В статье рассмотрен феномен молчания в качестве ресурса невербального общения. Специалисты, занимающиеся прикладной лингвистикой утверждают, что использование молчания для общения может быть определено факторами нескольких категорий,... more
В статье рассмотрен феномен молчания в качестве ресурса невербального общения. Специалисты, занимающиеся прикладной лингвистикой утверждают, что использование молчания для общения может быть определено факторами нескольких категорий, одним из которых является спасение репутации. На сегодняшний день было предпринято множество исследований того, как носители языка используют молчание, тем не менее, только немногие из них рассматривали молчание в качестве стратегии спасения репутации. Таким образом, для того чтобы определить связь между спасением репутации и невербальным общением, автором было предпринято данное исследование. В рамках текущего исследования был проведен анализ молчания в качестве рабочей стратегии, применяемой в общении на английском языке лицами, не являющимися его носителями. Для этой цели были выбраны 4 группы лиц, не являющихся носителями английского языка. Была предпринята стратегия качественного исследования. В результате было обнаружено, что в тех случаях, когда ...
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People draw on the languages in their linguistic repertoire, depending on the speech participants’ needs and the conversational setting. The English language has gained salience replacing the Russian language as the foreign language most... more
People draw on the languages in their linguistic repertoire, depending on the speech participants’ needs and the conversational setting. The English language has gained salience replacing the Russian language as the foreign language most often studied at schools after Latvia regained independence in 1990. Since then, it has been used widely as a lingua franca in various fields, for instance, international diplomacy, science, and education. This has been a fruitful environment for code-switching, as it is claimed that many young people alternate effortlessly between the Latvian language and the English language, which they often use as a means of communication, especially on social media. In order to ascertain the linguistic manifestation of code-switching, a study was conducted by using a qualitative descriptive research design. Extra-sentential, inter-sentential, and intra-sentential code-switching was explored on social media. Extra-sentential switching or inserting tag elements f...
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Linguistic politeness plays an important role when establishing respectful interpersonal relationships in any communicative situation, the academic context including. The speech act of request can become a face- threatening act if... more
Linguistic politeness plays an important role when establishing respectful interpersonal relationships in any communicative situation, the academic context including. The speech act of request can become a face- threatening act if language users are unable to adapt their language use to the social variables determined by the context of use. The present study aimed at establishing an understanding of the negative politeness strategies and request strategies used by tertiary level students in electronic communication in English. Schauer’s (2009) request strategies and Levinson’s (1987) seminal work on politeness strategies laid the foundations for the present paper. The framework by Biber and Conrad (2009) for analysing situational characteristics proved a valuable resource for the case study, which drew its data from a corpus of email messages written in the time period from August 9, 2010 to June 25, 2011. The obtained data demonstrated that the Latvian students tended to use direct...
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As a result of the ethno-cultural and economic contacts taking place between different countries, the 21st century has set new guidelines, known as transversal or soft skills, for employability worldwide. Communication between specialists... more
As a result of the ethno-cultural and economic contacts taking place between different countries, the 21st century has set new guidelines, known as transversal or soft skills, for employability worldwide. Communication between specialists representing different areas and occupations demands specific competences required by innovative employment systems. This, to a certain extent, has an impact on the world-wide use of English as an instrument for multinational communication. Thus, the present research, which is based on the results of the survey administered as part of the Erasmus+ Strategic partnership project Transversal Skills in Dentistry: Content and Language Integrated Approach, explored some of the key skills that are cross-disciplinary in nature and are required by the world of work. These skills tend to determine employability of tertiary level graduates with hands-off experience in dentistry. From the practical perspective, the study illustrates the key skills that are vit...
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Interactional competence involves knowledge of the relation between language forms and the social contexts in which they are applied. The paper aims at focusing on the concept of interactional competence within the framework of... more
Interactional competence involves knowledge of the relation between language forms and the social contexts in which they are applied. The paper aims at focusing on the concept of interactional competence within the framework of cross-cultural pragmatics. The study expresses its author’s belief that non-native language users’ interactional competence to use contextually and situationally appropriate linguistic forms to express the pragmatic intent in question is to be developed at the tertiary level of language studies. The case study was based on the analysis of the speech act of compliment. The research findings indicated that instances of miscommunication resulted from differing beliefs regarding the speech act production and perception. The research has resulted in a conclusion that non-native language learners’ interactional competence can be advanced if the contributions on the speech act theories and an empirical research carried out into the area of the speech act are conside...
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In 2017, the organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that around 25 per cent of the population experiences difficulties in reading comprehension. The World Health Organisation (2021) has indicated that around 15... more
In 2017, the organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that around 25 per cent of the population experiences difficulties in reading comprehension. The World Health Organisation (2021) has indicated that around 15 per cent of the world population faces functional impairment-related problems, which limit sufficient access to information unless the resources are adapted for meeting the needs of this layer of society. Considering the increasing numbers of the population who suffer from impairments at the language perception level, the present study has attempted to examine selected approaches that might serve for developing easy-to-read (EtR) discourses. Limited research has been conducted in the above-mentioned field, and the contributions that exist so far have focused on the linguistic and design features considered when producing EtR discourses; however, other central components that govern the adaptation of authentic texts for EtR needs seem to be neglected. ...
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In the 21st century, globalization and massive migration have increased the global demand for effective transnational communication skills in English in the health care workplace and academic contexts, including dentistry. English for... more
In the 21st century, globalization and massive migration have increased the global demand for effective transnational communication skills in English in the health care workplace and academic contexts, including dentistry. English for Dentistry falls under the umbrella of English for Specific Purposes (ESP): this refers to teaching and learning English as a foreign language in a particular domain. While the role of grammar acquisition in ESP courses is often understated in the key theoretical literature on ESP, this article highlights the importance of lexicogrammatical knowledge. Dentistry students and practitioners in Latvia highly value the accuracy in communication since the knowledge of various syntactic and morphological rules of grammar and their use in the dentistry-related context contribute to the accuracy required in the performance of different communicative tasks, for instance, asking for, explaining, and providing information, giving instructions. Besides, if dentists ...
Research Interests: Globalization and Grammar
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Несмотря на чрезвычайно широкий круг стоматологического дискурса и большое число журналов на английском языке, посвященных научному обсуждению ключевых вопросов стоматологии среди профессионалов в сфере различных дисциплин, число... more
Несмотря на чрезвычайно широкий круг стоматологического дискурса и большое число журналов на английском языке, посвященных научному обсуждению ключевых вопросов стоматологии среди профессионалов в сфере различных дисциплин, число опубликованных работ в области прикладных языковых исследований, посвященных жанру научной статьи по стоматологии, представляется небольшим. В связи с чем данная работа стремится расширить понимание этого профессионального жанра. Цель исследования - предложить теоретически обоснованное понимание риторического структурирования исследовательской статьи ввиду условного и стандартизированного характера этого коммуникативного события. Значимость данного исследования видится в его практическом применении для неанглоязычных профессионалов в области стоматологии, готовых издать свои рукописи в научных журналах на английском языке, а также для специалистов по прикладной лингвистике в обучающих целях.
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
Bu makale, siyasi retorikte kullanilan kinaye, mursel mecaz, ve metafor gibi dilbilimsel araclarin kullanimini ele almaktadir. Analizler dilbilimsel bakis acisina gore ele alinmistir. Teoretik cati, 20. yuzyilin sonlarinda ve 21. yuzyilin... more
Bu makale, siyasi retorikte kullanilan kinaye, mursel mecaz, ve metafor gibi dilbilimsel araclarin kullanimini ele almaktadir. Analizler dilbilimsel bakis acisina gore ele alinmistir. Teoretik cati, 20. yuzyilin sonlarinda ve 21. yuzyilin baslarinda Atkinson, M. Chilton, P.A Fairclough, ve Naciscione A. ‘nin ortaya koymus olduklari siyasi soylemin theoretik etkileri ile ilgili yapmis olduklari arastirmalar uzerine insa edilmistir. Arastirmanin metodolojisi ‘The Baltic Times (2006)’ ve ‘The Times (2006)’ gazetelerinde yayinlanan ozgun makaleler ve kaynaklara dayandirilmistir. Bu baglamda, calismanin yazarlari metin dilbilim ve metin edimbilim prensiplerine bagli kalmislardir. Calismanin ortaya koymus oldugu sonuclardan biride dilbilim manipulasyonun siyasi soylemde etkili bir arac olarak kullanilabilecegidir
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The article reports on the multicultural cooperation experience of three higher education institutions from the Netherlands, Latvia and Portugal involved in the Erasmus+ project “Transversal Skills in Dentistry: Content and Language... more
The article reports on the multicultural cooperation experience of three higher education institutions from the Netherlands, Latvia and Portugal involved in the Erasmus+ project “Transversal Skills in Dentistry: Content and Language Integrated Approach” funded by the European Commission. Delineating the concept of culture, the article aims at discussing the project culture and the disciplinary culture, namely, dentistry as a hard discipline and linguistics as a soft discipline within the context of the Erasmus+ project. Although disciplinary differences should be taken into account when working on project outcomes, the methods applied profitably exist simultaneously. Successful creation of project culture, which was established at the outset by careful selection of the profile and background of participating organizations, allowed the consortium to agree on the roles and tasks of each organization involved in the project. The level of networking, cooperation and commitment of each p...
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The paper concerns the phenomenon of interdiscourse communication and views it from the perspective of Linguistic Relativity Theory. The goal of the paper is to analyse the linguistic behaviour of non-native language users, who apply the... more
The paper concerns the phenomenon of interdiscourse communication and views it from the perspective of Linguistic Relativity Theory. The goal of the paper is to analyse the linguistic behaviour of non-native language users, who apply the English language for instrumental purposes in interaction, which establishes in multinational discourse among interactants having different cultural backgrounds. The paper reports on some of the research results that were acquired in the period from 2011 to 2013 during the ERASMUS Intensive Programme project Cross-Cultural Competence and Interaction. The focus of the study was on analysing the linguistic and pragmatic strategies prioritised by the tertiary level Latvian and Lithuanian interactants for whom the English language served as the instrument of communication in the multinational discourse community, which was constructed of students from Latvia, Lithuania and Turkey. The research findings reveal that non-native language users having the cu...
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Today, social reality can hardly be viewed as the one-state-one-nationone language ideological framework (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). The modern multilingual and multicultural communities are inclined to examine social reality in a multiple... more
Today, social reality can hardly be viewed as the one-state-one-nationone language ideological framework (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). The modern multilingual and multicultural communities are inclined to examine social reality in a multiple variety of socio-economic and political manifestations and forms. To understand how social reality can be explored through examining certain socio-political processes in a country, the present paper aims at analysing the role of conceptual metaphor in cases when political scandals, involving corruption charges of high-ranking officials in Latvia are considered. For this purpose, the present study has focused on the analysis of selected commentaries that deal with corruption charges which were revealed in December 2019 issues of the magazine IR. The Latvian-origin weekly magazine IR was selected deliberately because; on the one hand, it has an enormous influence on how social reality is constructed and perceived by Latvian citizens. On the other han...
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The 21st century has introduced many changes in modern workplaces which have become multilingual and multicultural. The present paper sheds light on selected aspects of workplace discourse, revealing that backstage communication in... more
The 21st century has introduced many changes in modern workplaces which have become multilingual and multicultural. The present paper sheds light on selected aspects of workplace discourse, revealing that backstage communication in a professional setting plays a very significant role in establishing and maintaining effective subject-bound transaction and/or interaction between the partners involved in communication. The theoretical framework of the paper is designed to consider recent contributions in professional communication research supported by some seminal theoretical writings on linguistic ecology that explore the role of language in natural interactions that occur among people working for multinational companies. T he linguistic politeness theories are taken into account when cases of communication harmonization in a professional setting are examined. T he empirical part of the paper deals with a qualitative discourse analysis of authentic electronic data collected in a mult...
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It is commonly accepted that the language of law is often considered to be a highly traditional and, to a certain extent, a conservative means of professional communication, which tends to be stereotypically viewed impenetrable by... more
It is commonly accepted that the language of law is often considered to be a highly traditional and, to a certain extent, a conservative means of professional communication, which tends to be stereotypically viewed impenetrable by the layman. Various peculiarities of the language of law and the fact that many legal systems differ all over the world in terms of their origins and frameworks often make legal discourse difficult to comprehend. To communicate professionally, the English language for instrumental purposes is increasingly employed at international level. Considering the above stated, the present study aims at analysing selected areas of the language of law. More specifically, using a case study, it finds its research interest in revealing the many-faceted nature of the concept gender within the framework of its contextual meaning established in specialist discourse. It has been concluded that due to the fact that gender is a polysemic concept in English, the translation in...
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... a) idioms; b) phrasal verbs. ... This quotation partly explains the extensive use of modal verbs (may, might, would, could, etc.) and modifying phrases (slightly, somewhat, fairly, etc). ... 6. Prattern, J. (1997) Banking English,... more
... a) idioms; b) phrasal verbs. ... This quotation partly explains the extensive use of modal verbs (may, might, would, could, etc.) and modifying phrases (slightly, somewhat, fairly, etc). ... 6. Prattern, J. (1997) Banking English, Surrey: Delta Publishing. ...