What Words Do We Use to Lie?: Word Choice in Deceptive Messages

Text messaging is the most widely used form of computer- mediated communication (CMC). Previous findings have shown that linguistic factors can reliably indicate messages as deceptive. For example, users take longer and use more words to craft deceptive messages than they do truthful messages. Existing research has also examined how factors, such as student status and gender, affect rates of deception and word choice in deceptive messages. However, this research has been limited by small sample sizes and has returned contradicting findings. This paper aims to address these issues by using a dataset of text messages collected from a large and varied set of participants using an Android messaging application. The results of this paper show significant differences in word choice and frequency of deceptive messages between male and female participants, as well as between students and non-students

Effects of Visual Priming and Event Orientation on Word Order Choice in Russian Sentence Production

Existing research shows that distribution of the speaker’s attention among event’s protagonists affects syntactic choice during sentence production. One of the debated issues concerns the extent of the attentional contribution to syntactic choice in languages that put stronger emphasis on word order arrangement rather than the choice of the overall syntactic frame. To address this, the current study used a sentence production task, in which Russian native speakers were asked to verbally describe visually perceived transitive events. Prior to describing the target event, a visual cue directed the participants’ attention to the location of either the agent or the patient of the subsequently presented visual event. In addition, we also manipulated event orientation (agent-left vs. agent-right) as another potential contributor to syntactic choice. The number of patient-initial sentences was the dependent variable compared between conditions. First, the obtained results replicated the effect of visual cueing on the word order in Russian language: more patient-initial sentences in patient cued condition. Second, we registered a novel effect of event orientation: Russian native speakers produced more patient-initial sentences after seeing events developing from right to left as opposed to left-to-right events. Our study provides new evidence about the role of the speaker’s attention and event orientation in syntactic choice in language with flexible word order

Minds, Bodies, and Political Selves: Embodying Pro-Choice Activism

The abortion debate in the United States is a contentious social issue. Within the past three years, legislators introduced abortion related restrictions in unprecedented quantities. Pro-choice activist organizations and individuals are responding to this influx of targeted legislation. My thesis is an ethnographic study of pro-choice activist habitus and the cultural capital shared among activists. I explore political activists\u27 and clinic escorts\u27; shared rhetorical tactics and personal preferences regarding key pro-choice issues. First I discuss and analyze how gender inequality and gender identity is present in activists\u27; political abortion discourse and personal life choices. Second, I explore activist political and personal discussions of the body as it relates to abortion and health care. And third, I present and analyze how activist use of the word fetus is a significant pro-choice preference that tactically furthers their cause. My thesis expands upon existing ethnographic exploration of activist social movements and their tactics, habitus and preferences, as well as feminist anthropology

Minds, Bodies, and Political Selves: Embodying Pro-Choice Activism

The abortion debate in the United States is a contentious social issue. Within the past three years, legislators introduced abortion related restrictions in unprecedented quantities. Pro-choice activist organizations and individuals are responding to this influx of targeted legislation. My thesis is an ethnographic study of pro-choice activist habitus and the cultural capital shared among activists. I explore political activists\u27 and clinic escorts\u27; shared rhetorical tactics and personal preferences regarding key pro-choice issues. First I discuss and analyze how gender inequality and gender identity is present in activists\u27; political abortion discourse and personal life choices. Second, I explore activist political and personal discussions of the body as it relates to abortion and health care. And third, I present and analyze how activist use of the word fetus is a significant pro-choice preference that tactically furthers their cause. My thesis expands upon existing ethnographic exploration of activist social movements and their tactics, habitus and preferences, as well as feminist anthropology

Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Judgment has two functions therefore: determining and reflecting. Determining involves finding the right 'universal', that is concept or word for the situation at hand. Thus this function covers the choice of rule or aesthetic, that is, the metric of measurement. Reflective judgment is particularly relevant to the related activities of aesthetic choice and purposeful behaviour. It is the source of what Kant calls 'empirical concepts', that is, for my purposes, the range of aesthetic rules or metrics that one has at one's disposal. Kant's ideas about beauty, although stimulating for my purposes, are not directly relevant to the issues of measurement. But his concept of the Sublime is. \"The experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature.\" The specific category of the 'mathematically sublime' appears especially important for empirical measurement

LEARNERS' LANGUAGE CHALLENGES IN WRITING ENGLISH

This paper discusses a number of common linguistic challenges or issues or problems which learners (would-be teachers) of the English language encounter when attempting to express themselves in written form, particularly in paragraph writing. The paper also suggests strategies for dealing with the challenges and points out (dis)advantages of using a certain evaluation approach. Generally, the common language issues can, for example, be classified into: 1. articles, 2. concord or agreement, 3. finite verbs, 4. prepositions, 5. countable and uncountable nouns, 6. sentence levels (fragments, comma splices and run-on or fused sentences) and 7. spelling. Other general, more abstract challenges include diction or word choice, idiomatic expressions and sentence variations. The so-called Minimum Requirements, which are commonplace mistakes, as mostly listed in numbers 1-7 above and which learners (particularly those who are English teacher candidates) should avoid, are put forward and commented on. The writer believes this grammar-oriented approach still remains relevant

A semantic prosody analysis of the lexical halal

Language analysis in real world linguistic is a method in observing language usage phenomena that is mobilized by a process or the social practice of a society. The usage phenomenon is represented by lexical (word) choice of language users in a society. This is because every lexical item of a language would be based on meaning and values that would capture and highlight the cultural expressions of a nation. Based on this premise, this study aims to specifically discuss the cultural expressions identified from the investigation on the lexical item halal that is often used by society in discussing matters pertaining to everyday life. This analysis utilizes the cognitive linguistics perspective in explaining the usage of the lexical halal that can be visualized in schematic representation form. Aided by the display of concordance and wordlist from the Antcom program, this study discovered that the lexical halal is used in a variety of domains and is not restricted to food only. In addition, the lexical halal is also able to explain issues pertaining to livelihood, wealth, items/objects and issues that touch on status

The significance of the risk-related challenges in tourist destination choice

There are numerous pull forces that determine destination choice. In the contemporary turbulent conditions, safety and security risks have a growing role. This is particularly evident in the Mediterranean region, bearing in mind that the political crisis in the Arab world has reflected in this region as the largest receptive market. Therefore, the study has been conducted to determine which factors are the most important in the process of choosing a destination and whether the recent crises have affected travel habits. In addition to the descriptive statistics, the data obtained by the Likert scale were analyzed by independent samples t-test in SPSS. The results have revealed that price, service quality, and risk-related issues are the main parameters of destination choice. In this regard, the respondents expressed their understanding of contemporary security risks in the Mediterranean (terrorist acts, militant groups, migration crisis, etc.). The research also showed the influence of different sources of information on travel habits, primarily word-of-mouth process, and mass media. The crisis has affected the demand allocation, but not trip cancellation. Based on the abovementioned we can conclude that safety and security risks are not the only and decisive factor but represent an important parameter in the destination choice

Bias and Misrepresentation of Science Undermines Productive Discourse on Animal Welfare Policy: A Case Study

Reliable scientific knowledge is crucial for informing legislative, regulatory, and policy decisions in a variety of areas. To that end, scientific reviews of topical issues can be invaluable tools for informing productive discourse and decision-making, assuming these reviews represent the target body of scientific knowledge as completely, accurately, and objectively as possible. Unfortunately, not all reviews live up to this standard. As a case in point, Marino et al.’s review regarding the welfare of killer whales in captivity contains methodological flaws and misrepresentations of the scientific literature, including problematic referencing, overinterpretation of the data, misleading word choice, and biased argumentation. These errors and misrepresentations undermine the authors’ conclusions and make it impossible to determine the true state of knowledge of the relevant issues. To achieve the goal of properly informing public discourse and policy on this and other issues, it is imperative that scientists and science communicators strive for higher standards of analysis, argumentation, and objectivity, in order to clearly communicate what is known, what is not known, what conclusions are supported by the data, and where we are lacking the data necessary to draw reliable conclusions