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Sport doping is not a recent phenomenon. Athletes have used many forms of performance enhancements going back to antiquity. Within the sport philosophy literature, sport doping is entangled in a multitude of ethical discourses, some denouncing, and some supporting, doping in sport. Our aim is to use a systematic approach to classify ethical discourses put forward by scholars focused on doping. To take stock of these ethical discourses, and to advance the sport philosophy literature on doping, this paper provides an empirical account of the types of arguments used in the peer-reviewed sport philosophy literature. This empirical account is intended to provide a map of the ethical discourses in circulation, to highlight the most common arguments, and to show where other types of arguments are absent or less well developed. To map the ethical discourses, the authors use an ethical discourse typology from a university-based ethical reasoning program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although name, image, and likeness policy officially changed on July 1, 2021, actions leading up to this policy modification provide insight into the desires and perspectives of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Feeling pressure from individual states and federal legislators, the NCAA engaged in discussion regarding name, image, and likeness in Fall of 2019. In response to newly introduced name, image, and likeness policy changes, the NCAA listed their official statements on the Taking Actions: Name, Image and Likeness webpage. These statements (n = 10) were analyzed using critical discourse analysis methodology underpinned with a Foucaultian perspective. Using critical discourse analysis, we extrapolated three overarching themes related to power dynamics: (a) Establishing Control While Undercutting Oppositional Power, (b) Power Shifts Away from NCAA, and (c) Power Reinforcement. We conclude by discussing the importance of examining discourse within organizations and implications for policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children rapidly learn to use language to effect a variety of communicative acts, such as proposing actions, asking questions, and making promises. While prior work has characterized this development in cross-sectional corpora, these analyses have been unable to comprehensively track individual differences in children's acquisition of communicative acts. We analyzed a longitudinal corpus of parent-child interactions from ages 14 to 58 months. We find that children's repertoires of communicative acts diversify over this period, with stable individual differences in the diversity of children's communicative act repertoires. Further, the diversities of parents' and children's communicative act repertoires are correlated. Children with more diverse communicative act repertoires also have larger vocabularies and use more diverse syntactic frames, suggesting links between discourse development and lexical and syntactic knowledge. Taken together, this work provides new insight into individual trajectories of communicative development and connections between communicative act use and other levels of language structure.

In spoken languages, new information is often expressed with a longer duration than given information. We investigated whether signers use duration to mark information status. Fifty deaf Chinese Sign Language (CSL) signers retold a cartoon clip, and we examined how they tracked references. The results showed that CSL signers mostly used nominals, classifiers and constructed actions, but rarely used any pointing or zero anaphora. When focusing on nominals, newly introduced references had a longer duration than the maintained and re-introduced ones, while the durations of maintained and re-introduced nominals did not differ. Additionally, there was a gradient decrease in sign duration over the first three mentions followed by an increase for the fourth and fifth mentions. Furthermore, between two nominal mentions, the more non-nominal referring there were, the shorter the duration of the current nominal mention. Thus, CSL signers vary the duration of nominals to indicate the degree of accessibility.

We explore different aspects of cognitive diversity and its effect on the success of group deliberation. To evaluate this, we use 500 dialogues from small, online groups discussing the Wason Card Selection task - the DeliData corpus. Leveraging the corpus, we perform quantitative analysis evaluating three different measures of cognitive diversity. First, we analyse the effect of group size as a proxy measure for diversity. Second, we evaluate the effect of the size of the initial idea pool. Finally, we look into the content of the discussion by analysing discussed solutions, discussion patterns, and how conversational probing can improve those characteristics.Despite the reputation of groups for compounding bias, we show that small groups can, through dialogue, overcome intuitive biases and improve individual decision-making. Across a large sample and different operationalisations, we consistently find that greater cognitive diversity is associated with more successful group deliberation. Code and data used for the analysis are available in the repository: https://github.com/gkaradzhov/cognitive-diversity-groups-cogsci24

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

Pronoun interpretation seems to be driven by structural factors, but also by factors related to meaning. In a forced-choice pronoun interpretation experiment, we compare the impact of the next-mention bias associated with transfer-of-possession-verbs on the interpretation of three Dutch pronominal forms that differ in the strength of their structural biases: reduced personal pronoun ze ‘she_reduced ', full personal pronoun zij ‘she_full', and demonstrative pronoun die ‘that'. In addition to replicating the common Goal-bias associated with transfer-of-possession verbs, results show significant differences in the proportion of pronoun resolved to the preceding subject between all three pronominal forms. However, the effect of the next-mention manipulation did not differ between pronominal forms. These findings are in line with a model of pronoun interpretation that combines structural and meaning-related factors, and present particularly strong evidence against models that posit that pronoun interpretation is the mirror image of pronoun production.

Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across speakers, a process often referred to as alignment. While the presence of linguistic alignment is well documented in the literature, several questions remain open, including the extent to which patterns of reuse across speakers have an impact on the emergence of labelling conventions for novel referents. In this study, we put forward a methodology for automatically detecting shared lemmatised constructions---expressions with a common lexical core used by both speakers within a dialogue---and apply it to a referential communication corpus where participants aim to identify novel objects for which no established labels exist. Our analyses uncover the usage patterns of shared constructions in interaction and reveal that features such as their frequency and the amount of different constructions used for a referent are associated with the degree of object labelling convergence the participants exhibit after social interaction.More generally, the present study shows that automatically detected shared constructions offer a useful level of analysis to investigate the dynamics of reference negotiation in dialogue.

When we communicate with others, we often repeat aspects of each other's communicative behavior such as sentence structures and words. Such behavioral alignment has been mostly studied for speech or text. Yet, language use is mostly multimodal, flexibly using speech and gestures to convey messages. Here, we explore the use of alignment in speech (words) and co-speech gestures (iconic gestures) in a referential communication task aimed at finding labels for novel objects in interaction. In particular, we investigate how people flexibly use lexical and gestural alignment to create shared labels for novel objects and whether alignment in speech and gesture are related over time. The present study shows that interlocutors establish shared labels multimodally, and alignment in words and iconic gestures are used throughout the interaction. We also show that the amount of lexical alignment positively associates with the amount of gestural alignment over time, suggesting a close relationship between alignment in the vocal and manual modalities.

This study explores the way discourse structure information is used during encoding of linguistic representations, using the distinction between main and subordinate information as a case study. We use the two contrasting constructions: (a) “The singers\textsubscript{MAIN} who admired the violinists\textsubscript{MAIN} invited their mentors to the party”; (b) “The singers\textsubscript{MAIN}, who admired the violinists\textsubscript{SUBORDINATE}, invited their mentors to the party.” While both contain discourse-main information, (b) includes discourse-subordinate information in the clause ``who admired \textit{the violinists}.” Importantly, \textit{the singers} and \textit{the violinists} are both plausible antecedents for \textit{their}, but the overlap in discourse-information between the two NPs differs: (a) overlap ({MAIN, MAIN}); (b) no overlap ({MAIN, SUBORDINATE}). Through two web-based eye-tracking experiments using a visual world paradigm, we find that this overlap leads to competition between the two NPs, evidenced by eye-gaze differences, (a) < (b). We also find that this effect manifests early, even before retrieval, i.e., before pronoun resolution.

A speaker's use of language is one of the most important indicators in detecting deception. To date, however, little research has focused on grammatical cues used in deceitful statements. One such cue is evidentiality which is the grammatical encoding for the source of information; i.e., whether the speaker has direct or indirect access to what they assert. This study investigates whether and how evidentiality coding in Turkish, an evidential language, interacts with producing deceitful and truthful narratives. Deceptive retellings were notably longer and syntactically more complex compared to truthful counterparts. Our hypothesis of increased past forms in deception was confirmed, alongside a heightened use of direct evidential inflection (–DI) in deceptive conditions. This exploration sheds light on the nuanced relationship between grammatical evidentiality and deceptive language use.

Connectives like ‘because' are referred to as ‘processing instructions' as they facilitate processing of linguistic material directly following the connective. In an expectation-driven account of discourse processing, this can be attributed to predictions that readers make about the upcoming discourse relation, but also to predictions about upcoming discourse content. By modeling these two accounts, termed the relation prediction account and the content prediction account respectively, we show that they make different predictions about when the presence of a connective is most beneficial. In a self-paced reading study, we replicate the facilitative effect of the connective on processing, but do not find any evidence that this effect can be explained by a strong or weak version of either of the two accounts. This suggests that the role of the connective goes above and beyond informing the reader about the upcoming relation and content and possibly triggers a different processing strategy.

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

Disagreements are speech acts used by interlocutors to challenge previous assertions. When disagreements express subjective views, they can often be perceived as faultless. However, it is unclear whether accepting a disagreement as faultless causes comprehenders to update their own semantic representations of the predicate targeted by the disagreement. Using the vague quantifiers \textit{many} and \textit{few} as a case study, we find in two adaptation studies that participants shifted their meaning representations of the quantifiers after being exposed to disagreements that on average were more likely to be perceived as faultless. The adaptation strengthened the participants' baseline preferences, suggesting that even when a disagreement is judged to be faultless, there exists a perceived asymmetry in the plausibility of the two viewpoints under discussion.

Researchers have long been interested in understanding and closing the “reading gap” that exists between White and racially marginalized students. This study explored whether group differences in inference strategies (i.e., bridging and elaboration) and comprehension performance existed among college readers. Three hundred college participants who self-identified as White, Black, or Hispanic completed a think-aloud task along with measures of reading proficiency and comprehension. Results from hierarchical regression models indicated that group differences in elaborative strategies were present, but differences in bridging strategies and comprehension performance disappeared when foundational skills in reading were included in the models. The results are explained in terms of inequities in educational experiences prior to entering college.

Counterfactual statements are famously difficult to process, and so are negated sentences and infrequent clause orders. Here, we argue that their combination can ease much of the processing cost when these difficult constructions align to clarify what is being referred to, thereby reducing referential uncertainty. In Experiment 1, we tested how affirmative and negative counterfactual statements (e.g., If there had been (no) zebras, there would have been (no) lions) are interpreted using a web-based eye-tracking paradigm. We found that negation facilitates processing, particularly when a Question under Discussion is about the actual state of affairs. In Experiment 2, reversing the clause order resulted in easier comprehension. These results provide support for a model of incremental language processing that puts the construal of semantic representations front and center.

In multi-clause sentences, which clause carries the at-issue point is expected to be influenced by whether a clause is at the Right Frontier: Last-uttered clauses or clauses that subordinate these are expected to be at-issue. In a Dutch forced-choice experiment, we measure the rate at which comprehenders interpret an ambiguous pronoun to refer to one of two possible antecedents in a preceding sentence. We manipulated the type (matrix vs. subordinate) and position (sentence-early vs. sentence-final) of the clauses hosting the antecedents, as well as the topicality of the subject (mentioned in context vs.not mentioned in context). We find no effect of topicality, but we find that clause position and type influence the at-issue status of clauses within multi-clause sentences in Dutch: When multiple clauses are at the Right Frontier, sentence-final clauses are more likely hosts for at-issue content, and matrix clauses more so than subordinate clauses in this position.

German has two demonstrative series, the der (die, das) series and the dieser (diese, dieses) series. Both have been claimed to be topic shifters, taking up a non-topical antecedent and promoting it to topichood. However, der can form topical referential chains, while dieser cannot. We operationalize discourse topichood via questions and provide evidence from a corpus study and an acceptability study that while dieser is indeed sensitive to topichood and avoids topical antecedents, der is compatible with topical antecedents. We hypothesize that only dieser is a discourse topic shifter, while der marks a sentence topic.

We know that context influences the facilitation of language comprehension. Previous research has shown that discourse coherence influences this contextual facilitation, with comprehenders making stronger predictions about upcoming words when reading highly coherent narratives. However, it is unclear whether the predictions made by Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit similar discourse-level influences. As such, we investigate whether surprisal values from LLMs reflect longer context effects. We calculated word-level surprisal values (as a measure of prediction strength) for passages that vary in coherence. We used these to predict human reading times for the same passages collected from 289 participants. We found that surprisal only predicted reading times early in the target sentence, and that GPT-2's surprisal values were not influenced by discourse coherence, in contrast to human reading data. This has implications on the use of Transformer-based LLMs in modelling human cognition.

Languages differ in what meanings their lexical items encode: The meaning covered by English 'blue' is famously split into 'sinij' (darkblue) and 'goluboj' (lightblue) in Russian. Recent years have seen novel interest in functional explanations of such variation, pointing to a correlation between greater communicative need of a lexical field and a finer-grained lexical inventory. Here, I develop the position that rather than the mere difference in “need” to mention lexical field, it is the field's discourse-pragmatic diversity that predicts whether languages “lump” or “split” more. I will demonstrate this with computational techniques and a typologically diverse corpus of spontaneous spoken data from 51 languages (DoReCo), first for the field of verbs of visual perception ('see'-'look'), then on a lexicon-wide level. There are implications: our notions of what a comparable concept is in lexical semantics, what lexical knowledge entails, and the dimensions along which languages differ require re-examining.

Sentence completion studies have shown that L1 English readers use verbal aspect (VA) as a cue to disambiguate pronouns in the context of sentences with transfer of possession verbs. Specifically, in the context of a sentence like “Mary gave/was giving a book to Bill”, a subsequent pronoun is more likely to refer to the source referent (“Mary”) when the aspect is imperfective (“was giving”) than when it is perfective (“gave”). L2 studies have shown mixed results on whether L2 speakers, living within an L2 country or outside, can utilise VA as a discourse cue. The current study tested L2 English speakers using an online Maze task, where a pronoun (“He” or “She”) referring to either the source or goal referent had to be chosen at the critical point in the sentence. The results showed that both L1 speakers and L2 speakers, regardless of location, used VA as a disambiguation cue.

Even when early implanted, children with cochlear implants show heterogeneous language skills and often struggle with pragmatic communication aspects. Research aimed at elucidating specific weaknesses at the interactional level has yielded inconsistent findings. We analyse dyadic interactions involving nine hearing-impaired children and fourteen normal-hearing children engaging with an adult during a referential (treasure-hunting) task, periodically alternated with role-reversal sub-tasks (e.g., child-led referential-tasks, child-storytelling). Our investigation employs a multi-level analysis approach, encompassing acoustic features (F0, intensity, speech duration, speech rate), turn-taking dynamics (duration, gaps, overlaps), laughter responsiveness and pragmatic functions, convergence of these features, dialogue acts, contingency, and task success. We compare interactional patterns across groups and conditions. The adoption of a multi-level characterization is grounded in the hypothesis that alignment at "lower levels" serves a functional role and concurrently offers insights into alignment at a conceptual level, thereby facilitating mutual understanding and conversational success, giving insights on underpinning neuro-psychological processes.

Proficient speakers of a second language (L2) show similar processing of affective content as native speakers, but reduced magnitude, later latency, and a less differentiated emotional neural response (e.g., Hsu et al., 2015). Because language and culture are intertwined, this study examined whether cultural relevance of short stories affects immersion during reading, independent of language proficiency. Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland Chinese (MLC) readers were exposed to identical short stories featuring events and traditions related to either culture. Their level of attention, transportation and emotional engagement after each story was measured using the Story World Absorption Scale (Kuijpers et al., 2014). Preliminary results show that HK participants were significantly more immersed in HK cultural stories than in MLC stories, especially when they described modern events. Instead, MLC participants showed no difference in immersion. The results will be discussed considering historical common origins and modern stark distinction between the two cultures.

This article explores how trans school employees redeploy, trouble, challenge, and refuse prevalent discourses about transness and education. Drawing from interviews with 100 school workers in Canada and the United States, we employ Coleman’s (2023) concept of ‘narrative repair’ to consider participants’ responses to an interview question asking what they would like the public to know about their workplace experiences. We show that workers in our study primarily drew from four overarching narratives about the relationship between their transness and their work in schools: 1) trans school workers face increased difficulty; 2) trans school workers have unique strengths; 3) trans school workers are no different from other school workers; and 4) the experiences of trans school workers defy narrativization. Our findings deepen understandings of how broader cultural discourses influence how teachers narrativize their professional experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autocracies and their practices have figured prominently in modernity's making and associated sociologies, but in the 21st century the discourse of StrongMen has surged, coming to dominate our "attention economy." We consider its various expressions alongside its articulations referencing multiple spaces and consider it a "floating signifier" that appears to explain but in fact distracts from deeper causalities and possible effects of autocratic governance. In this knowledge cultural sociology, we explore how the concept of StrongMen works within nations, with antipodes, and in networks across global and historical conjunctures. We focus in the end on Erdoğan's 2023 re-election and Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, identifying not only the practices that make them StrongMen, but also how the very concept becomes part of the toolkit implicated in recognizing their autocratic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT From the very beginning of Pierre Bourdieu's oeuvre, but with increasing intensity, one can find expressions that are either explicitly taken from psychoanalysis, or at least have a psychoanalytic meaning. This paper aims to contribute to the existing discourse on Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis by examining the meaning of Bourdieu's most frequently used term, unconscious, which is also a key one in psychoanalysis, in Bourdieu's writings. In a brief introduction, I outline Bourdieu's relationship to psychoanalysis based on the literature and Bourdieu's texts, and argue that although Bourdieu's relationship with psychoanalysis remained controversial over the years, there is a growing integrative tendency, with psychoanalysis playing an increasingly important—even if sometimes hidden—role in his texts. In the main body of the paper, I argue that this tendency does not fully cover Bourdieu's approach to the unconscious, and that although his approach to the unconscious is not independent of the tendency discussed in the previous section, a dichotomy can be observed from the beginning to the end of the oeuvre, namely the parallel use of the unconscious in the sociological and psychoanalytic sense, and the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the two. Finally, in the last section, I point out that socioanalysis, as an emancipatory project, should have clarified its position on the unconscious, because it marks the limits of the actors' potential for self‐reflexivity, which can also shape political strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine investor reaction to corporate socio-political activism (CSA). CSA relates to companies taking a stance on divisive political and social issues. We contribute to existing research on CSA by showing that activism is beneficial for companies, especially when societal discourse about a socio-political issue becomes noisy. In addition, we highlight that investor reaction is more positive for companies engaging in a higher intensity of activism. Investors perceive that the stakeholders will reward companies that decide to take a radical stance by owning and championing a specific socio-political issue to fight for broader societal change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher education takes part in producing childhood. This is rarely discussed in teacher education. In this study, we are interested in what kinds of positions become normalised for children and youth in the discourses in teacher education. We utilise the concepts of narrative resources and storylines, looking into the storylines in which student teachers take themselves to be in, and in the positions that are opened for pupils in these storylines. The results show that a child in peer conflict is produced in problematic ways, as an ideal child or object of fixing. Teacher is produced as central and important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 2 years, since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, there have been very few studies that have examined the war from the perspective of Russian military thinking. To be able to more accurately predict ways in which the Russian way of war and force structure may change, it is essential to study the Russian military scientific discourse on the lessons of the war in Ukraine. Taking for granted that the Russians come to the same conclusions as Western observers can lead to mirror-imaging and will ignore the likely prospect that Russian lessons learned from the war will not coincide with those of Western military experts. This article contributes to the understanding of Russian military thinking with regard to the war by focusing on three key aspects. (1) The evolution of Russian thinking about indirect strategy. (2) The changing Russian perspective on the concept of non-contact war. (3) The Russian military discourse about the challenge posed by the increasingly transparent battlefield of contemporary wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subvertising is a communication phenomenon aimed at eliciting a response from citizens to advertising messages, and provides tools to fight back on a symbolic battleground. Within the current communication paradigm, subvertising stands as a form of empowerment for a better informed and more participatory active audience. Subvertising practices provide a communication response to a corporate discourse that is considered by many collectives to be manipulative and excessive in its omnipresence. Given that subvertising is such a practical phenomenon, it seems relevant to review what theoretical contributions have been made and determine the current state of research into the subject. This article presents a scoping review of publications on subvertising from 1980 through to March 2020, the main objective being to determine the intellectual output and evolution of existing research, with in-depth analysis of the texts and studies identified. The review process was carried out by searching 11 national and international databases, using 19 keywords selected in a preliminary narrative phase. The results show the evolution of existing literature by country of publication, language, document type, journal, authorship and document features. The conclusions reached indicate that the number of publications on the phenomenon of subvertising is on the rise, attracting interest from a wide range of disciplines, not solely those relating to communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beauty as the manifestation of aesthetic responses and valuations is a human universal. All societies operate with (a version of) the category of beauty. We all navigate the world aesthetically. Architecture and the design disciplines together shape the outward appearance of the social world. Therefore, beauty as the engaged response to appearances should be an indispensable category of all design discourses, including architectural discourse. However, beauty is an increasingly embattled and by now nearly extinct category within a conscientious architectural discourse that is rightly aspiring to rational accountability and evidence-based propositions. Beauty has been eliminated from the discipline's discourse because it is seen as subjective and irrational, as an irresponsible diversion or distraction from architecture's societal tasks. However, beauty is clearly not being abandoned by the end-users of design. Nor are aesthetic choices absent from actual contemporary design practice. Beauty is just no longer being explicitly referred to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse analysis is a commonly used research methodology in the social and human sciences. In this paper, we highlight two different approaches to discourse analysis and discuss critical elements of each approach. As researchers new to discourse analysis, two Masters of Nursing students reflect on the process of making careful choices when deciding on using an approach developed by Fairclough or Foucault. The decision making must consider the substantive focus, methodological knowledge, and positionality and interest of the researcher. We illustrate key components of the two different discourse analysis approaches, the decision making involved in selecting a particular approach, and the shortcomings and limitations that each approach holds in relation to a particular research focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces a deep‐learning model fine‐tuned for detecting authoritarian discourse in political speeches. Set up as a regression problem with weak supervision logic, the model is trained for the task of classification of segments of text for being/not being associated with authoritarian discourse. Rather than trying to define what an authoritarian discourse is, the model builds on the assumption that authoritarian leaders inherently define it. In other words, authoritarian leaders talk like authoritarians. When combined with the discourse defined by democratic leaders, the model learns the instances that are more often associated with authoritarians on the one hand and democrats on the other. The paper discusses several evaluation tests using the model and advocates for its usefulness in a broad range of research problems. It presents a new methodology for studying latent political concepts and positions as an alternative to more traditional research strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the core of the 2008 global financial crisis was a foreclosure crisis in the United States. The federal government focused on responding to the concurrent banking crisis, leaving foreclosure prevention to the states. Despite a nationwide crisis, only some states advanced foreclosure prevention policies. Political theory scholars argue that political ideology and economic interests are the primary drivers of policy outcomes, while discourse scholars argue that themes in the public discourse shape policymaking. In this article, I integrate these literatures to develop and test an account of foreclosure prevention policymaking. To measure discourse, I scrape the text of over 20,000 state-level media publications and inductively code them using Structural Topic Modeling. Using event history analysis, I examine the relationship between discourse themes, political factors, and the timing of foreclosure prevention policymaking by state legislatures. I find that states where a “markets” theme was more prevalent in the foreclosure discourse were less likely to advance foreclosure prevention policies, whereas states with discourse focused on “intervention” were more likely to do so. Results also corroborate previous scholarship showing that political ideology and special interest group activity impacted these policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main goals: first, to analyze current research related with transition to identify the foci being produced and reproduced by research through a literature review and, second, to map the connections between circulating discourses to unfold the discursive network that supports them via an intensive reading. Specifically, we are interested in how social and economic factors, educational background, and cognitive development impact the transition process and the documented potential challenges students may face. In this fashion, the questions that guide the development of the paper are as follows: What are the dominant narratives in mathematics education research about the transition from school to university mathematics? How do dominant narratives entangle particular rationalities to configure a discursive network about the transition from school to university mathematics? As a result, we identify three dominant narratives entangled, which shape a system of reason that regulates what is possible to do, act, and think. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to study and analyze the literary discourse of "Amos Oz," the leftist Zionist writer, and to investigate the crisis of this discourse in the context of textual argumentation and ideology. It takes "A Tale of Love and Darkness" as a model, since it is a Zionist discourse that is described as colonial. The tale entirely embodies a narrative, cultural and ideological work, representing a latent, mysterious, and ambiguous colonial vision associated with colonial and post-colonial contexts charged with cultural, historical, and religious aspects. This discourse seeks to introduce both overt and sometimes covert colonial conceptions. The research problem lies in the deconstruction of this discourse with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian status amid the ongoing conflict over identity, place, history, and heritage. It examines texts with historical and cultural aspects within the framework of the political establishment to reveal linguistic textual aspects and identify the mutual relationship between the text, society, event construction, character development, history, conflict management, and cultural hegemony in colonial and post-colonial era. What we mean by colonization in the Zionist leftist literary discourse which exceeds military colonization to cultural invasion, historical supremacy and cultural hegemony. The study raises several questions on how leftist Colonialist, Zionist and literary discourse presents a culturally disguised discourse to the reader and the world under the impacts of minor and major narrative events and historical developments in determining the ideology and promotion of the state of Israel. To answer this research question, the study adopted the colonial and post-colonial theory, as well as cultural criticism. The study is divided into two chapters. The first chapter discusses the foundations of reading of Amos Oz's text in the context of colonial theories, while the second chapter focuses on the discourse, dialectics and ideology of the text. Following analysis of the minor and major narrative elements, the study revealed the risks and dangers of (exclusion and substitution). This involves exclusion of the narratives of the "other" Palestinian Arab and their existence and connection to their land, place, and history as well as exclusion of opposing narratives by marginalizing and decentralizing them. Then cultural and historical narratives, of the Zionist Jewish self-entity, surpasses them and becomes (Central before Marginal) and (Civilized before Uncivilized) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological identity involves all aspects of how individuals or collectives identify themselves with nature. This paper aims to examine the discursive construction of corporate ecological identities in corporate sustainability reports in China and evaluate how these identities are legitimated through the lens of ecolinguistic discourse analysis. Our data was drawn from a collection of English-language sustainability reports of Huawei Technologies Corporation (2016–2020). The findings suggest a mix of ecological identities across all texts, among which stewarding nature dominates and it relates to the belief that humans are obligated to steward nature for the sake of sustainability. These ecological identities are discursively legitimized in terms of defining characteristics, social roles, and community memberships. Innovativeness, leadership and ethicalness are legitimated as the corporation's dominant characteristics which serve as moral identity standards, allowing further legitimation of the social roles and community memberships that the corporation claims. In the case of social roles, green manufacturing depends on green technologies, and both of them point to the instrumentality and rightness of technology in advancing sustainability. These construals uncover the ecological sustainability in the Chinese cultural context, that is, achieving the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. In legitimizing community memberships, hierarchical relationships between the corporation and other participants are revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the media representation of the involvement of Fenerbahçe, a football club in Türkiye, in the 2011 Turkish Sports Corruption Scandal. Specifically, the study focuses on the discursive construction of Fenerbahçe's 'innocence' and 'corruption' through the central arguments of Fenerbahçe's self-defense and how the newsprint media represents these arguments of innocence in Türkiye. The data consist of the council board speech of the club's president after his release, the front-page headlines, and the news reports of Turkish daily newspapers featuring the speech. In the study, adopting the critical discourse analysis framework, we discuss that the newspapers either recontextualize the innocence arguments or set them aside to pursue their ideological stances. Besides, our analysis reveals that the newspapers ultimately ignore Fenerbahçe's arguments about the existence of a secret criminal organization endeavoring to gain control of Fenerbahçe via match-fixing claims and the state via a civil coup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spontaneous discourse, a speaker sometimes encounters word-formulation trouble, and she may use a 'placeholder' (PH) such as whatchamacallit and you-know-what, a dummy expression to be inserted into the slot of a 'target form' in the sentence structure of an utterance. It has been widely held that there are two types of usage motives: (i) a speaker cannot produce a target form when, e.g., she does not recall it, or (ii) a speaker does not want to produce a target form when, e.g., it is considered taboo. Previous studies have described the grammatical and functional properties of PHs in a variety of languages, but no study has examined their usage-motive patterns crosslinguistically. In this paper, I propose an implicational hierarchy relating to the usage motives of PHs based on the relevance-theoretic notions of 'ability' and 'preference' and derive several predictions from this hierarchy, which are tested against PH data in 56 languages. The predictions are mostly confirmed, with some (putative) counterexamples explained by non-cognitive–pragmatic factors (e.g., lexical-semantic factors). As an implication, the hierarchy may also serve as a basis for drawing predictions in other linguistic fields (e.g., language acquisition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains citizen support for executive aggrandizement? Previous work points to support for the president, showing that individuals who support the incumbent are more accepting of executive aggrandizement. Yet, the role of the president in shaping support for (and the meaning of) executive aggrandizement is unexplored. I argue that populist discourse increases support for executive aggrandizement by framing the president as the genuine representative of the people and by portraying institutional opposition as corrupt. Two studies support this argument: First, a multilevel analysis shows that a text-based measure of populist discourse is associated with increasing support for the president closing congress or the supreme court. The estimated effect of populist discourse is largest among presidential supporters. Second, a survey experiment conducted in Ecuador shows that populist and anti-elitist discourse increase support for a hypothetical executive closing the legislature. The findings indicate that populist discourse undermines public opinion as an executive accountability mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miscarriages, stillbirths and neonatal deaths have received limited attention in global health programmes and research, even though pregnancy loss is common, traumatic and stigmatised. This paper seeks to illuminate lived experiences of pregnancy loss in southern Malawi, drawing on findings from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with women who have experienced loss, health professionals and community members, and observations of maternity care. Combining thematic and discourse analysis, we show how societal and medical discourses frame women as responsible for (failed) reproduction, and restrict possibilities to speak about, and respond to, loss. Some accounts and (care) practices invisibilise loss and associated suffering. However, invisibilisation may also be intended as support, and underscores rather than denies the social significance of parenthood. Other accounts (e.g. women emphasising faith and acceptance) constitute moral survival strategies to avoid the acquisition of a 'spoiled identity'. We conclude that societal and medical discourses of loss enact stigmatised, subaltern subject positions for women experiencing pregnancy loss, create social suffering, and amount to a form of structural violence. Programmes and interventions should change these discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the convention of off-stage cries deployed in Greek tragedy and satyr play chiefly to represent violent events. Unlike other studies dedicated to this topic, it is primarily focused on the cries themselves and to a lesser extent on their context, both dramatic and theatrical. Using the familiar distinction between word and action, it begins with a simple question: how exactly does an off-stage cry represent a violent event taking place within? Examined first as textual phenomena the voices from within are found to acquire their meaning through the discourse of the characters, and not as cries per se. The performative approach, however, also brings their auditory dimension into perspective. Although the evidence is mostly circumstantial, its cumulative weight does suggest that the vocal qualities of the off-stage cries could endow them with meanings unaccounted for in the textual perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]