Verbs and gender: the hidden agenda of a multicultural society

This study explores the issue of gender inequality displayed in action verbs found in English language secondary school textbooks using the Hidden Curriculum Theory. The two aspects of hidden curriculum are the frequency imbalance, i.e., male occurrences are more than female, and gender stereotyping based on roles, i.e., masculine against feminine activities. This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods for collecting data. Wordsmith Tools 4.0 (WST) was used to analyse five categories of action verbs: activity verbs, process verbs, verbs of bodily sensation, transitional event verbs, and momentary verbs. The concordance tool from the WST was used to tabulate occurrences based on gender portrayals. School teachers who taught English at secondary schools were also interviewed to validate the findings and link them to the theoretical framework used. The findings reveal gender inequality is evident in these textbooks

Sentiment analysis of China-related news in The Star Online newspaper

As China and Malaysia approach their 47th year of diplomatic relationships, cooperation and trust between the two countries have deepened in aspects ranging from politics to economy. Despite this mutual reliance, the relationship between Malaysia and China is not without its conflicts and these conflicts are often manifested in media reports. How China is presented in Malaysia news is a field that has been scarcely explored. As part of the research on media sentiment towards China, this research investigates the general sentiment of China-related news in Malaysian media through sentiment analysis of some selected news coverages. Selecting China-related news in The Star Online from 2012 to 2021 as the data for investigation, the Excel Add-in tool Azure Machine Learning was used to generate polarity of these news reports automatically and corpus tool Wordsmith was used for the analysis of news discourse. A total of 137,475 pieces of news have been collected as the research sample. The finding reveals that: 1) despite the large proportion of news with negative sentiment in China-related news in The Star Online, the monthly trend of sentiment shows a slight increase of positiveness over time; 2) an investigation into the keyword lists of three months with highest proportion of negativeness and collocates of the top keywords, however, shows that negative sentiment of the news may be due to a global conflict at that particular time and does not necessarily indicate negative sentiment towards China. A combination of sentiment analysis and corpus approach on the study of China-related news in Malaysian media enriches the study of news discourse from the perspective of corpus linguistics

Penukaran kod dalam korpus hansard Malaysia: analisis berpandukan korpus

Peraturan 8 dalam Peraturan-Peraturan Majlis Mesyuarat Dewan Rakyat, Parlimen Malaysia berdasarkan perkara 62(1) memperuntukkan bahawa “Bahasa rasmi Majlis ialah Bahasa Malaysia, tetapi Tuan Yang di-Pertua boleh membenarkan penggunaan Bahasa Inggeris”. Hal ini menunjukkan bahawa bahasa Melayu ialah bahasa rasmi serta mempunyai status yang sangat tinggi dalam Dewan Rakyat. Walau bagaimanapun, terdapat laporan akhbar yang menyatakan bahawa status bahasa Melayu semakin ‘layu’ atau lemah di parlimen dan ahli Dewan Rakyat lebih gemar menggunakan bahasa Inggeris. Ahli-ahli parlimen dikatakan acapkali menggunakan penukaran kod yang melibatkan penggunaan bahasa Melayu dan bahasa Inggeris. Lantaran itu, kajian ini ingin mengenal pasti serta meneliti pola penukaran kod dalam teks parlimen 13, Dewan Rakyat. Kajian ini turut menjelaskan trend penukaran kod yang terdapat dalam perbahasan di parlimen. Data yang digunakan adalah berbentuk penukaran kod yang terdiri daripada bahasa Melayu dan bahasa Inggeris daripada Hansard Malaysia, Parlimen 13 yang mengandungi empat penggal yang terdiri daripada 224 fail mesyuarat. Kaedah analisis berpandukan korpus telah digunakan oleh pengkaji bagi meneliti trend penukaran kod dalam teks parlimen. Kerangka model kekangan morfem bebas oleh Poplack (1980) telah digunakan bagi menentukan serta mengenal pasti penukaran kod yang terdapat dalam teks parlimen. Dapatan kajian menunjukkan terdapat peningkatan dalam penukaran kod daripada bahasa Melayu ke bahasa Inggeris dalam teks parlimen 13. Hal ini dapat dibuktikan dengan peningkatan jumlah penggunaan bahasa Inggeris yang semakin menaik dari penggal 1 hingga penggal 4. Hal ini dengan jelas memperlihatkan bahawa ahli-ahli parlimen dalam Dewan Rakyat banyak menggunakan penukaran kod dalam perbahasan dan secara tidak langsung semakin gemar menggunakan bahasa Inggeris berbanding bahasa Melayu. Perkara ini adalah bercanggah serta memberi kesan kepada status penggunaan bahasa Melayu sebagai bahasa rasmi Majlis yang termaktub dalam peraturan-perturan Majlis Mesyuarat Dewan Rakyat

Expletive there structures: a minimalist analysis

Expletive structures can be recognized by the presence of there at the beginning of the sentence. Previous studies claim that there is not present through merge operations at the numeration level, but it enters into the syntax structure at the interface level of the Logical Form through Expletive Insertion Rules (EIR). There is a claim that there is no subject-to-subject movement in the expletive structure because there is generated directly to the subject position [Spec,TP]. Therefore, this study aims to re-evaluate this view and present an analysis based on morphosyntactic feature research. The data used in this study was taken from a corpus of three selected online novels based on the highest number of readers. The data type selected is the expletive construction of there only. The selected data is analyzed through the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 2015). Through the corpus, this study found two expletive structures that are rarely discussed, namely BE-post-Expl and V-post-Expl. In vP Shell analysis, this study found that there is actually generated at the [Spec,vP] position due to the feature checking requirements [uExpl] brought by the small v node. However, subject-to-subject movement occurs when there moves to the subject position [Spec,TP] due to the need to check the feature [uExpl] assumed to be brought by the Tense. This proves that there is not generated at the Logical Form interface level, but rather there is a merge operation at the numeration level in the computational system. Thus, this study contributes to the understanding of the expletive structure based on morphosyntactic feature research

Learning agility quotient and work readiness of graduating accounting students: embracing the dynamics of IR4.0

This study examines if the learning agility quotient (LAQ) is an important determinant for the work readiness of graduating accounting students in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) environment. Using a questionnaire survey involving 275 respondents, we find that those with higher intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) have higher LAQ. We also find that LAQ mediates the positive impact of IQ and EQ on their work readiness. Our findings implicate accounting education as they highlight the significant role of LAQ in relation to IQ, EQ, and work readiness. Further research is needed to determine if educational and work environment factors can effectively support and enhance learning agility

Public perceptions on climate change : a sentiment analysis approach

Public perception on climate change is a paramount component that affects the implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures. Taking into account the public perceptions on the issue may assist decision-makers in producing appropriate strategies to ameliorate the impacts of climate change. A corpus-driven sentiment analysis approach was done to classify the polarity of Malaysian public perceptions, identify the sentiment lexicon, and analyse the public sentiments. A part of a specialised corpus namely the Malaysian Diachronic Climate Change Corpus (MyDCCC) was developed from The Sun Daily and was used as the data for this study. The methodology involved the employment of Azure Machine Learning software to conduct sentiment analysis to explore the polarity of public sentiments, corpus analysis approach to identify the sentiment lexicon and discourse analysis to analyse public sentiments based on the identified sentiment lexicon. The results revealed that the majority of public sentiments appeared to be negative, depicting sentiment words such as long, critical, and serious. Positive sentiment words also prevailed such as better, best and hope. The discourse analysis revealed that the public is reasonably insightful of climate change although their sentiments appeared to be negative. However, the negative stance was largely influenced by the public's indignation with how decision-makers handle the climate change issue. Ironically, the negative sentiments may be an indication for the decision-makers to improve their approach in addressing climatechange. This study has contributed significantly to research on public perceptions of climate change in the Malaysian context

Media report about climate change in an English online Malaysian newspaper through thematic and discourse analysis approaches

Climate change studies are mainly focused on disaster management and inundated with scientific jargons that the public could not fathom. Thus, the dissemination of climate change discourse to the public has been less effective due to lack of information and understanding which explains the lack of public engagement and participation. Studies on climate change that consider linguistics aspects are beginning to emerge, but are still lacking. Therefore, the present study intends to conduct a linguistic analysis by identifying themes in news on climate change and by analysing the extent of media propagation about climate change. 922 news articles from Malaysiakini were analysed using a corpusdriven approach through frequency and collocation analysis. This enabled us to identify themes on climate change. Discourse analysis was then conducted to find out about the linguistic manifestations of the identified themes. The findings reveal that governance is the most propagated theme, followed by mitigation and adaptation, contributor and impacts, and threats, which may polarise the public’s understanding of climate change. Instead, the themes of contributors and impacts, and threats are those which should be put forward as they may provide facts on the causal relationship of climate change that may help in assisting the public in understanding what to do, what to avoid, and the consequences of not acting on climate change. An understanding of the temporal aspects of public involvement in engaging with climate change issues through thematic analysis could assist in identifying the types of public participation in this issue

A corpus-based analysis of trends and themes of diabetes a case study of an online Malaysian newspaper

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study that investigates the trends and themes related to the word 'diabetes' in the Malaysian media. The study utilizes the Malaysian Diabetes Corpus (MyDC), a specialized corpus consisting of online newspaper articles published between 2013 and 2018. The analysis combines corpus linguistics methodology with visualizations to examine the data. The results reveal a notable peak in the usage of the term 'diabetes' during the month of November across the studied years (2013-2018), coinciding with the increased attention given to World Diabetes Day. While there was a significant rise in the number of articles in 2018, the relative frequency of the word 'diabetes' remained stable throughout all the years. Among the various themes associated with 'diabetes', the most common ones include 'Awareness/Management', 'Type of (other related) disease', and 'Patient/Population'. This suggests that diabetes is increasingly portrayed in diverse contexts, with a greater emphasis on raising awareness and managing the condition rather than the traditional linguistic definition of the illness. The findings underscore the influential role of online media in promoting diabetes awareness and providing an effective platform for public diabetes prevention strategies. However, further investigation into the dynamics of online media and its impact on diabetes education is recommended to gain a deeper understanding of this relationship

Linguistic sexism in Qatari Primary Mathematics textbooks

Linguistic sexism and gender stereotyping are barriers to gender equality. If they are inculcated at an early age, they could be institutionalized and become part of the social code. Hence the school environment, where children receive their earliest education about society, norms, culture and the world around them, should be free of such biasness.One medium where linguistic sexism and gender stereotyping can exist is school textbooks. Children exposed to textbooks that contain gender ideology may internalize it.This paper, therefore, aims to study the linguistic sexism in Qatari primary mathematics textbooks. A quantitative qualitative approach is adopted. Wordsmith Tools 5.0 is used for the quantitative analysis and Fairclough’s (1989) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used for the qualitative analysis. The findings reveal that males are more visible than females in imported texts. However, in the Qatari published textbooks, females are more visible and dominant than males. This paper also discusses the implications of the findings on teaching and learning in the schools. Its objective is to raise the awareness of the existence of linguistic sexism and gender stereotyping in school textbooks

Unraveling linguistic sexism & sex role stereotyping in Malaysian English Language textbooks: the wordsmith tools way

Analisis secara kuantitatif terhadap seksisme linguistik dan penonjolan peranan stereotaip gender yang wujud di dalam dokumen-dokumen bercetak seperti buku teks sekolah lazimnya dijalankan dengan menggunakan kaedah pengiraan peratusan. Dalam kajian lepas yang telah dijalankan di Malaysia seperti yang dilakukan oleh Saedah Siraj (1990) ke atas buku teks bahasa Melayu dan oleh Chandran dan Mardziah Abdullah (2003) ke atas buku teks bahasa Inggeris telah menggunapakai kaedah pengiraan kekerapan secara tradisi iaitu secara manual di dalam menentukan prejudis gender. Kaedah pengiraan secara manual ini bukan sahaja mudah mengakibatkan ketidak tepatan penemuan dan analisis bahkan memakan masa yang lama untuk disiapkan, dan dengan tidak langsung akan mempengaruhi kesahihan dan integriti penemuan kajian berkenaan. Untuk mengatasi kelemahankelemahan di dalam analisis data ini, satu kaedah yang lebih mantap dan menjimatkan masa perlu digunakan. Berpandukan kepada satu kajian yang sedang dijalankan yang membuat analisis kandungan, lebih khususnya, analisis teks, makalah ini akan memaparkankan bagaimana instumen Wordsmith Tools 4 (Oxford University Press 2004) boleh dimanfaatkan untuk menganalisis dokumen bercetak dan dapat memberikan keputusan yang lebih sahih dan cekap dalam mengenal pasti seksisme linguistik dan penonjolan peranan stereotaip gender di dalam buku teks Bahasa Inggeris di Malaysi