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Flourishing refers to one kind of generalized wellbeing. Contemporary flourishing research often privileges positive emotion in the theorization and measurement of the construct, such that flourishing is frequently conceptualized as involving a predominance of positive over negative emotions. Positive emotions are thus, on some views of flourishing, seen as an essential component of "the good life." This paper explores the nuanced variations in conceptions of the good life, focusing on the interplay between positive emotion and flourishing. Through an analysis of contemporary perspectives on flourishing, we underscore the diversity in conceptualizations of flourishing and the implications of this diversity for flourishing theorists. Our review reveals significant disparities in perspectives regarding the significance of positive emotion in the pursuit of a good life. Furthermore, we delineate the theoretical distinctions between objective-list approaches and functional approaches to flourishing, highlighting their respective advantages and limitations. Theoretical dissensus persists regarding whether positive emotion is a necessary constituent of the good life, thus prompting a critical examination of the justification for its inclusion in flourishing models. Finally, we emphasize the need for greater theoretical clarity in defining wellbeing to inform both research endeavors and societal discourse. We suggest that an adequate appreciation of variation in the development and maintenance of flourishing requires admitting for more complex relationships between the construct and both positive and negative emotionality, while embracing the cultural and individual variety that are unavoidable in accurate models of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is concerned with cognitively and consciously enacting a new dialectical opposite-unity approach into Chinese harmonious discourse (CHD) analysis in an ecological perspective, which contributed to converting antagonistic thinking between human and nature into an ecological harmonious one cultivated into an unconscious state. The method applied is primarily the theoretical analysis and interpretation, due to the newness of this subject and the lack of corpus data. The motivation of this paper is evoked by the discovery of various cognition dissonances and insufficiencies with the academic development of newly born ecolinguistics. On a micro or specified level, this paper presents a cutting-edge example of an ecologically cognitive approach to the analysis of CHD, based on Chinese dialectical opposite-unity philosophy, to construct a higher-level cognition mechanism into a habitually unconscious thinking state. Such a mechanism has its practical significance in devoting to alleviating the ecological crisis by a change in ways of thinking, mediating cognitive dissonance brought about by the crisis, and improving the one-sided cognition deficiency brought about by ways of antagonistic thinking in order to maintain the ecological harmony. The theoretical significance lies in it demonstrating the cognitive process about how the unconscious ecological harmony cognition is cultivated by the conscious operational opposite-unity cognition procedure, with the ultimate purpose to achieve and maintain a real ecological harmony, under the cross-cultural background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the pragmatic functions of evidentiality categories in diplomatic discourse by illustrating a new classification of English evidentiality. It adopts a data-based approach by analyzing a corpus of thirty English political speeches from three US presidents (including Bush, Obama, and Trump). The results show that: (i) Evidentiality can be classified into three categories: personal sources; shared sources and other sources. (ii) Besides the function of (de)legitimation, evidentiality can also be used to normalize the speaker's ideology. (iii) Shared sources of evidentials reflect the speaker's ideological bias, because they encode the speaker's presupposition of authority, facts, or shared knowledge. (iv) Personal sources of evidentials mean that the speaker is more willing to take verbal responsibility. (v) Other sources of evidentials reflect the speaker's lower responsibility for the information he/she offered. (vi) The use of the three evidential sources reflects the speakers' different responsibilities for their propositions and reveals their subjective or intersubjective stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual-gestural modality affords its users simultaneous movement of several independent articulators and thus lends itself to simultaneous encoding of information. Much research has focused on the fact that sign languages coordinate two manual articulators in addition to a range of non-manual articulators to present different types of linguistic information simultaneously, from phonological contrasts to inflection, spatial relations, and information structure. Children and adults acquiring a signed language arguably thus need to comprehend and produce simultaneous structures to a greater extent than individuals acquiring a spoken language. In this paper, we discuss the simultaneous encoding that is found in emerging and established sign languages; we also discuss places where sign languages are unexpectedly sequential. We explore potential constraints on simultaneity in cognition and motor coordination that might impact the acquisition and use of simultaneous structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research spanning linguistics, psychology, and philosophy suggests that speakers and hearers are finely attuned to perspectives and viewpoints that are not their own, even though perspectival information is not encoded directly in the morphosyntax of languages like English. While some terms seem to require a perspective or a judge for interpretation (e.g., epithets, evaluative adjectives, locational PPs, etc.), perspective may also be determined on the basis of subtle information spanning multiple sentences, especially in vivid styles of narrative reporting. In this paper, I develop an account of the cues that are involved in evaluating and maintaining non-speaker perspectives, and present an economy-based discourse processing model of perspective that embodies two core principles. First, perspectives are subject to a "speaker-default," but may shift to a non-speaker perspective if sufficient contextual cues are provided. Second, the processor follows the path of least resistance to maintaining perspective, opting to maintain the current perspective across sentences as long as the shifted perspective continues to be coherent. The predictions of the model are tested in a series of offline and online studies, manipulating the form of an attitude report and the tense of the sentence that follows. Implications for processing perspective and viewpoint in speech and narrative forms are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to explain the power of perspective taking in narrative discourse by turning to research on the oral foundations of storytelling in human communication and language. We argue that narratives function through a central process of alignment between the viewpoints of narrator, hearer/reader, and character and develop an analytical framework that is capable of generating general claims about the processes and outcomes of narrative discourse while flexibly accounting for the great linguistic variability both across and within stories. The central propositions of this viewpoint alignment framework are that the distance between the viewpoints of participants in the narrative construal – narrator, character, reader – is dynamic and regulated by linguistic choices as well as contextual factors. Fundamentally, viewpoint alignment is grounded in oral narrative interaction and, from this conversation, transferred to the written narrative situation, varying between demonstration and invasion of the narrative subjects and guiding readers' route of processing the narrative (experiential versus reflective). Our claim is that variations in viewpoint alignment are functional to the communicative context and intended outcomes of narratives. This is illustrated with the analysis of a corporate journalistic narrative that comprises both interactional and non-interactional aspects of storytelling. The concept of viewpoint alignment further explains the oral fundaments of narrative discourse in conversational storytelling and poses new questions on the relation between the dynamic processing of stories on the one hand and their static outcomes on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how subjectivity in capitalist culture can be characterized. Building on Lacans later seminars XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX, the author first outlines Lacans general discourse theory, which includes four characteristic discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. Next, the author explores the subjectivity and the mode of dealing with jouissance and semblance, which is entailed in a fifth type of discourse, the capitalist discourse, discussed by Lacan (1972). Indeed, like the other discourses that Lacan discerns, the discourse of the capitalist can be thought of as a mode of dealing with the sexual non rapport. It is argued that in the case of neurosis the discourse of the capitalist functions as an attempt to ignore the sexual non rapport and the dimension of the unconscious. Psychosis, by contrast, is marked by an a priori exclusion from discourse. In that case, consumerist ways of relating to the other might offer a semblance, and thus the possibility of inventing a mode of relating to the other. Two clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate this perspective: one concerning the neurotic structure and one concerning the psychotic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (or "empty") signifier in political discourse analysis has thus proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand it demonstrates how crucial psychical processes are performed via the operations of the signifier, extending thus the Lacanian thesis that identification is the outcome of linguistic and symbolic as opposed to merely psychological processes. On the other, the use of the master signifier concept within the political realm to track discursive formations tends to distance the term from the dynamics of the unconscious and operation of repression. Accordingly, this paper revisits the master signifier concept, and does so within the socio-political domain, yet while paying particular attention to the functioning of unconscious processes of fantasy and repression. More specifically, it investigates how Nelson Mandela operates as a master signifier in contemporary South Africa, as a vital means of knitting together diverse elements of post-apartheid society, enabling the fantasy of the post-apartheid nation, and holding at bay a whole series of repressed and negated undercurrents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (or 'empty') signifier in political discourse analysis has thus proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand it demonstrates how crucial psychical processes are performed via the operations of the signifier, extending thus the Lacanian thesis that identification is the outcome of linguistic and symbolic as opposed to merely psychological processes. On the other, the use of the master signifier concept within the political realm to track discursive formations tends to distance the term from the dynamics of the unconscious and operation of repression. Accordingly, this paper revisits the master signifier concept, and does so within the socio-political domain, yet while paying particular attention to the functioning of unconscious processes of fantasy and repression. More specifically, it investigates how Nelson Mandela operates as a master signifier in contemporary South Africa, as a vital means of knitting together diverse elements of post-apartheid society, enabling the fantasy of the post-apartheid nation, and holding at bay a whole series of repressed and negated undercurrents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missing-link conditionals like "If bats have wings, Paris is in France" are generally felt to be unacceptable even though both clauses are true. According to the Hypothetical Inferential Theory, this is explained by a conventional requirement of an inferential connection between conditional clauses. Bayesian theorists have denied the need for such a requirement, appealing instead to a requirement of discourse coherence that extends to all ways of connecting clauses. Our experiment compared conditionals ("If A, C"), conjunctions ("A and C"), and bare juxtapositions ("A. C."). With one systematic exception that is predicted by prior work in coherence theory, the presence or absence of an inferential link affected conditionals and other statement types in the same way. This is as expected according to the Bayesian approach together with a general theory of discourse coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discourse-based approach to understanding security has been explored in the study of International Relations, yet how other agents rather than the political agents speak to conceptualize the emotive appeal in unconventional security issues is less discussed. This corpus-based cognitive critical discourse study examines security by combining the International Relations' theory of securitization with the proximization approach in Critical Discourse Studies. As a case study, texts concerning Confucius Institutes on the National Association of Scholars' official website from 2014 to 2020 were collected to discuss how the threat is constructed discursively and cognitively for an endeavor to influence the public and the political decision-making process. The corpus was further divided into two sub-corpora in order to expose the difference in their cognitive construction of Confucius Institutes. The findings show that the American academia delivers a bottom-up securitizing move by constructing education security discourse on Confucius Institutes in the initial process, yet later the whole-of-society security narratives interacting with a top-down securitizing move from the political agents have been adopted. As indicated by the corpus statistics, the concerned discourses are discursively constructed by following the "Self-Other" dichotomy security narratives, in which Confucius Institutes are cognitively transformed from an academic issue to a national security issue and legitimized through proximization in the spatial, temporal, and axiological dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missing-link conditionals like “If bats have wings, Paris is in France” are generally felt to be unacceptable even though both clauses are true. According to the Hypothetical Inferential Theory, this is explained by a conventional requirement of an inferential connection between conditional clauses. Bayesian theorists have denied the need for such a requirement, appealing instead to a requirement of discourse coherence that extends to all ways of connecting clauses. Our experiment compared conditionals (“If A, C”), conjunctions (“A and C”), and bare juxtapositions (“A. C.”). With one systematic exception that is predicted by prior work in coherence theory, the presence or absence of an inferential link aected conditionals and other statement types in the same way. This is as expected according to the Bayesian approach together with a general theory of discourse coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual-gestural modality affords its users simultaneous movement of several independent articulators and thus lends itself to simultaneous encoding of information. Much research has focused on the fact that sign languages coordinate two manual articulators in addition to a range of non-manual articulators to present different types of linguistic information simultaneously, from phonological contrasts to inflection, spatial relations, and information structure. Children and adults acquiring a signed language arguably thus need to comprehend and produce simultaneous structures to a greater extent than individuals acquiring a spoken language. In this paper, we discuss the simultaneous encoding that is found in emerging and established sign languages; we also discuss places where sign languages are unexpectedly sequential. We explore potential constraints on simultaneity in cognition and motor coordination that might impact the acquisition and use of simultaneous structures.

Classroom teaching is a kind of social activity system. Thus, as a form of classroom learning, collaborative problem solving has a strong social attribute. It is extremely common to choose the conflict discourse in the context of cooperation. The verbal characteristics of the conflicting discourse level in cooperative mathematics problem solving directly affects the cooperative learning between students and the classroom teaching of teachers. This article focuses on the overall linguistic characteristics of conflict discourse in solving cooperative problems and the discourse style and language characteristics of the three stages of conflict discourse. The main research conclusions are as follows: (1) The classification of language features of conflict discourse includes extreme summaries, negation, discourse markers, and so on. Among them, the frequency of Indexical 2nd-person pronouns is the highest. (2) The language expressions at the “initial stage of conflict” include Explanatory statement Negative response, instruct refuse and Seditious inquiry Confrontational answer. The language shows the characteristics of using emphatic words or phrases, negative words, imperative sentences and so on. Meanwhile, rebuttal questions, direct responses, explanations, and negative avoidance are the main forms language expressions at the “conflict stage.” It also exhibits the verbal characteristics of rhetorical questions, negative comments, and direct negation. Lastly, topic-shifting, compromise, thirdparty intervention, and one-sided wins are the linguistic expressions at the “end of conflict.” The language features are the appearance of tone relaxation and language easing, and the conflict ending utterances reflect cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined L2 learners' interpretation of pitch accent cues in discourse memory and how these effects vary with proficiency and working memory (WM). One hundred sixty-eight L1-Chinese participants learning L2-English listened to recorded discourses containing pairs of contrastive alternatives and then took a later recognition memory test. Their language proficiency and WM were measured through standard tests and the participants were categorized into low, medium, advanced, and high advanced language proficiency groups. We analyzed recognition memory task performance using signal detection theory to tease apart response bias (an overall tendency to affirm memory probes) from sensitivity (the ability to discern whether a specific probe statement is true). The results showed a benefit of contrastive L + H* pitch accents in rejecting probes referring to items unmentioned in a discourse, but not contrastive alternatives themselves. More proficient participants also showed more accurate memory for the discourses overall, as well as a reduced overall bias to affirm the presented statements as true. Meanwhile, that the benefit of L + H* accents in rejecting either contrast probes or unmentioned probes was modulated for people with greater working memory. Participants with higher WM were quite sure that it did not exist in the memory trace as this part of discourse wasn't mentioned. The results support a contrast-uncertainty hypothesis, in which comprehenders recall the contrast set but fail to distinguish which is the correct item. Further, these effects were influenced by proficiency and by working memory, suggesting they reflect incomplete mapping between pitch accent and discourse representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher identity has evolved from a core, inner, fixed, linear construct to a dynamic, multifaceted, context-dependent, dialogical, and intrinsically related phenomenon. Since little research has provided an inclusive framework to study teacher identity construction, this article proposes a novel conceptual framework that includes the following components: mirrors of power, discourse, the imagination of reality, investment, emotioncy, and capital. The above core constituents have been discussed thoroughly to trigger significant insights about teacher identity development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the complex interplay of religiosity, sexuality, and infidelity. We adopted a case study approach in this research, and discourse was made central to the analysis. There were two participants; both identified as homosexuals. One participant, Fahrin, is married while the other, Muzz, is divorced at the time of the interview. The participants were subjected to an in-depth, semi-structured interview to gauge their experiences, perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and thoughts on their sexuality, Islamic faith as well as relationship with their spouses. The data were then transcribed and analyzed using the Discursive Action Model (DAM) and Discursive Psychology (DP) frameworks. From the analysis, two overarching themes were identified. They are (1) the allocation of blame and accountability and (2) the participants' attachment to their Islamic identity. The discussion then revolves around the societal role that pressures gay men to marry women and contextualizes the position of Islam on Homosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent studies have claimed that non-referential gestures (i.e., gestures that do not visually represent any semantic content in speech) are used to mark discourse-new and/or -accessible referents and focused information in adult speech, to our knowledge, no prior investigation has studied the relationship between information structure (IS) and gesture referentiality in children's narrative speech from a developmental perspective. A longitudinal database consisting of 332 narratives performed by 83 children at two different time points in development was coded for IS and gesture referentiality (i.e., referential and non-referential gestures). Results revealed that at both time points, both referential and non-referential gestures were produced more with information that moves discourse forward (i.e., focus) and predication (i.e., comment) rather than topical or background information. Further, at 7–9 years of age, children tended to use more non-referential gestures to mark focus and comment constituents than referential gestures. In terms of the marking of the newness of discourse referents, non-referential gestures already seem to play a key role at 5–6 years old, whereas referential gestures did not show any patterns. This relationship was even stronger at 7–9 years old. All in all, our findings offer supporting evidence that in contrast with referential gestures, non-referential gestures have been found to play a key role in marking IS, and that the development of this relationship solidifies at a period in development that coincides with a spurt in non-referential gesture production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anaphora is the main linguistic means to establish discourse coherence, and anaphora resolution is the psychological process to maintain this coherence. Chinese discourse is characterized with providing multiplicity of linguistic clues to readers by employing various referential apparatuses such as pronoun anaphora, zero anaphora, and so on. As a way of avoiding repeated reference to an object that is mentioned beforehand, zero anaphora is frequently employed in discourse. The production and resolution of zero anaphora largely concerns some constraints underlying psychological mechanisms. We particularly focus on zero anaphora resolution in the present study to try to discover some specific aspects of the underlying mechanism, hoping to find out some factors unique to the resolution process. We designed the first two experiments to probe into the psychological reality when participants were presented with sentences containing either pronoun anaphora or zero anaphora or both under discourse condition with topic continuity in Experiment 1a and topic discontinuity in Experiment 1b. We did not find any significant difference in the reaction time between zero anaphora resolution and pronoun anaphora resolution, indicating that zero anaphora possibly works within the processing mechanism on which pronoun anaphora resolution depends. However, we found significantly longer time in reading the first sentence in any of the discourse, showing that the first-mention effect exists in anaphora resolution. We further explored the time course of zero anaphora resolution by measuring the reaction time during the period when participants read sentences that varied according to the location where zero anaphora occurred under two conditions: topic continuity (Experiment 2a) vs. topic discontinuity (Experiment 2b). The strategies of searching for the referential information were found divergent: the exhaustive searching strategy was adopted when the topics within a discourse were kept continuous and the heuristic searching strategy was employed when the topics were discontinuous. The design of Experiment 5 took the factor of voice type and situation consistency into consideration, investigating in what way do those factors influence the resolution of zero anaphora. The voice type, according to the results, plays a significant role for its exclusively close relationship with the first-mention effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse connectives are lexical items like "but" and "so" that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argumentative discourse has a complexity that is not entirely captured by purely structural analyses. In arguments about socio-scientific issues (SSI), a range of dimensions, besides scientific knowledge, including values, ethical concerns, cultural habits, or emotions, are mobilized. The relationship between argumentation and emotions is now drawing attention of researchers. Our focus is on the dynamic interactions among emotions and scientific evidence. We draw from Plantin, who proposed that emotions are mobilized as argumentative resources alongside knowledge. The goal of our study is to examine in which ways emotional tension frames the construction of arguments about vegetarian vs. omnivorous diets (ODs) with a group of four preservice teachers. The results suggest that the interactions between the group emotional tension and the evaluation of evidence drive a change toward a decision that would be emotionally acceptable for all participants. Participants attended to the epistemic dimension, weighing evidence, and values about the choices, but the emotional framing took priority. We suggest that the analysis of this emotive framing may be a fruitful approach for sophisticated studies of argumentation beyond structural issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some feminist discourses blame some men for gender inequality, gender domination, and gender-based violence. Some women use such discourse as a perfect scenario to criticize some men's behavior. Indeed, they usually do so with Oppressed Traditional Masculinities (OTM) but not with Dominant Traditional Masculinities (DTM), who are the men who were violent with those women and with whom some of those women chose to have relationships. However, there have always been men who have been on the side of women and have never committed violence against them. Therefore, New Alternative Masculinities (NAM) reject being indicated as guilty of the violence committed against women by DTM. Through a communicative approach, applying six semi-structured interviews with a communicative orientation and a communicative data analysis of all information, this article explores both women's communicative acts that blame OTM for what DTM have done to women and NAM's reactions to these accusations to stop such blaming to make it possible to overcome hegemonic discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stroke survivors undergo a thorough cognitive diagnosis that often involves administration of multiple standardized tests. However, patient's narrative discourse can provide clinicians with additional knowledge on patient's subjective experience of illness, attitude toward current situation, and motivation for treatment. We evaluated the methods of analyzing thematic content and story types in relationship to cognitive impairment in stroke survivors with no aphasia (including 9 left hemisphere damage – LHD patients, and 16 right hemisphere damage – RHD patients). Cognitive impairment was evaluated in comparison to a group of 25 patients with orthopaedic injury not involving the brain. Our findings primarily show that higher elaboration on own cognitive problems, physical ailments or coping strategies in LHD patients and cognitive problems, emotional issues and circumstances of illness onset in RHD patients is related to deficits in executive functions and retrieval of information from memory. Furthermore, RHD patients who use more chaos story type show lower executive functioning. However, these results did not survive the significance threshold of p < 0.05 after Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons. In conclusion, this study provides preliminary evidence that stroke survivor's narrative can constitute an additional source of clinically-relevant information regarding patient's experience of illness and attitude toward recovery. This knowledge can aid clinicians and nurses in everyday interactions with the patients and support individualized strategy to treatment. Still, the current results need be confirmed with future studies in a larger cohort of stroke patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, comprehenders use both multimodal cues (e.g., gestures) and linguistic cues to identify the antecedent. While research has shown that gestures facilitate language comprehension, improve reference tracking, and influence the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, literature on reference resolution suggests that a wide set of linguistic constraints influences the successful resolution of ambiguous pronouns and that linguistic cues are more powerful than some multimodal cues. To address the outstanding question of the importance of gesture as a cue in reference resolution relative to cues in the speech signal, we have previously investigated the comprehension of contrastive gestures that indexed abstract referents – in this case expressions of personal preference – and found that such gestures did facilitate the resolution of ambiguous statements of preference. In this study, we extend this work to investigate whether the effect of gesture on resolution is diminished when the gesture indexes a statement that is less likely to be interpreted as the correct referent. Participants watched videos in which a speaker contrasted two ideas that were either neutral (e.g., whether to take the train to a ballgame or drive) or moral (e.g., human cloning is (un)acceptable). A gesture to the left or right side co-occurred with speech expressing each position. In gesture-disambiguating trials, an ambiguous phrase (e.g., I agree with that , where that is ambiguous) was accompanied by a gesture to one side or the other. In gesture non-disambiguating trials, no third gesture occurred with the ambiguous phrase. Participants were more likely to choose the idea accompanied by gesture as the stimulus speaker's preference. We found no effect of scenario type. Regardless of whether the linguistic cue expressed a view that was morally charged or neutral, observers used gesture to understand the speaker's opinion. This finding contributes to our understanding of the strength and range of cues, both linguistic and multimodal, that listeners use to resolve ambiguous references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the content of 12th-grade mathematics textbooks and workbooks, based on their inclusion of mathematical discourse components. The mathematics textbooks and workbooks were used in a Saudi Arabian school, where students are transitioning from secondary education to university. The results revealed that Saudi Arabian school textbooks and workbooks did not appropriately include discourse components or discourse skills to help facilitate mathematical learning among students. Furthermore, these textbooks did not exceed level two of the four levels of inclusion. As a result, the inclusion was insufficient in helping students meaningfully understand mathematical concepts, become active students, and develop successful community leadership. This implies that mathematics textbooks and workbooks should be revised to include mathematical discourse so that this inclusion is more student directed than teacher directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on bimodal discourse reference has shown that gestures are sensitive to referents' information status in discourse. Gestures occur more often with new referents/first mentions than with given referents/subsequent mentions. However, because not all new entities at first mention occur with gestures, the current study examines whether gestures are sensitive to a difference in information status between brand-new and inferable entities and variation in nominal definiteness. Unexpectedly, the results show that gestures are more frequent with inferable referents (hearer new but discourse old) than with brand-new referents (hearer new and discourse new). The findings reveal new aspects of the relationship between gestures and speech in discourse, specifically suggesting a complementary (disambiguating) function for gestures in the context of first mentioned discourse entities. The results thus highlight the multi-functionality of gestures in relation to speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slender and skinny body ideals have been associated with psychological disorders such as eating disorders. However, the tendency to promote a "healthier" and more athletic female body ideal has received minimal critical attention. This study aims at exploring the underlying conditions for such an athletic ideal through asking: How is the female athletic body constructed in the pseudonymous contemporary women's fitness magazine, "Xrzise"? We investigated the object of inquiry through a modified version of Parker's Foucauldian discourse analysis. We analyzed the interviews of four athletic role models in "Xrzise" and identified four discourses: "Neo-liberal discourse," "Health expertise discourse," "Discourse of surveillance and control" and "Discourse of emancipation." The "Neoliberal discourse" constructs the female athletic body as something that the individual woman should strive for by appropriately managing her own resources, abilities and skills. The "Health expertise discourse" constructs the female athletic body through a homeostatic logic where the individual is responsible and healthcare experts have the mandate to intervene in order to maintain good health. The "Discourse of surveillance and control" constructs the female athletic body as an internalized panoptic stance, disciplining women to accept hegemonic beauty ideals. The "Discourse of emancipation" accentuates that the female athletic body is alleviated from a culturally rigid body image and instead improved physical performance and functionality are considered good ends. The results and discussion indicate that the female athletic body is a result of a complex nexus of different discourses associated with the powers of economy, sex differences, institutions, and ideological forces. We have advocated that magazines like "Xrzise" can have covert disciplinary effects hidden by seemingly well-intentioned motives, which can contribute to women's objectification of their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's understanding of unobservable scientific entities largely depends on testimony from others, especially through parental explanations that highlight the mechanism underlying a scientific entity. Mechanistic explanations are particularly helpful in promoting children's conceptual understanding, yet they are relatively rare in parent–child conversations. The current study aimed to increase parent–child use of mechanistic conversation by modeling this language in a storybook about the mechanism of electrical circuits. We also examined whether an increase in mechanistic conversation was associated with science learning outcomes, measured at both the dyadic- and child-level. In the current study, parents and their 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 60) were randomly assigned to read a book containing mechanistic explanations (n = 32) or one containing non-mechanistic explanations (n = 28). After reading the book together, parent–child joint understanding of electricity's mechanism was tested by asking the dyad to assemble electrical components of a circuit toy so that a light would turn on. Finally, child science learning outcomes were examined by asking children to assemble a novel circuit toy and answer comprehension questions to gauge their understanding of electricity's mechanism. Results indicate that dyads who read storybooks containing mechanistic explanations were (1) more successful at completing the circuit (putting the pieces together to make the light turn on) and (2) used more mechanistic language than dyads assigned to the non-mechanistic condition. Children in the mechanistic condition also had better learning outcomes, but only if they engaged in more mechanistic discourse with their parent. We discuss these results using a social interactionist framework to highlight the role of input and interaction for learning. We also highlight how these results implicate everyday routines such as book reading in supporting children's scientific discourse and understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Production studies show that anaphoric reference is bimodal. Speakers can introduce a referent in speech by also using a localizing gesture, assigning a specific locus in space to it. Referring back to that referent, speakers then often accompany a spoken anaphor with a localizing anaphoric gesture (i.e., indicating the same locus). Speakers thus create visual anaphoricity in parallel to the anaphoric process in speech. In the current perception study, we examine whether addressees are sensitive to localizing anaphoric gestures and specifically to the (mis)match between recurrent use of space and spoken anaphora. The results of two reaction time experiments show that, when a single referent is gesturally tracked, addressees are sensitive to the presence of localizing gestures, but not to their spatial congruence. Addressees thus seem to integrate gestural information when processing bimodal anaphora, but their use of locational information in gestures is not obligatory in every discourse context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, we examine English monolinguals' and Spanish-English bilinguals' ability to predict an upcoming pronoun referent based on the Implicit Causality (IC) bias of the verb. In an eye-tracking experiment, the monolingual data show anticipation of the upcoming referent for NP1-bias verbs. For bilinguals, the same effect is found, showing that bilinguals are not slower than monolinguals at processing the information associated with the IC of the verb. In an off-line experiment, both groups showed knowledge of IC bias information for the verbs used in the eye-tracking experiment. Based on the findings of the two experiments, we show that highly proficient bilinguals have similar online and off-line predictions based on IC verb information than monolingual speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the number of characters (1 vs. 2) and, for stories in which there were two characters, in their ambiguity in gender (different vs. same gender). Data were coded for the type of reference markers as well as the type of reference content (i.e., the extent of the information provided in the referential expression). Results showed that, beyond the expected effects of discourse stages on reference markers (more indefinite markers at the introduction stage, more pronouns at the maintaining stage, and more definite markers at the shift stage), the number of characters and their ambiguity in gender also modulated speakers' referential choices at specific discourse stages, For the maintaining stage, an effect of the number of characters was observed for the use of pronouns and of definite markers, with more pronouns when there was a single character, sometimes replaced by definite expressions when two characters were present in the story. For the shift stage, an effect of gender ambiguity was specifically noted for the reference content with more specific information provided in the referential expression when there was referential ambiguity. Reference content is an aspect of referential marking that is rarely addressed in a narrative context, yet it revealed a quite flexible referential behavior by the speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how subjectivity in capitalist culture can be characterised. Building on Lacan’s later seminars XVI, XVII, XVIII and XIX, the author first outlines Lacan’s general discourse theory, which includes four characteristic discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. Next, the author explores the subjectivity and the mode of dealing with jouissance and semblance, which is entailed in a fifth type of discourse, the capitalist discourse, discussed by Lacan in 1972. Indeed, like the other discourses that Lacan discerns, the discourse of the capitalist can be thought of as a mode of dealing with the sexual non-rapport. It is argued that in the case of neurosis the discourse of the capitalist functions as an attempt to ignore the sexual non-rapport and the dimension of the unconscious. Psychosis, by contrast, is marked by an a priori exclusion from discourse. In that case, consumerist ways of relating to the other might offer a semblance, and thus the possibility of inventing a mode of relating to the other. Two clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate this perspective: one concerning the neurotic structure and one concerning the psychotic structure.

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (or ‘empty’) signifier in political discourse analysis has thus proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand it demonstrates how crucial psychical processes are performed via the operations of the signifier, extending thus the Lacanian thesis that identification is as much the outcome of linguistic and symbolic as opposed to merely psychological processes. On the other, the use of the master signifier concept within the political realm to track discursive formations tends to distance the term from the dynamics of the unconscious and operation of repression. Accordingly, this paper revisits the master signifier concept, and does so within the socio-political domain, yet while paying particular attention to the functioning of unconscious processes of fantasy and repression. More specifically, it investigates how Nelson Mandela operates as a master signifier in contemporary South Africa, as a vital means of knitting together diverse elements of post-apartheid society, enabling the fantasy of the post-apartheid nation, and holding at bay a whole series of repressed and negated undercurrents.

We discuss four interconnected issues that we believe have hindered investigations into how language may affect thinking. These have had a tendency to reappear in the debate concerning linguistic relativity over the past decades, despite numerous empirical findings. The first is the claim that it is impossible to disentangle language from thought, making the question concerning "influence" pointless. The second is the argument that it is impossible to disentangle language from culture in general, and from social interaction in particular, so it is impossible to attribute any differences in the thought patterns of the members of different cultures to language per se. The third issue is the objection that methodological and empirical problems defeat all but the most trivial version of the thesis of linguistic influence: that language gives new factual information. The fourth is the assumption that since language can potentially influence thought from "not at all" to "completely," the possible forms of linguistic influence can be placed on a cline, and competing theories can be seen as debating the actual position on this cline. We analyze these claims and show that the first three do not constitute in-principle objections against the validity of the project of investigating linguistic influence on thought, and that the last one is not the best way toframe the empirical challenges at hand. While we do not argue for any specific theory or mechanism for linguistic influence on thought, our discussion and the reviewed literature show that such influence is clearly possible, and hence in need of further investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visualworld study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rdperson pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children's performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children's language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report results from an eye-tracking during listening study examining English-speaking adults' online processing of reflexive pronouns, and specifically whether the search for an antecedent is restricted to syntactically appropriate positions. Participants listened to a short story where the recipient of an object was introduced with a reflexive, and were asked to identify the object recipient as quickly as possible. This allowed for the recording of participants' offline interpretation of the reflexive, response times, and eye movements on hearing the reflexive. Whilst our offline results show that the ultimate interpretation for reflexives was constrained by binding principles, the response time and eye-movement data revealed that during processing participants were temporarily distracted by a structurally inappropriate competitor antecedent when this was prominent in the discourse. These results indicate that in addition to binding principles, online referential decisions are also affected by discourse-level information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]