Diss. Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2009.

Esta dissertação constitui uma reflexão sobre a situação social, política e cultural da Inglaterra na década de 70, especialmente nos anos de 1972 e 1973, como descrita no romance Serena, de Ian McEwan. O objetivo principal desta pesquisa é apresentar como o momento histórico supracitado é narrado no discurso ficcional, a partir da perspectiva da personagem Serena, em comparação com o discurso histórico, de acordo com fontes selecionadas, que narram a história da Inglaterra no contexto da Guerra Fria, dos ataques terroristas do IRA e do funcionamento do Serviço Secreto doméstico inglês, chamado MI5. / This dissertation constitutes a reflection about the social, political and cultural situation of England in the 70s, especially in the years of 1972 and 1973, as described in the novel Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan. The main objective of this research is to present how the historical moment mentioned above is narrated in the fictional discourse, from the perspective of the character, in comparison with the historical discourse and from a selection of sources, which narrate the history of England in the context of the Cold War, the terrorist attacks of the IRA and the functioning of the English domestic Secret Service, called MI5.

This thesis analysed the variety of views expressed about disparities between Romanian Roma and non-Roma by people who are actively engaged in redressing unjust social and economic differences. The focus was placed on the variability of views between and within three different contexts: academic texts proposing policy measures for addressing disparities between Roma and non-Roma people; policy documents concerning measures for Roma inclusion; and conversations by people involved in the implementation of Roma inclusion policy measures. The general concerns of this study were to identify (1) the ways in which the problem of ethnic disparity was portrayed, (2) the solutions proposed to the problem of ethnic disparity, (3) the ambivalent, dilemmatic or concealed aspects concerning the topic of disparities between Roma and non-Roma people living in Romania, (4) whether the perspectives of Roma people were accounted for in the contexts analyses and (5) the similarities and differences between the discourses of academics, policy makers, practitioners and beneficiaries of public policies concerning disparities. The theoretical foundation for this thesis was offered by the social psychological literature that links disparities between groups of people and racial or ethnic prejudice. There are four ways in which this thesis has contributed to this literature. Firstly, most of the social psychological research on ethnic disparities has been experimental, whereas in this thesis, the focus was on the often overlooked discursive practices concerning ethnic disparities. Secondly, although some of the social psychological literature, especially research on the contact hypothesis and social identity theory, has looked at the dynamic interrelationship between advantaged and disadvantaged group members, most research has focused only on the perspectives of the advantaged group members. Therefore, there remains a research gap in the literature concerning the perspectives presented in inter-ethnic interactions, and even more so, by disadvantaged group members. This thesis added to the analysis the perspectives of advantaged and disadvantaged group members, both separately and in interaction. Thirdly, whereas emergent work looks at the ambivalent views towards ethnic or racial minorities, and the possible ironic effects of prejudice reduction strategies, there is virtually no research about the possible ironic, ambivalent or dilemmatic effects of strategies which target systemic based ethnic disparities - issues explored in this thesis. Finally, most social psychological research focuses on a single context of study, most commonly the public perceptions about members of the disadvantaged groups, but also marginally mass media representations, academic publications or political discourses. This thesis places attention on an equally important area of study concerned with whether and how discourses can move between different domains, and the impact or acknowledgement of elite discourses on the everyday conversations. There are four key findings that emerged from the studies conducted for this thesis. Firstly, it was found that while expressing views about ethnic disparity, academics, policymakers, practitioners and beneficiaries of public policies for Roma people displayed subtle forms of ethnicism. Secondly, a great deal of political discourse was devoted to the encouragement of individual changes in ethnic minorities, without a similar focus on the roles of majority group members in perpetuating inequality. Whereas, the problem of Roma inclusion was acknowledged by academics, policymakers, practitioners and beneficiaries of policy measures, to be a matter for public policies, some of the attribution of responsibility for inclusion was offered to Roma people, who were encouraged to change as individuals in accord with majoritarian norms. Thirdly, the analysis showed the inclusion of the perspectives of ethnic minorities only in two of the three contexts where policy measures for Roma people were proposed and implemented: academic publications and conversations. The perspectives of feminist experts and women were only marginally present in academic publications and conversations, while missing from policy discourses. Also the perspectives of academics or the non-hegemonic voices of excluded or disadvantaged Roma people were largely absent from the arguments presented in policy documents for Roma inclusion. Lastly, this thesis found that there are ambivalence, dilemmas and concealment at work within arguments proposing policy measures for redressing ethnic disparities, with important political consequences. The findings of this thesis contribute to the important conversation about the meanings of disparity and the political solutions for achieving equality between groups of people. Also, the findings of this thesis have important implications for the social psychological theory of disparity, the policies for redressing disparity and the social work practice with disadvantaged group members.

In this thesis, we aim to analyze the computational aspects of discourse annotation. Discourse is not only a concatenation of sentences / in fact the totality of discourse is more than the sum total of the sentences that constitute it. The property that differentiates discourse from a set of arbitrary sentences is defined as coherence. Coherence is established by the relations between the parts of discourse. We have a lexicalized approach to discourse, therefore in this study, discourse relations are considered to be set up by lexical items called discourse connectives. Systematic analysis of coherence requires an annotated corpus in which coherence relations are encoded. We developed an annotation environment to be used in an ongoing discourse level annotation project which aims to generate a theory-neutral source of coherence relations. We followed a data-driven methodology in design of the data structure employed in the annotation software. For this reason, we examined the predicate-argument structure of connectives. This analysis shows that stand-off annotation technique is more suitable than an inline method for such an annotation environment. This thesis also include a brief discussion on the formal implications of coherence relation constructions.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Linguistics, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 210-223.

Progressing into the 21st century young pregnancy and parenthood in the United Kingdom is a focus of political, media and public attention. The country is described as experiencing an epidemic, with the highest rates of young pregnancy and parenthood recorded in Western Europe. Statistics demonstrate that in 2000 38,690 under 18 year-olds in England became pregnant, of which 44.8% ended in legal termination. In light of this data, and within their remit to address the issue of Social Exclusion, New Labour commissioned a report into young pregnancy resulting in the development and implementation of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy. The Strategy has two main aims; namely reducing the rates of young conceptions and providing better support and education for young parents. This thesis argues from a conceptual framework that questions the contested assumption that young pregnancy and parenthood is a problem. A literature review demonstrates a lack of representation of the voices and experiences of young mothers. This directs the research question to ask what is the experience of young mothers in their own words and placed within context? Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine three examples of context shaping data that includes government policy, a newspaper article and a radio talk show programme. The analysis reveals discourses that suggest there is a right time and framework for motherhood. These discourses form a dialectical relationship with voices and experiences of young mothers that are analysed using Discourse Analysis. This analysis elicits two key central discourses permeating the experiences of young mothers that are the Good- Bad mother binary that informs and exacerbates experiences of maternal ambivalence. Moreover, these discourses inform the practice of discrimination against young mothers. The thesis concludes with a call to listen to the experiences of young mothers in order that their needs might be more fully understood. It suggests that discrimination against young mothers be incorporated into Equal Opportunity and Anti- Discrimination policy.

Esta dissertação constitui uma reflexão sobre a situação social, política e cultural da Inglaterra na década de 70, especialmente nos anos de 1972 e 1973, como descrita no romance Serena, de Ian McEwan. O objetivo principal desta pesquisa é apresentar como o momento histórico supracitado é narrado no discurso ficcional, a partir da perspectiva da personagem Serena, em comparação com o discurso histórico, de acordo com fontes selecionadas, que narram a história da Inglaterra no contexto da Guerra Fria, dos ataques terroristas do IRA e do funcionamento do Serviço Secreto doméstico inglês, chamado MI5. / This dissertation constitutes a reflection about the social, political and cultural situation of England in the 70s, especially in the years of 1972 and 1973, as described in the novel Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan. The main objective of this research is to present how the historical moment mentioned above is narrated in the fictional discourse, from the perspective of the character, in comparison with the historical discourse and from a selection of sources, which narrate the history of England in the context of the Cold War, the terrorist attacks of the IRA and the functioning of the English domestic Secret Service, called MI5.

The work aims to describe field of discourses, where the texts and talks about immigration (more concretely about immigrants in the Czech Republic) are created. The theoretical part describes the notions of nation and identity; it also provides a brief description of the explanatory models of migration and describes the universalism and particularism dichotomy in the immigration policies. Moreover it elaborates a concept of the multiculturalism as a discourse and construction. The concept of discourse is firstly explained in broader theoretical context, with reference to issues of language, power and ideology; secondly in its methodological consequences. Author also gives an account of linguistic tools (modality), and concepts of related sciences (binary opposition, ideological square). The analytical approach is based in the frame of the Critical discourse analysis. An important conclusion is the revelation of the risk as a discourse which legitimates the power and dominancy over immigrants. According different strategies regarding the risks' construction, three main categories in the field of discourse was considered: opportunity, ambivalence and threat. For the further study the author recommends to investigate the field of key actors who has a power to create and shape the discourses in this field.

With the advent of online publishing of scientific research came an avalanche of electronic resources and repositories containing knowledge encoded in some form or another. In the domain of biomedical sciences, research is now being published at a faster-than-ever pace, with several thousand articles per day. It is impossible for any human being to process that amount of information in due time, let alone apply it to their own needs. Thus appeared the necessity of being able to automatically retrieve relevant documents and extract useful information from text. Although it is now possible to distil essential factual knowledge from text, it is difficult to interpret the connections between the extracted facts. These connections, also known as discourse relations, make the text coherent and cohesive, and their automatic discovery can lead to a better understanding of the conveyed knowledge. One fundamental discourse relation is causality, as it is the one which explains reasons and allows for inferences to be made. This thesis is the first comprehensive study which focusses on recognising discourse causality in biomedical scientific literature. We first construct a manually annotated corpus of discourse causality and analyse its characteristics. Then, a methodology for automatically recognising causal relations using text mining and natural language processing techniques is presented. Furthermore, we investigate the automatic identification of additional information about the polarity, certainty, knowledge type and source of causal relations. The entire methodology is evaluated by empirical experiments, whose results show that it is possible to successfully extract causal relations from biomedical literature. Finally, we provide an example of a direct application of our research and offer ideas for further research directions and possible improvements to our methodology.

In der Stadtplanung hat sich in der jüngeren Vergangenheit Partizipation als neues Paradigma durchgesetzt. Projektentwickler, Planer und Politiker haben erkannt, dass Bauprojekte mit großem Einfluss auf Stadtgesellschaft und Stadtentwicklung nicht mehr ohne umfassende Bürgerbeteiligung durchgeführt werden können. Vorfälle wie die Unruhen um das Bahnhofsprojekt Stuttgart 21 haben gezeigt, dass die regulären Verfahren der Bauleitplanung mit ihren Instrumenten der formalen Bürgerbeteiligung (Anzeige und Auslage von Planungsunterlagen) nicht ausreichen, um einen gesellschaftlichen Konsens zu kontroversen Projekten zu erzielen. Die Problematik lässt sich zu einem großen Teil auf das sogenannte „Planungsparadox“ zurückführen: dezidierte Meinungen und Kritik aus der Bevölkerung bilden sich oft erst, wenn das jeweilige Projekt zur Ausführung kommt und konkrete Formen annimmt – also wenn die Planungen bereits abgeschlossen sind und jegliche weitere Änderung mit erheblichen Aufwendungen verbunden ist. [... aus dem Text]