TEMPORAL AND DISCURSIVE VARIATION OF THE “BOGUCHANSKAYA HYDROELECTRIC POWER PLANT” CONCEPT

Statement of the problem. One of the postulates of the modern cognitive-discursive paradigm is the thesis about the variability of structure and content of the concept. The variability of the concept is influenced by many factors: temporal, socio-cultural, discursive, ecological, political, and individual-psychological. The relevance of the study of variability of the concept is due to a number of reasons: 1) the need for theoretical justification of the heterogeneity of concepts within the same linguoculture; 2) the possibility of revealing the ratio of basic and variable informational and axiological structures in the content of the concept; 3) the need to establish the connection of cognitive mechanisms with worldview and with the emotional reflection of the individual and / or social groups; 4) the importance of studying the factors of “constructing reality” by actualizing those or other sides of the concept. The purpose of the article is to consider the variation of the value and semantic content of the “Boguchanskaya HPP” concept, to determine the causes and factors of variation of units of expression of figurative and value layers of this concept. In order to achieve this goal, linguistic, stylistic and linguopragmatic means of expression of the “Boguchanskaya HPP” concept in different types of discourse are analyzed. The material of the research. The empirical basis of the study is the data of the National Corpus of the Russian language; materials of publications in the media about Boguchanskaya HPP, placed in the section “Press” on the main website of the hydropower plant (http://www.boges.ru/press-tsentr/smi-o-boguchanskoy-ges/publikatsii-v-presse/); publications of the website “Dam. No!” (http://www.plotina.net/); transcripts of interviews and reminiscences of displaced people from the flood zone of Boguchanskaya HPP as well as people permanently residing in Boguchansky and Kezhemsky districts of the Krasnoyarsk region. As a result of a sample listing of written and oral texts about Boguchanskaya HPP, more than 400 contexts of conceptual, figurative and axiological attributes of this concept were written out. The research methodology is as follows: in order to achieve the goal the method of conceptual analysis developed by representatives of the linguocultural direction, as well as the interpretive analysis and the method of linguistic description of the results are used. Research results. The “Boguchanskaya HPP” concept refers to dynamic, actively translated concepts of national linguoculture. It is distinguished by high modifying potential, discursive variability of its structure, and value and semantic content. Variability of the content of this concept is manifested, first of all, in different degrees of relevance of those or other conceptual features at different stages of its life cycle, as well as ambivalence of evaluations which determine the content of axiological layer of the “Boguchanskaya HPP” concept in conversational discourse, ecological Internet discourse and official mass-media discourse. The reason for the variability of the value and semantic content of the concept are socio-economic, socio-cultural and civilizational factors.

Identifying and describing functional discourse units in the BNC Spoken 2014

On the surface, it appears that conversational language is produced in a stream of spoken utterances. In reality conversation is composed of contiguous units that are characterized by coherent communicative purposes. A large number of important research questions about the nature of conversational discourse could be addressed if researchers could investigate linguistic variation across functional discourse units. To date, however, no corpus of conversational language has been annotated according to functional units, and there are no existing methods for carrying out this type of annotation. We introduce a new method for segmenting transcribed conversation files into discourse units and characterizing those units based on their communicative purposes. In this paper, the development and piloting of this method is described in detail and the final framework is presented. We conclude with a discussion of an ongoing project where we are applying this coding framework to the British National Corpus Spoken 2014.

A Structure Self-Aware Model for Discourse Parsing on Multi-Party Dialogues

Conversational discourse structures aim to describe how a dialogue is organized, thus they are helpful for dialogue understanding and response generation. This paper focuses on predicting discourse dependency structures for multi-party dialogues. Previous work adopts incremental methods that take the features from the already predicted discourse relations to help generate the next one. Although the inter-correlations among predictions considered, we find that the error propagation is also very serious and hurts the overall performance. To alleviate error propagation, we propose a Structure Self-Aware (SSA) model, which adopts a novel edge-centric Graph Neural Network (GNN) to update the information between each Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU) pair layer by layer, so that expressive representations can be learned without historical predictions. In addition, we take auxiliary training signals (e.g. structure distillation) for better representation learning. Our model achieves the new state-of-the-art performances on two conversational discourse parsing benchmarks, largely outperforming the previous methods.

Credible as Evidence? Multilayered Audience Reception of Narrative Arguments

Building on a view of both narration and argumentation as dynamic concepts, this paper considers ways of assessing the credibility of narrative arguments constructed in empirical examples of conversational discourse. I argue that the key in any such exercise is to pay close attention to both structural and pragmatic details, particularly how conversational storytelling gets embedded in the surrounding discourse and how the way this is discursively accomplished vis-à-vis the narrators’ multilayered audience may be reflective of their argumentative goals.

Spontaneous classroom engagement facilitating development of L2 pragmatic competence

The question of how to teach toward social, cultural and linguistic L2 pragmatic competence has raised serious challenges (Kasper, 1997). This is more the case for spoken rather than written discourse. As can be expected, the underlying pragmatic implications of spontaneous face-to-face communication naturally constrains the interactional scope and its potential pedagogical application. To address this issue, this naturalistic study explores two key potential contributors to the development of oral pragmatic competence: meta-pragmatic classroom conversational discourse and the course framework supporting that kind of relatively spontaneous interaction. An English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course provided fluency practice protocols, instruction in pragmatic categories, analysis of conversational data and “live” in-class intervention, focusing on meaning and alternate expressions and forms. Those interventions were designed to enhance learners’ ability to self-assess, monitor and expand their interactional repertoires. Part of a larger research project examining principles of pragmatics applied in EAP instruction, this study focuses on data from spontaneous classroom interactions situated within the integrated instructional framework of the course. Results present a range of strategies employed by the instructor consistent with current theoretical models of factors or pedagogical interventions that facilitate development of pragmatic competence.