Rosa María Pacheco Baldó
Abstract
This paper discusses nearly eight hundred reviews posted on Google search engine about twenty prisons in Spain and the United States. These countries have cultural values that are inevitably reflected in the language of their speakers. Through a qualitative and then quantitative analysis, some differences ...
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This paper discusses nearly eight hundred reviews posted on Google search engine about twenty prisons in Spain and the United States. These countries have cultural values that are inevitably reflected in the language of their speakers. Through a qualitative and then quantitative analysis, some differences that could be related to the cultural features that are prevalent in these two countries have been found. However, the analysis has focused primarily on the use of metaphor and verbal irony. In particular, the analysis has revealed what could be called ironic metaphor in both corpora, since in a significant percentage of reviews, the prison is compared to tourist accommodation. Undoubtedly, this comparison would be a metaphor, but likewise, it must also be regarded as irony since prison is the antithesis of a leisure facility. As shown, the cultural differences between these countries are sometimes reflected in the reviews, but also a kind of globalization of the metaphor could be argued.
Amir Zand-Moghadam; Leila Bikineh
Volume 3, Issue 1 , March 2015, , Pages 47-61
Abstract
Due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the Iranian and English contexts to find out the probable similarities and ...
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Due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the Iranian and English contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (DMs) between the two cultures. To this end, three sets of interviews were selected, and the DMs used in those interviews were identified and classified based on the framework proposed by Fung and Carter (2007). The results revealed that along with the similarities, some differences were present in the use of DMs among the interviewees. Such differences can be attributed to the cultural differences between the interviewees and their communicative purposes. The findings of the study help us understand the importance of DMs in organizing institutional discourse and intercultural inconsistencies that exist between Iranian and English-speaking politicians.