http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38313 2026-04-05T16:46:41Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38339 The Influence of Level of Proficiency in the L2 and L3 on the Production of the L3 Spanish Apico-alveolar Sibilant Sypiańska, Jolanta; Cal, Zuzanna Current Third Language Acquisition research has traditionally focused on the L2 status (e.g. Hammarberg 2001, Bardel & Falk 2007) or linguistic proximity (e.g. Cenoz 2001, Westergaard, Mitrofanova, Mykhaylyk & Rodina 2016). Limited research has been conducted on the influence of the potentially significant factor of level of proficiency, and particularly where proficiency in both the L2 (Tremblay 2006, Woll 2016) and the L3 (Hammarberg 2001, Wrembel 2010) may be considered as a conditioning factor for the shape of the L3. The aim of the current study was thus to determine the influence of L2 and L3 level of proficiency (L2LoP and L3LoP) and the interaction of the two factors on the production of the L3 Spanish apico-alveolar sibilant in a group of L1 Polish, L2 English and L3 Spanish trilinguals who had different levels of overall proficiency in the two foreign languages. The parameters of the sibilant under analysis were spectral moments: centre of gravity (M1), standard deviation (M2), skewness (M3) and kurtosis (M4) in intervocalic position in two-syllable words with initial stress. The results point to the influential role of both L2LoP and L3LoP as well as their interaction on the production of the L3 Spanish sibilant. When the level of proficiency in one of the languages was low, it allowed the other language with a higher level of proficiency to exert influence on the values of the spectral moments in the L3 sibilant. This interplay of factors furthers the understanding of how levels of proficiency in the L2 and the L3 condition the developing L3. 2020-03-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38338 "You Don't Have Time to Think Up There. If You Think You're Dead" – A Corpus-assisted Study of Discursive Strategies to Engage Readers in Corporate Blogs Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław; Fronczak, Katarzyna This study investigates recurrent language resources employed in corporate blogs to connect with readers and (to a lesser extent) express authorial positions. It is based on the premise that constructing identity and enhancing image underpins most, if not all, corporate discourse and blogs are no exception. Based on a corpus of 500 different posts (totalling 318,296 words) from the Business Process Outsourcing and Information Technology sectors, we use standard Corpus Linguistics (Partington et al. 2013) techniques (keywords, cluster analysis, concordancing) to identify linguistic features associated with the expression of engagement: reader pronouns and their co-occurrence with selected modal verbs, questions, adverbs marking shared knowledge and directives. These are then interpreted in in terms of a model of textual interactions proposed in Hyland (2005). We argue that the communication found in this relatively new and underresearched genre is essentially effected one-way establishing a pseudo-dialogue, with virtually no or very low level of interactivity between blog writers and blog readers. 2020-03-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38337 Conflict – Crisis Hierarchy in English News Discourse: Cognitive Rhetorical Perspective Potapenko, Serhiy I.; Shcherbak, Olena M. The paper argues that in English on-line news the meanings of the conflict and crisis terms serve as reference points for the construction of a confrontation hierarchy. It is based on the interaction of the relations of force, serving as primes for meaning formation, with three levels of discourse prominence meant to attract, focus and keep the addressee’s attention in headings, headlines and throughout the text respectively. It is found that news stories arrange the units of conflict – crisis hierarchy according to three patterns: zoom-in, offering a detailed textual representation of confrontation with support of the argumentation sections of evidence, explanation or commentary; zoom-out, generalizing on the forces, underlying confrontation construction; multiperspectivation, aimed at a multifaceted representation of conflict – crisis hierarchy. 2020-03-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38335 Performative Discourse of Drag Queens: A Sociolinguistic Study Szymańska, Maria The article presents the analysis of two speeches given by Rory O’Neill, also known as Panti Bliss, who is so far the most recognisable Irish drag queen. Apart from being a drag queen, Rory O’Neill is also a political activist whose performances were part of the campaign before the referendum concerning the 34th Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland. In the analysis both these aspects of the speaker’s identity are taken into consideration. Although the analysis is mostly linguistic, it also considers extralinguistic aspects of communication, e.g. the performer’s appearance on stage, as contextual elements are essential in sociolinguistic contexts. Thus, the analysis draws from the theoretical background focused on political discourse and the language used by drag queens to a detailed account of the two speeches in order discuss them in relation to the standards of both a drag performance and a political speech. 2020-03-30T00:00:00Z