Oleksandr Kapranov
NLA University College, Teacher education, Faculty Member
The present article introduces and discusses a quantitative study that examines the use and the frequency of discourse markers (further-DMs), which are utilised in speeches on the issue of climate change by the current British monarch,... more
The present article introduces and discusses a quantitative study that examines the use and the frequency of discourse markers (further-DMs), which are utilised in speeches on the issue of climate change by the current British monarch, King Charles III (thereafter-the King). The study involved a corpus of the King's speeches on climate change from 2005, when the King was still referred to as His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, to 2023, i.e. one year after his coronation. The corpus was examined in the software program AntConc (Anthony) for the presence of DMs, whose frequency was computed and subsequently processed in the statistical package SPSS (IBM). The results of the qualitative analysis revealed that the King's speeches on the issue of climate change were characterised by such frequently used DMs, as and, as, but, and if. These findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article, which concludes with the summary of the major findings, their implications, limitations and direction for future research.
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Whilst climate change discourse has been widely researched (Zurru, 2024), still not much is known about how Greenpeace and, in particular, its New Zealand branch Greenpeace Aotearoa (further-GA) frame their discourses on the issue of... more
Whilst climate change discourse has been widely researched (Zurru, 2024), still not much is known about how Greenpeace and, in particular, its New Zealand branch Greenpeace Aotearoa (further-GA) frame their discourses on the issue of climate change. The present article introduces a qualitative study whose research aim is to gain insight into the framing of climate change discourse by GA on its official Facebook page. The results of the qualitative framing analysis have revealed that GA frames its climate change discourse on Facebook via the frames A Battle, A Threat to the Ocean, Climate Extremists, Emissions, Extreme Weather Events, Fast Track, Fossil Fuel, Industrial Animal Farming, and Renewables. The results are further discussed in the article.
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Climate change discourse provides a fertile ground for research in communication, linguistics, and discourse studies (Grist 2008; Isopp 2024; Nerlich et al. 2010). Anchored in a quantitative linguistic paradigm, the article presents a... more
Climate change discourse provides a fertile ground for research in communication, linguistics, and discourse studies (Grist 2008; Isopp 2024; Nerlich et al. 2010). Anchored in a quantitative linguistic paradigm, the article presents a mixedmethods study on the use of self-mentions (for instance, I, we, etc.) in a corpus of speeches on the topic of climate change delivered by King Charles III. The study aims at establishing the frequencies of the occurrence of self-mentions and learning about their pragmatic roles in the corpus. To that end, the corpus of King Charles III's speeches on climate change was collected and analysed. The results of the corpus analysis indicated that I was the most frequent self-mention, which King Charles III utilised in order to impart a personalised dimension to his discourse on climate change. The findings and their discussion are further presented in the article.
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The issue of climate change has been one of the critical foci of political discourse worldwide (Wagner, 2023). Given that political debates and political discourse are quite often communicated on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), for... more
The issue of climate change has been one of the critical foci of political discourse worldwide (Wagner, 2023). Given that political debates and political discourse are quite often communicated on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), for instance Facebook and X (Araújo & Prior, 2021), it appears highly relevant to tap into political actors' discourse on SNSs that addresses the issue of climate change. Guided by the importance of SNSs in political discourse on climate change, the present article introduces and discusses a study on how Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister of the United Kingdom (the UK), frames the issue of climate change on his official Facebook and X accounts. Specifically, the aim of the study was to identify the types of frames used in Sunak's climate change discourse in a corpus of his posts on Facebook and X. The corpus was collected and analysed in accordance with the methodology proposed and developed by Entman (2007). The results of the analysis revealed that Sunak's framing of climate change involved a pragmatic economyoriented aspect, which was presented discursively by imparting it a personalised dimension that involved multimodality. In particular, it was discovered that Sunak frequently framed the issue of climate change via the frames Burden and Green Technology. The findings were discussed in conjunction with the prior research on framing in climate change discourse.
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One of the critical skills that undergraduate students of English as a Foreign language (EFL) should master involves their ability to write an argumentative essay, which is adequately supported by credible sources, such as scientific... more
One of the critical skills that undergraduate students of English as a Foreign language (EFL) should master involves their ability to write an argumentative essay, which is adequately supported by credible sources, such as scientific articles, books, and online materials. Arguably, a successful argumentative essay reflects EFL students' genre-appropriate citation practices that, according to Swales (1990), involve several discursive realisations of citation (for instance, integral, non-integral, etc.) in the text. The article presents a study whose aim is to learn about citation and referencing practices in a corpus of argumentative essays written by a group of undergraduate EFL students on the upper-intermediate level of proficiency (henceforth-participants). Anchored in the theoretical framework developed by Swales (1986, 1990), the participants' citation and referencing practices in the corpus were identified and quantified. The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that the participants preferred the non-integral type of citation, in which the author/authors cited are mentioned at the end of the citation in the parentheses. The participants' referencing practices were found to be dominated by books and book chapters published by a number of reputable domestic publishing houses.
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The article presents and discusses a mixed-method study whose aim is to find out how Harrods and Liberty, two luxury department stores in London (the United Kingdom) that are referred to as British cultural icons (visitbritain.com 2023),... more
The article presents and discusses a mixed-method study whose aim is to find out how Harrods and Liberty, two luxury department stores in London (the United Kingdom) that are referred to as British cultural icons (visitbritain.com 2023), use modality that is expressed by modal verbs (e.g., can) in their discourse on sustainability. Methodologically, the study is based upon the literature (Aiezza 2015; Bu et al. 2020; Garzone & Catenaccio 2022; Kranich & Bicsar 2012), which argues that modal verbs play a number of important pragmatic roles in corporate discourse. Following the literature, it is hypothesised in the study that modal verbs in sustainability discourses by Harrods and Liberty are employed in a pragmatically similar manner. In order to verify the hypothesis, a corpus of Harrods' and Liberty's sustainability discourses is collected and analysed quantitatively in the computer program AntConc (Anthony 2022) to compute the frequency of the occurrence of modal verbs. Thereafter, the most frequent modal verbs in the corpus are examined qualitatively to establish their pragmatic roles in Harrods' and Liberty's sustainability discourses. The findings indicate that these discourses make use of the modal verbs will and can as boosters that contribute to a positive corporate image-building.
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This article presents a study that seeks to explore the dynamics of needs experienced by a group of in-service primary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) who are enrolled in a course in English phonetics at a regional... more
This article presents a study that seeks to explore the dynamics of needs experienced by a group of in-service primary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) who are enrolled in a course in English phonetics at a regional university in Norway. The course in English phonetics is designed for the group of EFL teachers (further – participants) who combine working full-time with taking in-service EFL courses. The aim of the study is to explore how the dynamics of the participants’ needs change within the time frame of two semesters. The study is based upon theoretical premises of needs analysis (further – NA) formulated by Hyland (2006), who regards EFL learners’ needs as a continuous process that changes over time. The results of NA indicate that whereas initially the participants explicitly express the need for obtaining tertiary-level education in English to be able to teach English at primary school, their needs change towards the end of the course to involve the foc...
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The article introduces a quantitative study that examines how modality, which is associated with modal verbs (e.g., must, would, etc.), is represented in English-medium research articles (henceforth – RAs) that are published in... more
The article introduces a quantitative study that examines how modality, which is associated with modal verbs (e.g., must, would, etc.), is represented in English-medium research articles (henceforth – RAs) that are published in specialised scientific journals that focus on the intersection of climate change-related research and health. The aim of the study was to collect a corpus of RAs published in the international peer-reviewed journals Eco-Environment and Health and The Journal of Climate Change and Health and examine the frequency of the occurrence of modal verbs in order to determine the most frequent modals in the corpus. To that end, the corpus was analysed in the software program AntConc (Antony, 2022) in order to establish the frequency of the central modal verbs in English, such as can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. The results of the quantitative investigation revealed that can and may were the most frequent modal verbs in the corpus. The findin...
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This article presents and discusses a study on modal verbs in sustainability reports that are communicated online by the University of Cambridge (UC) and the University of Oxford (UO) in the United Kingdom. The study is based upon a... more
This article presents and discusses a study on modal verbs in sustainability reports that are communicated online by the University of Cambridge (UC) and the University of Oxford (UO) in the United Kingdom. The study is based upon a contention proposed by Fløttum (2010), who posits that modal verbs are used in sustainability discourse as micro-linguistic means that are involved in a range of pragma-communicative strategies. Following Fløttum (2010), the present study seeks i) to establish the frequency of the occurrence of the so-called “central” modal verbs, i.e. can/could, may/might, must, shall/should, and will/would and ii) to identify their involvement in the programa-communicative strategies in the sustainability reports by UC and UO. The sustainability reports by UC and UO were analysed in the computer program AntConc version 4.0.11 (Anthony, 2022) in order to compute the frequency of the central modal verbs. Thereafter, they were analysed qualitatively to establish their rel...
The article introduces a study whose purpose is to provide a review of research articles (RAs) in psycholinguistics which focus on foreign language teaching (FLT). To that end, the study examines a corpus of RAs in psycholinguistics that... more
The article introduces a study whose purpose is to provide a review of research articles (RAs) in psycholinguistics which focus on foreign language teaching (FLT). To that end, the study examines a corpus of RAs in psycholinguistics that address FLT-related research topics, which are published in two international peer-reviewed journals, namely Psycholinguistics and Eastern European Journal of Psycholinguistics. The corpus was examined for the presence of research topics in FLT, as well as the RAs’ bibliometric data. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that the majority of the RAs were single-authored by female researchers, who focused on such FLT-related research topics as translation and interpreting, speaking in a foreign language (FL), and FL proficiency. It was established that the FLT-themed RAs investigated primarily English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and, less frequently, German, Chinese, Japanese, Latin, and Ukrainian. The findings are further described and discuss...
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Throwing food at famous paintings (e.g., a can of soup thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers) represents a rather novel form of climate change protest. The study, which is further presented in the article, seeks to unpack the way British mass... more
Throwing food at famous paintings (e.g., a can of soup thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers) represents a rather novel form of climate change protest. The study, which is further presented in the article, seeks to unpack the way British mass media cover the food-throwing incidents that take place in the context of climate change activism. To that end, a corpus of texts was collected on the official websites of the leading British mass media outlets that describe the instances of throwing food at the world-known canvases by climate change activists. The corpus was analysed qualitatively in line with the theoretical premises of i) intermedial ecocriticism proposed by Bruhn (2020a, 2020b) and ii) framing methodology developed by Entman (2007). The results of the corpus analysis indicated that British mass media frame the famous paintings involved in the climate change protest incidents by foregrounding the monetary value of the paintings and the extent of damage done to them concurrently wi...
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The article introduces and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to shed light on the frequency and use of the central modal verbs (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would) in research article (further: RA)... more
The article introduces and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to shed light on the frequency and use of the central modal verbs (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would) in research article (further: RA) abstracts in applied linguistics published in the Inner and Outer Circles of English, respectively. The study is informed by the construal of the Circles of English that are comprised of the Inner Circle, where English is spoken as the mother tongue (for example, the United Kingdom), the Outer Circle, where it is used as a second language in the former British colonies (for instance, Hong Kong, Malaysia, etc.), and the Expanding Circle (e.g., Japan), where English is spoken and taught as a foreign language (Kachru 48). In the construal of the Circles of English, the Outer Circle is regarded as a heterogeneous sociolinguistic space with fluid boundaries (Higgins 615) that affects the frequency and use of the central modal verbs in a variety of textual gen...
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"The Syntax of Climate Change: Syntactic Means in the Construction of Greta Thunberg’s Community Identity on Facebook. It is argued that the identity of an online community (e.g., a Facebook community) is manifested by linguistic... more
"The Syntax of Climate Change: Syntactic Means in the Construction of Greta Thunberg’s Community Identity on Facebook. It is argued that the identity of an online community (e.g., a Facebook community) is manifested by linguistic devices, such as syntactic means (Androutsopoulos 2015; Blumenfeld-Jones 2022; Kapranov 2019). This contention is explored in the study that is further presented and discussed in the article. The study seeks to identify syntactic means, in particular dependent clauses, which are involved in the construction of Greta Thunberg’s community identity on Facebook. Greta Thunberg, a famous climate change activist from Sweden, has a public account on Facebook that is followed by a substantial number of Facebook users, who, presumably, share her views on climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues. It is assumed in the study that Greta Thunberg’s status updates on her public Facebook account could be characterised by syntactic means that facilitate the construction of the climate activists’ community identity. In order to verify the assumption, a corpus of Greta Thunberg’s status updates on Facebook was collected and analysed by the software program L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu 2010). The computer-assisted analysis was supplemented by a manual procedure of identifying the types of dependent clauses in the corpus. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that Greta Thunberg’s community construction on Facebook was facilitated by such syntactic means as dependent clauses, in particular non-finite, adverbial, and relative clauses. The findings were further discussed in the article through the lens of the construction of community identity. Keywords: climate change, dependent clauses, Facebook, Greta Thunberg, identity, online community, syntactic means "
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The article presents and discusses a study that focuses upon discursive representations of sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) that are found on the official web-site of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The... more
The article presents and discusses a study that focuses upon discursive representations of sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) that are found on the official web-site of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The study involved a corpus of texts related to sustainability in ELT that were collected on the website of the University of Oxford. The corpus was analyzed qualitatively to identify and classify the types of discursive representations of sustainability in ELT. After that, it was investigated quantitatively to calculate the most frequent types of discursive representations of sustainability. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that the most frequent types of discursive representation of sustainability in ELT at the University of Oxford involved “lifelong learning” and “digital sustainability”, respectively. It was found that the aforementioned discursive representations did not reflect the main sustainability goals that were set by the University...
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This paper presents and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to investigate the use of discourse markers (“DMs”) in academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (“EFL”) by a group of in-service primary school teachers... more
This paper presents and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to investigate the use of discourse markers (“DMs”) in academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (“EFL”) by a group of in-service primary school teachers (“participants”). The aim of the study is to establish whether or not there would be differences in the use of DMs in the corpus of academic writing in EFL in literature and linguistics written by the participants, who concurrently with teaching EFL at a range of primary schools are enrolled in an in-service tertiary course in English. The corpus of the study consists of the participants’ i) reflective essays in English linguistics and children’s literature in English, respectively, and ii) analytic explanatory essays in English linguistics and children’s literature, respectively. The corpus of the participants’ essays was analysed quantitatively in order to identify the frequency of DMs per 1,000 words. The results of the quantitative data analysis indi...
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This article introduces and discusses an empirical investigation that aimed to establish how pre-service teachers of English (hereinafter “participants”) framed their perceptions of Canvas, a learning management system (LMS), in their... more
This article introduces and discusses an empirical investigation that aimed to establish how pre-service teachers of English (hereinafter “participants”) framed their perceptions of Canvas, a learning management system (LMS), in their studies of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In the present study, the participants and their respective controls (i.e., non-teacher EFL students) were requested to write a short reflective essay associated with the use of the LMS in their EFL course. All participants and the control group used Canvas as their LMS. The corpus of the participants’ and controls’ reflective essays was analysed qualitatively by means of framing analysis. The results of the qualitative framing analysis revealed that whilst there were similarities in the participants’ and controls’ framing, the corpus of the participants’ essays involved instances of framing that were specific to the participants’ perceptions of Canvas. These findings and their linguo-didactic implication...