Johanna Miecznikowski
University of Lugano, Istituto di Studi Italiani, Department Member
This contribution examines the way dynamic appearance verbs in Italian function as lexical evidential strategies and signal inferential relations in argumentative discourse. In argumentative discourse, evidential markers and strategies... more
This contribution examines the way dynamic appearance verbs in Italian function as lexical evidential strategies and signal inferential relations in argumentative discourse. In argumentative discourse, evidential markers and strategies can be hypothesized to function as “argumentative indicators” by contributing to signal argumentative relations. The present analysis focuses on two Italian appearance verbs, rivelare and emergere. Differently from the more studied appearance verb to seem and corresponding verbs in Romance languages, these verbs denote dynamic eventualities rather than states. The analysis focuses on uses that denote an eventuality of knowledge acquisition and on performative contexts in which these acquire an evidential function. The study of dynamic appearance verb constructions makes both a lexicological contribution in the domain of perception and mental verbs and aims at underlining the role of verb-based lexical constructions in the expression of the basic pragmatic categories of information source and argumentative relations. On the theoretical level, it also sheds some light on the relation between the two mentioned categories, which overlap as to the type of relevant conceptual relations, but differ as to their communicative functions and as to their contribution to text organization.
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Cette contribution étudie la construction de la référence future dans les actes de prévision en italien. Une éventualité peut être placée dans l’avenir par des marqueurs déictiques (notamment le temps verbal du Futur), par des relations... more
Cette contribution étudie la construction de la référence future dans les actes de prévision en italien. Une éventualité peut être placée dans l’avenir par des marqueurs déictiques (notamment le temps verbal du Futur), par des relations de discours qui la situent temporellement par rapport à un repère textuel et par des inférences qui mobilisent des connaissances contextuelles. L’examen d’un corpus de presse économique a révélé l’importance des stratégies d’ancrage de caractère textuel, basées sur des moyens lexicaux et grammaticaux qui se combinent avec des infinitifs ou des prédicats nominalisés pour exprimer des relations entre cause et effet, action et but, désir et objet du désir, prévision et éventualité prévue, acte de langage et conséquence perlocutive. La comparaison avec les prévisions contenant un verbe fini au Futur suggère qu’une motivation fonctionnelle de ces stratégies est celle d’exprimer des actes de prévision indirects. Les prédications complexes dans ces actes indirects (a) placent le focus assertif sur des éventualités dans le présent et réduisent donc les risques interactionnels liés à la prévision d’un futur incertain et (b) peuvent être interprétées comme des spécifications évidentielles et/ou des argumentations compactées, en augmentant ainsi à la fois la densité informationnelle et la légitimité de l’acte de prévision.
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Based on an Italian corpus of contributions to comment spaces of online reviews in different domains, we argue that some of these contributions are user reviews. We show that users position themselves as legitimate contributors by... more
Based on an Italian corpus of contributions to comment spaces of online reviews in different domains, we argue that some of these contributions are user reviews. We show that users position themselves as legitimate contributors by conforming to genre conventions that are central in official reviews, in particular to the requirement that the reviewer must possess direct knowledge of the reviewed object. Other genre norms are not observed, thus adapting the genre to the context of comment spaces.
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"How do you know?" – "What makes you think that?" One might say that it is to forestall such potentially challenging questions that speakers and writers evidentially qualify weak or strong assertive statements, providing more or less... more
"How do you know?" – "What makes you think that?" One might say that it is to forestall such potentially challenging questions that speakers and writers evidentially qualify weak or strong assertive statements, providing more or less specific cues as to their sources of information and hence the type of evidence that justifies the performed speech acts. In this paper, I have used the method of a case study to illustrate the category of information source, paying attention both to the way it is coded linguistically and to its functions in discourse. The examined case is a gastronomic discussion, developed online in the comment space of a restaurant review on the Italian website www.passionegourmet.it. The context of reviews and of the associated online discussions is particularly interesting in an evidential perspective because of the specific evidential requirements of the review genre and because of asymmetries between discussion participants resulting from an unequal access to sources.
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Compared to other domains of media discourse, economic-financial news contain a considerable amount of speech acts regarding future events, in particular predictions. This can be explained by their specific institutional context,... more
Compared to other domains of media discourse, economic-financial news contain a considerable amount of speech acts regarding future events, in particular predictions. This can be explained by their specific institutional context, financial markets, where investors constantly seek to single out gain opportunities and to correctly assess their risk. One of the crucial factors making economic-financial predictions worthy of being considered in investment decisions is argumentation, in particular the extent to which the predicted proposition follows from a plausible and acceptable reasoning. Starting from a corpus of 50 articles of the Italian economic-financial press, we consider the inferential dimension of prediction-oriented arguments, focusing on the locus , i.e. the ontological relation on which the connection between the argument(s) and the predictive conclusion rests. All predictions found in the corpus were manually annotated with the software UAM Corpus Tool . For each of them we identified the source, which could be either the journalist him/herself or a third party, typically financial analysts or corporate actors. We distinguished mere predictive opinions from predictive standpoints, i.e. predictions for which the journalist advances one or more supportive arguments (either confirmatory of refutatory). For the latter category, we identified the locus referring to an adaptation of the taxonomy outlined by Rigotti (2009). The findings highlight in particular the following three interesting aspects: (1) in predictions, journalists reinforce their stance by plausible justifications, but weaken it at the same time by marking it as uncertain and/or by using reported speech or evidential means to reduce their responsibility for the predictive speech act; (2) the justification of a predictive standpoint, by the journalist or by third parties, is mostly based on loci of causality, in particular on the locus from efficient cause , the locus from final cause and complex forms of causality where the involvement of rational agents is implied but defocused; (3) moreover, journalists refer to the predictive opinions of experts or corporate insiders to activate the locus from authority, either by explicit argumentation or implicitly, by reporting speech from reliable sources. Our study suggests that the role of predictions in financial news is not so much that of giving any straightforward advice to investors, but rather that of providing chunks of sound argumentative reasoning, including both supportive evidence and rebuttals or refutatory moves, that the investor-reader might apply and combine in the highly uncertain context of financial markets. Overall, our findings shed light on how financial journalists fulfil the function of information intermediaries in finance.
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Les origines lexicales diverses des marqueurs discursifs signalant une connexion inférentielle laissent entrevoir la grande richesse sémantique de ce type de connecteur. La présente contribution traite un... more
Les origines lexicales diverses des marqueurs discursifs signalant une connexion inférentielle laissent entrevoir la grande richesse sémantique de ce type de connecteur. La présente contribution traite un marqueur italien basé sur un verbe de perception, come si vede ('comme on le voit'), qui, parmi d'autres fonctions, peut signaler une connexion inférentielle. L'analyse, basée sur un corpus écrit, décrit la polyfonctionnalité de ce marqueur, sa spécialisation pour certains loci et le rapport entre ces fonctions et le signifié compositionnel. L'approche choisie met en valeur la relation conceptuelle entre les connexions inférentielles dans le discours argumentatif et la catégorie de l'évidentialité.
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Bilder spielen in der alltäglichen Arbeit von Wissenschaftlern wie in ihren Publikationen eine wichtige Rolle; sie tragen auf grundlegende Weise zur Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Fakten bei. In diesem Artikel geht es um die... more
Bilder spielen in der alltäglichen Arbeit von Wissenschaftlern wie in ihren Publikationen eine wichtige Rolle; sie tragen auf grundlegende Weise zur Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Fakten bei. In diesem Artikel geht es um die Beschreibungs- und Interpretationspraktiken, mit denen Wissenschaftler Bilder, die sie während bestimmter Tätigkeiten produzieren, auswerten, als Belege heranziehen, in Frage stellen. Besonderes Interesse gilt der interaktiven Dynamik, durch welche Bilder den praktischen Anforderungen des Moments gemäss als geordnet, sinnvoll und nützlich konstituiert werden. Die Analyse dieser Praktiken basiert auf Transkripten von Diskussionen, während denen Chirurgen aus verschiedenen medizinischen Teams per Videokonferenz Meinungen und Ratschläge zu schwierigen klinischen Fällen austauschen. Der Beitrag analysiert die Verwendung von Bildern in der Präsentation eines klinischen Falls, ihre «Aneignung» durch ein Mitglied eines anderen Teams während der Diskussion und der Kommentierung von Bildern im Off sowie während informellen Gesprächen innerhalb eines Teams. Diese verschiedenen Kontexte geben einen Einblick in die sprachliche und interaktive Dynamik, durch die Bilder den praktischen Anforderungen der Diagnosestellung gemäss interpretiert, beschrieben und kommentiert werden. Die Analyse zeigt die Relevanz der Formen und sequenziellen Organisation von Bildbeschreibungen und hebt die Kontextgebundenheit und die kollaborative Dimension der Verwendung von medizinischen Bildern hervor.
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Il contesto tecnologico e socio-culturale della Rete odierna influisce in vari modi sui generi testuali che sono stati trasferiti dalla stampa in Internet. Un esempio pertinente a questo riguardo è il genere della recensione, che è... more
Il contesto tecnologico e socio-culturale della Rete odierna influisce in vari modi sui generi testuali che sono stati trasferiti dalla stampa in Internet. Un esempio pertinente a questo riguardo è il genere della recensione, che è presente in numerosi tipi di siti web, dove il suo uso è stato esteso a un'ampia gamma di oggetti, inclusi destinazioni turistiche, servizi e diversi prodotti di consumo. Questo contributo esamina la variazione nelle recensioni online e la manifestazione degli atteggiamenti normativi degli utenti rispetto a questo genere testuale. L'analisi linguistica e pragmatica di un corpus di recensioni di esperti pubblicate su siti tematici italiani nonché dei relativi spazi di commento illustra, da un canto, la standardizzazione delle recensioni online esplicitamente categorizzate come tali dai siti. D'altro canto l'analisi dimostra la presenza, negli spazi di commento, di contributi di utenti che si conformano al modello generico nelle sue componenti pragmatiche essenziali ma adattano tale modello al contesto specifico del forum asincrono. In questi testi, che non sono stati discussi nella ricerca esistente sulle recensioni online, appaiono con particolare chiarezza certe tendenze innovative che caratterizzano più generalmente le recensioni di utenti e consumatori (la brevità; il registro ibrido specializzato e informale; un incremento di soggettività).
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Reviews (it. recensioni), a text genre that is traditionally associated with the written press, have become common in a variety of online contexts. This paper focuses on the linguistic and pragmatic characteristics of online reviews,... more
Reviews (it. recensioni), a text genre that is traditionally associated with the written press, have become common in a variety of online contexts. This paper focuses on the linguistic and pragmatic characteristics of online reviews, drawing on a corpus consisting of reference reviews published on thematic websites by the websites’ official collaborators and of review-like contributions posted by users on associated forums. Particular attention is dedicated to the argumentation schemes used. It is shown, on one hand, that both types of review maintain central features of their printed predecessors, in particular the basic goals and speech acts, the strong relevance of argumentation and the use of field-specific arguments. On the other hand, reviews on forums are innovative in a number of respects. Besides formal features such as briefness, also conceptual differences with respect to reference reviews have been observed, in particular the use of analogical argumentation to support recommendations. It is hypothesized that the latter be favored by the sequential characteristics of interactions on forums and by users’ representation of forum participants as a community of peers with shared interests.
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Student migration, universities’ institutionalized multilingual language policies and the use of English for academic purposes make academic environments increasingly multilingual. Biographical narratives may provide useful insights about... more
Student migration, universities’ institutionalized multilingual language policies and the use of English for academic purposes make academic environments increasingly multilingual. Biographical narratives may provide useful insights about the students' view on this development. In this paper, five narrative interviews with multilingual first year students of the Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano) have been analyzed, paying attention to the rhetorical organization of narrative and argumentative discourse. The university requires these students to learn Italian, a second Swiss national language and English. All students have acquired competences in several languages and have developed similar lay theoretical explanations of language acquisition. When it comes to the way the first period of studying at university has been experienced, however, the students' narratives and assessments differ. One student feels isolated and under strong time pressure because confronted with three foreign languages in top of the regular study program. The others consider one or two of the required languages as a first language and have satisfying social contacts, partly within groups of students having the same origin. Besides good linguistic competence in several languages, shared cultural experience appears to be a key resource for accessing social networks and informal learning situations in the first weeks of study.