The study considers mass media communication as intertwined with social norms, as assumed by the perspective of social representations. It explores the Italian press communication by focusing on three pairs of men and women politicians with different political orientations and all serving as presidents of the Houses of Parliament in three legislatures. The article concentrates on five newspaper...

The article deals with the issues of linguistic and cultural adaptation students, problems they face in a new environment. According to results research, patterns connections between student's personality, socio-cultural skills, academic performance realities are revealed. process is manifested verbal behavior foreign-speaking students. Experimental studies show length social contact, connectio...

This article considers the current problem of investigation and development of method of web-members’ socio-demographic characteristics’ profile validation based on analysis of socio-demographic characteristics. The topicality of the paper is determined by the necessity to identify the web-community member by means of computer-linguistic analysis of their information track (all information abou...

Narrowly defined, contrastive linguistics can be regarded as a branch of comparative linguistics that is concerned with pairs of languages which are ‘socio-culturally linked’. Two languages can be said to be socio-culturally linked when (i) they are used by a considerable number of bior multilingual speakers, and/or (ii) a substantial amount of ‘linguistic output’ (text, oral discourse) is tran...

This article examines how linguistic interaction patterns changed over time among a geographically and ethnically diverse group of young people in an online virtual community, the Junior Summit '98 online youth forum. The tools of word frequency and content analyses are paired with evidence from post-hoc interviews. Results demonstrate the ways in which these young people from different cultura...

We discuss a cue-based grammar induction approach based on a parallel theory of grammar. Our model is based on the hypotheses of interdependency between linguistic levels (of representation) and inductability of specific structural properties at a particular level, with consequences for the induction of structural properties at other linguistic levels. We present the results of three different ...

Dialect speakers in the North of England use vowel-less forms of the definite article (the) which are unattested in English varieties elsewhere and have been termed Definite Article Reduction (DAR). Previous research on DAR has provided detailed phonological descriptions, but less insight has been gained into other aspects of DAR like its emergence and the northern pattern of occurrence. I demo...

This paper is a corpus study on humor in discourse of the film, Crazy Stone (疯狂的石头). Three levels of humor are examined. The first level is strictly linguistic in the study of humor. The second level is from the societal perspective. The third level is the interaction between language and the socio-political context. According to these three levels, three basic findings are (1) the linguistic d...

This paper examined disagreement in two sets of data in the context of service encounters: problem-solving interactions (doctor-patient communication) and purchase-oriented encounters (pharmacies) from a cross-cultural perspective (Spanish-British English). We proposed assertiveness, a term that refers to both socio-psychological and linguistic features of communication, as a concept that may h...