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The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of Spanish and Korean reformulation markers against the backdrop of a contrastive / intercultural rhetoric approach (Kaplan, 1966; Hinds, 1987; Clyne, 1994; Connor, 2008, 2011). In order to carry out the analysis, following a line of previous research papers in Murillo (2007, 2012), an empirical study using Spanish and Korean journalistic corpus was performed. The results obtained demonstrate significant disparity between the use of Spanish and Korean RMs when approached from a linguistic-intercultural rhetoric perspective, more specifically as to the use of double reformulation -the repetition of the Korean markers (jeuk… jeuk… / got… got…)-, some particular rhetorical patterns of the Korean marker got, denoting its cultural idiosyncrasy, and the discourse processes, such as ‘definition’, ‘denomination’, and ‘conclusion’, utilizing the selected markers in the two languages.

Digression is a discourse function that is identifiable and distinct from other similar functional strategies, and varies cross-linguistically. This paper investigates the way speakers of Spanish and English digress from their main discourse topics and how these transitions are marked. Once digression is defined by the proposal of four features considered to be inherent in this concept, the paper focuses on so-called 'digression formulating phrases', recurrent expressions which make explicit reference to the digression and signal that a new direction with respect to topic is proposed. The paper thus adopts a less common than the usual approach to discourse coherence and digression, whose literature has largely focused on discourse markers. The dataset, extracted from a corpus of parliamentary discourse, is analysed in an attempt to address two research questions. I investigate, first, the frequency and distribution of the selected digression formulating phrases in the two languages, and discern which of the two contexts of digression (i.e. beginnings and ends) is more highly marked, and, second, their use in connection to aspects such as syntactic configuration and position, and co-occurring features of semantic and pragmatic meaning. The contrastive perspective adds precision and richness to the treatment of digression.

This paper discusses those metadiscourse techniques that help develop learners’ communication skills in university courses of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Firstly, the theoretical framework of the concept of metadiscourse (Hyland 1998, Mauranen 1998&2000, Swales 2001, Thompson 2003) is revised and then applied to those language strategies for effective communication which are covered by current bibliographical references on academic listening and speaking in these courses. In the second part of the article, an empirical analysis illustrates how metadiscourse in EAP monologic speech is targeted to enhance both the cognitive (Wilson & Sperber 1998) and interpersonal aspects of language use (Ventola & Mauranen 1991, Johns 1997, Hyland 2000). The third part of the paper details experimental research concerning suitable pedagogical procedures for teaching/learning spoken metadiscourse through a genre-based approach (Ferguson 2002). The article concludes with a reflection on the need to approach tertiary education syllabuses from the perspective of a social theory of language and communication.

This paper uses multimodality to study communication. Communication does not only depend on language but also includes other modes, such as image. This paper focuses on advertising as it commonly uses multimodality to help it convey messages better. It studies two Malaysian commercial bank brochures and their use of image and language in print media to inform about and promote banking products to consumers. This suggests that both modes contribute to the communicative purposes of advertising. Two modes could deliver similar meanings to consumers differently and improve or strengthen the meanings of another mode. This paper tries to see the cooperation between image and language to create coherent brochures that interest consumers. It discusses several aspects of the image and language used to expose the messages both seem to convey. It then discusses the possible relations image and language have with each other. This paper argued that both image and language induce consumer interest in the product.

In this paper the role that prosody plays in oral narratives will be analysed drawing on Wennerstrom (2001) framework on prosody in discourse analysis. For this paper, I will use the recording of several topic oriented qualitative interviews in which the speakers had to expose her ideas about their beliefs and attitudes towards Basque national identity. These interviews followed a protocol in which the subjects had to answer questions about different aspects of national identity, these questions were grouped around several thematic areas (question sets) following De Cillia et al. (2000) methodological approach. This analysis will show how the argumentation in “narratives of national identity” is not only organized lexicogramatically (as in De Cillia 2000 analisis of narratives of national identity) but also prosodically by the use of high pitch accents to “highlight” certain ideas, and low pitch accent to “background” others. I will also observe how deictical elements aligned with prosody serve to systematise the structure of discourse, and how evaluative language, e.g epistemic modality (Palmer1986, Simpson 1993) lined up with prosody serves to emphasise or diminish the point of view of the speaker’s. In this sense, evaluative lexical items align with high pitch accents the moment the speaker desires to highlight the truth value of the proposition. However, they can also be backgrounded when they are embedded in ideas that are peripheral to the main ideas or in parenthetical. Besides this the speaker employs prosody to emphasize loaded lexical items or words that contribute to the climactic essence of the narration. Therefore prosody helps in the expression of subjectivity and directly in the modalization of speech. In essence, this research can enlighten the study of intonation in discourse analysis.

In the last decades much research has been carried out on discourse as a form of social practice from the Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. The Vienna school of CDA led by Wodak and her associates has developed a discourse-historical approach to discourse which investigates the linguistic construction of national identities through a method of description and analysis which posits three categories –topics, strategies and linguistic devices– employed in the construction, perpetuation, transformation and dismantling of nations and national identities. Following this approach, the present paper aims to analyse the linguistic construction of Catalonia’s present and political future in a corpus of public discourse fragments produced by Catalan pro-independence leaders and activists during the so-called Catalan crisis. The analysis reveals that the linguistic construction of the Catalan present and political future relies on constructive, justification and dismantling strategies that seek to support self-determination and construe Catalonia as an independent Republic.

This paper focuses on Frame-based Terminology (FBT), a theoretical framework based on cognitive premises that underpin the representation of specialized objects and events. It demonstrates that specialized semantic frames can be inferred from lexical schemas and semantic annotation. This research used corpus techniques to collect data for the representation of multilingual semantic frames. The research focuses on deforestation within the domain of Environmental Science. The methodology involves the encapsulation of corpus queries and semantic annotation to guide the creation of specialized frames associated with the deforestation event. Although the creation of frame-based terminological resources can be time-consuming, our results show that it is facilitated by the use, of e-tools that extract the arguments of specialized predicates, which are often immersed in complex syntactic constructions.

This paper aims to explore the trends and hot topics of American applied linguistics by the content analysis of AAAL annual conferences’ handbooks. Making a diachronic research on topical strands of AAAL Conference from 1999 to 2019, the paper studies the dynamics and the trends of American applied linguistics by analyzing the changes of the strands in the conferences under study in 20 years. Based on self-built corpora of titles and abstracts of the presented papers in 2019 AAAL Annual Conference, high-frequency vocabulary and their collocations are detected by TagCrowd and AntConc in order to find the current hot topics of applied linguistics research. The conclusion is that the development of applied linguistics has speeded up in the past four years. Educational linguistics, corpus linguistics, research methodology, teacher education, lexical research, phonetics/phonology and oral communication are the new trends in this field. The hot words of applied linguistics in 2019 include academic writing, teacher education, Chinese and translanguaging. Finally, the study found that retrospective review study of international conferences could be a new research method in the field of review study, providing scholars with a comprehensive understanding of the discipline dynamics over a period of time

This paper deals with the traditional distinction between necessary and unnecessary loanwords as a problematic one because it marginalises the functions of so-called unnecessary loanwords. By adopting a cognitive-linguistic approach, this paper aims to highlight the importance of both types of loanwords from a language user’s point of view. To this end, we examine anglicisms in Montenegrin on the basis of a new pragmatic model which distinguishes between catachrestic and non-catachrestic loanwords (Onysko, Winter-Froemel 2011). Our study has shown that the pragmatic distinction of anglicisms is possible in Montenegrin, thereby proving it is unacceptable to divide them into necessary and unnecessary ones. The results also show that anglicisms do not always have all the characteristics typical of their categories, which brings us back to the cognitive-linguistic approach we have taken in our study.

This theoretical paper first explores how English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers’ beliefs impact their delivery of textbook content. In response to this important pedagogical relationship, as well as the trend of de-contextualized teaching in EFL settings, this paper argues for the compatibility of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an intervention tool to shape teachers’ beliefs and facilitate their deconstruction of textbook content in terms of the co-play between language form (i.e., grammar/vocabulary) and meaning representations. The paper ends with pedagogical strategies for pre-service and in-service EFL teacher education, enabling teachers to conceptualize the dynamic relationship between language form and meaning embedded in textbook content and to enact contextualized instruction in textbook-based classrooms.

This paper proposes a system of pragmatic tagging for the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus, available at the Observahumor.com website. To date, the work of the GRIALE group has involved the study of irony and humour in Spanish, leading to the creation of a taxonomy of humour markers and indicators that serve to identify ironic and humorous utterances in the corpus. Markers are elements that help in the interpretation of an utterance as humorous (e.g., intonation or laughter), whereas indicators are humorous elements per se (e.g., certain suffixes or phraseological units). Timofeeva and Ruiz Gurillo (2021) have developed a pilot version of a pragmatic tagging system, based on markers and indicators, for the CHILDHUM corpus (also available at Observahumor.com). However, their system incorporates characteristics which are applicable to that specific corpus of children’s narratives, and as such cannot easily be extrapolated to all the corpora hosted at Observahumor.com. For this reason, it is necessary to carry out a detailed study of the pragmatic tags that might best be used towards a better interpretation of each text therein, and hence that would be suitable for each type of corpus. In the present study we present a proposal for the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus, which comprises 148 ironichumorous sequences extracted from 67 colloquial conversations of the Val.Es.Co. corpus (http://www.valesco.es/). The aim of this proposal is to provide the reader with all the necessary information to be able to interpret these humorous sequences and thus be able to analyse the corpus adequately..

This paper explores expressive illocutionary acts in responses to hotel guests' reviews posted on Tripadvisor and aims to compare their occurrences and realizations in 320 managerial responses in English from English and Serbian hotels, with manifestations of linguistic politeness a focus of analysis. Drawing largely on Leech's (2014) framework, it has attempted to determine whether the acts which tend to come in the form of formulaic, routinized expressions occurring in the responses written by hotel representatives with different backgrounds exhibit some differences as a reflection of culture-specific politeness values. The analysis has revealed considerable similarity between the two data sets in the lexico-grammatical realization of expressives and the use of resources for politeness. However, some noteworthy points of dissimilarity have emerged which correlate closely with the differences in cultural value preferences of the two countries in Hofstede et al.'s (2010) dimensions of power distance and of individualism.

This paper is based on a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of three British dailies (the Guardian, the Independent and the Times) on NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia. The paper briefly introduces van Dijk’s notions of microstructures and macrostructures of newspaper articles and discusses some aspects of CDA (van Dijk, Fairclough), especially its approach of combining linguistic analysis with intertextual analysis. It then focuses on the issues of dominance and politics. The paper starts from the assumption that the concepts of dominance, power and politics are linked to the role of language that shapes or legitimates particular views, which is also the case in the corpus we analyzed. Politicians always use media in wartime to persuade citizens in a justness of war, leading consumers of news to uncritically accept that the ‘news’ presented to them is true. The paper offers examples from the three dailies and discusses them based on the theoretical approach taken. It briefly touches upon macrostructures and focuses on the elements on the micro level (verbs, nouns, noun phrases and adjectives) that are important for the interpretation of the analyzed articles

In order to investigate whether the acquisition of N-drop (null nouns) is related to the acquisition of the agreement system of Spanish determiners this paper analyzes L1 longitudinal Spanish data from two children and L2 longitudinal data from two children learning Spanish in a naturalistic setting. Based on the results, it is argued that in L1, the acquisition of N-drop may be triggered by the feature 'word marker' which constitutes the make-up of Spanish Nouns, Adjectives and Determiners (Harris 1991, Berstein 1993). However, in the case of L2 acquisition, projecting the abstract ‘word marker’ feature of the Spanish DP the morphology of the Spanish determiner may not be a condition for the productive use of Null Nouns. We base this conclusion on the following pieces of evidence: (1) Monosyllabic place-holders (non-tonic vowels which appear before referential categories) occur in child L1 Spanish, which leads us to propose that these items play a role in the projection of the abstract [+word marker] syntactic feature in L1 Spanish; (2) Monosyllabic place-holders do not occur in child non-native Spanish, which leads us to propose that L2 acquires’ sophisticated phonological systems may prevent them from dissecting the incoming input data (using a ‘bottom up’ processing strategy) which leads to the projection of abstract features; (3) In L1 acquisition non-adult null determiners cease to occur when N-drop becomes productive. This is not the case on L2 acquisition, which again leads us to propose that L2 acquires do not rely on the ‘bottom up’ strategy to deal with input data; (4) In L1 acquisition gender mismatches cease to occur when N-drop becomes productive. In the case of L2 acquisition there is not correlation between productive use of N-drop and the disappearance of gender mismatches. Given the fact that the morphological realization of word markers and gender markers is difficult to tease apart in Spanish, these results provide further evidence that L1 learners make indirect use of morphological markers (via phonological dissection) to project abstract syntactic features.

Constructions commonly called adverbial clauses in traditional grammar are seen in Functional Grammar (FG) as expressions of satellites. FG's multi-layered model of the abstract underlying clause structure assumes each single layer consists of a certain kernel structure plus some (possibly zero) appropriate operators and satellites. Each complete layer (except the top one) is embedded as the subsequent kernel at the next layer up. At each layer, operators and satellites are said to have scope over the corresponding kernel, and, thus, over all lower operators and satellites which are contained in that kernel. This paper discusses adverbial clauses which are assumed to occur as satellites at the second layer of the FG model, sometimes called circumstantials elsewhere, but in FG predication satellites, or, alternatively, level 2 satellites. It is shown that the scope of such adverbial clauses raises a problem which can't be solved within the currently accepted model of FG and thus risks remaining a refractory case for the theoretical framework. While I don't strive for very radical changes, and take as much as possible for granted, I prefer a different view found elsewhere which offers an elegant solution for the problem indicated here. The view in question is rejected by Dik (1997), however, and I explain why that is a regrettable mistake.

Our aim in this paper is to explore the notion of Theme from a cognitive perspective. We see the pressures which are brought to bear on Theme choice as manifold, as these pressures come in varying degrees from the three metafunctions: the interpersonal, the textual, and the experiential. It is this last component, with respect to the text producer’s cognitive perspective of reality, which is focused on here. To this end, using a discoursal cognitive perspective, we expand the functional conception of Theme, and review other analysts’ (Ghadessy, 1993; Fries, 1995a; inter alia) results on Theme selection, as well as provide results from our own contrastive studies on Theme in Spanish and English. We conclude that, since Theme choice is linked to the contextual configuration of the text, the way in which text producers view the field of discourse, i.e. their cognitive representation of the field, is a contributing factor in motivation for Theme selection.

This paper tries to articulate from the point of view of linguistic theory how Spanish native grammatical competence of embedded indirect questions, as characterized by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), can influence knowledge and production of such structures in non-native English by adult Spanish learners. A theory on the difference between native and adult non-native acquisition is also invoked in order to support the need for explicitly teaching and making adult learners aware of the differences between the two languages for these particular structures.

This paper focuses on the acquisition of word order in German by adult native speakers of Spanish in an institutional context. During three semesters we analyzed the written production of Spanish undergraduate students at intermediate and advanced levels. We contrasted the production of students whose acquisition took place exclusively in Spain with other students who spent one semester at a German University. In addition to this longitudinal corpus, three transversal tests were carried out on our subjects, and then these results were contrasted with those of native German speakers.

A relevant part of Jainism is its logic. Jaina logic gives tools to communicate and argue. However, it is problematic from the western perspective: it seems to be a paraconsistent system, that is, a system in which a fact and the denial of that very fact can be true at once. Those difficulties have been overtaken from interpretations that ignore classical standard logic and assess Jaina logic from a point of view more linked to reasoning and the real use of natural language. One of those interpretations have resorted to the theory of mental models, and that interpretation is the one the present paper develops. This is because the theory of mental models has been updated and, hence, any relation provided between Jaina logic and this last theory should be updated as well.

This paper focuses on two basic issues: the anxiety-generating nature of the interpreting task and the relevance of interpreter trainees’ academic self-concept. The first has already been acknowledged, although not extensively researched, in several papers, and the second has only been mentioned briefly in interpreting literature. This study seeks to examine the relationship between the anxiety and academic self-concept constructs among interpreter trainees. An adapted version of the Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (Horwitz et al., 1986), the Academic Autoconcept Scale (Schmidt, Messoulam & Molina, 2008) and a background information questionnaire were used to collect data. Students’ t-Test analysis results indicated that female students reported experiencing significantly higher levels of anxiety than male students. No significant gender difference in self-concept levels was found. Correlation analysis results suggested, on the one hand, that younger would-be interpreters suffered from higher anxiety levels and students with higher marks tended to have lower anxiety levels; and, on the other hand, that younger students had lower self-concept levels and higher-ability students held higher self-concept levels. In addition, the results revealed that students with higher anxiety levels tended to have lower self-concept levels. Based on these findings, recommendations for interpreting pedagogy are discussed.

Among the various devices that conform a given writer’s style (i.e. syntactic, semantic, and so on), we will ll analyse in this paper two of them, allusion and euphemism. And so, in order to illustrate how, by means of these stylistic devices, A. Machado gets cognitive effects and criticizes two given philosophical systems in two extremely short poems. Euphemisms and allusions do perform meanings in cognitive domains not merely aesthetic or rhetorical ones. And this function is related to previous knowledge and presuppositions of the speakers. For that reason several levels of readings are possible according to the different levels of presuppositions made by speakers.

Humor is built and co-constructed by the participants in conversation, by means of terms and / or attitudes. The paper shows the effects of humor and its co-construction on the interaction itself and on the relationship of the participants to each other. The qualitative analysis of a short sequence carried out emerges into a theoretical reflection about both the functioning of humor itself and about familiar conversation in general.

Simile is much less investigated than metaphor, although it occurs as frequently in discourse. This paper aims to provide an account of similes in English, which serves as the starting point for an exploration of the problems they can pose when translated into Italian. First, it deals with the nature and function of similes, the criteria for their classification, and their interpretation. Then, it examines a range of similes illustrating the translation problems they can pose, and discusses the strategies to adopt for each problem stated. The data discussed are taken from English texts belonging to various textual genres, and their translations into Italian.

This paper presents a treatment of aspectual formation in Russian based on the eventive characteristics of verbal forms. Unlike other proposals of this kind, my hypothesis assumes that aspect-changing processes in this language transform the event structure of the verb in two different ways: the perfectivizing prefixation selects for certain parts of the simple event as well as adds some extra bits of idiosyncratic meaning related to the manner of action (intensity, attenuation, adversity, etc.); the imperfectivizing suffixation, in turn, is in charge of multiplying events or visualizing their preparatory phase. Thus, it is also confirmed that the mentioned processes are applied at different levels: the former is basically lexical and the letter syntactic. Concrete examples of the event structure transformations throughout the aspectual derivation are given.

This paper examines the degree to which learners’ L1 typology may affect the comprehension and production of L2 constructions. It has been suggested that English makes more use of constructional meaning than other languages (Goldberg, 2006: 120). Spanish learners of English have been found to face difficulties interpreting constructional meaning when it does not match the verb sense. One of the reasons for this failure may be the lack of a comparable construction in their native language (Martínez Vázquez, 2004). The caused-motion construction is common to satellite-framed languages but almost inexistent in verb-framed languages. I will hypothesize that learners of English with a source language that has a similar construction will make a better use of constructional meaning than learners whose native language does not contain this form-meaning correspondence. In order to test this hypothesis I made an extensive search for Motion verbs in the ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English). The writing produced by native speakers of three satellite-framed languages (German, Dutch and Swedish) was contrasted with the production of native speakers of verb-framed languages (Spanish, French and Italian). The results supply evidence of how the typology of the source language may facilitate or hinder the learning process.

It is a widespread claim in the literature that there does not exist an epistemic use of the modal verb mustn’t in English. Instead, the form can’t is said to fill the gap in the system. This paper shows that there is an epistemic use of mustn’t in Present-day English, investigates the contexts in which it appears and compares the use of epistemic can’t and mustn’t.

Health care reform and immigration reform are heated subjects in the United States of America. The main research question of this paper links the two by analyzing the effectiveness of government communication about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) towards Hispanics. The expansion of health insurance does not necessarily ensure access to care for all members of this minority group. Apart from questions of eligibility, immigrants face other obstacles, such as language, cultural differences, and perceptions about health care. These realities should be taken into consideration when communicating with Latinos, but was this the case for ACA? This paper presents the results of a corpus-based research of six government sources and six sources from non-profit organizations on ACA. An analysis of effective communication using 11 parameters was performed on this corpus and showed that undeniable communicative flaws, together with the too frequent lack of linguistic accuracy in Spanish, point out the need for experts when it comes to communicate publically with ethnic minorities.

The present study scrutinizes the Spanish morphological variation between masculine and feminine possessive complements used with locative adverbials (e.g. cerca mío / mía ‘close to me’). The feminine -a suffix (e.g. mia) is the innovative variant and has been described by normative grammars as a low-frequency and stigmatized trait. This paper focuses on Andalusian Spanish, where the innovative -a-suffix has the highest frequency of use. Twitter data from the eight provinces of Andalusia are compiled in order to determine the innovation’s diatopic distribution and linguistic diffusion. The quantitative results show that the -a variant predominates in all Andalusia and that the change has spread through all the adverbial locative contexts. We propose a series of analogical extensions have taken place whereby the feminine possessive complement spreads from one adverbial context to another, creating an analogical snowballing effect.

This paper builds on the notion of reformulation as a category which can be distinguished from other closer functions (paraphrase, conclusion, correction) (Pons Bordería, 2013, 2017). In particular, it focuses on the relationship between reformulation and reformulation markers in Spanish. On the basis of previous theoretical works (Rossari, 1990, 1994), it is argued that paraphrases can be produced and assimilated without any discourse marker since they are based on equivalence, while reformulation involves some degree of distance which can only be highlighted (even established) by using reformulation markers (e.g., Sp. o sea, es decir‘that is’). Experimental results obtained from eye-trackingexperiments (Rayner, 1998, 2009) show that reformulation can be produced with or without reformulation markers; their presence facilitates its assimilation throughout the whole reading, but its absence does not affect the complete processing. Eye-tracking experiments are based on the eye-mind hypothesis (Just y Carpenter, 1980), by which ocular movements produced when contents are observed reveal how information is being cognitively processed. Eye-tracking data allow thus for completing theoretical ideas and hypotheses from a new dimension offering qualitative and quantitative results (Noveck y Sperber, 2004).

TED talks are a relatively new genre, in which experts in different fields share their knowledge, ideas and experiences to large audiences. The talks are broadcasted worldwide, thus reaching international and intercultural spectators. Although public spoken language has been extensively studied in literature, TED talks present a new field of study, and are considered as a hybrid genre. It has been argued that, although similar in some ways, they differ from other oral discourse types, such as university lectures, in many aspects, such as the epistemic stance, the presentation of ideas, or the macro-discourse markers used (Caliendo and Compagnone, 2014). The utilization of emotion for triggering audience response is the foundation of the present study, aimed at examining the way speakers use emotions to involve spectators in their monologues, and exploring other strategies exploited to spark feedback, so that the most successful ones can be identified. The paper discusses the analysis of 120 TED talks from two different topics, business and education, taking a basic list of emotion words as a starting point, to continue examining how these emotion words and audiences intermingle by looking into laughter and applause, as the two identified forms of feedback. Results indicate that no significant differences can be found in the two subcorpora analyzed in terms of emotion words, the use of multiple humor strategies, and the acknowledgment of multicultural audiences on the side of the speakers.

Writers’ identity (Ivanič, 1998) and positioning in written text have been studied under multiple terms. However, a clearer distinction should be made between writers’ positioning (Hyland, 2005a) and writers’ presence or voice (John, 2005). This paper explores how disseminators and specialised writers adapt or mediate the voice of the researchers and writers of medical research articles (Med-RAs) in the corresponding medical popularizations published on-line (Med-E-Pops). By manually scanning a self-compiled corpus of 40 Med-RAs and their 40 Med-E-Pops published in digital sources, it will be shown how evidence of the most personal authorial voice used in research articles, self-mentions, are adapted in the Med-E-Pops texts using other (de)voicing mechanisms. Results from the data-driven analysis show that whereas Med-RAs researchers claim their authorship, knowledge and prestige, Med-E-Pops writers make their own voice negligible to guide the readers’ attention back to the Med-RAs writers’ presence. Med-E-Pops writers ratify Med-RAs writers’ agency creating trustworthy texts for the audience.

International research groups are expected to ensure global dissemination and visibility of their knowledge production, for which Twitter is effectively employed to reach diversified audiences. This paper analyses the dialogic dimension of tweets published in accounts of Horizon2020 research projects, where group’s productivity and work are promoted, and multiple readers addressed. Our study focuses on the use, in these Twitter accounts, of interactional pragmatic strategies, their verbal realisation through engagement markers, as well as on medium affordances and non-verbal markers. A sample of 1.454 tweets from 10 accounts of the EUROPROtweets corpus were coded and analysed through NVivo. The data-driven pragmatic analysis triggered the identification of 8 interactional strategies. We then quantitatively analysed the use of engagement makers and qualitatively studied the characteristic non-verbal markers with a dialogic function within each of these. Our findings will help understand the complexities of current digital academic professional practices, especially as regards the dynamics of dialogic interaction in social media.

This paper explores the current use of the verb like in sequences such as “me likey”. This new use is practically limited to modern variant spellings (likey, likee, like-y and likie) and resembles the original (and now obsolete) impersonal structure of the verb in which the experiencer was encoded in the objective case and the verb was used invariably, among other aspects. However, rather than the re-emergence of an impersonal construction, the sequence “me likey” seems to be the result of a situation of language contact and it is in line with the informalisation of English as seen, for example, in the increasing tendency for objective pronouns to be used in subject position in a variety of constructions. In light of the evidence from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the TV Corpus, we can conclude that the sequence is used in highly informal registers, and that it tends to appear in rather formulaic expressions, especially in two-word sequences.

Considering the importance of adequate understanding of instruction books and manuals on board vessels all over the world, as well as the challenges it imposes to the English language teachers and course designers, this paper aims to answer important research questions in relation to the quantity and type of vocabulary required for their adequate reading comprehension. In this study we use the method of Lexical Frequency Profiling and the software developed by Anthony Laurence – AntWordProfiler 1.4.0w. The corpus is comprised of 1,769,821 running words obtained from instruction books and manuals of various ship and machinery types. The results of this study point to the high technicality and lexical demand of the corpus, which calls for a highly technical English courses’ design and further research in marine engineering (English) vocabulary. Additionally, the research findings point to the need of creating a marine engineering-specific word list.

This paper explores the application of conceptual metonymy (Lakoff, 1987; Ruiz de Mendoza, 2000; Langacker, 2009; Panther, Thornburg and Barcelona, 2009; Barcelona, 2013) in the development of pedagogical resources for the teaching of the Spanish verbal system to L2/FL learners. To this end, a description is given of the advantages of introducing inferential reasoning using metonymy based on certain principles taken from the Cognitive Grammar model (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2009) in grammar teaching materials — both descriptions and activities. We focus on tense uses that involve metonymic processes, particularly, the meaning extensions in two Spanish past tenses: (1) the actional meaning of stative verbs when conveyed in pretérito indefinido (preterit), as in Pudimos comprar la casa 'We could buy the house', metonymically extended to Compramos la casa 'We bought the house'; and (2) the distancing use (uso citativo) of pretérito imperfecto (imperfect) when referring to current facts, as in ¿Cómo te llamabas? (How PRO.REFL.2SG call.IPFV.PST.2SG?) 'What was your name again?', which is metonymically extended to (Se me ha dicho/No recuerdo/No he oído) cómo te llamas [('I have been told/I can't recall/I couldn't hear') how PRO.REFL.2SG call.PRES.2SG]. In order to discuss the kind of contribution that this conceptual standpoint can make to the teaching of the Spanish verbal system, the pedagogical potential of some techniques and resources is explored in terms of (a) metonymic and metaphorical reasoning in pedagogical grammar descriptions, (b) consciousness-raising paraphrase exercises focused on meaning indeterminacy, and (c) network building and the use of (dynamic) images to show variable construals in grammatical meaning

The topic under discussion in this paper is the syntax of sentences introduced by a subordinate conjunction (que, si, como) that have an independent function in the discourse. Some authors have considered them insubordinate clauses. The author discusses the functions they perform in Spanish discourse, especially in reactive turns, and proposes a macrosyntactic approach that includes a range of structural possibilities: independent utterances, conventional constructions, or discursive operators. These possibilities depend on the different degrees of grammaticalization they show: as semi-fixed constructions or pragmatic markers.

This paper reports on a mixed method study that examined the motivation of 121 students in a 1-year intensive language course in German or French at a Chinese university. Drawing on Dörnyei’s (2009) theory of the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS), a survey was conducted to explore their motivation to learn German or French. Regression analyses revealed that learning experience and promotion-focused instrumentality were the predictors for the German learners’ intended learning effort, while ideal L2 self was the predictor for the French learners’ motivation. Furthermore, ought-to self, culture/community interest and prevention-focused instrumentality were excluded in both regression models. In addition, 17 participants’ qualitative data in the interviews suggested that most of them had lower expectations for the value of German or French than for the value of English in improving one’s employability. Instead, they were much more oriented to learn and appreciate the cultural values of these languages. The results provided insight into the complexity of motivation to learn Languages Other than English (LOTEs) in the university context in China, and suggested future direction for research on LOTE learning motivation

In popular culture, the stereotypically iconized “geek” can be identified in different media narratives from mainstream television to magazines. Drawing upon insights from sociolinguistics and business communication studies, this paper attempts to identify the discursive constructs of “being geek” in Chinese digital business communication. By collecting the discourse data of online customer reviews from amazon.cn and analyzing the data based on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, the study investigates how linguistic mechanisms operate in the shaping of geek culture and the construction of “being geek” in the participatory communication of business. The results revealed lexical variables and generic intertextuality are prominent in the discourse construction of “being geek”, to create a stimulus for a promotional culture in business communication.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a developed software program called the “Spanish Collocation Tool (SCT)” and its application in related corpus-based studies. The Spanish Collocation Tool (SCT) was designed to assist with the research and analysis of Spanish collocation. The SCT allows searches of collocated elements not limited to words, but also parts of speech and lemmas. Furthermore, it can compare two collocation lists to detect any significant differences between them. In this study, this collocation tool, SCT, and a constructed L3 Taiwanese learners’ written corpus of Spanish called CEATE were combined to create efficient access to results in a systematic approach. Furthermore, by using the SCT, the pedagogical implications of the search results for the development of on-line multimedia material for learning Spanish collocations are discussed in the end.

This paper studies the conceptualisation of love by the Montenegrin student population, via conceptual metaphors, metonymies and related concepts, as well as through the lenses of cultural scripts. The corpus with the conceptual instantiations was collected using a sentence-completion elicitation questionnaire, which was administered to Montenegrin university students. The aim was to identify the cognitive model of love of the targeted population, and to determine the level of universality and cultural variation of the conceptualisations identified. The results suggest that the level of universality and culture-specificity depends on how generally we define the conceptualisation – the superordinate-level, i.e. more general and abstract metaphors displayed more universality, whereas more cultural specificity was likely to be found in the basic-level metaphors, i.e. narrower metaphors.

This paper provides evidence of the fruitfulness of combining analytical categories from Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of complex literary characterizations. It does so through a detailed study of the “tributes”, i.e. the randomly selected children who have to fight to death in a nationally televised show, in The Hunger Games. The study proves the effectiveness of such categories to provide an analytically accurate picture of the dystopian world depicted in the novel, which is revealed to include a paradoxical element of hope. The type of dehumanization that characterizes the dystopian society of Panem is portrayed through an internally consistent set of ontological metaphors which project negative aspects of lower forms of existence onto people. This selection of metaphors promotes a biased perspective on the poor inhabitants of Panem, while legitimizing the social inequalities the wealthy Capitol works hard to immortalize. However, Katniss undergoes a metamorphosis through her discovery of her own identity, which hints at an emerging female empowerment. This transformation, together with her identification with the Mockingjay, a supernatural being that voices her beliefs and emotions, contributes to disrupting the status quo imposed by the almighty Gamemakers and to purveying a message of optimism.

This study adopted social network analysis (SNA) as a theoretical framework and methodological approach to understand the collective agency of a multilingual team of eight language teachers during their research practice in a Chinese university. As being guided by SNA that focuses on identifying social relationships and their impact, we used questionnaires and qualitative interviews to collect data and examine the emergence of collective agency. The data analysis revealed that the participants broke linguistic boundaries and engaged in cross-linguistic interactions. The findings further suggest that they offered complementary resources and emotional support for each other at individual, subgroup and group level. Based on the findings, this paper proposes a multi-layered understanding of collective agency to advance our knowledge of how to sustain collective agency. The findings point to the importance of addressing social interactions and relations in the emergence and enhancement of collective agency, so as to facilitate the professional development of language teachers.

This paper investigates the lexical items used in online automobile advertising to characterize the motorcar as a luxury product. The main questions examined are, firstly, how certain words are interpreted as denoting luxury concepts by potential readers, and, secondly, whether luxury and non-luxury marques differ in the use of these units. The issues here are addressed from a double theoretical framework: a theory of luxury, which allows for the identification and classification of the vocabulary of luxury, and Relevance Theory, a pragmatic model which explains how words are subject to pragmatic modulation during interpretation, leading to the construction of ad hoc concepts.

This paper examines the pragmatic translation of cultural-linguistic items through a relevance-theoretic study. The results suggest: 1) implicative value of the cultural-linguistic items is context-dependent and 2) loss of the linguistic form might imply the loss of the implicit clue. The study aims to expose the pragmatic values conveyed by the cultural-linguistic elements of Spanish and its Chinese translation. Furthermore, it explores how much original Spanish linguistic elements are accessible to the target readers of the Chinese translation. Based on a Spanish novel, namely La Colmena, and its Chinese translation Feng Fang, linguistic cultural referents from the Spanish original and their translations were compared, considering their cognitive contexts. This research points to the fact that the cognitive-environmental values of cultural-linguistic elements are generally underestimated, especially in Spanish-to-Chinese translation and, a large number of Spanish linguistic items do not maintain their implicatures in the Chinese translation due to different contextual assumptions.

A learner corpus (LC) is widely known as a rich source of information regarding the use of expressions and the errors made by students in their productions. In fact, we, as teachers, can profit from the compilation of their tasks so as to analyze in detail their way of writing. However, the mere compilation of texts does not guarantee a successful exploitation, as more steps than saving texts must be involved in the whole process. Therefore, it seems essential to follow a protocolized methodology of compilation. In this paper we propose five phases for compiling a LC containing texts from the spontaneous written productions from undergraduate and postgraduate students. The outcomes thrown with the LC exploitation will reveal the errors in students’ productions regarding the use of plural, comparative and superlative in adjectives and also other fails detected in the tagging phase, most of which are due to students’ misuses.

This paper aims to examine the new positioning and new development of Malaysian Chinese educational roles based on the reality with the rise of China, where the Chinese Language has risen in prominence to become a world language. The article points out that it is necessary to reunderstand the advantages of Malaysian Chinese education and re-position its roles due to the inevitable trend of dissemination in the Chinese language to the world. The article suggests that the triple roles of Malaysian Chinese language and the triple functions of Malaysian Chinese education. Malaysian Chinese education should be promoted as a national strategy of Malaysia and to make Malaysia a base to support Chinese education in the nearby countries. Besides, Malaysia should also be a base of Chinese education theoretical construction, standard research and development base, as well as other innovative ideas making for Southeast Asian countries.

In this paper we argue that in analyses of discourse interaction the relationship between participants must be considered as a parameter that conditions their linguistic behavior. A relationship is the result of the experiences shared by partners which create a “cultural code” between them. Each relationship brings a set of circumstances into play that regulates how members behave and how they interpret each other’s words and actions. Our proposal stems from observing how Spanish speakers who hold different types of relationships handle opposing points of view in conversation. Our results show that the expression and interpretation of dissent is linked to the interlocutors’ need to maintain the relationship in good terms. In order to protect relationships, the basic principle guiding interaction is to reach consensus. Additionally, the type and strength of the relationship condition the impact of expressions. Strong disagreement is allowed in strong relationships, as the risk for its affecting the relationship is low. Conversely, weak disagreement is preferred in weak relationships, since opposing views may result in higher impact.

This paper explores the beliefs, attitudes, and efforts of parents with regard to the use and preservation of regional Chinese varieties including Cantonese in the region of Guangzhou, China. The study relied on a sequential mixed method approach, involving 771 parents who completed a parental questionnaire in an online survey on Chinese parents’ language ideology, practice, and management in the home domain, followed by semi-structured interviews of 10 of the surveyed participants to gather detailed data related to the questionnaire results. The study identified inconsistencies in the participants’ beliefs and actual language practice in the survey, revealing mediation by sociolinguistic complexities, national language policies, and socioeconomic conditions on family language decisions and practices. These remind us that the survival of regional Chinese varieties or linguistic varieties without official recognition requires conducive socio-political conditions, including relevant national language policies. The results also suggest that researchers should be particularly concerned by the decline of regional Chinese varieties other than Cantonese, which are not backed up by the national language policy but enjoy a similarly prestigious status to Cantonese in the region.

This paper deals with the way in which certain meanings originate from the participation of a multiplicity of cues that emerge from different modalities. The analysis is based on the implementation of specific linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that trigger the generation of the audience’s unconscious construction of meaning. The corpus of the analysis concentrates on an excerpt of David Hare’s script (2002) of the movie The Hours: three women’s lives, by Stephen Daldry, that acts as the backbone of the analysis. The analysis is cross-referenced with parallel modality inputs (Kress 2009), such as specific filmic or visual details, found either in the scene or the rest of the movie. The approach of this qualitative study is mainly cognitive making special emphasis on the three types of underspecification proposed by Radden (2007a). It also draws from Langacker’s (2008) proposals related to attention and perspective to identify figure-ground relations as determinant in the molding of the characters and their ideological standpoints in the scene.

The study of motivation based on non-English languages has attracted increasing attention in recent years, but related research in China is still limited. In an attempt to address this situation and with Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) as a framework, this paper studied seventeen Chinese university students’ motivational disposition to learn Spanish as their university major without abandoning their English study. Based on Q-methodology and complementary interviews, the results of our experiment showed that these Chinese students displayed two types of foreign-language learning motivation, one being “Multilingual group with an English orientation”, and the other “Strong Spanish”. The first group, profoundly influenced by their ideal L2 selves, had a strong motivation to learn English instead of Spanish, while the second group learned Spanish with a motivation closely related to their ought-to L2 selves. A variety of analyses were applied to answer questions pertaining to group differences and students’ attitudes towards Spanish and English learning mediated by individual, educational, and social factors.