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- Volume 7, Issue, 2014
English Text Construction - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2014
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Speaking in the face of disintegration: Absurdism and the persistence of empathy in the dimming dialogues of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Author(s): Christine Temkopp.: 151–177 (27)More LessIn its analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the present article aims to establish that, despite the bleakness of the deathscape portrayed, McCarthy nevertheless did not intend for violence to get the final word. Through a discussion of the dialogues of the novel, this article explores to what extent they may indeed be qualified as dialogical. Moreover, examining the instances in which language as communication becomes a problem in light of both the concerns and the mechanisms of playwrights of the absurd Beckett and Pinter, it intends to show that even though the referents of human culture appear to have vanished close to entirely from the face of The Road’s earth, sociability and empathy nonetheless manage to survive. Keywords: Cormac McCarthy; The Road; Absurdism; Samuel Beckett; Harold Pinter
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Interactions between ideology, dialogic space construction, and the text-organizing function: A comparative study of traditional and postmodern academic writing corpora
Author(s): Tomoko Sawakipp.: 178–214 (37)More LessDialogic elements are considered to play a crucial role in text construction, but little has been revealed concerning how these elements interact with other resources to construct text. This paper explores the text-organizing function of heteroglossic resources quantitatively by focusing on different ideological stances that thesis writers take, namely, the traditional or postmodern stance they take toward history writing. In this study, I demonstrate that traditional and postmodern theses vary significantly in the way they create dialogic spaces. The analysis further reveals that the different dialogic strategies they employ are manifested in the larger textual organization, which demonstrates that dialogic resources interact with text-organizing resources in the construction of text. Keywords: dialogism; corpus linguistics; English for Academic Purposes; history discourse; interactions between multiple resources
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‘Author (date)’ constructions in academic discourse
Author(s): Shuguang Li and Klaus-Uwe Pantherpp.: 215–248 (34)More LessThis article elucidates the semantics and pragmatics of a genre-specific nominal pattern with a definite referring function, the ‘Author (date)’ construction, which is widely used in scientific discourse. We investigate the conceptual structure and pragmatic use of this construction in terms of conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor theory. The construction exhibits three senses: a literal ‘author’, a metonymic ‘work’, and a metaphorized ‘human agent’ sense (personification). Contextual factors that enable, coerce, or preempt the occurrence of these meanings are identified by means of various grammatical and semantic-pragmatic parameters, such as number agreement, anaphoric constraints, and the meaning of verbs collocating with the construction. Finally, the implications of our theoretical findings for the teaching and learning of academic discourse are considered. Keywords: conceptual metonymy; conceptual metaphor; genre-specific construction; personification; teaching and learning of academic discourse
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Looking for form-meaning motivation in new L2 words: A think-aloud study among proficient learners of English
Author(s): Julie Deconinck, Frank Boers and June Eyckmanspp.: 249–280 (32)More LessIn a previous, effect-of-instruction study (Deconinck et al. 2010), we reported on the benefits for word learning of an intervention which prompts learners to evaluate the extent to which a novel word’s meaning is congruent with its form. However, that study did not explore the nature of the thought patterns provoked by this evaluation activity. The present article reports a think-aloud experiment designed to gain insight into these thought patterns. Thirty learners of English as a foreign language were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they performed the task of rating the degree to which they felt the meaning of novel English words was congruent with their form. The participants were found to resort to a variety of associations in order to carry out this task, associations that make use – but also go beyond – traditional notions of prior lexical knowledge, including sound symbolism. Keywords: Second Language Acquisition; vocabulary learning; Cognitive Linguistics; language transfer; sound symbolism
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Notions of (inter)subjectivity
Author(s): Jan Nuyts
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A case for corpus stylistics
Author(s): Michaela Mahlberg and Dan McIntyre
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