Online leadership discourse in higher education: a digital multimodal discourse perspective

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a small-scale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices (not individual choices), and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns – in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector

The generic structure of the call for papers of predatory journals: A social semiotic perspective

“Predatory journals” are profit-oriented journals which ignore academic quality. In 2014 Jeffrey Beall, a librarian from the University of Colorado Denver, compiled two lists in order to highlight this issue: one which listed questionable publishers and another which listed questionable standalone journals. He insisted that these publishers and journals were “corrupt” and that they “exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts” (Beall 2014). In his study of “bogus journals”, Renandya (2014, pp. 4–7) identified the key characteristics of predatory journals as: (1) publication fees; (2) high frequency publication; (3) an extremely high acceptance rate; (4) quick turnaround times; (5) a rapid review process; and (6) low or extremely uneven quality of published articles. While Beall’s (2014) and Renandya’s (2014) contributions to the detection of predatory publishers are very important, there is currently a lack of available information on the generic structure of the predatory publishers’ call for papers. As the first point of contact for many academic writers, the call for papers plays a vital part in early detection of predatory publishers. This chapter addresses this issue by analysing the generic structure of 25 calls for papers using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The chapter draws from Martin’s work on genre as “…staged, goal oriented” and “purposeful activity” (2009, p. 13) and Halliday’s features of field, tenor and mode that exist within the context of situation in SFL (Halliday 1978; Halliday and Hasan 1985/1989), to interpret the social context of the predatory call for papers. Further analyses of the appraisal devices (Martin and White 2005) and lexico-grammatical choices within the texts were conducted and are outlined in this chapter (Halliday and Matthiesen 2014; Sardinha 2013), with some analysis of the spoken and written forms of text emerging in the email (Halliday 1989). Beall’s (2014) and Renandya’s (2014) concepts were used to identify the 25 predatory emails used in this study. Understanding the generic structure and the lexico-grammatical construction is beneficial to writers seeking to publish their work in reputable circles

Food security, nutrition and health of food bank attendees in an English city: A cross-sectional study

Food banks in contemporary Britain are feeding record numbers of people. Little is known about attendees’ level of food insecurity, background diet quality or health. We surveyed 112 food bank attendees. Over 50% had experienced food shortage with hunger on a weekly basis or more often. Obesity and mental health problems were prevalent in women. Diet quality was poor, with energy, protein, fibre, iron and calcium intakes inadequate, while saturated fat and sugars intake were disproportionate. Women had poorer diet quality than men. Such patterns may lead to ill health

A Fine-grained Multilingual Analysis Based on the Appraisal Theory: Application to Arabic and English Videos

International audienceThe objective of this paper is to compare the opinions of two videos in two different languages. To do so, a fine-grained approach inspired from the appraisal theory is used to analyze the content of the videos that concern the same topic. In general, the methods devoted to sentiment analysis concern the study of the polarity of a text or an utterance. The appraisal approach goes further than the basic polarity sentiments and consider more detailed sentiments by covering additional attributes of opinions such as: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. In order to achieve such a comparison, in AMIS (Chist-Era project), we collected a corpus of 1503 Arabic and 1874 English videos. These videos need to be aligned in order to compare their contents, that is why we propose several methods to make them comparable. Then the best one is selected to align them and to constitute the data-set necessary for the fine-grained sentiment analysis

Doing politics in the recent Arab uprisings: Towards a political discourse analysis of the Arab Spring slogans

The present paper aims to analyse a number of those slogans collected from the sit-in quarters in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Using political discourse analysis, it unravels various typical discourse structures and strategies that are used in slogans in the construction of a sub-genre of political discourse in the Arab world. Drawing data from several mediums, including banners, wall graffiti, audio-visual instruments, chanting, speeches and songs, this paper tries to show the extent to which the slogans serve as a medium by which political complaints and comments are dispensed and consumed. This paper draws on a rhetorical analysis to find out their persuasive effect on shaping the Arab intellect and on the change of the political atmosphere in the region. Lastly, this paper attempts to show to what extent the slogans meet the standards of political discourse and whether they can be considered as a sub-genre of political discourse or not.IS

Towards an understanding of contextual features that influence the linguistic formality of British Sign Language users

This paper seeks to understand linguistic formality through the identification and measurement of contextual features. Using an adapted sociometric methodology to combine systemic functional linguistics and sign linguistics, a survey identifies the elements of context that have an effect upon the level of linguistic formality employed by British Sign Language users. The responses of 51 participants are analysed in order to ascertain (i) the level of linguistic formality that would be employed in certain communicative scenarios, and (ii) the contextual features of these scenarios that have an influence on linguistic formality. The results obtained from this study posit that there is an overall agreement shared between British Sign Language users when choosing levels of linguistic formality based on broad contextual description alone. The people involved in the communication and their interpersonal relationships tend to be the biggest influence on the level of formality employed, whereas the topic of the interaction appears to show no significant influence upon linguistic formality on its own. This work contributes further evidence to the importance of studying language within communicative contexts and the importance of formality as an influential factor in linguistic production. It is hoped that this will encourage future studies to derive linguistic data of British Sign Language users, or indee

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being ‘an undergoer’ rather than an ‘effector’ of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using ‘grammatical logic’, it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the ‘story of intentionality’ (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14, 20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker’s book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime

On Being Negative

This paper investigates the pragmatic expressions of negative evaluation (negativity) in two corpora: (i) comments posted online in response to newspaper opinion articles; and (ii) online reviews of movies, books and consumer products. We propose a taxonomy of linguistic resources that are deployed in the expression of negativity, with two broad groups at the top level of the taxonomy: resources from the lexicogrammar or from discourse semantics. We propose that rhetorical figures can be considered part of the discourse semantic resources used in the expression of negativity. Using our taxonomy as starting point, we carry out a corpus analysis, and focus on three phenomena: adverb + adjective combinations; rhetorical questions; and rhetorical figures. Although the analysis in this paper is corpus-assisted rather than corpus-driven, the final goal of our research is to make it quantitative, in extracting patterns and resources that can be detected automatically

Exploratory mathematics talk in a second language: a sociolinguistic perspective:

This paper illuminates challenges confronting teachers and students at the literacy/numeracy interface in contexts where students have not developed sufficient English language proficiency to be learning mathematics through English but, due to socio-politically and economically driven perceptions are being taught in English. We analyse transcript data of classroom talk in a South African grade 4 mathematics lesson on fractions. Together with interview data, the lesson data highlight some of the consequences students’ diminished access to their home language appear to have on their access to mathematical meaning-making