The pragmatics of a diachronic journal impact factor

the paper argues for a pragmatic approach to the Thomson-Reuter’s journal impact factor. The paper proposes and discusses to replace the current synchronous Thomson-Reuter journal impact factor by an up-to-date diachronic version (DJIF), consisting of a three-year citation window over a one year publication window. The DJIF online data collection and calculation is exem-plified and compared to the present synchronous journal impact factor. The paper discusses briefly the dimensions of currency, robustness, understandability and comparability to other impact factors used in research evaluation

Towards a constructional approach to discourse-level phenomena : the case of the Spanish interpersonal epistemic stance construction

This study contributes to a better understanding of how constructional models can be applied to discourse-level phenomena, and constitute a valuable complementation to previous grammaticalization accounts of pragmatic markers. The case study that is presented concerns the recent development of the interpersonal epistemic stance construction in Spanish. The central argument is that the expanding use of sabes as a pragmatic marker can best be fully understood by taking into account the composite network of related expressions which Spanish speakers have at their disposal when performing a particular speech act. The diachronic analysis is documented with spoken corpus examples collected in recent decades, and is mainly informed by frequency data measuring the productivity, as well as formal properties of the construction and its instances

<i>‘Je sais et tout mais...’</i> might the general extenders in European French be changing?

This paper addresses contemporary trends in the use of general extenders in two recent corpora of spontaneous French stratified by age. In these corpora, certain variants (e.g. et tout) are highly prevalent in the speech of young people compared to older speakers, while others are not. Other studies have shown that general extenders’ form as well as frequency tends to vary with respect to speakers’ age, while some extenders may also undergo grammaticalisation. The present study includes a comparison with a late 20th-century corpus of spoken French, and finds that not only age grading but also generational change might be occurring. This conclusion is supported by qualitative and quantitative analysis of the contemporary data, showing that the forms most frequent among young people appear to have acquired new pragmatic functions

Tracking Interpersonality in Research Article Abstract: A Diachronic Study of Dynamic Nature of Genre

This study reports on interpersonality in a diachronic-contrastive investigation in Research Article (RA) abstracts. The study analyzed a corpus of 180 RA abstracts from two journalsof Psychological Bulletin and Personality and Individual Differences over the last three decades. This paper uses Hylands (2005b) Stance Model of Interaction and Hyland Tses (2005) Classification of Sentences Containing Evaluative that in order to explore interpersonality. The results of this study revealed that authors of these journals adopted different stance and positioning over time in their writing. In addition, the findings of this paper did not corroborate previous research findings that RA abstracts exhibit high number of boosters. In relation to writing pedagogy, the results of this study can help the scholars to frame their papers in order to publish them in English-medium journals

Text-organizing metadiscourse: Tracking changes in rhetorical persuasion

Published academic writing often seems to be an unchanging form of discourse with its frozen informality remaining stable over time. Recent work has shown, however, that these texts are highly interactive and dialogic as writers anticipate and take into account readers' likely objections, background knowledge, rhetorical expectations and processing needs. In this paper, we explore one aspect of these interactions and how it has changed over the past fifty years. Focusing on what has been called interactive metadiscourse (Hyland 2005; Hyland and Tse 2004), or the ways authors organise their material for particular readers, we analyze a corpus of 2.2 million words compiled from articles in the top journals in four disciplines to discover whether, and to what extent, interactive metadiscourse has changed in different disciplines since 1965. The results show a considerable increase in an orientation to the reader over this period, reflecting changes in both research and publication practices

Introduction: converging data sources in cognitive linguistics

The aim of the paper is to outline the topic of the present special issue. In the first section, the authors give a concise overview of current discussions on the structure and function of linguistic data and evidence in general. They argue that one of the main insights which the discussions led to is the need to integrate different data sources in linguistic theorising. The second section deals with the specific manifestation of these discussions in cognitive linguistics. The authors raise the questions which the papers in the special issue address with respect to cognitive linguistics: What data sources can be integrated?; How can different data sources be integrated?; How does the integration of different data sources affect the acceptability of hypotheses? Finally, in the last section, the structure of the special issue is summarised

“In this paper we suggest”: Changing patterns of disciplinary metadiscourse

Metadiscourse is the commentary on a text made by its producer in the course of speaking or writing. Here we take an interpersonal perspective, focusing on metadiscourse as a repertoire of resources available for writers to organise a discourse or their stance towards its content or the reader. In this paper we explore whether, and to what extent, metadiscourse has changed in professional writing in different disciplines over the past 50 years. Extending our diachronic work analysing a corpus of 2.2 million words from articles in the top journals in four disciplines, we show there has been a significant increase in interactive features and a significant decrease in interactional types. Surprisingly, interactional metadiscourse shows a marked decline in the discursive soft knowledge fields and a substantial increase in the science subjects

The diachrony of im/politeness in American and British movies (1930–2019)

In this paper, we use a relatively new source of data, the Movie Corpus, to explore the common stereotype that politeness standards keep falling. In this data, which contains transcripts of movies from 1930 to 2019, we trace a range of elements that have relatively clear default politeness or impoliteness values (e.g. please, could you and a range of title nouns versus swear words). And we introduce a terminological distinction between conduct politeness and etiquette politeness. The results suggest a complex picture of some “polite” expressions that are indeed declining (e.g. title nouns, would you (please)) while others are rising (e.g. can you (please)). Many “impolite” swear words have increased considerably over the last five decades. We carefully discuss the reliability of these results, which fully depend on the composition of the corpus and its consistency over time as well as on the reliability of the chosen elements as im/politeness indicators. We compare the results for American/Canadian and for British/Irish movies (following the distinction of the Movie Corpus), and we discuss the extent to which movies can be taken as indicators of language change in general