Guided by Foucault's concept of "discursive formations," the study reported here draws on primary archival and secondary source material to examine how French has been discursively shaped in England and in relation to English. Unpacking sociohistorical constructions of sameness--difference offers a productive frame to explore ideological…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

Discourse theory has always played a significant role in Michel Foucault's larger theoretical framework. His discourse theories integrate language, power, and knowledge as to achieve the 'truth,' though there is a debate whether they are inherently linked. This paper explores the longitudinal evolution of Foucault's discourse theory from the…

A great deal of research undertaken in child language development, neurolinguistics and various branches of functional and cognitive linguistics has shown that a main source of language development is the spoken input to which learners are exposed. Despite the fact that for most adult L2 learners, the greatest exposure to the L2 is the input they…

This study aimed to investigate gender variations in letters of recommendation. It used the metadiscourse theory with respect to the following resources: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions. The findings showed that hedges devices were the least frequent in both groups, but at the same time were used more by…

A correlation between media, gender identity and society is central in this information era. Gender and sexuality has seen a paradigm shift in recent decades, making female representation a subject of several cultural studies. International media contributed to shaping women's identity and impacting social construction. The aim of this study was…

Framed by MCDA, our study examines diachronic changes in gender representation in five New Headway Elementary (NHE) editions. Our findings demonstrate that NHE's gender representation is established on heteronormative binaries indicating bias against women in recreational, domestic, professional, and educational spaces despite few important…

The aim of this paper was to evaluate gender differences in the language used in United Nations (UN) General Assembly debates by one male and one female representative each from India, China, the USA, and Indonesia. The critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework of van Dijk (2015) was used along with the 25 discursive devices in this framework.…

In this paper, the author examines the reflection of social violence within the structure of the Arabic language through an analysis of classical Arabic grammar texts. The study's comprehensive examination of grammatical examples, rules, and terminologies reveals how the societal relationships and power dynamics of the era were embedded within the…

The aim of the study is to investigate gender-bound language use in Turkish and English languages and to identify the differences and similarities across cultures and genders in the plays with family and social themes. Four English and five Turkish plays were chosen randomly for comparison. The number of words in the plays were taken into…

Discourse markers (DMs) as linguistic devices have a significant role in the coherence of conversation--a speakers' fluency. With the growing use of English worldwide, it is of great importance to focus on DMs as an essential part of communication which provides discourse coherence. This study was conducted to develop a description of spoken…

This essay explores the way that the social interactions of the classroom play a role in shaping sign production. It examines the talk of one second year Advanced Level English literature class in North London during their study of John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" through the lens of Volosinov's theories of language. It seeks to…

Over the last decade, psychological interventions, such as the values affirmation intervention, have been shown to alleviate the male-female performance difference when delivered in the classroom, however, attempts to scale the intervention are less successful. This study provides unique evidence on this issue by reporting the observed differences…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology…