Positive self-evaluation versus negative other-evaluation in the political genre of pre-election debates.

The present study explores the language of evaluation in a sub-genre of political discourse, pre-electoral debates, and its potential persuasive function for gaining voters via a contraposition of positive self-evaluation and negative evaluation of the other candidate. A further aim of this research is to check whether the candidate¿s ideology has a bearing on the entities that get evaluated. After a brief examination of the characteristics of the sub-genre at hand, specifically in the Spanish context, we present the results of an evaluation analysis carried out in a corpus of 19,849 words, which is the extension of the most recent pre-electoral debate held in Spain between the candidates of the two main political parties. Taking into account Van Dijk¿s CDA framework (2005) for parliamentary debates as global semantic strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, Martin and White¿s (2005) method was adopted as an analytical tool. The results showed that, although each candidate had different preferences in the choice of evaluative devices, they both used them as a strategy to win electoral votes while deprecating the opposing party and, therefore, minimizing their chances of winning the elections. On the other hand, and despite their opposing ideology, they both seem to defend those policies that are more widely accepted in order not to risk losing voters: public services and egalitarian social policies

"Poof! a'm heppily saving the Lord...": multimodality and evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape

This paper explores the use of punctuation, capitalisation, linguistic forms and images in the construction of evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape. Of particular interest is how male students use these devises in the discursive construction of the appraisal resource of Attitude, Graduation and Evaluation. Using over 150 tokens of graffiti, the paper uses a multimodal approach employing notions of resemiotisation and remediation to show how taboo language, font size, images and sketches are repurposed to aid the evaluation of the 'self' and the 'other' in toilet graffiti. The paper shows that through utilising multimodal texts, graffiti writers are able to reformulate and situate novel meanings in contexts; and in terms of appraisal, the verbal and non-verbal semiotic material are strategically combined to engender novel evaluations

Presupposition and 'taking-for-granted' in mass communicated political argument - An illustration from British, Flemish and Swedish political colloquy

Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen, Peter R. R. White and Karin Aijmerhttp://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=P%26bns%2016

Multi-versioning Performance Opportunities in BGAS System for Resilience

Resilience has become a major concern in high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Addressing the increasing risk of latent errors (or silent data corruption) is one of the biggest challenges. Multi-version checkpointing system, which keeps multi-version of the application states, has been proposed as a solution and has been implemented in Global View Resilience (GVR). The resulting more sophisticated management of data introduces overheads and the resulting impact on performance need to be investigated. In this paper we explore the performance of GVR for an HPC system with integrated non-volatile memories, namely Blue Gene Active Storage (BGAS). Our empirical study shows that the BGAS system provides a significantly more efficient basis for flexible error recovery by using GVR multi-versioning features compared to using a standard external storage system attached to the same Blue Gene/Q installation. Using BGAS especially achieves at least 10×performance boost for random traversal across multiple versions due to significantly better performance for small random I/O operations

Beyond modality and hedging: A dialogic view of the language of intersubjective stance

Copyright © 2003 Walter de GruyterP. R. R. Whitehttp://www.degruyter.de/journals/text/detail.cf