Band 45, Heft 1

This paper is concerned with an exploration of the structural arrangement of Arabic hard news reporting with reference to a corpus of twenty accident news stories drawn from two leading Middle Eastern news organizations, Aljazeera and Alarabiya. A range of journalistic traditions has been examined with respect to organizational structures used in their hard news reporting texts. Within journalism discourse analysis, the nucleus-satellite structure developed by scholars of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is commonly found in news reporting in English and across various languages. However, news media texts in some cultures, such as Arabic, have not undergone any close scrutiny from a generic perspective. Accordingly, this study attempts to fill such a gap by investigating the genre-related features of the Arabic accident reports, drawing on the insights provided by SFL literature on the news story as a genre. It employs various lines of analysis such as textual deconstruction, timeline, radical editability, and lexical chaining. The findings of these analyses suggest that the Arabic accident news reports are non-chronologically organized operating with the lead-dominated orbital model, and thus generically bearing a close resemblance to the English news reports.

Differences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT) – to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The findings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they differed in their use of thematized clauses. More non-finite clauses were found in science writing, and more finite clauses in humanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These findings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary fields of study are recommended.

This paper deals with automated football match reports as a common genre of automated journalism. Based on a corpus of automated and human-written reports ( n  = 1,302) on the same set of matches and with reference to linguistic concepts of text and textuality, the textual properties of these texts are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis is based on the idea that the task of text generation can be described as the task of automatically selecting cues of textuality such as connectives or signals of thematic relatedness. The results show that automated and human-written texts differ significantly in the use of these cues, particularly in the use of linguistic means for creating evaluation and contrast, and thus allow to trace in detail, how these cues contribute to cohesion, coherence and narrative qualities. Different from computational linguistic approaches focused on optimizing text generation algorithms, this paper proposes to use automated texts, which are to some extent imperfect, as models of textuality that through their imperfection can say something about the nature of texts in general. The paper thus contributes to the field of (mostly communication studies) research on automated journalism in which the texts themselves are rarely investigated.

Tasting sessions are a social activity in which the senses and the sensorial features of the tasted objects are the main focus of the participants, who do not only experience taste but also aim at precisely describing it. For doing that, they use pre-formatted tasting sheets and pre-existing standardized repertoires of descriptors. This paper investigates the relations between bodies and sensations, linguistic expressions and the normativity of lexical repertoires. While the literature has insisted on the sensorial lexicon of diverse languages and its specialization within expert domains, the very way in which the sensing body, language, and the normativity of standardized categories are precisely articulated in tasting practices remains understudied. Using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, this paper demonstrates how participants in training tasting sessions achieve practically, bodily and materially the association between the sample tasted, the sensing body and the use of lexical repertoires. Artefacts and tools like tasting sheets and lexical lists are situatedly mobilized in a way that enhances the senses but also socializes and standardizes them. On the basis of cheese tasting sessions video-recorded during training workshops of professional tasters in Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the paper demonstrates how the normative order of sensing is achieved through the imbrication of the use of tasting sheets within the sensory examination of samples – thus showing how body, materiality, language, and artefacts are normatively constrained, practically managed and bodily aligned in the tasting session.

Mandarin Chinese, as the national lingua franca in China, has gained increasing importance in bilingual education in ethnic minority areas in the country. However, little research has explored ethnic minority children’s pragmatic competence. Therefore, this study investigates ethnic Uyghur children’s written pragmatic performance of advice-giving through a brief note in Mandarin and the possible effects of proficiency and gender on their advice-giving. Data were collected from 300 ethnic Uyghur children across three proficiency levels with a balanced gender split. In addition, 100 Han children were also recruited as a comparison group. The advice produced by the children was coded in terms of speech act strategies and supportive moves. The findings showed that the Uyghur children with higher proficiency provided more reasons and fewer affective expressions when giving advice than the two lower proficiency groups, reflecting the performance of the Han children. On the other hand, the results also revealed gender differences in certain advice-giving strategies and supportive moves. The study discusses the findings in relation to national lingua franca and second language pragmatics. Some pedagogical implications for multilingual education in ethnic minority areas are also provided.

Respondents in standardized survey interviews do not always answer closed-ended questions with just a type-conforming answer, such as “yes” or “three.” Instead, they sometimes expand the type-conforming answer or provide a response that does not contain a type-conforming answer. Standardized survey methodology aims to avoid such answers because they are found to cause interviewers to deviate from their script. However, we found that many expanded and non-conforming responses do not lead to intervention by the interviewer and are treated as unproblematic. A Conversation Analytic study of survey interviews, incorporating three different surveys, with recordings available for interviews varying in number between four and 430 interviews, shows that answer attempts can be divided into five types: four turn expansions (serial extras, uncertainty markers, prefaced answers, answers followed by elaborations), and non-conforming answers. Each of these targets a specific aspect of the interview situation. A follow-up quantitative analysis of 610 Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) shows that expanded answers are overwhelmingly accepted by interviewers, while non-conforming answers are in most cases followed by interviewer probing.