Combining problem-solution categories and communicative acts: an analysis of Malaysian and British business journalistic texts

Textual features are evidence of a community’s routines for producing knowledge. In Language for Special Purposes (LSP), it is generally accepted that through text, it is possible to explore the activity of knowledge-making in a professional community, particularly in specialized written discourse. This activity or communicative tasks are realized as communicative acts which contains the writer’s / speaker’s thoughts and intentions. The assumption of the present research is that the communicative tasks that a specialist performs in the real world can be manifested in the specialized text and that business journalistic discourse contains problems and solutions. By comparing Malaysian (MB) and British (MT) business journalistic texts, this paper examines the feasibility of combining [13] and [5] theories to search for speech acts that fall into the Problem- Solution categories. Using a corpus linguistics methodology, the results indicate that 1) there are significant differences in the frequencies of communicative acts underlying the Problem and Solution in MB compared with MT and 2) there are no one-to-one mappings of communicative functions onto either a Problem or a Solution

Critical discourse analysis in new media: theoretical and methodological challenges

This paper investigates the range of theoretical and methodological challenges facing scholars attempting to do studies employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the context of New Media, such as participatory web platforms, social networking websites, or online forums. The rise and popularity of Web 2.0 has attracted researchers from diverse fields of academic inquiry to this area. However, CDA scholars had not paid attention to these domains until recently. The specific features of Web 2.0 spaces create a multitude of challenges for a (critical) discourse analyst, ranging from issues of language, to problems of data collection and applicable theoretical frameworks. Drawing from the existing literature, and also experiences gained through a CDA study on Facebook discourses, this article will discuss these challenges, the current state of affairs, and the limitations of doing discourse analytical studies in New Media

Genre-based analysis of travel guides: a study on Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

The language of travel guides can help highlight the importance of modelling the mind of the readers and changing them from readers to actual clients. This paper reports a genre- based analysis study of a move-structure of online tourist travel guides of three Asian countries: Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Kathpalia’s nine-move structure (1992) for advertising is adopted as a framework to analyse the selected travel guides using Atlas ti (a qualitative data analysis software). Data selection is based on the latest edition of Asian online travel guides. The main purposes of this study are to analyze the move structures, their strategies and communicative purposes, identify the prevalent move(s) in the selected travel guides, as well as to find out whether the selected travel guides have the same move structures. The findings of this study show that the travel guides have different quantity of moves. The prevalent moves in these three travel guides were also identified. Results highlight the diversity and strategies of moves in the online travel guides which are related to the nature of the country, perception and aims of the writer to promote or persuade readers. A brief discussion on these categories, and teaching implications follow these finding

A literature review of rapport management in business meetings

A meeting is a planned communicative event where the participants' role is to achieve the discussed objectives. Business English (BE) is often used as the lingua franca for meetings. Studies on BE are becoming a growing interest but there are still limited readily available studies on business meetings, especially on those in the Malaysian context, and even fewer that describe rapport management in meetings. In a meeting, rapport is established when there is a shift in formality in the management of face, sociality rights and interactional goals. This may be the result of the display of the chairperson's power. BE, on the other hand, is used to achieve the communicative purposes that help to promote rapport. By reviewing past studies, this paper explores how the chairperson in local and other cultures establishes rapport through the use of politeness and other communicative strategies in conversational turn-taking. Conversational Analysis (CA) has been used widely to analyse audio and video recordings of meetings as it provides for microanalysis of such turn-taking. Past studies have shown that politeness, small talk, humour and the use of non-verbal expressions are elements of rapport management displayed by the chairperson

Facebook as a tool for discursive resistance: a case study

Iran is one of the few countries in the world with laws of compulsory hijab for women, regardless of their religion. In the last couple of years, Iranian women have formed online communities to resist such laws and voice their dissent. The role of online social networks in causing social change, and the extent to which these New Media can help the processes of emancipation and democratization has been a matter of increasing academic attention. However, there are not enough studies, particularly from a linguistics viewpoint, on the online resistance movement of Iranian women against compulsory hijab. This leaves a gap in our understanding of both the dynamics and strategies of such movements, and also the bigger question of whether or not New Media can be useful tools in advancing human rights, democracy, and equality. This study, employing the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, investigates a corpora of over 500 Facebook posts by the most popular pages created for the purpose of resisting compulsory hijab in Iran. In contrast to the dichotomization and Xenophobia reported in studies on similar discourses, our findings point to a trichotomized discourse, in which the Self is identified against a negatively represented domestic Other (Oikophobia), and a positively framed foreign Other (Xenophilia). The paper concludes that the use of New Media in this case has led to an illusion of resistance, and how the movement under study is self-destructive, reproducing the same ideologies it is resisting

Combating H1N1: metaphors of war in a Malaysian newspaper

In April 2009, reports of a new strain of a deadly flu virus emerged in Mexico. The scarcity of information available on this new threat can be observed clearly in the language used in the news reports. This study investigates the use of conceptual metaphors of the Influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in the newspaper and how these metaphors helped to construct the notion of a pandemic in the media. Metaphors of illness and disease are a prominent tool in the discourse of disease in the news. The conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) was utilized as a framework in this study to investigate the coverage of the pandemic in the newspaper. The data was extracted from a corpus of news reports from The New Straits Times Malaysia from April 2009 to August 31, 2009 when the disease was at its peak. The results of the study yielded various metaphorical linguistic expression of war and construction of the pandemic in the news. Metaphors of war were found to be prominent, and it had a rhetorical function in helping to structure and control the situation. By highlighting certain aspects of war, the concept of disease was given a form and structure and thus, made it more tangible and controllable

Schematic structural analysis of newspaper editorials: a comparative study of the New York Times and the New Straits Times

This study compares the rhetorical characteristics of editorials of two different newspapers: The New York Times (NYT) and the New Straits Times (NST) in terms of the functions and occurrences of their rhetorical moves and steps. To realise the objectives, 240 selected editorials (NYT: n=120; NST: n=120) were subjected to content analysis. The analysis was conducted based on a composite framework of Bhatia's (1993), Gunesekar's (1989), Ansary and Babaii's (2005), and So's (2005) models. The analysis showed a typical rhetorical structure for editorials that includes obligatory and optional moves and steps. Variations in the use of the moves and their steps were also observed in both newspapers. Additionally, based on the functions of the moves, it was found that NYT and NST editorials have differing writing stances. To conclude, findings of this study may heighten the awareness of ESP learners on the importance of using appropriate rhetorical moves in achieving a persuasive stance in the writing of editorials. Furthermore, the results of the study may also be an invaluable resource for ESP instructors to tap into for their teaching of successful editorial writing

Linguistic analysis on the construction of satire in Nigerian political cartoons : The example of newspaper cartoons.

Political cartoons constitute a form of media text whose verbal and visual elements have made them aninteresting research field across academic disciplines. The 21st century has witnessed a considerableresearch on political cartoons. This increasing research interest indicates that political cartoons havesuccessfully constituted a distinct multimodal genre within media discourses. Political cartoons areused to express opinions, construct valuable arguments and provide specific knowledge oncontemporary social issues. However, the analysis of the cartoons from linguistic perspectives remainsunder-researched. This paper aims at contributing to the knowledge of political cartoon research byanalyzing the linguistic elements used in the cartoon written texts to illustrate how Nigerian cartoonistsspecifically use language to construct satire as a means that could be used perhaps to initiatingpositive social and political reforms in Nigeria. The method of analysis used in this paper as itsframework of analysis, comprises of perceptual theory of satire and linguistic analytical frameworkwithin the realm of critical discourse analysis. Semiotic discussion on semiotic modes of the cartoonshas also been incorporated in the analysis. From the findings of the study, a distinct lexical topology foridentifying lexical items and their distribution in the cartoon written texts has been developed. Thetopology comprises of five items as follows: loan word, coinage, word class, denotation andconnotation. Additionally, Nigerian cartoonists use interjections frequently in the cartoon written textsto create satirical impressions about political leaders, because interjections are used to express astrong emotions or feelings. Given the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements contained in the cartoontexts, cartoons could be harnessed to provide additional insights on how language is specifically usedin media discours

Political cartoons in the first decade of the millennium

The beginning of the new millennium (the year 2000 to 2010) has witnessed a dramatic increase in the political cartoons’ research. By their nature, political cartoons constitute a specific genre of political reporting in that they are pictorial representations which depict political and social issues and events, as well as the parties involved, in an immediate and condensed form. The genre is characterised by humorous depiction of events, exploiting the ability of irony and satire to unravel, ridicule and attack in a playful, witty and artful fashion (Test, 1991). They project a particular point of view (El Refaie, 2009) and enlighten readers on public issues while exposing wrong practices (Akande, 2002). Due to the increasing research on political cartoons, this study reviews previous studies conducted in the area from the beginning of the millennium (2000) to the year 2010 that marks the first decade of the 21st century millennium. It is hoped that the review will highlight how the genre contributes to social and political commentary and to provide an inspiration for further research in political cartoons