In Sierra Leone unemployed young college graduates explored entrepreneurship as alternatives to formal employment. Qualitative approaches were followed to understand their motivations and the entrepreneurial environment in which they operated. The sample for this study included forty-two unemployed graduates in two regional districts of Sierra Leon and tenkey informants as resource persons. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with the graduates through individual interviews in the city of Freetown, Western district and focus groups in the city of Bo, Southern district. Telephone interviews were conducted with the tenkey informants/resources persons. Using the integrated theoretical frameworks of Azjen’s Theory of Planned Behavior and the Shapero-Sokol Entrepreneurial Event Model the study identified the underlying factors of desirability and feasibility of entrepreneurship with insights into the entry-level experiences in setting up a venture. The data wereanalyzed using the theoretical thematic approach and open coding techniques to identify patterns and trends. Thefindings were then triangulated and validated. Desirability of entrepreneurship was found to begenerallyhigh, but feasibility was generally low and difficult to explore. The inability to secure start-up capital and a generally weak support system for entry level entrepreneurs accounted for the barrierstosuccessful entrepreneurship. Two descriptive models, each on desirability and feasibility, were developed from the findings. Theyexplainthe processes involved in the transmission from entrepreneurial intentions to actions. The findings of this study would contribute to advocacy campaigns for the facilitation of entrepreneurship for unemployed young graduates aspiring for self-employment, inform educational programs about the gaps in entrepreneurial proficiencies, and advice policy interventions to scale-up support for young adults to enable them to create businesses for self-employment in a developing country context.The study suggests collaborative engagements to synergize the actions between communicators, educators and policy actors to facilitate entrepreneurship for unemployed graduates.

<p>  </p> <p>This study addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by investigating the manifestation of impoliteness through the use of emojis within the online Vietnamese community on social media. The research is guided by three central questions: (1) How do Vietnamese Facebook users use emojis in their posts and comments? (2) How do Vietnamese Facebook users perceive impolite behaviors in cyberspace? and (3). What strategies do Vietnamese speakers employ to express impoliteness with emojis on social media? Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on a corpus of posts and comments on a Facebook showbiz confession page. Results show that facial emojis, particularly those forming homogeneous sequences, are preferred, with laughter-related emojis prominently featured. Additionally, emotive particles, together with expletives, frequently co-occur with emojis, compensating for absent extralinguistic cues in computer-mediated communication. By administering checks using dictionaries, mutual information scores, collocation visualizations, and cosine similarity, a nuanced understanding of impoliteness in CMC was achieved. Religious influences, particularly from Buddhism, were found to play a significant role in shaping Vietnamese impoliteness perception, exemplified by terms such as <em>vô duyên</em> and <em>sân si</em>. A coding scheme informed by findings from the second research question on a sample of 100 first posts and comments in the main corpus was used. The study further substantiates the hypothesis that Vietnamese speakers predominantly employ implicational impoliteness strategies, particularly through multimodal mismatches facilitated by emojis. Conventionalized formulas featuring emojis were infrequent, suggesting a preference for more dynamic and context-specific impoliteness expressions. This research contributes to the refinement of impoliteness theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as providing a foundation for further studies in online discourse and natural language processing. </p>

<p>This investigation examined the functions of two Spanish discourse markers, <i>pues</i> and <i>bueno</i>, in the interlanguage of intermediate English-speaking learners of Spanish. <i>Pues</i> is translated in English to ‘so’, ‘then’, ‘cos’, and ‘well’, and <i>bueno</i> is translated in English to ‘well’ and ‘alright’. Discourse markers like <i>pues</i> and <i>bueno </i>provide cohesion in spoken interaction, and despite the lack of attention received in second language research and classrooms, they are important linguistic features for second language users. While several studies have addressed discourse markers by non-native speakers, the present investigation contributed to the scarce body of research on interlanguage discourse marker use in Spanish and to general theoretical discussions about second language discourse marker use and acquisition by considering discourse marker frequency in input and describing the use of <i>pues</i> and <i>bueno</i> in the interlanguage of Spanish learners. In this investigation, frequency of use, functional range, and functional distribution were analyzed as three distinct facets of discourse marker proficiency.</p> <p>Using a native speaker functional framework established by Travis (2005) for reference, the analyses responded to the following general questions: How do Spanish learners compare to native speakers of Peninsular Spanish in their frequency of use, functional range, and functional distribution of <i>pues</i> and <i>bueno</i>? How are these three variables among learners affected by a 6-week, language immersion study abroad program? Finally, how do native speakers of Peninsular Spanish and second language learners of Spanish compare in their characteristic patterns of <i>pues</i> and <i>bueno</i> functional use? Using oral interviews of 58 non-native (L2) Spanish speakers at the beginning and end of a program abroad and 14 native speakers (NS) of Spanish from Madrid, all tokens of <i>pues</i> (<i>N</i> = 506) and <i>bueno</i> (<i>N</i> = 273) were analyzed according to the functional framework (Travis, 2005). Analyses revealed infrequent L2 use of <i>pues </i>and <i>bueno</i> with a limited range of functions and distinct functional distribution compared to NS data. Over the program abroad, learners significantly increased their functional range of <i>pues</i>.<i> </i>No other significant differences in learner use over the program were identified. Detailed analysis of the patterns of use of native speakers and learners led to the identification of unique discourse marker uses in the interlanguage of learners. These findings were discussed in light of issues of interlanguage discourse marker use, discourse marker frequency in input, and second language instruction.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>It is well established that people are highly sensitive to timing in interaction and that delay of response is consequential in shaping the interaction (Davidson, 1984; Jefferson, 1989; Pomerantz, 1984; Roberts, Francis, & Morgan, 2006). There is also crosslinguistic evidence that people of different language backgrounds orient to these delays as problematic, though with different levels of tolerance (Roberts, Margutti, & Takano, 2011). However, few studies, if any, have focused on the timing of responsive actions such as laughter or open class repair initiators (OCRI; e.g., English “what?” or Japanese <em>nani).</em> Both types of actions fill the slot of responses but are semantically-underspecified. They provide no overt comment on the speaker’s talk; although laughter does have a sociocultural association with humor and positive affect. In effect, laughter and OCRI are “agnostic” responses whose interpretations are highly dependent on contextual factors. This dissertation explores the phenomena of laughter and OCRIs in relation to timing and delay and the possibility of crosslinguistic variation by examining delayed laughter and delayed OCRI in American English and Japanese via two inter-related studies.</p> <p>The first phase examined delayed laughter and delayed OCRI in naturally-occurring conversation (telephone calls) using the analytic framework of Conversation Analysis (CA). The data for this analysis came from the CallFriend – English (Northern US) and CallFriend – Japanese corpora of audio-only telephone call conversations between friends and are accessible through the TalkBank database (MacWhinney, 2007). The English corpus contains 31 half-hour conversations, and the Japanese corpus consisted or 32 half-hour conversations. The results suggest little crosslinguistic variation in the sequence and function of delayed laughter and delayed OCRI. However, the results of this phase indicate that delayed laughter is often found as a hearer’s response to the speaker’s delicate and is typically oriented to by the speaker as an affiliative signal, unless additional indications of disaffiliation also co-occur in the interaction. Delayed laughter also functions as a forecast of an upcoming action that may spark trouble in the interaction or pose a face threat (such as an imperative.) On the other hand, delayed OCRI seem to indicate the hearer’s surprise at some sequential trouble, such as a disjunctive topic, or in a sequence of disaffiliation.</p> <p>The second phase takes these insights gleaned from the CA phase and investigates them experimentally by asking native speakers of English and Japanese to report their perceptions of laughter or OCRI at one of three different delay lengths. Participants for this study were recruited via the online crowdsourcing platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk (for English native speakers; n = 413) and Crowdworks (for Japanese native speakers; n = 240). Participants were asked to complete an online Qualtrics survey in which they listen to short, simulated telephone calls and rate their perceptions of agreement, surprise, and avoidance in the context of a recipient’s delayed laughter or OCRI. The experiment was conducted as a between-groups design, so for each language group, participants were exposed to either the laughter or the OCRI condition at one of three delay levels (0ms, 400ms, or 600ms). The results support the CA findings, as the participants reported that laughter expressed more agreement and avoidance than OCRI, and OCRI expressed more surprise than laughter, regardless of delay length. As with the CA findings, there was little crosslinguistic variation, but there was indication that native English speakers were more likely than Japanese speakers to perceive laughter as an expression of agreement and OCRI as an expression of surprise.</p> <p>The overall results suggest that delayed laughter is typically oriented to as an affiliative action by the co-participant while OCRI is more of a neutral action that has the potential to be a face-threatening action. Because these non-linguistic features are understudied, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how the perceptions of seemingly agnostic responses are shaped by temporal characteristics and interactional sequence. </p>

<p>  </p> <p>The present study describes the pragmatic functions and the social meaning of the discourse marker (DM) <em>órale</em>. <em>Órale </em>is a recognized and salient DM in Mexican Spanish (Mejía-Gómez, 2008; Mendoza-Denton, 2011; Navarro, 2005), but research on its pragmatic meanings and use in interaction and society is minimal. Considering previous literature on discourse markers and descriptions of <em>órale</em>, two research questions were addressed to examine the pragmatic and sociolinguistic uses of <em>órale</em>: (1) What are the pragmatic functions of <em>órale</em>? and (2) Do gender, age, and educational level affect the use of <em>órale</em>? By answering these research questions, the current investigation represents the largest and most systematic analysis of <em>órale</em> to date, and it offers both pragmatic and sociolinguistic understandings. </p> <p>The analysis considered all 189 <em>órale </em>tokens in the Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México (CSCM) (Butragueño & Lastra, 2011–2015)<a href="https://hammer.purdue.edu/account/home#_ftn1" target="_blank">[1]</a>. The pragmatic analysis relied on an iterative approach, using open coding and axial coding (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). In addition, it relied on the triangulation of prior descriptions of <em>órale</em>, turn position, and the speakers’ positioning in the social narrative. For the sociolinguistic analysis, descriptive statistics and statistical models were used to understand the effect of gender, age, and education on <em>órale</em> in general and its different functions.</p> <p>Results indicated three discourse functions of <em>órale</em> (i.e., exhortation, affirmation, reorientation), each with two subfunctions. Exhortation functions appeared in first pair part positions (i.e., initiating) and aided speakers in positioning as authoritative. Affirmation functions were in second pair part positions (i.e., responsive) and reflected a more agreeable positioning, and reoriention functions were turn­ medial. Quantitative analysis of the distribution of <em>órale</em> indicated that affirmation was the most frequent function, followed by reorientation and then exhortation. Regarding the sociolinguistic variables, a quasi-Poisson regression model and multinomial logistical models revealed that gender had a statistically significant effect on <em>órale</em> use, in that men used the DM more than women. In addition, in the analysis of the effect of the social categories on function of <em>órale</em>, education had a significant effect. The middle educational level relied more on <em>órale </em>for affirmation compared to other functions than the other groups. The interaction between social categories and functions was discussed with respect to the findings related to gender and level of education.</p> <p>A main contribution of this investigation was the typology of the pragmatic functions of <em>órale</em>. The analysis was sufficient to explain all data and more economical than some prior descriptions. Furthermore, the proposed typology relies on a triangulation of pragmatic function, turn position, and the positioning made by the speaker, which taken together provide validity to the analysis. Other contributions were the distribution of the functions of<em> órale </em>in discourse and among social categories. In addition, a theoretical contribution was made by the proposal of the core meaning, leading to more precise understanding of <em>órale</em>. </p> <p>  <br>    </p> <p><a href="https://hammer.purdue.edu/account/home#_ftnref1" target="_blank">[1]</a> The CSCM is a balanced corpus of 108 interviews with men and women across three social classes and three age groups. Interviews addressed thematic modules, including life threatening situations.</p>

Adopting an eclectic analytic perspective of discourse analysis, conversation analysis and functional approaches, this study conducts an in-depth pragmatic analysis and describes the function of three pragmatic particles yani, iSte and Sey in casual, conversational Turkish. All three particles have multiple functions, which are described by reference to occurrences in utterances within three different domains of conversation. While utterance initial occurrences of yani are mainly connective and continuative, the utterance final placement of yani mainly acts as a situating particle with a strongly interactional nature. The utterance medial occurrences are basically &lsquo / self-editing&rsquo / whereby the speaker marks the clarification of a point in his/her prior talk. iSte mainly acts as a frame particle demarcating utterances as containing detailed, highlighted, and reported information as well as connecting distant pieces of utterances. The third particle Sey basically marks the speaker&rsquo / s temporary mental effort of extracting the linguistic information from the memory. In addition to its major role in repair organisation whereby marking its producer&rsquo / s verbal planning and word search, Sey displays caution and discretion and marks politeness when assessing/asserting something about the self or the other.

In this study, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze how queer women are represented in 34 English-language children’s picture books distributed in contemporary U.S. markets. I consider how these books include and exclude particular types of queer women characters and incorporate or omit specific queer women experiences. I argue that, in children's picture books, many queer women identities are “othered” through the binary oppositions of (i) lesbianism and motherhood and (ii) lesbianism and being a woman of color. In addition, (invisible) lesbianism in these picture books is still presented as an “issue.” The binary opposition of lesbianism and motherhood is created by making lesbianism invisible in children’s picture books by emphasizing mothering through the prominence of caregiving activities, limiting queer physical intimacy, limiting queer verbal intimacy, utilizing naming practices based on motherhood labels, and directing homophobia disproportionately at queer characters without children. The binary opposition of lesbianism and being a WOC is created by primarily featuring white queer characters. (Invisible) Lesbianism is still presented as an issue by the representation of two-mom families/queer relationships as “incomplete,” “unnatural,” “special,” “just the same as non-queer families and relationships,” and homonormativity. Informed by these results, I offer (i) a toolkit to evaluate the representation of queer women characters in picture books and (ii) a creative response to the queer women representation gaps in children’s literature.

<p>This investigation examined the effectiveness of different types of explicit classroom instruction on second language (L2) development of the Spanish discourse marker (DM) <em>pues</em>. While several studies have addressed the positive effect of explicit instruction on L2 DM development, the current investigation moves beyond the explicit-implicit method debate by examining the comparative effectiveness of different types of explicit instruction, specifically by comparing the effects of concept-based instruction (CBI), rule-based instruction (RBI), and a control group (CTRL). This investigation contributes to the field of instructed pragmatics by demonstrating how different types of explicit instruction can affect the robustness of pragmatics learning outcomes. Furthermore, with the inclusion of CBI, this investigation expands theoretical paradigms for L2 pragmatics teaching to include a less explored framework for instruction — sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1987).</p> <p><br></p> <p>Given the learnability problem posed by the low perceptual salience and extensive multifunctionality of DMs, along with their conceptual connections to important interactional practices and to a semantic core that guides their use in discourse, DMs and <em>pues</em> specifically were identified as a potentially ideal candidate for development through CBI. <em>Pues</em> is translated in English to ‘so’, ‘then’, ‘cos’, and ‘well’ and is a highly frequent feature of Spanish conversation (Domínguez García, 2016; Stenström, 2006a; Stenström, 2006b). DMs like <em>pues </em>contribute to speakers’ ability to communicate effectively and participate in social interaction (Crible & Pascual, 2020; Hayano, 2011; Hoshi, 2017; Thörle, 2016) and, thus, they are important linguistic features for L2 speakers.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Using a pre, post, and delayed post design, data were collected using an oral decision-making task and a dialogue reflection task. The analyses addressed whether CBI, RBI, and CTRL produce the same effect on L2 Spanish learners’ <em>pues</em> frequency of use, <em>pues</em> functional range, and use of <em>pues</em> in interaction. As a secondary objective, the analyses also considered whether CBI and RBI produce the same effect on L2 Spanish learners’ ability to transfer learning to unlearned DMs.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Quantitative analyses, which addressed the learners’ ability to use <em>pues</em> frequently and for a range of functions, indicated an advantage for the CBI group, with CBI learners using <em>pues</em> with greater frequency of use and functional range than RBI and CTRL learners. The qualitative analysis, which addressed the learners’ ability to use <em>pues</em> in interaction, also indicated an advantage for the CBI group, with CBI learners using <em>pues</em> to express a stance of givenness towards utterances as well as to manage turn-taking in interaction. CBI learners’ use of <em>pues</em> for accomplishing these two interactional practices indicated a deeper understanding of <em>pues</em> and how the DM can be used to accomplish social actions in interaction.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Overall, the findings provide support for the claim that CBI is superior to traditional explicit models of instruction (Erikson, Lanning, & French, 2017) and suggest that the learnability problem of DMs may be lessened by providing a conceptual structure that presents learners with a framework for organizing DM multifunctionality and that also highlights the interactional importance of DMs as tools that can be used to accomplish social actions. The findings are discussed considering the role of conceptual knowledge in L2 DM development and implications for pragmatics instruction.</p>

<p>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). </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p>

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a popular curricular approach in medical education. This thesis asks the question: How does PBL teach medical students about what matters in medicine using qualitative methods. The research demonstrates that PBL contributes to the on-going marginalisation of social issues in medical education.