Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs.

Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is selfpresentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been called stancetaking. When writers mark their stances, for instance by saying I think, they enact different ways of signalling a relation to others, marking disagreement, enacting surprise, andironicising previous contributions. All these moves are ways of presenting one’s own contribution as distinctive, showing one’s entitlement to a position. In this paper, I use concordance tools to identify strings that are very frequent in a corpus of blogs, relative to a general corpus of written texts, focus on those relatively frequent words that mark stance and analyse these markers in context. I argue that the prominence of stance-taking indicates the priority of individual positioning over collective and deliberative discussion

Weak Assertion

We present an inferentialist account of the epistemic modal operator might. Our starting point is the bilateralist programme. A bilateralist explains the operator not in terms of the speech act of rejection ; we explain the operator might in terms of weak assertion, a speech act whose existence we argue for on the basis of linguistic evidence. We show that our account of might provides a solution to certain well-known puzzles about the semantics of modal vocabulary whilst retaining classical logic. This demonstrates that an inferentialist approach to meaning can be successfully extended beyond the core logical constants

How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations

We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions. Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed, with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook

Interruptions Produced by the Mollucan Students in the Fellowship Meeting

This thesis is about a study of the interruptions produced by the Moluccan students in a fellowship meeting, consisting of fifteen students as the respondents, who are divided into two: the chairperson and the members. The purposes of the study are to know the tokens and the functions of interruptions used by the chairperson and the members of the meeting by considering social role as the social factor. The writer applies the theory of interruptions by Tannen (1990) and Wardhaugh (1985) as the main theories. Besides, the writer also uses the theory of social role by Johnstone (2008) and the theory of discourse markers by Schiffrin (2003) as the supporting theories. The writer used qualitative approach to conduct this research. The writer discovered that the chairperson produced more tokens (19) than the members (13). Moreover, the writer found that the respondents produced Ambonese tokens, such as “Hiii”, “Weee”, “Seng”, “Eee”, and Suroboyoan tokens, such as “Lho” and “Itulho”. Both the chairperson and the members produced “other” functions the most with 58.75% and 63.81%. In conclusion, social role influenced the interruptions and their functions, and the number of tokens produced by the participants

Stancetaking strategies in judicial discourse : evidence from US Supreme Court opinions

Intended as a study of stancetaking patterns in judicial opinions, this article aims at contributing to stance-related investigations of specialist discourse. For this purpose, it builds on the work of stance researchers and interactional linguists as well as attempts to apply their concepts in an examination of written data. In particular, the analysis is informed by Du Bois’s interactional concept of stance and the two related notions of epistemicity and evidentiality. It also follows Chilton’s discourse space theory in what is proposed as a stance analysis framework intended to aid researchers in categorising individual stance acts. The study draws on data from a theme-focused corpus of US Supreme Court opinions dealing with capital punishment

Adverbial markers of epistemic modality across disciplinary discourses: A contrastive study of research articles in six academic disciplines

Epistemic adverbs, like other markers of epistemic modality, are concerned with the speaker’s assessment of the truth value of the proposition. In other words, they indicate that the speaker considers certain situations as possible, impossible, probable, certain, or uncertain. At the same time, they signal the author’s presence in the text, and invite the reader to make his/her own conclusions and interpretations. The use of modal markers has been demonstrated to differ across academic disciplines, but the specific differences concerning the use of epistemic adverbs have not been studied systematically. This paper investigates the use of epistemic adverbs in research articles representing six disciplines belonging to three different branches of science: the humanities (linguistics and literary studies), the social sciences (law and sociology), and the natural sciences (physics and medicine), with the aim of establishing discipline-specific tendencies in their use. The study is based on a corpus of 160 research articles compiled by the author. It begins with an attempt at delimiting the category of epistemic adverbs in English. After that, a list of the most frequent epistemic adverbs in the subcorpora of all the disciplines is established and discussed. The study demonstrates that frequent use of epistemic adverbs is largely a property of research articles in the humanities and social sciences. Medical and physics research articles use them significantly less often. The most frequent epistemic adverbs in the research articles under analysis include indeed, perhaps, clearly, certainly, of course, arguably, possibly, and reportedly. Some adverbs appear to be associated with specific disciplines, e.g., clearly (physics, linguistics, sociology, medicine), indeed (linguistics, literary studies, sociology), possibly, reportedly (medicine), arguably (law). The association of individual adverbs with specific disciplines may serve as an important clue to the understanding of their functions, in particular in the case of the less frequent ones, such as arguably and reportedly, which remain significantly understudied. The findings may also prove useful in teaching English for academic purposes

Compliments in American English and Chinese: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Compliment as a speech act is shared by all the nations to create or reinforce the solidarity in communication. However, compliment/response interaction may vary greatly because of the influences and constraints of different cultural factors. This study compares the differences of compliments in American English and Chinese. Topics, linguistic formulas and compliment respoaCompliment as a speech act is shared by all the nations to create or reinforce the solidarity in communication. However, compliment/response interaction may vary greatly because of the influences and constraints of different cultural factors. This study compares the differences of compliments in American English and Chinese. Topics, linguistic formulas and compliment responses are discussed and special emphasis is laid on some different interpretations of the well-accepted patterns and the changes in the speech act of complimenting/responding to compliments due to the popularization and development of English learning and teaching in China.nses are discussed and special emphasis is laid on some different interpretations of the well-accepted patterns and the changes in the speech act of complimenting/responding to compliments due to the popularization and development of English learning and teaching in Chin

Parenthetical 'I say (you)' in Late Medieval Greek vernacular: a message structuring discourse marker rather than a message conveying verb

In this paper, I argue that the first-person singular of the "ordinary" verb lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde ('I say') in the thirteenth-to fourteenth-century political verse narratives Chronicle of Morea and War of Troy does not always carry its "normal", representational content ('I inform/assure [you]'). Frequently, lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde structures the discourse rather than conveying conceptual meaning and, thus, has procedural meaning. In this respect, the verb can be compared to modern discourse markers (i.e., semantically reduced items which abound in spoken language). An important-yet not decisive-criterion to distinguish the conceptual from the procedural use is the position of lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde: all "DM-like" examples are parenthetical. As for their precise pragmatic function, these forms are used, in particular, to signal a clarification towards the listener ("I mean") or, more generally, to grab the attention of the audience. Applied to the modern binary distinction between interpersonal and textual discourse markers, they thus belong to the former category. Finally, I tentatively relate the observation that the procedural parenthetical examples show a marked preference for pre-caesural position to the concept of "filled pauses", which makes sense given the adopted oral style of the Late Medieval Greek political verse narratives

An Error Analysis Of The Result Of An Achievement Test In English Given At Dunbar High School, Ferris, Texas, 1947-1948

Today the American high schools are being called upon, as never before, for a greater efficiency and for a superior product. The growing enrollments, the rising cost of education, and the mounting criticisms that always occur following a war are causing the public schools to take stock of themselves. These schools are expected to be the source of that type of citizenry which is capable of coping with the problems of our rapidly changing society. Therefore our schools must know where they are going, must possess the means of getting there, and also must possess the instruments that can determine when they have arrived. All of these phases of education must be accomplished by our schools with efficiency and dispatch. Basic to developing this superior citizenry for our rapidly changing society is an acceptable usage of English for the ability to write effectively, the ability to speak correctly, to spell correctly, and to read with rapidity and understanding serve as one group of criteria for determining the success of a school1 s work. With rising enrollments and a decreasing supply of teachers, our schools are compelled to seek means of performing their functions more efficiently within the framework of these limitations. Therefore all devices, techniques and instruments that will enable the school to meet this challenge of society for better-prepared students while still facing the handicaps of large classes and limited teaching staff, must be increasingly used. To this end the Dunbar High School of Ferris, Texas, has been studying its program, its instructional methods, and the progress of its students and graduates