Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / No autorizada su publicación a texto completo, según petición de su autor / To date, most of the existing standard grammatical descriptions of the English language have used decontextualised written sentence tokens as their primary source of data. However, these standard grammatical descriptions have overlooked the complexities of the constructions and patterns which can be normally found in oral interactions. The present research study aims to determine the defining structural properties and discourse-pragmatic functions of adnominal and sentential English relative clauses in spontaneous oral narratives produced by adult native speakers of British English. For this purpose, 110 relative clauses which were gathered from 4 interviews collected from an online British database of real life personal narratives of health and illness experiences were analysed. Results show that some instances of adnominal relative clauses and sentential relative clauses differ structurally from relative clauses commonly found in written English for such factors as the proximity between the antecedent and the relative clause, on the one hand, and the role of ellipsis in spoken interactions, on the other hand. It was also found that relative clauses in spoken interactions can be considered supra-sentential units which serve six different discourse pragmatic functions: narrative, evaluative, argumentative, reporting, descriptive and informative.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / No autorizada su publicación a texto completo, según petición de su autor. / The present research focuses on the implicit compliments among the native speakers of American English. The pioneering research by Manes and Wolfson (1981) revealed that verbal compliments in middle-­‐class American society are “formulaic”, meaning that a small variety of constructions accounts for the majority of the data. Since then, existing research has focused almost exclusively on the explicit compliments and appears to have adopted a restricted view of the gender differences in verbal complimenting behaviour. This work argues that a more balanced picture of complimenting is required, and to this end, presents discourse and conversation analysis of 40 samples of implicit compliments, produced by male and female TV presenters of 4 American talk-­‐shows. By taking a stance of the “difference” approach to gender discourse (e.g. Tannen, 1991), it attempts at discovering gender-­‐based differences between their topics, linguistic realisation and functions. Overall showing a significant distinction between the use of implicit compliments by men and women in terms of their form and function, and an asymmetry in their topics, the research makes a contribution to the existing work on discourse and gender. On the one hand, it adds new perspectives and findings about the difference in the ways men and women construct conversations and build social relations through complimenting. On the other hand, it shows how a shift from explicitness to implicitness in evaluative language allows the speakers to deal with topics not commonly associated with gender expectations.

Tesis para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The analysis presented in this presentationcenters on conversational turn-taking in these interviews and a comparative analysis of the interactions among different politicians according to a conversational structural interaction, examining, specially, the organization of turn-taking, along with, the conceivableadjustments thatturn-taking system can suffer such as interruptions, overlaps and some others In this opportunity, the analysis will be particularly keen on deviances from the turn-taking regulation that stipulates that only one party should talk at a time. The original hypothesis is that the interactions amongst politicians and the interviewer are surrounded by general features of the political interview; however these interactions also display certain areas of variability that replicatecertain ambiguity about the roles of the interlocutors.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística, mención Lengua Inglesa / The relations holding between politics and cognitive science have to do with the cognitive unconscious level: much of what we interpret from political discourse does not lie in the linguistic expressions being used but in the interpretation that is activated and configured in our minds by such expressions. According to van Dijk (2002) and Lakoff (2009), the domain of political discourse and cognition has not received enough attention so far. Taking this into account, the main motivation of the present research was to attempt to determine discoursal interconnections holding between the operation of conceptual metaphors by means of the examination of the paradigmatic sets of linguistic expressions which formalise them at text level, and the expressions of evaluative meanings according to the proposals by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the former, and Martin and White (2005), the latter. Focusing on political discourse, the corpus chosen consisted of public political speeches given by the latest two presidents of the United States, namely, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It is proposed the existence of linguistic differences in opposing politicians’ public speeches when they express their ideological positions by means of joint expressions of Conceptual Metaphors and Appraisal Items, this difference being in correlation with Lakoff (2009)’s proposal of metaphorical systems of moral values. In addition, it is also proposed the existence of a metaphorical evaluative discourse modelled by the participants in discourses such as the ones presented in this study.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / The present two-fold theoretical research attempts to firstly identify the emotions that emerge in the oral narratives of twelve pre-service English teachers about their learning experience and, secondly, to examine their linguistic instantiation. The analysis was centred upon how the twenty two emotions, as defined by Ortony, Clore, & Collins (1988), relate to specific events, agents and objects involved in this experience of learning English in tertiary education. A secondary step was to analyse the emotion-indexed utterances and recognise lexical and discursive patterns across the corpus. The results showed a slight increase in the display of negative emotions across participants, which can be interpreted through linguistic theory of cultural scripts. It was also revealed from the data the occurrence of reproach as the highest cued emotion associated to classmates and teachers, yielding insightful reflections as to the role of those agents in the learning experience and identity construction. Finally, the discussion on the interplay of emotions, multiple functions and concept metaphors for emotions helped elucidate on the long-held debate over linguistic relativism or universality of emotions.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / The purpose of this research is to analyze ironic and sarcastic utterances in the number of occurrence and their sociopragmatic function is sitcoms from different decades from 1950 to 2010. To carry out the analysis, seven transcripts from seven different decades with their correspondent videos were selected. Once the ironic and sarcastic utterances were identified, two matrices of analysis were utilized. For ironic utterances, the matrix of analysis proposed by Aguilera et. al (2001) and for sarcastic utterances, the matrix of analysis proposed by Negrón (2011). The results show a homogeneous occurrence of ironic utterances through decades whereas sarcasm becomes recurrent from 1970 on. This suggests that sarcasm corresponds to a contemporary phenomenon that evolved with the natural evolution of sitcoms regarding the social context of the decade. The same social context seems to limit or increase the sociopragmatic functions of these rhetorical devices. In the case of irony, its use seems to change over time while approaches and Humorous effect seem to constitute a permanent part of the genre. In the case of sarcasm, the results suggest that FTA change over time whereas the speaker attitude seems to be bounded to the characteristics of the sitcoms. Appraisal seems to constitute a feature of sarcastic utterances as indicated by its predominance in the analysis.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / In the recent decades, many studies on the subject of sarcasm have been conducted, though not as abundantly as irony has been investigated into. However, the expression of sarcasm seems to be as relevant as the expression of irony in the general study of the main aspects and dimensions involved in the configuration of pragmatic meanings that are characteristic of conversational interactions. Sarcasm has often been intermingled with irony in the research conducted in different academic disciplines. Within linguistic studies, there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are part of the same communicative phenomenon or whether they are related to each other hierarchically, such that irony may be viewed as constituting the superordinate category and sarcasm may be regarded as a manifestation of the former. In fact, the latter has been defined, in broad terms, “as an overtly aggressive type of irony” (Attardo, 2000:795). However, some other specialists, such as Barbe (1995), contend that the expression of either sarcasm or irony involves different, if not opposite, principles of pragmatic behaviour: on the one hand, an ‘ironic utterance’constitutes a ‘face-saving’ act; on the other, a sarcastic utterance is a ‘face-threatening act’ (cf. Brown and Levinson, 1987).

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Nuestra investigación ha consistido en un estudio comparativo de la frecuencia de ocurrencia de tanto los „patrones sintácticos evaluativos‟ (Hunston y Sinclair 2001) como de los „significados valorativos‟ (Martin y White 2005) i.e., significados semántico-pragmáticos evaluadores empleados en textos expositivos científicos escritos en inglés. En este tipo textual3, se incluyen, primero, artículos publicados en revistas4 científicas; segundo, artículos periodísticos de investigación científica publicados en revistas destinadas al público en general y tercero, editoriales publicados en números extraordinarios de revistas de investigación científica.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa