Vol 27, No 4 (2023): Modern Languages and Cultures: Varieties, Functions and Ideologies in Cognitive Perspective

In the current climate ecolinguistic research has arguably never been more important, as its basic premises regard the survival of life on Earth and key philosophical questions hitherto under-acknowledged by mainstream science. In recent decades, environmental thinking has made great advances in shaping current opinions towards nature and the non-human world. The goal of this paper is to explore certain currents of mediated thinking in modern Britain regarding nature, in order to assess how far expressions of sorrow for the felling of a prominent tree might correspond to a genuine ecological sentiment. The study explores public responses to an apparent case of eco-vandalism, the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023 in Northumberland, using data taken from social media and other online sources such as e-newspapers. From the point of view of Ecolinguistic theory and that of Positive Discourse Analysis it applies critical lenses such as Evaluation and Discourse Pragmatics to dig beneath the surface of texts produced on the topic, in order to explore diverse current attitudes to trees in the UK. The paper finds that, though there are instances in which people appear to express grief for the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree, it is possible to account for these in ways that lessen the likelihood that they are motivated by purely ecological sentiment. In practice human attitudes towards trees tend to be superficial and instrumental, and this tendency is also found here. The Sycamore Gap event brings many latent social attitudes into play, and this paper thus contributes to the developing field of Ecolinguistics by focusing on tree-centred narratives, distinguishing between inherent ideologies of pseudo- and authentic environmental sensitivity.

Digitality is closely related to and expressed within analogicity, offering a sense of intersectional continuity between the online and offline realms. However, this poses a theoretical and conceptual challenge, particularly when addressing the heterogenous notion of contemporary diaspora as a phenomenon of online/offline and past/present co-constituency. To this end, this article advances a semio-chronotopic approach to reclaiming indigenous identities. It aims at decentring the concept of spatial dispersal by situating diaspora within a temporal continuum. The article investigates the Nubian Facebook* page Al Nuba Café in this concern. Deployment of the notion of resemiotization enables us to analyse narrative networks of Nubian diaspora as mediatized through digital space. It is found that Nubian online narrative shows a chronotopic condition of coeval alignment in which the two identity events before and after the displacement are kept conflated. The posts are found to blur the boundaries between the spatiotemporal there-and-then of the story and of the here-and-now of the storytelling world. The study concludes that Nubian digital tellings of diaspora are organized within a continuum of specific chronotopes that vacillate between past and present, spatial yearning and temporal nostalgia, statehood and diaspora, roots and routes, delineating an umbrella chronotope of the changing same. This semio-chronotopic conceptualisation of Nubian diaspora acknowledges the centrality of translocal temporality in its manifestation. Accordingly, the study argues that while space is considered the primary measure of diaspora in the analogue contexts, digital context emphasizes a rather the temporal dimension which dynamically participates in the reproduction of translocal diaspora experiences.

This study proposes a Multimodal Hermeneutic Model (for short, MHM) as a methodology that extends the analytic scope of Ricoeur’s (1973, 1976, 1981) classic hermeneutic theory of text interpretation towards examining multimodal texts. The model has been empirically tested by examining the advertising discourse order of ‘Saudization’ as channelled via the Saudi Uber Blog’s multimodal text. A twofold social semiotic praxis has been theoretically incorporated into the distanciation-appropriation dialectics underlying the interpretation of multimodal texts in potentia . First, a multimodal cluster transcription (Baldry & Thibault 2006) has been utilized in enhancing the description of distanciated text sense as a holistic configuration of clusters across different communicative modalities with interacting semiotic modes ( intra-textually ). Second, an interpersonal-meaning analysis of multimodal participants (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006a, 2006b, Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) has been employed in enriching the explanation of appropriated text reference ( extra-textually ). The empirical site used for validating the MHM is the Uber-Blog-mediated multimodal text designed by Saudi Arabia-based Uber Company. The multimodal transcription of textual clusters has demonstrated how the text sense thematically revolves around the macro topic of ‘Saudization’ across verbal, visual, and pictorial modalities with material and semiotic modes, viz. linguistic, graphological, anthropic, sartorial, spatial, natural, and technological. The multimodal participant analysis has explained how the referents of (i) a model Saudi Uber driver, (ii) the Saudi Public Transport Authority, (iii) Saudi driver-partners, and (iv) Uber app collectively contribute to the recontextualization of ‘Saudization’ from a governmental discourse to an advertising discourse order realized in the multimodal text under analysis.

Text complexity impact on immediate recalls and range of metadiscourse markers remains a research niche due to the lack of multidisciplinary data necessary to shed light on the issue. The current study aims to identify effects of text complexity and Russian-English discourse differences on immediate text-based recalls relating to the amount and type of the information reproduced. For the research purposes we engaged 94 native Russian speakers as respondents in a text-retelling task to explore the amount of propositions recalled from an opinion article and the range of discourse markers employed. The reading text and text-based recalls were contrasted on informative and linguistic levels. The informative complexity of the reading text was evaluated on the basis of propositional analysis, and the linguistic complexity was carried out on the basis of descriptive parameters (word and sentence length, proportion of long words), readability index, word complexity and range of metadiscourse markers. The study revealed that the complexity level of the reading text is a strong predictor of propositional recall. The comparative analysis indicated a slight decrease in metrics of descriptive parameters. We also revealed that high ability readers make a choice in favor of superordinate propositions recalling about 60% of them and losing over 70% of the subordinate propositions. They also tend to shift the metadiscourse patterns of the original text from interactive to more logical ones by loosing hedges, emphatics and evidentials. The study furthers our understanding of cross-linguistic differences in the use of metadiscourse, its results will find application in discourse complexology and natural language processing.

The content and volume of language corpora provide an opportunity to obtain reliable information about the real use of a particular linguistic unit. Nowadays, there is a large number of corpora in different languages, their formation technologies are being improved. Nevertheless, some problems and limitations arise when using these resources in comparative studies. Corpora users need to work with annotated data submitted to tagging through annotation protocols. The article presents the structure and functionality of the supracorpora verb database (SVD) developed on the basis of a parallel Russian-French subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and reveals the difference in their potentials. The described database is a pilot version of the final software, which is currently under development and is being tested. It consists of several clusters focused on solving such linguistic tasks as studying the grammatical semantics specifics and the distribution of verb forms in Russian and French; identifying the polysemantic structure in the two languages, which in turn verifies the understanding of the linguistic worldview of the speakers of Russian and French. It has been found that the mechanism of functioning of SVD cluster formations allows us to study both individual characteristics of verbs and the semantics of verbal lexemes and collocations. The manual annotation enables users to identify the systematic asymmetry of verb forms and cases of contextual and low-frequency asymmetry. Thus, SVD can be used in language pedagogy, teaching and studying discursive grammar, as well as the analysis of translation models variability.

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