The Voices of History: theorising the interpersonal semantics of historical discourses

‘The individual consumer, the learner of history, is offered an impressive array of discursive products geared to catch his or her attention, to persuade him or her of the truth of whatever message is transmitted’ (Blanco and Rosa 1997: 197. In this article I examine these discursive products from the perspective of ‘voice’. I do this as a way of bringing to conscious attention the strategies that historians use in order to persuade and position the ‘consumer’. ‘Voice’ in recent systemic linguistic theorizing refers to distinctive configurations of APPRAISAL choices. Within the domain of history, research to date has identified three main configurations or voices—‘recorder’, ‘interpreter’, and ‘adjudicator’. Central to the research reported on in this article is Martin’s APPRAISAL framework (Martin 1997, 2000). APPRAISAL 1 systems are the semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgments, and valuations. In this article I will examine how choices from these systems vary in ways that are systematic — different history texts speak with different ‘voices’. These voices, I argue, are a key rhetorical strategy in history discourse. Different combinations of APPRAISAL resources are drawn on to negotiate the heteroglossic positions of their audiences. As such they are a key resource for both the professional and apprentice historian in their assessment of interpretations of the past

Diachronic Variation of Temporal Expressions in Scientific Writing Through the Lens of Relative Entropy

The abundance of temporal information in documents has lead to an increased interest in processing such information in the NLP community by considering temporal expressions. Besides domain-adaptation, acquiring knowledge on variation of temporal expressions according to time is relevant for improvement in automatic processing. So far, frequency-based accounts dominate in the investigation of specific temporal expressions. We present an approach to investigate diachronic changes of temporal expressions based on relative entropy – with the advantage of using conditioned probabilities rather than mere frequency. While we focus on scientific writing, our approach is generalizable to other domains and interesting not only in the field of NLP, but also in humanities.This work is partially funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant SFB 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de)

Relating imperatives to action

The aim of this chapter is to provide an analysis of the use of logically complex imperatives, in particular, imperatives of the form Do A1 or A2 and Do A, if B. We argue for an analysis of imperatives in terms of classical logic which takes into account the influence of background information on imperatives. We show that by doing so one can avoid some counter-intuitive results which have been associated with analyses of imperatives in terms of classical logic. In particular, I address Hamblin's observations concerning rule-like imperatives and Ross' Paradox. The analysis is carried out within an agent-based logical framework. This analysis explicates what it means for an agent to have a successful policy for action with respect to satisfying his or her commitments, where some of these commitments have been introduced as a result of imperative language use

Developing effective practice learning for tomorrow's social workers

This paper considers some of the changes in social work education in the UK, particularly focusing on practice learning in England. The changes and developments are briefly identified and examined in the context of what we know about practice learning. The paper presents some findings from a small scale qualitative study of key stakeholders involved in practice learning and education in social work and their perceptions of these anticipated changes, which are revisited at implementation. The implications for practice learning are discussed

Holistic corpus-based dialectology

This paper is concerned with sketching future directions for corpus-based dialectology. We advocate a holistic approach to the study of geographically conditioned linguistic variability, and we present a suitable methodology, 'corpusbased dialectometry', in exactly this spirit. Specifically, we argue that in order to live up to the potential of the corpus-based method, practitioners need to (i) abandon their exclusive focus on individual linguistic features in favor of the study of feature aggregates, (ii) draw on computationally advanced multivariate analysis techniques (such as multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis), and (iii) aid interpretation of empirical results by marshalling state-of-the-art data visualization techniques. To exemplify this line of analysis, we present a case study which explores joint frequency variability of 57 morphosyntax features in 34 dialects all over Great Britain

Tapes, transcripts and trials:The routine contamination of police interview evidence

This article addresses a serious, but currently unacknowledged, problem of evidential consistency regarding police-suspect interview evidence. It sheds light on flaws in current criminal procedure through the lens of linguistics, focusing on key stages of currently accepted practice which fly in the face of what linguists have long known about language. It demonstrates that, in stark contrast to the strict principles of preservation applied to physical evidence, interview data go through significant transformation between their creation in the interview room and their presentation in the courtroom, especially through changes in format between written and spoken text. It argues that, despite the safeguards provided by PACE 1984, there is nonetheless a level of routine distortion and contamination unintentionally built in to the current system of presenting police interviews as evidence in England & Wales

On the missing single collision peak in low energy heavy ion scattering

We present experimental and simulation data on the oblique angle scattering of heavy Sn ions at 14 keV energy from a Mo surface. The simulations are performed with the binary collision approximation codes TRIM, TRIDYN, TRI3DYN, SDTrimSP, and IMSIL. Additional simulations were performed in the molecular dynamics framework with LAMMPS. Our key finding is the absence of an expected peak in the experimental energy spectrum of backscattered Sn ions associated with the pure single collision regime. In sharp contrast to this, however, all simulation codes we applied do show a prominent single collision signature both in the energy spectrum and in the angular scatter pattern. We discuss the possible origin of this important discrepancy and show in the process, that widely used binary collision approximation codes may contain hidden parameters important to know and to understand.</p

'In-ger-land, In-ger-land, In-ger-land! : exploring the impact of soccer on the sense of belonging of those seeking asylum in the UK

Utilising research conducted in Sheffield (UK) with people seeking asylum,this article explores the ways in which soccer might be used to create a sense of belonging in the host country. It explores participant feelings about soccer and its potential to alleviate the pressures that the status of being an ‘asylum seeker’ brings. The ways in which soccer may play a role in the identity formation of those seeking asylum is considered in relation to both self-identity and the perceptions of others. The findings of this exploratory study suggest that the various ways of interacting with soccer can provide participants with a sense of control, identity and belonging

On Being Negative

This paper investigates the pragmatic expressions of negative evaluation (negativity) in two corpora: (i) comments posted online in response to newspaper opinion articles; and (ii) online reviews of movies, books and consumer products. We propose a taxonomy of linguistic resources that are deployed in the expression of negativity, with two broad groups at the top level of the taxonomy: resources from the lexicogrammar or from discourse semantics. We propose that rhetorical figures can be considered part of the discourse semantic resources used in the expression of negativity. Using our taxonomy as starting point, we carry out a corpus analysis, and focus on three phenomena: adverb + adjective combinations; rhetorical questions; and rhetorical figures. Although the analysis in this paper is corpus-assisted rather than corpus-driven, the final goal of our research is to make it quantitative, in extracting patterns and resources that can be detected automatically