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In the wake of tragic events such as the 'Paris Attacks of 2015', the expression of condolences through e-messages has become a common way for individuals to offer support and sympathy to those affected. However, limited research has been conducted on the linguistic aspects of condolence e-messages and how they reflect the speech act of condolence. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the syntactic and pragmatic elements present in these messages. The aim is to understand how the syntactic and pragmatic elements of these messages contribute to the expression of the communicative speech act of condolence. Condolence e-messages were identified and analyzed using an adapted version of Elwood's (2004) coding scheme. The analysis focused on common themes in the condolence sentences, revealing that some linguistic functions were overtly used to express grief. Additionally, specific words such as 'pray', 'love', and 'condolence' were frequently used in conjunction with the expressions of condolence. The findings highlight the influence of sociocultural factors in shaping the norms and variations in the production of speech acts across different cultures. Understanding these linguistic variations can contribute to effective communication and cultural sensitivity in expressing condolences., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

A correlation between media, gender identity and society is central in this information era. Gender and sexuality has seen a paradigm shift in recent decades, making female representation a subject of several cultural studies. International media contributed to shaping women's identity and impacting social construction. The aim of this study was to analyse the role played by international media organisations like Netflix through the lens of Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). In order to offer an in-depth analysis of the female identity, the study opted for a qualitative research method using discourse analysis and a systematic literature review to achieve the research objectives. The findings of the study demonstrated that Netflix, as an international media organisation, has been using a biased representation of female characters where the major focus has been led on the overt masculinity of white female characters. The study used contextuality to study two recently released Netflix original series "Sex Education" and "Ginny and Georgia." Further, to achieve the second objective of the study, semantics analysis was conducted to review the studies published by previous scholars. The findings of the study further demonstrated the stereotypical representation of the female protagonists portrayed by Netflix and other international media organisations. Additionally, the study offered a further analysis of Systematic Functional Linguistics to study the language used for shaping female identity on a global level.

Gender stereotyping and perception of gender roles have been a pervasive issue in media discourse. Studies have shown that language plays a crucial role in shaping our perceptions and understanding of gender. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a linguistic framework that analyzes the functional and social aspects of language use. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between SFL and gender stereotyping as well as the impact of SFL on gender stereotyping and perception of gender roles in international media discourse. Additionally, the study investigated whether language proficiency moderated the relationship between SFL and gender stereotyping. The study recruited 287 participants from colleges in Beijing and Shanghai cities of China. Participants were selected based on their language proficiency in English and Mandarin. Data were collected through a self-administered online questionnaire. The results indicated that SFL had a significant positive effect on both gender stereotyping and perception of gender roles in international media discourse. Furthermore, language proficiency was found to moderate the relationship between SFL and gender stereotyping, such that the effect of SFL on gender stereotyping was stronger for individuals with higher language proficiency. However, the mediating effect of perception of gender roles on the relationship between SFL and gender stereotyping was not significant. This study provided insights into the potential impact of SFL on gender stereotyping in international media discourse. It highlights the importance of language proficiency in shaping the perception and understanding of gender in media discourse. The study also provided directions for future research, such as investigating the role of other linguistic frameworks on gender stereotyping and exploring the impact of media literacy on gender perceptions.

The aim of this study is to analyze spoken linguistic features of three-minute startup pitches. Linguistic features analyzed included discourse markers, dysfluency, modality, numeral phrases, pronouns, reduced forms, repetitions, rhetorical questions, vague expressions, and vocatives. The corpus is comprised of 92 startup pitches delivered in real time at a pitching competition as part of an international technology conference. The pitches were transcribed, and linguistic features were identified with the aid of concordance software. Results from the analysis of linguistic features show that startup pitches contain aspects typically found in spoken genres, reflecting orthographic transcription, real time, shared context, interactivity and style.

Dissertation introductions (DIs) have received on-going attention because they are considered to be the most challenging and difficult part of an academic text for graduate students, particularly for non-native English speakers (NNES). However, research that has investigated DIs written by native English speakers (NES) and by NNES, particularly Indonesian (IND) PhD students across various disciplines, is lacking. This paper presents an analysis of moves in the introductory section of 200 dissertations written by NES and IND PhD students in terms of move organization based on Bunton's (2002) adaptation of the CARS framework. The corpus consisted of 200 DIs from the disciplines of physics, linguistics, engineering, and education that were published online on the ProQuest Dissertation and Theses Database. The findings revealed that both NES and IND PhD students followed the moves and steps presented in the framework to create their introduction sections. However, it was also found that only 13 DIs (7%) followed Bunton's CARS in this research, but most of them were not constructed in the way assumed in CARS because a number of move reversals and recursives were found. There were both similarities and differences between NNES and NES writers in the introduction sections with regard to the frequency of move-step occurrences, move-step classifications, patterns, and new steps. Similar findings between the NNES and NES writers appeal for the need to make teachers and L2 learners as well as L1 Ph.D. writers aware of methods for writing precise and concise DIs.

This article presents findings from an empirical study in which we investigated Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) students' linguistic resources in the L2 (English) to convey different Cognitive Discourse Functions (Dalton-Puffer 2013; 2016)--"Describe, Compare (Categorize), Report, Evaluate" and "Explore"--in two different contexts. The participants were primary school students (grade 6) participating in CLIL programs in Finland and Spain. To allow comparison, two sets of data were obtained by asking the students to write in response to a similar prompt in the area of social science (History in the Spanish context and Geography in the Finnish context). We compared the frequency of the Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) produced, and the fluency and complexity of students' realizations of CDFs, using tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The results reveal similarities across contexts in the frequency and extension of some of the CDFs produced, and differences in terms of CDF complexity, measured in students' use of clause complexes, "Appraisal" resources and complex nominal groups to express different CDFs.

Background: Gangstalking is a novel persecutory belief system whereby those affected believe they are being followed, stalked, and harassed by a large number of people, often numbering in the thousands. The harassment is experienced as an accretion of innumerable individually benign acts such as people clearing their throat, muttering under their breath, or giving dirty looks as they pass on the street. Individuals affected by this belief system congregate in online fora to seek support, share experiences, and interact with other like-minded individuals. Such people identify themselves as targeted individuals., Objective: The objective of the study was to characterize the linguistic and rhetorical practices used by contributors to the gangstalking forum to construct, develop, and contest the gangstalking belief system., Methods: This mixed methods study employed corpus linguistics, which involves using computational techniques to examine recurring linguistic patterns in large, digitized bodies of authentic language data. Discourse analysis is an approach to text analysis which focuses on the ways in which linguistic choices made by text creators contribute to particular functions and representations. We assembled a 225,000-word corpus of postings on a gangstalking support forum. We analyzed these data using keyword analysis, collocation analysis, and manual examination of concordances to identify discursive and rhetorical practices among self-identified targeted individuals., Results: The gangstalking forum served as a site of discursive contest between 2 opposing worldviews. One is that gangstalking is a widespread, insidious, and centrally coordinated system of persecution employing community members, figures of authority, and state actors. This was the dominant discourse in the study corpus. The opposing view is a medicalized discourse supporting gangstalking as a form of mental disorder. Contributors used linguistic practices such as presupposition, nominalization, and the use of specialized jargon to construct gangstalking as real and external to the individual affected. Although contributors generally rejected the notion that they were affected by mental disorder, in some instances, they did label others in the forum as impacted/affected by mental illness if their accounts if their accounts were deemed to be too extreme or bizarre. Those affected demonstrated a concern with accumulating evidence to prove their position to incredulous others., Conclusions: The study found that contributors to the study corpus accomplished a number of tasks. They used linguistic practices to co-construct an internally coherent and systematized persecutory belief system. They advanced a position that gangstalking is real and contested the medicalizing discourse that gangstalking is a form of mental disorder. They supported one another by sharing similar experiences and providing encouragement and advice. Finally, they commiserated over the challenges of proving the existence of gangstalking., (©Andrew Lustig, Gavin Brookes, Daniel Hunt. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 05.03.2021.)

The present study aims to examine the mathematical language use of primary prospective teachers through the mathematical texts they write. Forty-seven 3rd-year prospective teachers studying in the Department of Mathematics Education at a university participated in the study. The prospective teachers were asked to solve 4 open-ended mathematics problems, in which 3 of them were taken from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012. The data were analyzed through the content analysis method. The main findings of the study illustrate that the language used by the prospective teachers in the mathematical texts they have written were incomplete or incorrect in logical connective use, equal, congruent, approximate symbols, time measurement expressions, rational numbers, abbreviation, division algorithm, ratio-proportion representation and the presentation of solutions. The errors and ambiguity in participants' proportion.

This paper displays a Systemic Functional Linguistic and Critical Discourse Analysis of Boris Johnson's first public speech on COVID-19. COVID-19 is a very dangerous infectious disease caused by the last discovered virus of the Coronavirus strain. This virus began in Wuhan's Chinese city in December 2019. COVID-19 has spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world. It has now turned into a pandemic affecting the whole world. Halliday's (2004) model of systemic functional linguistics (meta-functions), relying on interpersonal and ideational meta-functions, and Van Dijk's ideology and discourse (2000) model depending on the argumentation categories, are the adopted models of analysis. The paper's main objectives are to analyze the speech of Prime Minister Boris critically to uncover the used ideologies to advise, persuade and control the people's beliefs and actions. In addition, this paper aims to identify the interpersonal and ideational meta-functions in the selected speeches of the chosen figure stating their frequencies, then finding out how these features uncover the ideological strategies used to affect all people; Finding the argumentation categories that are used by the prime minister to support the ideas and actions presented. The paper presents a theoretical background of discourse, Critical discourse analysis, dominant, and ideology. Explains the adopted models; Analyzes the speech critically.

Princess Reema Bint Bander Al-Saud is a Saudi woman leader who is nowadays serving as the Saudi ambassador to the United States of America. She has been serving passionately and effectively in both the public and private sectors of Saudi Arabia, setting a perfect example of Saudi women's empowerment in different fields. This paper gives a comprehensive linguistic analysis of selected spoken texts of HRH Princess Reema. The research focuses on both the rhetoric and the persuasive patterns based on the linguistic structures proposed by Van Dijk's theory and Norman Fairclough's reflections on Ideology. This paper has successfully identified some essential linguistic strategies and how they are conducted skillfully by HRH Princess Reema Bint Bander with a focus on the concept of Saudi women empowerment. This research adopts a qualitative method based on observations and thematic interpretations of selected texts of a public speech given by HRH Princess Reema. Moreover, this paper investigates the linguistic and the stylistic markers that Princess Reema applied in her public remarks that makes her address sounds very persuasive and convincing. This research concludes by discussing some linguistic themes that HRH Princess Reema mentioned, such as the concepts of Conservatism, Socialism, and Liberalism feminist ideology, which create a perfect model of Saudi woman empowerment aligned with the Vision of 2030.

The study of discourse markers has attracted the attention of researchers as a facet of linguistics since the 19th century. The focus of research has been based on the theoretical status of discourse markers in relation to how they are used and for what reasons, explored in different contexts and settings; however, few studies have been conducted in the context of Saudi Arabia. This study, therefore, attempted to look at the use of discourse markers by senior university students majoring in English in Saudi Arabia and its functions. Fraser's (2004) semantic perspective, classifying discourse markers into four categories, was adopted, together with Hiilker's (1991) features of discourse markers, consistent with the view that the meaning of discourse markers is related to their function of clarifying the intrinsic value of an utterance. The results revealed that students in their essays employed discourse markers in all four of Fraser's (2004) categories. However, it was evident that the participating students struggled with the appropriate use of discourse markers. This issue should be examined in greater depth and the reasons for this difficulty assessed. One reason lies in students' low exposure to discourse markers in class. It is thus highly recommended that teachers raise EFL students' awareness of discourse markers by providing them with more related tasks and exercises.

This paper investigates the frequency and contextual uses of the metadiscoursal devices of evidentials, code glosses, hedges and boosters in four academic disciplines, namely, linguistics, literature, chemistry and medicine. Hyland and Hinkel's taxonomies of metadiscourse provided the search items. The data analyzed consisted of a corpus of forty research articles, divided into four subcorpora equally drawn from the four disciplines. The corpus was randomly selected from leading international journals and processed by the corpus analysis toolkit, AntConc. The AntConc concordancer was employed so that each metadiscourse item could be counted and examined in its context. The findings show that hedges were the most frequent metadiscoursal device, which may be seen as an indication of the academic authors' tendency to use language of caution and uncertainty. The second rank in frequency was occupied by evidentials, which reflects the need for academic writing to establish credibility. Code glosses and boosters have the least frequency, which may measure for the value of conciseness in academic discourse. The analysis also shows that linguistics and literature exceed the two scientific disciplines, chemistry and medicine, in the frequency of the four metadiscoursal devices. Linguistics manifests the highest distribution of hedges and code glosses, medicine the highest number of boosters, literature the highest frequency of evidentials. Chemistry has the lowest frequency of all metadiscoursal devices. This study aims to help students of academic writing to learn about the use of the selected metadiscoursal devices in many disciplines. Future studies need to investigate more metadiscoursal devices in other academic disciplines.

No research article is imaginable without reporting verbs. They help the writer voice his/her own views against the backdrop of other community voices, while also serving to project his/her authority and expertise in the field. The vast variety of reporting verbs in academic discourse and their disciplinary specificity account for a huge challenge this topic can pose for EAL academic writers. In this study, we analyzed the rhetorical and discursive functions of strong reporting verbs "argue," "claim" and "believe" in a corpus of 40 articles from leading Linguistics journals, with close attention to their Self/Other references. It has been revealed that "argue" and "claim" are mostly used in this realm to refer to other authors, while "believe" is slightly more common with reference to the writer himself/herself. While it tends to be perceived as interchangeable with "argue," "claim" is almost exclusively used to introduce the opinion of others; besides, it is often an opinion that the writer does not fully support. Also, we have shown that it is typical for "argue" to play a discourse-organizing role, being featured in retrospective endophoric markers. We believe it is important to help novice academic writers understand the subtle nuances in the semantics of these reporting verbs and their discourse functions.

During a consultation at the postgraduate level, interactions between lecturer and student are essential in completing a thesis or dissertation. In most interactions, both speakers tend to construct their identities with their stance. Consequently, this paper examines how the postgraduate lecturers and students take a stance and construct their identities in lecturer-student interaction. Moreover, it explores the pedagogical implications of conversational stance and identity construction. This study combined the Stance Triangle and Stance Marker as a theoretical framework to analyze the construction of identity between lecturers and students and employed conversation analysis as an approach in the data analysis. Ten conversations between lecturer and postgraduate students during consultations were examined. The findings of the study reveal that attitudinal, deontic, epistemic, and textual stance markers are frequently used and linked to how they construct their identities. Results further show that lecturers position themselves as mentors, experts, counselors, and leaders, while the students position themselves as mentees, non-experts, counselees, and followers. Such diverse identities may impact the lecturer-student relationship and students' academic performance. In addition, it provides opportunities for lecturers to enhance their supervisory skills and strategies and develop better classroom interaction.

Conceptualization of foreign language teaching as a cross-cultural interaction means engaging learners in various cultural mediations. Language use becomes a form of interpretative architecture of a target language. Understanding language use from a discursive perspective develops meta-pragmatic awareness and interpretative capacities of learners. The study answers the question of how to design the architecture of context analysis. This research aims to determine the effective ways of interpretative engagement of learners with aspects of pragmatics in the Ukrainian university setting. The study investigates how the process of interaction shapes the engagement of learners in practices of noticing, reflection, and comparison of cross-cultural situations. The data came from a case study on cross-cultural language learning within the second semester, 2021. The study analyzes the audio-recording of the classes, researcher notes, and post-course interviews of 24 participants. This research used a method of the content analysis. The study of the results, based on six categories (narrative analysis, discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative analyses, conversation analysis, and critical analysis), showed that the learners started to consider the nature of their cross-cultural mediation. The research proved that through such an interpretative engagement, students become engaged into working with languages and cultures. The study presents some recommendations for language teachers to create a meaning-making process from multiple perspectives.

This case study demonstrates teaching and learning activities in the school laboratory, and employs talk moves for the direct assessment of practical task effectiveness. By adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach (SCLA), learning chemistry is understood to be a discursive process in which knowledge is constructed through social interaction and language. Thus, learning may be identified by attending to the language used in classroom discourse. The multimodal communication that took place during two acid and alkali practical lessons for learners aged 11 and 12 years was filmed and transcribed. Analysis of the transcripts revealed the language learning opportunities afforded by the tasks and demonstrated that school chemistry practical lessons can be understood in terms of three linguistic opportunities: introducing, using, and reflecting upon language. This lesson structure could be employed to plan more inclusive and equitable practical lessons which foreground language and value discussion equally to manipulating equipment. Recasting practical lessons as sites for learning and using the language of chemistry, key words introduced by the teacher are tracked and counted throughout the lesson to identify when they are used and by whom. The novel 3-part practical (3P) framework and multimodal discourse analysis are employed to assign the use of key words to the macroscopic, submicroscopic or symbolic level of thought. This analysis reveals the centrality of a results table to structuring talk and the detrimental effect of introducing novice learners to multiple levels of thought simultaneously. The Talk Identification (ID) Grid has been developed and used here to analyse student group discourses using talk moves to signpost learning in the domain of ideas and the domain of observables. Descriptors are provided to support instructors in identifying talk moves and how these moves relate to practical task effectiveness to target interventions that improve learning procedural and conceptual knowledge in the laboratory.

Purpose: The existing body of work regarding discourse coherence in aphasia has provided mixed results, leaving the question of coherence being impaired or intact as a result of brain injury unanswered. In this study, discourse coherence in non-brain-damaged (NBD) speakers and speakers with anomic aphasia was investigated quantitatively and qualitatively., Method: Fifteen native speakers of Cantonese with anomic aphasia and 15 NBD participants produced 60 language samples. Elicitation tasks included story-telling induced by a picture series and a procedural description. The samples were annotated for discourse structure in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) in order to analyse a number of structural parameters. After that 20 naïve listeners rated coherence of each sample., Result: Disordered discourse was rated as significantly less coherent. The NBD group demonstrated a higher production fluency than the participants with aphasia and used a richer set of semantic relations to create discourse, particularly in the description of settings, expression of causality, and extent of elaboration. People with aphasia also tended to omit essential information content., Conclusion: Reduced essential information content, lower degree of elaboration, and a larger amount of structural disruptions may have contributed to the reduced overall discourse coherence in speakers with anomic aphasia.

Background: Previous research has shown that speakers with aphasia rely on enactment more often than non-brain-damaged language users. Several studies have been conducted to explain this observed increase, demonstrating that spoken language containing enactment is easier to produce and is more engaging to the conversation partner. This paper describes the effects of the occurrence of enactment in casual conversation involving individuals with aphasia on its level of conversational assertiveness., Aims: To evaluate whether and to what extent the occurrence of enactment in speech of individuals with aphasia contributes to its conversational assertiveness., Methods & Procedures: Conversations between a speaker with aphasia and his wife (drawn from AphasiaBank) were analysed in several steps. First, the transcripts were divided into moves, and all moves were coded according to the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) framework. Next, all moves were labelled in terms of their level of conversational assertiveness, as defined in the previous literature. Finally, all enactments were identified and their level of conversational assertiveness was compared with that of non-enactments., Outcomes & Results: Throughout their conversations, the non-brain-damaged speaker was more assertive than the speaker with aphasia. However, the speaker with aphasia produced more enactments than the non-brain-damaged speaker. The moves of the speaker with aphasia containing enactment were more assertive than those without enactment., Conclusions & Implications: The use of enactment in the conversations under study positively affected the level of conversational assertiveness of the speaker with aphasia, a competence that is important for speakers with aphasia because it contributes to their floor time, chances to be heard seriously and degree of control over the conversation topic., (© 2018 The Authors International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.)

This paper addressed the under-investigated question whether speech act moves can be identified and classified in conversation by examining the content, positioning, and strategic role of utterances in turns and turn sequences. To this end, offering exchanges were analysed in the transcripts of 31 open role-plays. These were elicited from American native speakers through written prompts, and exemplified dialogues between interactants differing in terms of social distance and degree of power. In the data examined, the offerers and the offerees produced conversation management moves for opening, closing, and sustaining the interaction (e.g., summoning vs responding to summons), and goal-furthering moves for negotiating the offering exchange in line with their complementary initiating vs responding discursive and speech-act roles (e.g., motivating the offer vs the reaction to it). The study revealed that: the strategies realizing offers and reactions to them were similar across interactional role-relationships; clusters of moves showed preferred sequencing patterns; the interlocutors actively cooperated towards the co-construction of their interaction; and function-detecting heuristic prompts were particularly useful for the identification of moves in turns. Pedagogical implications were drawn from the findings, showing how model scripts may help language learners become familiar with the interactional strategies called for in goal-oriented communication.

Thematic progression can be applied as one of the techniques to analyse whether the paragraphs written are coherent or not. To this end, the present study scrutinized six English final reports written by the sixth semester students learning at an academy of secretary in Indonesia. The data originated from the six final reports were identified, parsed, analysed, and interpreted using qualitative approach with descriptive analysis related to theme and thematic progression patterns of systemic functional linguistics. Moreover, this was equipped by descriptive statistics showing the sum of data evaluated. The results of deciphering the data supported the claim that thematic progression can be administered as an alternative in seeing the coherence of students' writing work. This manifested by ninety-five percent of the paragraphs jotted down utilized thematic progressions and the clauses developed them formed theme patterns, hence they were coherent. The most encountered thematic progression was zigzag, as for the theme pattern, the unmarked topical structure dominated. These results indicated that the secretary academy students whose works investigated proven capable of writing final reports in English. From the overall findings, there are some steps to consider, especially in the field of writing final reports resides in secretarial academies. First, this study demonstrates how the theme patterns and their thematic progressions can be used as an instrument to see whether the addressed paragraphs are coherent or not. This, in turn, can assist lecturers, teachers, and instructors of language to determine whether the students need to be given some enrichment or not. Second, from this, it can be taken some measures to 'nurture' supervisors in terms of theme and thematic progression patterns before assigned to supervise the students while writing the final reports in the context of secretarial academies. Finally, the sixth semester students learning in academies of secretary can be introduced to the process of writing in which the theme and thematic progression discussion employed as the focus of the learned materials. This, at the end, might give contribution to the enhancement of their paragraph writing. [Note: The volume number (10) shown in the header of the PDF is incorrect. The correct volume number is 16.]

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and commented on. Besides determining the most frequent communicative functions, in this paper, the RVs are further analysed in terms of the verb tense, voice, and subject-agent. The findings revealed significant differences between the two disciplines. In the former, most RVs were in the present active with named-author as the subject, conveying a neutral attitude towards the reported message and neutrally summarising previous research outcomes. Most RVs were in the past tense in the latter, reporting on past research procedures or outcomes. The findings reveal infrequent use of evaluative or critical verbs. Each discipline's predominant choice may suggest writers' lower ability to highlight the cited sources' direct relevance to their research. The study hopes to contribute to the efficacy of teaching English for Academic Purposes to non-native speakers. It has pedagogical implications for academic writing in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at non-philological tertiary education institutions.

The concept of Theme is regarded as a functional linguistic element that exists in many languages. The main aim of this study is to explore the functions of Theme in Arabic, applying the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework adopted by Downing (1991). Methodologically, several related real examples have been selected from the written discourse of Modern Standard Arabic and then analyzed contextually. The empirical analysis has revealed that (i) Theme can provide different functions, such as Individual, Circumstantial and Subjective and Logical Frameworks for the interpretation of the Theme, and (ii) Theme can interact dynamically with different grammatical functions (e.g. Subject, Object, etc.) and have different pragmatic functions (e.g. Topic, Given and New information). Therefore, the view that makes a necessary link between Theme on the one hand and Noun Phrase, Topic or Given information on the other hand is proven incorrect and empirically invalid. Similar results have been obtained in the context of English (Downing 1991) but not yet for Arabic? This strengthens not only the universality of the concept of Theme but also its functions.

Suicide notes are messages left by individuals who commit suicide or who intend to commit suicide. These written messages express the victims' feelings that were not expressed when they were alive. And thus, this qualitative study intends to investigate the characteristics of linguistic features of suicide notes written by eleven male well-known individuals. The approach to this study is qualitative content analysis. Data were obtained from suicide notes written by eleven male well-known individuals. These notes were retrievable online. The researchers read, classified, and described the data based on the five characteristics of linguistic features of suicide notes, they are clear reasoning, expressing emotion, structure text, grammar, punctuation. The results showed that all of the characteristics of linguistic features were found in the well-known individuals' suicide notes. The characteristics of clear reasoning took place as the most frequent one to occur since it tells the readers of the victims' point of view about the problems that they were facing that led them to suicide. While the absence of doubt and form of address took place as rare. In the end, the result of this research can provide more information in research regarding the study of suicide notes in forensic linguistics, an application of linguistic on analyzing data or legal issues.

This study explores the ways in which master thesis writers position their research in the field of English language teaching in a context where academic literacies are still a developing field. From a social semiotic perspective, this paper aims to identify the resources writers use to represent their object of study and provide a context and justification for research. The analysis focuses on the ideational and textual metafunctions to account for patterns of meanings in seven introductory chapters of master theses in English teacher education. The results reveal a set of interconnected genres--descriptions of the object of study, definitions, and personal exemplum--that build a shared experience with the reader as well as the persuasive purpose of the text.

The ability to manage specific forms of disciplinary expression - Languages of Schooling - is regarded as a factor of academic success (Council of Europe recommendations - Council of Europe CM/Rec. [2014]. "Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on the Importance of Competences in the Language(s) of Schooling for Equity and Quality in Education and for Educational Success." Accessed December 25, 2018. https://search.coe.int/cm/Pages/result_details.aspx?ObjectID=09000016805c6105). One of the core discursive functions students perform across academic subjects is defining, which is part of the inventory of descriptors for the language of schooling (e.g. Beacco [2010]. "Items for a Description of Linguistic Competence in the Language of Schooling Necessary for Teaching/Learning History (End of Obligatory Education)." Strasbourg: Language Policy Division, Council of Europe). This study addresses defining as a component of the language of schooling by which CLIL students express specialized knowledge across languages, educational levels and fields (see Coffin [2006b]. "Historical Discourse. The Language of Time, Cause and Evaluation." London: Bloomsbury Publishing, Continuum). We elicited, analysed and compared students' written definitions in English (L2) and Spanish (L1) of two different historical fields in primary (6th grade) and secondary (8th grade). For this purpose, we applied an analysis scheme that merges Trimble's ([1985]. "English for Science and Technology: A Discourse Approach." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) definitional construct and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen [2014]. "An Introduction to Functional Grammar." London: Hodder; Martin [2013]. "Embedded Literacy: Knowledge as Meaning." "Linguistics and Education" 24: 23-37). Our results show that while students produced more definitions in English in the higher educational level, the differences in their realizations are attributed more to the field being defined. The study has also shown no differences in the frequency and type of definitions across languages.

Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers' ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of the current study is to present features of variation in Israeli Sign Language as they appear in two discourse types--narrative versus expository texts. We present this aspect of linguistic literacy as it is expressed in two case studies of two adult signers in two domains: sign parameters and the use of signing space. The findings reveal a discourse type effect on the way that these aspects are expressed and highlight the importance of discourse and linguistic knowledge to educators of deaf students.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify discourses of sustainability of community colleges and how they related to sustainability imaginaries. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a combination of research strategies associated with corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Data included 57 issues of "Community College Journal," a professional magazine published by the American Association of Community Colleges, and 2,972 abstracts of dissertations about community colleges. Publication dates ranged from 2010 to 2020. Findings: Community college discourse of sustainability coheres around six themes: careers and fields of study; curriculum and credentialing; campus ecological sustainability; administrative roles and processes; external organizations, partnerships and processes; and fiscal sustainability. There is little evidence of a sustainable living imaginary found. Research limitations/implications: The analysis is limited to a specific set of professional and academic texts about community colleges. Future researchers should explore discourses of sustainability in other contexts. Originality/value: There has been no research associated with critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to explore community college discourses of sustainability, specifically in the field of community college leadership. The findings of this study situate the community college within contests over sustainability competencies in the practice of community college leadership development.

The study examines the intermodality in children's picture books, with a special focus on the visual-verbal meaning instantiation in young learners' visual literacy readings. Picture books serve as one of the main platforms and channels that prepare children for early literacy education. Coronavirus as a key theme children have encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic period has been widely discussed in picture books for different educational purposes. This study employs systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based multimodal discourse analysis and draws upon Painter, Martin, and Unsworth's (2013) visual narrative analytic framework to explore the intermodal relationships between the visual and verbal meaning systems and how each semiotic system is represented and instantiated in the picture books as bimodal texts. "Coronavirus: A book for children" (2020) and "My hero is you: How kids can fight COVID-19" (2020), the two most widely disseminated picture books on Coronavirus, were chosen for case study and comparative analysis. Through these, the intermodal meaning making process that features in children's literature is examined and synthesised from the three visual analytical perspectives of the representations, relationships, and organisations in the social semiotic construction to facilitate children's ability to read and comprehend the COVID-related visual information in integration with the verbal semiotics. The findings reveal the visual images function as visual recontextualization for the verbal realisations and provide imagistic contextualisation for the textualized storytelling.

An increasing number of studies focus on discourse production in patients with neurodegenerative diseases and underline its clinical usefulness. However, if this is to be used as a clinical tool, one needs to consider how normal discourse varies within cognitively unimpaired elderly populations. In the current study, the aim has been to investigate discourse macrolinguistic variability. For this, 123 participants aged between 55 and 84 were recruited. A cluster analysis of their discourse macrolinguistic features was conducted. Then, cluster characterisation based on socio-demographic and linguistic performance was tested (fluency, naming, syntax and spelling). This method aims to identify various profiles of speaker and informativeness and then see if inter-individual variability may be related to socio-demographic and/or linguistic aspects. Four clusters of informativeness were found but no socio-demographic features appeared significant. The fourth cluster, defined as 'off topic', had lower performance during linguistic tasks than others and thus the boundary between normality and pathology should be questioned.

This paper explores the dissemination of human rights through English language learning in Pakistan and builds on the knowledge that contributes to the development of democratic educational outcomes. Textbook discourses have long been the domain of critical linguistics; critical linguists understand textbook discourse primarily as a language in the context of schooling while the discourse analysts understand such discourses as systems of knowledge and ideology. The question of how the learners are expected to engage with the subject knowledge is explored from two theoretical perspectives: linguistic analyses are executed using tools such as choice of pronouns, mood, and modality from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday et al., 2014), a social semiotic theory of language as a meaning potential, and reinterpreted according to the intercultural paradigm (Piller, 2010) to familiarize the ways interactants choose to build relations in the textbook narratives because in exploring interpersonal meanings it is very easy to focus on what is said and why. Additionally, the image analysis is done by representational analysis that of how images reflect ideologies (Kress & Van Leeuwen., 2006). The contributions of this study are of particular importance to make visible elements of interpersonal meaning-making which were explored in the context of cumulative knowledge building in humanities.

A great deal of research undertaken in child language development, neurolinguistics and various branches of functional and cognitive linguistics has shown that a main source of language development is the spoken input to which learners are exposed. Despite the fact that for most adult L2 learners, the greatest exposure to the L2 is the input they experience in the classroom, we still know very little of the linguistic quality of L2 classroom input and its links to L2 development. The study reported in this paper is a partial response to this gap. Drawing on research from L1 classrooms linking the linguistic quality of teacher questions to the linguistic quality of student responses and grounded in the shared theoretical and methodological framework of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, our study examines the linguistic designs of L2 teacher questions and the links between them and the L2 student responses they engender.

This corpus-based study aims to identify the interactional and interactive metadiscourse markers in terms of frequency in the abstract and discussion sections of research articles on linguistics, written in English by native, Egyptian, and Saudi researchers. To attain this aim, 60 research articles have been randomly compiled and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively via AntConc.3.2.4 depending on Hyland's (2005) classification of metadiscourse markers (MM). Taking the abstracts and discussions written by the natives as a benchmark, this study poses the following essential question: How close and far is the amount of the interactional and interactive resources in Egyptian and Saudi abstracts and discussions to and from the native level? The results showed that except for hedges, evidential markers, and endophorics, the usage of attitudes, code glosses, engagement markers, self-mentions and transitions in the E-abstracts (i.e. written by Egyptian researchers) was much far from the native level. But in S-abstracts (i.e. abstracts written by Saudi researchers), only two close points to the native level have been recorded: transitions and engagements. In the E-discussion sections, unlike code glosses and frame markers, attitudes, boosters, endophorics, hedges, and self-mentions were reported very close to the N-level. In the S-discussion sections, boosters, code glosses, emphatic, engagement, frame markers, and transitions have recorded far rates from the N-level; whereas only attitudes and hedges were much close to the native normal level.

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a state-of-the-art review on the topic of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its theoretical and practical implications on the field of language education. SFL has been widely recognized due to its potentiality to encourage both reflection and action for the participants involved, becoming over the years in a very influential applicable linguistic theoretical approach. Recent empirical studies were thoroughly reviewed, which shed light on the three most researched areas, including text analysis and literacy intervention, classroom discourse, and language teaching and learning processes. As a final remark and taking into account the literature analysis, some prospective studies are briefly listed.

This research aimed at investigating the most dominant of transitivity process used in report text and how it relates with the nature of report text. It employed descriptive qualitative design and applied Systemic Functional Linguistics on Transitivity. The data were 29 clauses taken from report texts used in ninth grade's National Exam. The result of this research revealed that six types of transitivity processes found in the report texts. Yet, material (44%) and relational (31%) were found to dominate the rest of the processes. This implied that those two processes serve important roles in providing clear information and description for the readers to understand the object being described in report text.

This study attempted to scrutinize the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary generic variations of textbook introductions in humanities and basic sciences with reference to the onion model. The data included a sample of 60 introductions (i.e. ten each from applied linguistics, sociology, and psychology within humanities, and ten each from biology, agriculture, and geology within basic sciences). Humphrey and Economou's (2015) onion model of discourse analysis was adopted, and MAXQDA 10 software of qualitative analysis was used for coding. The findings revealed similarities and differences not only within but also between the two disciplines, which can be attributed to the nature of disciplines as well as the generically accepted conventions in each discipline. Moreover, the results of the study highlighted the predominance of descriptive and analytical phases in textbook introductions not only in isolation but also in establishing more complicated genres like persuasion and critique. The study highlights the importance of teaching which is concerned with learners' rhetorical consciousness-raising of the disciplines as well as the discipline-specific lexico-grammatical features in expert texts.

This review examined previous research applications of linguistic discourse analysis to assess the language of adults with aphasia. A comprehensive literature search of seven databases identified 165 studies that applied linguistic measures to samples of discourse collected from people with aphasia. Analysis of methodological applications revealed an increase in published research using linguistic discourse analysis over the past 40 years, particularly to measure the generalisation of therapy outcomes to language in use. Narrative language samples were most frequently subject to analysis though all language genres were observed across included studies. A total of 536 different linguistic measures were applied to examine language behaviours. Growth in the research use of linguistic discourse analysis and suggestions that this growth may be reflected in clinical practice requires further investigation. Future research directions are discussed to investigate clinical use of discourse analysis and examine the differences that exist between research and clinical practice.

Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing--biography and report--composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students' understanding of the nature of science. These texts were analyzed for a range of schematic, lexical, and grammatical features that instantiate the two target genres. Statistical and descriptive analyses revealed that the students demonstrated a fairly mature control over the schematic and lexical features that realize the purpose of either genre and relied heavily on the grammatical resources characteristic of everyday registers in constructing both genres. Additionally, there was a positive relationship between the students' genre/register familiarity and the holistic quality of their writing, and the students' reading proficiency was a significant predictor of their genre familiarity and holistic writing quality, but not their register understanding. These findings suggest that learning the grammatical resources characteristic of academic registers remains a major and potentially daunting task for many adolescents.

The commercialization of higher education is a global phenomenon that is catching up with Pakistani higher education institutions. Due to inculcation of marketing practices, the role allocation and social relationship between the university and the students are being defined using new parameters. Through the incorporation of Halliday's (Introduction to functional grammar, 2nd edition, Edward Arnold, London, 1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics theory with Critical Discourse Analysis, the linguistic analysis of the introductory pages of prospectuses of Pakistani universities is undertaken to examine the assigned role and relationship of the two major parties, i.e., the 'university' and the 'students.' The results reveal that universities keep formal writing style and maintain an evident distance between the university and students. In general, the results show that marketization aspects are evident in the discourse of prospectuses through various advertisement practices; however, the university's position as a powerful entity is ideologically strengthened through addressing students from an authoritative place.

This article reveals the meaning and content of the linguistic and cultural studies integration into social and political science course in the training of future politicians. The article reflects the importance of linguistic and cultural studies for the formation of language competence of students as well as skills of political communication, for understanding the characteristics of the country's social and political issues. The interdisciplinary approach emphasises the relationship in the study of linguistic, cultural, and political agenda, characterises the interdisciplinary essence of regional studies. The critical discourse analysis (CDA) of political texts was chosen as the key methodological strategy for the efficient development of political communication and problem-solving skills. The authors propose the implementation of a special interdisciplinary course for the first-year students majoring in philology and political studies, focused on the studying the political and cultural features of a language-targeted country by means of CDA. We compared the results of students' political communication skills development prior and post- course period and we observed the improvement according to the following criteria: perception of the vocabulary and functional language structures (by 17%); analysis of cultural and political agenda from the explicit and implicit language structures (by 23%); text annotation (by 50%); text production, distribution and target audience analysis (by 10%). Moreover, it was observed that CDA implementation facilitated the development of critical thinking skills as well as the skills of texts decoding.

Teacher feedback has been reported to be challenging for learners to understand and use productively in revising their writing, especially when it is provided in a monologic manner. There have thus been calls for teachers to ensure feedback is more 'dialogic' or 'interactive', encouraging students to become active respondents to feedback rather than mere receivers of it. However, teacher dialogic/interactive feedback in face-to-face settings may be time-consuming and demanding for teachers. This motivated us to think of how electronic (e-)feedback practices could be made more interactive through the use of technological tools. This study, based on the instructor's written feedback on 10 undergraduates' L2 academic writing for a course in language and linguistics in a Malaysian public university, identifies several factors clustered under three dimensions: teacher-related, task-related and learner-related factors that promote teacher-learner interactions in teacher e-feedback in Google Docs. Interactive feedback also contributed to students' discussion of issues in their writing, engagement in accurate text revisions and negotiation of feedback. The study discusses pedagogical implications for instructors in promoting interactive feedback practices in writing courses.

Television, like other media, can work as a platform for promoting learning. This article illustrates the value of multimodal discourse analysis for evaluating the potential of a children's television show as a vehicle for fostering knowledge and skills in a specific subject area. Drawing on social semiotic principles and systemic functional genre theory, we examine the use of language and other modes in "Teacup Travels" -- a show designed to introduce young viewers to historical artefacts. The analysis demonstrates that both story structure and particular semiotic resources contribute to how these objects are represented, and thus shape the TV programme's potential to engage children in learning about the past. Our findings suggest that multimodal storytelling strategies used in "Teacup Travels" encourage some aspects of children's historical consciousness and thinking, while backgrounding others.

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's idea that early years already had the wherewithal of adult concepts and affirmed the age-specific quality of child thinking instead. He demonstrated this through two ingenious 'name games'. In this paper, with the help of two Korean children, we will replicate the name games and use one game to study the difference between Vygotsky's 'Crisis at Three' and the 'Crisis at Seven'. We describe the differences from the systemic-functional perspective of Ruqaiya Hasan and Michael Halliday. In this way, we hope to restore a diagnostic function to Vygotsky's ZPD.

Abstract In this article, we bring together conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics to investigate the second language (L2) developmental trajectory of a linguistic construction within the complex multimodal ecology of naturally occurring social interaction. We document how, over the course of 15 months, an L2 speaker's use of the French multiword expression comment on dit [how do you say] diversifies in both form and function. Two types of longitudinal change are observed: (a) The expression expands in its context of use: "Literal" uses are observed initially to request a candidate lexical item but are later also found in requests for confirmation, (b) these literal uses become proportionally less frequent, and the expression progressively routinizes as a marker-like element used for indexing cognitive search and floor-holding, and eventually also as a preface to self-correction. This routinization entails erosion in form and meaning, in concert with systematic change in co-occurring bodily-visual conduct, in particular gaze and gesture. By documenting change over time in the functional use and the multimodal delivery of the target construction, the findings evidence the longitudinal development of L2 grammar-for-interaction and showcase how linguistic and bodily resources may interface in L2 development. They also have important implications for language teaching and learning.

The prevalence of English monolingualism in the current sociopolitical public has well been documented in the field of educational linguistics. In the United States, the monolingual underpinnings of educational policies have been criticized extensively for putting language minority (LM) students at a disadvantage. An important consequence of such policies is that teachers, who are in the position to enact them, could internalize the covert ideological underpinnings, and in turn, engage in the reproduction of unequal power structure through teaching and discursive practices. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study examines the teacher discourse produced in an online forum and explores how they talk about language, monolingualism, and multilingualism. Adopting Van Leeuwen's [2008. "Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis." Oxford University Press] categorization of legitimation strategies, the analysis illustrates some prevalent ways in which (de)legitimation strategies are used to reinforce marginalization of LM students. Also, the study shows examples of counter discourse among those who advocate for more bi/multilingual and inclusive ways to work with LM students. The paper further discusses the role of teachers' discursive practices in reproducing and maintaining predominant monolingual ideologies and practices.

In this article, we focus on a series of lessons, called "Think Like a Linguist," that we designed and implemented with multilingual adolescents. These lessons were developed as an introduction to a semester-long study on academic vocabulary and word analysis using Latin roots. Our intention in "Think Like a Linguist" lessons was to present concepts about language patterns and relationships by leveraging students' diverse language backgrounds. Transcripts of lessons from one middle school class and two high school classes were inductively coded and thematically analyzed. Three main findings about students' participation and learning are presented. First, students engaged in hypothesis-checking and flexible thinking about language. Second, students collectively leveraged all the languages they knew for analysis. Third, lessons created the conditions for students to reflect on relations between language and power. In addition to these findings, we present major concepts introduced, examples of instructional tasks, and resources for instruction.

Background: The literature, field research, and daily practice stress the need for adequate communication in palliative care. Although language is of the utmost importance in communication, linguistic analysis of end-of-life discussions is scarce., Aims: Our aim is 2-fold: We want to determine what the use of 4 significant Dutch modal verbs expressing volition, obligation, possibility, and permission reveals about the concept of unbearable suffering and about physicians' communicative style., Methods: We quantitatively (TextStat) and qualitatively (bottom-up approach) analyzed the use of the modal verbs in 15 interviews, with patients requesting euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, their physicians, and their closest relatives., Results: An essential element of unbearable suffering is the patient's incapacity to perform certain tasks. Further, the physician's preference for particular modal verbs reveals whether his attitude toward patients is more or less patronizing and more or less appreciative., Conclusions: Linguistic analysis can help medical professionals to better understand their communicative skills, styles, and approach to patients in end-of-life situations. We have shown how linguistic analysis can contribute to a better understanding of physician-patient interaction. Moreover, we have illustrated the usefulness of interdisciplinary research in the medical domain., (© 2013 World Institute of Pain.)

This article argues for using discourse analysis in business and management curricula to increase language awareness. To that end, an ecolinguistic discourse analysis approach (Stibbe, 2015a) for teaching sustainability is proposed. The article first explores sustainability discourse in two chief executive officer letters to shareholders followed by a classroom implementation enabling students to practise discourse analytical skills. Students examined vocabulary, hedging, modals, abstract and concrete representation, and social actors. Linguistic features were interpreted to reveal communicators' underlying ideologies. This systematic analytical approach allows students to reflect on communication processes and how these processes can be used strategically when communicating in organizational contexts.