The disambiguation and processing of coherence relations is often investigated with a focus on explicit connectives, such as but or so. Other, non-connective cues from the context also facilitate discourse inferences, although their precise disambiguating role and interaction with connectives have been largely overlooked in the psycholinguistic literature so far. This study reports on two crowdsourcing experiments that test the role of contextual cues in the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations. We compare the effect of contextual cues in (...) conceptually different relations, and with connectives that differ in their semantic precision. Using offline tasks, our results show that contextual cues significantly help disambiguating contrast and consequence relations in the absence of connectives. However, when connectives are present in the context, the effect of cues only holds if the connective is acceptable in the target relation. Overall, our study suggests that cues are decisive on their own, but only secondary in the presence of connectives. These results call for further investigation of the complex interplay between connective types, contextual cues, relation types and other linguistic and cognitive factors. (shrink)

The disambiguation and processing of coherence relations is often investigated with a focus on explicit connectives, such asbutorso. Other, non-connective cues from the context also facilitate discourse inferences, although their precise disambiguating role and interaction with connectives have been largely overlooked in the psycholinguistic literature so far. This study reports on two crowdsourcing experiments that test the role of contextual cues (parallelism, antonyms, resultative verbs) in the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations. We compare the effect of contextual cues (...) in conceptually different relations, and with connectives that differ in their semantic precision. Using offline tasks, our results show that contextual cues significantly help disambiguating contrast and consequence relations in the absence of connectives. However, when connectives are present in the context, the effect of cues only holds if the connective is acceptable in the target relation. Overall, our study suggests that cues are decisive on their own, but only secondary in the presence of connectives. These results call for further investigation of the complex interplay between connective types, contextual cues, relation types and other linguistic and cognitive factors. (shrink)

As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course, and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre’s linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers’ and readers’ perception of this genre. A corpus of (...) 50 motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro- and microtextual features of this particular genre and co-occurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writers’ moves and readers’ moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple perspectives analysis of the corpus shows evidence of significant co-occurrences among modalization, discourse markers, and rhetorical moves. Writers’ ideal representations of this discourse genre, which spans the academic and professional fields, can also be deduced. (shrink)

While dominant medico-psychological approaches in suicidology depict suicide as resulting from individual psychic/corporeal pathologies, suicides of minority groups are frequently understood in muc...

This paper investigates teachers' use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning previously undertaken by the class, but less awareness of how the learning might build on prior learning outside school. The paper considers how teachers make connections between new learning (...) and prior learning, and how those connections can variously support or confound children's acquisition of new knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

This essay examines several of Plato’s philosophical texts to show how in the process of trying to differentiate rhetoric and medicine—to prove that medicine is an art or science like philosophy, and that rhetoric, in comparison, is just a knack or skill—Plato indirectly and unwittingly reveals just how similar the two practices may be. As such, this essay seeks a fuller interpretation of Plato’s attitude toward rhetoric, supplementing the work of scholars who claim the only evidence Plato gives us about (...) an ideal rhetoric is through its relationship to philosophy. This essay shows instead that Plato captures the potential of rhetoric as a true art precisely through its intricate relationship to medicine. (shrink)

The notion of kontrast, or the ability of certain linguistic expressions to generate a set of alternatives, originally proposed by Vallduví and Vilkuna (1998) as a clause-level concept, is re-analyzed here as connecting the level of information packaging in the clause and the level of discourse structure in the following way: kontrast is encoded at the clausal level but has repercussions for discourse structure. This claim is supported by evidence from the distribution properties of three colloquial Russian particles (...) -to, e, andved' which are analyzed as unambiguous markers of kontrast. Both the placement of these particles at the clausal level and their role in discourse are viewed as consequences of the type of the kontrast set and the cognitive status of information marked by each particle. (shrink)

This paper investigates teachers' use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning previously undertaken by the class, but less awareness of how the learning might build on prior learning outside school. The paper considers how teachers make connections between new learning (...) and prior learning, and how those connections can variously support or confound children's acquisition of new knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are (...) conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives, secondly less frequent ones, and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete. Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives. (shrink)

Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse (...) connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the potential of systematically studying the linguistic surface of discourse for the purposes of identifying markers of argumentative moves and other related categories, such as types of arguments and argumentative strategies. Such a list of argumentative markers can prove useful for the (semi)automatic treatment of a large corpus of texts. After reviewing literature on the linguistic realization of argumentative moves as well as literature on the subject of discourse markers, it becomes clear that (...) the search for representative items of argumentative markers cannot be restricted to those elements marking relations but that it should also include elements that signal a certain function that is of pertinence to argumentative analysis. In this view, argumentative markers can be any single or complex lexical expression as well as a discursive configuration whose presence in a given utterance marks that utterance or the one preceding/following it, or a larger piece of discourse as having a certain argumentative function (as an argumentative move, a type of argument or an argumentative strategy). Examples taken from a French corpus on the controversy surrounding the development and applications of nanotechnology currently under study are used to illustrate the different types of argumentative markers proposed. (shrink)

Discourse connection is a challenging aspect of writing in a second language. This study seeks to investigate the effects of two classroom instructions on discourse connection in writing for EFL college students, focusing on their argumentative writing. Three classes were exposed to different pre-task conditions: receiving reading materials that provide content support for the writing, receiving planning instructions on effective outlining, and receiving no resources. The results showed that the instructions helped students attain better overall coherence in writing. (...) However, noticeable differences between the two experimental groups emerged in terms of cohesion features. The reading group was found to employ more lexical cohesion devices in writing than the outline group, which indicated a heightened genre awareness. This inquiry helped us identify the reading group’s alignment with content support materials, particularly the change in stance as a factor that contributes to a higher level of lexical cohesion in writing. (shrink)

This article is a theoretical examination of the relationship between truth and forms of dialogue, in discursive psychology. To do this, I mainly draw on Bakhtin and Kiekegaard . In contrast to a hermeneutic tradition that has sidelined the importance of the author to discourse , these authors offer an understanding of truth that depends on the author's emotional connection to the truth they are expressing. They most clearly demonstrate the dynamics of our emotional connection to truth in their (...) descriptions of different forms of speech. Kierkegaard describes the relationship between self and truth in irony, while Bakhtin does the same in the epic, the confession and the quarrel. It is my argument that these forms of speech interact with truth and help organise selfhood. I also argue that our current methodological emphasis on the function of words or the play of dominant discourses tend to overlook the experiential landscape of language and its reciprocal relationship with our subjectivity. (shrink)

This article is concerned with pragmatic connectives and their uses in discursive argumentation. Three approaches to pragmatic connectives will be presented: (1) argumentation theory, which implies a conception of pragmatics integrated within semantics, and a specific type of argumentative rules, called ‘topoi’; (2) discourse structure theory, which associates a function in the structuring of discourse sequences to pragmatic connectives; (3) relevance theory, which constitutes a cognitive pragmatic theory, in which no specific principle is associated to linguistic items. However, (...) two main functions to pragmatic connectives can be proposed: the facilitation of inferences, and the access to relevance. The final purpose of this article is to indicate how argumentative effects in discourse can be explained in a cognitively-based pragmatic theory. (shrink)

Continuing the dialogue: postcolonial feminist scholarship and Bourdieu — discourses of culture and points of connection Postcolonial feminist theories provide the analytic tools to address issues of structural inequities in groups that historically have been socially and economically disadvantaged. In this paper we question what value might be added to postcolonial feminist theories on culture by drawing on Bourdieu. Are there points of connection? Like postcolonial feminists, he puts forward a position that aims to unmask oppressive structures. We argue that, (...) while there are points of connection, there are also epistemologic and methodologic differences between postcolonial feminist perspectives and Bourdieu's work. Nonetheless, engagement with different theoretical perspectives carries the promise of new insights — new ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘understanding’ that might enhance a praxis‐oriented theoretical perspective in healthcare delivery. (shrink)

This study examines the complex dynamics of communication in the changing field of journalism influenced by the use of media. It specifically focuses on how thoughts and perceptions are expressed in this evolving landscape. Information and communication technologies significantly influence journalism by rapidly disseminating news, updates, and societal impacts. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, the study aims to reveal systematic language usages and uncover latent meanings beyond news texts. Focused on the 2023 Turkish Presidential Election, news texts from four prominent (...) international newslets Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, and Euronews are analyzed. The comprehensive analysis of international media coverage investigates the interplay of linguistic and thematic choices in shaping narratives. With a dual focus on macro and micro levels of discourse, the study uncovers diverse approaches among foreign media outlets. Each outlet adopts a distinctive thematic approach at the macro level, emphasizing key figures and sociopolitical contexts. Al Jazeera spotlights competition, BBC underscores post-election polarization, CNN focuses on Erdogan's victory, and Euronews provides insights into national challenges. Visual elements, like photographs, contribute significantly to framing events, offering nuanced political messaging. Micro-level analysis explores linguistic choices, syntax, and rhetoric, emphasizing the active voice to underscore leaders' agency. Deliberate use of the passive voice in presenting election results maintains a neutral tone. The way sentences are structured and the cause-and-effect connections help readers understand political developments by providing context. The study underscores the importance of media literacy in decoding political event representations, emphasizing the multifaceted complexities of media discourse. (shrink)

The book approaches law from the legal-linguistic perspective. Its aim is to clarify the processes in which the meaning of law emerges in legal discourses. In order to enable the understanding of law as a discursive practice, professional and non-professional discourses are analyzed. With this aim in mind, the author focuses on the epistemological consequences of the discursiveness of law. Other relevant legal-linguistic operations such as legal interpretation or legal translation are scrutinized in terms of their theoretical prerequisites and their (...) practical consequences. Their analysis also shows the potential and the limits of law as a social and as a linguistic phenomenon that is determined by its discursiveness. Finally, the book demonstrates how the discursiveness as the distinctive feature of law establishes the connection between the science of law and other social sciences. (shrink)

Classroom discussion practices that can lead to reasoned participation by all students are presented and described by the authors. Their research emphasizes the careful orchestration of talk and tasks in academic learning. Parallels are drawn to the philosophical work on deliberative discourse and the fundamental goal of equipping all students to participate in academically productive talk. These practices, termed Accountable TalkSM, emphasize the forms and norms of discourse that support and promote equity and access to rigorous academic learning. (...) They have been shown to result in academic achievement for diverse populations of students. The authors outline Accountable Talk as encompassing three broad dimensions: one, accountability to the learning community, in which participants listen to and build their contributions in response to those of others; two, accountability to accepted standards of reasoning, talk that emphasizes logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions; and, three, accountability to knowledge, talk that is based explicitly on facts, written texts, or other public information. With more than fifteen years research into Accountable Talk applications across a wide range of classrooms and grade levels, the authors detail the challenges and limitations of contexts in which discourse norms are not shared by all members of the classroom community. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what discourse ethics might have to contribute to increasingly urgent issues in intergenerational justice. Discourse ethics and deliberative democracy are often accused of neglecting the issue, or, even worse, of an inherently presentist bias that disregards future generations. The few forays into the topic mostly seek to extend to future people the “all affected principle” according to which only those norms are just to which all affected can rationally consent. However, this strategy (...) conflicts with core commitments of discursive ethics, as it renders agreement hypothetical and discursive participation virtual. I will attempt a supplementary route toward a connection between discourse ethics and intergenerational justice. Discourse ethics must be concerned, in what Habermas calls the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld, with the emergence of rational minds capable of assessing reasons for proposed norms and policies, and such emergence is an intrinsically intergenerational affair. Symbolic reproduction links overlapping and non-overlapping generations in what has been elaborated as a chain-of-concern model, which I show to be linked to forms of indirect reciprocity among more than two parties. I conclude by discussing some consequences of this model for the all affected principle when viewed as specifically applied to future generations. (shrink)

he importance of gender equality and of women’s work in relation to the environment is regarded as a crucial question for development in “third‐world” rural societies. “Development” and a certain standard of welfare make these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country such as Sweden. In this article, I trace some of the contradictions and connections in the ways in which gender equality is conceptualized in women’s struggles vis‐à‐vis environmental issues in rural areas in Sweden and India. (...) The article throws light on two important insights: First, in Sweden, where gender equality has been actively pursued as the bedrock of modern societal organizing, the space to organize as women in relation to environmental issues was fraught with ambiguity. Second, development discourses about equality and empowerment of oppressed third‐world women not only bear on how gender equality is conceptualized and practiced in the global South but also shape the space for gender equality in the North. Analyzing the two cases in relation to each other reveals the travel of ideas and conversations across distant geographical spaces. While ideas about the independent, empowered woman are used to deny agency to women’s collectives in India, gendered discrimination has taken different forms in Sweden, making it more difficult to contest. Understanding how this takes place opens an opportunity for interruption in an order and a space that appears to have become narrower under the umbrella of development, welfare, and growth. It brings into question the category of development in a southern but particularly so in a northern context, where the North, and especially Sweden, is taken as a referent for questions of development and gender equality. -/- . (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social media has given way to information and prosumption-oriented discursive fields wherein individuals construct their own social identities. Although interactivity, multimodality, user-centeredness and accessibility are the unique aspects of digital media but the fact that digital media as effective spaces for representing extreme self/other representation while being anonymous and free from following social norms, can cause dysfunctional social behaviours such as cyber hate. Mirroring the normative notions of femininity, masculinity and gender stereotype allows groups and individuals to connect and (...) express similar manifestations of hate, which, often result in the emergence of a ‘discursive spiral of hate’, misogyny and sexism. This paper draws on the important caveats discussed around Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies understanding of the contemporary digital discourses to deconstruct the complex relations between gender, hate speech and celebrities’ discourses on social media. In particular, how Lena Dunham, American celebrity, portrays herself on her Instagram page by going against the hegemonic views and how the audiences, i.e. the digital prosumers perceive that portrayal. Analysing 2000 user-generated comments deconstruct how women are required to suppress their feeling and limit their authentic online presentation to maintain the outward countenance that matches the stereotypical gender roles in audiences’ state of mind. (shrink)

Deictic (or pointing) gestures are traditionally known to have a simple function: to supply something as the referent of a demonstrative linguistic expression. I argue that deixis can have a more complex function. A deictic gesture can be used to _say something_ in conversation and can thereby become a full discourse move in its own right. To capture this phenomenon, which I call _rich demonstration_, I present an update semantics on which deictic gestures can indicate situations from a conversation’s (...) context and those situations coherently connect to prior discourse to generate information. (shrink)

This paper asks whether geographically localised, or ‘hyperlocal’, uses of Twitter succeed in creating peer-to-peer neighbourhood networks or simply act as broadcast media at a reduced scale. Literature drawn from the smart cities discourse and from a UK research project into hyperlocal media, respectively, take on these two opposing interpretations. Evidence gathered in the case study presented here is consistent with the latter, and on this basis we criticise the notion that hyperlocal social media can be seen as a (...) community in itself. We demonstrate this by creating a network map of Twitter followers of a popular hyperlocal blog in Brockley, southeast London. We describe various attributes of this network including its average degree and clustering coefficient to suggest that a small and highly connected cluster of visible local entities such as businesses form a clique at the centre of this network, with individual residents following these but not one another. We then plot the locations of these entities and demonstrate that sub-communities in the network are formed due to close geographical proximity between smaller sets of businesses. These observations are illustrated with qualitative evidence from interviews with users who suggest instead that rather than being connected to one another they benefit from what has been described as ‘neighbourhood storytelling’. Despite the limitations of working with Twitter data, we propose that this multi-modal approach offers a valuable way to investigate the experience of using social media as a communication tool in urban neighbourhoods. (shrink)

Excerpt: 1. Introduction This chapter provides insight into the diverse ethical debates on genetics and epigenetics. Much controversy surrounds debates about intervening into the germline genome of human embryos, with catchwords such as genome editing, designer baby, and CRISPR/Cas. The idea that it is possible to design a child according to one’s personal preferences is, however, a quite distorted view of what is actually possible with new gene technologies and gene therapies. These are much more limited than the editing and (...) design metaphors suggest. Such metaphors are therefore highly problematic phrases in the context of new gene technologies, for two reasons. On one hand, to design a child of choice by modifying the genome would require modifying any gene of choice, which is more than can be done with current gene technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas. On the other hand, a modification of genes would need to be enough to create any characteristic of choice in the future child. The latter presupposes the assumption of genetic determinism. Moreover, the CRISPR/Cas technology can not only be used in a potentially therapeutic manner at the germline level. In addition, there is the (more likely) scenario of a future clinical therapeutic use of these new gene technologies for modifying the DNA sequence of other cells of the body (somatic genome editing). There is also the option of modifying the epigenome, that is, the spatial configuration of DNA (epigenome editing) (see table 1). Like genetics and genome editing, epigenetics has been at the center of recent popular scientific and ethical discourse as well as scientific debates. The concept of epigenetics has given rise to very different notions of inheritability and responsibility for health, which, however, are oftentimes based on scientifically controversial basic assumptions. That there continues to be covert genetic determinism in the form of epigenetic determinism (see table 2) in debates about epigenetics has been pointed out in ethical analyses of epigenetics. Neither genetic determinism nor epigenetic determinism has been confirmed scientifically. It is therefore important to recognize the concepts that are discussed (and sometimes harshly criticized) in debates about genome editing and epigenetics—for example, concepts about the causal role of DNA for our own life course. This importance is based on the fact that if we understand such controversial concepts, we will be able to remain critical when evaluating scientific knowledge and ethical arguments about genome editing and epigenetics. This chapter, therefore, explains some of these concepts. For an ethical analysis of epigenetics as well as of genome editing, it is necessary to understand and critically reflect upon the underlying concepts of genetic determinism and other, related -isms. The following section offers a detailed introduction to these -isms (section 2; see also table 2). Section 3 provides an ethical analysis of genome editing and epigenetics based on the explanations in section 2. Section 3 focuses on inheritability and responsibility, justice, safety, the problem of consent, and the effects of genome editing and epigenetics on embryos and future generations. This section does not discuss in detail further points that can be found in ethical debates about epigenetics as well as in ethical debates about genome editing. These points include (among others): • fear that the findings of epigenetics and that the methods of genome editing are misused—this also with respect to eugenics and enhancement; • naturalness—an issue we mention in passing a few times in the following analysis; • a possible connection between the genome/epigenome and the concept of human dignity, and the derived danger of instrumentalization and infringement of autonomy when intervening in the genome or epigenome. Since current discourse about ethical issues associated with genome editing focuses mainly on germline interventions, which are, for instance, interventions into a human embryo’s genome, we mainly focus on germline interventions when comparing the debates on genome editing and on epigenetics in section 3. (shrink)

This book investigates Chinese comprehension and treatment of the relationship between language and reality. The work examines ancient Chinese philosophy through the pair of concepts known as ming-shi. By analyzing the pre-Qin thinkers' discourse on ming and shi, the work explores how Chinese philosophers dealt with issues not only in language but also in ontology, epistemology, ethics, axiology, and logic. Through this discourse analysis, readers are invited to rethink the relationship of language to thought and behavior. The author (...) criticizes and corrects vital misunderstandings of Chinese culture and highlights the anti-dualism and pragmatic character of Chinese thoughts. The rich meaning of the ming-shi pair is displayed by revealing its connection to other philosophical issues. The chapters show how discourse on language and reality shapes a central characteristic of Chinese culture, the practical zhi. They illuminate the interplay of Chinese theories of language and Dao as Chinese wisdom and worldview. Readers who are familiar with pragmatics and postmodernism will recognize the common points in ancient Chinese philosophy and contemporary Western philosophy, as they emerge through these chapters. The work will particularly appeal to scholars of philosophy, philosophy of language, communication studies and linguistics. (shrink)

The volume starts with the paper of Lynn Maurice Ferguson Arnold, former Premier of South Australia and former Minister of Education of Australia, concerning the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that was held from 25 May to 25 November 1937 in Paris, France. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the Nazi German and the Soviet pavilions directly across from each other. Many papers are devoted (...) to the interpretation of this opposition. Arnold’s paper considers the differences in the two totalitarian states’ architectural and design discourse styles. Although each of them communicated a totalitarian language of purposes, permissions, and boundaries, they essentially differed in the styles of discourse represented by the architecture and design of their respective pavilions. They were opposites of each other and the liberal ideals they contested. The internationalist viewpoint reflecting the multi-ethnic mix of the USSR is contrasted to the ein Volk homogeneity represented in the German pavilion. The Soviet pavilion opted for a utopian future to be arrived at by “benign” leadership, whereas the German pavilion anchored itself in the myth of Teutonic history with the nostalgic pride protected by the swastika-bearing eagle. Jean-Yves Béziau is best known as a logician and founder of Universal Logic. However, in this paper, he poses a new philosophical question: why philosophical discourse does not use images? The paper begins with a general analysis of different types of philosophical discourses. Then, he focuses on why images have been and are still rejected in philosophical discourse. He explains various ways to use images in a fruitful way to develop philosophical thinking and discourse and illustrates his view by providing several examples. He concludes with a promising programmatic declaration about founding a new journal entitled World Journal of Pictorial Philosophy to stimulate the usage of images for developing philosophical thinking. Although complaints about the obscurity of many philosophers’ discourse are widespread, Tatiana Denisova, ex-professor of the Surgut University and a research associate of the University of the Aegean undertakes a positive attitude to this problem. She explains that the reasons for the obscurity of philosophical texts, the subsequent complexity in communicating philosophers’ meanings and their eventual incomplete understanding is not a sign of their inferiority. On the contrary, it is a sign of the fruitfulness of philosophical discourse, which can generate new meanings. Thus, the darkness of philosophical discourse is like the life-giving chaos, and the obscurity that it inevitably contains can be the keeper of implicit meanings and even their generator. Katarzyna Gan-Krzywoszyńska and Piotr Leśniewski, authors of a monograph on Polish philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890 – 1963), make a comparative analysis of his educational style with that of Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997). The authors highlight that these scholars have distinctly different backgrounds. The former was an educator, philosopher and a leading advocate of critical pedagogy connected with the dialogical Latin-American tradition. The latter was a philosopher and logician, a notable representative of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic with significant contributions to semantics, model theory and the philosophy of science. Despite their apparent difference, the authors identify some striking similarities regarding their attitudes towards education; notably, their approaches are essentially dialogical. Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, educator, and filmmaker. In her experiential paper, he explains how and why she uses four channels of communication in her creative expression: writing, painting, filmmaking, and teaching, as dialogic inquiry. She considers that these channels compose a continuum of discourse styles, each reaching a different facet of kaleidoscopic consciousness. She claims that her choice of medium is prompted by a need to communicate her insights profoundly. Thus, for instance, she created painted allegories to express narratives based on dreams and visions emerging from her subconscious. Art and healing is another Tibetan-rooted type of discourse practised by the author. Creating and observing a healing image produces a positive psychophysiological change in both the artist and the viewer. The discourse here is tripartite between creator, image, and viewer. Filmmaking is another type of discourse she practices between the filmmaker/artist as shaman or healer and the viewer as respondent or participant. These films are meant to be experienced frame by frame, physically and emotionally in both the body and mind. Jocelyn Ireson-Paine is a cartoonist and programmer. His paper offers an original attempt to use category theory in cartooning. Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides concepts and methods to describe general abstract structures in terms of a labelled directed graph called category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows (or morphisms or transformations or mappings). The author explores different ways to define “style” in art using category theory and a relational view of art. Moreover, he examines how “translation” (transformation) between styles could be defined and reveals the difficulties of how it could be implemented in a computer using special software. Jens Lemanski is a philosopher who has revived research in Arthur Schopenhauer’s legacy by exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. In this paper, he advances a new approach to eristic as an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to win an argument. The author attributes the origins of this view to Schopenhauer, suggesting a new reading of his work. According to the author, eristic is a prohibitive technique that takes effect when the norms of discourse ethics are transgressed and violated. Thus, eristic is viewed as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Roshdi Rashed is an authority on the history of Arabic mathematical sciences. Proceeding from Gilles-Gaston Granger’s definition of mathematical style, he studies the question of whether a mathematical work can be characterized by a single style or by a multitude of styles. This question is explored within the style of a single work, namely Menelaus’s Sphaerica, and through the study of the development of a single problem over time, namely the isoperimetric problem. He indicates Menelaus’s divergence from the Euclidean style of (plane and stereometric) geometry caused by the drop of the Parallel Postulate, which associated it with hyperbolic geometry. Hence, the author concludes that Menelaus’s Sphaerica incorporates the well-known Euclidean style with a variation of the non-Euclidean one. On the other hand, examining the isoperimetric problem reveals another interesting historical picture. A succession of different styles (cosmological, geometric, infinitesimalistic, style of the calculus of variations, of synthetic geometry) can be observed due to the transformation of the research object over time. Boris Shalyutin, a Russian social philosopher, and Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, explores the origins of discourse in combination with the birth of society and law. He claims that legal discourse marks the historical emergence of discourse in general. Homo Juridicus generated Homo Sapiens, which have created new spheres of discourse, notably moral discourse and further philosophical, political, and scientific discourse. Petros Stefaneas, a logician, computer scientist and novelist, suggests an alternative to the traditional narratology approach for studying (interactive) social media discourse. He claims that style describes how the parts of a narrative are blended into a whole. The author relies upon Goguen’s and Harrel’s concept of style as a choice of blending principles and transfers to the study of the social media narratives elements from the methodology of studying Web-based collaborative search for mathematical proofs like those implemented within the Polymath project. The last paper belongs to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, a linguist, language revivalist, and proponent of a model of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, according to which Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary sources of Modern Hebrew. This paper explores the fascinating and multifaceted Yiddish language and its survival in Israeli. Yiddish is characterized by a unique style that embeds psycho-ostensive expressions throughout its discourse. The author highlights the cross-fertilization between Hebrew and Yiddish as it manifests itself in any aspect of the Israeli language. He claims that Yiddish survives beneath Israeli phonetics, phonology, discourse, syntax, semantics, lexis, and even morphology, although traditional and institutional linguists have been most reluctant to admit it. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a foundation for studying the interplay between emoji and linguistic (natural language) expressions; it does so by proposing a formal semantic classification of emoji-text combinations, focusing on two core sets of emoji: face emoji and activity emoji. Based on different data sources (introspective intuitions, naturalistic Twitter examples, and experimental evidence), we argue that activity emoji (case study I) are essentially event descriptions that serve as separate discourse units (similar to free adjuncts) and connect to (...) the accompanying (linguistic) text by virtue of suitable discourse relations. By contrast, face emoji (case study II) are expressive elements that are anchored to an attitude holder and comment on a proposition provided by the accompanying text. We provide further evidence for the distinct behavior of face emoji and activity emoji by looking at their scopal behavior with respect to linguistically-expressed negation. In particular, we probe interactions of emoji and texts that contain clausal negation, and conclude that both face emoji and activity emoji generally do not scope under negation. However, the appearance of such a scope relation arises with activity emoji when the emoji are connected to the accompanying text by virtue of an Explanation discourse relation. With face emoji, scopal interactions seem to appear in cases where the default interpretation would result in a discourse contribution that is pragmatically infelicitous, and also in cases that involve a specialized emoji-repetition construction where a repeated alternation of face emoji with words assumes a scope-marking role. (shrink)

This article explores political discourse in the context of an online-mediated 2021 rapprochement between Swedish ‘mainstream’ and far-right parties paving the way for their eventual 2022 electoral success and later joint government coalition. The article analyses specifically how the above political accord on the Swedish right – often seen as breaking the long-term cordon sanitaire around Sweden’s far right – would be legitimised via discourses that carried significant elaboration and deepening of the ‘criminality’ and ‘immigration’ connection later recontextualised into (...) the broader Swedish public discourse and public imagination. Using social media analytics and qualitative, critical discourse analysis, we explore in depth a ‘discursive shift’ wherein the focus on criminality would become a key ‘proxy discourse’, i.e., a public-wide implicature, which, while referring to and debating a potentially genuine social issue would be strategically instrumentalised to effectively pre-legitimise ‘moral panics’ around immigration and cultural diversity. The analysis highlights that the emergence as well as the later recontextualisation of the ‘proxy discourse’ in question – implicitly suggesting that criminality, immigration, and cultural diversity are ‘somehow’ inherently connected – not only supported the political mainstreaming of the Swedish far-right’s anti-immigration stance but also normalised the wider tenets of illiberal, nativist ‘politics of exclusion’. (shrink)