
Wilbert SpoorenRadboud University | RU · Centre for Language Studies
Wilbert Spooren
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Publications (113)
Ten handbooks of journalism most-used in Dutch and Iranian (applied) universities were content-analyzed and compared for their instructions on (crime) newswriting and assumptions behind the given instructions. While Dutch handbooks consider ‘informing’ the optimal function of journalism and news, Iranian handbooks put emphasis on ‘increasing awaren...
In this study, the concept of framing is applied in order to show differences in the conception of crime events in the genre of news texts across socio-cultural contexts. Three aspects of framing at the thematic, lexical and syntactic level are defined: occurrence, marked description and prominence and, accordingly, a corpus of one hundred crime-ne...
This article aims to further test the cognitive claims of the so-called subjectivity account of causal events and their linguistic markers, causal connectives. We took Mandarin Chinese, a language that is typologically completely different from the usual western languages, as a case to provide evidence for this subjectivity account. Complementary t...
In this study, we analyze the meaning and use of Mandarin causal connectives kějiàn ‘therefore/it can be seen that’, suǒyǐ ‘so’, yīncǐ ‘for this reason’, and yúshì ‘thereupon/as a result’ in terms of causality and subjectivity. We adopt an integrated approach to subjectivity and analyze the subjectivity profile of a causal construction in terms of...
This paper examines whether use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and non-standard informal written language therein harms youths' literacy skills. An experiment was conducted with 500 Dutch youths of different educational levels and age groups to assess if social media use affects their school writings. It was measured if chatting via Whats...
With the increasing availability of large corpora, quantitative corpus analysis is becoming more and more popular as a method for conducting linguistic research. This paper uses a new research tool (cesar) that makes it possible to search syntactically annotated corpora without extensive programming knowledge to study the subjectivity patterns of f...
Few studies have focused on visual representation of crime-related events in news images across national contexts. In this study, eighty-three news images from two hundred Iranian and Dutch news articles published in national newspapers were qualitatively analyzed. These images were scrutinized for their use of semiotic strategies as well as the ov...
Language users have preferences for the connectives they choose to express causal relations. These choices may depend on the subjectivity involved in the relation. Dutch connectives illustrate this situation clearly: want (‘since/for’) is preferred typically for expressing subjective relations and omdat (‘because’) for objective ones. While various...
Studies in several languages find that causal connectives differ from one another in their prototypical meaning and use , which provides insight into language users’ cognitive categorization of causal relations in discourse. Subjectivity plays a vital role in this process. Using an integrated subjectivity approach, this study aims to give a compreh...
The high lexical density and complex morphology of written standard English in academic and administrative contexts have raised concerns about their effect on reading proficiency across educational levels. This study provides empirical evidence of a serial multiple mediator model supporting the relationship between English L2 students’ morphologica...
This chapter investigates Dutch police interviews with children who are a victim or a witness of sexual violence. These interviews have a great import for children. On the one hand, the testimonies allow children to tell their story and the fact that they are interviewed demonstrates faith in their competence to testify. On the other hand, the inte...
Human language is the most powerful communication system that evolution has produced. Within this system, we can talk about things we can physically see, such as cats and tables, but also about more abstract entities, such as theories and feelings. But how are these abstract concepts grounded in human cognition and represented in the mind? How are...
Corpus-based studies in various languages have demonstrated that some connectives are used preferentially to express subjective versus objective meanings, for example, omdat vs. want in Dutch. However, Spanish connectives have been understudied from this perspective. Moreover, most of the studies of subjectivity have focused on explicit relations a...
This study reports on a conceptual model that provides insight into the relationship between English reading proficiency and academic performance of first-year science and mathematics university students in Ghana, and an empirical test of that model. Longitudinal data were acquired from a sample of 133 students. Using three different mediation anal...
Health consumers are increasingly expected to play an active role with respect to their health and make informed decisions. Therefore, it is essential that health information meets the needs and expectations of health consumers. Online health information is examined from the perspectives of patients with uterine cervical dysplasia undergoing a freq...
OMG, sgool, indd: informele communicatie in whatsapptaal bevat vaak ‘slordige’ spelling, grammaticale ‘fouten’ en andere afwijkingen van het Standaardnederlands. Het is dan ook niet vreemd dat ouders en docenten bang zijn dat sociale media de schrijfvaardigheid van onze jeugd verpesten. Beïnvloedt dat continue geapp en gechat inderdaad de prestatie...
Many studies of structure in present-day Western news texts have shown that the dominant structure is the inverted pyramid, even if the use of a chronological narrative structure is acknowledged. However, the relevant literature has exclusively investigated Western news texts. In this study, we challenge the dominance of the inverted news structure...
Causality and subjectivity are relevant cognitive principles in the categorization of coherence relations and connectives. Studies in various languages have shown how both notions can explain the meaning and use of different connectives. However, the Spanish language has been understudied from this perspective. Also, most of the existing research o...
This study evaluated the effectiveness of a reading intervention in first-year university courses (Chemistry and Linguistics) in Ghana, emphasising text structure, vocabulary and reading motivation. A between-group design was used to compare experimental (n = 51) and control groups (n = 33) in a pre-test post-test setup. The experimental manipulati...
The introduction of new media as a means of communication by the police triggers interesting questions about the impact of such new developments, such as the effect on people's safety perceptions. Since communication is mostly overlooked as a possible determinant of safety perception, this led to a research project into the relationship between Twi...
https://tijdschriften.boomcriminologie.nl/tijdschrift/tijdschriftveiligheid/2016/4/TvV_1872-7948_2016_015_004_002
How transparent can we be?
In their contribution Hornikx and Batenburg (2016) raise a number of issues related to the transparency and integrity of quantitative research in particular. In this contribution two additional issues are raised that may hinder the accessibility and accountability of our research results. One is related to studies based o...
https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/468793
Many languages of the world have connectives to express causal relations at the discourse level. Often, language users systematically prefer one lexical item (because) over another (even highly similar) one (since) to express a causal relationship. Such choices provide a window on speakers' cognitive categorizations, and have been modeled in previo...
News stories narrate newsworthy facts, events, and opinions. Most of the content of these stories comes from sources other than the news narrator. Reporters obtain their news from news sources, representing their utterances in more or less verbatim ways, paraphrasing and summarizing as they think necessary. The representation of source material can...
The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it is an attempt to fill in the blanks on the unexplored map of reading behaviours, attitudes, and self-concept of teacher education students in Ghana. Secondly, it investigates whether the negative perceptions of lecturers from the University of Cape Coast (UCC) and the University of Education Winneba (...
Language users systematically prefer one lexical item (because) over another (even highly similar) one (since) to express a causal relationship in discourse. Such choices provide a window on speakers' cognitive categorizations, and have been modeled in previous work in terms of subjectivity. This paper analyzes the Dutch connectives omdat ('because...
This reading study registered eye movements to investigate the influence of different discourse constructional factors on anaphor resolution in written discourse. More specifically, the study focused on the influence of the possible interplay of proximity between a possible referent and the anaphor and amount of elaboration on the time course of th...
In several studies of English data, researchers have observed a trend of ‘informalization’: a shift of stylistic preferences in public written discourse, such as journalistic texts, towards a more conversational, or oral, style. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this issue by empirically testing this informalization thesis for Dutch. For this...
The alliance between cognitive linguistics and the study of discourse has become stronger in the recent past. On the one hand, cognitive linguistics focuses on language as an instrument for organizing, processing, and conveying information; on the other, language users communicate through discourse rather than through isolated sentences. This artic...
Vandaag de dag kunnen informatieontwerpers tekst en beeld op steeds complexere manieren met elkaar combineren. De keuze voor die combinaties is vaak gebaseerd op intuïtie, doordat evidence-based richtlijnen ontbreken. Onderzoek naar de effectiviteit van beeld voor tekstbegrip is in verschillende domeinen uitgevoerd, waardoor het lastig is om algeme...
Bij een gezondheidsprobleem gaan velen op zoek naar informatie bij zorgverleners of naasten, in encyclopedieën, en steeds vaker op internet. Ziekenhuizen zouden op deze behoefte kunnen inspelen door patiënten zelf te verwijzen naar betrouwbare informatie. Zorgverleners zouden
ook zelf interactieve informatie kunnen aanbieden op ziekenhuiswebsites....
This paper tackles the issue of the validity and reliability of coding discourse phenomena in corpus-based analyses. On the basis of a sample analysis of coherence relation annotation that resulted in a poor kappa score, we describe the problem and put it into the context of recent literature from the field of computational linguistics on required...
Binnen de traditie van critical discourse analysis heeft Fairclough het concept ‘conversationalisatie’ geïntroduceerd: in case studies van publiek taalgebruik observeert hij een verschuiving in de tijd, waarbij steeds meer informele kenmerken uit conversatie gebruikt worden. In navolging van Steen (2003) en Pearce (2005) willen we een bijdrage leve...
This chapter focuses on the cognition of coherence relations, that is, relations like Cause-Consequence, Contrast ,and Enumeration. Understanding the coherence relations between utterances in a discourse is a crucial aspect of verbal communication. If readers and listeners have not inferred the coherence relation, they have not understood the text...
This article presents an analysis of the acquisition order of coherence relations between discourse segments. The basis is a cognitive theory of coherence relations (Sanders et al., 1992) that makes predictions about the order in which the relations and their linguistic expressions are acquired, because they show an increasing cognitive complexity....
We explored the possibility of using automatic techniques to analyze the use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of 2 techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis, the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were studied. The method of analysis is described. We found that differences th...
In this paper we describe the (annotation) tools underly-ing two automatic techniques to analyse the meaning and use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of these techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis, the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were stud-ied. We will focus here o...
Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics is designed as a comprehensive introductory text for first and second-year university students of language and linguistics. It provides a chapter on each of the more established areas in linguistics such as lexicology, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, historical linguistics, and language...
In this paper we expl ore a relatio nship, reported earlier in Bekke r and Spooren (1999), between reversal and co herence relations. In that paper it was suggested that reversed order relatio ns have an perspectivizing effect on the interpr etation o f the text. Per spectivizat ion is usually established on t he basis o f the pre senc e of linguis...
This book brings together linguistics and psycholinguistics. Text representation is considered a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding. The focus is on referential and relational coherence and the role of linguistic characteristics as processing instructions from a text linguis...
In document design studies, the phase of inventio (deciding what information to communicate) is often neglected. given. In this contribution we intend to remedy this situation, by combining the Quintillian inventio system with the Gricean notion of relevance. First we discuss the difference between writer-relevance (a writer's goals) and reader-rel...
Students can be regarded as professional readers: they have to attend to, comprehend and remember the most important information in instructional texts, often about topics they are not readily interested in. Optimising such instructional texts has been the subject of much reading research. This research has shown robust effects for the influence of...
One reason discourse coheres is because coherence relations such as Cause‐Consequence can be inferred between the sentences that function as the building blocks of the discourse. This article discusses cases in which the coherence relation remains underspecified: A connective is used that does not “literally” express the intended coherence relation...
in fact, it is an article on rhetorical questions
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Understanding a discourse means constructing a coherent representation of that discourse. Inferring coherence relations, such as cause‐consequence and claim‐argument, is a necessary condition for a discourse representation to be coherent. Despite some descriptively fairly adequate proposals in the literature, there is still no theoretically satisfy...