Weak and strong discourse markers in speech, chat and writing:Do signals compensate for ambiguity in explicit relations?

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as but or moreover) with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three genres (discussion, chat, and essay). The presence of discourse signals is expected to vary with the ambiguity of the discourse marker and with the genre. This analysis complements recent approaches to discourse signalling by zooming in on the different types of discourse markers with which other signals combine. The corpus annotation study uncovered three categories of marker strength—weak, intermediate, and strong—thus refining the concept of “explicitness.” Statistical modeling reveals that weak discourse markers are more often compensated than intermediate and strong markers, and that this compensation is not affected by genre variation

Integrating terminological methods in a framework for collaborative development of semi-formal ontologies

Despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. To tackle this issue a collaborative platform was developed where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework. In this article we describe the integration of a terminological method to support experts in eliciting and organizing concepts of their domain. The method is based on a linguistic analysis of textual resources with the help of a term extraction tool and by highlighting markers of relations between concepts. An application scenario is then presented to illustrate the connection between the terminological processes and the knowledge representation processes without blurring the theoretical distinction between terms and concepts.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Use of Perspective Markers and Connectives in Expressing Subjectivity: Evidence from Collocational Analyses

This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian, which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres

Theoretical issues in the interpretation of Cappadocian, a not-so-dead Greek contact language

Cappadocian is a mixed Greek-Turkish dialect continuum spoken in the Turkish Central Anatolia Region until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Only a few Cappadocian dialects are still spoken in present-day Greece. Since the publication of Thomason and Kaufman’s Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics in 1988, Cappadocian has attracted the attention of historical and contact linguists, because of its unique mixed character. In this paper, I will discuss a number of theoretical issues in the interpretation of the linguistic structure of Cappadocian, focusing on the following topics: (1) the status of loan phonemes and loan morphemes in contact languages, (2) the distinction between code switching and code mixing in relation to Poplack’s Free Morpheme Constraint, (3) the schizoid typology of contact languages

The law review paper between the Kingdom of the law and the realms of academia: A systemic functional analysis of adverbial clauses

Legal discourse has long been classified among those genres that defy generic changes the most (Gocić 2012). Recently, however, hybrid legal genres have been challenging this generic stability by imposing their own norms to coin a novel kind of ‘legal culture’ (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011: 11). The law review article is a case in point for it combines both legal and academic standards of writing which make it “far richer in intertextuality and interdiscursivity” (Bhatia 2006: 6) than the traditional set of legal genres. This generic subversion can be traced in the lexico-grammatical choices made by the authors to turn their papers into influential legal sources rather than mere descriptions of the law. In this context, this study aspires to scrutinize the use of adverbial clauses as one specific lexico-grammatical choice in a corpus of 44 accredited law review papers with the aim of showing how this hybrid genre strives to evolve beyond the stagnation of what is termed ‘language of the law’. Specifically, a Systemic Functional Linguistics analysis of the semantic, structural and thematic uses of these structures is conducted to demonstrate how the hybridity of contexts in a single genre can make for unprecedented generic breaches. The quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed an uneven distribution of adverbial patterns in favor of non-finite purpose and finite condition, concession and reason clauses. Additionally, the positional distribution of these patterns is manipulated whenever the need arises to hedge claims as a form of allegiance to the communal demands of the law and academia. These choices are found to comply with the authors’ needs to balance both legal and academic rituals of writing while observing at the same time their personal needs to be highly acclaimed as legal scholars and to “publish or perish” (Christensen & Oseid 2008: 1)

Conjuncts in Nineteenth-Century English: Diachronic Development and Genre Diversity

This is the author's accepted manuscript. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014This article explores the use of connective adverbials or conjuncts (e.g. therefore, on the other hand, firstly) in nineteenth-century English. Drawing on A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English (CONCE), the study focuses on charting change over time and variation among different genres, and considers the distribution of various semantic types (e.g. contrastive, resultive) as well as individual conjuncts and author styles. We show that nineteenth-century English displays considerable genre differentiation in the use of conjuncts, both in terms of frequency and semantic types of conjuncts employed. Within these larger trends, patterns are also evident for individual conjuncts (e.g. now, therefore, so) and individual authors (e.g. in Letters). Science writing, in particular, reveals a drastic increase in conjuncts (in nearly all semantic types), which sets it apart from other genres. This suggests that the conjunct-heavy style of academic writing that has been attested in studies of Present-Day English was established in the nineteenth century. On a more general level, this result underlines the importance of considering formal genres when charting language change, as they may be in the forefront of the formation of new linguistic patterns that are unique to written texts. The article also contributes to our growing understanding of Late Modern English syntax

Social Student Bodies in the IM World: Digital Vernaculars and Self-Reflexive Rhetoric

Recent rhetoric, composition, and literacy scholarship has refocused attention on the body’s role in reading and writing, arguing against abstracting literacy practices and texts from material situations, contexts, and the physical bodies who create them. This scholarship challenges descriptions and accounts of emerging media and digital writing situations as “disembodying.” This thesis argues that in the “IM world” in which incoming college students learn to write by participating in online communities, their digital writing can be considered “embodied” as real-world, socially-situated practice. By actively participating in online communities, many incoming college students learn distinct online language practices outside of school; they acquire digital vernacular literacy practices that can be useful when they encounter school literacies. To illustrate the importance of digital vernaculars for students growing up in the IM world, this project analyzes digital classroom writing from thirty-one students at the University of Tennessee. Writing online in blog and chat forums, these students drew from past digital rhetorical knowledge to produce identity-building writing with wide- ranging motives while negotiating present academic writing situations. The project concludes by suggesting that incorporating digital writing in classroom situations can help first-year writing teachers teach students to become self-reflective rhetorical practitioners, rhetors who use all available means across different writing situations and domains

Mastering Academic Language: Organization and Stance in the Persuasive Writing of High School Students

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically-useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern U.S. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers; transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures; and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker, i.e., epistemic hedges, significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically-informative assessment tools