<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This paper aims at showing why the stylistician can be construed as a prolific “impostor” in a most positive sense: pledged to no specific linguistic prophet, she can opt for different theoretical linguistic tools (in the sphere of pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, cognitive grammar, etc.) depending on her object of study and what her research question is. The liberty claimed by the stylistician explains why stylistics is the “undisciplined” child of linguistics, shirking any clear definition of its boundaries. It will be argued that stylistics can only exist as a cross-disciplinary field given its conception of language as fundamentally contextualized. If it was a discipline determined by clear-cut pre-established boundaries, stylistics would be far more “disciplined” but would run the risk of serving only itself. The broad goal of this paper is thus to evince that the “indisciplinarity” of stylistics constitutes its very defining essence. With this aim in mind, it will demonstrate what stylistics owes to other disciplines, what it shares with similar language-based disciplines and what it can offer to other fields or practices of knowledge.</abstract>

The ‘indisciplinarity’ of stylistics

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This study investigates the relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge as measured by the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation and Beglar, 2007) and free productive vocabulary knowledge as demonstrated by the learners when writing a short story based on pictures. The focus is on three different areas of productive vocabulary use: lexical diversity (i.e. the proportion of different words in a text), lexical sophistication (i.e. the proportion of advanced words in a text) and lexical density (i.e. the proportion of content words in a text). The results of a bivariate correlation analysis indicate that there is a moderate relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical diversity of the texts they produce; there is a weak relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical sophistication in the texts; and there is no relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical density.</abstract>

The relationship between receptive and productive vocabulary of Slavic EFL learners

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In doing a critical reading of news commentary headlines drawn from a corpus, this study uses critical stylistics as an initial tool for delineating the headlines’ textual, ideational and interpersonal features and also for categorizing them according to the main type of triggering located in their respective textual-conceptual functions. Presuppositions are found to be a key device in constructing the headlines’ ideational “text-worlds”, which can strategically activate readers’ “belief systems knowledge” and rapidly validate or shape their attitudes regarding social reality, even when a headline is being scanned and read autonomously on a mobile device platform. To better understand the contextual and representational role of these news commentary headlines in contemporary journalistic knowledge production and reception, this research examines their stylistic and syntactic design, identifying accompanying characteristics such as embedded ideological perspectives and propositional interpretive frameworks, while noting the headlines’ specialized positioning as cohesive interpolating texts in the digital news ecosystem.</abstract>

Critical reading of online news commentary headlines: Stylistic and pragmatic aspects

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The way the structure of the Japanese honorific system <italic>keigo</italic> is grasped and presented influences the understanding and appropriate use of the honorific forms this system includes. Functional categorization makes it easier to perceive principles that are not immediately evident.This paper argues for the superiority of the new 5-category division into <italic>sonkeigo</italic> (‘deferential speech’), <italic>kenjōgo</italic> (‘humble speech’), <italic>teichōgo</italic> (‘formal polite speech’), <italic>teineigo</italic> (‘polite speech’) and <italic>bikago</italic> (‘refined speech’), recently promulgated by the Ministry of Education, over the traditional and wide-spread 3-category division into <italic>sonkeigo</italic>, <italic>kenjōgo</italic> and <italic>teineigo.</italic> It proposes that the new system offers significant functional advantages in that it better captures the ways social relations are expressed within the Japanese honorific system and that it sets out more clear-cut categories which better reflect the differences between the forms available to the speaker. Through description and comparison of the more notable frameworks proposed by Japanese linguists over the past fifty years, the paper seeks to demonstrate that the 5-category system is not just another more extensive model but also represents a logical outcome of developments in this field of scholarship.</abstract>

On the categorization of the Japanese honorific system <italic>Keigo</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
There is very little research on the use of metadiscourse markers in abstracts across different disciplines (especially in a single study) in the research of undergraduates as novice researchers, and little qualitative research has been done on the topic in EFL and ESL contexts altogether. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the use of metadiscourse markers in EFL and ESL undergraduates’ abstracts in social sciences across three disciplines (English Language and Communication, Mass Communication, and Psychology) in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at UCSI University, a Malaysian private university. We adopt Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model which involves two main categories – interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse – to analyse all 62 abstracts collected from the 2016 Colloquium held at the faculty. The method used is qualitative to categorize the metadiscourse markers accordingly as well as counting their frequencies. The findings showed that the interactional metadiscourse markers were used nearly twice as often as the interactive discourse markers for the three disciplines, and the most used markers are boosters. The most used interactive metadiscourse markers are transitions, followed by frame markers, evidentials, code glosses, and endophoric markers. The findings can be used by ESL and EFL instructors when teaching students learning argumentative writing and research writing to use metadiscourse markers to make arguments and write proper critiques to reflect their stance and voice. This research adds some insights into this neglected genre of academic discourse at the undergraduate level.
</abstract>

An investigation into the use of metadiscourse in undergraduates’ abstracts in social sciences

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Some traditional accounts view literal meaning (LM) as the central component in the process of meaning interpretation. This paper supports this view while adding that LM is the first but not the only piece of evidence available to the hearer of the speaker’s meaning. After critically evaluating examples from previous studies and my own examples, the study concludes that discourse comprehension is a sequential and graded process. To understand the significance of LM as evidence in the process of meaning understanding, the study has to reconsider the notion of evidence according to Relevance Theory (RT) and define the vigorously debated term of LM. The results from this study suggest that literal meaning is initial and context is subsequential; while both co-determine the speaker’s meaning in implicature, the latter enriches the speaker’s meaning into a higher order speech act in explicature.</abstract>

Literal meaning: A first step to meaning interpretation

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
One of the defining morphological properties of nouns and adjectives of Dagbani (a Gur/Mabia language of northern Ghana) and related languages is the presence of suffixes that mark number (singular or plural) as well as serve as the basis for noun classification. The typical regular noun or adjective (e.g. <italic>bi-a</italic> ‘a child’) consists of a bound root (<italic>bi-</italic>) providing the lexical meaning, and a suffix (-<italic>a</italic>) which indicates the singular number of the noun. In plural form, the suffix is replaced by a different one that marks plurality: (<italic>bi-hi</italic>). In this paper, we show that while this broad description is generally accepted, it is much weaker than assumed in previous studies, with many inconsistencies. As our main goal, we offer a much broader analysis of the morphological and syntactic functions of the nominal suffixes. We show that these suffixes are primarily there to project lexical words as nouns and adjectives and should be referred to as nominal suffixes used to inflect inherent nouns and derive nouns and adjectives from verbs. The nominal suffixes are also crucial to distinguishing between different compound nouns and noun phrases. The paper is largely descriptive, with no specific theoretical approach assumed.
</abstract>

The morphological and syntactic functions of Dagbani nominal suffixes

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Austin’s groundbreaking distinction between constative and performative utterances and his investigation of how to act in saying something initiated a whole new research programme in linguistics and philosophy of language. Within this programme, the arguments and discussions concerning the constative-performative distinction are based on linguistic intuitions. However, generally, they are only based on the respective linguist’s or philosopher’s own intuitions. This fact makes the whole programme seem incomplete because the linguistic intuitions of native speakers should be considered an important contribution which, so far, is mostly missing. With this article, we contribute to closing this gap by empirically investigating native speakers’ linguistic intuitions with respect to the following four aims: Aim 1 is concerned with the question of whether Austin’s criteria for distinguishing between performatives and constatives work. In order to achieve Aim 2, we introduce a new criterion for distinguishing between constatives and performatives, representing what we call the <italic>event character of performatives</italic>. For Aim 3, we evaluate Austin’s presumably strongest argument to reject the constativeperformative distinction which we call the <italic>Constative Expositive Argument</italic>. Aim 4 is concerned with the much-discussed question of whether performatives have truth values and, thus, are statements. In order to achieve the four aims, we present the findings of an online study comparing native speakers’ responses to vignettes containing constative or performative utterances.
</abstract>

Austin in the Lab: Empirically reconsidering the constative-performative distinction

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In this article, the author applies the theory of frame semantics, a usage-based model of construction grammar, and quantitative corpus-based methodology to investigate the nature of the <italic>ADV speaking-construction</italic> in American English, an adverbial participle construction that has not been previously explored using quantitative corpus-based methods. To investigate this construction, the author extracted its occurrences from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), analysed its structural, semantic, distributional and discourse-functional properties, and identified adverbs that frequently appear in the construction. The investigation reveals that the construction tends to combine with speech-functional adverbs, which evoke different semantic frames. It commonly occurs in spoken and written registers and serves various functions in discourse. In particular, it is used frequently in spoken discourse and academic prose to comment on the manner of conveying a message and to express speakers’ stances and attitudes toward various topics.
</abstract>

The ADV speaking-construction in American English: A quantitative corpus-based investigation

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The article is dedicated to researching <sc>resilience</sc> as a relevant social concept. It puts forward a new idea to study the actual mental consideration of social and political phenomena via purely linguistic tools. As a research methodology, a new approach is offered. In particular, the authors extrapolate Zhabotynska’s semantics of lingual networks onto Popova and Sternin’s semantic-cognitive analysis. The study is conducted through corpus technologies: a COCA sample of discourse contexts with the <italic>resilience</italic> lexeme is used to reconstruct a conceptual model of the <sc>resilience</sc> concept (denotative meaning). Subsequently, this meaning is processed via two cognitive operations: cognitive interpretation and prominence. Finally, the field cognitive model of <sc>resilience</sc> is obtained. Sorted by frequency in the corpus sample as core and periphery zones, the separate cognitive features indicate what is more or less important for Americans in the current consideration of <sc>resilience</sc> as a social and political phenomenon. Each research stage is explained and discussed by the authors in detail.
</abstract>

The mental consideration of <sc>resilience</sc> as a relevant social concept (a corpus-based research of American English)

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This study aims at analysing the absolute semantic complexity of kin terms in Hausa, i.e. to measure the amount of semantic information of individual kin terms. Each kin term is defined by a set of sufficient and necessary conditions (i.e. properties and relations) derived from the construction of a genealogical “space”. In order to calculate semantic complexity, properties (e.g. <italic>x is male</italic>, <italic>x is older than y</italic>) and relations (e.g. <italic>x is married to y</italic>, <italic>x is father of y</italic>) are encoded as a series of predicates. The terms are defined in a feature matrix system: for each property and relation each kin term is assigned a value on a truth table. Resorting to predicate calculus, the complexity coefficient <italic>c</italic> of kin terms is calculated as the negative dyadic logarithm of the relative number of trues according to the formula proposed by Lehmann (1978) and adapted from Carnap and Bar-Hillel (1952). Being culture-independent, the definition of kinship terms in a feature-matrix system allows for a) cross-linguistic comparison; b) a consistent treatment of polysemous instances based on the principles of intension and extension; and c) further analysis and applications in representations of kinship systems formulated with genealogical or algebraic approaches.
</abstract>

The semantic complexity of Hausa kinship terms

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical anchor for this study, express the role of language, culture and cognition in the construal and expression of human experiences. The approaches posit that the metaphorical use of language by an individual or group is shaped by their ideological orientation, knowledge of their natural and social world, and their cultural worldview. This study investigates the metaphorical use of language by the Nigerian print media in their attempts to express ideation on corruption in the Nigerian public sector. There has not been any deliberate and rigorous attempt to study the metaphorical representation of corruption in the Nigerian media discourse, hence this study aims at addressing the lacuna. Thus, this study uses insights from CMT and CL to identify, classify and analyse some of these metaphors in six Nigerian newspapers, namely; <italic>The Guardian</italic>, <italic>Punch</italic>, <italic>Daily Trust</italic>, <italic>The Nation, Vanguard</italic> and <italic>The Sun</italic>. The study shows that print media reports of corruption in Nigeria involving powerful social actors such as politicians, government appointees, career civil servants, academics, the military, the media and others have often used metaphorical frames that emanate from the domains of disease, war and conflict, enmity, impediment to movement, violent natural forces, monstrosity, among others, to describe the incidence, scope, effects and consequences of public sector corruption in Nigeria.
</abstract>

Metaphoric construction of corruption in Nigerian media discourse

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The aim of the article is to examine the language used by an emerging online community known as <italic>incels</italic>. <italic>Incels</italic> are “involuntarily celibate” men who gather online to share their frustration and resentment. They blame their predicament on their alleged ugliness, as well as on the structure of modern Western society in general, and women’s behaviour in particular. Hate speech and violent language flourish on <italic>incel</italic> online forums to such an extent that most of their websites are taken down, one by one, due to breaches of rules around violent content. In the present article I aim to analyze the language used by <italic>incels</italic>, focusing on the dehumanizing metaphors used in order to describe women, who are the main target of <italic>incels’</italic> hatred. This paper was realized within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis with special emphasis on conceptual metaphor theory.</abstract>

<italic>Foids are worse than animals.</italic> A cognitive linguistics analysis of dehumanizing metaphors in online discourse

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to produce English metaphorical and metonymical expressions, using a completion task. It also examines whether the use of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of the participants’ first language, i.e. Jordanian Arabic (JA) would facilitate the production task. The study adopts a contrastive model to compare and contrast figurative devices in English and JA, consisting of six types that vary in relation to the conceptual bases and linguistic expressions involved. The results reveal that even though the participants’ scores were poor, the participants exhibited a general capacity to produce metaphorical/metonymical expressions that are similar in meaning to the ones required on the test, utilizing their L1 conceptual and linguistic knowledge. It was suggested that three important factors need to be satisfied to enable EFL learners to produce English figurative devices correctly, i.e. knowledge of the conceptual bases involved, a good command of English collocational knowledge and familiarity with the concept of partial synonymy, and continuous exposure to the figurative expressions in real-life English. Based on these results, the study proposes some pedagogical implications that may assist EFL learners to familiarize themselves with metaphorical/metonymical expressions in English and it concludes with recommendations for further research.</abstract>

On the production of metaphors and metonymies by Jordanian EFL learners: acquisition and implications

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Some (though not all) previous studies have documented the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB), i.e. the greater intelligibility of non-native (relative to native) speech to non-native listeners as compared to native listeners. Moreover, some studies (again not all) found that native listeners consider foreign-accented statements as less truthful than native-sounding ones. We join these two lines of research, asking whether foreign-accented statements sound more credible to non-native than to native listeners and whether difficult-to-process (less comprehensible) utterances are less credible. In two experiments we measure the intelligibility, comprehensibility and credibility of native and foreign-accented statements for native listeners and non-native listeners matched or mismatched in L1 with non-native talkers. We find an ISIB in both matched and mismatched non-native listeners, and an analogous matched comprehensibility benefit. However, we obtain no evidence of an interlanguage speech credibility benefit. Instead, both matched and mismatched non-native listeners tend to trust native statements more (i.e. statements produced by their target-language models). For native listeners, we do not confirm the tendency to mistrust non-native statements, but we do find a moderate correlation between the comprehensibility and credibility of foreign-accented utterances, giving limited support to the hypothesis that decreased perceptual fluency leads to decreased credibility.</abstract>

PhD. Department of English and American Studies Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Křížkovského 10 77180, Olomouc Czech Republic

Department of English and American Studies Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Křížkovského 10 77180, Olomouc Czech Republic

Is there an interlanguage speech credibility benefit?

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The purpose of this study is to investigate the discriminability of two different assimilation types, the Uncategorized-Categorized (UC) and the Uncategorized-Uncategorized assimilation (UU) (Best and Tyler, 2007), as reflected in the discrimination accuracy and reaction times towards non-native contrasts by Russian speakers. The discriminability of these assimilation types varies in the literature. To this purpose, the same Russian speakers who evaluated Greek consonantal contrasts as UC and UU types in an assimilation test of a previous study completed an AXB discrimination test in this study to detect the discriminability of these assimilation types. The findings demonstrated that most of the UU non-overlapping (UU-N) types, and specifically those with focalized-focalized responses, were more accurately discriminated and had faster RTs than the UC non-overlapping (UC-N) type. However, one UU-N type with clustered-clustered responses did not differ in terms of discrimination accuracy and reaction times with the UC-N type. It is suggested that despite having the same overlapping parameters (non-overlapping), UU types might be more discriminable than UC types with respect to consonants. Also, similarity of uncategorized phones with other assimilated phones (e.g., focalized, clustered, dispersed) might shape the UC-UU type relationship. Finally, it is assumed that the discriminability of UC-UU types might be consonant-specific.</abstract>

Discrimination of Uncategorized-Categorized and Uncategorized-Uncategorized Greek consonantal contrasts by Russian speakers

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Combining critical discourse analysis and the cognitive theory of metaphor, the study analyses hard news on Ebola from two American newspapers of a liberal political orientation, The New York Times and The New York Daily News, to investigate metaphoric representations of the disease and portrayals of its victims. It is revealed that both newspapers heavily rely on a single conceptual metaphor of EBOLA AS WAR, with only two alternative metaphors of EBOLA AS AN ANIMATE/HUMAN BEING and EBOLA AS A NATURAL CATASTROPHE employed. All three metaphoric themes assign the role of a culprit solely to the virus, which stands in contrast to non-metaphoric discursive allocations of blame for the situation in Africa, assigning responsibility mainly to man-made factors. African victims tend to be impersonalized and portrayed as voiceless and agentless, rarely occupying the role of a “fighter” in the military metaphoric representation of the disease, which runs counter to the findings of recent studies detecting a change towards a more positive image of Africa in the media. Both newspapers fail to represent infected ordinary Africans as sovereign agents, hindering readers from reflexively identifying with them.</abstract>

Representations of Ebola and its victims in liberal American newspapers

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper gives a critical overview of the analytical approaches dominating the field of discourse studies in the last three decades, from the perspective of their philosophical and formative bases: social constructionism and linguistics. It explores different conceptions of the theoretical nexus between these two bases leading to the emergence of three distinct yet complementary strands of thought (i-iii). The paper starts with poststructuralist views of discourse salient in (i) Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory. Laclau and Mouffe’s assumption that no discourse is a closed entity but rather transformed through contact with other discourses is taken as the introductory premise to present a large family of (ii) critical discourse studies, characterized as text-analytical practices explaining how discourse partakes in the production and negotiations of ideological meanings. Finally, the paper discusses (iii) three recent discourse analytical models: Discourse Space Theory, Critical Metaphor Analysis and the Legitimization-Proximization Model. These new theories take a further (and thus far final) step towards consolidation of the social-theoretical and linguistic bases in contemporary discourse studies. The empirical benefits of this consolidation are discussed in the last part of the paper, which includes a case study where the new models are used in the analysis of Polish anti-immigration discourse.</abstract>

Discourse studies: Between social constructionism and linguistics. A critical overview

Editorial Policy

Instructions for Authors

Open Access License