A corpus-assisted study of the discourse marker well as an indicator of judges' institutional roles in court cases with litigants in person

In this paper, I concentrate on court cases with litigants in person (lay people who act on their own behalf in legal proceedings without a counsel or solicitor) and discuss the challenges of building a corpus of courtroom discourse where it is crucial to distinguish between speakers due to their distinct institutional roles. The corpus incorporates seven sub-corpora of verbatim transcripts from different court cases with litigants in person and comprises over eleven-million tokens. The focus of this paper is on the interplay between the legal and lay discourse types and how judges project their institutional roles through well-initiated turns directed at litigants in person and counsels. As a versatile discourse marker, well provides a good opportunity to explore how judges have to adapt their roles to ensure lay litigants in person receive the necessary support and that their lack of competence does not impede on the fairness of the proceedings. Given the breadth and importance of the topic of litigation in person, I discuss how the tools and approaches of corpus linguistics can be helpful in this multi-disciplinary area where multiple functions and uses of individual linguistic features need to be explored in depth

Change but no climate change: discourses of climate change in corporate social responsibility reporting in the oil industry

Using corpus linguistic tools and methods, this paper investigates the discourses of climate change in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental reports produced by major oil companies from 2000 to 2013. It focuses on the frequency of key references to climatic changes and examines in detail discourses surrounding the most frequently used term ‘climate change’. The analysis points to shifting patterns in the ways in which climate change has been discursively constructed in the studied sample. Whereas in the mid-2000s, it was seen as a phenomenon that something could be done about, in recent years the corporate discourse has increasingly emphasised the notion of risk portraying climate change as an unpredictable agent. A pro-active stance signalled by the use of force metaphors is offset by a distancing strategy often indicated through the use of hedging devices and ‘relocation’ of climate change to the future and other stakeholders. In doing so, the discourse obscures the sector’s large contribution to environmental degradation and ‘grooms’ the public perception to believe that the industry actively engages in climate change mitigation. At the methodological level, this study shows how a combination of quantitative corpus-linguistic and qualitative discourse-analytical techniques can offer insights into the existence of salient discursive patterns and contribute to a better understanding of the role of language in performing ideological work in corporate communications

Unexplored capabilities of chemiluminescence and thermoanalytical methods in characterization of intact and degraded hyaluronans. Polym Degrad Stabil 91

Abstract Three intact and four degraded hyaluronans were investigated by using chemiluminometry, differential scanning calorimetry, and thermogravimetry. Degradation of hyaluronan was induced by a system containing H 2 O 2 alone (882 mM); 55 mM H 2 O 2 plus 1.25 mM CuCl 2 ; NaOCl alone (10 mM); and NaOCl plus CuCl 2 and ascorbic acid (10 mM, 0.1 mM, and 100 mM, respectively). The four different oxidative systems yielded biopolymer fragments represented by similar viscosity characteristics. The results obtained by using chemiluminescence and thermoanalytical methods indicate that hyaluronans of similar rheological properties could be distinguished from each other

Toolset for image and text processing and metadata enhacement - Final release

This demonstration description presents tools and partial workflow results produced by EuDML [partners] and either integrated and used in core EuDML processing and/or made available as standalone tool or as demonstrations. Enhancement workflow and tools whose functionality should find, check, merge, correct and enhance metadata and text or PDF document full text of items in the EuDML collection are described. Demonstration web pages allow testing and evaluation of these tools, in addition to the project site itself, where enhanced data are projected