Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Japanese language Discourse analysis Case studies'

This paper analyzes some forms of linguistic manipulation in Japanese in newspapers when reporting on North Korea and its nuclear tests. The focus lies on lexical ambiguity in headlines and journalist’s voices in the body of the articles, that results in manipulation of the minds of the readers. The study is based on a corpus of nine articles from two of Japan’s largest newspapers Yomiuri Online and Asahi Shimbun Digital. The linguistic phenomenon that contribute to create manipulation are divided into Short Term Memory impact or Long Term Memory impact and examples will be discussed under each of the categories.The main results of the study are that headlines in Japanese newspapers do not make use of an ambiguous, double grounded structure. However, the articles are filled with explicit and implied attitudes as well as attributed material from people of a high social status, which suggests that manipulation of the long term memory is a tool used in Japanese media.
この論文は日本語の新聞中の北朝鮮と核実験に関する報告記事の曖昧さと操作的な態度についてである。この研究は特に北朝鮮について新聞の記事中の計画的で無意識に言語的な操作態度についてである。記事の見出しと読者の心意を関わる曖昧さについてである。全部の記事は読売新聞と朝日新聞に取ったが、全部の中に、多大態度がある。調査は日本の最大の新聞読売オンラインと朝日新聞デジタルの九の記事のコーパスに基づいてである。研究の主な結果は、日本の新聞の見出しがあいまいな構造を利用していないことだが、記事は明示的な態度だけでなく、多大な引用文で満たされている

Since Kaplan started the study of contrastive rhetoric, researchers have investigated Japanese and English compositions and have found some differences between them. However, few studies have investigated how these differences are perceived by native English readers when the different rhetorical patterns are transferred to English writing. Drawing from Hinds' study, this research focuses on the following: how the Japanese style of writing is evaluated by Japanese and American readers, especially in academic situations, how Japanese rhetorical patterns are perceived by American readers, and how a change of organization affects the evaluation by American readers.

This study seeks to understand the social interaction of small talk in two different countries. Defining small talk as 'phatic communion' and 'social talk' as contrasted to 'core business talk' and 'work-related talk,' Holmes (2000) claims that small talk in the workplace is intertwined with main work-talk. Small talk can help build solidarity and rapport, as well as maintain good relationships between workers. Much of the research on small talk has been focused on institutional settings such as business and service interactions; thus, there is a need for research on non-institutional small talk between participants without established relationships. This study compared how native English and Japanese male speakers interact in small talk that occurs during the initial phase of relationship formation, when interlocutors who have just met are waiting for a shared purpose. I analyzed their unmonitored small talk interaction in order to examine what types of topics they discuss and how conversations actually occur. I also conducted interviews to obtain information on perceptions of small talk and examined how these perceptions reflect different social norms and values pertaining to small talk in real-life settings. The data on the characteristics of small talk come from the pre-interview conversation between two participants, and the data on perceptions about small talk come from the interviews. The topics discussed differed between the U.S. and Japanese pairs. The U.S. pairs had "Informational Talk" elaborating on class details such as professors, systems, materials, or class content. The Japanese pairs, on the other hand, had "Personal Informational Talk," talking about personal matters such as study problems, worries, gossip, and stories. Furthermore, the Japanese pairs tended to have many pauses/silences compared to their English-speaking counterparts (the average frequency of pauses per conversation were 6 for the U.S. participants and 16 for the Japanese), presenting the impression that the Japanese pairs might have been uncomfortable and awkward. However, one similarity was that both groups discussed topics on which they shared knowledge or discussed the research study in which they were participating in order to fill silence during small talk with strangers. The most prominent result from the interviews is that interactions with strangers are completely normal for the U.S. participants, while for the Japanese participants such small talk with strangers makes them feel surprised and uncomfortable. The U.S. participants have numerous experiences with and are aware of the small talk occurring in everyday life, and they commonly discuss impersonal subjects; that is, their talks tend to be about factual information. The Japanese males, on the other hand, reported that they do not commonly talk with strangers; they need a defined place or reason to talk in order to converse openly and exchange personal information. However, in the actual pre-interview small talk, they incrementally came to know each other and started to discuss personal concerns and gossip about friends. This study has shown that small talk can be viewed as a locus where cultural differences in social norms are reflected.

The historical nature of language contact between French and Arabic in Algeria has created a sociolinguistic situation in which French is permeated throughout Algerian society. The prevalence and use of spoken French in Algeria by native speakers of Spoken Algerian Arabic has been a topic of interest to researchers of codeswitching since the 1970s. Studies have been conducted on codeswitching in Algerian media such as television, radio, and music. The hip hop scene has been active in Algeria since the 1980s. Algerian hip hop lyrics contain a multitude of switches into French. This study explores the structural makeup of the codeswitching between French and Spoken Algerian Arabic in Algerian hip hop. These are pattern that have gone heretofore unstudied. The purpose of this study was to utilize Myers-Scotton's MLF and 4-M models in order to analyze the codeswitching between Spoken Algerian Arabic and French found in the lyrics to the hip hop album Kobay by popular Algerian hip hop artist Lotfi Double Kanon. This study had two goals: the first was to document the structural patterns of the codeswitching found in the data. The second goal was to test Myers-Scotton's models and determine whether the patterns found in the data could be predicted by the MLF and 4-M models. In order to accomplish these goals, the lyrics to the album were transcribed, translated, coded and analyzed at the level of the complementizer phrase. The principles of the MLF and 4-M models were used as central tool for analysis. This study demonstrates that the codeswitching found in the lyrics to Kobay follow the principles of the MLF and 4-M models to a great extent. However, three examples of problematic data are presented. This is followed by a discussion on the social and structural implications of these findings.

My study arose in the context of an intervention programme aimed at the development of a child with autism’s communication and social interaction skills. The approach I take is a social constructionist one in which language is considered to be constructive and constitutive of social and psychological reality. This orientation challenges the assumptions of a western psychiatric approach that emphasizes the impairment and deficits associated with autism. The participants of the study are a 6-year-old boy diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (Autistic Spectrum), and his mother, father, sister and a volunteer on the intervention programme. The discourse analytic method of conversation analysis is employed as a means of elucidating the collaborative mechanisms employed by both the child and his co-participants in making sense of one another. The specific aims of the study are to closely examine the communicative behaviour and interactive styles of the child and his coparticipants, their implications for communicative success (co-ordinated interaction) or breakdown (discordant interaction), and the implications for how the child is positioned within the discourse in relation to his co-participants. My constructions of the data suggested that a playful, activity-based interactive style constituted by non-verbal turns, affection and short, simple utterances enhance mutual participation and the accomplishment of co-ordinated interaction. Barney’s co-participants sometimes tend to dominate interaction and frequently employ a strategy of repetitive questioning, which functions to direct and constrain the interaction and results in the child’s withdrawal and discordant interaction. This tendency to withdraw, however, seems to function as a means by which the child is able to actively resist positioning by others, and thus constitutes himself in a position of greater power. Furthermore, his use of the pronoun ‘I’ and collaborative negotiation of the words yours and mine suggest the active co-construction and positioning of himself as a separate person in relation to his co-participants. This research informs intervention efforts and encourages the co-participants to reflect on how interaction is co-constructed between themselves and the child.

Immigration policies and border control in the US were hardened significantly more ever since the new government’s immigration executive order in 2017. A series of massive raids and immigrant detentions were carried out which got the attention of both human rights activists and the news media. How these immigration detention events are portrayed in the news media reflect, moreover, a series of discourses which seem to attract audiences from either left-wing or right-wing political ideologies, specifically to read CNN and Fox news respectively, according to previous survey-based research. This paper aims to identify through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) how those in detention are represented in the news headlines of Fox News and CNN, and secondly, identify what possible left-wing and right-wing political ideologies about immigration are expressed in the news outlets. Reference strategies and transitivity will encompass the micro-level analysis, which focuses on language construction. For the macro-level analysis, on the one hand, discourse practices like process of production and consumption will be considered, and on the other hand, American foreign policy viewed from the left-wing and right-wing perspectives will be discussed to consider differences in style, tone, and perspective in CNN and Fox News’ headlines in relation to immigration detention events. Results show that CNN, tied to left-wing audiences, portray the immigration detention events from the perspective of immigrants who are in a vulnerable position since they are detained with their families. Moreover, Fox News, tied to right-wing audiences, show the events more from the viewpoint of the government and the public entities in charge of the immigration policies, who are in need to restrain, detain, and deport immigrants for the sake of the country’s security. This paper aims to contribute further to the research on political ideologies as a relevant factor to understand differences in discourse in the news media for future research.

The focus of the thesis is on the Language Policy in the English education system for bilinguals by looking at texts such as official documents (Languages for All: Languages for Life A Strategy for England and Every Language Matters) and the inspection reports of several schools and identifying discourses and then considering the consequences of these discourses (what are these discourses reveal) for education.

This thesis aims to elucidate the translation process by devising a way of retrieving evidence of this process from its output. It further aims to assess the claims made by some scholars concerning the possible existence of Translation Universals. In order to isolate the interaction of texts and contexts, a corpus of American short stories was created, with their translations into Persian published after the 1979 Revolution. Three complementary methodologies gave a rounded picture: (1) Corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies; (2) The pragmatic and rhetorically-based approach of Thinking Translation devised at St Andrews; and ‎(3) The analytical framework mostly established by Halliday in his Systemic Functional Grammar.‎ Approaching the process of translation in the specific order devised in this thesis provided four vantage points to analyse the data in a systematic way from linguistic, discourse, cultural and literary views before reaching what are at once the most personal and most characteristic aspects of a translator's work. The research begins with a literature review of the field and an account of linguistic constraints and of all Translation Universals hypothesised so far, followed by an extensive analysis of data in two consecutive chapters. With reference to the choices made in this corpus, it is discussed in the Conclusions chapter that most of the Translation Universals so far claimed are not in fact universal. It is the role of the translator which has emerged as the determining factor in producing a translated text, and thus as the key to resolving the issues explored in this thesis. It seems there are no constraints beyond the translator's reach, and there are no parameters which do not involve the translator, who introduces his or her own choices, or manipulates certain parameters. Only when they have done so, will the translation, as both process and product, be accomplished.

The Internet, and Web 2.0 tools can empower audiences to actively participate in media creation. This allows the production of large quantities of content, both amateur and professional. Online memes, which are extensions of usually citizen-created viral content, are a recent and popular example of this. This thesis examines the participation of ordinary individuals in political culture online through humor creation. It focuses on citizen-made political humor memes as an example of engaged citizen discourse. The memes comprise of photographs of political figures altered either by captions or image editing software, and can be compared to more traditional mediums such as political cartoons, and 'green screens' used in filmmaking. Popular culture is often used as a 'common language' to communicate meanings in these texts. This thesis thus examines the relationship between political and popular culture. It also discusses the value of 'affinity spaces', which actively encourage users to participate in creating and sharing the humorous political texts. Some examples of the political humor memes include: the subversion of Vladimir Putin's power by poking fun at his masculine characteristics through acts similar to fanfiction, celebrating Barack Obama’s love of Star Wars, comparing a candid photograph of John McCain to fictional nonhuman creatures such as zombies using photomanipulation, and the wide variety of immediate responses to Osama bin Laden's death. This thesis argues that much of the idiosyncratic nature of the political humor memes comes from a motivation that lies in non-serious play, though they can potentially offer legitimate political criticism through the myths 'poached' from popular culture.

A word or a linguistic construction can mean various things depending on the context. The imperative is a representative example of such a construction and can express a variety of illocutionary forces such as COMMAND, REQUEST, ADVICE, and more (Quirk et al., 1985, Huddleston et al., 2002).

However, although there are many studies that comprehensively deal with the imperative or individual illocutionary forces of it (e.g. Lakoff, 1966, Ljung, 1975, Davies, 1986, Wilson & Sperber 1988, Han, 2000, Takahashi, 2012, Jary & Kissine, 2014), there is no such study that shows a possible overall process of how we would interpret an imperative to reach a certain illocutionary force when it is uttered. Without such a shared process, we cannot explain why we can communicate using imperatives without misunderstandings. Thus, this process needs to be investigated.

Another problem regarding imperatives is the treatment of non-directive uses of imperatives such as “Have a good day”. The illocutionary force of this imperative would be called GOOD WISH and regarded as a conventional use of imperatives (Davies, 1986). However, it has not been clearly explained why we would choose the imperative construction to express wishes. If this kind of wishes expressed in the form of the imperative are actually a use of imperative, then there should be some reason and motivation for it.

The main purposes of this study are to provide (1) a schema of how one would typically reach the interpretation of WISH when hearing an imperative and (2) an account of such use of imperatives as WISH. In this study, examples of imperatives in two non-cognate languages are used for the analysis in the hope to substantiate the credibility of the schema and the account: Japanese and English. Based on the analyses on the imperative and individual illocutionary forces that have been presented in the literature combined with my own analysis, a schema is proposed that illustrates how one would typically reach PRIVATE WISH, the state of affairs of which is deemed to be desirable mainly for the speaker, and GOOD WISH, the state of affairs of which is deemed to be desirable mainly for the addressee. Then, an account for the use of PRIVATE WISH and GOOD WISH is provided. Specifically, the use of imperatives as WISH is an analogous use of prototypical imperatives; people would use the imperative construction to express their strong desirability, and to build and maintain a good relationship with others.

This paper provides analysis of a series of email correspondences between secondary newcomer immigrant students and Latino business professionals within the same urban community. The author, using James Gee's discourse theory (1990, 1996, 1999, 2004) contends that school-based discourses and structures have historically operated as barriers to academic success and societal acceptance for the vast majority of secondary English Language Learners, indicating the systemic perpetuation of a racist, classist, xenophobic social order through the public schools. When an attempt is made to sidestep these school-based discourses and put students in direct contact with mature, successful practitioners of English outside of the education community, the students encounter "mentor talk," a set of discourses that uncritically embrace the notions of a neutral, meritocratic, knowledge-based socioeconomic order. At the same time, students encounter language that can be appropriated for their own creative constructions of identity as they seek to position themselves in a new society. Even when there exists a strong alignment between the student's socially-situated identity presentation and the ideological thrust of "mentor talk," many societal barriers stand in the pathway of social and educational advancement. More often, the student identities express resistance, often subtle, to the standard, hegemonizing guidelines for success they have been offered.
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This study explored language practices of trilingual undergraduate students of mathematics as they made sense of an algebraic task. Specifically, the study set out to explore whether, how and why trilingual undergraduate students used language(s) to make sense of mathematics. In this study a trilingual speaker is viewed as an individual proficient in three languages and whose proficiency in the languages is not necessarily equal. The speaker uses the three languages either separately or by switching between any two in ways that are determined by his/her communication needs. Exploring language practices helped me to understand how students position themselves as they engage with a mathematics task using mathematical Discourses (capital D) in relation to their trilingual language facility. This facility involves the use of either the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) (English) or the switching between two or three of the languages they know. These languages were home languages, including Kiswahili of the students. In tertiary institutions, English is the LoLT while the home languages are neither taught nor used in the classroom. The study used a qualitative inquiry process, specifically a case study approach. It was conducted at a public university in Kenya with a focus on first-year engineering students with mathematics in their programme. Data were collected using a students‟ questionnaire, and clinical and reflective interviews. A structured questionnaire was used to gather the baseline data, which was used for the selection of 15 interview participants. The clinical interviews provided information on language use as the students engaged with the task, explaining each step of the process, while the aim of the reflective interviews was to identify, ascertain and confirm various actions and different languages and language practices that were not apparent during the clinical interview. The interviews were transcribed and 11 paired transcripts were selected for analysis. The data were analysed using the methods of Discourse analysis (Gee, 2005). This analysis explored how students used language in tandem with non-language “stuff” in a single language or when switching between any two languages and how and why each was used. The focus was on the activities and identities they enacted through their interpretation of the given task and in part of the solution process. The findings revealed that when students engaged with mathematics, they drew on the LoLT only, or switched between the LoLT and their home languages or between the LoLT, home languages and Kiswahili. Those who switched did so when they were faced with interpretation challenges, when there was need to emphasise a point and due to habitual practices of switching. They commonly switched silently and communicated verbally in the LoLT. The purpose for code switching was to gain understanding of the task. On the other hand, a trilingual student is likely to remain in the LoLT because content has been taught and tasks presented in the LoLT. The key contribution of this study is its focus on the trilingual language context of undergraduate students of mathematics, an area that has not been researched up to now. Furthermore, this study has added to scholarly work in this discipline by establishing that code switching is not the preserve of students who are learning the LoLT; rather, it is a reality for trilingual students who are competent in the LoLT when they engage with mathematics.
Mathematics Education
D. Ed. (Mathematics Education)

The context for this study is the period leading up to and the four years since the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. It is a critical exploration of black students' responses to university discourses as they begin their degrees, and an analysis of the extent to which Critical Language Awareness can be used to facilitate a greater understanding of institutional conventions and practices. It includes a brief consideration of students' school experiences and then explores their perceptions of the university as a whole as well as of individual texts. The way in which language encodes asymmetrical power relations and is used to construct students' subjectivities within the institution is of central concern. The research methodology adopted here is critical action research. The study consists of two research cycles, a short pilot study and a longer eight week language teaching programme. This second cycle was carried out in 1991 at the University of Natal during a time marked by unprecedented political fluidity and the establishment of new institutional and social structures. The impact of these changes has been felt at every level as racial separation, uniformity and ethnic homogeneity, which were once dominant social norms, have been replaced by the movement towards an integrated social order defined by its diversity, difference, and multiplicity. Because the research process is inseparable from its socio-political context, a theoretical perspective which attempts to theorise multiplicity and contradiction has been adopted here. Insights from postmodern thought are therefore central to this work and have facilitated the interrogation and, at times, the rewriting of many aspects of critical social theory, critical pedagogy and critical action research. The immediate context for this study is Learning, Language and Logic, a first-year course whose primary aim is the acquisition of academic literacy. Over a period of four years, the two action research cycles were developed and integrated into the curriculum. The first was a short intervention during which students analysed three university texts and the second, central cycle was an eight week programme which introduced them to the central principles of Critical Language Awareness. It was designed to provide students entering the university with the opportunity to explore unfamiliar aspects of the university environment and to analyse a range of texts drawn from its discourses. The primary method of analysis of the data was Critical Discourse Analysis but a content analysis of some of the data was also undertaken. The results of this research provide a strong indication that the integration of the principles of Critical Language Awareness into a first year course in academic literacy adds a crucial dimension to students' understanding of the university environment. It provides them with linguistic insights from which they can further develop the ability to analyse their educational context, to respond critically to academic texts and to understand the roles that they can play within the university.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.