Common Scientific Lexicon for Automatic Discourse Analysis of Scientific and Technical Texts

The paper reports on preliminary results of an ongoing research aiming at development of an automatic procedure for recognition of discourse-compositional structure of scientific and technical texts, which is required in many NLP applications. The procedure exploits as discourse markers various domain-independent words and expressions that are specific for scientific and technical texts and organize scientific discourse. The paper discusses features of scientific discourse and common scientific lexicon comprising such words and expressions. Methodological issues of development of a computer dictionary for common scientific lexicon are concerned; basic principles of its organization are described as well. Main steps of the discourse-analyzing procedure based on the dictionary and surface syntactical analysis are pointed out.

Biologising parenting:neuroscience discourse, English social and public health policy and understandings of the child

In recent years, claims about children's developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England. While these policies assert that they are based on neuro-scientific discoveries, their relationship to neuroscience itself has been debated. However, what is clear is that they portray a particular understanding of children and childhood, one that is marked by a lack of acknowledgment of child personhood. Using an analysis of key government-commissioned reports and additional advocacy documents, this article illustrates the ways that the mind of the child is reduced to the brain, and this brain comes to represent the child. It is argued that a highly reductionist and limiting construction of the child is produced, alongside the idea that parenting is the main factor in child development. It is concluded that this focus on children's brains, with its accompanying deterministic perspective on parenting, overlooks children's embodied lives and this has implications for the design of children's health and welfare services.

Politeness in computer-mediated discourse of a virtual team

Drawing on the newest findings of politeness research, this paper proposes an interactionally grounded approach to computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Through the analysis of naturally occurring text-based synchronous interactions of a virtual team the paper illustrates that the interactional politeness approach can account for linguistic phenomena not yet fully explored in computer-mediated discourse analysis. Strategies used for compensating for the lack of audio-visual information in computer-mediated communication, strategies to compensate for the technological constraints of the medium, and strategies to aid interaction management are examined from an interactional politeness viewpoint and compared to the previous findings of CMD analysis. The conclusion of this preliminary research suggests that the endeavour to communicate along the lines of politeness norms in a work-based virtual environment contradicts some of the previous findings of CMD research (unconventional orthography, capitalization, economizing), and that other areas (such as emoticons, backchannel signals and turn-taking strategies) need to be revisited and re-examined from an interactional perspective to fully understand how language functions in this merely text-based environment.

Non-verbal signalling in digital discourse:the case of letter repetition

This study focuses on the interactional functions of non-standard spelling, in particular letter repetition, used in text-based computer-mediated communication as a means of non-verbal signalling. The aim of this paper is to assess the current state of non-verbal cue research in computer-mediated discourse and demonstrate the need for a more comprehensive and methodologically rigorous exploration of written non-verbal signalling. The study proposes a contextual and usage-centered view of written paralanguage. Through illustrative, close linguistic analyses the study proves that previous approaches to non-standard spelling based on their relation to the spoken word might not account for the complexities of this CMC cue, and in order to further our understanding of their interactional functions it is more fruitful to describe the role they play during the contextualisation of the verbal messages. The interactional sociolinguistic approach taken in the analysis demonstrates the range of interactional functions letter repetition can achieve, including contribution to the inscription of socio-emotional information into writing, to the evoking of auditory cues or to a display of informality through using a relaxed writing style.

Lexico-grammatical portraits of vulnerable women in war:the 1641 depositions

The 1641 Depositions are testimonies collected from (mainly Protestant) witnesses documenting their experiences of the Irish uprising that began in October 1641. As news spread across Europe of the events unfolding in Ireland, reports of violence against women became central to the ideological construction of the barbarism of the Catholic rebels. Against a backdrop of women's subordination and firmly defined gender roles, this article investigates the representation of women in the Depositions, creating what we have termed "lexico-grammatical portraits" of particular categories of woman. In line with other research dealing with discursive constructions in seventeenth-century texts, a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach is taken. Adopting the assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis, the discussion is extended to what the findings reveal about representations of the roles of women, both in the reported events and in relation to the dehumanisation of the enemy in atrocity propaganda more generally. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.