Search

This paper aims to analyze and interpret the linguistic and stylistic means by which the world of the novel Women. Voices. by Jasmina Musabegović is built. The paper analyzes and interprets the novel’s spoken language stylization, as its main stylistic feature. It is based on the assumption that orality, as a linguistic-stylistic feature of the novel, is primarily realized at the syntactic-stylistic level. In this direction, the elements of expressive syntax, such as spoken (oral) sentence length, elliptical, nominative, and fragmented sentences, as well as syntactic repetitions and accumulations, are especially explored. The mentioned syntactic-stylistic means are investigated to point out their stylistic potential in the revitalization of the tonal, rhythmic, intonation, and intensity values of the spoken language, based on which novelistic voices are generated as the narrative subject of the novel. Also, exclamatory and expressive interrogative sentences are explored in the paper as significant means of conveying emotional-expressive (affective) and intensifying the semantic values of a sentence. In doing so, it is particularly indicated that interrogative sentences, in addition to appearing as elements of expressive syntax, have a significant opening (cataphoric) value in developing the novel's narrative content. In addition, the paper points out the stylistic possibilities and values of the vernacular idiom in the stylization of novelistic expression with folk expression.

Measurement of users' perception and visual behaviors to anthropomorphic design cues of chatbots can improve our understanding of chatbots and potentially optimize chatbot design. However, as two typical and basic features, how chatbot appearances and conversational styles jointly affect users' perception and visual behaviors remains unclear. Therefore, this study conducted an eye-tracking experiment to explore users' perception and visual behaviors. Results indicate that anthropomorphic appearances and human-like conversational styles jointly increased users' perception of chatbots' social presence, trust in chatbots, and satisfaction with chatbots. In contrast, on users' visual behaviors, such a joint effect was not found, although chatbots with higher anthropomorphic appearances and human-like conversational styles triggered more fixation counts and longer dwell time. These findings suggest that anthropomorphic appearance and human-like conversational style can improve users' perception and attract more visual attention to chatbots. These findings provide theoretical contributions and practical implications for relevant researchers and designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although an underdog brand positioning can elicit positive consumer responses, maintaining a brand's positioning requires maintaining consistent brand associations. If the associations created by the company's service providers do not align with the brand's positioning, this discrepancy can lead to consumer confusion or to a decline in brand attitudes. Chatbots, as customer‐facing representatives, play a crucial role in how consumers perceive and evaluate a brand. However, the role of chatbots in shaping brand attitude has not been extensively studied. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of chatbot conversational styles on consumers' perceptions of the fit between a brand's positioning and its messaging, focusing on both "top‐dog" and "underdog" brands. This study demonstrates that underdog brands using chatbots with warm conversational styles and top‐dog brands using chatbots with competent (i.e., professional) conversational styles foster positive brand evaluations by consumers through perceived fit. Additionally, this study introduces the concept of power state—an individual's degree of perceived control over their surroundings—as a moderator in human–chatbot interactions, demonstrating that high‐power‐state consumers of top‐dog brands favor a competent conversational style, whereas low‐power‐state consumers favor a warm conversational style regardless of the brand's positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence in Spanish has been described as a plurifunctional communicative resource whose meanings vary depending on contextual, social, and cultural factors. The pragmatic and sociolinguistic nature of this phenomenon calls for examining each case considering the context, the social variables, and the relationship between participants. The aim of this study is to determine the use of silence in Spanish by young women. To achieve this, a corpus of 9 h of spontaneous conversations among six young Spanish university women (1.5 h per participant) was analyzed. The analysis has allowed identifying, first, a series of communicative functions of silence produced by the participants. A relationship between the duration of silence and its communicative function has also been established. Finally, differences in the use of silence by the participants have been found, determined by the interlocutor (male/female), which confirms that women use silence as a basic interactive strategy differently when talking with women and when they do so with men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Sciences & Humanities Studies / Društvene i Humanističke Studije (DHS) is the property of Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Tuzla and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recasting is the adult rephrasing of a child's immediately preceding utterance. It has been shown to have outstanding effects on promoting language development in autistic children. This study used lag sequential analysis to explore the impact of mothers' conversational styles on the communicative behavior of autistic children when using recasting. This study recruited 30 Chinese autistic children (aged 3–6 years) and their mothers. The utterances of the children and their mothers during 30‐min interactions were transcribed, coded, and analyzed. The mothers' conversational styles were determined by the percentages of child‐dominant, mother‐dominant, and equality styles. The results indicated that mothers' conversational styles were predominantly child‐dominant, differing from the expected mother‐dominant style that is typical in Eastern cultures and traditions. However, some mothers still demonstrated a significant proportion of mother‐dominant style in their conversation, while some exhibited a considerable amount of equality style. Moreover, mothers with a mainly child‐dominant style and minimal use of mother‐dominant and equality styles used recasting after the child's response, triggering the child to initiate new topics. Mothers with a child‐dominant style combined with prominent mother‐dominant features implemented untargeted self‐recasting, the children did not respond significantly. Mothers with a child‐dominant style combined with prominent equality features used recasting after the children responded, initiated, or expanded the conversation, which often facilitated the child's expansion of the conversation. These findings provide suggestions for designing parent‐mediated early language interventions for autistic children. Lay Summary: Conversational interaction styles of Chinese mothers and their autistic children were characterized by child‐dominant conversation. Mothers with different conversational styles applied recasting differently, with different effects on their children's language expansion behavior. These findings provide suggestions for designing parent‐mediated early language interventions for autistic children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence in Spanish has been described as a plurifunctional communicative resource whose meanings vary depending on contextual, social, and cultural factors. The pragmatic and sociolinguistic nature of this phenomenon calls for examining each case considering the context, the social variables, and the relationship between participants. The aim of this study is to determine the use of silence in Spanish by young women. To achieve this, a corpus of 9 h of spontaneous conversations among six young Spanish university women (1.5 h per participant) was analyzed. The analysis has allowed identifying, first, a series of communicative functions of silence produced by the participants. A relationship between the duration of silence and its communicative function has also been established. Finally, differences in the use of silence by the participants have been found, determined by the interlocutor (male/female), which confirms that women use silence as a basic interactive strategy differently when talking with women and when they do so with men.

This article deals with the conditions, reasons and factors of characterization of religious style in the field of linguistics. In addition, religious style and its main peculiarities, its importance in the social life, and the functional features of religious style are highlighted in the article. As a result of our investigation, the following results were obtained: a) the increase in the need for the creation and significance of religious language, particularly religious texts has been scientifically proved; b) the possibility of religious texts to represent the thoughts of the people, culture and world outlook has been verified; c) the specificity of religious language, religious texts has been revealed; d) the development of religious style as a functional style has been grounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the features of the presence of a person-oriented type of discourse in the online movie review written in English. Personal discourse in itself covers almost all text types generated by the Internet due to the presence of various verbal and non-verbal means of converging the addressee of the communicative message. The variety of linguistic characteristics of disclosing the inner world of a person, verbal means of expressing interpersonal relations, lexical means of explicating the category of a person and other way of linguistic representation of the author's self determine the consideration of online movie reviews as a person-oriented type of discourse. The aim of this article is to analyze the linguistic means of manifestation the personal discourse in the English-language amateur movie review. The empirical material collected for description, classification and analysis in this paper is based upon a corpus of movie reviews taken from the American review-aggregation website for film and television Rotten Tomatoes. The person-oriented type of discourse is intrinsically inherent in the online movie review due to its fundamentally dialogic nature and the low level of formalization of the communicative message. The analysis of the online movie reviews has revealed that the attributive feature of the deployment of personal discourse in the online movie review is a statement that carries subjective modality. Personal and demonstrative pronouns in conjunction with modal words, verbs and particles are those lexical means which express a subjective attitude towards the film. The explicators of the modal-evaluative meanings in the online movie review are parenthesis and inversion. In addition to emotional and expressive vocabulary, the personal discourse of online movie reviews manifests itself in the widespread use of colloquial vocabulary.

• The effect of anthropomorphic visual appearance and conversational style on users' information disclosure tendency towards the chatbot were discussed. • An interaction effect between the chatbot's visual appearance and conversational style on users' information disclosure tendency was found. • Compared to the visual appearance, the chatbot's conversational style has a greater impact on users' information disclosure tendency. • Perceived security positively mediated the effects of conversational style on users' information disclosure tendency towards the chatbot. Text-based chatbots are widely used to deliver personalized services by leveraging user-provided information, and anthropomorphic design is crucial for their effectiveness. However, most earlier studies investigated the effects of anthropomorphic design of chatbots while manipulating only one dimension of anthropomorphic cues. The current research investigated how different dimensions of anthropomorphic design cues affect users' information disclosure tendency towards chatbots. That is, the present study examined the effects of visual appearance (high anthropomorphism vs. low anthropomorphism), manipulating the visual cues dimension, and conversational style (human-like vs. mechanical), manipulating the verbal cues dimension, on users' information disclosure tendency towards chatbots. Results showed positive effects of human-like conversational style on users' information disclosure tendency. Of particular significance, an interaction effect between visual appearance and conversational style on users' information disclosure tendency was found. Users reported a higher information disclosure tendency when the chatbot was designed with anthropomorphic cues consistent over dimensions. This finding suggested that an expectancy violation effect occurs when a chatbot exhibits inconsistent anthropomorphic design cues on two different dimensions. Besides, perceived security was identified as a positive mediating factor in the relationship between conversational style and users' information disclosure tendency. This study advances research on users' information disclosure tendency towards anthropomorphic chatbots and highlights the importance of different dimensions of anthropomorphic cues in chatbot design. Additionally, practical guidance for chatbot designers was also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although meta-analytic reviews repeatedly found significant gender differences in the experiences of shame and pride throughout the life span, to date, gender differences in conversations about these emotions have not been studied. Our research was aimed at investigating the effect of child gender on maternal conversational style in and emotional content of mother-child conversations about shame- and pride-related past events in preschool years. Fifty four mother—preschool child dyads (52% girls, children’s age M = 70.36 months [SD = 8.13], mothers’ age M = 37.51 years [SD = 3.70]) from middle class Hungarian families were asked to talk about two past events, one in which children felt ashamed, and one in which they felt proud. The conversations were transcribed and coded for maternal conversational style and for emotional content. Maternal conversational style was indicated by maternal elaboration and evaluation of the child’s contributions. Emotional content was indicated by specific emotion terms, emotional behavior and emotional evaluations. In mother-son shame conversations, we found higher amount of negative emotional behavior. Boys also had longer conversations with their mothers, and mothers used more open-ended memory questions and more repetitions with boys in both shame and pride conversations. Girls had shorter contributions to pride stories than to shame stories, which was not the case for boys. Exploration of verbal socialization of shame and pride helps us to understand the development of individual differences in proneness to self-conscious emotions, and their implications for mental health.

The article discusses the Lebanese conversational style in relation to Lebanese cultural values. The study adopts a discourse analysis approach based on interactional sociolinguistic methodology for the analysis of audio recordings and semi-structured interviews involving Lebanese nationals (multi-active culture) and members of linear-active cultures, in addition to participant observation.

Although meta-analytic reviews repeatedly found significant gender differences in the experiences of shame and pride throughout the life span, to date, gender differences in conversations about these emotions have not been studied. Our research was aimed at investigating the effect of child gender on maternal conversational style in and emotional content of mother-child conversations about shame- and pride-related past events in preschool years. Fifty four mother-preschool child dyads (52% girls, children's age M = 70.36 months [SD = 8.13], mothers' age M = 37.51 years [SD = 3.70]) from middle class Hungarian families were asked to talk about two past events, one in which children felt ashamed, and one in which they felt proud. The conversations were transcribed and coded for maternal conversational style and for emotional content. Maternal conversational style was indicated by maternal elaboration and evaluation of the child's contributions. Emotional content was indicated by specific emotion terms, emotional behavior and emotional evaluations. In mother-son shame conversations, we found higher amount of negative emotional behavior. Boys also had longer conversations with their mothers, and mothers used more open-ended memory questions and more repetitions with boys in both shame and pride conversations. Girls had shorter contributions to pride stories than to shame stories, which was not the case for boys. Exploration of verbal socialization of shame and pride helps us to understand the development of individual differences in proneness to self-conscious emotions, and their implications for mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an account of one scholar's thirty-five-year immersion in language and gender research. I included a chapter on conversations between women and men in That's Not What I Meant!, my first book for general audiences, as part of an overview of interactional sociolinguistics. Disproportionate interest in that chapter led me to write You Just Don't Understand, which I assumed would be my last word on the topic. Then insights into gendered patterns turned out to be crucial in all my subsequent books, each of which grew out of the one before. Writing about gendered patterns in conversational interaction raised my own consciousness, illuminating aspects of a previous study that I had overlooked. It also brought me face to face with agonistic conventions in academic discourse, and the distortions and misrepresentations that result from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper examines the issue of conversational style in informal dialogical communication (between friends). We chose this subject as a relatively new focus of stylistic research in opposition to traditional stylistics, focused more on monologue and literary language. Using the methods of ethnomethodology and discourse analysis we aim to clarify the problematics of principles of conversational style.

Recasting is the adult rephrasing of a child's immediately preceding utterance. It has been shown to have outstanding effects on promoting language development in autistic children. This study used lag sequential analysis to explore the impact of mothers' conversational styles on the communicative behavior of autistic children when using recasting. This study recruited 30 Chinese autistic children (aged 3-6 years) and their mothers. The utterances of the children and their mothers during 30-min interactions were transcribed, coded, and analyzed. The mothers' conversational styles were determined by the percentages of child-dominant, mother-dominant, and equality styles. The results indicated that mothers' conversational styles were predominantly child-dominant, differing from the expected mother-dominant style that is typical in Eastern cultures and traditions. However, some mothers still demonstrated a significant proportion of mother-dominant style in their conversation, while some exhibited a considerable amount of equality style. Moreover, mothers with a mainly child-dominant style and minimal use of mother-dominant and equality styles used recasting after the child's response, triggering the child to initiate new topics. Mothers with a child-dominant style combined with prominent mother-dominant features implemented untargeted self-recasting, the children did not respond significantly. Mothers with a child-dominant style combined with prominent equality features used recasting after the children responded, initiated, or expanded the conversation, which often facilitated the child's expansion of the conversation. These findings provide suggestions for designing parent-mediated early language interventions for autistic children., (© 2023 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

In this paper cultural differences between Polish and Estonian conversational strategies are analysed in respect of how the evaluative words are used and what their degree of deliberateness is. The study compares the usage of adjectives and adverbs with positive value in the excerpts from Polish and Estonian corpora of casual conversation. The quantitative and qualitative comparison demonstrates that their overall frequency and the pragmatic functions are very similar. The differences of the conversational styles lay in greater accumulation and intensification of the evaluatives in the Polish conversations and in the tendency to externalize the positive affect in the Estonian ones. In general, Poles seem to pay more attention to their positive emotions and express their feelings deliberately. The Estonian style reveals a tendency to rely more on the societal norms and values than on one's individual affect and subjective opinions. The findings are discussed against the background of axiological semantics, the Appraisal Theory and a novel theoretical construct that captures the levels of metacommunicative awareness as a continuum that begins with semiautomatic usage of ready-made communicative patterns of positive feedback and ends with the deliberate attempts to impose one's perspective and values. The use of positively valued adjectives and adverbs in Polish and Estonian casual conversations. Similarities: • The overall proportion of the positive evaluatives in both Polish and Estonian corpora was very similar (0,7%). • Poles and Estonians alike used the positive evaluatives with gradable intentionality/deliberatness. • The interpersonal metafunction was found to play a central role in both of the languages and to be performed simultaneously with the textual and ideational metafunctions. Differences in the conversational styles: • The Poles are more verbose and make longer turns; the evaluative words and intensifiers tend to "accumulate. They tend to use evaluative words with the general axiological meaning ('good', 'well') more often, they prefer constructions with evaluative adverbs. Poles exploit the attitudinal subtype of expressing affect more heavily. They express their feelings and emotions overtly by using explicit emotion terms. They tend to rely on their subjective opinion and values. • The Estonians are less verbose, and their turns are shorter. There is neither local accumulation of the evaluative words nor the intensifiers. They prefer evaluatives with more specific meaning. They prefer constructions with evaluative adjectives. Estonians tend to avoid expressing their emotions overtly, they externalise their affect instead. Their preferred attitudinal subtypes are appreciation and judgement. They rely more on the societal values and norms than on their subjective opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research indicates that adults form life story chapters, representations of extended time periods that include people, places and activities. Life chapter memories are distinct from episodic memories and have implications for behaviour, self and mental health, yet little is known about their development during childhood. Two exploratory studies examined parent-child conversations about life chapters. In Study 1, mothers recorded naturalistic conversations with their 5-6 year old children about two chapters in the child’s life. In Study 2, mothers recorded conversations with their 6-7 year old children about a particular life chapter—the child’s kindergarten year—and also about a specific episode of their choice. The results indicated that young children are able to recall and discuss information about life chapters and that parents actively scaffold children’s discussion of general information in chapters as well as specific events. Mothers’ conversational style when discussing chapters (e.g., elaborativeness) predicted children’s memory contributions, and was also positively correlated with their style when discussing specific events. The results suggest new avenues for research on the ontogeny of life chapters, the factors that shape them, and their role in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language & Intercultural Communication is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)