Questões de Inglês - Palavras conectivas | Connective words para Concurso

Text VI.

                            Critical Discourse Analysis

      We have seen that among many other resources that define the power base of a group or institution, access to or control over public discourse and communication is an important "symbolic" resource, as is the case for knowledge and information (van Dijk 1996). Most people have active control only over everyday talk with family members, friends, or colleagues, and passive control over, e.g. media usage. In many situations, ordinary people are more or less passive targets of text and talk, e.g. of their bosses or teachers, or of the authorities, such as police officers, judges, welfare bureaucrats, or tax inspectors, who may simply tell them what (not) to believe or what to do.

      On the other hand, members of more powerful social groups and institutions, and especially their leaders (the elites), have more or less exclusive access to, and control over, one or more types of public discourse. Thus, professors control scholarly discourse, teachers educational discourse, journalists media discourse, lawyers legal discourse, and politicians policy and other public political discourse. Those who have more control over more ‒ and more influential ‒  discourse (and more properties) are by that definition also more powerful.

      These notions of discourse access and control are very general, and it is one of the tasks of CDA to spell out these forms of power. Thus, if discourse is defined in terms of complex communicative events, access and control may be defined both for the context and for the structures of text and talk themselves.

(van DIJK, T. A. Critical Discourse Analysis. In: SCHIFFRIN, D.; TANNEN, D.; HAMILTON, H. (eds.).   The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Wiley‐Blackwell, 2003. pp. 352‐371.)

Text IV

                       Identity and Interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach

      Different research traditions within sociocultural linguistics have particular strengths in analyzing the varied dimensions of identity outlined in this article. The method of analysis selected by the researcher makes salient which aspect of identity comes into view, and such 'partial accounts' contribute to the broader understanding of identity that we advocate here. Although these lines of research have often remained separate from one another, the combination of their diverse theoretical and methodological strengths  ‒  including the microanalysis of conversation, the macroanalysis of ideological processes, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of linguistic structures, and the ethnographic focus on local cultural practices and social groupings  ‒  calls attention to the fact that identity in all its complexity can never be contained within a single analysis. For this reason, it is necessary to conceive of sociocultural linguistics broadly and inclusively. The five principles proposed here  ‒  Emergence, Positionality, Indexicality, Relationality, and Partialness  ‒ represent the varied ways in which different kinds of scholars currently approach the question of identity. Even researchers whose primary goals lie elsewhere can contribute to this project by providing sophisticated conceptualizations of how human dynamics unfold in discourse, along with rigorous analytic tools for discovering how such processes work. While identity has been a widely circulating notion in sociocultural linguistic research for some time, few scholars have explicitly theorized the concept. The present article offers one way of understanding this body of work by anchoring identity in interaction. By positing, in keeping with recent scholarship, that identity is emergent in discourse and does not precede it, we are able to locate identity as an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon. This discursive approach further allows us to incorporate within identity not only the broad sociological categories most commonly associated with the concept, but also more local positionings, both ethnographic and interactional. The linguistic resources that indexically produce identity at all these levels are therefore necessarily broad and flexible, including labels, implicatures, stances, styles, and entire languages and varieties. Because these tools are put to use in interaction, the process of identity construction does not reside within the individual but in intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, realness and fakeness, power and disempowerment. Finally, by theorizing agency as a broader phenomenon than simply individualistic and deliberate action, we are able to call attention to the myriad ways that identity comes into being, from habitual practice to interactional negotiation to representations and ideologies.

      It is no overstatement to assert that the age of identity is upon us, not only in sociocultural linguistics but also in the human and social sciences more generally. Scholars of language use are particularly well equipped to provide an empirically viable account of the complexities of identity as a social, cultural, and ‒ most fundamentally ‒ interactional phenomenon. The recognition of the loose coalition of approaches that we call sociocultural linguistics is a necessary step in advancing this goal, for it is only by understanding our diverse theories and methods as complementary, not competing, that we can meaningfully interpret this crucial dimension of contemporary social life.

(BUCHOLTZ, M.; HALL, K. Identity and interaction: a sociocultural approach. In: Discourse Studies, vol 7 (4‐5). London: SAGE, 2005. pp. 585‐614.)

Smiling Can Actually Make People Happier, Study Finds

Researchers of a new study find that the simple act (1)______ smiling can actually make a person happier. Evidently, nearly 50 years of data shows facial expressions can affect an individual’s emotions or feelings.

Emotional Debate  

For over 100 years, psychologists have been debating whether facial expressions can affect emotions. The argument became even more pronounced (2)______ 2016 after 17 teams of scientists failed to replicate a popular experiment that would supposedly show that smiling can actually make people happier. 

While there are some studies that do not show a relationship (3)______facial expressions and emotional feelings, the researchers of the new study believe that they can’t focus on the data from just one. As such, they scoured data from 138 studies, which tested over 11,000 participants (4)_____ all over the world. 

“But we can’t focus on the results of any one study. Psychologists have been testing this idea since the early 1970s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence,” said lead researcher Nicholas Coles, PhD. 

Facial Expressions Affect People's Emotions 

Based on the team’s meta-analysis, facial expressions do, in fact, have a small impact on emotions. For instance, a person who smiles will feel happier, a person who scowls will feel angrier, and a person who frowns will feel sadder. While the effects aren’t very powerful or long-lasting, it is significant enough to show a correlation.  

According to researchers, their findings bring us closer to understanding how human emotions work and how the mind and body work together to shape how we experience emotions. That said, they do note that they are not saying that people can just smile their way to happiness, especially when it comes to mental health conditions such as depression. 

The study is published in Psychological Bulletin. 

Source: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/241396/20190413/smiling-can-actually-make-peoplehappier-study-finds.htm(adapted)Access: April 13th, 2019