This thesis attempts to investigate the structure of Arabic argumentative discourse in general and 'editorials' as an argumentative text-form in particular and the problems this discourse raises for translators. This investigation includes the identification of editorials' main constituents, the types of clause relations typical of this form of argumentation and their contribution to meaning continuity of such discourse, and certain textual phenomena, i.e repetition, parallelism, thematization, paragraphing, etc., and their unequivocal significance in translation. To this effect, random samples were taken from three different Arabic newspapers, i.e Al-Ahräm, Al-Ra'y, Al-Iqatan, to show how the structure of these texts gives rise to ambiguity when translated (literally) into English. To achieve these objectives, this study uses a semantic, structural, and pragma-semio-textual approach to analyze and then translate the texts chosen, as language in this study is considered to be a form of behaviour (Halliday 1973) that cannot be studied in isolation from its social, cultural, and contextual contexts in which it is used. Our textual analyses have shown some interesting results. First, editorials have their own generic structure, and such structure is presented in specific stages. Second, editorials as well as other argumentative texts are dominated by semantic causal relations; these relations tend to have a psychological impact on text-readers and should be accounted for in translation. Third, editorials favour the cohesive type of lexical repetition not only for cohesion purposes but also for persuasive functions as well. Fourth, editorials use many parallel constructions for conviction and persuasive functions. Fifth, editorials have semantic structures and stylistic features that cause problems for the English reader. These features require attention during the process of translation. All these issues tend to reflect the nature of editorials within argumentation and their unequivocal significance within the study of discourse.

Orientador: Maria Laura T. Mayrink-Sabinson / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-25T07:12:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vidon_LucianoNovaes_M.pdf: 3875315 bytes, checksum: 08abd6f38f6685b7fcb5fe228abb1d0b (MD5) Previous issue date: 1999 / Resumo: O presente trabalho teve como principal objetivo discutir a questão da individualidade na aquisição da escrita e do papel do outro na constituição dessa individualidade. Para isto, tomaram-se como dados, constituindo-se um corpus longitudinal, textos escritos por um sujeito nos momentos iniciais de aprendizado de uma representação escrita para a linguagem verbal. Os textos escolhidos para serem analisados foram aqueles em que poderiam ser encontradas, de alguma forma, tentativas de argumentação. A razão principal desta escolha se deve ao fato de estes textos, nos momentos iniciais de escrita de alunos do ensino fundamental, não serem muito trabalhados pela escola, pelo menos comparando-os ao trabalho realizado com os textos do tipo narrativo-literário, lidos e produzidos, freqüentem ente, neste momento. O exame do corpus foi de cunho qualitativo, interessando, especialmente, a análise do dado singular, capaz de iluminar aspectos muito particulares de certos processos, como os de aquisição da escrita e constituição do estilo. Fundamentado numa concepção sócio-histórica de linguagem, concebendo o estilo como marca de trabalho do sujeito, refletindo um processo de escolhas, e entendendo a enunciação como um processo, essencialmente, interlocutivo, em que há produção de linguagem e constituição de sujeitos, tentou-se, basicamente, refletir sobre o papel da escolarização formal na constituição da individualidade ou de uma autonomia na hora de o sujeito escrever um texto / Abstract: The main objective of this dissertation is to discuss the question of individuality in language acquisition and the other's constitutive role in it. Data were taken from a longitudinal corpus of texts written by one subject, at different moments during elementary school, learning a written representation of the spoken language (Portuguese). The texts analized were those in which there was some kind of attempt to construct an argument, a form of discourse not specifically taught in elementary school. Analysis was qualitative rather than quantitative, centered on singular data which would clarify certain very particular processes such as the acquisition of written language and the constitution of written style. Conceiving style as subject's work with/on language that reflects a process of choices visible through indicia present in texts, along with understanding enunciation as an essentially interlocutive process, in which there is production of language and the constitution of language subjects, we discuss the role of formal education/schooling in the constitution of individuality and authonomy in text production within a social-historical conception of language / Mestrado / Ensino-Aprendizagem de Lingua Materna / Mestre em Linguística Aplicada

A presente tese tem por objeto de estudo a construção do discurso persuasivo sob as óticas da Retórica Clássica e da Nova Retórica em três espécies de recursos judiciais cíveis, quais sejam, a apelação, o agravo de instrumento e os embargos de declaração. Assim, esta pesquisa teve por objetivo analisar os elementos retóricos presentes nos discursos judiciais delimitados e identificar a adequabilidade de cada estratégia persuasiva conforme a natureza e a modalidade do recurso judicial interposto. Para tanto, foram expostos e aplicados os fundamentos teóricos oriundos, sobretudo, dos ensinamentos clássicos aristotélicos e das modernas lições de Chaïm Perelman, entre outros estudiosos da linguagem, filosofia e direito processual civil, permitindo a averiguação de quais elementos retóricos se mostram mais eficazes e adequados em cada uma das modalidades recursais que compõem o corpus. / The objective of this thesis is to study the construction of the persuasive speech under the optics of the Classical Rhetoric and the New Rhetoric in three types of civil judicial resources, namely, appeal, bill of review appeal and motion for clarification. Thus, this study is aimed towards analyzing the rhetorical elements present in judicial speeches and identifying the suitability of each persuasive strategy according to the nature and type of the judicial appeal. As a result, the theoretical foundations were uncovered and derived primarily from the teachings of the classical Aristotelian and modern Chaim Perelman, among others scholars of language, philosophy and civil procedural law, allowing the examination of which type of rhetorical elements are more effective and suitable for each kind of appeal.

[pt] Apresenta-se um estudo exploratório conduzido com 14 alunos universitários em que se buscou avaliar em que medida resumos podem ser tomados como parâmetros da compreensão leitora. Para Kintsch (2002), o leitor bem sucedido é aquele que integra informações retiradas do texto com seu conhecimento de mundo. A questão é como investigar o nível de compreensão textual, visto que não se tem acesso direto às representações e operações mentais envolvidas nesse processo. Partindo da hipótese de que o resumo pode exemplificar a representação semântica global do texto (VAN DIJK, 2004), investigamos as operações de sumarização privilegiadas pelos sujeitos na produção de resumos de texto pertencente ao gênero artigo de opinião. A pesquisa também teve por objetivo contribuir para avaliação de técnicas de sumarização automática de textos. Procedeu-se à análise de resumos resultantes do destacamento das idéias principais do texto fonte e de resumos elaborados de modo livre. Esses textos foram comparados a resumo produzido pelo sumarizador automático GistSumm (PARDO, 2002). Sob o ponto de vista das pistas sintáticas para escolha da manutenção e apagamento das orações nos resumos sublinhados, não houve uniformidade de escolhas entre os sujeitos; as principais divergências ocorreram nos casos de orações pertencentes a períodos complexos, com grande número de encaixamentos. Uma análise qualitativa quanto às proposições, conectivos e referentes, nos resumos livres, possibilitou avaliar o grau de compreensão do texto fonte pelos sujeitos da pesquisa. Acreditamos que os resultados podem ser interpretados como indicativos de que o resumo consiste num recurso importante para avaliação da compreensão leitora. / [en] This research presents results of an exploratory study with 14 university students with the objective of evaluating if abstracts can be taken as parameters of reading comprehension. For Kintsch (2002), the successful reader is the one that incorporates information from the text with their knowledge of the world. The issue is how to investigate reading comprehension, since there is no direct access to mental representations and operations involved in this process. Based on the hypothesis that abstracts may exemplify the overall semantic representation of a text (van Dijk, 2004), we investigated the summarization operations favored by the subjects in the production of summaries of a text. The research also aimed to contribute to the evaluation of techniques for automatic text summarization. We analyzed summaries resulted from the highlight of the main ideas of the text, and also from free written summaries of the same text. These texts were compared to a summary produced by the summarization program GistSumm (PARDO, 2002). Taking into consideration the syntactic clues for the student’s choice of maintenance and deletion of the sentences highlighted in the summaries, there was no uniformity of choices; main differences occurred in complex sentences. A qualitative analysis related to the propositions, connectives and coreference chain in the student’s free summaries allowed us to assess the degree of understanding of the source text by the subjects of this research. We believe that the results can be interpreted as indicative that abstracts could be an important resource for the assessment of reading comprehension.

This study addresses discourses and how they affect climate policy, through the example of carbon offsets as a tool to reach domestic emissions reductions in the Swedish Climate Policy Framework. An interpretation of Maarten Hajer’s argumentative discourse analysis is applied to understand the ideas and arguments that inform the policy debate on carbon offsets as a supplementary measure in this policy process. By mapping, comparing and finding dominating storylines, it presents how Swedish government actors, businesses- and non-governmental organizations legitimize, justify and contest carbon offsets. The findings suggest that the dominating storylines largely remain in the status quo on carbon offsets, connecting to the larger policy discourses of ecological modernization and green governmentality. They also show a potential attempt to divorce of international development from carbon offset mechanisms, as a way to increase efficiency. However, in a Paris Agreement and Article 6 landscape, room to reimage and critically evaluate the use of carbon offsets has also emerged. Established actors join civil society in raising uncertainty and doubt of the future of carbon offsets. These discursive shifts may impact how Sweden intends to exercise leadership in deep decarbonization going forward.

Migration induced by the impacts of climate change is a complex phenomenon that consists of various concepts. It also consists of various perspectives about the cause and the effects of such migration. Regardless of these debates, however, some atoll island nations are under a threat of disappearance due the impacts of climate change, especially the rising sea levels. Migration remains the only option for these island nations. Consequently, there are numerous perspectives on how to address the arising problems due to such migration. By utilizing argumentative discourse analysis, this thesis identifies three dominant discourses that address these consequences of climate change induced migration and explores the island nation of Kiribati, although seemingly follows the lead of these dominant discourses, manages to shape and transform the discourses for the best interest of the Island Nation.

In recent years, several nations have adopted institutional framework laws, so-called Climate Change Acts (CCAs), as means to enforce Paris-compliant mitigation pathways. A key institutional feature to ensure policy stability and compliance with CCAs has been the establishment of independent advisory bodies, tasked with advising on mitigation targets and policy instruments, as well as the, monitoring and evaluation of target attainment. These advisory bodies are endowed with a crucial role in the long-term evaluation and planning process: examining how the low-carbon transition pathways might be achieved. Calling attention to the question of how transition pathways should be conceived and approached, whether it is in 'bio-physical' (climate science), 'techno- economic' (technology assessment/economics) or 'socio-technical' (socio-technical transition field) terms. Recent studies have indicated that a socio-technical transitions is increasingly framed as a question of removing carbon energy from various practices and infrastructures, challenging the dominant techno-economic approach of emissions reductions using carbon-pricing instruments. This thesis explores this challenge, drawing upon a case study of the establishment of the Swedish Climate Policy Council, by means of analyzing the process of institutionalization and how transition pathways are (re)produced discursively through the practices of climate policy evaluation and planning. The main findings of this thesis is that a cross-party consensus behind the Swedish CCA was formed around institutionalizing a 'bio-physical’ mitigation pathway, monitored and safeguarded by the Council which could assign 'political embarrassment' to governments failing to comply with the interim and long-term GHG mitigation targets. Beyond this consensus, the institutional design of the Council is the result of discursive struggles between actor-coalitions supporting techno-economic versus socio-technical transition pathways. However, the recently formed Council has come to challenge previously dominant techno-economic practices of forecasting cost-efficient emissions reductions. This has been accomplished by introducing a novel socio-technical approach to climate policy evaluation: the backcasting of interrelated technological and institutional shifts believed to be necessary in bringing about a low-carbon transition or transformation. Nevertheless, as this socio-technical practice primarily backcasts upon a number of key technological innovations, with limited changes to current industrial patterns of production and consumption, doubts are raised if this approach is to be considered as constitutive of transformative transition pathways.

Several studies suggest that the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries (DCs) can help such countries achieve national development goals - especially if accompanied by appropriate government policies designed to regulate and promote the use and the diffusion of ICTs in the national context. Over the past few years 'ICT policy' has thus become something worthy of academic attention, in particular in the ambit of ICT-for-development (ICT4D) literature. Scholarly studies on the subject have so far focused however primarily on policy content, and have often been prescriptive and/or evaluative in nature. Relatively less attention has been paid instead to the processes by which ICT policy is made in DCs - a lacuna reflected also in the relative scarcity, in the realm of ICT4D literature, of detailed theoretical frameworks with which to study ICT policymaking practice in DCs. This study intends to help fill this lacuna, by proposing an innovative framework for the analysis of ICT policy processes in DCs, and subjecting such a framework to a first 'proof of concept', through its application to a particular case (ICT policymaking in Uganda). In recognition of the importance of the cognitive aspects of policy practice, the framework proposed is interpretive in nature, and is organised around three 'movements', or steps: an analysis of the linguistic and non-linguistic constructs employed by policy actors to articulate discourse on ICT policymaking; an analysis of the key discourses around ICT policy constructed by policy actors in specific settings; and an analysis of the composition and the strength of the 'alliances', or coalitions, of actors that construct and propagate specific discourses in such settings. The ultimate purpose of this type of analysis is to understand how specific discourses on, or 'versions' of the ICT policy process gain particular purchase and acceptance in given national settings, thereby providing ICT policy actors with elements for reflection on the practices they are involved in. The framework proposed is particularly innovative in that integrates elements derived from mainstream political science and policy analysis literature - thus going some way in solidifying theorization in the ambit of ICT4D research. The study draws conclusions at two levels: at case level, findings indicate that Ugandan discourse around ICT policymaking appears to be constrained by the existence of a powerful, overall political discourse that defines ICT policy as necessarily 'participative'; at the level of theory and method, findings suggest that the framework proposed appears to be a viable and useful one for research on ICT policymaking practice in DCs.

This thesis investigates the role of discourse in our understanding of environmental issues, using an argumentative discourse analytical approach developed by Maarten Hajer. The case under study is the public debate around the Preem refinery expansion in the Swedish town of Lysekil, which mainly took place between 2019–2020. Particularly interesting about this case was the puzzling fact that all actors involved used climate-change mitigation as their main argument, regardless of being for or against the expansion, thus signalling differences in problem perception and representation. The ensuing public debate furthermore provided the opportunity to study Swedish environmental discourse in a non-traditional political arena. The results show the existence of four distinct discourses in the debate: one reformist, one pragmatic, one legalist, and one industrialist. All four refer to climate-change in their arguments but use it to promote different and conflicting actions. Interestingly, the results also show that both the reformist and the industrialist discourses were equally frequent in the debate, indicating the presence of two dominant discourses rather than one. Furthermore, despite the reformist being strictly anti-expansion and the industrialist being for expansion, they showed similarities in their ideological standpoints. Both discourses showed signs of ecomodernism, indicating a diversity within the Swedish ecomodernist discourse. Lastly, I conclude that the different discourses can be understood through the concept of discursive closure, where the ambiguity and simplification of concepts like climate-change lead actors to interpret it differently despite agreeing on the realness and severity of the issue.

[pt] No campo da Psicologia e da Didática de Línguas, pesquisas sobre aquisição e aprendizagem do discurso argumentativo entre crianças em fase de letramento têm conduzido à avaliação dessa competência discursiva, orientada por parâmetros definidores do modelo adulto de argumentar. Em decorrência, os estudos na área tendem a avaliar o texto argumentativo do escritor aprendiz na perspectiva da deficiência e inadequação e, sob a justificativa da complexidade cognitiva, o ensino da argumentação tem sido postergado para as séries finais do ensino fundamental (14- 15 anos). A hipótese implícita a tal decisão é a de que o ensino dos gêneros do discurso deva obedecer a uma gradativa sucessão, de modo que os gêneros da narração e descrição devam preceder ao ensino sistemático da argumentação. O primeiro objetivo relevante da pesquisa é o de determinar até que ponto alunos de 8-11 anos têm representado para si o esquema textual argumentativo, quando solicitados a produzir um texto de opinião em contexto escolar. O segundo é identificar como o esquema textual acionado é textualizado no modelo escrito de língua, considerando-se (1) o nível de desenvolvimento cognitivo da criança para lidar com a dimensão dialógica do discurso escrito; (2) as influências do modelo conversacional de mudança de turno na escrita do aprendiz; e (3) a ausência de ensino formalizado dos gêneros da argumentação no currículo escolar nas primeiras séries. Para atender a este propósito, o presente trabalho baseou- se na hipótese sociocognitiva de linguagem e na abordagem socionteracionista discursiva. A pesquisa analisa um corpus longitudinal, composto de 145 textos de opinião, produzidos pelos mesmos alunos entre a 2a. série e o início da 5a. série de uma escola pública, a partir da proposição de cinco diferentes tarefas. A análise orienta- se por dois enfoques: o primeiro foca a maneira como o escritor aprendiz constrói seu texto de opinião, no tocante à sua configuração textual, através de articulação e coordenação de seqüências textuais; o segundo incide sobre a natureza dos argumentos selecionados pelo aprendiz, no tocante à atitude epistemológica e evidencialidade. A pesquisa confirma que no que respeita à construção do discurso argumentativo e à capacidade de expressar opinião, a maioria das crianças é capaz de categorizar eventos comunicativos de linguagem em uso, mesmo que esse esquema não se adeque ao modelo prototípico de argumentação do adulto ou à expectativa da escola. Ao mesmo tempo, a pesquisa demonstrou que um simples dispositivo de conteúdo polêmico não determina, de antemão, o esquema textual a ser acionado pela criança para emoldurar sua argumentação; traços de natureza contextual e sociocognitiva são também utilizados para determinar a dimensão pragmática, discursiva e argumentativa do texto de opinião. Com base no exposto, defendemos que o ensino progressivo e sistemático da argumentação deve iniciar desde cedo nas práticas escolares de linguagem. / [en] In the field of Psychology and Didactics of Language many researches on the acquisition and learning process of argumentative discourse among elementary school students have led us to approach this discursive competence based on the parameters of adult mode of writing arguments. As a result, studies on the subject matter tend to conceive the children`s essays in terms of inadequacy and lack of proficiency; and as consequence of its complex cognitive demands the teaching of argument has been belated to the end of elementary school curriculum (14-15years old). The implicit hypothesis behind this procedure is that there is a graduation-succession for the learning of discursive genres in a way that narrative and descriptive genres should precede systematic teaching of argumentation. The prime goal of the present research is to determine to what extent 8-11 year-old pupils have represented for themselves the argumentative schema when they are asked to write an opinion essay as a school task. The second one is to identify how this textual schema is carried out by the learning children and textualized into written mode of language, considering (1) children`s cognitive development level to deal with the dialogic dimensions of written discourse; (2) the turn-take conversation influences on their writing, and (3) children`s lack of formal learning of argumentative genres in school curriculum. For this purpose we took as our basis on the sociocognitive hypothesis of language acquisition and on socionteracionist approach of language. The research analyses a longitudinal corpus composed of 145 essays produced by the same elementary school students from 2nd grade up to the beginning of 5th in a public school. The students were asked to write five different opinion essays. The analysis is split into two main focuses: the first one highlights the way the learning children build their written opinion in terms of textual configuration through both articulation and coordination of textual sequences; the second focus highlights the nature of arguments chosen by the learning children in terms of epistemological attitude and evidenciality. The research confirms that in the genre of argument and expressions of opinion, most of the children displays a particular knowledge to categorize communicative events of language in use, although the cognitive model triggered to convince and persuade the addressee could not necessarily suit the adult prototype schema and school expectations. At the same time, it also shows that a simple argumentative disposal does not determine beforehand the textual schema triggered by the children to frame their argumentation; contextual and sociocognitve features also determine the pragmatic, discursive and argumentative dimension of the text. Due to the features shown in the present research, and as far as pedagogy and didactic of language is concerned we defend that systematical and progressive teaching of argumentation should begin as early as possible in school context.