The terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and its place in post-war German history have been an important topic and therefore featured in public discourses of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1970 and 2008. The question whether this complex discourse and the underlying political and social views have changed significantly over the past four decades is addressed in this thesis. Considering the dialectic relationship of discourse and society, a qualitative and quantitative discourse-linguistic study of a corpus of newspaper articles of this time period is conducted. The online archive of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was selected as a source to establish the text corpus for this study. The analysis follows the methodology of the Düsseldorfer discourse-linguistic research and is informed by the general approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. After a brief discussion of the role of language in the construction of social reality, the relevant scholarly literature is reviewed and an overview of the major historical events in the context of the RAF is provided. The two theoretical discourse-linguistic approaches are discussed in some detail to derive the units of analysis and the necessary categories for the textual analysis in this project. These categories are then operationalized for this study. The focus lies on categories such as lexical choice, metaphors, semantic fields, argumentation patterns, and meta-linguistic comments. A pilot study was conducted to determine the scope of the representative corpus and to establish a set of concrete categories. Two complex topics for a detailed analysis were chosen: Mythos (myth) and Gnade (mercy, pardon, leniency). The analysis of a ‘Mythos RAF’ showed that the meaning of this phrase is highly polysemous in the whole period that was analyzed. It is interpreted as a Schlagwort as a means to evoke several semantic meanings. The field of Gnade is analyzed mainly for Argumentationstopoi (argumentation structures) that have been used in discussing whether or not former RAF terrorists should be released from prison. The analysis showed that there has been a certain change in the way the topic was publicly discussed, but it was not significant enough to infer a change in society’s view towards the topic. On the contrary, one could argue on the basis of this analysis that many of the biased views in German society remained stable.

The terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and its place in post-war German history have been an important topic and therefore featured in public discourses of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1970 and 2008. The question whether this complex discourse and the underlying political and social views have changed significantly over the past four decades is addressed in this thesis. Considering the dialectic relationship of discourse and society, a qualitative and quantitative discourse-linguistic study of a corpus of newspaper articles of this time period is conducted. The online archive of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was selected as a source to establish the text corpus for this study. The analysis follows the methodology of the Düsseldorfer discourse-linguistic research and is informed by the general approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. After a brief discussion of the role of language in the construction of social reality, the relevant scholarly literature is reviewed and an overview of the major historical events in the context of the RAF is provided. The two theoretical discourse-linguistic approaches are discussed in some detail to derive the units of analysis and the necessary categories for the textual analysis in this project. These categories are then operationalized for this study. The focus lies on categories such as lexical choice, metaphors, semantic fields, argumentation patterns, and meta-linguistic comments. A pilot study was conducted to determine the scope of the representative corpus and to establish a set of concrete categories. Two complex topics for a detailed analysis were chosen: Mythos (myth) and Gnade (mercy, pardon, leniency). The analysis of a ‘Mythos RAF’ showed that the meaning of this phrase is highly polysemous in the whole period that was analyzed. It is interpreted as a Schlagwort as a means to evoke several semantic meanings. The field of Gnade is analyzed mainly for Argumentationstopoi (argumentation structures) that have been used in discussing whether or not former RAF terrorists should be released from prison. The analysis showed that there has been a certain change in the way the topic was publicly discussed, but it was not significant enough to infer a change in society’s view towards the topic. On the contrary, one could argue on the basis of this analysis that many of the biased views in German society remained stable.

This thesis begins with the assertion that there are serious inadequacies in the academic writing of Japanese students of English studying at the post-secondary level in Japan. To substantiate this claim, Chapter 1 presents a preliminary profile of student writing, based on a survey of the literature, the testimony of established authorities, and representative samples of student compositions, establishing baseline parameters of infelicity in their written work and identifying key features that characterize such writing. This survey also reveals numerous problems inherent in the research carried out to date, including the fact that terminological confusions are widespread and findings tend to be impressionistic and anecdotal. Chapter 1 concludes with a statement of the basic premise of this thesis, claiming that given effective instruction, based on an integrated approach to composition pedagogy, Japanese EL2 students are capable of making significant improvements in their academic writing skills. Although purely descriptive, taxonomic approaches to the analysis of written discourse, such as the profile of student writing presented in Chapter 1, are often a useful initial heuristic, they also have a number of important limits, especially in accommodating cross-language linguistic evidence, and in providing a suitable basis for understanding the origins of students' writing difficulties. Such issues cannot be resolved at this level of analysis and need to be addressed within a framework of applied linguistic theory. Chapter 2 establishes this framework, exploring the evolution of research models in contrastive rhetoric and examining the influence of related areas of investigation in contrastive linguistics and discourse linguistics. Based on the assumption that language learners will transfer the rhetorical features of their native language to the target language, causing interference in second language writing, contemporary theories in contrastive rhetoric have moved beyond the boundaries of text itself to include the cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of language transfer, in particular the context in which text is produced, both situational and cultural. This research paradigm provides the theoretical basis for the investigations that follow, defining the conceptual parameters of the present study. Although contrastive rhetoric has been strongly influenced by movements within applied linguistics, it also has a direct relationship with both classical and modem rhetoric. Chapter 3 explores this relationship, examining the evolution of rhetoric and discourse education in the western tradition in an investigation designed to clarify the standards, norms, and conventions that define the writing canon of modem English prose, and to identify the historical antecedents of modem-day disciplines such as discourse analysis, text linguistics, and composition pedagogy. While the study of rhetoric helps specify the qualities that define effective writing in English, how they originated, and why they continue to be valued, the vi goal of research in composition pedagogy is to develop approaches, methods, and techniques for the classroom which will tell us how such writing should be taught. Chapter 4 provides an overview of composition pedagogy in both Li and L2 contexts, investigating the multiplicity of approaches to teaching writing cuffently proliferating in the field and the theoretical assumptions that underlie them. Chapters 5 and 6 provide a roughly parallel descriptive framework for Japanese rhetoric along cultural, historical, and educational dimensions, for if rhetorical transfer from Japanese can be presumed to be one the main reasons for students' writing difficulties in English, then it is essential to have a rigorous accounting of Japanese rhetorical conventions, including the cultural and educational contexts from which they arise. Chapter 5 defines the principal characteristics of Japanese rhetoric from a sociohistorical perspective, identifying formative elements in the culture that influence rhetorical values and preferences, while Chapter 6 assesses the educational environment in which writing skills are acquired in Japan in a survey of Li and L2 composition instruction and practice in Japanese schools. Building on the conclusions drawn from these investigations, Chapter 7 sets forth a proposal of pedagogic action designed to offer solutions to the writing difficulties of Japanese EL2 students in an approach to L2 composition instruction which integrates research in contrastive rhetoric, applied linguistic theory, and general pedagogic principles. This proposed pedagogy is tested in an empirical study of student writing based on a pretestlposttest, experimental/control group design, and the results are discussed in terms of the importance of integrating approaches to composition pedagogy along diachronic, synchronic, and human dimensions.

Dans le cadre d’une sémantique linguistique reposant sur la distinction signification/sens et partant du principe que le sens se construit en discours, nos recherches ont pour objectif de rendre compte de la diversité des emplois d’un signe dans une perspective intégrant la prosodie, afin de définir un processus de discrimination prosodique des différents sens d’une même unité tels qu'ils peuvent être décrits sur la base de corpus oraux authentiques. Elles portent sur un ensemble d’objets empiriques, de enfin à quelques ou oui en passant par disons, mais principalement sur des connecteurs discursifs. Après avoir mis au jour des corrélations forme prosodique/sens au niveau du lexique, et en prenant en compte le caractère gradable de la langue ainsi que la notion d’argumentation dans la langue, nous proposons un nouveau format de représentation sémantique distinguant, sur la base de nos résultats, deux niveaux de sens que sont l’interprétation-type et l’emploi-type, ce dernier présentant la particularité de comporter un commentaire exprimé par la prosodie, commentaire qui porte sur le rapport à la situation et/ou à l'énonciation. L’intégration d’un niveau de sens supplémentaire constitue l’originalité de ce nouveau format et présente l’avantage de réduire les phénomènes de surgénéralisations observables dans les caractérisations sémantiques des emplois. Nous présentons ensuite la façon dont nos résultats pourraient être intégrés à une perspective lexicographique, et dont ils pourraient permettre d'obtenir à la fois une plus grande cohérence et une plus grande exhaustivité des articles d’une entrée de dictionnaire, et une prise en compte systématique de la prosodie des emplois. / Within a linguistic approach to semantics based on the distinction between signification and sense (lexical meaning) and the assumption that sense is built it in discourse, our research aims is to account for the diversity of uses of a sign in a perspective that integrates the prosodic dimension of the interpretative process. Based extensively on authentic oral corpora and, its goal is to define a process of prosodic discrimination of the different senses of the same lexical unit. It deals with of empirical objects, from French enfin to quelques (some) or oui (yes) passing by disons (so to say, etc.), but essentially about discourse connectives (discourse markers). After establishing the existence of an association of prosody and senses at the level of lexicon, which takes into account the gradable nature of language (la langue) and its argumentative nature, we present a new semantic model in which the classical level of sense or lexical meaning is described as split between two levels of sense which are interpretation-type and use-type, the specificity of the latter being to include a prosodically expressed lexicalized comment about the speaker's relationship with the situation and/or its own discourse or enunciation. The integration of an additional level of sense is the originality of the new model. It aims at reducing the otherwise constant fatality of over-generalisation in the semantic characterisations of lexical uses. We further present the way our results could be integrated into a lexicographic perspective in order to obtain both more coherent and more exhaustive descriptions of actual language use in dictionaries and a systematic description of prosody within each entry.

This study brings together two approaches to linguistic variation, Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar and Labovian variation theory, and in doing so brings together a functional interpretation of language and its empirical investigation in its social context. The study reports on an empirical investigation of the concept of text. The investigation proceeds on the basis of a corpus of texts gathered in sociolinguistic interviews with fifty adult speakers of Australian English in Sydney. The total corpus accounted for in terms of text type or genre numbers 420 texts of varying length, 125 of which, produced in response to four narrative questions, are investigated in greater detail in respect both of the types of text they constitute as well as of some of their linguistic realisations. These largely narrative-type texts, which represent between two and three hours of spoken English and total approximately 53000 words, are presented in a second volume analysed in terms of their textual or generic structure as well as their realisation at the level of the clause complex. The study explores in some detail models of register and genre developed within systemic-functional linguistics, adopting a genre model developed by J.R. Martin and others working within his model which foregrounds the notion that all aspects of the system(s) involved are related to one another probabilistically. In order to investigate the concept of text in actual discourse under conditions which permit us to become sufficiently confident of our understanding of it to proceed to generalisations about text and its contextual conditioning in spoken discourse, we turn to Labovian methods of sociolinguistic inquiry, i.e. to quantitative methods or methods of quantifying linguistic choice. The study takes the sociolinguistic interview as pioneered by Labov in his study of phonological variation in New York City and develops it for the purpose of investigating textual variation. The question of methodology constitutes a substantial part of the study, contributing in the process to a much greater understanding of the very phenomenon of text in discourse, for example by addressing itself to the question of the feasibility of operationalising a concept of text in the context of spoken discourse. The narrative-type texts investigated in further detail were found to range on a continuum from most experientially-oriented texts such as procedure and recount at one end to the classic narrative of personal experience and anecdote to the increasingly interpersonally-oriented exemplum and observation, both of which become interpretative of the real world in contrast to the straightforwardly representational slant taken on the same experience by the more experientially-oriented texts. The explanation for the generic variation along this continuum must be sought in a system of generic choice which is essentially cultural. A quantitative analysis of clausal theme and clause complex-type relations was carried out, the latter by means of log-linear analysis, in order to investigate their correlation with generic structure. While it was possible to relate the choice of theme to the particular stages of generic structures, clause complex-type relations are chosen too infrequently to be related to stages and were thus related to genres as a whole. We find that while by and large the choice of theme correlates well with different generic stages, it only discriminates between different genres, i.e. generic structures in toto, for those genres which are maximally different. Similarly, investigating the two choices in the principal systems involved in the organisation of the clause complex, i.e. the choice of taxis (parataxis vs. hypotaxis) and the (grammatically independent) choice of logico-semantic relations (expansion vs. projection), we find that both those choices discriminate better between types more distant on a narrative continuum. The log-linear analysis of clause complex-type relations also permitted the investigation of the social characteristics of speakers. We found that the choice of logico-semantic relations correlates with genre and question, while the choice of taxis correlates with a speaker's sex and his membership of some social group (in addition to genre). Parataxis is favoured by men and by members of the group lowest in the social hierarchy. Age on the other hand is not significant in the choice of taxis at all. In other words, since social factors are clearly shown to be significant in the making of abstract grammatical choices where they cannot be explained in terms of the functional organisation of text, we conclude that social factors must be made part of a model of text in order to fully account for its contextual conditioning. The study demonstrates that an understanding of the linguistic properties of discourse requires empirical study and, conversely, that it is possible to study discourse empirically without relaxing the standards of scientific inquiry.

This study brings together two approaches to linguistic variation, Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar and Labovian variation theory, and in doing so brings together a functional interpretation of language and its empirical investigation in its social context. The study reports on an empirical investigation of the concept of text. The investigation proceeds on the basis of a corpus of texts gathered in sociolinguistic interviews with fifty adult speakers of Australian English in Sydney. The total corpus accounted for in terms of text type or genre numbers 420 texts of varying length, 125 of which, produced in response to four narrative questions, are investigated in greater detail in respect both of the types of text they constitute as well as of some of their linguistic realisations. These largely narrative-type texts, which represent between two and three hours of spoken English and total approximately 53000 words, are presented in a second volume analysed in terms of their textual or generic structure as well as their realisation at the level of the clause complex. The study explores in some detail models of register and genre developed within systemic-functional linguistics, adopting a genre model developed by J.R. Martin and others working within his model which foregrounds the notion that all aspects of the system(s) involved are related to one another probabilistically. In order to investigate the concept of text in actual discourse under conditions which permit us to become sufficiently confident of our understanding of it to proceed to generalisations about text and its contextual conditioning in spoken discourse, we turn to Labovian methods of sociolinguistic inquiry, i.e. to quantitative methods or methods of quantifying linguistic choice. The study takes the sociolinguistic interview as pioneered by Labov in his study of phonological variation in New York City and develops it for the purpose of investigating textual variation. The question of methodology constitutes a substantial part of the study, contributing in the process to a much greater understanding of the very phenomenon of text in discourse, for example by addressing itself to the question of the feasibility of operationalising a concept of text in the context of spoken discourse. The narrative-type texts investigated in further detail were found to range on a continuum from most experientially-oriented texts such as procedure and recount at one end to the classic narrative of personal experience and anecdote to the increasingly interpersonally-oriented exemplum and observation, both of which become interpretative of the real world in contrast to the straightforwardly representational slant taken on the same experience by the more experientially-oriented texts. The explanation for the generic variation along this continuum must be sought in a system of generic choice which is essentially cultural. A quantitative analysis of clausal theme and clause complex-type relations was carried out, the latter by means of log-linear analysis, in order to investigate their correlation with generic structure. While it was possible to relate the choice of theme to the particular stages of generic structures, clause complex-type relations are chosen too infrequently to be related to stages and were thus related to genres as a whole. We find that while by and large the choice of theme correlates well with different generic stages, it only discriminates between different genres, i.e. generic structures in toto, for those genres which are maximally different. Similarly, investigating the two choices in the principal systems involved in the organisation of the clause complex, i.e. the choice of taxis (parataxis vs. hypotaxis) and the (grammatically independent) choice of logico-semantic relations (expansion vs. projection), we find that both those choices discriminate better between types more distant on a narrative continuum. The log-linear analysis of clause complex-type relations also permitted the investigation of the social characteristics of speakers. We found that the choice of logico-semantic relations correlates with genre and question, while the choice of taxis correlates with a speaker's sex and his membership of some social group (in addition to genre). Parataxis is favoured by men and by members of the group lowest in the social hierarchy. Age on the other hand is not significant in the choice of taxis at all. In other words, since social factors are clearly shown to be significant in the making of abstract grammatical choices where they cannot be explained in terms of the functional organisation of text, we conclude that social factors must be made part of a model of text in order to fully account for its contextual conditioning. The study demonstrates that an understanding of the linguistic properties of discourse requires empirical study and, conversely, that it is possible to study discourse empirically without relaxing the standards of scientific inquiry.

Orientador: Sirio Possenti / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-20T10:50:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 OliveiraBitencourt_DaianeRodriguesde_M.pdf: 1022614 bytes, checksum: 90f72f4703c12467ebef8acea3f7420a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar como a Semântica Global Batista filtra discursos sobre o feminino na revista Visão Missionária. Este trabalho fundamenta-se nas noções de Semântica Global e de Discursos Constituintes propostas por Maingueneau. O corpus de análise é a revista Visão Missionária, a qual é uma publicação da União Feminina Missionária Batista do Brasil. Essa revista ensina como a mulher batista deve exercer suas funções diárias como uma mulher cristã. Nesta pesquisa, inicialmente, discute-se o espaço protestante brasileiro e a constituição do discurso batista. Em seguida, descreve-se a Semântica Global Batista e seu funcionamento nas práticas da Igreja. A seguir, apresenta-se a constituição de Visão Missionária, contrapondo-a a outras revistas femininas. Posteriormente, analisa-se como a revista representa a mulher batista em seus papéis de mãe, esposa e profissional como uma "Mulher Cristã em Ação". Depois disso, investiga-se como a Semântica Global Batista também regula as recomendações indicadas à mulher em seu cuidado com o corpo e a beleza. Por fim, verifica-se o funcionamento dessa Semântica Global no sistema de citações, particitações e comentários na revista. Os resultados da pesquisa mostram como a Semântica Global Batista regula não apenas os níveis discursivos, mas também os institucionais da Igreja, bem como os discursos sobre o feminino veiculados em Visão Missionária / Abstract: The objective of this research is to analyze how Baptist Global Semantic filters discourses about the feminine in Visão Missionária magazine. This work is based in the notions of Global Semantic and Constituents Discourses proposed by Maingueneau. The corpus of analysis is the Visão Missionária magazine, which is a publication of the Baptist Woman's Missionary Union of Brazil. The magazine teaches the Baptist Woman how to play her various functions in daily as a Christian. First of all, this research discusses the Brazilian Protestant space and the constitution of the Baptist discourse. Second, it describes the Baptist Global Semantics and its functioning in the church practices. Next, it presents the constitution of Visão Missionária, contrasting it to other women's magazines. Later, it considers how the magazine represents the Baptist woman in their roles as mother, wife and professional as a "Christian Women in Action." After that, it investigates how the Global Semantic Baptist also regulates the recommendations given to women in their care with her body and beauty. Finally, it verifies the functioning of this Global Semantic in the system of citations, particitations and comments in the magazine. The research results show how the Baptist Global Semantic regulates not only the discursive level, but also the institutional church as well the discourses about the women published in Visão Missionária / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística