Volume 55, Issue 1

The present article reports a comparative study of interactional metadiscourse markers in English and Persian research articles. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study investigates the employment of “hedges”, “boosters”, and “attitude markers” in a corpus composed of the post-method sections of 100 research articles (50 English and 50 Persian) in the field of architecture. Overall, it was found that there are statistically significant differences between the frequencies of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers used in English and Persian sub-corpora. Yet, the linguistic and functional analyses unveiled some basic similarities between the two languages in their epistemic metadiscourse strategies. The findings provide deep insights into the rhetorical conventions and norms in architectural articles and offer a broader perspective towards discoursing patterns and persuasion strategies of English and Iranian academic writers in this field.

Adopting a functional view of language, this study critically explores clausal patterns in lawyers’ opening address in an American criminal trial. Underpinned by the assumption that no linguistic options are value-free, the quantitative and qualitative analysis uncovers the syntactic choices employed by the opposing sides and accounts for them in terms of the presenters’ ideological positions concerning the guilt and innocence of the defendant. The findings reveal stark differences between the two sides. Such systematic differences in clausal configurations not only constitute a prime meaning-making strategy that serves to construct polarized positioning of the same people and events, but are also likely to strike a profound impact with the jurors, potentially leading them to make tentative conclusions at this initial stage of case presentation.

Stripping is a phenomenon whereby a full clause is coordinated with a phrase (XP) and an adverb, typically NEG(ation) (e.g. John read Hamlet but not Othello ). As noted previously in the literature (e.g. Bosque 1984), while in English NEG must precede XP, Spanish allows the reverse order as well (XP-NEG). This paper examines these two strings (i.e. XP-NEG and NEG-XP) in Spanish and compares them with respect to a number of properties. The major goal of this paper is to show that, despite the appearances, the two strings constitute radically distinct phenomena. Analytically, I defend, in line with many others, that XP-NEG involves sentential coordination and clausal ellipsis (Depiante 2000; Vicente 2006, a.o.). With respect to NEG-XP, I contend that it involves constituent negation, constituent coordination and no ellipsis at all. This paper thus provides novel data and arguments which support the view originally proposed in Bosque (1984).

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) investigates the relationship between language, power, and society. Corpus linguistics (CL) is the study of language based on examples of real life language use. Over the last two decades, various scholars have combined some approaches and notions of CDA with the analytical framework of CL to examine the representation of several phenomena in relatively large texts. This study follows a corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis approach to investigate a 2.5 million word corpus of Arabic news articles by Jordan’s News Agency (PETRA). It demonstrates how some researchers following this approach may make some decisions, at some stages of their analysis, which are likely to affect their findings. These potential decisions may include selecting what statistical measures to use, what threshold to consider, what terms from the frequency, cluster, and collocation results to further investigate, which concordance lines to include in their study, and some others. In this study, I argue that some of these decisions can be made to suit the researchers’ preconceived assumptions and pre-existing hypotheses. The study concludes that using corpus linguistic techniques to discursively analyze large data reduces but not completely removes researchers’ bias.

This paper discusses the issue of the influence of personal epistemological tendencies in native speakers of Polish on their perception of non-standard Polish. We argue in favor of taking into consideration the interpersonal differences concerning the way one conceptualizes the reality through the lenses of language as valid factors in of language perception. The essentialist factor in personal epistemology is believed to affect, to a considerable extent subconsciously, one's tolerance to non-standardness and ambiguity, which in turn influences covert and overt attitudes towards not only individual forms, but also entire spoken and written styles. The study described in this paper was devised in order to test and calibrate an experimental design for testing individual language-related epistemological and cognitive tendencies. The subjects are 36 Polish university students with no linguistic training. The study consists of a test designed to assess one’s personal epistemological tendencies representative of essentialist beliefs, and a language perception survey with a focus on non-standard forms in conversational Polish. The tendencies observed in the analysis of the results of the language perception survey and one’s essentialism indicator are discussed in order to propose possible further research.

In this paper, we take up the challenge of exploring the relationship between markedness and frequency in phonotactics. The study is based on word-initial and word-final consonant clusters in Polish and English. The aim of this study is threefold. First, we establish logarithmic frequencies for word-initial and final consonant clusters compiled from two resources, a dictionary (or paradigm) and a written corpus. Second, we examine the preferability status of clusters in three frequency bands (high, mid, low) in terms of two phonotactic principles, i.e. sonority and Net Auditory Distance. Finally, we test the correlations between degrees of markedness and frequency. The present paper extends our previous studies on comparative Polish–English phonotactics, where markedness and frequency constitute the core of the analysis. The study shows that there is no relationship between cluster markedness and its frequency. As to frequencies, Polish and English differ from each other with respect to the distribution of clusters in the dictionary list, while the disproportions are neutralized in usage.