ORIGINAL_ARTICLE
Situational Aspects of Congratulation in English, Persian, and Arabic: A Cross-cultural Perspective
The present study is an attempt to investigate the cross-cultural differences with regard to the production of a relatively understudied speech act; namely, congratulations. To this end, 48 American native speakers were asked to fill out a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of 4 situations in which the participants were asked to offer congratulations. Besides, the translated versions of the DCT were used to elicit data from 50 Persian native speakers as well as 44 native speakers of Syrian Arabic language. The corpus was analyzed to determine the congratulation strategies used and the frequencies of their occurrence. The content of semantic formulas as well as their shifts according to the status of the hearer were also investigated. Analysis of the data revealed several similarities and differences among the three groups, which may have implications for researchers as well as language teachers.
https://www.ldpjournal.com/article_133273_293399bdfc4087cfdfb29178d7775034.pdf
2021-05-01
1
17
680793/jldp.2021.133273
Speech Act
DCT
congratulations
cross-cultural pragmatics
status
IFID
Najmeh
Nasri
nasri.eng200@gmail.com
1
English Department, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran
LEAD_AUTHOR
ORIGINAL_ARTICLE
Investigation of Computer-mediated Communication Proficiency among Secondary School Students in Ibadan: Testing Bernstein’s deficit hypothesis
The nature of the relationship between language and social class has attracted the attention of language scholars, especially sociolinguists. The aim of this study is to provide further arguments on the never-ending debate around Basil Bernstein’s position on language and social class. However, unlike previous studies, it focuses on social class (as marked by school type and access to information technology tools) and computer-mediated communication proficiency among selected secondary school students in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. While there was no significant difference in the attitudes of the sampled public and private secondary schools’ students, strong evidence abounds to the effect that private school students had a better mastery and ‘proficiency’ in the use of computer-mediated communication language relative to their counterparts in public schools. Although there are studies challenging Bernstein’s claims on language and social class, the study further lends credence to the validity of these claims, particularly as experienced in the Nigerian context: upper and middle class children demonstrate better proficiency relative to their lower class counterparts, especially in (English) language-related subjects.
https://www.ldpjournal.com/article_133637_1bbfbaef528ee1fd53dcdbc19ec084dc.pdf
2021-05-01
19
35
computer-mediated communication
social class
Basil Bernstein
Nigeria
Ajayi
Temitope Michael
michaeltemitope@yahoo.com
1
Department of Linguistics and African Languages University of Ibadan, Nigeria
LEAD_AUTHOR
Amaka Linda
Ajuonuma
amakalinda05@gmail.com
2
Department of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
AUTHOR
ORIGINAL_ARTICLE
Examining Discursive Polarization and Group Representations in Political Inaugurals
The characterizations of an individual are connected to the systems of committed beliefs and ideas of an associated group the person belongs- otherwise, the group representations. These representations relate implicit ideals, values, and relations that abound in political inaugurals, like the gubernatorial type, which has rarely received adequate scholarly attention in extant works- particularly from the socio-cognitive perspective. Van Dijk’s ideology, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, and Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending guided the framework of the study. They imbued the form-function perspective of the analysis, as well as the explanations of group representations as discursive polarization in the speeches of three Nigerian governors. The findings establish six discursive issues that signal six ideological traits- which in turn indicate the divergence of discourse participants, through four grammatical processes (relational, material, mental, and verbal) in the data. The article argues that indirect collective behaviors are replete in political discourses, thus signaling the discursive divides, and the sharply contrasting discursive behaviors informed by group opinions and beliefs that abound in political inaugurals- hence illustrate the ongoing mental activities in various political language use situations.
https://www.ldpjournal.com/article_143601_8ad5d8e841f527bbc9a00176f54e0fc5.pdf
2021-05-01
37
53
680793/jldp.2021.143601
Keywords: Ideology
socio-cognitive perspective
discursive polarization
political inaugurals address
Adebayo
Mabayoje
rmabayoje@gmail.com
1
University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria
LEAD_AUTHOR
ORIGINAL_ARTICLE
Analyzing the Rhetorical Move Structure of MOOC’s Descriptions
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide digital learning opportunities for studentsworldwide. Most of the MOOC platforms include a course description which plays a critical rolein informing potential participants about the course (e.g., requirements and syllabus) and inpersuading them to enroll in it. Even though a large number of studies addressed MOOCs, exceptfor Hajeer’s (2020) pilot study, none of them have addressed the rhetorical function of MOOCdescriptions. Therefore, this study sets out to reveal the rhetorical move structure of MOOCdescriptions. A corpus of 70 MOOC descriptions was compiled from an online MOOC platformcalled Udemy.com. The outcomes of the rhetorical move structure analysis made it possible topropose a Rhetorical Move Structure (RMS) model for the study of MOOC descriptions andshow that MOOC descriptions consist of seven main moves; namely, Presenting Credentials,Introducing the offer, Highlighting Benefits, Incentivizing, Soliciting Action, Defining theAudience and Presenting Proof.
https://www.ldpjournal.com/article_147245_1759c02dc295ab568e85055bc578438f.pdf
2021-05-01
55
72
680793/jldp.2021.147245
Genre Analysis
Course description
MOOC
Rhetorical Move Structure
Ahmad
Hajeer
a7.hajeer@gmail.com
1
Department of International Business Languages, Budapest Business University, Budapest, Hungry
LEAD_AUTHOR
ORIGINAL_ARTICLE
Polite Expressions Across Cultures: A Case Study of English and Persian Everyday Discourses
Strategies employed in cross-cultural complements may cause misunderstanding in that they are either overused or under-used. In the literature, these types of misunderstandings have been referred to as pragmatic failure; however, they are mostly explained as cultural differences rather than linguistic ones. The present study looks at the problem of politeness formulas being used in English and Persian from a Relevance Theory point of view. To this end, a set of data collected in a variety of everyday situations were analyzed using the definition of complements for classifying polite expressions. This study attempted to shed some light on such linguistic differences by showing different interpretations of complements in both languages. The data comes from native speakers of English and Persian, both in monolingual and bilingual settings. The monolingual settings were both within and outside Iran, and, therefore the cultural settings were significantly different. The bilingual settings were so selected that they included speakers of both languages from different cultural backgrounds. The variety of linguistic as well as cultural backgrounds of the informants’ data led to quite rich results so that they could be generalized to some extent.
https://www.ldpjournal.com/article_148674_be0c50ed47904f74bc8412ce352e4883.pdf
2021-05-01
73
82
680793/jldp.2021.148674
Complements
Cross-Cultural Discourses
Discourse Analysis
Polite Expressions
Relevance Theory
Narges
Baktash
narges.baktash@ut.ac.ir
1
Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
LEAD_AUTHOR