Explains individual and institutional code and style choices as locally motivated pragmatic selections within the specific contexts of the workplace settings and the larger Malaysian sociolinguistics context of English as the normative choice of Malaysian business and Malay as the lingua franca. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the current linguistic trends in libraries where use of jargon borrowed from business and computer technology is jeopardizing humanistic expression. Discusses common characteristics of the specialized language; levels of library jargon and obscure language; the danger of specialization to the future of libraries; influences from other…

Many genre analyses have been carried out in English for specific purposes settings, but none has made full use of computer analysis to obtain exact linguistic information on the moves and strategies of a genre. This article reports a genre analysis, complemented by the Wordsmith suite of computer programs for corpus analysis, of the moves and…

Characterizes the perception of stylistic nuances of lexical items in both Swedish and Finnish among members of the Sweden Finnish minority in Sweden, with special emphasis on Swedish. Results are discussed in the context of the ongoing debate on immigrants and integration, and suggest a more similar language use may indicate a higher degree of…

Analysis of the speech habits of Spanish language instructors at the University of Southern California revealed that native Spanish speakers, as well as near-native Spanish speakers, sometimes produce labiodental [v] as an allophonic variant of Spanish /b/. Quantitative analysis by the VARBRUL statistical program indicated that linguistic, social,…

Although often viewed as burdensome, academic writing guidelines are rarely treated as actively problematic. Even progressive scholars are unlikely to challenge the cultural assumptions or political investments of academic style guides. Yet standards regarding clarity, precision, appropriateness, sensitivity, and objectivity are not politically…

This paper investigates English language literacy practices among teenagers, focusing initially on three young Singaporean students who are struggling to do well in English. By employing a conceptual framework that builds on a recent treatment of style as identity construction and drawing on interview data that recount the students' practices of…

Limitations in communication modality and interactivity influence the use of language in an online environment, and conversely, language may be adapted to compensate for the online constraints. This is significant for participants in online learning environments (OLEs) who rely on written verbalization to achieve their educational objectives.…

One fruitful line of research has been to explore the local linguistic as well as global rhetorical patterns of particular genres in order to identify their recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999: 22) calls "generic integrity". In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have employed one or the other of Swales'…

Cultural discontinuity refers to the lack of cohesion between two or more cultures. Upon entry into school, differences in the functional use of language among culturally and linguistically diverse children have been found to account for the discontinuity they experience. Because children come to school socialized to language in culture-specific…

Economic forecasting in the world of international finance confronts economists with challenging cross-cultural writing tasks. Producing forecasts in English which convey confidence and credibility entails an understanding of linguistic conventions which typify the genre. A typical linguistic feature of commercial economic forecasts produced by…

Good translation requires writing skills in each of its three stages: decoding the original text; transferring its cultural and linguistic element into the context of the target language; and encoding the information in that context. During decoding, the translator must be conscious of speech level, word usage, cultural references, syntactic…

A study of distinctive characteristics of the style in which people communicate in computer-mediated communication (CMC), focusing on use of politeness conventions, is reported. Aspects of the concept of "face" and politeness in social interaction are first reviewed, and threats to speaker's and hearer's face are outlined. The…

Every language has different systems for expressing third party information. While in some languages grammar rules stipulate how to do this, in both Japanese and English the degree of indirection or direction a speaker should use to express information obtained as hearsay is genuinely a pragmatic language issue. English speakers tend to express…

It is proposed that genre/discourse community interaction is a critical element in the teaching of English for Special Purposes (ESP). All text is intended to promote interaction between writer and audience. Authentic texts generally have a central purpose: to change opinion, introduce a new idea, or encourage a specific action. The principle…