During a few hours of a school day, a student might read textbook texts which are highly diversified in terms of abstraction. Abstraction is a central feature of specialized language and the transition from everyday language to specialized language is one of the most important things formal education can offer students. That transition is the focus of this thesis. This study introduces a new three-graded classification of abstraction including the levels of specificity, generalization and abstraction, based on a discussion of the concept of abstraction. The investigations performed, based on this classification, show that texts from different subject areas display distinct patterns of abstraction. The Swedish literary texts had the lowest degree of abstraction, the social science texts had an intermediate degree and the natural science texts were the most generalized and abstract. The results also show that the degree of abstraction in the textbook texts increases in later grade levels. The thesis presents a new way of analyzing shifts between levels of abstraction and their functions. Interestingly, the texts with a medium degree of abstraction, the social science texts, are the ones with the greatest variety in shifts. The functions of the shifts differ with respect to cultural domains. The shifts in the Swedish literary texts in general belong to the everyday domain while the shifts in the natural science texts belong to a specialized domain. The shifts in the social science texts had features of both domains. A secondary aim of the thesis is to develop the understanding of the relationship between author and reader in the texts. The results from my investigation of modality in the Swedish textbook texts confirm the earlier findings from English and Spanish textbooks. In comparison to other text types, textbook texts present knowledge in a more authoritative and less modalized way. From time to time, abstraction is described as a feature that hinders students accessing texts. Some researchers even suggest a removal of features of specialized language in textbook texts, in order to increase students’ understanding. However, in a society where specialized knowledge is necessary, the access to specialized texts is important. A democratic view of education and school mandates that children and adolescents have the opportunity to encounter and learn to encounter specialized language in school. In analyzing the texts special attention is paid to the relationship between the texts, the contexts of use and the student readers.

Already in the second century, the Church Father Irenaeus warned against reading the Gospel of Truth that was used among the so-called Valentinians. For more than one and a half millennium GospTruth was lost until in the 1950s a Coptic text was discovered that could be a translation of that work both loved and hated. Since the discovery scholars have tried to determine whether the Coptic text represents the one mentioned by Irenaeus, and whether its author might even be the famous Gnostic teacher Valentinus of Alexandria. The text is very complex and the present study the first attempt to use text linguistic tools for analysing GospTruth. A new and sometimes radically different translation is presented, and an hypothesis of date of redaction and authorship is put forward. Previously Gnostic texts have usually been read in light of the reports of the Church Fathers. In this study an attempt is made to detect topics that were interesting for the Valentinians and that have so far been neglected. The analysis presents a new ethical debate among early Christians regarding the Biblical law, and a hypothesis of how the author of GospTruth wanted his or her community to act towards the neighbouring communities is elaborated. In addition my investigation draws attention to an interpretation of the crucifixion that seems to have distinguished Valentinians from others. For a long time scholars depicted the Gnostics as evil opponents to the church. During the last decades this view has been criticized, and today many scholars abandon the term Gnostic altogether, and instead only use the term Christian. In my opinion such an approach risks to conceal the unique features of Valentinianism, and the results of the present study will hopefully shed new light on a branch of Christianity which still is relatively unexplored.

Learning in school is in many respects done through language. However, it has been shown that the language of school assignments is seldom explicitly discussed in school. Writing tasks are furthermore assigned without clear guidelines for how certain lexical choices make one text more powerful than another. The present study is a contribution to a linguistic and pedagogical discussion of student writing. More specifically the focus is on the use of evaluative language in texts written by students in the school subject of Swedish in grades 5, 8 and 11. The major investigations of the study have been accommodated within the theoretical framework of Appraisal. An overview is given of the language resources in the student texts for constructing emotion, judging behavior in ethical terms and valuing objects aesthetically. Another question addressed is that of how attitudinal meaning is intensified, thus creating greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity associated with the feelings. The results show that manifestations of attitude are found in practically all texts in the study. However, variations are noted in relation to different genres, age, proficiency level, language background and gender. A contribution of the study in relation to the theoretical framework upon which it draws is an extension of the system of Attitude as well as an identification of different patterns in the use of attitudinal resources. These patterns are furthermore discussed in relation to how students talk about their own written production in terms of text movability. Results indicate that students with a high degree of text movability also use attitudinal resources to a large extent. It is argued that applying the linguistic tool of Appraisal can facilitate a discussion of how to make one aspect of the hidden curriculum more visible, namely, how to write with an Attitude.

The aim of this thesis is to shed light on the handbook as a multimodal resource from a reader perspective, with the material consisting of 32 Swedish handbooks on gardening from 1643 to 2005. The study draws theoretically on social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis, as well as dialogism. There is an emphasis on the addressivity of the text, which is taken as a starting point for tracing signs of the intended text use in the design of the texts. The analysis is meaning-based, with the focus placed on functional features in the design of the texts. The first part of the study considers the reading goals afforded by the thematizations conveyed in titles, headings and text type patterns. The core function of these texts turns out to be action orientation, although the more recent books often include sections oriented towards other goals, like shaping individual aesthetic taste. The second part illustrates how the multimodal cohesive patterns in the books afford non-linear reading paths and make the texts searchable, which is enhanced by the presence of devices such as indices and tables of contents. Concentrating on six of the books, the third part of the study maps out the role of the reader that is naturalized by the design of the text, drawing on appraisal theory, and shows the strong, authoritative role taken by the authorial voice. The evaluative patterns naturalize a fact-seeking reading. However, the most recent book, from 1996, emphasizes emotions to a greater extent, naturalizing a parallel reading that invokes sensory experience. The conclusion drawn is that the core characteristics of the handbooks are action orientation, searchability and factuality. As different parallel functions in recent books are discerned, a tendency towards diversity and multifunctionality is described. The range of semiotic resources has also expanded, it is noted, and there is growing support for the view of a tendency towards the visualisation of written texts.

This work presents a first study of discourse features in Balochi narratives of Sistan. Discourse analysis investigates what are the properties that make for well-formed texts in a language. There are many approaches to discourse analysis and most approaches focus on a particular aspect of text formation. The approach to text linguistics or discourse analysis taken in this work is based on Dooley and Levinsohn’s Analyzing Discourse: A manual of basic concepts (2001). Their methodology has been refined over years of practical use and, among diverse methodologies, they follow a functional and cognitive approach. In this dissertation, Roberts’ (2009) application of Dooley and Levinsohn’s methodology to Persian is followed in the study of our Sistani Balochi text corpus. In chapters 2-7 this approach is applied to Balochi narrative text. Chapter two introduces the reader to the discourse-pragmatic structuring of sentences in BS and chapter three shows how different syntactic devices can distinguish foreground and background information in BS oral texts. In chapter four we study the deixis of time and place and how the concept of proximal and distal deixis applies across a range of deictic elements. Chapter five examines some basic connectives and how they link propositions in the discourse context, and in chapter six reported speech is studied. Chapter seven illustrates how different participants are introduced into a discourse and how their activation status is signalled throughout the discourse. Appendix 1 contains details of the Balochi text-corpus used, and Appendix 2 contains interlinearized versions of ten of the main texts used in the study. A CD with nine audio files and one video file of the ten texts from Appendix 2, plus one extra video file, is also included.

Nous présentons, dans ce manuscrit, un dispositif informatique d'aide à la formation des futurs enseignants de FLE en Colombie. Il prend ses sources dans la linguistique textuelle et cherche à améliorer le niveau linguistique des étudiants universitaires actuellement en formation. Pour ce faire, le dispositif est fondé sur un corpus textuel spécifiquement annoté et étiqueté grâce aux outils de traitement automatique de langues (TAL) et à des annotations manuelles en format XML. Ceci permet de développer des activités à visée formative, en tenant compte des besoins exprimés par les publics cibles (enseignants-formateurs et leurs étudiants en formation).Comme nous l'exposons tout au long de cette thèse, l'élaboration d'un système comme le nôtre est le produit de la mise en œuvre de connaissances et de compétences issues de plusieurs disciplines et/ou domaines : didactique des langues, ingénierie pédagogique, linguistique générale, linguistique textuelle, linguistique de corpus, TAL et ALAO. Il se veut, principalement, un dispositif pédagogique pour la formation des étudiants en FLE dans le contexte de l'éducation supérieure en Colombie, un outil pensé en fonction des besoins et des objectifs de cet apprentissage. L'originalité de notre système repose sur le type de public choisi, le modèle didactique de formation mis en œuvre et la spécificité du corpus utilisé. À notre connaissance, il s'agit d'un des premiers systèmes d'ALAO fondé sur la linguistique textuelle s'adressant à la formation des futurs enseignants de FLE dans un contexte exolingue. / This thesis presents a computer device aimed at helping future FFL teacher training in Colombian universities. It is grounded in text linguistics and aims to contribute to improving the linguistic level of university students currently in training. To do so, this device is based on a textual corpus specifically annotated and labeled thanks to natural language processing (NLP) tools and to manual annotations in XML format. This should allow the development of activities with a formative aim, while also taking into account the needs expressed by the target public (teachers/trainers and their students, the trainees).As explained throughout this thesis, the elaboration of such a system is based on knowledge and skills stemming from several disciplines and/or fields: language didactics, educational engineering, general linguistics, textual linguistics, corpus linguistics, NLP and CALL. The ambition is to provide trainees and trainers in higher education in Colombia with a tool designed according to their needs and their learning aims and objectives. Finally, the originality of this system consists in the choice of target users, the didactic training model implemented and the specificity of the corpus annotated for the activities. It is one of the first CALL systems based on textual linguistics specifically targeted at training future FFL teachers in a non-native language context.

Correct Information Units (CIU) analysis is one of the few measures of discourse that attempts to quantify discourse as a function of communicating information efficiently. Though this analysis is used reliably as a research tool, most studies' apply CIUs to structured discourse tasks and do not specifically describe how raters are trained. If certified clinical speech-language pathologists can likewise reliably apply CIU analysis within clinical settings to unstructured discourse, such as the discourse of people with aphasia (PWA), it may allow clinicians to quantify the information communicated efficiently in clinical populations with discourse deficits. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine if using the outlined training module, clinicians are able to score CIUs with similar inter-rater reliability across both structured and unstructured discourse samples as researchers. Method: Four certified SLPs will undergo a two-hour training session in CIU analysis similar to that of a university research staffs' CIU training protocol. Each SLP will score CIUs in structured and unstructured language samples collected from individuals diagnosed with aphasia. The SLP' scores within the structured and unstructured discourse samples will be compared to those of a university research lab staffs'. This will determine (1) whether SLPs can reliably code CIUs when compared with research raters in a lab setting when both using the same two-hour CIU training and resources allotted; (2) whether there is a significant difference in reliability when structured and unstructured discourse is analyzed.

In the years since Joseph Smith completed the translation of the Book of Mormon, the English language has changed; some common phraseologies and word meanings are dissimilar to today's. Often, in reading the Book of Mormon, we impose our current definitions onto terms that in 1830 had a different meaning. Our interpretation of these words, as well as the passages in which they are found, is skewed by our modern definitions. These words, when they occur in the Book of Mormon, demonstrate dialectal and obsolete senses. In the case of some words, the dialectal or obsolete sense is so far removed in meaning from the prevailing modern sense that Book of Mormon readers may be unsure how to interpret the meaning.In this study I investigate words in the Book of Mormon text that have taken on different meanings, thus leading to potential misreadings within some passages of the text.

No description available.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo produzir uma tradução comentada, do alemão para o português, de uma seleção de documentos emblemáticos da resistência alemã ao Nacional-Socialismo. O corpus constitui-se especificamente de registros escritos dos interrogatórios (em alemão: Verhörprotokolle, protocolos de interrogatório) conduzidos em fevereiro de 1943 pela Polícia Secreta Nazista com os irmãos Hans e Sophie Scholl. Ambos eram integrantes do grupo A Rosa Branca, formado sobretudo por estudantes da Universidade de Munique que se opuseram ao regime nacional-socialista através da produção e distribuição de panfletos, nos quais lançavam críticas incisivas ao regime e à postura apática da população alemã perante os crimes cometidos pelo Estado. Tendo em vista o objetivo geral do trabalho e a conjuntura histórica em que se insere o corpus, partiu-se na análise e tradução dos protocolos de uma base teórica interdisciplinar, pautada tanto em elementos da pesquisa historiográfica quanto em pressupostos dos Estudos Funcionais da Tradução sobretudo no modelo de análise textual e tradução de Christiane Nord (1988, 2009) , da Linguística Textual e da Análise do Discurso. Para a tradução comentada dos protocolos, produto final deste trabalho, previu-se desde o início uma função documental, a qual justifica diversas microdecisões tomadas ao longo do processo tradutório. Elas vão desde a opção por reproduzir a formatação original dos textos de partida em alemão até a busca por reconstituir seu pano de fundo histórico por meio de comentários e imagens, inseridos propositalmente na margem direita e não no rodapé ou no fim da tradução. Espera-se, assim, que os textos traduzidos possam ser consultados, lidos e analisados como documentos e testemunhos sobre a resistência alemã ao Nacional-Socialismo, tema ainda pouco divulgado e estudado no Brasil. / This study aims to produce a commented translation from German into Portuguese of a selection of iconic documents of the German resistance to the National Socialism. The corpus is specifically consisted of written records of the interrogations (in German: Verhörprotokolle, interrogation protocols) conducted in February 1943 by the Nazi Secret Police with the brothers Hans and Sophie Scholl. Both were members of the group The White Rose, mostly comprised of students from the University of Munich who opposed the National Socialist regime by producing and distributing pamphlets in which they released incisive criticism to the government and apathetic posture of the German population before the crimes committed by it. Bearing in mind the overall aim of the work and the historical context to which the corpus belongs, an interdisciplinary theoretical basis was used in the analysis and translation of the protocols, based both in the historical research elements and on suppositions of the Functional Translation Studies especially in the model for translation-oriented text analysis by Christiane Nord (1988, 2009) , Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. For the commented translation of the protocols, the end product of this research, a documentary function was envisaged from the beginning, which justifies different micro decisions taken throughout the translation process, ranging from the choice of reproducing the original formatting of the source texts in German to the search for reconstituting the historical background of the source texts by means of comments and images intentionally inserted on the right edge of the page, and not in footnotes or at the end of the translation. It is, therefore, expected that the translated texts can be consulted, read and analyzed as documents and testimonies of the German resistance to the National Socialism, a subject still little publicized and studied in Brazil.