa May’s speeches delivered through her premiership. It aims to unveil the ideological discursive formation of Brexit after the referendum, and to investigate the way May squares the rhetoric to persuade the general public and the British/European political Elites to deliver the Brexit deal, though she campaigned pro-European Britain. I conduct a corpus-assisted discourse study approach, using discourse analysis methods and corpus linguistics tools for a case study of a purpose-built corpus of the Prime Minister speeches (2016-2019). The analysis revealed that the Brexit representation eschewed any identifi cation with ‘Europe’ and boosted Eurosceptic sentiments by (1) rationalizing the decision to leave the European Union; (2) proposing a better future after Brexit; (3) appealing to the British people’s emotion to support the Brexit deal.