So called ‘video essays’ on films and cinema have gained substantial popularity on the video sharing internet site YouTube in the past years. This essay explores this relatively recent type of video production from the perspective of genre analysis in order to investigate whether a pattern of form, content and style can be identified, which would suggest the emergence of a new genre. Previous research has investigated a similar genre, the film review, by identifying its pervasive or obligatory moves or stages (Taboada, 2011; de Jong & Burgers, 2013). However, video essays seem to be a rather subjective form of communication, with a clear persuasive purpose. For this reason, linguistic elements expressing evaluation, assessment, feelings and opinions are analyzed in the following under the umbrella term for evaluative language use, that is Appraisal (White, 2015). Five video essays from different creators were chosen for the present analysis, which is focused on situational, structural, and Appraisal elements. The analysis shows that there indeed are similarities between the video essays, pertaining both to their situational context and structure, and their use of evaluative language. Several overall pervasive moves were found, which suggests that the essays follow a specific structural pattern. The evaluative language indicates an intention of persuading the viewer.

Title: On the Linguistic Structure of Emotional Meaning in Czech Author: Mgr. Kateřina Veselovská Department: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Supervisor: Prof. PhDr. Eva Hajičová, DrSc., Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Keywords: emotional meaning, linguistic structure, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, evaluative language Abstract: This thesis has two main goals. First, we provide an analysis of language means which together form an emotional meaning of written utterances in Czech. Sec- ond, we employ the findings concerning emotional language in computational applications. We provide a systematic overview of lexical, morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of emotional meaning in Czech utterances. Also, we propose two formal representations of emotional structures within the framework of the Prague Dependency Treebank and Construction Grammar. Regarding the computational applications, we focus on sentiment analysis, i.e. automatic extraction of emotions from text. We describe a creation of manually annotated emotional data resources in Czech and perform two main sentiment analysis tasks, polarity classification and opinion target identification on Czech data. In both of these tasks, we reach the state-of-the-art results.

The social spread of mass communication has allowed the emergence of new current textual genres. Among them, the histories of life, which are published by an agricultural cooperative journal and are read in the rural environment of the regions west, north-west and north of the state of Santa Catarina. This study aims at describing such genre, in special, the evaluative language that characterizes the histories of life. It also aims at testing the feasibility of the Appraisal Theory to be applied to the Portuguese Language and the use of computer tools to this kind of analysis. For such, a corpus of 23 pieces of histories of life published in 2005, which were analyzed under the categories of field and ideational content (Halliday, 1997), rhetorical movements (Swales, 1990) and attitude and voices in the journalistic speech (Martin e White, 2005). For complementary analysis from the histories of life reading, we applied our corpus to the tools of the software WordSmith, which provided data on the lexical frequency and terms occurrence in the linguistic context. Contextual information on the genre was gotten through interview with producers and consumers of histories of life and of the participative observation in the place of production of the journal. The results indicate that the rhetorical movements of history of life are, on one hand, strictly dependent on the production context of the interviews and, on the other hand, on the communicative objectives of the genre. The ideational content is identical in all the texts, focusing in the process of economic growth of the character. Concerning evaluative language, the histories of life mainly approach judgment rates, either explicit or implicit, based on social positive esteem, which are intensified by the use of the adverbs ever and never as well as connotative language. The most noticeable in the genre is the voice of the correspondent, in which authorial judgments of social esteem are present. This way, through these language resources, the histories of life consolidate its rhetoric objective that is to provide an example of farmer to the other farmers, aiming at the keeping the man in the countryside and the agricultural productivity increase. / A difusão social dos meios de comunicação de massa tem propiciado o surgimento de novos gêneros textuais na atualidade. Entre eles, estão as histórias de vida, que são publicadas por um jornal de cooperativa agropecuária e circulam no meio rural das regiões oeste, extremo-oeste e planalto-norte do estado de Santa Catarina. Este estudo procura descrever esse gênero, em especial, a linguagem avaliativa que o configura. Também visa a testar a viabilidade da Teoria da Valoração quando aplicada à Língua Portuguesa e o uso de ferramentas computacionais nesse tipo de análise. Para tanto, foi selecionado um corpus composto por 23 exemplares das histórias de vida, publicados no ano de 2005, o qual foi analisado sob as categorias de campo e conteúdo ideacional (Halliday, 1997), movimentos retóricos (Swales, 1990), índices de atitude e vozes do discurso jornalístico (Martin e White, 2005). Para complementar a análise decorrente da leitura das histórias de vida, utilizamos as ferramentas do programa computacional WordSmith, que forneceu dados sobre freqüência lexical e ocorrência dos termos no contexto lingüístico. Informações contextuais sobre o gênero foram obtidas através de entrevistas com produtores e consumidores das histórias de vida e de observação participante no local de produção do jornal. Os resultados indicam que os movimentos retóricos das histórias de vida são, por um lado, estreitamente dependentes do contexto de produção das entrevistas e, por outro, dos objetivos comunicativos do gênero. O conteúdo ideacional dos textos, por sua vez, é idêntico em todos os exemplares, centrando-se no processo de crescimento econômico do personagem. Em relação à linguagem avaliativa, as histórias de vida compreendem principalmente índices de julgamento, tanto explícitos quanto implícitos, baseados em estima social positiva, os quais são intensificados pelo uso dos advérbios sempre e nunca e de linguagem conotativa. A voz predominante no discurso do gênero é a voz do correspondente, na qual estão presentes julgamentos autorais de estima social. Assim, por meio desses recursos de linguagem, as histórias de vida concretizam seu objetivo retórico que é o fornecimento de um exemplo de agricultor para os demais agricultores, visando à permanência do homem no campo e ao aumento da produção e da produtividade agrícola.

The aim of this thesis was to examine the conditions for democratic bildung-oriented education for students in the school science discourse. This is something that the Swedish curriculum is based on and thereby the education should develop students' capacity for social, political and cultural awareness. The theoretical framework used is grounded in critical didactics and feminist theories which assume that students should feel involved and get their voices heard. The Swedish national test in chemistry (2009-2012) and student answers (198n) from one of the items in the 2009 test have been analyzed using discourse analysis. The first study explored the norms and values present in the national tests in chemistry, in relation to people, society and nature. The second study focused on student’s evaluative language in their free-text answers to one of the items. Thereby attitudes in student answers were projected in relation to the norms and values found in the first study. Finally, the student answers were used once more in a third study, where students’ positioning in relation to the scientific discourse in the chemistry test (2009) was explored, as well as which feminist figurations these subject positions express. The results show that the national tests harbor an elitist image and anandrocentric bias.The normative message is that students should adopt an objective, rational, non-judgmental and non-emotional role. Topics connected to young people’s everyday life, that might interest students, are rare. Contrary to the normative messages mediated by the tests, students use evaluative and embodied language to a high extent in their answers. They choose to write about topics that are close to their everyday life and they show that they are emotionally engaged. Through feminist figurations theories used in the third study one can see how the student-subject positions offer resistance in different ways. This is shown in their criticism of science and technology, human society and nature. The students' responses have embraced an embodied chemistry that can be interpreted as teaching based on bildung and deliberative discussions.