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Interactive probes: Towards action-level evaluation for dialogue systems Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Andreas Liesenfeld, Mark Dingemanse
Measures of ‘humanness’, ‘coherence’ or ‘fluency’ are the mainstay of dialogue system evaluation, but they don’t target system capabilities and rarely offer actionable feedback. Reviewing recent work in this domain, we identify an opportunity for evaluation at the level of action sequences, rather than the more commonly targeted levels of whole conversations or single responses. We introduce interactive
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Book review: Hiroki Nomoto and Elin McCready, Discourse Particles in Asian Languages Volume II Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Yanuar Wijayanti
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‘Have you insured yourself in any way?’ Salespersons’ mapping questions and their follow-ups in insurance sales negotiations Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Jarkko Niemi, Pilvi Heinonen
This study examines how insurance salespeople employ a mapping question to promote life insurance as an additional service to their customers. The mapping question serves a double function, asking about the customer’s situation and creating a context in which transaction-related negotiation is projected to occur. Applying conversation analysis to study video-recorded insurance meetings in Finland,
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Book review: Zsófia Demjén, Sarah Atkins and Elena Semino, Researching Language and Health: A Student Guide Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Fei Cheng, Zi Yang
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TV news on Instagram: Affordances, genres, journalistic cultures Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Martin Luginbühl
TV news programmes use social media intensively to promote and distribute their content. Instagram has become integral in this field, as all major players have their own account and Instagram has become a widely used news source. This article analyzes the news coverage of TV news shows on Instagram as a designed space, asking which genres are used, how they are positioned in regard to the technical
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Why news organizations “platform” illiberal politics: Understanding news production, economic insolvency, and anti-democratic pressure through CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Nikki Usher
This article discusses how the economic insolvency of the contemporary mainstream media makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation by illiberal political actors. Through a case study of CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall event, this article argues that democratic backsliding itself has become a potent constraint structuring news production routines and news decision-making. The metajournalistic discourse
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Conversation analysis and conversational technologies: Finding the common ground between academia and industry Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Elizabeth Stokoe, Saul Albert, Hendrik Buschmeier, Wyke Stommel
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Special issue of Discourse & Communication on news today: Introduction Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Monika Bednarek, Teun A. van Dijk
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Bridging the gap between conversation technology and conversation analysis Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-31 Robert J. Moore
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How Lenny the bot convinces you that he is a person: Storytelling, affiliations, and alignments in multi-unit turns Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Marc Relieu
This research delves into the world of conversation analysis, focusing on the unique conversational agent, Lenny. In contrast to most modern AI-based chatbots, Lenny employs a minimalistic approach, utilizing pre-recorded turns to engage with unsolicited callers and extend interactions. The study aims to dissect how Lenny’s long turns contribute to displaying ‘his’ personhood. By analyzing Lenny’s
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User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insisting Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Silke Reineke, Henrike Helmer
Moments of trouble and miscommunication occur regularly when users interact with virtual assistants like smart speakers. To add to the understanding of how users treat moments of trouble in everyday interactions with a virtual assistant (VA) in German, this paper reports on a conversation analytic study of practices that users deploy after a request to a VA has failed. The repair sequences that we
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The establishment and breakdown of trust in human-bot marketing calls Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 Rosina Márquez Reiter, Mandie Iveson
In this paper we explore human communicative behaviour in unsolicited commercial telephone calls between human telemarketers and ‘bots’ that exhibit human characteristics. Drawing on a corpus of recorded telephone conversations between telemarketers and a spam-interception service, we examine some of the communicative dimensions through which telemarketers make sense of their interactions with this
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Evaluating conversational technologies: Beyond satisfaction ratings Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-24 Oluwabusayo Adeniyi
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Distributed agency in smart homecare interactions: A conversation analytic case study Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Saul Albert, Lauren Hall
The agent of action in Human-Computer Interaction is, as the hyphenated name of the field suggests, usually conceptualized as an contrastive binary of either human or computer. This study, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, instead describes the interactional achievement of distributed agency in a ‘smart homecare’ setting where a homecare worker and a disabled person coordinate
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‘Playing the robot’s advocate’: Bystanders’ descriptions of a robot’s conduct in public settings Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Damien Rudaz, Christian Licoppe
Relying on a large corpus of natural interactions between visitors and a robot in a museum setting, we study a recurrent practice through which humans ‘worked’ to maintain the robot as a competent participant: the description by bystanders, in a way that was made accessible to the main speaker, of the social action that the robot was taken to be accomplishing. Doing so, bystanders maintained the robot’s
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Rejecting a robot’s offer: An analysis of preference Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Lucien Tisserand, Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre
Since the development of commercial robots dedicated to service or social encounters, there have been numerous appearances of such devices in public spaces or corporate buildings. However, their purpose might not be self-evident and the modalities for using it might not be self-explainable. Moreover, ‘talking’ to a robot that imitates a receptionist could raise practical problems, given the fact that
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Is human perception of AI robots introducing a new type of bias? Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Danica Damljanovic
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Agency as an elixir for design Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Martin Porcheron
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Membership categorisation, sociological description and role prompt engineering with ChatGPT Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 William Housley, Patrik Dahl
Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) have become the latest disruptive digital technologies to breach the dividing lines between scientific endeavour and public consciousness. LLMs such as ChatGPT are platformed through commercial providers such as OpenAI, which provide a conduit through which interaction is realised, via a series of exchanges in the form of written
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Productivity implications for generative AI role-based prompts as a networked hermeneutic Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Sean Rintel
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Performance without understanding: How ChatGPT relies on humans to repair conversational trouble Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Ole Pütz, Elena Esposito
LLM-based chatbots’ ability to generate contextually appropriate and informative texts can be taken as an indication that they are also able to understand text. We argue instead that the separation of the two competences to generate and to understand text is the key to their performance in dialog with human users. This argument requires a shift in perspective from a concern with machine intelligence
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‘This uh. . . young lady young gentleman’: Gender attribution in the context of a gender-ambiguous robot Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Lynn de Rijk, Mieke Breukelman, Evi Dalmaijer, Wyke Stommel
For humanoid robots, gender-ambiguous presentation is implemented as a potential way to avoid gender-stereotypical design. Using conversation analysis, we look at video recorded user interaction in the presence of a designedly gender-ambiguous robot, showing how this design choice is actually dealt with within a social context. Robot gender becomes relevant initially when a user refers to the robot
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Why can’t CUIs tell jokes? Timing Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Cathy Pearl
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System prompt design: Bridging the gap between novice mental models and reality Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-10 Maaike Groenewege
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Observing and designing signals of agency Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-09 Rebecca Evanhoe
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Evolving repair strategies and recipient design: Practical implications for conversational technologies Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-07 Sophie Parslow
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Story-ing AI – mini-narrative patterns of contemporary online science journalism Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
This study explores the range of discursive patterns used to present artificial intelligence as a revolutionary but controversial technology in online science journalism. It uses a triangulated dataset of over a hundred recent mini-narratives sourced from New Scientist, Nature daily briefings, and Scientific American to reconstruct typical storylines in the thematic domains of research, business, and
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Book review: Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste, Language Research in Multilingual Settings: Doing Research Knowledge Dissemination at the Sites of Practice Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Carol Hoi Yee Lo
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Book review: Igor Prusa, Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Innocent Chiluwa
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Move analysis of fraud in a mediated online transaction Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-23 Mochammad Rizki Juanda, Eri Kurniawan, Budi Hermawan
The fraud genre is executed through the use of language that can deceive victims, enabling scammers to control conversations and guide victims into complying with the scammer’s intentions. This research aims to identify rhetorical moves and linguistic features used by scammers during mediated online transactions on social media. The data used in this study consists of nine conversation transcripts
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Book Review: Muhammad Afzaal, A Corpus-Based Analysis of Discourses on the Belt and Road Initiative Corpora and the Belt and Road Initiative Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-16 Baoqin Wu
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Book Review: Fabrizio Gallai, Relevance Theory in Translation and Interpreting: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Xuechang Hou
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Book Review: Aditi Bhatia, Digital Influencers and Online Expertise The Linguistic Power of Beauty Vloggers Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Azizul Rahman, Olga Tiara
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Book Review: Omega Douglas and Angela Phillips, Journalism, Culture and Society: A Critical Theoretical Approach to Global Journalistic Practice Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Dongning Liu, Jixian Pang
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English-medium instruction for sale: The multimodal discourse of self-perception on Japanese liberal arts faculty websites Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-08 Mark Birtles
This study both contributes to and updates the growing body of literature into the framing of English-medium instruction on institutional websites. A three-dimensional discourse analysis model is used to investigate the self-perception of three well-established liberal arts faculties in Japan. The analysis reveals distinct features in the self-perception of these universities and teases out the ingrained
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‘No trash – do not touch’: Handwritten textual objects at a construction site Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-08 Nathalie Schümchen, Niina Lilja
Drawing on social semiotics and geosemiotics, this paper analyses multimodal texts written on different surfaces at a construction site. The analysis is based on longitudinal ethnographic work and a large collection of photos of handwritten texts that involve verbal language and other semiotic elements such as drawings or symbols. The analysis focuses on the multimodal design of the texts, their spatio-temporal
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Delineating the discursive (de) legitimation strategies outlined by Spanish politicians in their no-confidence motion speeches Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Mª Milagros del Saz-Rubio
The present study explores the discursive (de)legitimation strategies enacted by three Spanish politicians, viz., Pablo Iglesias, Pedro Sánchez, and Santiago Abascal, within the context of a no-confidence motion speech against the governing parties in the Spanish Congress in 2017 (Popular Party), 2018 (Popular Party), and 2020 (Partido Socialista Obrero Español). Using the output of a keyword search
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Reanimating experts and authorities: Functions of speech reporting in COVID-19 news Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-03 Orawee Bunnag, Krisda Chaemsaithong, Kyung-Eun Park
This study explores the incorporation of experts’ and authorities’ voices in COVID-19 news articles with respect to their distribution and discursive functions. Based on a corpus 90 articles from 2020 to 2022 in The Korea Herald, the analysis reveals that reporters rely heavily and, at times, uncritically, on biomedical voices, representing them as a homogeneous group that provides a superior form
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From image to identity icon: Discourses of organizational visual identity on Australian university homepages Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-23 Nataliia Laba
This article explores how universities construe organizational identities and engage digital audiences through images on web homepages. Combining visual content analysis and a discourse-analytic approach informed by social semiotics, I interpret the discourses of identity in 400 images from organizational homepages of four top-tier public universities in Sydney, Australia – University of Sydney, University
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Doing citizen sociosemiotics in the Covid-19 pandemic Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-20 Elisabetta Adami, Emilia Djonov, Zhe Liu
In May 2020, in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we set up the transmedia space PanMeMic, and involved our social networks, in a snowball fashion, to exchange observations and reflections on the changes in communication and social interactions ensuing from the restrictions imposed. We adopted a citizen approach towards co-constructing knowledge about semiotic practices, by integrating tenets
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A corpus-based discourse analysis of reparations inertia Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Joshua F Hoops
The movement for reparations for those enslaved on the North American continent from 1450 to 1866 has a long history fraught with debate, criticized by individuals on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Specific points of contention include how much money should be allocated, who the recipients and potential liable parties should be, and what specific form reparations should take
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How diabetes forum-users complain about others’ expectations: Troubles-telling and troubles-receiving Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Barbara De Cock, Charles Antaki
This article offers a qualitative analysis of two instances of troubles-telling threads on a diabetes forum, with a specific focus on how these instances contribute to constructing a way to manage others’ expectations concerning how persons diagnosed with diabetes control their condition. From the perspective of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this article shows some recurrent features
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Reading ‘between the lines’: How implicit language helps liberal media survive in authoritarian regimes. The Kommersant Telegram posts case study Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Alexey Tymbay
This case study demonstrates identification, explicitation, and validation of the implicatures found in the Kommersant (Russia) Telegram channel posts. It explores the primary reasons for Kommersant’s implicature use and the language means employed for the creation of the implicature. The contributors to the Kommersant Telegram channel use irony/sarcasm, creative neologisms, wordplay, metaphors, and
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Credibility in corporate testimonial videos: Addressed from a combined interactional and multimodal semiotic perspective Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen, Nina Nørgaard
The article reports a study of corporate testimonial videos from a Danish tech SME. The aim of the study is to show how combining Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) may provide new insight into the persuasive appeal of corporate testimonial videos. The study uses EMCA to demonstrate how participants interactionally construct a position
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Book review: Hazel Price and Dan McIntyre (eds), Communicating Linguistics: Language, Community and Public Engagement Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Aulia Putri Meidina, Ni Komang Diah Restu Swari, Arni Arta Rahayu
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Book review: Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch (eds), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Alif Lam Mim Huda, Yusuf Mukasyafah Rizqi Rahman, Hamidah Mulyani
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Book review: Gwen Bouvier and Joel Rasmussen, Qualitative Research Using Social Media Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Weiyi Li, Changpeng Huan
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Book review: Gordon C Chang, Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Frederick Erickson
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Collaboration, reinvented tools and specialist knowledge: Communication professionals’ experiences of global health crisis management Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Mats Landqvist, Mona Blåsjö
Communication professionals have a paramount role in global crisis. What did they learn during the covid pandemic that could be used in future global crisis? The aim of this article is to identify and analyze strategy changes among communicators in municipalities and how their conceptions of communicated knowledge transformed during the pandemic. Retrospective interviews and textual material are analyzed
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Violent incongruencies: Analyzing The New York Times’s discourse on George Floyd demonstrations and the Capitol riot Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Brown James
American news media outlets have a storied past of delegitimizing protest movements, particularly through violence. However, recent literature has suggested news media outlets in America are slowly beginning to pull away from this trend. Moreover, recent protest history has several memorable examples of this attempted course correction, such as CNN’s viral ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ headline during
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COVID-19 and figures of blame: Discursive representations of blame for COVID-19 and its impacts in UK online news Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Jamie Matthews, Farzeen Heesambee
As publics have attempted to make sense of the COVID-19 crisis and its longer-term impacts there has been an inevitable search for blame. Emergent research on the attribution of blame has focussed exclusively on the initial outbreak, with insufficient attention paid to how countries have responded to the pandemic. Our study adopts a longitudinal approach, examining the figures of blame that emerged
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Coping with gender-critical voices from within: A sociocognitive approach to Sussex’s Twitter (X) crisis responses Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Altman Yuzhu Peng, Thomas William Whyke, Feng Gu
Drawing on critical discourse studies (CDS), this article foregrounds how British higher education institutions respond to gender-critical controversies sparked by their staff members. Adopting Teun van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, we analyse the University of Sussex’s crisis responses on Twitter (known as X today) concerning de-platforming campaigns against Kathleen Stock. The analysis unpacks
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From compensation to competition: The impact of graphicons on language use in a Chinese context Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Yiqiong Zhang, Susan C Herring, Rongle Tan, Qingwen Zhang, Dingxu Shi
This study examines the impact of graphicons (emoticons, emojis, and stickers) on the use of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Chinese based on a 13-year longitudinal corpus of 941,020 comments po...
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Multimodal intertextuality and persuasion in advertising discourse Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Chunyan Xing, Dezheng (William) Feng
This paper provides an integrated social semiotic framework for analyzing intertextuality in multimodal advertising discourse. Following the distinction between manifest intertextuality and interdi...
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Twitter-based analysis of anti-refugee discourses in Türkiye Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Fahri Yılmaz, Tugay Elmas, Betil Eröz
As the number of refugees in Türkiye continues to grow, the constructed discourse of welcoming refugees with open arms has weakened, transforming the image of refugees from ‘guests’ to ‘threats’. S...
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Comparative discourse analysis of Kazakhstani universities’ organisational identity Discourse & Communication (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Zhansaya Tatyyeva, Aliya Zagidullina
The present study explored the discourses adopted by the Kazakhstani universities to represent their organisational identity. It analysed the information of 30 Kazakhstani universities as found in ...