Discourse markers (DMs) play a significant role in spoken communication, assisting in coherence and fluency in first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Understanding the use of these markers as disfluency strategies can inform language teaching by highlighting the significance of real-world communication skills. Researchers often focus on studying the use of these markers to unveil their various functions in spoken discourse and as signals of speakers’ pragmatic competence. However, there is little research on how L2 children employ speech management strategies such as DMs or filled pauses to overcome disfluency in their interactions. This study aims to explore how school-age Arab children learning English as an additional language employ DMs with other disfluency strategies (i.e., filled pauses and repetition) to manage disfluency in their speech by analyzing natural spoken data in a corpus of children’s speech. Results show that school-age Arab children employ the five most frequent DMs in the corpus (like, yeah, okay, so and oh) in co-occurrence with filled pauses and repetitions to serve primarily disfluency functions. The study contributes to the field of disfluency studies by offering insights into how Arabic-speaking child learners of English use discourse markers along with other strategies to manage disfluency and develop L1-like interactional patterns, thereby shedding light on the acquisition of pragmatic and interactional competence in L2 children.
Hate speech is a crucial tool in Trump’s conflict communication, which helped him win the 2024 presidential election. This study aims to investigate hate speech in Trump’s political discourse, focusing on the role and functions of hate speech as a conflict communication tool. The research demonstrates that hate rhetoric in Trump’s political discourse aimed at positioning himself as the best choice and, simultaneously, forming an extremely negative image of his political opponents. The expression of Trump’s hate speech encompasses negative stereotypical and non-typical nominations within the threat domain which are targeted at three main addressees: the presidential candidate Kamala Harris, then President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
This article examines how the public diplomatic, English-language press in East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – constructed Russia and Ukraine in the first year of the war. Drawing on a 2.06-million word corpus of news coverage from The Japan News, The Korea Herald, The Korea Times, and Taiwan News, we undertake a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the most frequent collocate variations of identity construction terms for both national actors in the data, focusing specifically on referential and predication strategies, as well as the discursive construction of transitivity. Our findings suggest that these outlets’ public-diplomacy patterning aligned with a U.S.-led bloc: Russia is cast as economically central yet norm-violating and is positioned as a legitimate target of condemnation and sanctions, often alongside China. By contrast, Ukraine is cast as a sovereign state and productive economy and represented transitively as the object of Russian attack and the beneficiary/agent of allied support and rebuilding. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how public diplomati press outlets function toward geopolitical bloc identity-building and polarisation during times of international conflict.
