This sixth volume of Collected Papers includes 74 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2015-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 121 co-authors from 19 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Abduallah Gamal, Amir Abdullah, Firoz Ahmad, Nadeem Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed Aboelfetouh, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Shariful Alam, W. Alharbi, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Amira S. Ashour, Asmaa Atef, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, A. A. Azzam, Willem K.M. Brauers, Bui (...) Cong Cuong, Fausto Cavallaro, Ahmet Çevik, Robby I. Chandra, Kalaivani Chandran, Victor Chang, Chang Su Kim, Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Mihaela Colhon, Shyamal Dalapati, Arindam Dey, Dunqian Cao, Fahad Alsharari, Faruk Karaaslan, Aleksandra Fedajev, Daniela Gîfu, Hina Gulzar, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Hewayda El-Ghawalby, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Branislav Ivanov, S. Jafari, Jeong Gon Lee, Milena Jevtić, Sudan Jha, Junhui Kim, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Songül Karabatak, Abdullah Kargın, M. Karthika, Ieva Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, Madad Khan, Majid Khan, Manju Khari, Kifayat Ullah, K. Kishore, Kul Hur, Santanu Kumar Patro, Prem Kumar Singh, Raghvendra Kumar, Tapan Kumar Roy, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luu Quoc Dat, T. Madhumathi, Tahir Mahmood, Mladjan Maksimovic, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Nivetha Martin, M. Kasi Mayan, Mai Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Raja Muhammad Hashim, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Nada A. Nabeeh, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Xenia Negrea, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Jagan M. Obbineni, Angelo de Oliveira, M. Parimala, Gabrijela Popovic, Ishaani Priyadarshini, Yaser Saber, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, M. Saleh, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Dönüș Șengür, Shio Gai Quek, Songtao Shao, Dragiša Stanujkić, Surapati Pramanik, Swathi Sundari Sundaramoorthy, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Muhammed Turhan, Alptekin Ulutaș, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Volkan Duran, Navneet Yadav, Yanhui Guo, Naveed Yaqoob, Yongquan Zhou, Young Bae Jun, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiao Long Xin, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of an addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on an (...) analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means by which interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities construct both writers and readers. (shrink)

The study reported here, building on the research methods of Conversation Analysis, Politeness Theory, and Relevance Theory, attempts to examine the distribution of Mandarin qishi and shishishang across two different discourse modes in formal speech settings: formal lectures and TV panel news discussions. The results indicate that qishi is prevalent in TV panel news discussion data, which fall into the interactional mode, whereas shishishang is more prevalent in formal speech data, which fall into the transactional mode. The study shows that (...) in interaction, qishi is addressee-oriented and signals alignment or divergence, whereas shishishang is message-oriented and asserts a proposition with a tone of certainty. In addition, the study suggests that although the literal meanings of qishi and shishishang, which are concerned with factuality, are seemingly unrelated to emotive expressivity, they offer a rhetorical strategy for expressing the speaker’s attitudinal position, and can both serve to indicate the speaker’s epistemic inference. (shrink)

The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (...) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions. (shrink)

Large companies must increasingly satisfy not only the conditions of their formal licences, but also the concerns and expectations of host communities and broader society. This has led to the emergence, particularly in the minerals industry, of the notion of “social licence”, an interdiscursive term whose meaning is rarely interrogated. We use textual analysis to critically investigate the construction of social licence discourse in minerals companies’ sustainable development reports and at a recent industry conference. We find that the texts mystify (...) the nature of agency, and privilege processes that maintain existing power relations. Through their partial accommodation of heterogeneous discourses, the texts downplay tensions and conflicts. We conclude that there is a need to reconceptualise the nature of company–stakeholder relationships through a more collaborative, dialogic and reflexive process, avoiding the binary state implied by the term licence. (shrink)

The centrality of argumentation in the judicial process is an age-old acquisition of research on legal discourse. Notwithstanding the deep insights provided by legal theoretical and philosophical works, only recently has judicial argumentation been tackled in its linguistic dimension. This paper aims to contribute to the development of linguistic studies of judicial argumentation, by shedding light on evaluation as a prominent aspect in the construction of the judge’s argumentative position. Evaluation as a deep structure of judicial argumentation is studied from (...) a discursive point of view entailing the analysis of a sample of authentic judicial language. Evaluative lexis is investigated within a single genre of judicial discourse, i.e. judgments, instantiated by a corpus of US Supreme Court judgments. Findings show that judges use diversified strategies to take stance as they organise their argumentative discourse: from easily recognisable verbal and adjectival tools to more finely-grained discourse elements such as the encapsulating pattern ‘this/these/that/those + labelling noun’. (shrink)

This paper brings together cutting-edge, quantitative corpus methodologies and discourse analysis to explore the relationship between text complexity and subjectivity as descriptive features of opinionated language. We are specifically interested in how text complexity and markers of subjectivity and argumentation interact in opinionated discourse. Our contributions include the marriage of quantitative approaches to text complexity with corpus linguistic methods for the study of subjectivity, in addition to large-scale analyses of evaluative discourse. As our corpus, we use the Simon Fraser Opinion (...) and Comments Corpus, which comprises approximately 10,000 opinion articles and the corresponding reader comments from the Canadian online newspaper The Globe and Mail, as well as a parallel corpus of hard news articles also sampled from The Globe and Mail. Methodologically, we combine conditional inference trees with the analysis of random forests, an ensemble learning technique, to investigate the interplay between text complexity and subjectivity. Text complexity is defined in terms of Kolmogorov complexity, that is, the complexity of a text is measured based on its description length. In this approach, texts which can be described more efficiently are considered to be linguistically less complex. Thus, Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of structural surface redundancy. Our take on subjectivity is inspired by research in evaluative language, stance and Appraisal and defined as the expression of evaluation and opinion in language. Drawing on a sentiment analysis lexicon and the literature on stance markers, a custom set of subjectivity and argumentation markers is created. The results show that complexity can be a powerful tool in the classification of text into different text types, and that stance adverbials serve as distinctive features of subjectivity in online news comments. (shrink)

Traditionally irony has been researched as a verbal mode of communicating non-literal meaning. Yet, the extant literal/non-literal meaning oriented research provided conflicting evidence and failed to explain how irony vs. non-irony is processed. The dominant literal/non-literal meaning approach hasn’t accounted for the role of attitudinal non-propositional contents so crucially involved in irony communication and comprehension. Employed to communicate indirectly, on top of non-literal meaning, irony serves to convey implicit attitudes: emotional load non-propositionally attached to the propositional contents. The role of (...) emotional contents implicitly communicated by irony has not been acknowledged in irony research so far. This paper reviews irony and attitude research, focusing on the non-propositional, emotional contents, aiming to bridge the propositional-non-propositional meaning gap in irony research. Neuroimaging and behavioral evidence showing that emotional load profoundly influences communicative contents processing, priming its computation and determining its processing patterns, is presented, and its role for irony processing is highlighted. (shrink)

This article provides a corpus-based analysis of formal structure and rapport orientation of evaluative speech acts in written Mandarin starting from the Qing Dynasty leading up to the present. It focuses on illocutional concurrences where the change of rapport management with the interlocutor significantly correlates with evaluative speech acts. The IC are holistic patterns that emerge at various levels of an utterance. They contribute both locally and peripherally to the encoding of contextually and temporally situated speech acts or pragmemes. Mixed (...) methods of hierarchical clustering and multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the recent history of evaluative speech acts in written Chinese is characterised by a shift from prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for politeness. Evaluative language in written Mandarin became less mitigated at the structural level and increasingly oriented towards rapport enhancement and rapport challenge. This shift significantly intersects with a progressive replacement of clause-final particles during the 20th century, especially after the so-called ‘May the 4th Movement’. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to propose a taxonomy of speakers from a socio-pragmatic perspective by taking an original approach to the study of single-turn political discourse, that is, political speeches, rather than debates, interviews or press conferences. This limitation on the scope of the study stems from the fact that the categorisation advanced is not concerned with turn-taking, but concentrates on the speaker’s use of other voices in his/her representation of reality. Thus, a clear distinction is made between (...) the speaker and the sayer, namely the original speaker whose words are reported, or rather creatively reconstructed, by the current speaker ‘here and now’. The taxomony comprises a number of categories employed strategically by the current speaker in the service of different objectives. The speaker categories are inherently limited due to a single principle of categorisation: the form of the report. The singular speaker is the default type which enables the speaker to present himself/herself as an individual as well as his/her attitudes, values and beliefs, while the collective speaker enhances the speaker’s belonging to a group and allows him/her to speak on behalf of its members. The sayer categories, by contrast, are more varied due to three independent principles of categorisation: the form of the report, the genuineness of the sayer’s utterance and the number of accounts embedded in the narrating event. The approach taken to the analysis of the narrative passages that involve the proposed speaker types owes much to Chilton’s Discourse Space Theory and is concerned with conceptualisation of the speaker’s representation of events from chosen perspective. The corpus of speeches selected to investigate and illustrate individual categories consists of over 80 political speeches delivered by three Democratic American Presidents: John Kennedy, William Clinton and Barack Obama. (shrink)

Based on systemic functional linguistics, and especially newly developed appraisal theory, this study uses editorials from the China Daily to investigate patterns of interpersonal rhetoric devised to construct and shape public opinion. Attitudinal lexis and modal expressions are examined separately with the object of discovering how editorials communicate their evaluation of their subject matter. This article contends that the author of an editorial is more likely to be explicit in evaluating events and implicit in evaluating behaviour and that he/she seldom (...) attributes attitudes to other sources. Modality occurs frequently in editorial discourse. Modal expressions of certainty, necessity and obligation are particularly common and indicate the authority and power nature of the discourse. Modal expressions of obligation/necessity normally occur at the end of the text in order to make the most powerful possible appeal to the reader. (shrink)

El propósito principal de este artículo es presentar un modelo teórico-metodológico de estudios del discurso desde una perspectiva social e ideológica y precisar el papel de los recursos interpersonales del lenguaje para dar cuenta de la explicación de fenómenos sociales. De manera particular se describe y explica el potencial analítico que ofrece el sistema de valoración para los estudios del discurso. Con el objeto de dar cuenta de una manera comprehensiva de este sistema, se ilustra cada uno de los sub-sistemas (...) y categorías propuestas con ejemplos provenientes de un corpus oral y escrito sobre las prácticas discursivas de transmisión pedagógica de las memorias históricas de un pasado reciente de violación a los derechos humanos cometidos durante la dictadura civil-militar de Augusto Pinochet en Chile. (shrink)

The critical linguistic analysis of authorial stance in English news reporting has long been concerned with uncovering the ideological bias embedded in the seemingly objective and neutral representation of people and events. Interest has recently shifted towards the nature of the authorial voice itself and the extent to which this semblance of objectivity is also typical in non-English reporting. This article explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’, as identified by Martin and White in English hard-news reported in (...) the press, is present in Italian reporting. The ‘appraisal’ categories developed by Martin and White are used, discussed and adapted for this purpose. Attention is thereby also given to significant expressive resources that may not be retrievable from English material alone. Similarities and differences in reporting styles are discussed and reference is made to the social and cultural variables that may underlie them. (shrink)

Despite its apparent simplicity, the speech act of complimenting has received a great deal of attention in the literature. However, studies have mostly focused on compliments’ realization in face-to-face conversational exchanges, while they have often been neglected in other channels such as online communication. This article is intended to redress the balance in support of online exchanges. More specifically, we aim to investigate how users of online social networks like Facebook use compliments to evaluate others and strengthen social rapport in (...) English and Spanish. In order to do so, we gathered two balanced corpora in both languages. The samples were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed using a systemic functional framework. The analysis reveals that compliments constitute a system of choices where several available options help Facebook users to encode their evaluation of the other from various perspectives. Furthermore, results also show that despite superficial similarities, compliments in both languages follow remarkably different frequencies of use which reflect deep cultural differences. (shrink)

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. A relatively overlooked means of expressing a stance, however, is through a Noun Complement structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause. This pattern allows a writer to front-load attitude meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation of the proposition which follows. In this article, we explore the (...) frequencies, forms and functions of this structure in a corpus of 160 research articles across eight disciplines totalling 1.7 million words. Developing a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, we show that the structure is not only widely used to express author comment and evaluation, but that it exhibits considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines. (shrink)

Organizations are altering their office settings to non-territorial workspaces, where employees do not have assigned desks but are supposed to choose freely where they sit. In this context, the metaphor of the nomad appears to be an understandable way to position the employees of organizations within non-territorial workspaces. Drawing on the empirical data of a study of organizational change in a Nordic media company, this study applied the discursive resources from the field of institutional interaction in the analysis. This article (...) presents how the participants employed the same metaphor of the nomad as a rhetorical strategy to support and resist change, and suggests that the use of a particular discourse does not necessarily contribute to the desired outcomes. Furthermore, the study shows how constructing senses of legitimacy involves the use of the same metaphor to construct arguments and counter-arguments toward the change. (shrink)

This article illustrates how metaphor is used as a stance-taking resource and strategy to indirectly index enduring and changing representations of organizational identity through an analysis of speeches delivered by consecutive Secretary Generals of an agency of the United Nations. Drawing on Bucholtz and Hall’s framework of identity, and recent research on stance, it illustrates how metaphor marks attitudes and orientations to context, propositions and social and political structures/relationships. The analysis highlights similarities in the depiction of the organization over two (...) terms of office, but also reveals differences in identity positioning and inter-subjective framing. Particular metaphorical scenarios and mappings are used rhetorically to strengthen subject positions and alignments, and mark evaluations, supporting Du Bois’s theory of stance as a ‘triune’ act. It is argued that a combined analysis of stance and metaphor provides an important framework and instrument for further research on identity construction, especially in organizational and political discourse. Moreover, the theory of stance can be further enhanced through an investigation of metaphorical mappings. (shrink)

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and caused an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably different in stance and attitude. To understand the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this article analyzes a corpus of 120 reports on the Occupy Central Movement from four major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, namely, Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News and Ta Kung Pao, which cover (...) the political spectrum from anti-Beijing to pro-Beijing. In total, 856 concordance lines of the two selected words ‘佔中’ and ‘佔領’ were annotated using the Attitude framework. Analysis shows that their attitudes toward the event form a continuum from supportive, through neutral, to antipathic. The attitudes do not simply reflect the stances of the newspapers, but are strategically selected and designed to legitimize or delegitimize the event. The pattern of attitudes reflects the ideological divergence in Hong Kong society, and at the same time, the news reports also exacerbate the divergence by reinforcing the attitudes of their readers. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an account of the effect that the use of adverbials such as ‘actually, in fact, clearly, obviously, perhaps, probably’ has, when qualifying an utterance that is reconstructed as a standpoint, contributes to a context-sensitive evaluation of argumentative discourse. The account provided draws from the concept of strategic manoeuvring developed within Pragma-dialectics. The effect of qualified standpoints on argumentative discussions is specified in terms of the protagonist’s management of the burden of proof.

The children’s reader, Udmurtiia naveki s Rossiei, celebrates the “450th anniversary of the voluntary entry of Udmurtia into the Russian State structure”. Published in Russian, one of its aims is to familiarize young children (aged 10 and under) with “key events” in Udmurt-Russian relations leading up to the inclusion of Udmurt-inhabited areas in the Russian Empire; emphasizing throughout the absence of inter-ethnic conflict in a “multi-ethnic Udmurtia”. Drawing on history, corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, we show how the official (...) representations of Udmurtia and Udmurts, as presented in the reader, fail to provide them with a distinct ethnic voice – separate from Russia – within today’s Russian Federation. Specific attention is paid to the consequences of using ‘unity’ as an argument for achieving ethno-linguistic equality via a Russian civic identity; the way(s) in which this serves the Russian government’s agenda; and its effect on the construction of Udmurt identity. (shrink)

A growing public awareness of the potential negative impacts of corporate activities on the natural environment and society compels large companies to invest increasing resources in the communication of their responsible conduct. This article employs Appraisal theory in a comparative analysis of BP’s and IKEA’s 2009 social reports, each company’s record of their non-financial performance. The main objective is to explore how, through Appraisal resources, BP and IKEA construct their corporate identity and relationship with their stakeholders. The analysis reveals two (...) markedly different approaches to the construction of a responsible corporate identity. While BP deploys interpersonal resources to portray itself as a trustworthy and authoritative expert, IKEA discloses itself as a sensitive and caring corporation, engaged in a continual effort to improve. These differences are interpreted in light of the legitimization challenges the two companies face. (shrink)

Resumen La reseña, situada en la sección final de revistas especializadas, es un género textual típico del discurso científico, que ofrece información crítica acerca del contenido de una publicación reciente. El propósito del presente trabajo es enfocar el aspecto evaluativo del género reseña, ámbito propicio para la ocurrencia de diversas actividades de imagen de rol, de autocortesía, de cortesía y de descortesía. Este trabajo adopta el punto de vista discursivo-sociocultural para abordar los fenómenos de cortesía: Bravo y Kaul de Marlangeon. (...) Asimismo emplea la perspectiva de la teoría de la evaluación en el discurso, principalmente: Martin y Martin y White. El corpus ha sido extraído de reseñas de obras de autores hispanohablantes publicadas durante la última década en una selección de revistas internacionales de lingüística escritas en español: RILI, Signos, Discurso & Sociedad y Linred, donde se constata tanto el uso de los recursos evaluativos interconectados en el texto, como las diferentes actividades de imagen que desarrolla el reseñador. (shrink)