Cet article présente le projet E-MIMIC, une application qui vise à éliminer les préjugés et la non-inclusion dans les textes administratifs rédigés dans les pays européens, à commencer par ceux qui ...sont rédigés dans les langues romanes. Il présente une méthodologie conçue à partir de critères discursifs inspirés de l’analyse du discours française et utilisés pour étiqueter un corpus de documents institutionnels, qui sont utilisés pour l’apprentissage profond des réseaux neuronaux. Des architectures de modélisation profonde du langage sont exploitées pour identifier automatiquement les extraits de texte non inclusifs, suggérer des formes alternatives et produire des reformulations inclusives. Une évaluation préliminaire menée sur un ensemble de données de référence pour la langue italienne montre des résultats prometteurs, qui poussent à finaliser l’application et à la réaliser également pour d’autres langues, tel le français.
Discourse Analysis and Artificial Intelligence to empower inclusive writing: the project E-MIMIC.
This paper presents the EMIMIC project, an application that aims to eliminate non-inclusive, prejudiced language forms in administrative texts written in European countries, starting with those written in Romance languages. It presents a methodology based on discourse criteria inspired by French discourse analysis and used to label a corpus of institutional documents, which are used for the deep learning of neural networks. Deep Language Modelling architectures are exploited to automatically identify non-inclusive text snippets, suggest alternative forms, and produce inclusive text rephrasing. A preliminary evaluation conducted on a benchmark dataset in Italian shows promising results and encourages us to finalise the application and to implement it also for other languages, such as French.
The rise of QAnon presents researchers with a number of important questions. While emerging literature provides insights into how QAnon exists online, there is a dearth of theoretical engagement with ...the questions of why it exists, and what conditions brought it into being. This paper seeks to address this gap by contextualizing QAnon as an ontological phenomenon underpinned by anxiety, and inquiring into the identity formation strategies employed by the movement. Applying the basic precepts of discourse theory and discourse analysis to a representative canon of QAnon content, it finds that, like other formations of collective identity, QAnon is premised on interconnected dynamics of ontological fulfillment that cannot be explained away by pointing to ‘the algorithm’ or ‘madness’. Nor can it be tackled effectively by the content takedowns and de-platforming strategies currently employed. The paper concludes with a call to explore more empathetic engagement with conspiracy adherents, arguing that until we (re)discover a more inclusive, agonistic politics, QAnon and other fantastical conspiracy movements will continue to arise and some may metastasize into violent action. New forms of resilience to (online) polarization can be built on this principle.
This volume deals with the pragmatic dimension of negations and is oriented towards empirical studies of negatives’ meanings and functions in media and public discourses. Negation is one of our most ...central phenomena in human language and we use it daily for a vast range of different purposes: for rejection, denial and for expressing non-existence. Negation is certainly one of the most multidimensional and complex units in language, semantically, cognitively and syntactically, as well as from a functional, pragmatic, perspective. Depending of the theoretical framework, sentence negation in particular has been identified as a modal operator, a truth-value operator, a rhetoric device, a figure of thought, a polarity item and a marker of linguistic polyphony and as a linguistic unit with a variety of discursive and contextual meanings. There remain, nevertheless, a large number of unsolved questions regarding negative forms of expressions and negative functions within specific languages, within different social settings and throughout the languages of the world. Thus, by bringing together scholars from different countries, with studies on different languages this volume aims to shed light and contribute to new knowledge about the forms and functionality of this universal phenomenon. Linguists and pragmaticiens generally agree that the use of negatives escapes logic and pure semantic description and is therefore best analysed with tools from cognitive and pragmatic theories. Similar themes connected to negatives approached from different perspectives and examined in different languages offer a contrastive reading that actually enlarges the spectra of new knowledge presented in the books’s chapters. Based on hypotheses within pragmatics and discourse analysis, the main assumption is here that forms of expressing negatives emerge and adjust constantly and in accordance with the cultural domain and the social setting of their appearance. This is why this volume focuses on the functions of negative expressions in specific domains and types of discourses.
In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill provides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal the underlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate in American culture. ...provides a detailed background on the theory of race and racism reveals how racializing discourse—talk and text that produces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people to them—facilitates a victim-blaming logic integrates a broad and interdisciplinary range of literature from sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legal studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that have studied racism, as well as material from anthropology and sociolinguistics Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series
The book presents a discourse analysis of police interrogations involving U.S. Hispanic suspects accused of crimes. The study is unique in that it concentrates on interrogations involving suspects ...whose first language is not English and police officers who have a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish. It examines the pitfalls of using police officers as interpreters at custodial interrogations. Using an interactional sociolinguistic discourse analytical approach, the book offers a microlinguistic examination of interrogations involving persons accused of murder, child molestation, and kidnapping. Communication difficulties are shown to arise from suspects' limited proficiency in English and police officers' equally limited proficiency in Spanish, coupled with the unwillingness of these officers to remain in interpreter footing. The volume demonstrates how pidginization and asymmetrical communicative accommodation can emerge in such situations of highly unequal power relations. It also demonstrates how cultural factors such as acquiescence to interlocutors of greater authority and higher socioeconomic status can lead persons of certain Latin American backgrounds to engage in ""gratuitous concurrence"", answering ""yes"" to police questions even when it is clear that that these yes-tokens are not truly affirmative responses to those questions. In addition, the book provides evidence of the kinds of abuse that can result from police interrogations that are not electronically recorded. Coerced Confessions reviews appellate cases involving police interpreters spanning a thirty-four-year period, and concludes that the Miranda rights are placed in jeopardy when a police officer is assigned the role of interpreter at a custodial interrogation.
This article introduces a new framework for the analysis of news discourse to scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and beyond. It emphasises the importance of news values for linguistic ...analysis and encourages a constructivist approach to their analysis. The new methodological framework is situated within what the authors call a 'discursive' approach to news values. From this perspective, news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse, and the primary research interest is in how texts construct newsworthiness through multimodal resources. This article first introduces resources that are used to construe news values in English-language news discourse, before illustrating the framework through two case studies of a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse. The framework itself is intended for both multimodal discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis, although this article focuses more on the integration of corpus linguistic techniques. Thus, the discursive approach ties in well with two recent trends in CDA – towards multimodal and towards corpus-assisted discourse analysis. More specifically, the case studies show that corpus linguistic techniques can identify conventionalised discursive devices that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate an ideology of newsworthiness. They further show that such techniques can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness around a specific topic, event or news actor. The article concludes with an outline of further applications of the framework for (critical) linguistic analyses of news discourse.
