in Morley, J. and Bayley, P. (eds), Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War, 2009
The research issue explored in this paper evolved as a challenge to what cognitivist G. Lakoff al... more The research issue explored in this paper evolved as a challenge to what cognitivist G. Lakoff alleges in his Moral Politics (2002 [1996]:11), that is, that, firstly, conservatives and liberals misread one another due to conflicting moral systems, and that, secondly, these are expressed in what he calls ‘lexical metaphors’ which he claims are connected to the ‘strict father mentality’ and the ‘nurturant parent’ one. The thesis struck us as a dichotomy which, both epistemologically and linguistically, was just a bit too neat. In the first place, it is an oversimplified partition of the possibilities for political positioning typically taken up by socio-semiotically constructed ‘meaners’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999:610-11), and then, a too-circumscribed classification of the potential linguistic resources systemically available to construe it. In short, lexical metaphor is hardly the whole story, or even the most relevant part of it. The focal point must be widened, as it is grammar (in the sense of lexicogrammar) that creates the potential within which we act and enact our cultural being. This potential is at once enabling and constraining: that is, grammar makes meaning possible and also sets limits on what can be meant.
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Intelligible pronunciation is undoubtedly an essential part of a lecturer’s communicative competence. However, while intelligibility refers to “the extent to which the speaker’s intended utterance is actually understood by a listener”, comprehension refers to “the listener’s perception of the degree of difficulty encountered when trying to understand an utterance” (Derwing & Munroe, 2005, p. 385). A crucial language factor affecting listeners’ degree of perceived comprehension is related to their judgement of their NNS lecturers’ pronunciation accuracy or accentedness (Clark, 2017; Costa & Mair, 2022; Lindemann & Subtirelu, 2013).
Furthermore, Kornder and Mennen (2021) noted that learners’ linguistic experience and language background – e.g. monolingual, bilingual – affect their perception of native and foreign-accented speech, which in turn affects learners’ perceptions of quality teaching (Jensen, 2013). In EMI settings, Clark (2017) found that while international students tended to be harsher in self-evaluation of English language competence and less critical of NNS lecturers’ language competence, second-year students, regardless of their L1, were more tolerant of lecturers’ English and had fewer problems in comprehension. However, more recently Costa and Mair (2022) pointed out that “while Italian listeners who share the lecturer’s first language are likely to be more lenient in their perception of the pronunciation […], the international students may find the local accent a greater impediment to comprehension” (p.11).
This paper aims to further contribute to the understanding of EMI students’ perception of their lecturers’ speech, and its impact on their comprehension. To do so, this paper reports on an online semi-structured survey administered to 128 students (including both Italian L1 speakers and speakers with other L1s) attending both first and second-cycle lectures delivered in English by Italian L1 lecturers. Students were asked to assess the speed of delivery, accentedness, intonation and pronunciation of their lecturers, and to evaluate whether these linguistic aspects interfered with lecture comprehension. Responses are compared and discussed on the basis of degree cycle, as well as in relation to L1.
Findings indicate that it is students’ past experience of English-taught courses as well as their familiarity with non-native English accented speech that influences students’ opinions of EMI lecturers’ language performance and their perceived comprehension in the classroom. The findings will serve to provide further empirical data which might help to set new pedagogical priorities for training programmes for both EMI lecturers and students.
References
Ball, P., & Lindsay, D. (2013). Language Demands and Support for English-Medium Instruction in Tertiary Education. Learning from a Specific Context. In Doiz, A., Lasagabaster, D. and Sierra, J.M. (Eds.). English-Medium Instruction at Universities. Global Challenges (pp. 44-66). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Clark, C. (2017). Perceptions of EMI: The students’ view of a Master’s degree programme. In K. Ackerley, M. Guarda, & F. Helm (Eds.), Sharing Perspectives on English-Medium Instruction (pp. 285–308). Bern: Peter Lang.
Costa, F., & Mair, O. (2022). Multimodality and pronunciation in ICLHE (Integration of Content and Language in Higher Education) training. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 16 (4-5) doi: 10.1080/17501229.2022.2053130.
Derwing, T. M., and Munro, M. J. (2005). Second Language Accent and Pronunciation Teaching: A Research-Based Approach. TESOL Quarterly 39 (3), 379–398. doi: 10.2307/3588486
Holliday, A. R. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Helm, F., and Guarda, M. (2015). ‘Improvisation is not allowed in a second language’. A survey of Italian lecturers’ concerns about teaching their subject through English. Language Learning in Higher Education, 5 (2), 353-373. doi: 10.1515/cercles-2015-0017
Jensen, C. 2013. Students’ Attitudes to Lecturers’ English in English Medium Higher Education in Denmark. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 13(1), 87-112. Retrieved from: https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/njes/article/view/1798/1572
Kornder, L., & Mennen, I. (2021). Listeners’ linguistic experience affects the degree of perceived nativeness of first language pronunciation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 717615. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717615.
Lindemann, S., & Subtirelu, N.C. (2013). Reliably Biased: The role of listener expectation in the perception of second language speech. Language Learning, 63, 567-594. doi:10.1111/LANG.12014.
Picciuolo, M., & Johnson, J.H. (2020). Contrasting EMI lecturers’ perceptions with practices at the University of Bologna. In Miller, D.R.(ed.), Quaderni del CeSLiC. Occasional papers. ISSN 1973-221X. Bologna: Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC) e Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna. AlmaDL, p. 23. doi: 10.6092/unibo/amsacta/6399.
Sercu, L. (2005). Foreign language teachers and the implementation of intercultural education: a comparative investigation of the professional self‐concepts and teaching practices of Belgian teachers of English, French and German. European Journal of Teacher Education, 28(1), 105-87. doi: 10.1080/02619760500040389.
Tange, H. (2010). Caught in the Tower of Babel: university lecturers' experiences with internationalisation. Language and Intercultural Communication, 10, 137 - 149. doi: 10.1080/14708470903342138.
Climate change communication plays a major role in forming people’s opinions and hence their actions. The words and framings chosen for this purpose are of fundamental importance (Lakoff, 2010, p. 73). For example, replacing the phrase ‘global warming’ with ‘climate change’ removed the emphasis on human action (Luntz, 2003). As Marx (2008) comments, the near-synonym environment would seem more useful for communicating the urgency of climate change action than nature, with its many ambiguities.
This paper compares the use of the nouns nature and environment within one specific genre of climate change communication over time: climate change non-fiction, a highly composite genre that plays a crucial role in science communication. For this study, a specialized corpus of around two million words consisting of over twenty non-fictional works on climate change and the environment from the mid-20th century to the present day is used to investigate and compare the participants and processes around the nouns within a CADS framework (Partington et al., 2013), focusing in particular on collocates, wordsketches, and agency to uncover patterns in usage.
Given the diachronic nature of this corpus, findings throw light on both differences and similarities in the linguistic patterns of the two nouns over a period which has seen an exponential increase in awareness of the effects of climate change.
References
Lakoff, G. (2010). Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment. Environmental Communication, 4(1), 70-81.
Luntz, F. (2003). The environment: A cleaner, safer, healthier America. The Luntz Research Companies straight talk (pp. 131-146). Unpublished Memo.
Marx, L. (2008). The Idea of Nature in America. Daedalus, 137(2), 8-21.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Williams, R. (1985). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Relevant expressions in Engineering lecture corpora from Italy, the UK, New Zealand and Malaysia are identified through extraction of selected query words. Analysis is made of their positioning with reference to the information highlighted, the degree of probability, and typical phraseology. Results are quantified and compared with reference to NS and NNS lecturers.
Findings suggest that NNS are less likely than NS to use such expressions prospectively with regard to important information, just as they are less likely to make use of the cumulative effect of this expression together with other importance markers, that Italian lecturers tend to hedge more than NS lecturers about assessment content, and that lexis and phraseology may vary due to L1 interference. Findings have relevance for pedagogical practices and for teacher professional development.
Keywords: assessment-related expressions, importance markers, Engineering lectures
Deroey, K.L.B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is': lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In Vandelanotte L., Kristin, D. Caroline G. & Ditte K. (Eds.), Recent advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and exploiting corpora, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 265-291.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Johnson, J.H. (forthcoming). Importance Marking in EMI Lectures: A Comparative Study
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2011). A corpus-based study of lecture functions. Moderna Sprak 105/2: 1–22.
Miller, C., & Parlett, M. (1974). Up to the Mark: A Study of the Examination Game. London: Society for Research into Higher Education.
JH Johnson and M Picciuolo
According to the European Commission, “[m]aking higher education systems inclusive and connected to society requires providing the right conditions for students of different backgrounds to succeed” . In recent years, one way that HE institutions have promoted inclusive education has been by introducing English-Medium Instruction (EMI), involving a shift to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as the instructional language in multilingual university settings.
The importance of student inclusion in lectures is not new. Talk-in-interaction is widely considered as an indicator of good pedagogical practice (Muijs & Reynolds 2011; Lo & Macaro 2015) and is generally accepted as beneficial to learning (Marton & Tsui 2004). Classroom talk has strong discoursal characteristics since lecturers’ main activities of teaching are realised linguistically through classroom talk. Given that lectures in Italy are generally lecturer-initiated (Ciliberti & Anderson 1999) by analysing what lecturers actually say when participating in classroom activity, patterns of participation may be revealed.
Investigating the use of personal pronouns is one way to do this, since pronouns are “central to intersubjective communication – they are the means language provides for constituting the roles of speaker and addressee in face-to-face interaction” (Rounds 1987: 14). Adel (2012) examined the occurrences of you in different genres of academic discourse, finding a relatively higher frequency of references to the audience as well as discourse organisation units in spoken academic discourse. In their analyses of ELF lecturer discourse, Formentelli (2017), Dafouz et al (2007), Dafouz Milne (2006) and Molino (2018) all found the most frequent pronoun to be we, signalling a collaborative approach and acting as an indicator of inclusion. While Walsh (2004) found I to be the most frequent personal pronoun, she noted that interpersonal rapport was created through involving students in activities also through audience-inclusive we, since such inclusive pronominal forms are “likely to foster the active participation of students in class, boosting their sense of belonging to a group” (Formentelli 2017: 68). Morell (2004) found that the most frequent pronouns depended on the type of lecture, with we most common in interactive and I in non-interactive lecture types.
The study presented in this paper aims to further contribute to this debate by investigating the frequency and function of personal pronouns in EMI lecturers’ classroom talk and comparing them with lecturers’ own perception of the degree of interaction in their lectures. This enables us to assess the level of inclusion in EMI lectures at UNIBO as well as to show the extent to which lecturers’ perceptions are consistent with their discursive practices. Indeed, non-native English-speaking lecturers have not always found it easy to adapt to the new EMI environment, claiming that EMI requires more time for preparation and finding it difficult to adjust their traditional lecturing style to promote active student participation (Jensen & Thøgersen 2011; Picciuolo & Johnson 2020).
This study extends ongoing research into EMI lecturer discourse (Johnson & Picciuolo 2020; Picciuolo & Johnson 2020). We interviewed lecturers of both Physical Sciences and Social Sciences subjects at an Italian university about their teaching experiences. Then we used SketchEngine to compare the frequencies of 1st and 2nd person pronouns across disciplines in a corpus of approx. 200,000 words of lectures given by the same lecturers. Lecturers’ perceptions might be expected to match their discursive practices. In fact, most lecturers in our survey considered the level of interaction in their classrooms to be fairly high. We found the pronoun you to be the most frequent pronoun used by lecturers from both macro-areas in our corpus, possibly suggesting direct reference, enabling the lecturer to interact with the students, asking them questions or expanding on previous points (Dafouz et al 2007), and thus perhaps providing evidence of a certain degree of co-operation between lecturer and students. However, a closer look at the co-text shows that you mostly appears in conditional sentences preceded by the conjunction if, in both macro-areas. Therefore, you functions here as an impersonal indexical which is not directly deictic to the hearer (idem. 2007: 653). This would instead suggest that lecturers are reluctant to promote bidirectional speech exchanges.
Findings may thus contribute to designing appropriate material for lecturer training courses. Indeed, the preparation of teaching materials for EMI lecturers’ support courses should bear in mind the importance of raising awareness among lecturers regarding the role of lexico-grammatical resources in mediating content-subjects (Lo & Lin 2019: 155), as well as among students, since “audience awareness is a central skill needed for effective communication” (Adel 2012: 122).
References
Ädel, A. 2012. ‘What I want you to remember is...’: Audience orientation in monologic academic discourse. English Text Construction, 5(1), 101–127.
Ciliberti, A. & Anderson, L. 1999. “Introduction.” In Le forme della comunicazione accademica: Ricerche linguistiche sulla didattica universitaria in ambito umanistico, Ciliberti, A. & Anderson, L. (eds), 29-44. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Dafouz Milne, E. 2006. “Solidarity Strategies in CLIL University Lectures: Teachers’ Use of Pronouns and Modal Verbs.” VIEWS: Vienna English Working Papers, 15(3), 9-15
Dafouz, E., Núñez, B. & Sancho, C. 2007. “Analysing Stance in a CLIL University Context: Nonnative Speaker Use of Personal Pronouns and Modal Verbs.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10(5), 647-662.
Formentelli, M. 2017. Taking Stance in English as a Lingua Franca: Managing Interpersonal Relations in Academic Lectures. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Jensen, C. & Thøgersen, J. 2011. University lecturers’ attitudes towards English as the medium of instruction. Iberica, 22, 13–33.
Johnson, J. H. & Picciuolo, M. 2020. Interaction in spoken academic discourse in an EMI context: the use of questions. Conference proceedings of the Congress UPV 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’20) Domenech, J., Merello, P., de la Poza, E. & Peña-Ortiz, R. (eds) Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, pp. 211-219. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAD20.2020.11787
Lo, Y. Y., & Lin, A. M. Y. (eds). 2019. “Teaching, Learning and Scaffolding in CLIL Science Classrooms” [Special Issue]. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 7(2), 151-328.
Lo, Y. Y. & Macaro, E. 2015. Getting used to content and language integrated learning: what can classroom interaction reveal? The Language Learning Journal, 43, 1-17. 10.1080/09571736.2015.1053281
Marton, F. & Tsui, A. 2004. Classroom discourse and the space of learning. Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Molino, A. 2018. ʻWhat I’m Speaking is almost English…ʼ: A Corpus-based Study of Metadiscourse in English medium Lectures at an Italian University. Educational sciences: theory & practice, 18 (4), 935-956.
Morell, T. 2004 Interactive lecture discourse for university ELF students. English for Specific Purposes, 23 (2004), 325 - 338.
Muijs, D. & Reynolds, D. 2011. Effective teaching: evidence and practice. Third edition. London: SAGE Publications.
Picciuolo, M. & Johnson, J. H. 2020. Contrasting EMI lecturers’ perceptions with practices at the University of Bologna. Quaderni del CeSLiC. Occasional papers. Miller, D. R. (ed) ISSN 1973-221X. Bologna: Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC) e Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna. AlmaDL, p. 23. http://amsacta.unibo.it/6399/
Rounds, P. L. 1987. “Multifunctional Personal Pronoun Use in an Educational Setting”. English for Specific Purposes, (6)1, 13-29.
Walsh, P. 2004. “A Complex Interplay of Voices: First and Second Person Pronouns in University Lectures.” In Evaluation in Oral and Written Academic Discourse, Anderson L. & Bamford, J. (eds), 31-52. Roma: Officina Edizioni.
The term itself has highly negative evaluative connotations. It is a class - or classes - which should not exist. But if whoever uses the term believes that it - or they - do exist, who is considered to be responsible? Are the same social actors blamed in different societies and by political voices from different political standpoints? There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that, in western newspapers at least, the term is ‘weaponised’, one political side accuses the other of having created an underclass by its negative or negligent policies. In another example, the Chinese authorities are criticized for having created the hukou, an ‘underclass’ of migrant workers (South China Morning Post).
A number of statements in recent sociology literature assert that the underclass is very frequently negatively represented “as a moral category” defined by its “deviant behavioural norms” (Hamilton, 2012: 86), however our findings suggest that the term is not in fact used to demonise, nor are the connotations of underclass always negative. We also found that certain themes connected with the underclass are universally relevant. In/visibility, for example, is a common feature, and im/migrants, either external or internal, seem to form an underclass within a society in all our sources. Women too often feature as an underclass within the underclass. The theme of how to prevent a single-generation underclass turning into a permanent one is also discussed across the newspapers, with possible solutions offered. Finally there is some evidence, with the emergence of “creative underclasses”, that the word is increasingly being used metaphorically and in the positive sense, while another surprising finding was a higher frequency in the use of a romanticised underclass in fictional settings.
A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach is used (Partington et al, 2013) in the study (Johnson and Partington, forthcoming). The corpora employed includes the SiBol suite of English language newspaper corpora (covering the period 1993-2013) alongside corpora of newspaper comment pieces and of political interviews from 2015-2016 which treat the topic of underclasses, downloaded using Lexis Nexis.
References
Johnson, J.H. & Partington, A. (forthcoming) ‘A corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) of representations of the ‘underclass’ in the English-language press: Who are they, how do they behave, and who is to blame for them?’ In Friginal, E. (ed.). (forthcoming) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics (Chapter 13), Oxford: Routledge.
Hamilton, K. (2012). Low-income Families and Coping through Brands: Inclusion or Stigma? Sociology 46(1), 74–90.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus assisted discourse studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
The focus of this paper is to explore how corpus stylistics and metaphor analysis within a translation perspective may be combined to provide a consistent analytical framework of the literary text for awareness-raising in the student of English.
Previous research into Grazia Deledda’s authorial style (Johnson 2009) using corpus stylistics techniques (eg. Mahlberg 2009) showed that figurative language was prominent in her work, particularly body part metonymy, and simile (Johnson 2014), confirming and extending previous non-corpus-based studies (eg. Miccinesi 1975). Typically used in conjunction with the moods and emotions of the characters (see also Johnson 2010), such figurative language often occurred in juxtaposition with metaphorical expressions connected with the elements and the natural landscape (see also Massaiu 1972; Scrivano 1990).
With a view to extending the previous studies, this study applies corpus tools to further explore the metaphorical usage of certain key phrases.
Our aim here is to combine keywords/phrases and metaphor into a consistent methodological framework – 1) keywords/phrases extraction and preliminary reading 2) metaphor analysis and analytical reading also in a 3) contrastive cultural perspective - and provide a template for language awareness-raising practices in the classroom, while making reference to selected translations in order to discuss problematic issues these raise for translators, as well as conceptual peculiarities also in a contrastive perspective.
While most such studies have focussed on works in their original language, ours instead compares the translation with the original text. More specifically, we explore the stylistic elements identified in Julian Barnes’ novel ‘The Sense of an Ending’ in the original and in its Italian translation. Indeed, if translators need to recreate predominant stylistic features of the Source Text in order to maintain stylistic or translational equivalence (Popovic 1976), then the functional equivalent (ibid. 1976: 6) of any significant foregrounding in the ST should be recreated in the Target Text.
Drawing on earlier studies of Barnes’ style (e.g. Shepherd and Berber Sardinha 2013), this work further explores aspects such as point of view (Simpson 1993) and the significance of memory in the novel by comparing the two parts of the ST and the TT, thus applying notions of tertiary or internal deviation (Leech 1985). Corpus stylistics methods were used to identify ‘good bets’ (Leech 2008: 164) which were then subjected to qualitative analysis. It was found for example that key clusters belonging to the category of ‘uncertain impressionistic perceptions’ (Shepherd and Berber Sardinha 2013), frequent in the ST, were minimally present in the key clusters of the TT. Instead, a number of Mental processes figured among the keywords of Part Two when compared with Part One of the TT, whereas this was not the case in the ST.
References
Leech, G.N. 1965. “‘This bread I break’: Language and Interpretation”, Review of English Literature, 6.2 London: Longmans, Green.
Leech, G.N. 1985. “Stylistics”. In T. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse and literature: new approaches to the analysis of literary genres. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Leech, G.N. 2008. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Leech, G. N. and Short M. H. 1981. Style in fiction: a linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. London: Longman
Mahlberg, M. 2013. Corpus stylistics and Dickens’s fiction. New York/London: Routledge.
Mukařovsky, J. 1958. “Standard language and poetic language”. In P. L. Garvin (ed. and tr.) A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style. Washington D.C.: American University Language Centre.
Popovic, A. 1976. A Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation. Edmonton: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta.
Shepherd, T.M.G. and Berber Sardinha, T. 2013. “A Rough Guide to doing Corpus Stylistics”. Matraga, rio de janeiro, v.20, n.32, Jan/Jun. 2013.
Simpson, P. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London/New York: Routledge.
Stubbs, M. 2005. “Conrad in the computer: examples of quantitative stylistics methods”, Language and Literature, 14 (1): 5-24.
Though risk within a sociological framework has long been an object of study, risk sociology has only recently been combined with linguistics (e.g. Zinn 2010, Hardy and Colombini 2011, Hamilton et al 2007, and Johnson, forthcoming). This paper uses a similar cross-disciplinary approach to investigate diachronic changes in the linguistic representation of threat with reference to the family in news discourse.
The media plays a major role in shaping the views of the public (Kitzinger and Reilly 1997: 320) and threat is a key lexical item in news discourse, perhaps also because at least two or even three of the newsworthy roles (Galtung and Ruge 1965) - negativity, and dramatic or sensational impact, as well as personalisation - are filled by making reference to threat. This paper explores the nature of these threats, focussing, in Fillmore and Atkins’ (1992) terms, on the Harm embodied by the threat, the Victim of the threat, and specifically, the Actor - whether implicit or explicit - involved in perpetrating the threat, since choice of the word threat, unlike its near-synonyms risk or danger, always implies reference to an Actor.
Using an MD-CADS approach (Partington ed. 2010), I exploit purpose-built corpora featuring all the articles containing the lemma THREAT within a 10 word span of family/families from both the Guardian and the Daily Mail between 1993 and 2012 (each corpus containing around 1 million tokens) in order to investigate linguistic patterns around the lemma in context. Finally a qualitative analysis of particular stretches of discourse is made to build a comparative picture of changes in threats to the family in the press.
References
Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage.
Fillmore, C.J. and Atkins, B.T.S. 1992. Toward a Frame-based Lexicon: the Semantics of RISK and its Neighbours. In Lehrer, Adrienne / Feder Kittay, Eva (eds.) Frames, Fields and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organisation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 75-102
Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. H. 1965. The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2, 64-91
Hamilton, C., Adolphs, S., Nerlich, B. 2007. The Meanings of ‘Risk’: A View from Corpus Linguistics. Discourse and Society 18 /2, 163-181.
Hardy, D.E. and Colombini, C. B. 2011. A Genre, Collocational, and Constructional Analysis of RISK*. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16/4, 462-485.
Johnson, J.H. (forthcoming) Family in the UK – Risks, Threats and Dangers: A Modern Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study across Two Genres. In Gotti Maurizio / Giannoni Davide S. (eds.) Corpus Analysis for Descriptive and Pedagogic Purposes: English Specialised Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.
Kitzinger, J. and Reilly, J. 1997. The Rise and Fall of Risk Reporting. Media Coverage of Human Genetics Research, ‘False Memory Syndrome’ and ‘Mad Cow Disease’. European Journal of Communication 12/3, 319-350.
Nohrstedt, S.A. 2010 (ed.). Communicating Risks: Towards the Threat Society. Goteborg, Sweden: Nordicom/University of Gothenburg,
Partington, A. 2010 (ed.) Modern Diachronic Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on UK newspapers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ungar, S. 2001. Moral panic versus the risk society: the implications of the changing sites of social anxiety. British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 52 Issue No. 2 ( June 2001), 271–291.
Zinn, J.O. 2010 (ed.). Special Issue on Risk. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 4/2.
A corpus stylistic approach may provide insights into literary texts by means of generating quantitative data from the texts in electronic format and analysing these data qualitatively to provide information about stylistic features of the texts (e.g. Mahlberg 2009). The approach is applied in this presentation to a specially compiled corpus of selected novels by Grazia Deledda and their translations into English, for the purpose of exploring figurative language.
Earlier corpus-assisted research into Deledda’s authorial style (Johnson 2009) showed that the lemmas parere/sembrare emerged as key in relation to a comparable reference corpus. Besides serving to construct a particular point of view (Simpson 1993; Johnson 2010, 2011), the high frequency of these mental processes of perception also confirms the findings of non-corpus-based Deledda scholars (e.g. Miccinesi 1975) who noted the importance given in Deledda’s works to the characters’ inner feelings, which are often described using figurative language such as simile and often marked lexically by expressions such as come se/come + [article], expressions which also featured highly in wordlists of Deledda’s novels. The moods and emotions of the characters are often expressed through reference to the semantic domain of the elements and the natural landscape (e.g. Massaiu 1972; Dolfi 1979; Scrivano 1990), symbolically representing the deeper themes in Deledda’s work (Gagliardi 2010) and this feature also emerges through a corpus stylistic analysis.
The presentation will discuss how corpus stylistics may thus provide valid assistance in identifying key figurative elements in preparation for the translation process, through a comparison of published translations of Deledda’s work into English with their source texts.
References
Dolfi A.. 1979. Grazia Deledda, Mursia, Milano.
Gagliardi E.. 2010. I Romanzi cervesi di Grazia Deledda, Ravenna: Longo editore
Johnson J. H.. 2009. “Towards an identification of the authorial style of Grazia Deledda. A corpus-assisted study” Occasional Papers dei Quaderni del CeSLiC published online: http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002678/
Johnson J. H.. 2010. “A corpus-assisted study of parere/sembrare in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and La Madre. Constructing point of view in the Source Texts and their English translations”, in J. Douthwaite and K. Wales (eds), Stylistics and Co. (unlimited) – the range, methods and applications of stylistics, Textus 2010 (1).
Johnson J. H.. 2011. "The use of deictic reference in identifying point of view in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and its translation into English", in Target 23 :1 (2011), 62-76
Mahlberg M.. 2009. “Corpus stylistics and the Pickwickian watering-pot”. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, London: Continuum, pp. 47-63
Massaiu M.. 1972. La Sardegna di Grazia Deledda, CELUC, Milano.
Miccinesi M.. 1975. Grazia Deledda, La Nuova Italia: Firenze
Scrivano R.. 1990. “I topoi del mito nella Deledda”, in A. Pellegrino (ed.), Metafora e biografia nell'opera di Grazia Deledda, Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, Roma, (Atti di convegno, 1987), pp. 17-30.
Simpson P.. 1993. Language, ideology and point of view, London: Routledge
The corpus examined comprises all the articles published in one of the discipline's most authoritative academic journals, the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, between 2000 and the end of 2011. Collected in electronic form and divided into subsections both as regards text types (abstracts, article bodies, references, etc.), and period of time (EARLY: 2000-2004; MID: 2005-2008; LATE: 2009-2011), the texts have a total of 1.5 million tokens.
Concordancing software (WordSmith 5.0) was used to compare different parts of the IJCL corpus and highlight keywords and key clusters. This initial stage was followed by qualitative analysis of the concordance lines of keywords occurring over a substantial number of articles in order to identify diachronic changes as well as similarities (see also Taylor Forthcoming) in topics treated as well as lexical trends that could be generalised to the journal and possibly the field as a whole.
Initial findings emerging from keyword analysis suggest that, whereas earlier articles in the IJCL indicated greater focus on topic fields such as translation, terminology and collocation, more focus in later years is placed on discourse, grammar – particularly modality – and spoken language.
A further research direction was introduced by comparing the IJCL corpus with a specially compiled corpus of articles from another social sciences discipline. This comprised all the articles from the online version of Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association, between 2008 and 2011, making up a reference corpus of almost 2 million tokens. This has enabled further investigation into what makes corpus linguistics discourse distinctive.
Keywords: MD-CADS, academic articles, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, content analysis, keywords
References
Taylor, C. 2008. What is corpus linguistics? What the data says. ICAME Journal, 32: 143-164.
Taylor, C. Forthcoming. Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8(2).
Since “discourse and society shape each other” (Fairclough 1992: 9), and “language is used for the living of life, how it acts in the creation, maintenance, and alteration of human relations, which range from consensus to conflict, from cogeneration to exploitation, and from accommodation to submission” (Hasan 1993: 79), the linguistic representation of the family may be indicative of its social representation (Berger and Luckmann 1966), defined as “knowledge and assumptions, [...], belief systems, attitudes and dispositions to act, ideas and ideologies, etc. within different domains of life” (Linell 2001: 124). Such a representation also has relevance for the preparation of teaching material.
This study investigates the linguistic representation of the family in a purpose-built corpus containing recent authentic material for sociology students, including academic texts, institutionalised texts and selected newspapers.
A quantitative analysis of linguistic patterns around the words family/families is made, followed by a qualitative analysis from an SFL perspective, to create a comparative picture of the different representations of the family in sociology literature.
Research questions include:
- How does the linguistic representation of the family differ in the genres used in undergraduate sociology classes?
- How far can any differences be explained by reference to genre-specificity alone?
- How can these findings be applied to develop appropriate pedagogic practices?
References
Berger, P.L. and Luckmann T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City NY: Anchor Books.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Introduction. In Fairclough N. (Ed.) Critical Language Awareness. London and New York: Longman.
Giddens, A. (2001). Sociology. 4th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hasan, R. (1993). Contexts for meaning. In Alatis J.E. (Ed.) Language, Communication and Social Meaning. Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 79-104.
Linell, P. (2001). Dynamics of discourse of stability of structure: Sociolinguistics and the legacy from linguistics. In Coupland N., Sarangi S. & Candlin C.N. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and social theory. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 107-126
This paper presents the results of an analysis of a corpus of novels by the Nobel prize winner for literature, Grazia Deledda. The most frequent multiword items in the original Italian were extracted through comparison with a reference corpus in order to highlight key themes and authorial style (Hoover, 2002). This evidence was then compared with that of individual novels by Deledda, in order to highlight any departures from the traces of authorial style described (Culpeper, 2002). Subsequently, salient multiword items suggesting a foregrounding of certain stylistic features were examined closer in the source texts with the aid of concordancing tools. A parallel corpus consisting of the English translations of selected Deledda novels was compiled in order to focus on these features, and the findings were analysed from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective (O'Halloran, 2007).
Though various researchers have described methods for approaching different text genres for the purpose of translation (Baker, 1992; Ulrych, 1996; Bell, 1997, etc.), not many have described practical ways to approach the translation of literary prose, though the need for such tools has been felt (Cluysenaar, 1976; Bassnett-McGuire, 1980; Snell-Hornby, 1995).
The findings of this study thus have relevance for applied and descriptive translation studies (Toury, 1995), addressing issues such as how far multiword items can provide an indication of authorial style, how translations of the novels compare with the originals as regards the style of each novel, and how a corpus-assisted analysis of literary texts may be exploited to provide an instrument for translators and trainee translators.
References
Baker M. (1992) In Other Words. A coursebook on translation. London: Routledge
Bassnett-McGuire S. (1980) Translation Studies. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd
Bell R. T. (1997) Translation and Translating. Theory and Practice. Harrow: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd.
Cluysenaar A. (1976) Introduction to Literary Stylistics. London: Batsford
Culpeper J. (2002). “Computers, language and characterisation: An analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet”. In U. Melander-Marttala, C. Östman, M. Kytö (eds.), Conversation in Life and in Literature, Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet, 11-30.
Hoover D.L. (2002) 'Frequent word sequences and statistical stylistics', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 7(2): 157-80
Mahlberg M. (2007a) “Corpus stylistics: bridging the gap between linguistic and literary studies”, in M. Hoey, M. Mahlberg, M. Stubbs, W. Teubert (eds), Text, discourse and corpora. London: Continuum. (219-246)
Mahlberg M. (2007b) Corpora and translation studies: textual functions of lexis in Bleak House and in a translation of the novel into German”. In M. Gatto & G. Todisco (eds.), Translation. The State of the Art/ La Traduzione. Lo stato dell'arte, Longo, Ravenna. (115-135)
O'Halloran K. (2007) The subconscious in James Joyce's 'Eveline': a corpus stylistics analysis that chews on the 'Fish hook', Language and Literature 16(3): 227-244
Snell-Hornby M. (1995) Translation studies: an integrated approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Starcke B. (2007) The phraseology of Jane Austen's Persuasion: Phraseological units as carriers of meaning, ICAME 30
Stubbs M. (2005) Conrad in the Computer: Examples of quantitative stylistics methods. Language and Literature, 14 (1), pp. 5-24
Toury G. (1995) Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Ulrych M. (1996) Translating texts. From theory to practice. Rapallo: CIDEB
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Related studies of literature in translation (e.g. Bosseaux, 2007; Munday, 2008) have compared the effectiveness of the translation strategies used in conveying the point of view created in the Source Text.
Using a corpus stylistics approach (e.g. Mahlberg, 2009), this paper focuses on the attribution of point of view in novels by the Italian writer Grazia Deledda, comparing them with their translations in English. It draws on the findings of an earlier study (Johnson, 2009) where certain frequent mental Processes of perception in Deledda’s work were found to create a distinctive alignment between the reader and the characters in the narrative. Subsequent qualitative investigation of these items in published English translations (Johnson, forthcoming) suggested that certain translation choices altered the point of view thus created.
Certain spatial and temporal references were found to be unusually frequent in the narrative structure of two novels in particular, and qualitative investigation suggests that these often herald a deictic shift towards a particular point of view, marking a transition to Free Indirect Discourse, as well as shifts in tense. Close qualitative examination of the translated novels is made to assess how far the point of view constructed by these cues in the ST is conveyed in the TT.
References
Bosseaux, C. (2007). How does it feel? Point of view in translation. Amsterdam/NY: Rodopi
Fowler, R. (1986, 2nd ed 1996). Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Johnson, J.H. (2009). "Towards an identification of the authorial style of Grazia Deledda. A corpus-assisted study" (Occasional Papers dei Quaderni del CeSLiC published online: http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002678/)
Johnson, J.H. (2010). "A corpus-assisted study of PARERE/SEMBRARE in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and La Madre. Constructing point of view in the Source Texts and their English translations", to be published in J. Douthwaite and K. Wales (eds), Stylistics and Co. (unlimited) – the range, methods and applications of stylistics, Textus 2010 (1).
Leech, G. N. & M. H. Short (1981, 2nd ed 2007). Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Pearson Education
Mahlberg, M. (2009). “Corpus stylistics and the Pickwickian watering-pot”. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum, 47-63
Munday, J. (2008). Style and Ideology in Translation. Abingdon: Routledge
Simpson, P. (1993). Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge
Uspensky, B. (1973). A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: University of California Press
Papers by Jane H Johnson
Intelligible pronunciation is undoubtedly an essential part of a lecturer’s communicative competence. However, while intelligibility refers to “the extent to which the speaker’s intended utterance is actually understood by a listener”, comprehension refers to “the listener’s perception of the degree of difficulty encountered when trying to understand an utterance” (Derwing & Munroe, 2005, p. 385). A crucial language factor affecting listeners’ degree of perceived comprehension is related to their judgement of their NNS lecturers’ pronunciation accuracy or accentedness (Clark, 2017; Costa & Mair, 2022; Lindemann & Subtirelu, 2013).
Furthermore, Kornder and Mennen (2021) noted that learners’ linguistic experience and language background – e.g. monolingual, bilingual – affect their perception of native and foreign-accented speech, which in turn affects learners’ perceptions of quality teaching (Jensen, 2013). In EMI settings, Clark (2017) found that while international students tended to be harsher in self-evaluation of English language competence and less critical of NNS lecturers’ language competence, second-year students, regardless of their L1, were more tolerant of lecturers’ English and had fewer problems in comprehension. However, more recently Costa and Mair (2022) pointed out that “while Italian listeners who share the lecturer’s first language are likely to be more lenient in their perception of the pronunciation […], the international students may find the local accent a greater impediment to comprehension” (p.11).
This paper aims to further contribute to the understanding of EMI students’ perception of their lecturers’ speech, and its impact on their comprehension. To do so, this paper reports on an online semi-structured survey administered to 128 students (including both Italian L1 speakers and speakers with other L1s) attending both first and second-cycle lectures delivered in English by Italian L1 lecturers. Students were asked to assess the speed of delivery, accentedness, intonation and pronunciation of their lecturers, and to evaluate whether these linguistic aspects interfered with lecture comprehension. Responses are compared and discussed on the basis of degree cycle, as well as in relation to L1.
Findings indicate that it is students’ past experience of English-taught courses as well as their familiarity with non-native English accented speech that influences students’ opinions of EMI lecturers’ language performance and their perceived comprehension in the classroom. The findings will serve to provide further empirical data which might help to set new pedagogical priorities for training programmes for both EMI lecturers and students.
References
Ball, P., & Lindsay, D. (2013). Language Demands and Support for English-Medium Instruction in Tertiary Education. Learning from a Specific Context. In Doiz, A., Lasagabaster, D. and Sierra, J.M. (Eds.). English-Medium Instruction at Universities. Global Challenges (pp. 44-66). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Clark, C. (2017). Perceptions of EMI: The students’ view of a Master’s degree programme. In K. Ackerley, M. Guarda, & F. Helm (Eds.), Sharing Perspectives on English-Medium Instruction (pp. 285–308). Bern: Peter Lang.
Costa, F., & Mair, O. (2022). Multimodality and pronunciation in ICLHE (Integration of Content and Language in Higher Education) training. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 16 (4-5) doi: 10.1080/17501229.2022.2053130.
Derwing, T. M., and Munro, M. J. (2005). Second Language Accent and Pronunciation Teaching: A Research-Based Approach. TESOL Quarterly 39 (3), 379–398. doi: 10.2307/3588486
Holliday, A. R. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Helm, F., and Guarda, M. (2015). ‘Improvisation is not allowed in a second language’. A survey of Italian lecturers’ concerns about teaching their subject through English. Language Learning in Higher Education, 5 (2), 353-373. doi: 10.1515/cercles-2015-0017
Jensen, C. 2013. Students’ Attitudes to Lecturers’ English in English Medium Higher Education in Denmark. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 13(1), 87-112. Retrieved from: https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/njes/article/view/1798/1572
Kornder, L., & Mennen, I. (2021). Listeners’ linguistic experience affects the degree of perceived nativeness of first language pronunciation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 717615. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717615.
Lindemann, S., & Subtirelu, N.C. (2013). Reliably Biased: The role of listener expectation in the perception of second language speech. Language Learning, 63, 567-594. doi:10.1111/LANG.12014.
Picciuolo, M., & Johnson, J.H. (2020). Contrasting EMI lecturers’ perceptions with practices at the University of Bologna. In Miller, D.R.(ed.), Quaderni del CeSLiC. Occasional papers. ISSN 1973-221X. Bologna: Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC) e Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna. AlmaDL, p. 23. doi: 10.6092/unibo/amsacta/6399.
Sercu, L. (2005). Foreign language teachers and the implementation of intercultural education: a comparative investigation of the professional self‐concepts and teaching practices of Belgian teachers of English, French and German. European Journal of Teacher Education, 28(1), 105-87. doi: 10.1080/02619760500040389.
Tange, H. (2010). Caught in the Tower of Babel: university lecturers' experiences with internationalisation. Language and Intercultural Communication, 10, 137 - 149. doi: 10.1080/14708470903342138.
Climate change communication plays a major role in forming people’s opinions and hence their actions. The words and framings chosen for this purpose are of fundamental importance (Lakoff, 2010, p. 73). For example, replacing the phrase ‘global warming’ with ‘climate change’ removed the emphasis on human action (Luntz, 2003). As Marx (2008) comments, the near-synonym environment would seem more useful for communicating the urgency of climate change action than nature, with its many ambiguities.
This paper compares the use of the nouns nature and environment within one specific genre of climate change communication over time: climate change non-fiction, a highly composite genre that plays a crucial role in science communication. For this study, a specialized corpus of around two million words consisting of over twenty non-fictional works on climate change and the environment from the mid-20th century to the present day is used to investigate and compare the participants and processes around the nouns within a CADS framework (Partington et al., 2013), focusing in particular on collocates, wordsketches, and agency to uncover patterns in usage.
Given the diachronic nature of this corpus, findings throw light on both differences and similarities in the linguistic patterns of the two nouns over a period which has seen an exponential increase in awareness of the effects of climate change.
References
Lakoff, G. (2010). Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment. Environmental Communication, 4(1), 70-81.
Luntz, F. (2003). The environment: A cleaner, safer, healthier America. The Luntz Research Companies straight talk (pp. 131-146). Unpublished Memo.
Marx, L. (2008). The Idea of Nature in America. Daedalus, 137(2), 8-21.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Williams, R. (1985). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Relevant expressions in Engineering lecture corpora from Italy, the UK, New Zealand and Malaysia are identified through extraction of selected query words. Analysis is made of their positioning with reference to the information highlighted, the degree of probability, and typical phraseology. Results are quantified and compared with reference to NS and NNS lecturers.
Findings suggest that NNS are less likely than NS to use such expressions prospectively with regard to important information, just as they are less likely to make use of the cumulative effect of this expression together with other importance markers, that Italian lecturers tend to hedge more than NS lecturers about assessment content, and that lexis and phraseology may vary due to L1 interference. Findings have relevance for pedagogical practices and for teacher professional development.
Keywords: assessment-related expressions, importance markers, Engineering lectures
Deroey, K.L.B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is': lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In Vandelanotte L., Kristin, D. Caroline G. & Ditte K. (Eds.), Recent advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and exploiting corpora, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 265-291.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Johnson, J.H. (forthcoming). Importance Marking in EMI Lectures: A Comparative Study
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2011). A corpus-based study of lecture functions. Moderna Sprak 105/2: 1–22.
Miller, C., & Parlett, M. (1974). Up to the Mark: A Study of the Examination Game. London: Society for Research into Higher Education.
JH Johnson and M Picciuolo
According to the European Commission, “[m]aking higher education systems inclusive and connected to society requires providing the right conditions for students of different backgrounds to succeed” . In recent years, one way that HE institutions have promoted inclusive education has been by introducing English-Medium Instruction (EMI), involving a shift to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as the instructional language in multilingual university settings.
The importance of student inclusion in lectures is not new. Talk-in-interaction is widely considered as an indicator of good pedagogical practice (Muijs & Reynolds 2011; Lo & Macaro 2015) and is generally accepted as beneficial to learning (Marton & Tsui 2004). Classroom talk has strong discoursal characteristics since lecturers’ main activities of teaching are realised linguistically through classroom talk. Given that lectures in Italy are generally lecturer-initiated (Ciliberti & Anderson 1999) by analysing what lecturers actually say when participating in classroom activity, patterns of participation may be revealed.
Investigating the use of personal pronouns is one way to do this, since pronouns are “central to intersubjective communication – they are the means language provides for constituting the roles of speaker and addressee in face-to-face interaction” (Rounds 1987: 14). Adel (2012) examined the occurrences of you in different genres of academic discourse, finding a relatively higher frequency of references to the audience as well as discourse organisation units in spoken academic discourse. In their analyses of ELF lecturer discourse, Formentelli (2017), Dafouz et al (2007), Dafouz Milne (2006) and Molino (2018) all found the most frequent pronoun to be we, signalling a collaborative approach and acting as an indicator of inclusion. While Walsh (2004) found I to be the most frequent personal pronoun, she noted that interpersonal rapport was created through involving students in activities also through audience-inclusive we, since such inclusive pronominal forms are “likely to foster the active participation of students in class, boosting their sense of belonging to a group” (Formentelli 2017: 68). Morell (2004) found that the most frequent pronouns depended on the type of lecture, with we most common in interactive and I in non-interactive lecture types.
The study presented in this paper aims to further contribute to this debate by investigating the frequency and function of personal pronouns in EMI lecturers’ classroom talk and comparing them with lecturers’ own perception of the degree of interaction in their lectures. This enables us to assess the level of inclusion in EMI lectures at UNIBO as well as to show the extent to which lecturers’ perceptions are consistent with their discursive practices. Indeed, non-native English-speaking lecturers have not always found it easy to adapt to the new EMI environment, claiming that EMI requires more time for preparation and finding it difficult to adjust their traditional lecturing style to promote active student participation (Jensen & Thøgersen 2011; Picciuolo & Johnson 2020).
This study extends ongoing research into EMI lecturer discourse (Johnson & Picciuolo 2020; Picciuolo & Johnson 2020). We interviewed lecturers of both Physical Sciences and Social Sciences subjects at an Italian university about their teaching experiences. Then we used SketchEngine to compare the frequencies of 1st and 2nd person pronouns across disciplines in a corpus of approx. 200,000 words of lectures given by the same lecturers. Lecturers’ perceptions might be expected to match their discursive practices. In fact, most lecturers in our survey considered the level of interaction in their classrooms to be fairly high. We found the pronoun you to be the most frequent pronoun used by lecturers from both macro-areas in our corpus, possibly suggesting direct reference, enabling the lecturer to interact with the students, asking them questions or expanding on previous points (Dafouz et al 2007), and thus perhaps providing evidence of a certain degree of co-operation between lecturer and students. However, a closer look at the co-text shows that you mostly appears in conditional sentences preceded by the conjunction if, in both macro-areas. Therefore, you functions here as an impersonal indexical which is not directly deictic to the hearer (idem. 2007: 653). This would instead suggest that lecturers are reluctant to promote bidirectional speech exchanges.
Findings may thus contribute to designing appropriate material for lecturer training courses. Indeed, the preparation of teaching materials for EMI lecturers’ support courses should bear in mind the importance of raising awareness among lecturers regarding the role of lexico-grammatical resources in mediating content-subjects (Lo & Lin 2019: 155), as well as among students, since “audience awareness is a central skill needed for effective communication” (Adel 2012: 122).
References
Ädel, A. 2012. ‘What I want you to remember is...’: Audience orientation in monologic academic discourse. English Text Construction, 5(1), 101–127.
Ciliberti, A. & Anderson, L. 1999. “Introduction.” In Le forme della comunicazione accademica: Ricerche linguistiche sulla didattica universitaria in ambito umanistico, Ciliberti, A. & Anderson, L. (eds), 29-44. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Dafouz Milne, E. 2006. “Solidarity Strategies in CLIL University Lectures: Teachers’ Use of Pronouns and Modal Verbs.” VIEWS: Vienna English Working Papers, 15(3), 9-15
Dafouz, E., Núñez, B. & Sancho, C. 2007. “Analysing Stance in a CLIL University Context: Nonnative Speaker Use of Personal Pronouns and Modal Verbs.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10(5), 647-662.
Formentelli, M. 2017. Taking Stance in English as a Lingua Franca: Managing Interpersonal Relations in Academic Lectures. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Jensen, C. & Thøgersen, J. 2011. University lecturers’ attitudes towards English as the medium of instruction. Iberica, 22, 13–33.
Johnson, J. H. & Picciuolo, M. 2020. Interaction in spoken academic discourse in an EMI context: the use of questions. Conference proceedings of the Congress UPV 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’20) Domenech, J., Merello, P., de la Poza, E. & Peña-Ortiz, R. (eds) Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, pp. 211-219. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAD20.2020.11787
Lo, Y. Y., & Lin, A. M. Y. (eds). 2019. “Teaching, Learning and Scaffolding in CLIL Science Classrooms” [Special Issue]. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 7(2), 151-328.
Lo, Y. Y. & Macaro, E. 2015. Getting used to content and language integrated learning: what can classroom interaction reveal? The Language Learning Journal, 43, 1-17. 10.1080/09571736.2015.1053281
Marton, F. & Tsui, A. 2004. Classroom discourse and the space of learning. Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Molino, A. 2018. ʻWhat I’m Speaking is almost English…ʼ: A Corpus-based Study of Metadiscourse in English medium Lectures at an Italian University. Educational sciences: theory & practice, 18 (4), 935-956.
Morell, T. 2004 Interactive lecture discourse for university ELF students. English for Specific Purposes, 23 (2004), 325 - 338.
Muijs, D. & Reynolds, D. 2011. Effective teaching: evidence and practice. Third edition. London: SAGE Publications.
Picciuolo, M. & Johnson, J. H. 2020. Contrasting EMI lecturers’ perceptions with practices at the University of Bologna. Quaderni del CeSLiC. Occasional papers. Miller, D. R. (ed) ISSN 1973-221X. Bologna: Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC) e Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna. AlmaDL, p. 23. http://amsacta.unibo.it/6399/
Rounds, P. L. 1987. “Multifunctional Personal Pronoun Use in an Educational Setting”. English for Specific Purposes, (6)1, 13-29.
Walsh, P. 2004. “A Complex Interplay of Voices: First and Second Person Pronouns in University Lectures.” In Evaluation in Oral and Written Academic Discourse, Anderson L. & Bamford, J. (eds), 31-52. Roma: Officina Edizioni.
The term itself has highly negative evaluative connotations. It is a class - or classes - which should not exist. But if whoever uses the term believes that it - or they - do exist, who is considered to be responsible? Are the same social actors blamed in different societies and by political voices from different political standpoints? There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that, in western newspapers at least, the term is ‘weaponised’, one political side accuses the other of having created an underclass by its negative or negligent policies. In another example, the Chinese authorities are criticized for having created the hukou, an ‘underclass’ of migrant workers (South China Morning Post).
A number of statements in recent sociology literature assert that the underclass is very frequently negatively represented “as a moral category” defined by its “deviant behavioural norms” (Hamilton, 2012: 86), however our findings suggest that the term is not in fact used to demonise, nor are the connotations of underclass always negative. We also found that certain themes connected with the underclass are universally relevant. In/visibility, for example, is a common feature, and im/migrants, either external or internal, seem to form an underclass within a society in all our sources. Women too often feature as an underclass within the underclass. The theme of how to prevent a single-generation underclass turning into a permanent one is also discussed across the newspapers, with possible solutions offered. Finally there is some evidence, with the emergence of “creative underclasses”, that the word is increasingly being used metaphorically and in the positive sense, while another surprising finding was a higher frequency in the use of a romanticised underclass in fictional settings.
A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach is used (Partington et al, 2013) in the study (Johnson and Partington, forthcoming). The corpora employed includes the SiBol suite of English language newspaper corpora (covering the period 1993-2013) alongside corpora of newspaper comment pieces and of political interviews from 2015-2016 which treat the topic of underclasses, downloaded using Lexis Nexis.
References
Johnson, J.H. & Partington, A. (forthcoming) ‘A corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) of representations of the ‘underclass’ in the English-language press: Who are they, how do they behave, and who is to blame for them?’ In Friginal, E. (ed.). (forthcoming) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics (Chapter 13), Oxford: Routledge.
Hamilton, K. (2012). Low-income Families and Coping through Brands: Inclusion or Stigma? Sociology 46(1), 74–90.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus assisted discourse studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
The focus of this paper is to explore how corpus stylistics and metaphor analysis within a translation perspective may be combined to provide a consistent analytical framework of the literary text for awareness-raising in the student of English.
Previous research into Grazia Deledda’s authorial style (Johnson 2009) using corpus stylistics techniques (eg. Mahlberg 2009) showed that figurative language was prominent in her work, particularly body part metonymy, and simile (Johnson 2014), confirming and extending previous non-corpus-based studies (eg. Miccinesi 1975). Typically used in conjunction with the moods and emotions of the characters (see also Johnson 2010), such figurative language often occurred in juxtaposition with metaphorical expressions connected with the elements and the natural landscape (see also Massaiu 1972; Scrivano 1990).
With a view to extending the previous studies, this study applies corpus tools to further explore the metaphorical usage of certain key phrases.
Our aim here is to combine keywords/phrases and metaphor into a consistent methodological framework – 1) keywords/phrases extraction and preliminary reading 2) metaphor analysis and analytical reading also in a 3) contrastive cultural perspective - and provide a template for language awareness-raising practices in the classroom, while making reference to selected translations in order to discuss problematic issues these raise for translators, as well as conceptual peculiarities also in a contrastive perspective.
While most such studies have focussed on works in their original language, ours instead compares the translation with the original text. More specifically, we explore the stylistic elements identified in Julian Barnes’ novel ‘The Sense of an Ending’ in the original and in its Italian translation. Indeed, if translators need to recreate predominant stylistic features of the Source Text in order to maintain stylistic or translational equivalence (Popovic 1976), then the functional equivalent (ibid. 1976: 6) of any significant foregrounding in the ST should be recreated in the Target Text.
Drawing on earlier studies of Barnes’ style (e.g. Shepherd and Berber Sardinha 2013), this work further explores aspects such as point of view (Simpson 1993) and the significance of memory in the novel by comparing the two parts of the ST and the TT, thus applying notions of tertiary or internal deviation (Leech 1985). Corpus stylistics methods were used to identify ‘good bets’ (Leech 2008: 164) which were then subjected to qualitative analysis. It was found for example that key clusters belonging to the category of ‘uncertain impressionistic perceptions’ (Shepherd and Berber Sardinha 2013), frequent in the ST, were minimally present in the key clusters of the TT. Instead, a number of Mental processes figured among the keywords of Part Two when compared with Part One of the TT, whereas this was not the case in the ST.
References
Leech, G.N. 1965. “‘This bread I break’: Language and Interpretation”, Review of English Literature, 6.2 London: Longmans, Green.
Leech, G.N. 1985. “Stylistics”. In T. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse and literature: new approaches to the analysis of literary genres. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Leech, G.N. 2008. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Leech, G. N. and Short M. H. 1981. Style in fiction: a linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. London: Longman
Mahlberg, M. 2013. Corpus stylistics and Dickens’s fiction. New York/London: Routledge.
Mukařovsky, J. 1958. “Standard language and poetic language”. In P. L. Garvin (ed. and tr.) A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style. Washington D.C.: American University Language Centre.
Popovic, A. 1976. A Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation. Edmonton: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta.
Shepherd, T.M.G. and Berber Sardinha, T. 2013. “A Rough Guide to doing Corpus Stylistics”. Matraga, rio de janeiro, v.20, n.32, Jan/Jun. 2013.
Simpson, P. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London/New York: Routledge.
Stubbs, M. 2005. “Conrad in the computer: examples of quantitative stylistics methods”, Language and Literature, 14 (1): 5-24.
Though risk within a sociological framework has long been an object of study, risk sociology has only recently been combined with linguistics (e.g. Zinn 2010, Hardy and Colombini 2011, Hamilton et al 2007, and Johnson, forthcoming). This paper uses a similar cross-disciplinary approach to investigate diachronic changes in the linguistic representation of threat with reference to the family in news discourse.
The media plays a major role in shaping the views of the public (Kitzinger and Reilly 1997: 320) and threat is a key lexical item in news discourse, perhaps also because at least two or even three of the newsworthy roles (Galtung and Ruge 1965) - negativity, and dramatic or sensational impact, as well as personalisation - are filled by making reference to threat. This paper explores the nature of these threats, focussing, in Fillmore and Atkins’ (1992) terms, on the Harm embodied by the threat, the Victim of the threat, and specifically, the Actor - whether implicit or explicit - involved in perpetrating the threat, since choice of the word threat, unlike its near-synonyms risk or danger, always implies reference to an Actor.
Using an MD-CADS approach (Partington ed. 2010), I exploit purpose-built corpora featuring all the articles containing the lemma THREAT within a 10 word span of family/families from both the Guardian and the Daily Mail between 1993 and 2012 (each corpus containing around 1 million tokens) in order to investigate linguistic patterns around the lemma in context. Finally a qualitative analysis of particular stretches of discourse is made to build a comparative picture of changes in threats to the family in the press.
References
Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage.
Fillmore, C.J. and Atkins, B.T.S. 1992. Toward a Frame-based Lexicon: the Semantics of RISK and its Neighbours. In Lehrer, Adrienne / Feder Kittay, Eva (eds.) Frames, Fields and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organisation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 75-102
Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. H. 1965. The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2, 64-91
Hamilton, C., Adolphs, S., Nerlich, B. 2007. The Meanings of ‘Risk’: A View from Corpus Linguistics. Discourse and Society 18 /2, 163-181.
Hardy, D.E. and Colombini, C. B. 2011. A Genre, Collocational, and Constructional Analysis of RISK*. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16/4, 462-485.
Johnson, J.H. (forthcoming) Family in the UK – Risks, Threats and Dangers: A Modern Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study across Two Genres. In Gotti Maurizio / Giannoni Davide S. (eds.) Corpus Analysis for Descriptive and Pedagogic Purposes: English Specialised Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.
Kitzinger, J. and Reilly, J. 1997. The Rise and Fall of Risk Reporting. Media Coverage of Human Genetics Research, ‘False Memory Syndrome’ and ‘Mad Cow Disease’. European Journal of Communication 12/3, 319-350.
Nohrstedt, S.A. 2010 (ed.). Communicating Risks: Towards the Threat Society. Goteborg, Sweden: Nordicom/University of Gothenburg,
Partington, A. 2010 (ed.) Modern Diachronic Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on UK newspapers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ungar, S. 2001. Moral panic versus the risk society: the implications of the changing sites of social anxiety. British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 52 Issue No. 2 ( June 2001), 271–291.
Zinn, J.O. 2010 (ed.). Special Issue on Risk. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 4/2.
A corpus stylistic approach may provide insights into literary texts by means of generating quantitative data from the texts in electronic format and analysing these data qualitatively to provide information about stylistic features of the texts (e.g. Mahlberg 2009). The approach is applied in this presentation to a specially compiled corpus of selected novels by Grazia Deledda and their translations into English, for the purpose of exploring figurative language.
Earlier corpus-assisted research into Deledda’s authorial style (Johnson 2009) showed that the lemmas parere/sembrare emerged as key in relation to a comparable reference corpus. Besides serving to construct a particular point of view (Simpson 1993; Johnson 2010, 2011), the high frequency of these mental processes of perception also confirms the findings of non-corpus-based Deledda scholars (e.g. Miccinesi 1975) who noted the importance given in Deledda’s works to the characters’ inner feelings, which are often described using figurative language such as simile and often marked lexically by expressions such as come se/come + [article], expressions which also featured highly in wordlists of Deledda’s novels. The moods and emotions of the characters are often expressed through reference to the semantic domain of the elements and the natural landscape (e.g. Massaiu 1972; Dolfi 1979; Scrivano 1990), symbolically representing the deeper themes in Deledda’s work (Gagliardi 2010) and this feature also emerges through a corpus stylistic analysis.
The presentation will discuss how corpus stylistics may thus provide valid assistance in identifying key figurative elements in preparation for the translation process, through a comparison of published translations of Deledda’s work into English with their source texts.
References
Dolfi A.. 1979. Grazia Deledda, Mursia, Milano.
Gagliardi E.. 2010. I Romanzi cervesi di Grazia Deledda, Ravenna: Longo editore
Johnson J. H.. 2009. “Towards an identification of the authorial style of Grazia Deledda. A corpus-assisted study” Occasional Papers dei Quaderni del CeSLiC published online: http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002678/
Johnson J. H.. 2010. “A corpus-assisted study of parere/sembrare in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and La Madre. Constructing point of view in the Source Texts and their English translations”, in J. Douthwaite and K. Wales (eds), Stylistics and Co. (unlimited) – the range, methods and applications of stylistics, Textus 2010 (1).
Johnson J. H.. 2011. "The use of deictic reference in identifying point of view in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and its translation into English", in Target 23 :1 (2011), 62-76
Mahlberg M.. 2009. “Corpus stylistics and the Pickwickian watering-pot”. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, London: Continuum, pp. 47-63
Massaiu M.. 1972. La Sardegna di Grazia Deledda, CELUC, Milano.
Miccinesi M.. 1975. Grazia Deledda, La Nuova Italia: Firenze
Scrivano R.. 1990. “I topoi del mito nella Deledda”, in A. Pellegrino (ed.), Metafora e biografia nell'opera di Grazia Deledda, Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, Roma, (Atti di convegno, 1987), pp. 17-30.
Simpson P.. 1993. Language, ideology and point of view, London: Routledge
The corpus examined comprises all the articles published in one of the discipline's most authoritative academic journals, the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, between 2000 and the end of 2011. Collected in electronic form and divided into subsections both as regards text types (abstracts, article bodies, references, etc.), and period of time (EARLY: 2000-2004; MID: 2005-2008; LATE: 2009-2011), the texts have a total of 1.5 million tokens.
Concordancing software (WordSmith 5.0) was used to compare different parts of the IJCL corpus and highlight keywords and key clusters. This initial stage was followed by qualitative analysis of the concordance lines of keywords occurring over a substantial number of articles in order to identify diachronic changes as well as similarities (see also Taylor Forthcoming) in topics treated as well as lexical trends that could be generalised to the journal and possibly the field as a whole.
Initial findings emerging from keyword analysis suggest that, whereas earlier articles in the IJCL indicated greater focus on topic fields such as translation, terminology and collocation, more focus in later years is placed on discourse, grammar – particularly modality – and spoken language.
A further research direction was introduced by comparing the IJCL corpus with a specially compiled corpus of articles from another social sciences discipline. This comprised all the articles from the online version of Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association, between 2008 and 2011, making up a reference corpus of almost 2 million tokens. This has enabled further investigation into what makes corpus linguistics discourse distinctive.
Keywords: MD-CADS, academic articles, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, content analysis, keywords
References
Taylor, C. 2008. What is corpus linguistics? What the data says. ICAME Journal, 32: 143-164.
Taylor, C. Forthcoming. Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8(2).
Since “discourse and society shape each other” (Fairclough 1992: 9), and “language is used for the living of life, how it acts in the creation, maintenance, and alteration of human relations, which range from consensus to conflict, from cogeneration to exploitation, and from accommodation to submission” (Hasan 1993: 79), the linguistic representation of the family may be indicative of its social representation (Berger and Luckmann 1966), defined as “knowledge and assumptions, [...], belief systems, attitudes and dispositions to act, ideas and ideologies, etc. within different domains of life” (Linell 2001: 124). Such a representation also has relevance for the preparation of teaching material.
This study investigates the linguistic representation of the family in a purpose-built corpus containing recent authentic material for sociology students, including academic texts, institutionalised texts and selected newspapers.
A quantitative analysis of linguistic patterns around the words family/families is made, followed by a qualitative analysis from an SFL perspective, to create a comparative picture of the different representations of the family in sociology literature.
Research questions include:
- How does the linguistic representation of the family differ in the genres used in undergraduate sociology classes?
- How far can any differences be explained by reference to genre-specificity alone?
- How can these findings be applied to develop appropriate pedagogic practices?
References
Berger, P.L. and Luckmann T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City NY: Anchor Books.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Introduction. In Fairclough N. (Ed.) Critical Language Awareness. London and New York: Longman.
Giddens, A. (2001). Sociology. 4th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hasan, R. (1993). Contexts for meaning. In Alatis J.E. (Ed.) Language, Communication and Social Meaning. Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 79-104.
Linell, P. (2001). Dynamics of discourse of stability of structure: Sociolinguistics and the legacy from linguistics. In Coupland N., Sarangi S. & Candlin C.N. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and social theory. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 107-126
This paper presents the results of an analysis of a corpus of novels by the Nobel prize winner for literature, Grazia Deledda. The most frequent multiword items in the original Italian were extracted through comparison with a reference corpus in order to highlight key themes and authorial style (Hoover, 2002). This evidence was then compared with that of individual novels by Deledda, in order to highlight any departures from the traces of authorial style described (Culpeper, 2002). Subsequently, salient multiword items suggesting a foregrounding of certain stylistic features were examined closer in the source texts with the aid of concordancing tools. A parallel corpus consisting of the English translations of selected Deledda novels was compiled in order to focus on these features, and the findings were analysed from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective (O'Halloran, 2007).
Though various researchers have described methods for approaching different text genres for the purpose of translation (Baker, 1992; Ulrych, 1996; Bell, 1997, etc.), not many have described practical ways to approach the translation of literary prose, though the need for such tools has been felt (Cluysenaar, 1976; Bassnett-McGuire, 1980; Snell-Hornby, 1995).
The findings of this study thus have relevance for applied and descriptive translation studies (Toury, 1995), addressing issues such as how far multiword items can provide an indication of authorial style, how translations of the novels compare with the originals as regards the style of each novel, and how a corpus-assisted analysis of literary texts may be exploited to provide an instrument for translators and trainee translators.
References
Baker M. (1992) In Other Words. A coursebook on translation. London: Routledge
Bassnett-McGuire S. (1980) Translation Studies. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd
Bell R. T. (1997) Translation and Translating. Theory and Practice. Harrow: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd.
Cluysenaar A. (1976) Introduction to Literary Stylistics. London: Batsford
Culpeper J. (2002). “Computers, language and characterisation: An analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet”. In U. Melander-Marttala, C. Östman, M. Kytö (eds.), Conversation in Life and in Literature, Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet, 11-30.
Hoover D.L. (2002) 'Frequent word sequences and statistical stylistics', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 7(2): 157-80
Mahlberg M. (2007a) “Corpus stylistics: bridging the gap between linguistic and literary studies”, in M. Hoey, M. Mahlberg, M. Stubbs, W. Teubert (eds), Text, discourse and corpora. London: Continuum. (219-246)
Mahlberg M. (2007b) Corpora and translation studies: textual functions of lexis in Bleak House and in a translation of the novel into German”. In M. Gatto & G. Todisco (eds.), Translation. The State of the Art/ La Traduzione. Lo stato dell'arte, Longo, Ravenna. (115-135)
O'Halloran K. (2007) The subconscious in James Joyce's 'Eveline': a corpus stylistics analysis that chews on the 'Fish hook', Language and Literature 16(3): 227-244
Snell-Hornby M. (1995) Translation studies: an integrated approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Starcke B. (2007) The phraseology of Jane Austen's Persuasion: Phraseological units as carriers of meaning, ICAME 30
Stubbs M. (2005) Conrad in the Computer: Examples of quantitative stylistics methods. Language and Literature, 14 (1), pp. 5-24
Toury G. (1995) Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Ulrych M. (1996) Translating texts. From theory to practice. Rapallo: CIDEB
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Related studies of literature in translation (e.g. Bosseaux, 2007; Munday, 2008) have compared the effectiveness of the translation strategies used in conveying the point of view created in the Source Text.
Using a corpus stylistics approach (e.g. Mahlberg, 2009), this paper focuses on the attribution of point of view in novels by the Italian writer Grazia Deledda, comparing them with their translations in English. It draws on the findings of an earlier study (Johnson, 2009) where certain frequent mental Processes of perception in Deledda’s work were found to create a distinctive alignment between the reader and the characters in the narrative. Subsequent qualitative investigation of these items in published English translations (Johnson, forthcoming) suggested that certain translation choices altered the point of view thus created.
Certain spatial and temporal references were found to be unusually frequent in the narrative structure of two novels in particular, and qualitative investigation suggests that these often herald a deictic shift towards a particular point of view, marking a transition to Free Indirect Discourse, as well as shifts in tense. Close qualitative examination of the translated novels is made to assess how far the point of view constructed by these cues in the ST is conveyed in the TT.
References
Bosseaux, C. (2007). How does it feel? Point of view in translation. Amsterdam/NY: Rodopi
Fowler, R. (1986, 2nd ed 1996). Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Johnson, J.H. (2009). "Towards an identification of the authorial style of Grazia Deledda. A corpus-assisted study" (Occasional Papers dei Quaderni del CeSLiC published online: http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002678/)
Johnson, J.H. (2010). "A corpus-assisted study of PARERE/SEMBRARE in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and La Madre. Constructing point of view in the Source Texts and their English translations", to be published in J. Douthwaite and K. Wales (eds), Stylistics and Co. (unlimited) – the range, methods and applications of stylistics, Textus 2010 (1).
Leech, G. N. & M. H. Short (1981, 2nd ed 2007). Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Pearson Education
Mahlberg, M. (2009). “Corpus stylistics and the Pickwickian watering-pot”. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum, 47-63
Munday, J. (2008). Style and Ideology in Translation. Abingdon: Routledge
Simpson, P. (1993). Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge
Uspensky, B. (1973). A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: University of California Press
First, it will further and extend research by considering linguistic and discursive patterns of meaning in the broad semantic area of human mobility vis-a-vis immobility, and the values they may construe, by combining Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington et al 2013) with a discourse analytical perspective grounded in SFL and CDA (Thompson and Hunston 2006, Martin and White 2005, Bednarek and Caple 2014). In fact, as early as 2011, the UK Foresight Report was highlighting vulnerabilities due to the impact of environmental change and the potential inability of “trapped” populations to move (2011: 9). However, our recent research suggests that there is little mention of the fact that some people do not, or cannot, move. Given the importance of this topic, one would expect it to be present in climate change and migration discourse in the media. While most studies have tended to focus on migration as an adaptation strategy, research into why some people do not move has also received scant attention (but see Zickgraf 2019, Ayeb-Karlsson et al 2018).
Secondly, drawing on research into discursive absence as discussed by Partington (2014), Duguid & Partington (2018), Schröter & Taylor (2018), Taylor (2012), the paper will provide some discussion about the methodological and interpretative challenges these absences may prompt within this particular context.
For the purpose of this study, and in order to answer our research questions, two diachronic specialized corpora from two different genres are used. One consists of articles from a selection of quality newspapers from the Global North and the Global South, in the 3-month period before and after COP21 in Paris (2015), and COP26 in Glasgow (2021), amounting to roughly 500,000 tokens, thus covering two key periods in the negotiations of climate change, and contributing to “a distinct era of policy making” (Nash 2017). The second corpus consists of a collection of high-level speeches from the official representatives of countries in the Global North and the Global South from COP21 and Cop26 (60 speeches each) amounting to approx. 80,000 tokens, in order to compare dominant and absent discourses over time and across genres.
References
Ayeb-Karlsson, S., C.D. Smith, D. Kniveton. 2018. A discursive review of the textual use of ‘trapped’ in environmental migration studies: the conceptual birth and troubled teenage years of trapped populations. Ambio, 47 (5) (2018), pp. 557-573.
Bednarek M. & H. Caple 2014 Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond. Discourse & Society 2014, Vol. 25(2) 135–158
Bevitori C. & Johnson J.H. 2017. “Human Mobility and Climate Change at the Crossroad: A Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of the Nexus in UK and US Newspaper Discourse”. In K.E Russo & R. Wodak (eds.) Special Issue, The Representation of ‘Exceptional Migrants’ in Media Discourse: The Case of Climate-induced Migration, p.1-19 ANGLISTICA AION AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL - ISSN: 2035-8504 vol. 21 (2).
Bevitori C. & Johnson J.H. 2022 Risk and Resilience in a changing climate: a diachronic analysis in the press across the globe «TEXT & TALK», 2022, 42, pp. 1 – 23
Duguid A. & Partington A. 2018 Absence: you don’t know what you’re missing. Or do you? Taylor, C. & Marchi, A. (eds.), Corpus approaches to discourse: a critical review. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, pp.38-59
Foresight: Migration and Global Environmental Change (2011) Final Project Report, The Government Office for Science, London.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nash, S.L. 2017. From Cancun to Paris: An Era of Policy Making on Climate Change and Migration. Global Policy, 9(1), 53-63.
Partington, A. 2014. Mind the gaps: the role of corpus linguistics in investigating absence, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:1 (2014), 118-146
Partington, A., Duguid A. & Taylor. 2013. Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. C. (eds)
Schröter, M. & Taylor C. (eds) 2018. Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse. Empirical Approaches, Palgrave Macmillan.
Taylor, C. 2012. ‘And there it isn’t: (how) can we access the absent using CADS?’ Talk given at CADSConf 2012, September 13–14, University of Bologna.
Thompson, G. & Hunston, S. (eds.) 2006. System and Corpus: exploring connections. London: Arnold.
Zickgraf C. 2019. Keeping People in Place: Political Factors of (Im)mobility and Climate Change. Social Sciences, MDPI, Open Access Journal, vol. 8(8): 228.