The business web genre: a genre analysis on the websites of selected Malaysian small

Websites are another form of service provided to the public to help improve information sharing of a particular discourse community. Selection of a website is influenced by the persuasiveness of the website’s content. As the power of the Internet grows, so do the opportunities for small businesses. In fact, the Internet is already contributing 4.1 % a year to Malaysia’s economy, and that’s set to rise even more over the next 3 years. With the upsurge of E-entrepreneurs in Malaysia, business websites demonstrate a variety of styles in web writing and design, indicating a creative yet bold sense of marketing and advertising of products and services. Hence, the purpose of this study was to establish the common moves and steps found in a corpus of selected Malaysian SME business websites. This study used Swales (Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990) CARS model and the two-dimensional genre model (Askehave and Nielsen, Proc 38th Hawaii Int Conf Syst Sci 00(C):1–8, 2005) to analyse the data. The study has revealed that there are obligatory and optional moves in the business web genre. The goal of this genre is to inform and to promote the company’s product and services via its website. Findings from this study may be a good resource for students and practitioners to design and write for the web

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

Getting physical with the market: a study of metaphors in the business times

This study investigates the metaphorical linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphor, market movements are physical movements, using Charteris-Black and Ennis’s (2001) notion of conceptual metaphors. Following a corpus linguistic approach for data collection purposes, it analysed 50 unique Business Times articles randomly identified from a total of 292 articles. An expert within the business context provided expertise in the interpretation of specific types of data derived from the corpus. The findings show that the metaphorical linguistic expressions generally concretise the abstract concept of the economy and market movements and mainly comprise of verbs and nouns. This paper illustrates some of the examples of the relevant metaphorical expressions and discusses how the domain of physical movements helps to structure the domain of market movements. The findings of this study, however, can only be generalised to the samples involved in this study

Immigration in the United States 2016 presidential debates: a functional analysis

This paper describes an analysis of the three U.S. 2016 presidential debates published in The New York Times using Benoit’s (2007a) functional theory. The three presidential debates in the U.S., which occur every four years, remain as the most sensitive political rhetoric that lead to the election of the next U.S. President. These debates include discussion of different issues between the two presidential candidates. One of these issues is immigration. The U.S. presidential debates have been researched by many on various aspects but there has not been a study that focus primarily on the issue of immigration in the three 2016 U.S. presidential debates. All statements regarding this issue between the two presidential candidates, Trump and Clinton, were extracted from these debates and analyzed using Benoit’s (2007a) functional theory. Findings revealed that attack statements occurred more than acclaims, and defences were less used than acclaims. The statements included in these debates pertained to policy (30%) and character (70%). As expected, general goals were employed more often using acclaim function rather than attack and defend. However, ideals were employed more often using defence than to acclaim and attack. Due to different contexts, situations, and participants, Benoit’s (2007a) functional theory may not be generalized for all debates. This study reveals certain inconsistencies regarding some of the hypotheses of Benoit’s (2007a) functional theory in relation to our knowledge of the presidential debates, specifically the issue of immigration

The Hunger Games: linguistic modality as reflector of point of view in a dystopian novel

Dystopian literature is a genre that imagines a futuristic universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are expressed. One famous novel of this genre is The Hunger Games written by Suzanne Collins (2008). Considering its strong social and pedagogical influences, an analytical study was considered necessary to investigate the linguistic modality of the novel. Modality refers to a speaker's opinion concerning the truth of a proposition. Hence, the primary goal of this study is to examine the linguistic manifestations of modality to identify point of view in the novel by determining the dominant modality shading. Simpson's (2005) framework was used as the analytical tool to conduct the analysis. The results indicate that epistemic modality is the most prevalent modality used in the novel and this has provided the novel with a negative shading. Furthermore, this accentuates notions of alienation and confusion within the narrative, by highlighting the narrator's struggles to make sense of what is happening. The results indicate that the narration reflects the character

Communicating beyond the conventional functions: an assessment of newspaper announcements

By default, all announcements notify listeners or readers of a given event, be it social, cultural, or religious. Newspaper personal or non-product advertisements tend to make audiences focus on its sponsors or the subject-matter of the announcements. Most personal announcements fall within the homely discourse genre. Scholars believe that careful examination of these types of announcements reveals further communications achieved beyond its primary functions and literal wordings. These communications could be within sociocultural or religious contexts. This critique reviews scholarly literature on how language is employed in a variety of newspaper announcements to convey much deeper sociocultural, religious, or political messages. The review focuses two types of genres, viz: congratulatory, and obituary and death announcements. Findings reveal that in congratulation and thank-you messages, a higher level of communication is achieved through various segments of such announcements, i.e. the use of multimodal, its position in the newspaper, etc. It shows how the announcements serve certain communicative purposes and how they are being influenced by factors such as gender and socioeconomic class. On the other hand, the literature reviewed on obituary and death announcements discloses how language is being utilized in the advent of death to communicate, not only to the deceased, but with wider audiences. The appraisal demonstrates how pages of newspaper death notice become platforms for eradicating social divisions and fighting the privileged groups. Another part of the evaluation discusses some contrasting conflicting views on the question of invoking God and religion in death rituals. As deceased persons are being celebrated and seen as martyrs in given cultures, others subscribe to notions that perceive death as personal choice and mere departure from the world. It is therefore recommended that more empirical works be conducted on congratulatory and other happy ceremony category of the newspaper announcements as the literature reviewed, so far, shows a very few scholarly works in that aspect of the genre

Complex speech act as a performance of fallacies in Nouri al-Maliki’s political speeches

Pragmatics has revealed how the discourse of political speakers contains deliberate persuasive and manipulative claims which are carried out by an array of speech acts. Most of the time, such claims can be questionable as the meaning of a claim cannot be arrived at without considering additional elements, including the function of the speech act and the context of the utterances under investigation. Previous studies on speech acts were conducted to interpret the illocutionary act of a single utterance; no study has addressed the act of a series of utterances. Therefore, it is necessary to interpret the illocutionary act of a series of utterances that can be employed for a particular purpose as the real intention might not be expressed within a sentence. Hence, this study focusses on the notion of fallacies which refer to faulty arguments that consist of more than one utterance, and together they comprise a series of speech acts. Such a chain of speech acts needs to be interpreted precisely to uncover the illocutionary force of such complexity. This study followed a textual analysis method and adopted Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, and Henkemans (2002) pragma-dialectical approach to analyze the speech act of fallacies in ten political speeches of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The study found that the illocutionary force at the sentence level is different from the illocutionary force at the argumentation level. The study concluded that within political discourse, fallacies need to be analyzed as a complex speech act; otherwise, analyzing fallacies as a single act may result in an insufficient interpretation as the illocutionary force of fallacies does not exclusively rely on the properties of the verbal form of fallacies, rather, it depends on the function of such properties in the context and the concerned situation

Construction, identification, and evaluation of dengue promotional campaign posters in a language classroom

Health promotional campaign as the practice of encouraging people to improve health has increased over the last decades in response to various health problems. This paper highlights strategies used by students to develop persuasive promotional campaign posters regarding the dengue health problem. Communication and media studies students were involved to show the combined results between the knowledge of health communication and the effective use of media in constructing an effective and persuasive health messages. A total of 56 students from two cohorts, i.e. twenty-five master’s students and thirty-one undergraduates were selected. Kurt Lewin’s model of action research was used to set the tasks: campaign objectives, information on dengue, themes/slogans to write the posters either by drawing or designing using a computer. The students were divided into groups where each group was monitored to record, check and evaluate their message writing performances. This study uses the Health Message Review Tool for data analysis which is grounded in the theories of Extended Parallel Process Model and Persuasion Hierarchy Effect. The findings revealed that the participants were able to construct, identify and evaluate major multi modal features in the dengue posters and persuasive elements which included: verbal texts, images, colours, graphic designs, metaphors, 1-sided and 2-sided message, firm conclusion and frames with more effective appeals. It was concluded that similar strategies may well be used in producing other campaign materials such as brochures, pamphlets, and billboards. The linguistic and pedagogic implications are also discussed at the end

The economy is an organism? A study of metaphors in Malaysian business times

This article applies Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to investigate the metaphorical linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphor the economy is an organism based on Charteris-Black and Ennis’s (2001) proposed conceptual metaphor. This study is a non-experimental descriptive study, which uses the corpus linguistic approach for data collection and the corpus for analysis of 50 share market news reports that were randomly identified. An expert within the business context was appointed to provide expertise in the interpretation of specific types of data derived from the corpus. The findings demonstrate that the conceptual metaphor: the economy is an organism is widely used in the corpus collected. The findings show that the use of metaphorical linguistics expressions (MLE) resistance in a way concretizes the abstract concept of share prices as it evokes the image of share prices as an animate entity that can move forward and be stopped by a force (resistance). The analysis above therefore, supports Charteris-Black and Ennis’s (2001) conceptual metaphor, the economy is an organism

Metaphorical expressions and ethical appeals in Said Nursi’s Damascus Sermon

Contemporary cognitive linguistics views metaphor as pervasive in thoughts and conceptual in nature. There are studies on conceptual metaphors in religious discourse, but little is known about how orators make use of them and ethos (ethical appeals) to influence their audience. This paper reports the results of an explanatory case study of an influential Muslim thinker and theologian, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s (1877-1960) ethos and conceptual metaphors in his Damascus Sermon (1911). Specifically, this study identifies and interprets the metaphorical expressions used by Nursi which helps him establish his ethos to strengthen his persuasion. The classical rhetorical theory is employed to examine the ethos while Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) cognitive theory of metaphor is also used. The analysis of the Sermon involves three main stages: i) identification of phrases that indicate ethos, ii) identification of linguistic metaphors using the Metaphor Identification Procedure by Pragglejaz Group (2007) and iii) identification of the underlying conceptual mapping of the expressions. The findings show how Nursi’s use of conceptual metaphors has contributed to the effectiveness of his ethical appeals to persuade his audience. This study sets an antecedent for future studies on conceptual metaphors in religious discourse as a mechanism for rhetorical appeals