A discourse-based approach to verb placement in early West-Germanic

The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization

ALFABETIZACIÓN ACADEMICA, GÉNEROS Y COMPETENCIAS: UN MODELO DIDÁCTICO PARA LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS A ESTUDIANTES DE TRADUCCIÓN

Academic literacy has been the subject of many publications in the last decade. Yet, the practices to develop it still need to be carefully contextualised, in accordance with the field of studies, the academic context, and even the language in which they are to be implemented. The aim of this work is to develop a didactic model that caters for the needs of (mainly advanced) translation students. Achieving an acceptable standard of academic literacy involves linguistic and extra-linguistic –discursive, sociocultural, metacognitive– competences, together with translation competence. Additionally, the study of English from a contrastive perspective –regarded as a problem-solving task and applied at the lexical, syntactic, textual and sociocultural levels– is deemed unavoidable. The didactic model has an ESP (English for Specific purposes) and textual approach. The activities proposed include metacognitive and metalinguistic reflection, cognitive and linguistic recognition and production, text analysis, design and assessment, discussion, negotiation and social interaction. La alfabetización académica es un tema sobre el cual mucho se ha publicado en los últimos diez años. Sin embargo, poco se ha escrito sobre las prácticas necesarias para llevarla a cabo. Para ello, es fundamental desarrollar actividades contextualizadas con respecto al área de especialización, el entorno académico e incluso el idioma en el que se impartirán. Este artículo desarrolla un modelo didáctico para satisfacer los requerimientos de estudiantes avanzados de la carrera de Traductor Público en idioma inglés. En este caso, un nivel aceptable de alfabetización académica implica la adquisición de distintas competencias lingüísticas y extra-lingüísticas, como la discursiva, la sociocultural y la metacognitiva, además de la competencia traductora. Asimismo, en este contexto es imprescindible abordar el estudio del idioma ingles desde una perspectiva contrastiva, que lo considera una actividad de resolución de problemas aplicada a nivel léxico, sintáctico textual y sociocultural. Este modelo didáctico está anclado en las áreas de inglés para propósitos específicos y el análisis del discurso. El enfoque propuesto incluye la reflexión metacognitiva y metalingüística, el reconocimiento y la producción a nivel cognitivo y lingüístico, así como el análisis de textos, y diseño y evaluación de actividades que incluyen discusión, negociación e interacción.Academic literacy has been the subject of many publications in the last decade. Yet, the practices to develop it still need to be carefully contextualised, in accordance with the field of studies, the academic context, and even the language in which they are to be implemented. The aim of this work is to develop a didactic model that caters for the needs of (mainly advanced) translation students. Achieving an acceptable standard of academic literacy involves linguistic and extra-linguistic –discursive, sociocultural, metacognitive– competences, together with translation competence. Additionally, the study of English from a contrastive perspective –regarded as a problem-solving task and applied at the lexical, syntactic, textual and sociocultural levels– is deemed unavoidable. The didactic model has an ESP (English for Specific purposes) and textual approach. The activities proposed include metacognitive and metalinguistic reflection, cognitive and linguistic recognition and production, text analysis, design and assessment, discussion, negotiation and social interaction

Making Good Sense: Pragmatism's Mastery of Meaning, Truth, and Workable Rule of Law

The hermeneutic pragmatism explored in this article timely examines how “post-truth” claims over-estimate semantic freedoms while at the same time underestimating semantic and pre-semantic restraints. Such pragmatism also timely examines how formalists err by committing the reverse errors. Drawing on insights from James, Peirce, Putnam, Rorty, Gadamer, Derrida, and others, such hermeneutic pragmatism explores (1) the necessary role of both internal and objective experience in meaning, (2) the resulting instrumental nature of concepts required to deal with such experience, (3) the related need for workability to apply to the “the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted,” (4) the inherent role of morality and other norms in measuring such workability, (5) the semantic as well as experiential nature of our workable realities, (6) the semantic freedoms involved in constructing, framing, and retaining our workable realities and concepts, and (7) the semantic, pre-semantic, and other restraints on constructing, framing, and retaining our workable realities and concepts. Such hermeneutic pragmatism also introduces Eunomia, a real-world alternative to Dworkin’s superhuman judge Hercules. Named after the Greek goddess of good order, the human Eunomia represents the reasonable judge excellently versed in (among other things) legal theory, legal practice, linguistics, and philosophy of language. Additionally, in its appendices, this article surveys the pragmatic restraints of “implementives” and provides a detailed overview of pragmatic “workability” restraints for both law and fact. (By “sense” the title of this article means not only “meaning conveyed or intended” but also “capacity for effective application of the powers of the mind as a basis for action or response.” See Sense, MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY (11th ed. 2014) “Workable” has the broad meaning discussed in Sections II, IV, and Appendix C of the Article, and "good" is further explored in the section on Eunomia, namesake of the Greek goddess of good order.) Keywords: Pragmatism, Hermeneutic, Truth, Rule of Law, William James, C.S. Peirce, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Gadamer, Habermas, Derrida, Lon Fuller, H.L.A. Hart, Post-truth, Postmodernism, Trump, Rhetoric, Meaning, Interpretation, Metaphor, Category, Lifeworld, Formalism, Framing, Deconstructio

Genre-Based Approaches and the International Baccalaureate Diploma English Exam Paper 2

There are relatively few examples of genre-related text analysis on academic high-stakes English written exams. Of those that are written, discourse analysis and corpus studies are often used as tools to measure genre-related discourse awareness and textual patterns. In Genre Analysis, John Swale’s used text analysis from a rhetorical and linguistic background to come up with a theory of genre based on shared communicative purposes. To large extent genre scholars since then have ignored student reports of how they understand and deal with the rhetorical organization and textual patterns in high-stakes English exams. Furthermore, these concerns have not been studied in the International Baccalaureate English Language and Literature Exam Paper 2. Building on genre traditions in ESP research and New Rhetoric research, this dissertation explores how students report to make sense of high-stakes English exams in upper secondary school. This dissertation aims at identifying some of the approaches that students report to use when engaged in writing expository comparative literary essays. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, artifact analysis and surveys of student rhetorical moves, this study seeks to bridge genre studies traditions that have largely ignored social contexts of high-stakes exams as socially situated phenomena. Findings here suggest that social context plays a significant role in rhetorical development in academic writing. Some findings point out that inter-clausal contexts reflect rhetorical intentions unnoticed in previous studies, and must be considered before quantitative summaries of rhetorical modes can be validated in studies that measure argumentative rhetorical modes. This paper argues that schematic organization of longer expository writing within the overall rhetorical purpose of argumentation needs further examination when considered against task-related influences.Master's Thesis in Education Specializing in EnglishVID-MAUENGENGMAU65

This research topic of yours – is it a research topic at all? Using comparative interactional data for a fine-grained reanalysis of traditional concepts

This paper demonstrates how bottom-up research on interactional data offers the opportunity of disentangling presumably basic linguistic notions into smaller primitives. Using parallel case studies on interrogatives and left dislocations from two unrelated languages (Modern Hebrew and Anal Naga), the paper shows how avoiding restrictive definitions and recurrently expanding the set of examples results in a revision of concepts, taken for granted at the beginning of the study. The findings emphasise the need for channelling corpus-based research into an interactionally-informed examination of the metalanguage employed for the analysis. They illustrate how studying a research topic and questioning the validity of the concepts that underlie it are part of the same process

Concession relations in argumentative discourse : the case of written reviews

Traballo fin de Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesas. Curso 2013-2014This paper has considered the role of concession in the argumentative genre, specifically the role of the concessive markers but and although in written reviews of books and films. Therefore, it was necessary to examine the theoretical ackground of such concession and written reviews. Firstly, the argumentative genre, and in particular written reviews were analysed in relation to concession. Secondly, a review of previous literature on concession was discussed. In this, concession was analysed with reference to its semantic features, its connection to other coherence relations (causal, conditional and opposite relations), its markers, its structure according to the RST, its discourse function and its pragmatic characteristics in consonance with Appraisal Theory. To this end, different examples(several taken from my corpus and others from the literature reviewed) were discusse