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This diachronic corpus-based analysis investigates the use of epistemic stance devices inreports from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)from the date of its first report on the physical science of climate change in 1990 to itssixth contribution in 2021. Applying the framework of stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989),the study focuses upon changes in the use of the epistemic stance markers of modal verbsand adverbs across the approximately 30-year period. To empirically measure thestrength of trends in the use of these stance devices, Kendall’s Tau correlation coefficientwas calculated for each item using their normalized frequencies from the six reports.Analysis displayed that the use of modal verbs has consistently decreased across thisperiod of time in which the scientific consensus regarding the anthropogenic origins ofclimate change expanded and solidified. Additionally, of the greater than twenty stanceadverbs displaying consistent use trajectories across the period, the majority of theseitems were emphatic adverbs declining in use.

This corpus-assisted discourse study investigates diachronic change in a specialised corpus of seventeen American presidential debates from 2000 to 2020. The texts were tagged using the ucrel Semantic Annotation System (usas) ( Rayson, 2008 ) to facilitate the investigation of emergent and decreasing semantic trends over the period; the strength of trends was empirically evaluated through application of Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient. The analysis revealed that domains reflecting truth evaluations and matters of credibility increased alongside a more people-orientated discourse, as evidenced by increases in personal pronouns. Furthermore, instances invoking warfare and defence decreased, paralleled by a decrease in the representations of toughness. These results may reflect a shift in US political discourse generally, and American presidential discourse specifically, while also reflecting evolving contemporary social and political interests over the twenty-year span of the corpus. This study concludes with interpretations of these discursive shifts in the context of the current era of so-called ‘fake news’, intense partisanship, and social and political divisiveness. Findings indicate that the current US political climate cannot simply be attributed to an anomalous Trump administration but, rather, the discursive features contributing to and reflecting the current political environment have been present and increasing since at least the year 2000 election cycle.

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) seeks to promote social justice by explicitly calling attention to power issues in the context of literacy development and language instruction. In this article, we assert that a CLA approach to English language teaching (ELT) which does not recognize and account for the urgency of climate change and its myriad effects on present and future generations of learners is flawed. It is time ELT extends a critical lens to the role that our practices and pedagogies serve in the (re)production of attitudes, ideologies, identities, and actions which contribute to ecological degradation and climate crisis while also engaging how we may advance ecological wellbeing and sustainability. This article outlines the rationale for this ecolinguistics-informed CLA (eco-CLA) approach to English language instruction by asserting the compatibility of ecolinguistics and CLA and the intersection of social, linguistic, and environmental justice. It then presents and discusses five principles for an eco-CLA approach to ELT that can be applied to a range of language learning contexts. Finally, it demonstrates how these principles can be operationalized within ELT by presenting a series of instructional activities.

La Grande-Bretagne a-t-elle frôlé la révolution en 1819-20 ? Le ‘massacre de Peterloo’ le 16 août 1819, répression sanglante d’une manifestation de travailleurs exigeant le suffrage universel masculin, est un événement crucial dans l’histoire du radicalisme britannique. La vague de protestations et de troubles qui le suivit fut plus forte et plus étendue que la campagne radicale en elle-même. On y retrouva tout le spectre des opposants de l’époque, des aristocrates Whigs les plus prudents jusqu’aux ouvriers insurgés du nord et aux ultra-radicaux de Londres qui tentèrent d’assassiner les membres du gouvernement dans la conspiration de Cato Street de février 1820. Cet essai, irrigué par l’étude du très riche fonds des Archives Nationales britanniques, examine les liens entre tous ces mouvements afin d’évaluer la viabilité des divers plans d’insurrection. Il conclut que les ultra-radicaux de Londres, quoique présentés comme la force motrice de la rébellion, s’étaient retrouvés isolés et écartés du mouvement radical au cours de l’année 1819. Ce n’est pas la promesse d’un soulèvement national à venir, mais l’échec d’une manifestation déjà passée qui a mené à la conspiration de Cato Street. How close did Britain come to revolution in 1819-20? The ‘Peterloo massacre’ of August 1819 in Manchester was a landmark event in British radicalism. The wave of protests and disturbances which followed was stronger and more widespread than the radical campaign itself. It involved the whole spectrum of opposition from cautious Whig aristocrats through insurgent northern workers to London’s ultra-radicals, who attempted to assassinate the government in the Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820. This essay uses the wealth of material in the UK National Archives to examine the connections between these movements, and to assess how viable were plans for insurrection. It concludes that the London ultra-radicals, whilst giving the appearance of leading, had become isolated from the main radical movement by late 1819. The Cato Street conspiracy happened not because a national rising was expected but because one had already failed.

This article reports a corpus-aided analysis of stance adverbs within published judicial opinions from the 12 geographically-apportioned districts of the United States (US) Federal Courts of Appeals. The study first analyzes stance adverbs previously investigated in US Supreme Court decisions in order to more comprehensively explore these interactional features across multiple levels of the judicial system. Following this initial analysis, the study then examines variation in the use of stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions in Courts of Appeals opinions to identify salient similarities and differences in frequency and function in the two opinion types. The initial analysis reveals divergence in stance adverb use between the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court and between legal writing and other registers, indicating the prevalence and importance of stance adverbs within legal writing. Additionally, the study notes variation in stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions. This article details the variation of stance adverbs across these aforementioned contexts, discusses how the variation noted in the corpus analysis at times conflicts with the advice of legal writing style guides, and offers pedagogical implications of these findings for English for Legal Purposes instruction.

Hierarchical self-assembly is an effective means of preparing useful materials. However, control over assembly across length scales is a difficult challenge, often confounded by the perceived need to re-design the molecular building blocks when new material properties are needed. Here, we show that we can treat a simple dipeptide building block as a polyelectrolyte and use polymer physics approaches to explain the self-assembly over a wide concentration range. This allows us to prepare interesting analogues to threads and webs, as well as films that lose order on heating and “noodles” which change dimensions on heating, showing that we can transfer molecular-level changes to bulk properties all from a single building block.

The present study explores the attitudes of novice teachers towards corpus-aided language learning and teaching in an undergraduate writing course for multilingual students at a large US public uni...

In Bristol from Below, two leading historians of popular protest join forces to create what they call ‘the first urban history from below of the long eighteenth century’ (4–5). Working ‘at the inte...

In the middle of Freedom’s Laboratory, Audra Wolfe describes a moment of archival revelation. Presented with the catalogue of the immense archive of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]-supported ...

This article presents an ecolinguistic analysis of a popular digital simulation game, Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2012). As the popularity and immersive capability of digital gaming continues to exp...

Biomarkers of effect are measurable changes in an individual that indicate health impairment or disease. Although biomarkers have long been a crucial part of medical practice - blood pressure is a simple example - researchers have recently identified a variety of new biomarkers that signal the presence of conditions such as nervous system damage, autoimmune disorders, and cancer. Of particular interest is the potential of these new biomarkers to measure adverse health effects that may arise from exposure to environmental pollutants. On August 12-13, 2020, the Standing Committee on the Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a 2-day workshop to explore how new biomarker approaches can be applied to understanding the consequences of environmental exposures and improve environmental health decisions. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group, including experts in public health, environmental health, clinical medicine, and health disparities to discuss the state of the art in biomarkers and health. This Proceedings of a Workshop-in Brief summarizes the workshop presentations and the discussions that took place among the participants.

Understanding and ensuring healthy aging has become increasingly important as the human life span increases with each decade. The need to better understand the role of environmental exposures in the development of aging-related diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia, is now an important driver for research at the intersection of aging and environmental health. With that in mind, on June 9–10, 2020, the Standing Committee on the Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a 1.5-day workshop to explore how environmental exposures influence or mediate aging and how aging influences environmentally mediated health outcomes. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts who described the current state of knowledge in the field as well as ideas for next steps including research opportunities and needs, enabling technologies and analytical tools, and mechanisms to anticipate and use new data to inform environmental health decisions. This Proceedings of a Workshop in Brief summarizes the invited speakers' presentations and the discussion periods that followed each session.

Plastics have become incredibly important in the modern world and are used for purposes for which other materials are unsuitable. As a result, demand for plastics is expected to increase globally for the foreseeable future. However, tiny bits of plastics, known as microplastics, have been increasing in the environment—in the air, water, soil, and food. As yet, relatively little is known about the health effects of these microplastics. On January 27–28, 2020, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop to explore emerging technologies to advance research on and improve decisions about the environmental health effects of microplastics. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts in environmental health, the presence and behavior of plastics in the environment, agriculture, wastewater treatment, and science policy to discuss what is known about microplastics and environmental health, what research is needed to fill gaps in current knowledge, and how emerging science could help address these gaps to provide an improved basis for public policy. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

It has been claimed that the standard model of cosmology (LCDM) cannot easily account for a number of observations on relatively small scales, motivating extensions to the standard model. Here we introduce a new suite of cosmological simulations that systematically explores three plausible extensions: warm dark matter, self-interacting dark matter, and a running of the scalar spectral index of density fluctuations. Current observational constraints are used to specify the additional parameters that come with these extensions. We examine a large range of observable metrics on small scales, including the halo mass function, density and circular velocity profiles, the abundance of satellite subhaloes, and halo concentrations. For any given metric, significant degeneracies can be present between the extensions. In detail, however, the different extensions have quantitatively distinct mass and radial dependencies, suggesting that a multi-probe approach over a range of scales can be used to break the degeneracies. We also demonstrate that the relative effects on the radial density profiles in the different extensions (compared to the standard model) are converged down to significantly smaller radii than are the absolute profiles. We compare the derived cosmological trends with the impact of baryonic physics using the EAGLE and ARTEMIS simulations. Significant degeneracies are also present between baryonic physics and cosmological variations (with both having similar magnitude effects on some observables). Given the inherent uncertainties both in the modelling of galaxy formation physics and extensions to LCDM, a systematic and simultaneous exploration of both is strongly warranted., 22 pages, 12 figures, to match MNRAS accepted version

We introduce the ARTEMIS simulations, a new set of 42 zoomed-in, high-resolution (baryon particle mass of ~ 2x10^4 Msun/h), hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies residing in haloes of Milky Way mass, simulated with the EAGLE galaxy formation code with re-calibrated stellar feedback. In this study, we analyse the structure of stellar haloes, specifically the mass density, surface brightness, metallicity, colour and age radial profiles, finding generally very good agreement with recent observations of local galaxies. The stellar density profiles are well fitted by broken power laws, with inner slopes of ~ -3, outer slopes of ~ -4 and break radii that are typically ~ 20-40 kpc. The break radii generally mark the transition between in situ formation and accretion-driven formation of the halo. The metallicity, colour and age profiles show mild large-scale gradients, particularly when spherically-averaged or viewed along the major axes. Along the minor axes, however, the profiles are nearly flat, in agreement with observations. Overall, the structural properties can be understood by two factors: that in situ stars dominate the inner regions and that they reside in a spatially-flattened distribution that is aligned with the disc. Observations targeting both the major and minor axes of galaxies are thus required to obtain a complete picture of stellar haloes., Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

Dark matter (DM) direct detection experiments aim to place constraints on the DM--nucleon scattering cross-section and the DM particle mass. These constraints depend sensitively on the assumed local DM density and velocity distribution function. While astrophysical observations can inform the former (in a model-dependent way), the latter is not directly accessible with observations. Here we use the high-resolution ARTEMIS cosmological hydrodynamical simulation suite of 42 Milky Way-mass halos to explore the spatial and kinematical distributions of the DM in the solar neighbourhood, and we examine how these quantities are influenced by substructures, baryons, the presence of dark discs, as well as general halo-to-halo scatter (cosmic variance). We also explore the accuracy of the standard Maxwellian approach for modelling the velocity distribution function. We find significant halo-to-halo scatter in the density and velocity functions which, if propagated through the standard halo model for predicting the DM detection limits, implies a significant scatter about the typically quoted limit. We also show that, in general, the Maxwellian approximation works relatively well for simulations that include the important gravitational effects of baryons, but is less accurate for collisionless (DM-only) simulations. Given the significant halo-to-halo scatter in quantities relevant for DM direct detection, we advocate propagating this source of uncertainty through in order to derive conservative DM detection limits., Comment: 37 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in JCAP

This paper analyzes the use of evaluative adjectives within letters to the shareholders from the top 100 corporations from the 2016 Fortune 500 list. The letter represents an important promotional genre and is published annually to report financial performance while also projecting a vision for future success and continued growth. These influential messages detail and frame institutional vision and strategy as they attempt to maintain relationships with current investors while attracting new ones. This paper adopts Thompson and Hunston's term of evaluation and its definition as “the expression of the speaker or writer's attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or proposition” (2000, p. 5) as it investigates the semantic classes of evaluative adjectives present in the letters and their function within this ESP genre of interest. While there are many features that reflect and realize evaluation, adjectives are the focus of this inquiry because their overt evaluative quality makes them an accessible item to extract and analyze with basic corpus techniques which could be taught and applied within a classroom setting. This paper reports the use of evaluative adjectives while also displaying that little salient variation exists between a sub-corpus of only 10 letters and the full corpus collection. With little noticeable variation and numerous learning affordances, a pedagogically-downsized specialized corpus can be easily compiled, analyzed, and implemented in EBP and other ESP contexts.

Arran Stibbe’s most recent text is one of the more significant contributions to ecolinguistics since Alwin Fill and Peter Muhlhausler’s The ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology and environment ...

This article details an integration of geographical information system (GIS) and corpus linguistics (CL) techniques for an ecolinguistic analysis of a contentious, environmental debate in Arizona, ...

This article reports a corpus-aided ecological discourse analysis (EDA) of texts from an international mining company and an environmental advocacy group regarding a proposal to build a massive open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona, USA. The analysis details the grammatical and semantic clusters within the controversial environmental debate and how these clusters reflect the values and beliefs of each group as well as their conceptualization of the mountains and the environment. The integration of the ecolinguistic framework with corpus linguistic methods of keyword analysis as well as part of speech (POS) and semantic tag analysis facilitated the identification of clusters of linguistic features perpetuating a dominant and ultimately destructive cultural discourse that places humans in a role of dominion and authority over the environment in the company texts. In contrast, clusters within the oppositional discourse forwarded by the environmental group promote the aesthetic value of the land and a need for responsible environmental stewardship.

We study 2001-2004 and 2004-2007 rent growth of 18,000 rental units, ending our study prior to the Great Recession. Which variables correlate with rent growth: Location? Age? Rent level? Occupancy duration? Structure type? The answers deepen understanding of the rental market, help statistical agencies make decisions about sample stratification and substitution, and expose coverage problems. We document significant rent stickiness. Initial relative rent level is the best predictor, though mainly due to mean reversion. "Location" comes in second, though often not statistically significantly: the relative value of location is persistent. Age and occupancy duration are also notable. Our findings are reassuring to statistical agencies.

This chapter traces the history of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the science fiction short story ‘The Sentinel’ through the novel ‘Journey Beyond the Stars’ to the making of 2001 as a cult film. It grew out of Kubrick’s Cold War classic Dr. Strangelove and his concern with nuclear war, and dramatized the space program, astrofuturism and the issue of extra-terrestrial life. It drew on the ideas of human evolution of Louis Leakey, Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey, particularly Ardrey’s African Genesis and the ‘man the hunter’ and ‘killer ape’ theories. In 2001 Kubrick and Clarke created a ‘myth of progress’ which captured both the optimism of the Space Age and the dark side of human nature.

Interviewing and assessment are integral to the practice of psychiatry, and this book helps psychiatrists and other mental health professionals develop the skills needed to gain the right information to make diagnostic formulations and build therapeutic relationships with their patients. The text examines common dilemmas and problems in an engaging and accessible way, and the use of case studies relates the principles discussed to identifiable psychiatric settings. This new edition has been revised and expanded to reflect changes in clinical practice in recent years. New chapters have been added covering the assessment of neurodevelopmental disorders, fragmented interviews and 'impossible' clinical situations such as the assessment of intoxicated patients and rhetorical interviews. Essential reading for all mental health professionals, the practical grounding in real-world clinical experience will benefit trainee psychiatrists, experienced clinicians, nurses, social workers and physician associates.

A move towards self-management is central to health strategy around chronic low back pain, but its concept and meaning for those involved are poorly understood. In the reported study, four distinct and shared viewpoints on self-management were identified among people with pain and healthcare providers using Q methodology. Each construes self-management in a distinctive manner and articulates a different vision of change. Identification of similarities and differences among the viewpoints holds potential for enhancing communication between patients and healthcare providers and for better understanding the complexities of self-management in practice.

This study investigates the use of epistemic stance features within a specialized, diachronic corpus of biochemical research pertaining to the motility of bacterial cells in a process referred to as chemotaxis. The corpus constructed for the investigation includes 328 open access research articles citing the seminal 1972 publication, "Chemotaxis in Escherichia coli analyzed by three-dimensional tracking" in the peer-reviewed journal Nature by Drs. Howard Berg and Douglas Brown. For the investigation, the corpus was segmented into sub-corpora representing five time periods and the trends in use of epistemic stance markers were analyzed. Over the period covered by the corpus (1972–2017), the overall use of modal auxiliaries and non-modal hedges decreased while the frequency of boosters increased. Additionally, epistemic stance markers indexing greater degrees of certainty increased while epistemic stance markers reflecting doubt and uncertainty decreased. These findings are noteworthy as they contrast with previous studies investigating diachronic change in epistemic stance use in both academic and science writing and add to our understanding of the use of epistemic stance in the formation of knowledge.

‘One such year … is worth a life,’ wrote Richard Carlile towards the end of the year 1820. In an important book which integrates the history of protest, government and society, Malcolm Chase shows ...

On the eve of the great migration of the rapidly developing textile industry into the steam-powered factory and the town, the nascent cotton district of south and east Lancashire had a rich and varied calendar of popular holidays, traditions and customs. Samuel Bamford listed those that prevailed during his boyhood in Middleton, a weaving and mining village a few miles north of Manchester, in the early nineteenth century. The year began with the Christmas holidays, which lasted for several days from the first Monday after New Year's Day. Shrove Tuesday was a holiday, and mid-Lent Sunday was observed with cymbalin cakes and mulled ale. Easter saw heavy drinking, dancing, 'pace-egging' and a mock mayor ceremony, and it concluded on the Wednesday with 'White Apron Fair', when the local women displayed themselves in all their finery. May-Day was used for the ritual settling of grudges, and Whitsuntide was a further occasion for dancing and drinking, with many villagers visiting Manchester Races. But, we are told, '"The Rush-bearing" was the great feast of the year.' This was held on the anniversary of the dedication of the church, usually the third Saturday in August, when rushes were ceremonially carried from the outlying hamlets and strewn in the parish church to act as a floorcovering during the coming year.

This study compares the effectiveness of online textual glosses enhanced with modified corpus-extracted sentences presented in concordance lines and textual glosses enhanced with dictionary definitions drawn from an online learner’s dictionary for academic vocabulary learning at higher proficiency levels. Particularly, the study aimed to determine which textual gloss technique would be most beneficial in helping intermediate to advanced language learners, who likely possess foundational receptive knowledge, i.e. they recognize the word and know the definition, gain productive knowledge of academic lexical items. While the usefulness of multimedia and image-based glosses are not disputed, lexical items from an academic word list may not be easily glossed through these techniques, and the development of a concordance-based modality may prove beneficial for more proficient learners seeking productive vocabulary knowledge. Also investigated were learner attitudes towards the textual annotation techniques. Participants in both experimental groups exhibited post test gains in receptive and judgment tasks, but only the concordance-based group displayed improvement on the productive assessment. Further, the concordance-based group responded that the glosses were beneficial and likely to be used for subsequent language study, while the dictionary group indicated the glosses would not be later used as the annotations were perceived as ineffective.