Factors controlling the seasonal variation in soil water content and pore water pressures within a lightly vegetated clay slope

Seasonal cycles of soil water content cause shrinking and swelling in clay soils that can in turn contribute to strain-softening and progressive failure. This paper presents and analyses six years of field measurements of soil water content and pore water pressures in the upper layers of a lightly vegetated London Clay slope near Newbury, UK. The field observations are set in the context of a 40 year run of rainfall data for the site. Moderately extreme rainfall and drought events were experienced over the period 2003-2008, allowing almost the full variation in likely pore water pressures to be characterised. Pore water pressures were found to return to near hydrostatic during most winters. Variations in summer rainfall, particularly during June-August, are shown to have a large influence on the magnitude of the cycles of pore water pressure and effective stress. The 40 year rainfall dataset is used to calculate approximate return periods for the observed soil conditions and provides a benchmark for calculating the impacts of expected climate change on similar sites

\u201cLogically, We Quite Agree with the IARC\u201d: Negotiating Interpersonal Meaning in a Corpus of Scientific Texts

This chapter extends the scope of a previous study (Fusari 2017 and in press 2018) of the reception, by a range of scientific journals featured in the database Elsevier Science Direct, of a 2015 report (IARC 2015) in which the International Agency for Research on Cancer officially incorporated red meat in Group 2A carcinogens (probably carcinogenic to humans) and processed meat in Group 1 (carcinogenic to humans). For this study, we have built a 384,491 words corpus, fully POS-tagged, and partially parsed using a systemic functional grammatical formalism. While the previous stages in this project concentrated on ideational meaning, addressing the use of mass vs. countable nouns, nominalization, the experiential structure of the Noun Group, and patterns of Transitivity, this new step moves beyond representation (Glenn 2004; Gupta 2006; Stibbe 2014; Cook 2015), to explore interpersonal meaning. This area of meaning is less widely studied with corpus approaches, largely because of the greater difficulty, both technical and epistemological, of analysing Tenor with a corpus-assisted approach (Fuoli 2018). Our aim is to analyze how the roles of the various Participants (IARC, scientific community, general public) in the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity are negotiated. To achieve this aim, we rely on the notions of Attitude, Engagement and stance, in terms of both Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005) and interactional metadiscourse (Hyland 2005; 2017; Jiang & Hyland 2017). We concentrate specifically on attitudinal Values, Graduation, comment Adjuncts, modal verbs and personal pronouns. The results show that the scientific literature exemplified in this corpus does not aim to settle the meat/cancer controversy once and for all, but rather to \u201cpersuade readers [i.e. other members of the relevant discourse communities] of the scientific acceptability of the knowledge claims presented\u201d (Allen, Qin & Lancaster 1994, p. 280). Therefore, the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity should not be seen only in terms of relating objective facts and hard data about the levels of risk involved, but also in terms of \u201cdialogism\u201d (O\u2019Hallaron, Palincsar & Schleppegrell 2015), which is equally - if not more - important to reach a shared interpretation (Fern\ue1ndez Polo 2018) of scientific facts