Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 0-0
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 0-0
Shaughan A. Keaton; Howard Giles
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 1-10
Abstract
A consensually-agreed position among scholars of communication and aging is that while psychological and physical health mutually impact each other, the quality of language to and from older adult individuals shape each of these—and are shaped by them. Encounters with others inside and outside ...
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A consensually-agreed position among scholars of communication and aging is that while psychological and physical health mutually impact each other, the quality of language to and from older adult individuals shape each of these—and are shaped by them. Encounters with others inside and outside of one’s age ingroup involve stereotyped expectations with regard to language and other speech behaviors, resulting in reinforcement of age-based stereotypes and changes in social interaction, personal control, and self-esteem. These outcomes interfere with the quality of care an older adult receives from medical practitioners as older patients simply enjoy more communication satisfaction with supportive physicians than those who utilize negative age stereotypes and language. Many studies have been language-oriented as evident in attention to patronizing talk, painful self-disclosures, and stereotypes. We overview some of the major findings arising from the study of language and aging, with a view to articulating a more cohesive, integrative model that can coalesce previous theoretical and empirical efforts.
Reza Pishghadam; Haniyeh Jajarmi; Shaghayegh Shayesteh
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 11-21
Abstract
Given the significance of relativism in molding our worldview and uncovering the nature of truth, this study using the newly-developed concept of emotioncy, attempted to introduce sensory relativism as a new perspective based on which senses can relativize our understanding of the world. To espouse the ...
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Given the significance of relativism in molding our worldview and uncovering the nature of truth, this study using the newly-developed concept of emotioncy, attempted to introduce sensory relativism as a new perspective based on which senses can relativize our understanding of the world. To espouse the theory, 24 individuals were interviewed on their experiences of phlebotomy. The results were analyzed in light of the six-level emotioncy model and five major themes were extracted. Overall, the outcomes of the study showed that, unlike the Exvolved individuals (Auditory, Visual, Kinesthetic emotioncies) who used more hedges and had shorter talk time, distal emotion, limited vocabulary size, and more use of associations, the Involved individuals (Inner and Arch emotioncies) employed fewer hedges and had longer talk time, proximal emotion, wider vocabulary size, and more use of analogies. The findings providing empirical support for sensory relativism, revealed that, deeper than language, senses can relativize cognition.
Gilda Sensales; Alessandra Areni; Alessandra Dal Secco
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 22-38
Abstract
The study considers mass media communication as intertwined with social norms, as assumed by the perspective of social representations. It explores the Italian press communication by focusing on three pairs of men and women politicians with different political orientations and all serving as presidents ...
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The study considers mass media communication as intertwined with social norms, as assumed by the perspective of social representations. It explores the Italian press communication by focusing on three pairs of men and women politicians with different political orientations and all serving as presidents of the Houses of Parliament in three legislatures. The article concentrates on five newspapers in order to sound out the presence of a possible gender bias in favor of men in the coverage. It explores the strategic use of language to enhance or penalize the role of women politicians. In order to scrutinize the role of gender visibility and discrimination, the study compares how women and men presidents are named and examines the linguistic sexism/nonsexism used for women politicians also in relation to the ideological/cultural orientations of newspapers. Thereby, 591 headlines were collected and analyzed with SPAD-T statistical package. The results, for some cases, confirm the trends revealed in the international literature, in other cases, disprove expectations.
Azizullah Mirzaei; Mahmood Hashemian; Fatemeh Safari
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 39-54
Abstract
Before a president practically begins his four-year term of office in Iran, a formal inaugural ceremony is held in the parliament. Being attended by national dignitaries and representatives from other countries, the inauguration of Iran's seventh president, Hasan Rouhani, was spectacular in several respects. ...
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Before a president practically begins his four-year term of office in Iran, a formal inaugural ceremony is held in the parliament. Being attended by national dignitaries and representatives from other countries, the inauguration of Iran's seventh president, Hasan Rouhani, was spectacular in several respects. The current study aimed at investigating the generic structure and rhetorical moves that ran through the president’s inaugural discourse. Then, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, drawing upon Fairclough’s three dimensional approach (2010), was adopted to explore the socio-cultural, religious, and political values underlying different rhetorical moves he employed in his inaugural address. The results demonstrated that Rouhani constructed his inaugural address on a succession of 9 generic moves using an interdiscursive mix of generic (i.e., inaugural, report, informational) and discoursal (i.e., religious, constitutional, and revolutionary) structures to reach out to different sectors of Iranian population. The predominant inaugural genre was then manifested largely through intertextuality and interdiscursivity, drawing upon other related (sub-) genres.
Mei-Ya Liang
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 55-70
Abstract
How do English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers achieve multimodal cohesion on the basis of their specific interests and cultural backgrounds? From a dialogic and collaborative view of communication, this study focuses on how verbal and nonverbal modes cohere together during intercultural conversations. ...
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How do English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers achieve multimodal cohesion on the basis of their specific interests and cultural backgrounds? From a dialogic and collaborative view of communication, this study focuses on how verbal and nonverbal modes cohere together during intercultural conversations. The data include approximately 160-minute transcribed video recordings of ELF interactions with 4 groups of university students who engaged in the following two classroom tasks: responding to a film excerpt and a music video. The results showed that individual participants engaged in the processes of initiation and response to support or challenge one another using a range of communication strategies. The results further indicated that during the discursive activities, the small groups achieved multimodal cohesion by deploying specific embodied resources in four types of participation structure: (1) interlock, (2) unison, (3) plurality and (4) dominance. Future research may broaden our understanding of the embodied interaction that is involved in intercultural conversation.
Niloofar Keshtiari; Michael Kuhlmann
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 71-86
Abstract
This paper reports on a behavioral study that explores the role of culture and gender in the recognition of emotional speech in an under investigated cultural context (a collectivist society: i.e., Iran). Participants were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated emotional vocal ...
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This paper reports on a behavioral study that explores the role of culture and gender in the recognition of emotional speech in an under investigated cultural context (a collectivist society: i.e., Iran). Participants were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated emotional vocal portrayals (including the five basic emotions). Findings of the experiment were then compared with the results of a similar study performed on members of an individualist culture. Taken together, our results established that both, gender as a biologically rooted social mechanism and cultural factors modulate the recognition of emotional speech. More specifically, our findings supported the view that with regard to vocal emotions, females are more sensitive compared to males. Additionally, it was revealed that members of a collectivist culture show higher sensitivity to vocal emotional cues compared to their individualist counterparts. These findings imply that cultures that center on group harmony (i.e., collectivist cultures), may thus promote higher default levels of emotional sensitivity.
María de la O Hernández López
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 87-104
Abstract
This paper examined disagreement in two sets of data in the context of service encounters: problem-solving interactions (doctor-patient communication) and purchase-oriented encounters (pharmacies) from a cross-cultural perspective (Spanish-British English). We proposed assertiveness, a term that refers ...
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This paper examined disagreement in two sets of data in the context of service encounters: problem-solving interactions (doctor-patient communication) and purchase-oriented encounters (pharmacies) from a cross-cultural perspective (Spanish-British English). We proposed assertiveness, a term that refers to both socio-psychological and linguistic features of communication, as a concept that may help understand disagreement. To this end, this study explored, on the one hand, frequency and types of disagreement in 160 British and Spanish service encounter interactions (SEIs, henceforth), in order to understand degrees of assertiveness, as well as the difficulty to grasp motivations for disagreement. On the other hand, five case studies were examined to unravel the social meanings attached to disagreement. The results showed that not in all cases Spanish interlocutors are more assertive than British interlocutors, that social meanings are not stable within the same genre and that linguistic choices may be linked to psychosocial motivations, such as assertiveness.
Tarek Hermessi
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 105-118
Abstract
This study investigated the cognition of 70 Tunisian teachers on the place of culture in English education. It showed that Tunisian teachers believe that English textbooks and curricular documents are not specific about the cultural dimension of EFL. It also revealed that L2 teachers, whose mother culture ...
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This study investigated the cognition of 70 Tunisian teachers on the place of culture in English education. It showed that Tunisian teachers believe that English textbooks and curricular documents are not specific about the cultural dimension of EFL. It also revealed that L2 teachers, whose mother culture is distant from that associated with L2, hold ambivalent attitudes towards culture. They acknowledge the importance of culture to communicative competence and intercultural competence, but either approach culture with suspicion or prefer to keep it to a minimum in the curriculum. The reasons for the marginalization of culture in English curriculum, according to the participants of the study, are ‘vastness of the concept of culture’, ‘lack of resources’, and ‘problems of procedure’. These reasons are accepted by L2 teachers, worldwide, who seem to share a ‘co-culture’ that determines their cognition on the different aspects of language teaching. As regards the cultural dimension of L2 teaching, the ‘co-culture’ seems to drive teacher cognition more than ‘cultural distance’.
Lin Zhu
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 119-134
Abstract
Humans are equipped with some universal or language-specific abilities to recognize emotions. However, because of the different emotional contents in diverse languages and the relevant cultural differences, humans with different cultural backgrounds own different metapragmatical abilities to recognize ...
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Humans are equipped with some universal or language-specific abilities to recognize emotions. However, because of the different emotional contents in diverse languages and the relevant cultural differences, humans with different cultural backgrounds own different metapragmatical abilities to recognize and express emotions. A hypothesis concerning emotional effects about intonation and particle is proposed, testified by typological evidence and then extended to the relevant language phenomena. The linguistic systems utilizing emotional experiences might be more in a language with high emotional contents, and the expressions concerned with emotional metapramatical operation might be more complicated. Furthermore, high emotional contents in languages and more emotional metapragmatical abilities of the speakers lead people to pay more attention to the emotional contents, and thereby tend to develop collectivistic cultures. On the other hand, variant culture display rules regulate emotional expression and understanding, revealing the very intricate interaction between language and culture.
Zeinab Kafi; Khalil Motallebzadeh
Volume 4, Issue 2 , September 2016, Pages 134-140