Conference programme

Conference Programme (PDF) Book of Abstracts (PDF)

Programme

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

LOOKING BEYOND THE SURFACE OF THE TEXT

Brno, 4-5 September 2023

Monday, 4 September 2023

8:30-9:50 – registration (Room 50)

(11:00 till the end of the conference on 4th floor)

9:45-10:00 – opening (Room 50) Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova

10:00-11:00 – plenary lecture 1 (Room 50) – Pilar Mur Dueñas

Scientists’ digital dissemination practices: A look into the recontextualization of

specialised knowledge

Chair: Renata Povolná

11:00-11:15 – small coffee break (department floor)

Session 1

Section A (Room 57) – Beyond the surface of the text

Chair: Renata Jančaříková

11:15-11:45	Markéta Malá	The representation of speech in crosswriters’ adult and children’s fiction
11:45-12:15	Ulrike Tabbert	Applying critical/textual stylistics to two poems in Sorani (Kurdish language)
12:15-12:45	Tilo Weber	“X is the new Y.” On certain snowclones, schematic phrasemes, and constructions in English and German

Section B (Room 58) – ESP

Chair: Irena Hůlková

11:15-11:45	Adam Wojtaszek	Selective foregrounding of contextual elements within the Stratified Model of context in advertising communication
11:45-12:15	Tram Tran Nhu Quynh	Personal storytelling as an engaging strategy in TED Talks
12:15-12:45	Jana Pelclová	Celebrating motherhood. Face-work analysis of Mother’s Day advertisements

Section C (Room 59) – Functional sentence perspective

Chair: Radek Vogel

11:15-11:45	Vladislav Smolka	Nucleus placement variation in native speakers of English
11:45-12:15	Irena Headlandová Kalischová & Martin Adam	Unveiling the presentational potential of English verbo-nominal structures with Be + Prepositional Phrase: FSP under scrutiny
12:15-12:45	Suzana Marković	I’m so sorry to bother you but would you be so kind as to lend me your notes from yesterday? Versus posudi mi svoje bilješke, molim te. – Indirect speech acts in English and their translations into Serbian

12:45-14:00 – lunch

Session 2

Section A (Room 57) – Lexicology & phraseology

Chair: Radek Vogel

14:00-14:30	Junya Morita	The creativity of word-formation: What can we learn from hapaxes?
14:30-15:00	Michaela Hroteková	Algospeak: Creating and using neologisms to avoid content moderation systems on social media
15:00-15:30	Tatiana Szczygłowska	Looking beyond the dictionary definitions of academic adjectives to find sufficient evidence for their adequate description. A corpus-based study of two near-synonymous items
15:30-16:00	Hana Atcheson	Formulaic language in vocational written discourse: Learner corpus analysis

Section B (Room 58) – ELT

Chair: Martin Adam

14:00-14:30	Saddik Gouhar & Abdulrahman Al-Ali& Haitham Zinhom	The linguistic and cultural challenges of teaching modern literature to Emirati students in UAE universities
14:30-15:00	Monika Grotek &Grażyna Kiliańska-Przybyło & Agniezska Ślęzak-Świat	Key content words in oral text summary tasks following comprehension questions – eye-tracking study
15:00-15:30	Žaneta Voldánová	Pragmatics instruction and its effect on EFL students’ writing
15:30-16:00	Michaela Trnová	Depth of vocabulary knowledge in lower-secondary EFL coursebooks

Section C (Room 59) – Digital discourse

Chair: Markéta Malá

14:00-14:30	Josef Schmied	Specialised discourse with bots? Beyond ChatGPT in academic English
14:30-15:00	Dominika Beneš Kováčová	Info-social posts: A multimodal discourse analysis of text-based Instagram posts shared by digital activist accounts
15:00-15:30	Lisza-Sophie Neumeier	Digital scholarship: A genre analysis of conference tweets in the age of Covid-19

16:00-16:30 – big coffee break (RUV)

Session 3

Section A (Room 57) – ESP

Chair: Irena Headlandová Kalischová

16:30-17:00	Ludmila Novotny	A signal-meaning explanation for the distribution of the form through in discourse
17:00-17:30	Anna Shkotina	Metaphors and anthropomorphism in medical discourse

Section B (Room 58) – ELT

Chair: Josef Schmied

16:30-17:00	Petra Huschová	Expression of epistemic stance in spoken learner discourse
17:00-17:30	Naoki Kiyama & Masanobu Ueda	What about “what about”?: A cognitive pragmatic account
17:30-18:00	Ahmad Hajeer & Jamil Toptsi	Measuring intercultural sensitivity: The case of English for Business Purposes learners in Hungary

Section C (Room 59) – Learner discourse

Chair: Olga Dontcheva Navratilova

16:30-17:00	Chris Williams	It’s complicated: The relationship between lexis, syntax, and proficiency
17:00-17:30	Marie Lahodová Vališová	Endophoric markers in Master’s theses written in English by Czech students
17:30-18:00	Daniel Gerrard	‘I humbly believe that…’: Stance expression in student and expert writing in linguistics

19:00-21:30 – conference dinner (RUV)

Tuesday, 5th September 2023

Session 4

Section A (Room 57) – Political discourse

Chair: Irena Hůlková

9:00-9:30	Ivana Kapráliková	Corruption in political culture: Political discourse analysis in the context of corruption scandals of contemporary Czech and Slovak politicians
9:30-10:00	Iryna Nedainova	Emphasizing shared identity: The capacity of allusion in president Zelensky’s war discourse
10:00-10:30	Matteo Socciarelli	Argumentational discourse in second language academic writing: The case of MA theses at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Section B (Room 58) – ELT

Chair: Irena Headlandová Kalischová

9:00-9:30	Iveta Dokoupilová	Admixture of English ad hoc loans in the Czech student slang: Analysis of the trend
9:30-10:00	Alexey Tymbay	Conducting classroom research: Students as English prominence and melody annotators
10:00-10:30	Matthias Klumm	Inside or outside the core? The status of adjuncts as peripheral elements in English discourse

Section C (Room 59) – Learner discourse

Chair: Renata Povolná

9:00-9:30	Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova	Hedges and boosters in L2 (Czech) Master’s theses
9:30-10:00	Renata Jančaříková	Attitude markers in L1 and L2 academic writing
10:00-10:30	Tereza Brzá	The role of input in content-based language teaching

10:30-10:45 – small coffee break (department floor)

10:45-11:45 – plenary lecture (Room 50) – Jan Chovanec

Humour and conflict in public discourse

Chair: Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova

11:45-12:15 – big coffee break (RUV)

Session 5

Section A (Room 57) – ESP

Chair: Martin Adam

12:15-12:45	Jana Hallová	Pragmatic study of interruptive elements in US courtroom discourse
12:45-13:15	Veronika Dvořáčková	Exploring situational genres in medical discourse: A mediation-based approach for teaching first-year medical students
13:15-13:45	Radek Vogel	Alternative ways of expressing modality in corporate annual reports and their persuasive force

Section B (Room 58) – Cross-linguistic studies

Chair: Renata Jančaříková

12:15-12:45	Kate Challis	Why does the website always shrink when I click 'EN'?
12:45-13:15	Adriana Laputková & Zuzana Nováková	In-text referencing in research papers on applied linguistics: Patterns typical for Anglo-American and Slavic (Slovak) academic writing styles
13:15-13:45	Lu Wei-lun	Lexical strategies for encoding Chinese dish names: Cross-linguistics stability and variation

13:50 – conference closing (Room 57) Martin Adam

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

MASARYK UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

LOOKING BEYOND THE SURFACE OF THE TEXT

TENTH BRNO CONFERENCE

ON LINGUISTICS STUDIES IN ENGLISH

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Brno, 4–5 September 2023

Editors: Irena Headlandová Kalischová, Irena Hůlková

BRNO 2023

(pdf download available)

Introduction

This booklet contains abstracts of papers which will be presented at the Tenth Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English entitled Looking beyond the surface of the text. The conference is organised by the Department of English Language and Literature of the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, and is held on 4–5 September 2023.

The Tenth Brno Conference will focus on studies of the English language as a multifaceted, multidimensional and variable phenomenon. Aspects of the language, such as the form, structure, meaning, function and context work together to meet people’s communicative needs, and the message, medium employed, audience and culture complete the parameters of a communicative situation. We understand the combining of various perspectives and drawing on the tools characteristic of various linguistic disciplines as a necessary condition of contemporary linguistic research.

The conference organisers are happy to welcome the following keynote speakers, whose plenary lectures will address some of the key issues discussed at the conference:

Pilar Mur Dueñas, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Jan Chovanec, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

The organising committee:

Doc. Mgr. Martin Adam, Ph.D.
Doc. Mgr. Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, Ph.D.
Mgr. Irena Headlandová Kalischová, Ph.D.
Mgr. Irena Hůlková, Ph.D.
Mgr. Renata Jančaříková, Ph.D.
Mgr. Martin Němec, Ph.D.
Doc. PhDr. Renata Povolná, Ph.D.
Mgr. Radek Vogel, Ph.D.
Mgr. Helena Worthington

The editors
Brno, September 2023

PLENARY LECTURES

SCIENTISTS’ DIGITAL DISSEMINATION PRACTICES:
A LOOK INTO THE RECONTEXTUALIZATION
OF SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE

Pilar Mur Dueñas

University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

Researchers and scientists are increasingly encouraged by their institutions, by external organizations and by societal demands to foster the global dissemination of their knowledge production. Such dissemination is nowadays very frequently carried out online through different digital practices and texts, and responds to calls to open science up, to empower citizens, and to prompt their participation in scientific matters. The current Web 2.0 and Science 2.0 context in which we are immersed requires complex discursive practices to recontextualize and communicate specialized knowledge in a way that is accessible, understood and accepted by multiple audiences, ranging from experts in their own and other disciplines to a relatively uninformed general public.

Previous research has pointed out different strategies used in the recontextualization of scientific knowledge. Two types of strategies have been discerned as especially salient: explanatory or illustrative strategies and engagement or attention-getting strategies (e.g. Luzón, 2013, 2019; Calsamiglia & VanDijk, 2004; Gotti, 2004; Bondi et al., 2015; Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet, 2020; Bondi & Cacchiani, 2021; Lorés 2023). These strategies are verbally and non-verbally realized. To instantiate them diverse semiotic modes (especially visual and spatial) and specific digital affordances can be resorted to.

It is the aim of my talk (i) to focus on research which has unveiled digital practices commonly employed by scientists to globally disseminate knowledge, (ii) to identify and discuss digital medium affordances and aspects which have a bearing on how specialized knowledge is recontextualized to be communicated, and (iii) to illustrate how explanatory or illustrative strategies and engagement or attention-getting strategies are used in a section of our SciDis (Scientific Dissemination) corpus compiled by the InterGEDI research group, in particular, when knowledge on circular economy and sustainability is disseminated through diverse digital practices and texts.

Overall, a glimpse of the discursive challenges that digital global dissemination has brought about for scientists and mediators will be given, and some reflections on the ensuing challenges for discourse analysts when we look beyond the surface of the text will be shared.

References

Bondi, M., & Cacchiani, S. (2021). Knowledge communication and knowledge dissemination in a digital world. Journal of Pragmatics, 186, 117–123.

Bondi, M., Cacchiani, S., & Mazzi, D. (Eds.). (2015). Discourse in and through the media: Recontextualizing and reconceptualizing expert discourse. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Carter-Thomas, S., & Rowley-Jolivet, E. (2020). Three minute thesis presentations: Recontextualisation strategies in doctoral research. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 48(1), Article 100897.

Calsamiglia, H., & Van Dijk., T. A. (2004). Popularization discourse and knowledge about the genome. Discourse and Society, 15(4), 369–389.

Gotti, M. (2014). Reformulation and recontextualization in popularization discourse. Ibérica, 27, 15–34.

Lorés, R. (2023). Dual voices, hybrid identities: The recontextualization of research in digital dissemination scientific discourse. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 93, 69–84.

Luzón, M. J. (2013). Public communication of science in blogs: Recontextualizing scientific discourse for a diversified audience. Written Communication, 30(4), 428–457.

Luzón, M. J. (2019). Bridging the gap between experts and publics: The role of multimodality in disseminating research in online videos. Ibérica, 37, 167–192.

Pilar Mur Dueñas is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies at the Faculty of Education of the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), where she teaches several undergraduate courses in the degree in Primary and Pre-Primary Education and is also involved in the Master in Teacher Training for Secondary Education. Her research focuses on English for Academic Purposes and English for Research Publication Purposes. Her most recent research explores multilingual scholars’ digital practices when disseminating their research widely. She is a member of the research team InterGEDI and of the Research Institute of Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS).

She has published the results of her research widely:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pilar_Mur_Duenas.

HUMOUR AND CONFLICT IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Jan Chovanec

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the research of humour in diverse communicative contexts, marking a clear shift of focus from the referential or cognitive properties of language to the interpersonal dimension of communication, as well as to language play and creativity (Attardo, 2017; Vásquez, 2019). Against the background of the traditional approaches to the study of humour, the talk argues for the need to adopt an explicit socio-pragmatic perspective (e.g. Tsakona & Chovanec, 2023) in order to explain some of the forms and functions of this phenomenon in modern mediated contexts. The talk discusses some recent humorous data collected from various domains of public discourse to show how humour is present in the modern hybrid media environment (Koivukoski, 2022), and how memetic humorous content (Shifman, 2014; Wiggins 2019) flows between the social and public media spheres, particularly in relation to domestic and international conflicts.

References

Attardo, S. (2017). The routledge handbook of language and humor. Routledge.

Koivukoski, J. (2022). Political humour in the hybrid media environment. University of Helsinki.

Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. MIT Press.

Tsakona, V., & Chovanec, J. (2023). The sociopragmatics of humour. In T. E. Ford, W. Chlopicki, & G. Kuipers (Eds.), De Gruyter handbook of humor studies. De Gruyter.

Vásquez, C. (2019). Language, creativity and humour online. Routledge.

Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The discursive power of memes in the digital culture. Routledge.

Jan Chovanec is Professor of English linguistics at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, specializing in discourse analysis and socio-pragmatics. He has done research on the discursive processes of othering, e.g. in relation to the presentation of the ethnic minorities in online reader comments. He is the author of Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News (2014), The Discourse of Online Sportscasting (2018) and co-editor of a number of publications, including Representing the Other in European Media Discourses (2017), The Dynamics of Interactional Humour (2018) and Analyzing Digital Discourses: Between Convergence and Controversy (2021). He serves on the editorial board of the journals Internet Pragmatics, Discourse, Context & Media and Journal of Pragmatics.

PRESENTATIONS

FORMULAIC LANGUAGE IN VOCATIONAL WRITTEN DISCOURSE:
LEARNER CORPUS ANALYSIS

Hana Atcheson

Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Zlín, Czech Republic

When reaching an advanced level in second language writing, those who aspire to gain precision in lexico-grammatical structures, may wish to pay attention to fixed language forms which are generally labelled as formulaic language. This research adopts a definition of lexical bundles from Biber and Barbieri (2007). Rhetoric functions of lexical bundles are adopted from Hyland’s model of interaction, where three main functions for effective text coherence and reader’s engagement are named as: research-oriented, text-oriented and participant-oriented (Hyland, 2008).

Research questions relevant to the outlined problematics look at what the doctoral students’ objective needs are for a development of their communicative skills in English language in writing academic vocational texts. The scope of the study is determined by two corpora. A sub-corpus of argumentative essays by native speakers in British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE) is compared with a learner corpus of argumentative essays written by doctoral students in the disciplines of product/industrial design, audio-visual studies and photography. Frequency of use and the three types of rhetoric functions in four-word bundles are analysed and compared across the two corpora.

This corpus analysis in the broader context builds on the findings and extensive work in written corpora of academic writing across disciplines and in learners’ writing which was carried out by Flowerdew (2001, 2004, 2014, 2015), Henry & Rosenberry (2001), Hyland & Hamp-Lyons (2002), Hyland (2008, 2017), Chang (2012).

INFO-SOCIAL POSTS: A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TEXT-BASED INSTAGRAM POSTS SHARED BY DIGITAL ACTIVIST ACCOUNTS

Dominika Beneš Kováčová

University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic

While the impact of Instagram on the growth of influencer marketing is now largely undisputed, it should not be overlooked that the platform has also been found to play an important role in digital activism. Following a number of unprecedented challenges (e.g. the covid-19 pandemic, climate change, police shootings), digital activists – both individually and as a collective – make use of the affordances of this social media platform and raise awareness of these issues using text-based Instagram posts known as info-social posts (Instagram Business Team, 2020). Given the image-centred interface of Instagram and the impact of this type of content in digital activism, this paper aims to investigate the interplay between written language and visuals in info-social posts and explore their role in conveying (specialized) knowledge in social issues to social media users. To do this, the study adopts a multimodal discourse analytic approach and examines the semiotic resources adopted in 100 posts classified as info-social posts and shared by digital activist accounts. The preliminary results of this analysis show that while the adopted visual and linguistic resources complement each other and combine to form multimodal ensembles, the meanings they realize are further developed vertically in the caption of the post as well as horizontally through images sequenced in the carousel. Therefore, the study also sheds more light on the definition of info-social posts and maps their potential for information sharing.

References

Instagram Business Team. (2020). What’s trending – info-social: Creativity of the movement.

Business.Instagram.com. https://business.instagram.com/blog/trends-info-social-posts

THE ROLE OF INPUT IN CONTENT-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING

Tereza Brzá

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Content-Based Language Teaching (CBLT) is a foreign language teaching approach which stresses the importance of integrating language instruction with cognitively stimulating and linguistically rich content. This approach has gained popularity for its effectiveness in promoting language acquisition through meaningful communication in authentic contexts. One of the key factors that contribute to the successful implementation of CBLT is the role of input in the language learning process. This poster will examine the theoretical foundations of the role of input in L2 learning with regard to the specifics of CBLT and its importance in the development of learners’ vocabulary and grammar knowledge. Different types of input and their effectiveness in promoting language acquisition will be explored. Moreover, strategies for optimizing input, including scaffolding, the use of authentic materials, and the integration of ICT tools will be highlighted. In order to implement CBLT effectively in various educational contexts, it is crucial to select appropriate input which is comprehensible and engaging for learners at different levels of proficiency. This poster aims to provide a deeper insight into the role of input and offer practical suggestions and examples for incorporating it into content-oriented foreign language lessons.

ADMIXTURE OF ENGLISH AD HOC LOANS IN THE CZECH STUDENT SLANG:
ANALYSIS OF THE TREND

Iveta Dokoupilová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

The paper provides an insight into the dynamics of current slang, which is increasingly driven by language and cultural contact, and whose development seems to have been accelerated by a massive participation of its users in the English-dominated cyberspace. The study aims to map the most frequently used loanwords, describe their meanings, and analyze the reasons for their adoption. Additionally, it seeks to differentiate between loanwords employed in student slang and those utilized during second language acquisition (signs of code-switching) by examining their integration within the Czech morphological system, such as inflectional patterns and word formation processes. The research examines English quotational words and phrases and adapted words of English origin collected from a variety of sources, mostly from student discussion forums, social media and interviews. The findings contribute to the understanding of language contact facilitated by exposure of young Czechs to the English language on the internet, at school, via cultural trends and in other areas of life. The collection and categorization of the English component of Czech student slang aims to establish which domains of lexis are the most susceptible to influence from another language, as well as to illustrate how Czech, a synthetic language, incorporates and adapts loan words from an analytic one.

HEDGES AND BOOSTERS IN L2 (CZECH) MASTER’S THESES

Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Persuasion in academic discourse depends to a large extent on the degree of authoritativeness writers are prepared to project in their texts when expressing attitudes, judgements and assessments. Hedges and boosters enable academic writers to distinguish facts from opinions, evaluate the views of others and modulate the degree of commitment to their assertions (cf. Hyland, 1998, 2005) and as such are important rhetorical devices contributing to the construal of academic persuasion. However, hedges and boosters have not received sufficient attention in the genre of master’s theses, which is the most extended work that graduate students write.

The aim of this investigation is to explore variation in the use of lexical hedges and boosters in English-medium master’s theses by L2 (Czech) students of English language and literature university programs. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the study carries out
a contrastive analysis of three specialised corpora representing the disciplines of linguistics, literature and ELT methodology: (i) the MT_LLM corpus comprising master’s theses by Czech university students, and two reference corpora, i.e. (ii) the BAWE_LLM corpus comprising argumentative essays by British university students, and (iii) the RA_LLM corpus comprising research articles published in international journals. The comparison between the MT_LLM and the BAWE_LLM corpora seeks to reveal intercultural variation, while the comparison between the MT_LLM and the RA_LLM corpora investigates variation along the expertise dimension. The analysis has shown that frequency, realizations and functions of hedges and boosters across the three corpora vary. Czech graduates tend to underuse or overuse the functional categories and realization types of hedges and boosters. The results suggest that level of expertise seems to be a more important variable than linguacultural context. The findings are intended to inform the design of courses and study materials for the teaching of academic writing at university level, especially to L2 students.

References

Hyland, K. (1998). Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge. Text, 18(3), 349–382.

Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Continuum.

EXPLORING SITUATIONAL GENRES IN MEDICAL DISCOURSE:
A MEDIATION-BASED APPROACH FOR TEACHING
FIRST-YEAR MEDICAL STUDENTS

Veronika Dvořáčková

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Effective spoken communication between doctors and patients is essential for providing quality healthcare. The presentation will explore some situational genres in doctor-patient communication that are taught to first-year medical students at the Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, using mediation activities and strategies as outlined in the CEFR Companion Volume 2020. Specifically, the focus will be on three oral situational genres: giving a diagnosis, encouraging a patient to make a health behaviour change, and breaking bad news to a terminally ill patient.

For each genre, the presentation outlines a lesson sequence that employs relevant subgenres and authentic communication tools used in professional medical discourse. In class, each situational genre is practised through doctor-patient role-play and concludes with reflection and self-reflection activities. The self-reflection activity emphasizes the use of self-referential, metacognitive, and evaluative language by the doctor, which helps in building and consolidating their mediation competence.

The presentation will include survey data regarding the attitudes of the target learner population towards the teaching of the situational genres and its anticipated impact on their future clinical practice.

“I HUMBLY BELIEVE THAT…”: STANCE EXPRESSION IN STUDENT AND EXPERT WRITING IN LINGUISTICS

Daniel Gerrard

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

In academic writing, stance is the expression of a writer’s attitude, commitment, and presence. How stance is expressed by expert writers from different disciplines and linguacultural backgrounds has been extensively researched; far less attention, however, has been given to writing by PhD students. This paper reports on a pilot corpus study exploring stance expression by Czech PhD students and expert writers in theses and research articles in linguistics. The aim is to compare writers’ use of stance devices in three corpora of introduction sections – by Czech PhD students, academics with English as L1, and academics with English as L2. Quantitative and qualitative corpus-based analysis of stance features will be carried out based on Hyland’s (2005) model of stance and engagement. The findings should indicate whether and to what extent PhD students express stance differently to academics due to their level of expertise and L1 background.

THE LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL CHALLENGES OF TEACHING MODERN LITERATURE TO EMIRATI STUDENTS IN UAE UNIVERSITIES

Saddik Gouhar, Al-Ali Abdulrahman, Haitham Zinhom

NLA, Abu-Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

While lexical problems are integral to L2 acquisition and learning, language studies mostly prioritize phonological and syntactical areas of research giving less attention to lexical and cultural paradigms. Nevertheless, lexical errors, for instance, are disruptive and handicapping on the part of English language learners simply because it is in the choice of words that effective communication is hindered on a large scale. The paper examines the difficulties encountered by English Major Emirati students in comprehending American literary texts due to semantic and trans-cultural ambiguities deployed in the target texts. The paper identifies several types of culturally loaded vocabulary embedded in American slang and popular culture in addition to culture-bound items proliferated on a wide scale in contemporary American fictional and dramatic texts. Due to the lack of cross-cultural and collocational knowledge on the part of Emirati students, culturally determined vocabulary and slang language in American novels, for example, constitute a major obstacle for learners who found difficulties in analyzing and comprehending the texts. Since most of the American slang and idiomatic expressions in literary texts are language and culture specific-elements with no equivalence in TL, Emirati students in English Departments failed to understand them. Through inappropriate inter-lingual transfers, they reached perplexing conclusions formulating misconceptions about English language and literature. In this context, English language instructors have to search for innovative and non-traditional methods of teaching American literary texts to their students.

KEY CONTENT WORDS IN ORAL TEXT SUMMARY TASKS FOLLOWING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS: EYE-TRACKING STUDY

Monika Grotek, Grażyna Kiliańska-Przybyło, Agnieszka Ślęzak-Świat

University of Silesia in Katowice, Sosnowiec, Poland

Because effective learning from reading expository texts includes such strategies as summarization, keyword mnemonics and rereading, it is important to study how learners of English as L2 distribute their attention over the keywords in the reading text when doing standard multiple-choice comprehension tasks and when aiming to summarise the text from memory. It is also interesting to investigate to what extent the text pre-reading with a focus on multiple-choice questions for detailed understanding influences the direction in summarising as it might influence the pedagogical decisions about including such questions in content-focused reading for information retention. For these purposes, an eye-tracking (Tobii Model X120) study was designed in which over seventy students were presented with the same text in English (B1 level) twice on-screen: a) 1st reading – to answer 5 multiple-choice comprehension questions testing reading for detailed understanding, b) 2nd reading – to summarise the text in English orally. Then their oral summaries of the text were recorded and transcribed. The results corroborate previous studies on lexical skipping, showing that words that are shorter, higher frequency and more predictable from the context tend to be skipped and the longest words regardless of their meaning receive the most focus while reading, no matter what the purpose of the reading was. Keywords in the text necessary to answer specific questions for detailed understanding preceding a summary task tend to be omitted in the texts of the oral summaries and the keywords from the questions have a slightly higher frequency in the summaries than the corresponding keywords from the text.

MEASURING INTERCULTURAL SENSITIVITY: THE CASE OF ENGLISH FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES LEARNERS IN HUNGARY

Ahmad Hajeer

Budapest Business School, Budapest, Hungary

Jamil Toptsi

Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary

As internationalization continues to play an important role in the educational and economic landscape of EU member states, intercultural sensitivity is an important skill to be acquired by today’s university students as they prepare to enter the labor market. In order to develop this skill among learners, ESP practitioners should be in possession of reliable instruments to identify potential deficits related to the different components of intercultural sensitivity. This knowledge can contribute to effective materials design and curriculum planning. Therefore, this study aims to propose a modified version of a prominent intercultural sensitivity questionnaire that can be used to measure intercultural sensitivity in the Hungarian university context. To achieve this aim, the present study uses questionnaire data collected from 361 Hungarian students studying at a private business school in Budapest. The survey in question is Chen and Starosta’s (2000) Intercultural Sensitivity Scale, which has been used extensively in a number of different cultural contexts. However, as this instrument has not been validated for the Hungarian context, this study carries out exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to produce a version of the scale that is suitable for measuring the intercultural sensitivity of university students in Hungary, and perhaps other Central European contexts.
The study concludes by discussing the applications of such a scale in the field of ESP research and the implications that such a scale could have on ESP material design.

PRAGMATIC STUDY OF INTERRUPTIVE ELEMENTS
IN US COURTROOM DISCOURSE

Jana Hallová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

This project observes interruptive conversational elements and their effects on discourse in courtroom communication based on US Supreme Court argument transcripts. The study introduces the US Supreme Court as a unique environment of the legal system in the USA in terms of legal procedure and both non-verbal and verbal power dynamics and it utilizes both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to observe this environment in terms of power structures and their potential disruptions. The project devises a new methodology of identifying and classifying interruptive elements derived from two existing methods of interruption measurement in everyday speech and group discourse, namely a syntactic and a context-based method, adjusted to fit the specifics and limitations of Supreme Court transcripts. It also devises a unique categorization to delve into the findings. The study considers the created categories in terms of their relation to certain linguistic concepts (including, for example, Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims), as well as their recurrence within the discourse, and it draws conclusions based on the findings. Furthermore, the study acknowledges the existence of exceptions and anomalous instances within the transcripts and considers both their reoccurrence as well as the connotations of their existence. Altogether the project serves to demonstrate the extent and success of power manipulation with a highly controlled and specific discourse environment and it provides a novel methodology for measuring interruptions within it.

UNVEILING THE PRESENTATIONAL POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH VERBO-NOMINAL STRUCTURES WITH BE + PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE:
FSP UNDER SCRUTINY

Irena Headlandová Kalischová, Martin Adam

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

The focus of this corpus-based paper is on structures which, depending on their context and the communicative needs of the discourse participants, can perform different functions and thus affect the information flow, the message. The research methodology adopted for this study is the theory of functional sentence perspective, where it holds that if something is said about
a context-dependent subject, the sentence implements the Quality Scale. Under favourable conditions, however, the occurrence of a context-independent subject in the same kind of structure may lead to a presentational configuration (Presentation Scale). The paper looks at English clauses featuring verbo-nominal predications that follow the pattern Be + Prepositional Phrase (such as be under scrutiny, be on the move, be in the air and others) and studies their presentational potential. Taking into account their syntactic, textual and information structures, the analysis strives to determine whether – and under what circumstances – such predicates express existence/appearance of a new phenomenon on the scene. For the purposes of analysis, the Be + PrepP structures (extracted from the British National Corpus and processed by the SketchEngine corpus tool) will be classified into and assessed within several categories.

ALGOSPEAK: CREATING AND USING NEOLOGISMS TO AVOID
CONTENT MODERATION SYSTEMS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Michaela Hroteková

Comenius University Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia

Over the past 30 years, the English language has undergone many changes, mainly due to the emergence of technology and the Internet. On the one hand, mainstream language users have rapidly adopted new words. On the other hand, the Internet and technology are challenging people to use language creatively to avoid censorship, bullying, or other digital limitations. Although adapting language to avoid scrutiny is a practice that existed before the advent of the Internet, the most common “secret languages” such as leetspeak, textese or netspeak are the most contemporary references with the most recent member algospeak. Today, young people using social media platforms have created algospeak, a language designed to avoid algorithms and convey messages. Algospeak consists of a plethora of neologisms formed through multiple creative word-formation processes.

This study uses morphemic analysis to examine the linguistic creativity of using new forms for old words. It reflects on the word-formation process and contextual clues for speakers to decipher and understand their use. It also examines particular innovative word-formation processes, where emojis substitute graphemes. Finally, it provides an overview of the communities using algospeak and discusses the possible spread of the language to wider communities.

EXPRESSION OF EPISTEMIC STANCE IN SPOKEN LEARNER DISCOURSE

Petra Huschová

University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic

The paper discusses linguistic forms conveying epistemic stance in spoken production of Czech university students of English. The source of epistemic stance markers is a subset of the Corpus of Czech Students’ Spoken English, namely student-student discussions on a given topic. The aims of the analysis were to identify and classify a variety of lexico-grammatical structures indicating how certain the interlocutors are about the veracity of the information they provide, to examine prevailing patterns and contexts in which the personal stance markers occur, and to explore their functions in informal discussions. The findings indicate a systematic variation and distribution of the structures expressing the speaker’s uncertainty in spoken learner discourse. Regarding the variety of linguistic forms, Czech learners of English appear to employ a limited set of lexico-grammatical items recurrently, particularly epistemic lexical verbs, in order to not only express their personal stance but also to organize their discourse.

WHY DOES THE WEBSITE ALWAYS SHRINK WHEN I CLICK ‘EN’?

Kate Challis

Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA

The majority of people alive today with Czech heritage speak English as a first language (L1), yet owing to situational and historical factors, the majority of information about Czech history, culture, politics, language, identity, etc. tends to be available only in the Czech language. This presents a major problem for researchers who do not have sufficient language ability to access the desired information, which is essentially still locked away behind
a metaphorical reverse iron-curtain. Even though Czech websites frequently contain an English version, these tend to omit much of the original text content and often contain words and phrases which are difficult for L1 English speakers to parse. This “shrinking” phenomenon is demonstrated in this study through a mixed-methods analysis of a small parallel corpus of selected texts from Czech archives, libraries, and Czech Wikipedia, and is followed by
a discussion of possible causes and some potential solutions, including increasing opportunities for learning L2 Czech.

ATTITUDE MARKERS IN L1 AND L2 ACADEMIC WRITING

Renata Jančaříková

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

A well-written academic text presents a researcher’s work and its findings in a formal, objective style that requires the writer to adhere to rhetorical practices shared by the academic community in order to communicate the content effectively and persuasively. Writing is therefore a form of communication that involves interaction between the writer and the reader realized primarily through the use of metadiscourse. The present paper examines the use of one type of metadiscourse marker – attitude markers – as defined by Hyland and Tse (2004), with the aim of investigating how L1 and L2 academic writers express their stance towards the propositional content and communicate it to the reader. Attitude markers, namely attitudinal adjectives, verbs, nouns and adverbs are studied in three corpora of academic texts written by Czech graduate students, English native-speaker university students and expert writers.
The results reveal a number of similarities, for example, all three groups of writers use the research-oriented attitude markers more frequently than the topic-oriented markers. In all three corpora, the expression of attitude towards one’s own research and findings prevails over evaluation referring to previous and future research. Also, attitudinal adjectives are the preferred sub-category for all three groups of writers. There are, however, some notable differences within the individual sub-categories, for example, L2 writers tend to employ attitude markers primarily in sentence initial position while in L1 writing, both student and expert, the distribution across the positions in question appears more balanced. The findings may provide a valuable insight into the expression of attitude in academic contexts and may be of interest to writers themselves as well as to academic writing instructors in the university environment.

CORRUPTION IN POLITICAL CULTURE: POLITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF CORRUPTION SCANDALS OF CONTEMPORARY CZECH AND SLOVAK POLITICIANS

Ivana Kapráliková

University of Economics in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia

Corruption is a social phenomenon researched by scholars from different fields and from different standpoints.

The corruption issue has catapulted from the margins of academic and policy discourse on international affairs to a position as one of the central problems facing transition economies and the developing world today as part of an overall focus on governance in international political economy.

However, the study of corruption from the perspective of language has not enjoyed adequate research and if so, it focuses on the most chronic countries suffering from corruption the most (e.g. African countries).

Corruption cases involving politicians stand out because the accused corrupt politicians have more power to deny or tackle such accusations. The article aims to disclose to what extent the corruption scandals appearing during election campaigns or active political participation can be politicized and what are the real consequences of them in connection with the political culture of the country. The methodological approach used in this analysis was descriptive qualitative. By analyzing the political discourse in the context of corruption scandals of selected contemporary Czech and Slovak politicians, we also aim to answer how power relations can take a role in corruption discourse, and whether, in this case, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

WHAT ABOUT “WHAT ABOUT”?: A COGNITIVE PRAGMATIC ACCOUNT

Naoki Kiyama, Masanobu Ueda

The University of Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu, Japan

The present study investigates the cognitive pragmatic functions of the what/how about construction in English. As illustrated by what about going out for lunch?, the construction is widely known to take various syntactic units. While previous studies have found that the construction expresses “questioning” (Eilfort, 1989) and “suggestion/offer” (Culicover et al., 2017) through introspective analyses, their analyses are not sufficient due to small data sets and a narrow range of contexts. We argue that the full range of properties of the construction can only be understood by considering both discourse information and a cognitive pragmatic perspective. After manually inspecting 300 tokens randomly drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2010), we found that the construction has a broader range of pragmatic uses, including creating contrasts, adding information, and providing examples. An examination of the extended contexts of the concordance lines reveals that these uses are valid if discourse participants share knowledge that has been mentioned in previous discourse or is associated through frame-semantic knowledge (Fillmore, 1982). We argue that all the uses of the construction can be commonly characterized as “forcing the addressee to take a turn in the discourse”. Our study emphasizes the importance of integrating the analysis of the construction at the sentence and discourse levels with the participant’s cognitive status of information to fully understand the construction.

INSIDE OR OUTSIDE THE CORE? THE STATUS OF ADJUNCTS AS PERIPHERAL ELEMENTS IN ENGLISH DISCOURSE

Matthias Klumm

University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

Linguistic elements occurring at the left and right peripheries (LP and RP) of discourse units are typically characterized as being prosodically and syntactically non-integrated, positionally mobile, semantically non-restrictive and non-truth-conditional (Brinton, 1996, pp. 33–35). Adjuncts (in Quirk et al.’s (1985) terminology) are usually not classified as belonging to LP or RP because they contribute to the propositional content, and affect the truth conditions, of a discourse unit.

Following Traugott’s (2015) proposal for conceptualizing the boundaries between LP/RP and the core of a discourse unit as gradient rather than as rigidly discrete, this paper argues for conceiving adjuncts as belonging to the periphery (rather than to the core) in English discourse, in particular when they occur in discourse-unit-initial position, which constitutes
a marked choice for most adjunct types in English (Hasselgård, 2010).

Drawing on a corpus of spoken monologic data (i.e. TED talks) and written data from different genres (i.e. news reports, commentaries and personal narratives), this paper investigates the distribution and use of discourse-unit-initial adjuncts in English discourse, focusing in particular on phrasal temporal adjuncts such as “until this year” or “now” in (1).

(1) Until this year, Labour’s lead has rarely been enough to overcome the constituency bias towards the Tories. Now it streaks ahead by 20 to 30 points, threatening the jobs of
a hundred or more Tory MPs. (The Guardian, 06/10/2022)

The results show that discourse-unit-initial adjuncts – just like other peripheral elements such as discourse markers – fulfil important discourse-structuring functions across modes and genres, including the signalling of discourse relations between discourse units. It is for this reason that this paper argues for the inclusion of the category of adjuncts as a (less prototypical) member of the periphery of discourse units.

References

Brinton, L. J. (1996). Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. Mouton de Gruyter.

Hasselgård, H. (2010). Adjunct adverbials in English. Cambridge University Press.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language.Longman.

Traugott, E. C. (2015). Investigating “periphery” from a functionalist perspective. Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1), 119–130.

ENDOPHORIC MARKERS IN MASTER’S THESES WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
BY CZECH STUDENTS

Marie Lahodová Vališová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Metadiscourse is a concept defined as a discourse about discourse which plays a crucial role in enabling readers to ‘organize, interpret, evaluate, and react’ (Vande Kopple, 1985, p. 83) to information presented in writing.

Endophoric markers are important metadiscourse devices, as they allow writers to refer to elements within the same text, thus helping readers to make connections between different parts of the text and understand the author’s argumentative structure.

To better understand the use of endophoric markers in academic writing, Hyland’s taxonomy has been expanded to include a new classification that divides endophoric markers into two categories: directional and non-directional. Directional markers include anaphoric and cataphoric markers, while non-directional markers refer to various parts of the text without specifying a direction.

This study aims to explore and compare the occurrences of endophoric markers in two corpora – the first consisting of Master’s theses written in English by Czech university students graduating in linguistics, literature, and education, and the second comprising research articles in the same three disciplines written by experienced native English academic writers.

Through a comparative analysis of these corpora, this presentation will reveal the differences in the usage of endophoric markers between non-native novice writers and experienced academic writers, providing insights into the trends and patterns in the employment of endophoric markers in academic writing.

These findings can be used to improve academic writing courses and to help students develop the skills necessary to effectively communicate their ideas and arguments in written form.

References

Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse. Exploring interaction in writing. Continuum.

Vande Kopple, W. J. (1985). Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication,36(1), 82–93.

IN-TEXT REFERENCING IN RESEARCH PAPERS ON APPLIED LINGUISTICS: PATTERNS TYPICAL FOR ANGLO-AMERICAN AND SLAVIC (SLOVAK) ACADEMIC WRITING STYLES

Adriana Laputková, Zuzana Nováková

University of Prešov, Prešov, Slovakia

The Anglo-American academic writing style and its features have attracted considerable interest of both scholars specialising in teaching the subject and authors who publish their scientific work in English. Numerous manuals, recommendations or guidelines also help authors succeed in the process. However, those who are not able to communicate their scientific work in English tend to use translation services; some authors may also be unaware of the target language style or the Anglo-American features of writing when creating their research papers in the mother tongue. This is the reason why it might be useful to compare the macro-, meso- and microstructure of the genre in both the source and the target languages. The authors of this paper would like to contribute to a better understanding of English and Slovak writing styles by examining a corpus of sixty research papers focusing on applied linguistics (thirty in each language). Using the corpus and the discourse analysis, we investigate the lexical and grammatical patterns used in one integral micro-structural feature of a research paper, in-text references. Our first objective is to examine how authors from these different cultural backgrounds refer to other researchers’ work, and the second is to identify any problematic areas that should be considered when translating these parts of the text from Slovak into English, while providing solutions.

LEXICAL STRATEGIES FOR ENCODING CHINESE DISH NAMES:
CROSS-LINGUISTIC STABILITY AND VARIATION

Wei-lun Lu

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

In this study, I address the lexical strategies for encoding Chinese dish names in Chinese and a typologically distant language (which is Czech) from a cognitive semantic point of view, with emphasis on the use of conceptual mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy and image-schemas. The study will be methodologically based on the use of multiple parallel texts, comparing Chinese with a distant language using different versions of menus from sampled Chinese restaurants in Czechia.

The main findings to be presented include: firstly, some metonymy-based expressions in Chinese (such as 雙冬shuāng-dōng and 羅漢齋 luóhàn zhāi) simply cannot get through, or barely gets through, to the Czech language; secondly, some homophony-based Chinese dish names (such as 菩提肉 pútí ròu) do not get through to the Czech language at all; thirdly, some figurative Chinese dish names are highly obscure and when they do get across to the Czech menus, they keep their highly abstract and figurative nature (such as 三鮮 sān-xiān, 五香 wǔ-xiāng, 八寶 bā-bǎo, and 全家福 quán jiā fú); fourthly, in rare cases, Chinese-specific creativity may get through to the target language (or by accident “leak” to the target language, so to speak) from the source language (such as the case of 什錦魚 shíjǐn yú), resulting in a highly poetic (though completely inaccurate) construal of the dish.

With the above findings, I discuss the language-specificity of the Chinese linguistic tool against the framework of Radical Construction Grammar and the methodological advantage of studying renditions of Chinese dish names in various random languages following a Multi-ParT approach, in the backdrop of the socio-cultural turn of Cognitive Linguistics.

THE REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH IN CROSSWRITERS’
ADULT AND CHILDREN’S FICTION

Markéta Malá

Charles University, Praha, Czech Republic

The increase in popularity of crossover literature since the turn of the century, with more adults reaching for children’s books (Beckett), seems to have been accompanied by an increase in the interest in the similarities and differences between children’s and adult fiction, and “[works] of crosswriters, authors who write for both readerships in different works, are an excellent source of this research” (Haverals et al., 2022, p. 62).

The present study examines the works of J. K. Rowling, R. Dahl, S. Rushdie, and M. Paver for children and for adults to explore the impact of the intended reader on the one hand, and the authorial style on the other on the representation of direct speech in fiction. Methodologically, it combines a corpus-assisted quantitative approach with a qualitative analysis of text samples. The results confirm that in books for children, the proportion of direct speech is significantly higher than in adult fiction (cf. Anderson, 1984, p. 56). The reporting verbs were classified using Caldas-Coulthard’s (1994) taxonomy. When writing for children, all the writers rely most heavily on ‘descriptive verbs’, which refer to vocal effects and voice quality (e.g. hissed, mumbled), highlighting the importance of sound in children’s literature (Anderson, 1984, p. 163). In their fiction for adults, verbs explicitly indicating the intended illocutionary force (e.g. agreed, accused) are dominant. At the same time, the writers were found to differ in the extent of their presence in the text (e.g. in the use of glossing phrases with neutral reporting verbs, e.g. said Snape icily).

References

Anderson, C. C. (1984). Style in children’s literature: A comparison of passages from books for adults and for children. Open Access Dissertations. University of Rhode Island.

Beckett, S. L. (2009). Crossover fiction: Global and historical perspectives. Garland.

Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. (1994). On reporting reporting: The representation of speech in factual and factional narratives. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in written text analysis (pp. 295–308). Routledge.

Haverals, W., Geybels, L, & Joosen, V. (2022). A style for every age: A stylometric inquiry into crosswriters for children, adolescents and adults. Language and Literature, 31(1), 62–84.

I’M SO SORRY TO BOTHER YOU BUT WOULD YOU BE SO KIND AS TO
LEND ME YOUR NOTES FROM YESTERDAY?
VERSUS POSUDI MI SVOJE BILJEŠKE, MOLIM TE.
INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS
INTO SERBIAN

Suzana Marković

University of East Sarajevo, Bijeljina, Bosna i Hercegovina

The paper deals with the realization of indirect speech acts and their translations from English into Serbian. Indirect speech acts are those in which one act is performed indirectly using another which implies that there is a mismatch between a syntactic form and the discourse function. The aim of the paper is to analyze translation procedures employed to convey indirect messages from one language into another with special emphasis on the shift in the level of directness when indirect utterances are translated into Serbian. It has been noticed that some more indirect directives in English (e.g. Could you open the window?) are sometimes translated into Serbian using imperative sentences as most direct (e.g. Open the window). The paper is not exclusively limited to directives but includes other speech act classes as well. The sample for the research consists of utterances of indirect speech acts selected from five Anglo-American plays, two Anglo-American films, and several episodes of the popular American sitcom Friends and their subtitled translations. The sample is analyzed from the perspective of speech act theory and politeness theory using qualitative and comparative methods. Furthermore, a Google form survey is conducted to investigate the attitudes of the native speakers of Serbian regarding a couple of selected translations of indirect speech acts in which there is a shift in the degree of directness. The survey is distributed among the students of the English language and literature department. The preliminary results show that there is no firm attitude on whether to preserve the original English indirect form or to adapt it to the target Serbian audience and be more direct. Bearing in mind the particular context an indirect speech act is uttered in, as well as various socio-pragmatic variables, it will be explained what is behind such shifts in the degree of directness, and under what circumstances they typically occur.

THE CREATIVITY OF WORD-FORMATION:
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM HAPAXES?

Junya Morita

Kinjo Gakuin University, Nogoya, Japan

The present study shows that hapax legomena in a large-scale corpus plays a vital role in elucidating creative and functional aspects of word-formation. Hapaxes of a large corpus are significant in quantifying productivity, since experimental evidence shows that complex words of very low frequency are highly likely to be lexical inventions (Hay, 2003). Based on this, we propose a productivity measure: P=n1/V where n1 is the number of hapaxes and V is the number of types. This measure is applied to the data obtained from BNC to calculate the productivity of six kinds of suffixes together with four patterns of compounding. As a result, the high productivity rates of these word-formation devices demonstrate their creativity, thus supporting the thesis of generative morphology – regular complex words are constantly generated by word-formation rules.

Central to the creative process is contextually-related word-formation and its discursive functions are revealed by the examination of hapaxes: ‘brevity’ (to construct concise and sensible words), ‘defocus’ (to suppress the prominence of internal argument), and ‘cohesion’ (to serve as thematic substitute to achieve discursive cohesion). A relevant discourse is: So if “pay” and “payment” are indexed as having separate roots…this issue of root-assignment… Theoretically, that complex words are coined by referring to syntactic elements in discourse supports the “antilexicalism” thesis (syntactic word-formation). It may also serve to alleviate restrictions on morphological operations to expand grammatical potential; categorial selection of affixes is extended (e.g. packagee/coalness), phrasal-incorporation becomes possible (only-childhood/many-partedness), and stage-level nominals become possible (tellee “one who adopts the speaker’s belief”).

EMPHASIZING SHARED IDENTITY: THE CAPACITY OF ALLUSION IN PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY’S WAR DISCOURSE

Iryna Nedainova

University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic

Having picked up the burden of being the headliner in media communication, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy uses every opportunity to appeal to the world, reminding about the war in Ukraine and trying to ensure effective support from international communities. With appeals, he spoke online in the national parliaments of many countries, made speeches at international forums, summits, prestigious film awards and before students’ communities. By so doing, Zelenskyy taps into the patriotic symbolism of the audience he appeals to, reminds them of historic traumas, and resorts to idealized self-images people have about their countries. This research reviews allusions used by President Zelenskyy in his international war discourse as strategic means intended to encapsulate the desperate plight of his own country. Critical Discourse Analysis of the corpora gives the orientation to the study of language means within the processes of social change in their discourse aspect. The findings prove that the allusions used in President’s discourse serve as core-strategic elements regarding the audience they are intended to. In every discursive event the identified types of allusion (i.e. cultural, historical, cinematographic, and literary) reveal their emotional-evaluative and associative connotations and serve to fulfill their high pragmatic potential.

DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP: A GENRE ANALYSIS OF CONFERENCE TWEETS
IN THE AGE OF COVID-19

Lisza-Sophie Neumeier

University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Twitter is not only used among academic communities of various disciplines to post about academic achievements but also to exchange knowledge or network at conferences (Lee et al., 2017). In fact, a wealth of literature on the multimodal genre of conference tweets shows that Twitter constitutes a crucial tool for scholarly communication (e.g. Mazarakis & Peters, 2015). Especially since, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, most conferences were relocated to virtual settings, social media functioned as an alternative for real-life conference communication. However, the professional use of Twitter at online conferences remained mostly unaddressed.

Therefore, a data set consisting of tweets posted at a social anthropology online conference in 2021 was used to conduct a genre analysis. Multimodal content analysis (Ledin & Machin, 2020; Kuckartz, 2018) based on the framework of conference tweets by Luzón and Albero-Posac (2020) was employed to detect the communicative functions of the genre. Additionally, corpus-based sentiment analysis (Baccianella et al., 2010) was run in MAXQDA2022 to investigate the sentiments of the conference tweets.

The findings showed that academics used Twitter for numerous communicative functions, which were primarily assigned to organizational, self-promotional, and networking-related aspects. Posting content-related tweets was a rather uncommon practice. Tweets concerned with networking and self-promotion were more likely to include multimodal content. Furthermore, as expected, most tweets expressed a positive sentiment. These results indicate that conference tweets constitute a valuable genre for academics and should be considered in EAP syllabi. Also, promoting conference hashtags constitutes an effective strategy to enable a digital backchannel.

References

Baccianella, S., Esuli, A., & Sebastiani, F. (2010). Sentiwordnet 3.0: An enhanced lexical resource for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J., & Mariani (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on language resources and evaluation, LREC 2010, 17-23 May 2010, Valletta, Malta (pp. 2200–2204). European Language Resources Association. http://nmis.isti.cnr.it/sebastiani/Publications/LREC10.pdf

Kuckartz, U. (2018). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Methoden, Praxis, Computerunterstützung [Qualitative content analysis: Methods, practice, computer assistance]. (4th ed.). Beltz Juventa.

Ledin, P., & Machin, D. (2020). Introduction to multimodal analysis (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.

Lee, M. K., Yoon, H. Y., Smith, M., Park, H. J., & Park, H. W. (2017). Mapping a Twitter scholarly communication network: A case of the association of internet researchers’ conference. Scientometrics, 112(2), 767–797. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2413-z

Luzón, M. J., & Albero-Posac, S. (2020). ‘Had a lovely week at #conference2018’: An analysis of interaction through conference tweets. RELC Journal, 51(1), 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688219896862

Mazarakis, A., & Peters, I. (2015). Science 2.0 and conference tweets: What? Where? Why? When? The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 269–282.

VERBI Software. (2021). MAXQDA 2022 [computer software]. https://www.maxqda.com/products/maxqda-standard

A SIGNAL-MEANING EXPLANATION FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF
THE FORM THROUGH IN DISCOURSE

Ludmila Novotny

Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina

This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the preposition through and shows that its occurrence in discourse can be accounted for by a single, stable meaning (Novotny, 2022). My research is grounded in the theoretical position that language exists in the human mind as a set of signal-meaning correspondences, which are exploited in unlimited ways for communication thanks to the creative and inferential capacities of human beings (Diver, 1995, 2012[1975]; Huffman, 2001; Stern, 2019).

My hypothesis is that, every time through is employed in discourse, it conveys the meaning “succession of points in a three dimensional space”. Other ideas, such as continuity or completion, are also associated with the use of through, but I will show that these are derived from inferences that language users make, guided by communicative and contextual considerations, and are not part of the meaning of the form.

My analysis was carried out on a corpus of six contemporary American novels. I conducted a qualitative examination of through, providing a case-by-case rationale for its use, and examining the effects achieved with through in comparison to other prepositions: along, across, over, and during. Furthermore, I conducted a quantitative analysis to provide additional support to my qualitative findings.

My analysis supports the hypothesis that the distribution of through in discourse can be accounted for by the proposed invariable meaning, and shows that all other ideas linked to the use of through can be explained by the inferential capacities of its human users.

References

Diver, W. (2012). The nature of linguistic meaning. In A. Huffman, & J. Davis (Eds.), Language: Communication and Human Behavior, (pp. 47–63). Brill. (Reprinted with revisions from Introduction, CUWPL 2, 1975)

Diver, W. (1995). Theory. In E. Contini-Morava, & B. Sussman Goldberg (Eds.), Meaning as Explanation: Advances in linguistic sign theory, (pp. 43–114). Mouton de Gruyter.

Huffman, A. (2001). The linguistics of William Diver and the Columbia school. Word, 52(1), 29–68.

Novotny, L. (2022). La distribución de un signo lingüístico: Un análisis semiótico-semántico de la forma inglesa through [Master’s thesis]. Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/tesis/te.2497/te.2497.pdf

Stern, N. (2019). Introduction: Columbia School linguistics in the functional-cognitive space of the 21st century. In N. Stern, R. Otheguy, W. Reid, & J. Sackler (Eds.), Columbia School linguistics in the 21st century, (pp. 1–32). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

CELEBRATING MOTHERHOOD: FACE-WORK ANALYSIS

OF MOTHER’S DAY ADVERTISEMENTS

Jana Pelclová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

The representation of the mother figure in the discourse of advertising has mostly focused on the positive aspects of motherhood. This has resulted in the social construct of a flawless mother and in a cultural code of motherhood as a patriarchal institution with narrowly prescribed social and cultural expectations (Rich, 1976; O’Reilly, 2010). From the point of view of performative face-work (Moore, 2017), advertising texts tend to appeal to the positive face by addressing face-saving topics such as having a perfect household, smart children and ideal body and being capable of handling any type of problem. On the other hand, the face-threatening topics such as negative emotions and unwelcome troubles tend not to be discussed. Framed within the methodological framework of performative face-work (Moore, 2017) and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Ledin & Machin, 2020), the paper studies selected U.S. Mother’s Day audio-visual advertisements aired in the last years that challenge the negative face. These texts tend to foreground some of the negative aspects of motherhood by showing unhappy mothers, mothers that fight hard with everyday challenges during the pandemic, or mothers who swear. The preliminary results show that while the visual modality threats the negative institutional face of motherhood, the verbal modality tries to normalize it, and thus to justify an individual’s imperfectness in mothering.

METAPHORS AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN MEDICAL DISCOURSE

Anna Shkotina

Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Nitra, Slovakia

Metaphor is an effective way of conveying complex medical concepts to individuals of all backgrounds, especially when applied to personify or anthropomorphise disease. This paper offers a discourse and metaphor analysis of the usage of anthropomorphism in medical discourse by analysing a corpus of doctor-patient interactions. We use both metaphor and discourse analysis to identify the types of metaphors used to personify or anthropomorphise illnesses and assess how these metaphors contribute to the communication of medical data. Our methodology includes a comprehensive examination of interactions between patients and healthcare professionals, retrieved from online platforms devoted to discussing experiences of medical procedures. The data is analysed using discourse analysis and MIP, a metaphor identification procedure, in order to identify the metaphors. We investigate the potential consequences of using anthropomorphic metaphors in healthcare communication and the effect they have on those receiving medical information. Preliminary findings indicate that anthropomorphic metaphors are effective in conveying medical concepts; however, their use might still raise ethical concerns because they may contribute to discrimination and stigmatisation against individuals with illnesses. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of our study and suggestions for how healthcare professionals can responsibly and ethically employ metaphors.

SPECIALISED DISCOURSE WITH BOTS?
BEYOND CHATGPT IN ACADEMIC ENGLISH

Josef Schmied

Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany

This contribution follows the current discussion of ChatGPT in academic writing and provides examples of how large language models and other agents might be integrated in specialised English discourses now and in future. Despite impressive levels of fluency, the current bots’ limitations force us to reconsider basic principles of academic discourse. The presentation explains briefly the linguistic components of “Conversational Agents” like ChatGPT, esp. the corpus-principles of the data-base, the probabilistic processing though neural networks, and idiomatic problems in current out-put examples. It focusses on the defining features of academic discourse author commitment and author engagement, which are always based on personal judgement and evaluation. It discusses the current standardisation of academic genres (particularly international journal articles) and the individual creativity of academic authors, who wish to find their individual author identity. The special role of non-native standards is discussed on the basis of current examples from different writing cultures. Finally, this contribution also looks at the possibilities of integrating a spoken component into academic teaching like a conversational agent speaking non-standard English, and the attitudes between warmth and competence with examples from Czech and Italian students. In any case, although bots may be used efficiently for routine language work, it seems unlikely that they will be able to replace well-trained academic teachers.

NUCLEUS PLACEMENT VARIATION IN NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

Vladislav Smolka

University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, České Budějovice, Czech Republic

One type of English sentence structures is described in linguistic literature as somewhat anomalous: from the point of view of information structure (e.g. Mathesius, 1975), thetic sentences like The kettle is boiling cannot be easily divided into the thematic and rhematic part, while phonetic literature (e.g. Wells, 2006) notes that this type, described as event sentences, is unusual in favouring nucleus placement on the subject although the verb is the last lexical item in the sentence and presents new information.

The paper explores the degree of agreement or disagreement in native speakers of English in their choice of intonation nucleus in semantically identical but structurally different single-sentence responses of this type to a particular, well-defined communicative situation. The purpose of the research is to find out how the respondents intuitively interpret the information structure of the respective variants and to what extent their interpretation depends on the syntactic make-up of the sentences. Data for the research will be based on an analysis of recordings of the respondents, who will not know the purpose of the research, and the results obtained will be compared with a group of Czech speakers of English subjected to the same task.

ARGUMENTATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACADEMIC WRITING: THE CASE OF MA THESES AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

Matteo Socciarelli

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

This project seeks to investigate argumentative discourse in L2 MA theses written by non-native speakers of English at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

L2 MA theses have very specific communicative goals, in that writers have to persuade their limited readership (usually not more than a handful of gatekeepers) that they have acquired sufficient knowledge (a ‘mastery’) on a given topic, and are able to build an academic argument to present it through appropriate rhetorical means and linguistic abilities. It is thus surprising how little space has been devoted to investigate the interplay between argumentative discourse and second language academic writing (Hirvela, 2017).

The study proposes a methodology merging linguistic annotation and corpus linguistics to: a) isolate argumentative episodes from non-argumentative ones in the general argumentative architecture of literature review sections of selected MA theses from three disciplines (hard sciences, social sciences, humanities); b) discover their argumentative components and relations (Stab & Gurevych, 2014); c) focus on the most salient lexico-grammatical features through corpus study. This top-down, data-driven methodology allows for a descriptive inquiry into rhetorical-linguistic strategies used by Italian learners when building an academic argument in L2, without imposing prescriptive standards and evaluation criteria based on expert English L1 writers.

The result of the analysis will serve as starting point for the design of dedicated learning materials to further learners’ competence in argumentative writing in higher education, with special focus on discipline-specific features (Andrews, 2010) and a reflective framework grounded in English as a Lingua Franca.

References

Andrews, R. (2010). Argumentation in higher education: Improving practice through theory and research. Routledge.

Hirvela, A. (2017). Argumentation & second language writing: Are we missing the boat? Journal of Second Language Writing, 36, 69–74.

Stab, C., & Gurevych, I. (2014). Identifying argumentative discourse in persuasive essays. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 45–56.

LOOKING BEYOND THE DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS OF ACADEMIC ADJECTIVES TO FIND SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
FOR THEIR ADEQUATE DESCRIPTION:
A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF TWO NEAR-SYNONYMOUS ITEMS

Tatiana Szczygłowska

University of Bielsko-Biala, Bielsko-Biala, Poland

Adjectives are frequent in academic prose (Biber et al., 2021), where they serve to “describe and qualify phenomena observed during the experimental stage and to anticipate agreements or oppositions to claims with caution and strategical consideration of the opinions and views of peers” (Soler, 2002, p. 145). The potential to make meanings more precise is unfortunately impeded in the case of near-synonymous adjectives that, owing to their apparently identical meaning, are often defined in a circular manner, which implies their interchangeability without clearly emphasizing what makes them different. Therefore, looking beyond vague dictionary definitions, studies on near-synonyms have turned to corpus-based methods which allow to uncover “how the phraseological patternings of words are critically important in relation to meaning as well as usage” (Moon, 2010, p. 199).

This study draws on Liu’s (2010) corpus linguistics approach to near-synonymous adjectives in American English (COCA) to explore the semantic and usage differences between adequate and sufficient in the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE). The examined words belong to frequent academic lexis (e.g. Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2013) and appear among the top 300 adjective lemmas in the entire BAWE (sufficient: 165, adequate: 282). The distributional patterns examined include overall and discipline frequency, syntactic functions, typical noun collocates and modifying adverbs. Preliminary results indicate a preference for sufficient in academic prose, where it is distinguished from adequate by a more frequent predicative use, an inclination towards it-extraposed constructions, and a close collocational relationship with nouns relating to information.

References

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (2021). Grammar of spoken and written English. John Benjamins.

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238.

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2013). The academic vocabulary list. Available at <https://docs.steinhardt.nyu.edu/pdfs/metrocenter/atn293/pdf/academic_vocabulary_list.pdf>.

Liu, D. (2010). Is it a chief, main, major, primary, or principal concern: A corpus-based behavioral profile study of the near-synonyms. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(1), 56–87.

Moon, R. (2010). What can a corpus tell us about lexis? In A. O’Keeffe, & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 197–211). Routledge.

Soler, V. (2002). Analysing adjectives in scientific discourse: An exploratory study with educational applications for Spanish speakers at advanced university level. English for Specific Purposes, 21(2), 145–165.

APPLYING CRITICAL/TEXTUAL STYLISTICS TO TWO POEMS
IN SORANI (KURDISH LANGUAGE)

Ulrike Tabbert

University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom

This paper illuminates necessary adaptations to the model of Textual Stylistics (formerly known as Critical Stylistics), developed by Jeffries (2010, 2022), when applied to poetry in Sorani (Kurdish language).

We provide a critical/textual stylistic analysis of the opening lines of two poems, The Martyrs’ Wedding and Bloody Crown, by Sherko Bekas (Ibrahim & Tabbert, submitted). There are some major grammatical differences between Sorani and English and we will show how the textual conceptual function (TCF) of ‘Naming and Describing’, which deals with the build-up of noun phrases, needs modification when the model is applied to Kurdish texts. One of the dominant patterns we found in the data is an izâfa construction. The izâfa vowel i links two parts of a possessive construction and can be compared to the use of the preposition of possession of in English. In Sorani, i is used as a modifier and can be combined with an adjective or a noun. In noun phrases like gwêçkîleyi rastî dllm (“right atrium of my heart”), the modifier right is a permanent and not a temporary property of heart due to the meaning brought about by the izâfa construction. However, this needs to be taken into consideration when applying the TCF ‘Naming and Describing’ to Sorani.

Nevertheless we confidently argue that Critical/Textual Stylistics is applicable to Sorani texts if used in a flexible and adapted way.

PERSONAL STORYTELLING AS AN ENGAGING STRATEGY IN TED TALKS

Tram Tran Nhu Quynh

University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic

Engagement is an essential aspect of academic persuasion since it allows the writer/speaker to build a rapport with the reader/listener, and guide the audience towards intended interpretation. In TED conferences, the speaker not only masters the content but also knows how to communicate it effectively. The non-expert audience in TED talks is not keen on the professional knowledge which is abstract and unintelligible. What makes them interested is innovative ideas and reasons why an issue personally matters to the speaker. The presentation aims to investigate personal storytelling employed by TED speakers in communicating their research results to the public, focusing particularly on the variety of types of stories that typically occur, the roles they play in the talk, and on the external and internal evaluation strategies that help to make the stories engaging. The analysis is grounded in Labov and Waletzky’s (1967, 1972) narrative schema model and draws upon Eggins and Slade’s (1997) theories on storytelling, considering also Simmons’s (2015) reflections on the functions of stories in communication. Fifty most popular science-related TED Talks were selected to build a corpus, which was then coded and analysed using QDA Miner Lite, a free qualitative data analysis software.

DEPTH OF VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE IN LOWER-SECONDARY
EFL COURSEBOOKS

Michaela Trnová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Vocabulary knowledge should not be limited to knowing the word’s meaning and form. Nation (2001) introduces nine aspects of word knowledge that should be acquired to master vocabulary knowledge. This study presents a content analysis intending to discover whether lower-secondary EFL coursebooks used in the Czech Republic cover more aspects of vocabulary knowledge or whether they only focus on knowing the meaning and/or the form of vocabulary. First, vocabulary activities in the selected coursebooks were analysed and classified, based on Nation’s (2001) nine aspects of vocabulary knowledge. The results show that eight of the nine aspects are covered in the studied coursebook, with the aspect of form and meaning, the aspect of grammatical functions and the aspect of collocations being the most frequently represented, and the aspect of constraints on use being the least represented in the data. By contrast, the aspect of concept and referents is not covered at all. In order to look at vocabulary knowledge from the perspective of pedagogical practice, interviews with teachers using the studied coursebook at the lower-primary level were conducted. The results drawn from the interviews are in accordance with those of the content analysis. In addition, the interviews provide information on vocabulary work in the classroom. Based on the research results, recommendations for teachers and authors of coursebooks and supplementary materials are formulated.

References

Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press.

CONDUCTING CLASSROOM RESEARCH:
STUDENTS AS ENGLISH PROMINENCE AND MELODY ANNOTATORS

Alexey Tymbay

Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic

A large number of Bachelor’s and Master’s theses on English Phonology require native speakers’ assistance for validating the recordings. However, students often need help finding them, which may be a severe predicament in writing a diploma paper studying oral speech.
The report introduces the results of the experimental study involving two groups of students with different native languages (Russian and Czech) annotating the intonation of English texts. The study proves that phonologically trained non-native speakers of English are relatively good at identifying some fundamental suprasegmental features of the English language, such as word prominence. However, the identification of exact tones still needs to be improved.
The discovered lower sensitivity of the experimental groups compared to the native speakers is explained by the students’ L1 likely prosodic interference. Czech and Russian speakers of English rely on different cues when identifying the informational structure of an utterance. The report also includes observations on experimenting with two types of prosodic annotation (ToBI vs. traditional British marking) in English Phonology courses. An assumption is made that different techniques can be more suitable for students with other native languages. The obtained results’ reliability allows “crowdsourcing” large amounts of valuable prosodic information with the students’ help to validate their peers’ research findings. It also highlights key areas of L1 prosodic interference that are worth paying attention to during English Phonetics and Phonology classes.

ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF EXPRESSING MODALITY
IN CORPORATE ANNUAL REPORTS AND THEIR PERSUASIVE FORCE

Radek Vogel

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Modal expressions in texts with a persuasive intent perform various functions, ranging from commitments to claims and goals and stating obligations, to judgments about the probability of events, actions and states. As the previous corpus analysis of persuasively functioning genres in corporate annual reports (Vogel in Dontcheva-Navratilova et al., 2020, pp. 298–301) reveals, modal verbs are the prominent tool of hedging as well as boosting in specialised discourses, conveying usually epistemic (esp. likelihood and prediction), but also deontic and root modality (esp. obligation). However, all analysed specialised discourses contain some proportion of alternative ways of expressing modality, namely by constructions consisting of prop-it, copula be and predicative adjectives, by stance adverbs and by lexical verbs and nouns. These marginal devices expressing modality are explored with the aim of establishing a link between the prevalent persuasive function, modality type and corresponding adjectival, adverbal, nominal (as well as verbal) modal constructions realising it. A comparison of modal constructions gained from Anglophone corporate reports with equivalent constructions established in an analogous Czech corpus is also provided in order to confirm their persuasive function. The paper attempts to explain choices of different types of modality and their linguistic correlates which the corporate persuaders make in view of the intented impact on target readers.

PRAGMATICS INSTRUCTION AND ITS EFFECT ON EFL STUDENTS’ WRITING

Žaneta Voldánová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Pragmatics Instruction and Its Effect on EFL Students’ Writing Pragmatic aspects of utterances are an essential part of conveying a message successfully, be that through spoken conversation or written communication. Combining the disciplines of linguistics and didactics, the presented research deals with the impact of explicit pragmatics instruction on concepts such as speech acts, the co-operative principle, politeness, or explicitness and implicitness on EFL students’ writing skills. More specifically, it focuses on pragmatic aspects of the students’ texts in terms of their abilities to write formal and informal texts with regard to the addressee, context, and situation. The presentation aims to summarise preliminary data collected in a quasi-experiment carried out with the participation of university students of the Primary school teacher training programme. It was assumed that explicit pragmatics instruction and practice has a positive effect on the development of EFL university students’ writing skills. This hypothesis was tested with the use of a pre-test and a post-test and an assessment scale revolving around the pragmatic aspects of the texts. The students’ performance on the pre-test and post-test was compared both within and across the groups (control and experimental). The results indicate that the use of explicit pragmatics instruction on the concepts stated above is justified and helps the EFL students to produce texts with respect to the addressee and to express the message more appropriately to the context and given situation.

“X IS THE NEW Y.” ON CERTAIN SNOWCLONES, SCHEMATIC PHRASEMES, AND CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN

Tilo Weber

Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic

“I sometimes hear a phrase like green is the new black. Literally, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever” (English Language Learners, 2016). The puzzlement thus expressed in a post quoted from a popular English language learning website is matched by an interest that linguists have recently developed for so called snowclones in the context of questions regarding linguistic schematicity and creativity as well as lexical representation and the structure of the mental lexicon (cf. Hartmann & Unger, 2023; Weber, 2019).

In the present paper, schematic constructions like the one mentioned in the title of this abstract are considered from the point of view of their potential to induce in their users meanings that lie “beyond the surface of the text”, hence creating, in some, the impression of their making “absolutely no sense whatsoever”. In doing so, the investigation directs a particular focus on aspects of cultural background that seem to be associated with certain constructions and that may be relevant for their communicative realizations in different linguistic and cultural communities.

References

Hartmann, S., & Ungerer, T. (2023). Attack of the snowclones: A corpus-based analysis of extravagant formulaic patterns. Journal of Linguistics, 59(2), 1–36. doi:10.1017/S0022226723000117

English Language Learners Stack Exchange, The (March 2016). https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/83983/what-does-x-is-the-new-y-mean-and-why-do-we-say-this (2023-05-15).

Weber, T. (2019). Das Wechselspiel zwischen Lexikon und Diskurs – so genannte Antisprichwörter und die X ist das neue Y-Konstruktion. Linguistik Online, 96(3), 133–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.96.5535.

IT’S COMPLICATED: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEXIS,
SYNTAX, AND PROFICIENCY

Chris Williams

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

This research project explores the relationship between lexical and syntactic complexity measures and proficiency in L2 English argumentative essays written by L1 Czech high school students. With many previous writing complexity studies having been focused on advanced or university level L2 English users, the results of which may not be applicable to intermediate secondary school users (Lee et al, 2021), there is clear a need for an analysis on the written compositions produced in a school context. Syntactic complexity is generally understood as referring to the “range and sophistication” (Ortega, 2015) of grammatical constructions, whereas lexical complexity can refer to the range and frequency of the words used. The research used 106 essays written by final year high school students during their English lesson, which were then graded according to a rubric and prepared for analysis. Lexical complexity was analysed using the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Ai & Lu, 2010; Lu, 2012), syntactic complexity using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010, 2014) and Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesised developmental stages for complexity framework.

The results of the complexity analyses provide an insight into the kinds of complexity features that can be given more focus in essay writing instruction as well as being considered as means for determining proficiency in gymnasium students.

SELECTIVE FOREGROUNDING OF CONTEXTUAL ELEMENTS WITHIN
THE STRATIFIED MODEL OF CONTEXT IN ADVERTISING COMMUNICATION

Adam Wojtaszek

University of Silesia in Katowice, Sosnowiec, Poland

Advertising almost always employs multimodal integration for the purpose of maximally effective message transmission. It seems to create a unique space for traversals (Lemke, 2001, 2005) and invites conceptual blending (Coulson, 2006; Fauconnier & Turner, 1998, 2002), in which selected elements of two or more different mental spaces are mapped onto each other thanks to their salient analogy or identity, not causing at the same time conflicts between “the real” and “the imaginary”. New senses are also evoked by creative exploitation of widely-understood context, which dialectically participates in dynamic construction of new meanings (Kecskes, 2008).

The present study attempts to find the ways in which multimodal integration of message transmission assists in maximally effective exploitation of all communication channels within relatively narrow temporal and spatial constraints of selected Polish TV and press advertisements for a specific type of medical and dietary supplement products, which are in a large part also advertised internationally in a very similar way. The method employed is an in-depth content analysis of the material, based on my original conceptualization of the contextual elements (Stratified Model), followed by an attempt to integrate the identified mechanisms with the existing models of meaning-making (e.g. Kecskes’s Dynamic Model of Meaning and Fauconnier & Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory). The results will hopefully help in better understanding of the ways in which particular components of the context structure may interact with the message expressed verbally or pictorially in the construction of multilevel meanings in advertising communication.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Surname	First name	E-mail	Affiliation
Abdulrahman	Al-Ali	Abdulrhman.hamad@mbzuh.ac.ae	Mohamed bin Zayed University for Humanities
Adam	Martin	adam@ped.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Atcheson	Hana	atcheson@utb.cz	Tomas Bata University in Zlín
Beneš Kováčová	Dominika	dominika.kovacova@osu.cz	University of Ostrava
Brzá	Tereza	brza@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Campé	Sid	531306@mail.muni.cz	Université de Haute-Alsace, Masaryk University
Challis	Kate	kchallis@iastate.edu	Iowa State University
Chovanec	Jan	chovanec@phil.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Dokoupilová	Iveta	482192@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Dontcheva-Navratilová	Olga	navratilova@ped.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Duruttya	Michaela	durm@kaj.zcu.cz	University of West Bohemia
Dvořáčková	Veronika	veronika.dvorackova@med.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Gerrard	Daniel	daniel.gerrard@cjv.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Gouhar	Saddik	s.gouhar@nla.ae	NLA
Grotek	Monika	monika.grotek@us.edu.pl	University of Silesia in Katowice
Guziurová	Tereza	tereza.guziurova@osu.cz	University of Ostrava
Hajeer	Ahmad	hajeer.ahmad@uni-bge.hu	Budapest Business School
Hallová	Jana	jana.hallova.jh@gmail.com	Masaryk University
Headlandova Kalischova	Irena	kalischova@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk Univesity
Hroteková	Michaela	hrotekova1@uniba.sk	Comenius University in Bratislava
Hůlková	Irena	hulkova@ped.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Huschová	Petra	petra.huschova@upce.cz	University of Pardubice
Jančaříková	Renata	jancarikova@ped.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Kapráliková	Ivana	ivana.kapralikova@euba.sk	University of Economics in Bratislava
Kiyama	Naoki	n-kiyama@kitakyu-u.ac.jp	The University of Kitakyushu
Klumm	Matthias	matthias.klumm@uni-a.de	University of Augsburg
Lahodová Vališová	Marie	marie.lahodova@med.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Laputková	Adriana	adriana.laputkova@smail.unipo.sk	University of Prešov
Lu	Wei-lun	wllu@phil.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Malá	Markéta	marketa.mala@pedf.cuni.cz	Charles University
Marković	Suzana	suzanae@live.com	University of East Sarajevo
Morita	Junya	morita@kinjo-u.ac.jp	Kinjo Gakuin University
Muianga	Felizardo	452888@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Mur Dueñas	Pilar	pmur@unizar.es	University of Zaragoza
Nedainova	Iryna	ineda@kaj.zcu.cz	University of West Bohemia
Němec	Martin	nemecm@ped.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Neumeier	Lisza-Sophie	lisza.neumeier@univie.ac.at	University of Vienna
Nováková	Zuzana	zuzana.novakova@unipo.sk	University of Prešov
Novotny	Ludmila	ludmilanovotny@gmail.com	Universidad Nacional de La Plata
Pelclová	Jana	pelclova@phil.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Povolná	Renata	renatap@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Samoilov	Rowan	v.a.cherno@gmail.com	Masaryk University
Schmied	Josef	josef.schmied@phil.tu-chemnitz.de	Chemnitz University of Technology
Shkotina	Anna	anna.shkotina@ukf.sk	Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra
Smolka	Vladislav	smolka@pf.jcu.cz	University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice
Socciarelli	Matteo	248806@studenti.unimore.it	University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Szczygłowska	Tatiana	tszczyglowska@ath.bielsko.pl	University of Bielsko-Biala
Tabbert	Ulrike	ulritab@googlemail.com	University of Huddersfield
Tomášková	Renáta	Renata.Tomaskova@osu.cz	University of Ostrava
Toptsi	Jamil	jtoptsi@gmail.com	Eötvös Lóránd University
Tran Nhu Quynh	Tram	A18624@student.osu.cz	University of Ostrava
Trnová	Michaela	michaela.trnova@osu.cz	Masaryk University
Tymbay	Alexey	tymbay@inbox.ru	Technical University in Liberec
Ueda	Masanobu	mueda@kitakyu-u.ac.jp	University of Kitakyushu
Vogel	Radek	vogel@ped.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Voldánová	Žaneta	zaneta.voldanova@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Weber	Tilo	tilo.weber@tul.cz	Technical University in Liberec
Williams	Chris	chris.williams@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Wojtaszek	Adam	adam.wojtaszek@us.edu.pl	University of Silesia in Katowice
Worthington	Helena	105738@mail.muni.cz	Masaryk University
Zinhom	Haitham	haithm.morsy@mbzuh.ac.ae	Mohamed bin Zayed University for Humanities