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One aim of this paper is to begin to face the problem of how to relate an ethical, polltical, and critical perspective to the rational-technical means of analysis and description that have been developed by modern linguists.The second (and principal) question that this paper seeks to pursue is the following. Given that any utterance is a highly complex event in which wording, phrasing, and text-organisation fulfill multiple and simultaneous functions, what details is it possible to pin down in a text in such a way that it is rational to make claims about and critiques of ideological or distorted communication?

The participation of states in a wide range of processes--economic, military, tecnological, cultural, and political--produces ever more intense forms of insecurity on many dimensions. This working paper explores some of the assumptions that underlie conventional discourse on national securityand how they intersect with modern international relations theory.

This paper is the beginning of an analysis of the nature of nuclear strategic thinking; its emphasis is on the role of a specialized language that I call "technostrategic." I have come to believe that this language both reflects and shapes the nature ofthe American nuclear strategic project; that it plays a central role in allowing defenseintellectuals to think and act as they do; and that all of us who are concerned about nuclear weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to the role of language we and others choose to use -- who it allows us to communicate with, and what it allows us to think as well as say.

The concept of a "nuclear winter" has effected a turn in the discourse on nuclear war, which had long focused on imagery related to the initial blast and immediate after-effects. The paper discusses the origin of the nuclear winter theory and how it has influenced the nuclear debate.

An critique of the applicability and influence of Clausewitz's On War to the national security policies of the Reagan era.

What follows the Cold War? Even the fact that the question can be asked isastounding.  Shall the sequel be "peaceful competition" (Gorbachev), "cold peace and peaceful competition" (The New York Times editorial of August 10, 1987), "stable coexistence" (the American Committee on U. S.-Soviet Relations, including Arthur Macy Cox, William Colby, and George Ball)- or, grudgingly, "steps ... to reconcile vital U. S. and Soviet interests" (Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance)? There is dispute and confusion in both camps over what the new relationship is, what to call it. As the American establishment reorganizes its understanding of the world, theAmerican right is not silent. It is therefore useful to monitor the right's reactions to East-West rapprochement. In these notes, I look at the American right's responses to the East-West relaxation marked by the Washington and Moscow summits and the signing of the INF treaty. The discourse of the right in the first half of 1988 offers a preview of how it may be expected to react during the years to come.

This article examines the mode of censorship and reportage of atomic damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in one of Japan's leading newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun, during the months of August and September 1945, as well as representative cases of censorship during the early years of the Allied Occupation to answer the question of why there was not more immediate "horror and repulsion sweeping over the rest of the world" as predicted by the Franck Report. By going back to the very start of press coverage of atomic damage we hope to be able to shed light on the evolution of nuclear discourse in Japan, and, to a lesser extent, the United States.

If we need a new language of national and international politics in order to think differently so as to cope with the dangers of a nuclear world, we also need a new language of policy analysis to examine the structures and processes by which defense policy in general, and nuclear policy in particular, is made. What is needed, as a start, is a new lexicon of basic terms derived from language and discourse but applied to the policy process. We might then begin to develop this new vocabulary into an effective critique of defense decision making in the modern or indeed, the post-modern state.

This paper explores the use of linguistic strategies, specifically discourse markers like 'but', to express contrasts between expectations and reality when faced with unexpected events. The study concentrates on Denial of Expectation (DofE), themost powerful form of contrast, which arises when the expected value based on background assumptions is not met. The main focus of this paper is to model DofE as a weighted homogeneous relationship between object properties. The aim is to predict DofE for numerical properties in specific contexts. I aim to address a gap in previous models by considering the role of context. This is achieved by analyzing contrastive sentences from German car and motorcycle reviews. The research presents the concept of expectation intervals for scalar properties. These intervals align with expectations and exceeding them triggers a potential contrast. The study incorporates causality, expected behavior, and a shift function in selecting contrastive pairs, transforming the conditions into an algorithm.Keywords: contrast; computational and cognitive modeling; discourse analysis

Languages differ in how they form questions that are equivalent to English questions such as who does John think Maria loves? in that the correct answer is who John thinks Maria loves, and not who Maria actually loves. Linguists disagree about how Polish makes such inquiries, and to date, no research has investigated how native Polish-speaking adults judge, process or produce these inquiries. In this paper, we investigated the nature of Polish questions via a corpus study, a grammaticality judgment study, and a spoken production study. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that Polish has several syntactically distinct options for making these sorts of inquiries. Although, at first blush, this seems inconsistent with linguistic theories that argue against syntactic optionality, closer examination reveals that discourse context strongly affects which option is preferred. These findings highlight the importance of considering context, and the pitfall of studying sentences presented in isolation when evaluating linguistic or psycholinguistic claims.

Technology to predict responses is a key element in human-to-human messaging that has increasingly been utilized to enable AI-mediated communication. When response suggestions from AI are incorporated into human messaging, it will have an impact on the flow and content of the dialogue. In this paper, we investigated the effect of AI response suggestion sentences used for chat messaging on dialogue flow from two aspects: dialogue act and initiative. Usage rates of response suggestions for different dialogue acts were measured with BLEU scores, and we found that the response suggestions contributed to the establishment of a proper dialogue flow, such as an answer in response to a question. The results of our case study indicated that users who take the initiative in the dialogue tend to utilize response suggestions less frequently. We also found that some written responses were based on the suggested sentence structure but conveyed different messages.

The issue of language, specifically access to English, has emerged as a key concern for both U.S. policy-makers and immigrant communities alike. Many of these debates are framed by neoliberal and human capital perspectives, which view English as a set of skills and linguistic capital that are inextricably tied to employment opportunities and economic mobility. It is within this socio-historical, political, and discursive space that adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes are envisioned, developed, and implemented in various communities across the U.S. For decades, the federal government had allocated monies for states to fund programs that linked teaching English with the teaching of job readiness and workplace skills. In 1999, however, the Clinton administration launched a $70 million state grants program that integrated English literacy with civics education (EL/Civics). This was a clear departure from language education policies that positioned adult immigrants simply as workers who needed the linguistic skills to participate in the labor system.This paper argues that despite the purported aim to link English language instruction with broader notions of civic and political participation, a neoliberal agenda finds its way into the local implementation of the EL/Civics policy. Informed by poststructural and sociocultural theories as well as a transnational perspective, this paper draws on data from a 10-month ethnographic study of an EL/Civics program in Queens, NY. I employed ethnographic data collection methods such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and audio-recorded classroom discourse. Guided by the following questions, the analysis focuses on how neoliberal discourses insinuate themselves into the organizational practices and classroom interactions of an EL/Civics program: How are neoliberal discourses both taken up and interrogated by adult immigrant students? How do neoliberal discourses interact with enduring narratives of immigration? This work adds to the growing research on the critical role that language teachers and language learners play in responding to and remaking policies in their classrooms—a process that is mediated by actors’ identities, local contexts, and widely-circulating discourses of immigration and neoliberal logic. The paper concludes with a discussion of how we can begin to rethink EL/Civics programs and approaches and provide an alternative to the neoliberal model of adult English language education.

This paper investigates the processing of linguistic elementswhose interpretation depends on retrieving information thatwas available earlier in the situation. Using the visual-worldparadigm, we examine the processing of the verb return, whichrequires that an object has previously moved. We manipulatedwhether the moved object (and the movement itself) wasdescribed using language, by its typical label or by its location,or whether it was seen moving without that movement beinglabeled. We also manipulated whether the instructions werepositive (e.g., Return the X), therefore requiring the listener toperform an action, or negative (e.g., Don’t return the X), whichrequired no action. Results reveal a sensitivity to howinformation was introduced. Most importantly, with positiveinstructions, the naming of the object did not have an effect,whereas with negative instructions, naming was important tointerpretation. These results indicate that the way informationis introduced affects the status of this information when it isretrieved; these findings also lead us to explicitly consider thehypotheses that link language processing and visual attention.

Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure-mapping account, and then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to (a) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (b) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb's arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi-word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb's arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.

Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure-mapping account, and then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to (a) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (b) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb's arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi-word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb's arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.

The paper aims to explain the character and causes of obsolescence in assigned subject descriptors. The paper takes the form of a conceptual analysis with examples and reference to existing literature. Subject description comes in two forms: assigning the name or code of a subject to a document and assigning a document to a named subject category. Each method associates a document with the name of a subject. This naming activity is the site of tensions between the procedural need of information systems for stable records and the inherent multiplicity and instability of linguistic expressions. As languages change, previously assigned subject descriptions become obsolescent. The issues, tensions, and compromises involved are introduced. Drawing on the work of Robert Fairthorne and others, an explanation of the unavoidable obsolescence of assigned subject headings is presented. The discussion relates to libraries, but the same issues arise in any context in which subject description is expected to remain useful for an extended period of time. © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

In this paper, I will elaborate somewhat on Slobin's notion of 'thinking for speaking' by introducing the construct of 'rhetorical style', by which I mean a set of related constructions employed to achieve a particular discourse effect. Just as the presence of a particular grammatical category may impel speakers to organize their thinking to meet the demands of the linguistic encoding of that category on-line, so the use of a given rhetorical style may require similar adjustments in thinking for speaking.The goals of this paper are threefold. First I will present data, drawn primarily from narrative discourses, on the use of direct quotes in Chantyal, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. In Chantyal, direct quotes are conveyed by a set of constructions which I will refer to collectively as 'quotatives': quotatives always include a form of the verb 'say' together with a complement of 'say' presented as a direct quote. Second, I will argue that quotatives are used in Chantyal to affect the 'direct speech style', a mode of exploiting quotatives to further narrative goals that in many other languages are achieved by means other than quotatives. And third, I will discuss the direct speech style as a 'rhetorical style', and go on to present an overview of rhetorical styles, their uses, their status as areal features, and their diachronic developments.

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both apro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritagespeakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research oncross-linguistic influence in language contact situations.Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiencylevels have yielded conflicting results on whether there istransfer from the non-pro-drop patterns to the pro-droplanguage. Additionally, previous research has focused onspeech patterns only. In this paper, we study the two modalitiesof language, speech and gesture, and ask whether and how theyreveal cross-linguistic influence on the use of subject pronounsin discourse. We focus on elicited narratives from heritagespeakers of Turkish in the Netherlands, in both Turkish (pro-drop) and Dutch (non-pro-drop), as well as from monolingualcontrol groups. The use of pronouns was not very common inmonolingual Turkish narratives and was constrained by thepragmatic contexts, unlike in Dutch. Furthermore, Turkishpronouns were more likely to be accompanied by localizedgestures than Dutch pronouns, presumably because pronouns inTurkish are pragmatically marked forms. We did not find anycross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech or gesturepatterns, in line with studies (speech only) of highly proficientbilinguals. We therefore suggest that speech and gestureparallel each other not only in monolingual but also in bilingualproduction. Highly proficient heritage speakers who have beenexposed to diverse linguistic and gestural patterns of eachlanguage from early on maintain monolingual patterns ofpragmatic constraints on the use of pronouns multimodally.

In the search for an understanding of human communication,researchers often try to isolate listener and speaker roles andstudy them separately. Others claim that it is the intertwined-ness of these roles that makes human communication special.This close relationship between listener and speaker has beencharacterized by concepts such as common ground, backchan-neling, and alignment, but they are only part of the picture. Un-derlying these processes, there must be a mechanism for mak-ing inferences about our interlocutors’ understanding of wordsand gestures that allows us to communicate robustly and effi-ciently without assuming that we take the same words to havethe same meaning. In this paper, I explore this relationship be-tween language and concepts and propose an interactive mech-anism that can facilitate these latent conceptual inferences. Fi-nally, I show how this proposal paves the way for a more pre-cise account of the role of interaction in communication.

Discussions of reference tracking in spoken languages often invoke some version of a referential hierarchy. In this paper, we asked whether this hierarchy applies equally well to reference tracking in a visual language, American Sign Language, or whether modality differences influence its structure. Expanding the results of previous studies, this study looked at ASL referential devices beyond nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphora. We elicited four simple narratives from eight native ASL signers, and examined how the signers tracked reference throughout their stories. We found that ASL signers follow general principles of the referential hierarchy proposed for spoken languages by using nouns for referent introductions, and zero anaphora for referent maintenance. However, we also found significant differences such as the absence of pronouns in the narratives, despite their existence in ASL, and differential use of verbal and constructed action zero anaphora. Moreover, we found that native signers' use of classifiers varied with discourse status in a way that deviated from our expectations derived from the referential hierarchy for spoken languages. On this basis, we propose a tentative hierarchy of referential expressions for ASL that incorporates modality specific referential devices.

This paper explores corporate concept videos as a type of design fiction that embed a vision about the future of computing – including how computing should be done, for whom, and the norms that might exist – and allow for a discourse to explore and contest these claims. We introduce a method for critiquing and analyzing concept videos. Through an analysis of Google Glass’ and Microsoft HoloLens’ concept videos and a discourse analysis of media articles during the time period after the products were announced but before they were available to the public, we introduce a method of analysis that lets us surface values and critique the narratives presented in technology concept videos and in early media reactions. We also introduce the language of “anticipatory” and “speculative" orientations toward the future to better describe how people imagine sociotechnical futures.

This paper presents a biclausal construction in Chechen, arguing that it can be analyzed as an it-cleft. The construction consists of a main copula clause with a covert or pronominal subject, and a temporal complement that co-indexes with an adjunct position in a relative clause that does not form a constituent with the subject or the complement. A study of the construction in a corpus of newspaper and journal texts shows characteristics that make it stand out in terms of syntax and function: the cleft clause can appear both clause-finally as well as clause-initially, and its function is limited to text-structuring (it is mostly used to mark the start of a text or the transition to a new paragraph). This latter characteristic is exceptional: it-clefts in other languages (such as English and Norwegian) are known to be used for text-structuring to some extent, but Chechen is the first language known to only use it for this purpose. This prompts the question whether there are perhaps other language (e.g. from the Nakh-Daghestan family) with similar characteristics.

Neoliberal ideology attempts to make all spheres of social life play by the rules of the market (Gray, 2000), and foreign language teaching is not an exception. The hegemonic role of English in the neoliberal project breeds it as a commodity that can satisfy non-native speakers' need to access the globalized world. In the 1990s, neoliberalism dominated the sociopolitical landscape of most Latin American countries. At the time, language policies in Uruguay sought to make English the foreign language par excellence, to the detriment of other languages such as French and Italian. The discourse of neoliberal language policies related the expansion of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to a new global order that called for an instrumental language to help Uruguay become “a first world country,” and English was the key to open doors to globalization. During the first decade of the 21st century, however, the sociopolitical landscape of Uruguay shifted toward a left-wing ideology. Even though policies continued to promote EFL, they struggled to re-define its political meaning. As English was now seen as a symbol of imperialism (Phillipson, 1992) and colonialism (Pennycook, 1994, 1998, 2000), the only way for Uruguayan children to be critical of its hegemonic power was to learn the language through a pedagogy of empowerment. In this paper, I argue that the transition from neoliberal to left-wing ideology in central government brought about a political struggle (Koselleck, 1993, 2002) in which each ideology fought to (re)define EFL in its own terms. I will map this political struggle to define EFL in Uruguay by analyzing three official EFL-related documents written by policy makers and other stakeholders in the 1990s and 2000s, which represent the voices of neoliberal and left-wing policy makers, respectively.

Advances in automatic text classification have been necessitated by the rapid increase in the availability of digital documents. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can 'learn' from data: for instance a ML system can be trained on a set of features derived from written texts belonging to known categories, and learn to distinguish between them. Such a trained system can then be used to classify unseen texts. In this paper, we explore the potential of the technique to classify transcribed speech samples along clinical dimensions, using vocabulary data alone. We report the accuracy with which two related ML algorithms [naive Bayes Gaussian (NBG) and naive Bayes multinomial (NBM)] categorized picture descriptions produced by: 32 semantic dementia (SD) patients versus 10 healthy, age-matched controls; and SD patients with left- (n = 21) versus right-predominant (n = 11) patterns of temporal lobe atrophy. We used information gain (IG) to identify the vocabulary features that were most informative to each of these two distinctions. In the SD versus control classification task, both algorithms achieved accuracies of greater than 90%. In the right- versus left-temporal lobe predominant classification, NBM achieved a high level of accuracy (88%), but this was achieved by both NBM and NBG when the features used in the training set were restricted to those with high values of IG. The most informative features for the patient versus control task were low frequency content words, generic terms and components of metanarrative statements. For the right versus left task the number of informative lexical features was too small to support any specific inferences. An enriched feature set, including values derived from Quantitative Production Analysis (QPA) may shed further light on this little understood distinction.

"For its fortieth birthday, Women’s Studies has been given the gift of an impasse. What established, tenured Women’s Studies professors, the ‘foremothers’ turned academic powerbrokers, should do now with their own creation has snowballed into a discourse of crisis. Many Women’s Studies professors continue to support their departments and students. Yet there are a growing number of established scholars who are currently arguing, within a crisis discourse, that the project of Women’s Studies is no longer relevant or even possible. Women’s Studies scholarship has been framed as stagnant and naïve, based on identity politics and revolutionary ideals that no longer make sense in our post-modern, theory-based academy (i.e. Brown, Halley)." This paper addresses these issues with examples of student advocacy and a call for more student focused participation within the academic field of Women's Studies.

This paper examines Municipal Wireless (MW) deployments in the United States. In particular, the interest is in understanding how discourse has worked to mobilize widespread support for MW networks. We explore how local governments discursively deploy the language of social movements to create a shared understanding of the networking needs of communities. Through the process of "framing" local governments assign meaning to the MW networks in ways intended to mobilize support and demobilize opposition. The mobilizing potential of a frame varies and is dependent on its centrality and cultural resonance. We examine the framing efforts of MW networks by using a sample of Request for Proposals for community wireless networks, semi-structured interviews and local media sources. Prominent values that are central to a majority of the projects and others that are culturally specific are identified and analyzed for their mobilizing potency.