Linguistics Beyond and Within, 2023, Vol. 9
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
- ItemEuphemisms and teacher–student interactions(KUL Publishing House, 2023) Bloch-Rozmej, AnnaThe quality of teacher-student interactions appears to be one of the most significant prerequisites for effective instruction. One of the factors involved in determining this quality is definitely teacher talk that should adequately correspond both to the type of knowledge the teacher intends to transfer and students’ ability to absorb this knowledge. The latter we claim is directly related to the students’ attitude to the subject itself and the teacher. In this article we will delve into the problem of euphemisms as part of teacher and student talk with a view to determining the extent to which they might affect teacher-student interactions. The issue of euphemism use and their role in building positive relations in the language classroom will be discussed from the perspective of teachers’ experiences. To this end, we chose the research tool of an online questionnaire addressed at university teachers. The survey was administered in June 2023 and the results will be described and analyzed in the forthcoming pages. Euphemism use will also be considered as a manifestation of language creativity that should characterize good language teachers.
- ItemAutomatically generated language learning exercises for Finno-Ugric languages(KUL Publishing House, 2023) Ferenczi, ZsanettMorphologically rich languages always constitute a great challenge for language learners. The learner must be able to understand the information encoded in different word forms of the same root and to generate the correct word form to express certain syntactic functions and grammatical relations by conjugating a verb or declining a noun, an adjective or a pronoun. One way to improve one’s language skills is through exercises that focus on certain aspects of grammar. In this paper, a language learning application is presented that is intended to help learners of Finnish and Hungarian (with Hungarian and Finnish L1, respectively) acquire new vocabulary items, as well as practice some grammar aspects that according to surveys are considered difficult by learners of these languages with the other Finno-Ugric language being the learner’s native tongue, while alleviating the need to create these exercises manually. This application is a result of an on-going research project. In this research project, bilingual translation pairs and additional monolingual data were collected that can be utilized to build language learning exercises and an online bilingual dictionary with the help of automatic methods. Several linguistic patterns and rules were defined in order to automatically select example sentences that focus on a given part of the target language. These sentences were automatically annotated with the help of language processing tools. Due to the large size of the previously collected data sets, to date, only a subset of the analyzed sentences and the bilingual translation pairs has been manually evaluated. The results of this evaluation are discussed in this paper in order to estimate the precision of the methodology presented here. To ensure the precision of the information and the reliability of the application, only manually validated data sets are displayed. In this project, continuous data validation is planned, since it leads to more and more examples and vocabulary items that learners can benefit from.
- ItemRepresenting temporal concepts using redundant gestures in L2 ongoing interactions(KUL Publishing House, 2023) Hanamoto, HirokiHuman conversational interaction is multimodal, involving both verbal and non-verbal modalities. That is, when a speaker and listener interact, they use not only spoken messages but also manual gestures. Manual gestures and spoken messages are semantically and temporally related and work together to create and express a complete meaning. This study employs a data-driven approach to investigate how L2 learners spontaneously employ gestures to express temporal concepts in ongoing dyadic interactions using 11 recorded interactions among L2 learners. The distribution and frequency of specific types of manual gestures were examined using sequential and gesture analyses. The results showed that, when representing temporal concepts, the participants produced language-redundant gestures. For example, to convey temporal concepts, they tended to co-express the same information with manual gestures, namely abstract deictic and metaphoric gestures, on an imaginary mental timeline axis, which appeared to represent the English grammatical concepts of tense and aspectual meaning. Regarding the functional differences in gestures in interactions, based on sequential analysis, speakers employed language-redundant gestures to express time concepts explicitly in comprehension sequences and in the negotiation of meaning as a strategy of repair for lexical retrieval, paraphrasing, and clarification. These findings reveal that understanding the use of both modalities, speech and gestures, is critical in uncovering how speakers conceptualize time in their minds and integrate space and time in language.
- ItemComparative analysis of American and Russian political discourse: A discourse analysis study(KUL Publishing House, 2023) Kopik, MonikaThis article provides an exhaustive analysis of American and Russian political discourse through the examination of the linguistic techniques employed by President Joe Biden and President Putin in their speeches. The aim of this research is to examine the linguistic approaches employed in referencing social and political traditions in the United States and Russia, investigate disparities in linguistic strategies within both political discourses, and assess variations in semantic outcomes. The analysis has been conducted to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the linguistic methods of referring to social and political traditions in America and Russia? (2) Do the linguistic strategies differ depending on the political discourse? (3) Is the semantic output different depending on the political discourse? The findings reveal marked differences between the two discourses, reflecting the social and political discrepancies between the political systems of the United States and Russia.
- ItemRegister in Czech: Designing an MDA-based experimental study(KUL Publishing House, 2023) Marklová, Anna; Buchmüller, Olga; Demian, Christoph; Meyer, Roland; Szucsich, LukaThere are no conventionalized ways to investigate the results of multidimensional analysis (MDA) from the perceptual perspective in an experimental setting. An MDA of the Czech corpus Koditex by Cvrček et al. (2020) established eight dimensions of variation based on 122 linguistic features. The first two dimensions, which explain the largest proportion of shared variance, are labeled as 1. dynamic (+)/static (-) and 2. spontaneous (+)/prepared (-). In our study, we investigated if some situational contexts of language use evoke stronger associations with the poles of the two dimensions than others. Furthermore, we aimed to explore the impact of the mode of language use and the properties of the interlocutor on the ratings. Czech native speakers (n=107) rated various situational contexts on 7-point Likert-like scales representing the MDA-based dimensions. The items were balanced in the formality of the interlocutor’s name (Mr. or Mrs. in connection to surname/first name), the interlocutor´s gender, and the mode of language use (spoken/written). The statistical analysis uncovered a significant effect of the formality of the interlocutor's name and the mode of language use on the ratings. Using first names and spoken mode resulted in ratings closer to the positive poles of the dimensions. The comparison of individual items showed that some situations, mainly those representing the negative poles of the dimensions, are rated more consistently than others. The results of our study offer insight into how native speakers evaluate situations of language use on the scales of preparedness, subjectivity, and interactivity.