Linguistic Features Used in Development Discourse in Kimeru FM Radio Stations in Kenya

Whether it is the first day of school or a new job, individuals often find themselves in situations where they must learn the structure of existing social relationships. However, the mechanisms through which individuals evaluate the strength and nature of these existing relationships – social-relational inference – remain unclear. We posit that linguistic features of conversations may help individuals evaluate social relationships and may be associated with social-relational inference. Leveraging a naturalistic behavioral experiment (57 adults; 34,735 observations), participants watched a mid-season episode of a reality television show and evaluated the observed dyadic relationships between contestants. We employed novel person- and stimulus-focused approaches to: (1) investigate social-relational inference similarity between participants, (2) examine the association between distinct linguistic features and social-relational inference, and (3) explore the relationship between early season conversation similarity and later perceived relationship formation. We found high pairwise participant response similarity across two relational subtypes (friendship, rivalry), distinct associations between relational judgments and linguistic features, including semantic similarity, sentiment, and clout, and no evidence of an association between early conversation similarity and later friendship inference. These findings suggest that naturalistic conversational content is both a potential mechanism of social-relational inference and a promising avenue for future research.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-025-02654-0.

The growing interest in whether the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) will establish itself as a foundational law, constitution, or international standard for online platforms, driven by the so-called ‘Brussels Effect,’ underscores the significance of this study. Against this backdrop, the research compares the philosophies and regulatory methods of the EU Digital Services Act, the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, Korea's Network Act, and Broadcasting Act from a comparative legal perspective. The study aims to analyze not only the detailed provisions of the DSA but also its broader philosophical characteristics to better understand its potential impact on Korea’s online and media platform regulations. The research highlights that the DSA imposes significant obligations on very large online platforms (VLOPs), such as submitting transparency reports every six months and facing economic penalties for violations. However, categorizing platforms solely based on user numbers and applying uniform obligations may lack nuance, underscoring the need for carefully designed legislative frameworks aligned with regulatory philosophy. The study also emphasizes the importance of avoiding overlapping regulations when adopting similar laws domestically. While the EU applies multiple laws, such as the DSA, Audiovisual Media Services Directive, and Digital Markets Act, to regulate platforms like YouTube, Korea must ensure that domestic regulations do not stifle the growth of its online platform industry through redundant or excessive regulatory burdens. The DSA also imposes an obligation on VLOPs and search engine operators to assess the risks posed by algorithmic systems to public discourse and electoral processes. South Korea currently lacks legislation regarding the manipulation or unfair use of platform algorithms. Within the scope of preventing threats to democracy, it would be desirable to impose obligations for transparency in technical matters and data, as proposed in the DSA, and positively consider adopting similar provisions domestically. Regarding media regulations, the study suggests revising certain provisions in Korea’s Broadcasting Act that may excessively undermine content competitiveness. Additionally, when defining illegal information in online and media platforms, Korea should avoid the DSA’s broad approach of equating offline and online illegality. Instead, it should maintain clear and specific regulatory standards, as demonstrated by Korea’s existing laws, to safeguard freedom of expression while effectively addressing harmful content. The study further highlights the importance of media literacy in the context of expanded media platforms. It views the EU’s emphasis on public interest content and the distribution of political news as essential to fostering informed public discourse and democratic values in new media environments. Such regulatory approaches could serve as valuable references for shaping Korea’s own media literacy frameworks. Lastly, the research underscores the potential benefits of adopting legislative techniques that blend self-regulation with enforceability. The DSA’s regulated self-regulation, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive’s co-regulation, and Korea’s legal institutionalization of self-regulation in the Network Act are cited as effective models for improving regulatory effectiveness. The study concludes that while the EU leads in establishing legislation for a democratic digital environment, its approach may not fully align with Korea’s existing legal framework and regulatory environment. Therefore, it is crucial for Korea to adapt such legislative innovations thoughtfully, ensuring compatibility with domestic conditions while aligning with global standards. This research provides a foundational resource for developing balanced and effective online and media platform regulations in Korea.

This study investigates the representation of the English language as a form of social currency in recent Intermediate (Grades 11 and 12) English textbooks prescribed by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Textbook Board (KPTB), Pakistan. Situated within a multilingual and postcolonial context, the research examines how the English language is discursively constructed as a marker of prestige, power, employability, and upward social mobility. Looking through the lens of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and particularly guided by Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model, the study adopts a qualitative research design to analyze selected textual data extracts from the textbooks. The analysis focuses on linguistic features, for instance, pronoun usage, modality, lexical choices, interdiscursivity, and institutional framing to uncover underlying ideologies. The major finding of the study is that the English language, though often implicitly embedded within broader educational and developmental discourses, functions as symbolic and social capital that regulates access to academic success, professional legitimacy, and socioeconomic advancement. The textbooks encourage beliefs in meritocracy and neoliberalism by presenting success because of personal effort, skill development, and flexibility, while ignoring the social inequalities tied to class, location, and unequal access to English language resources. Learners are positioned as competitive subjects responsible for their own success or failure, reinforcing existing linguistic hierarchies. The study concludes that intermediate English textbooks play a significant ideological role in shaping learners’ perceptions of English as an indispensable resource for mobility and national progress. These findings have important implications for curriculum design, language policy, and pedagogical practices, particularly in fostering linguistic equity and critical awareness in English language education.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

The social media platform "Parler'' has emerged into a prominent fringe community where a significant part of the user base are self-reported supporters of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of elites controls global politics. QAnon is considered to have had an influential role in the public discourse during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. However, little is known about QAnon supporters on Parler and what sets them aside from other users. Building up on social identity theory, we aim to profile the characteristics of QAnon supporters on Parler. We analyze a large-scale dataset with more than 600,000 profiles of English-speaking users on Parler. Based on users' profiles, posts, and comments, we then extract a comprehensive set of user features, linguistic features, network features, and content features. This allows us to perform user profiling and understand to what extent these features discriminate between QAnon and non-QAnon supporters on Parler. Our analysis is three-fold: (1) We quantify the number of QAnon supporters on Parler, finding that 34,913 users (5.5% of all users) openly report supporting the conspiracy. (2) We examine differences between QAnon vs. non-QAnon supporters. We find that QAnon supporters differ statistically significantly from non-QAnon supporters across multiple dimensions. For example, they have, on average, a larger number of followers, followees, and posts, and thus have a large impact on the Parler network. (3) We use machine learning to identify which user characteristics discriminate QAnon from non-QAnon supporters. We find that user features, linguistic features, network features, and content features, can - to a large extent - discriminate QAnon vs. non-QAnon supporters on Parler. In particular, we find that user features are highly discriminatory, followed by content features and linguistic features.

This paper discusses a number of ideologies that some channels of children's programs may tend to implant in their minds. These channels rely on a number of cartoon series on multiple linguistic methods and structures to display these ideologies, explicitly or implicitly. This paper tends to expose the discourse that the series directs to children through analyzing some episodes according to discursive strategies, linguistic strategies, and social practice of the critical discourse analysis approach. A number of texts, which contain structures and vocabularies that refer in one way or another to these ideologies, have been selected for analysis and mention the power that display. To achieve the aforementioned aims, the paper hypothesizes that in terms of the linguistic (textual) strategies and the discursive strategies used in the TV series under investigation exposed several ideologies, some of them are more commonly revealed than others. The TV series is analyzed discursively and textually within the Fairclough's approach (2001).

The article examines humanitarian issues that can and should be considered together with the social component, since in most cases humanitarian and social processes accompany each other. The social and humanitarian sphere, like others, is under the influence of various factors and processes. The results of the study highlight such main aspects that the intensive development of the social and humanitarian sphere is taking place, due to the fact that in the modern world, people and human capital are becoming more and more important. The collapse of the bipolar system of interstate relations did not lead to the disappearance of the ideological factor, and the social and humanitarian component in interstate interaction became especially important. In modern world politics, the socio-humanitarian component penetrates more and more intensively into other spheres: military-political and political-economic. It has been established that social and humanitarian aspects accompany almost all conflicts. Moreover, socio-humanitarian aspects are used in a twofold way: on the one hand, phenomena of informational, "hybrid wars" arise to counter the enemy, on the other hand, to reduce tension and resolve conflicts. In the political and economic sphere, a global agreement is emerging, which forms the social responsibility of business on a global scale. In addition, various discussion platforms on political and economic issues, organized by both business structures and power structures, are receiving development. Global challenges, changes in the social and humanitarian sphere can affect global challenges, such as climate change, the fight against crime, the fight against natural disasters, they can require cooperation and coordination between countries. It was found that the increase or decrease of trust in political institutions, the transformation of the social and humanitarian sphere can affect the level of trust in political leaders and institutions in different countries, it can affect the stability and legitimacy of the government. The social and humanitarian sphere is also developing on its own, and at present it is mainly connected with the problems of higher education. In the future, other directions of development of the social and humanitarian sphere of world politics are planned, in particular, health care, international tourism and others, since the state has taken a course to increase its presence in the social and humanitarian field. It is substantiated that the mentioned issues acquired a new color and intensified, which gave a new impetus to the development of the social and humanitarian field. In addition, it was established that the social and humanitarian sphere is intensively involved in the solution of military-political issues. As a result, information and hybrid wars arise as tools for fighting the enemy, what happened for many years is happening today and on the territory of Ukraine from the side of the aggressor in the person of the Russian Federation and its regime. Today, in the modern world, there is a significant growth of the social and humanitarian component of world politics, which is manifested in all spheres of activity. At the same time, the social and humanitarian components are a single complex, and in most cases they accompany and mutually condition each other with various negative factors.

This study is conducted to identify the ways in which Scientific book blurbs differ from and/or similar to literature book blurbs and explores the linguistic features that are used in Scientific and literature book blurbs. To meet these aims, this study focuses on sixteen Scientific blurbs in different disciplines involving (Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Medicine, Biology, Computer Science, Linguistics, Agriculture) and sixteen literature book blurbs in four different disciplines involving (Novel, Drama, Poetry, Literature). These data are analyzed by adopting Gea valor (2005:52) classifications of linguistic features. The results have revealed that different linguistic strategies are employed in Scientific and literature books blurbs such as the ellipses, personal pronouns and complement languages. Imperative constructions are rarely used in Scientific blurbs, it has been found only in computer science discipline while they are absent in literature blurbs.

The relevance of this research project lies in the increasing interest of the general public and professional linguists towards public discourse and the specific type of the communicative personality whose verbal behavior shakes up the normative framework and leads to violations of linguistic security. Such a speaker prefers non-normative linguistic means with the strongest communicative and stylistic charge, because they support her desire for self-expression and attract the attention of others; needless to say they often include invective. The rejection of normative expressive means is also due to the deliberate or spontaneous intention of the speaker to humiliate, ridicule, or offend the interlocutor and assert herself, which is much easier to do with invective vocabulary. Looking at the functions of the invective, its paralinguistic and linguistic features, and the intentions of the speakers, the article describes the invective genres of hating and flaming. Hating is viewed as a deliberate communicative action aimed at discrediting a person or at her social stigmatization. Flaming is characterized by spontaneity and is due to the speaker’s communicative emotionality, asociality, and propensity towards conflicts. The author determines risks of using verbal abuse, invective genres, and pejoratives in public discourse, emphasizing the importance of regulating these through relevant legislation, since, as experience shows, invective may become a form of expressing linguistic extremism and lead to physical violence. The author discusses the immediate need of introducing mandatory moderation (both automated and manual) of chats on social networks, forums, public websites, messengers, TV shows and other media in order to prevent negative consequences of invectizing public discourse and to ensure linguistic security for communication participants.

Societal change is often driven by shifts in public opinion. As citizens evolve in their norms, beliefs, and values, public policies change too. While traditional opinion polling and surveys can outline the broad strokes of whether public opinion on a particular topic is changing, they usually cannot capture the full multidimensional richness of opinion present in a large heterogeneous population. However, an increasing fraction of public discourse about public policy issues is now occurring on online platforms, which presents an opportunity to measure public opinion change at a qualitatively different scale of resolution and context. In this paper, we present a conceptual model of observed opinion change on online platforms and apply it to study public discourse on Universal Basic Income (UBI) on Reddit throughout its history. UBI is a periodic, no-strings-attached cash payment given to every citizen of a population. We study UBI as it is a clearly-defined policy proposal that has recently experienced a surge of interest through trends like automation and events like the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that overall stance towards UBI on Reddit significantly declined until mid-2019, when this historical trend suddenly reversed and Reddit became substantially more supportive. Using our model, we find the most significant drivers of this overall stance change were shifts within different user cohorts, within communities that represented similar affluence levels, and within communities that represented similar partisan leanings. Our method identifies nuanced social drivers of opinion change in the large-scale public discourse that now regularly occurs online, and could be applied to a broad set of other important issues and policies.

This review of Sandipto Dasgupta’s Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge University Press 2024) delves into the complex legacy of constitutionalism in postcolonial India. The book assesses constitutionalism in India as an instrument that translated the revolutionary aspirations of an anticolonial mass movement into a legal framework for societal transformation. Dasgupta illuminates constitutionalism’s dynamic mediation of conflicting visions from India’s diverse masses and its political leaders, demonstrating how it intertwined the promise of anticolonialism with enduring tensions of representation, legal interpretation, and bureaucratic planning. He critically analyses its role in the development discourse in India, its accommodation of the voice of the Indian people, and its negotiation between colonial legacies and ambitions of democratic reinvention. The review evaluates Dasgupta’s methodological innovation in treating constitutionalism as an evolving project and assesses his argument about “the people” as authors of India’s political destiny. While appreciating its nuanced take on constitutionalism, it identifies areas where the book overlooks popular contributions to constitutionalism and alternate visions of development rooted in diverse epistemologies. The review situates the book within the current crises of constitutionalism in India, reflecting on its relevance for understanding India’s political trajectory as a postcolonial democracy. This discussion contributes to ongoing debates on the intersection of democracy, law, and decolonisation, making Dasgupta’s insights indispensable for scholars and practitioners alike.

The paper analyzes functioning of contact size adjectives in such fields as clothes, footwear, jewelry, food, face features and human body in English and Tatar languages applying digital methods, including corpus linguistic methods. The material of research is taken from the national language corpora, i.e. British National Corpus (96,263,399) and Tatar National Corpus (26,000,000). The results show that in real life communication, English speakers occasionally describe necklaces by size adjectives while for the Tatar language speakers the length parameter does not matter, since in communication traditionally or stereotypically specified length of the necklace is presupposed. Parametric adjectives of the Tatar language rather describe the form of the necklace (kin/keckena). In both languages, positive size adjectives prevail four- or five-fold in outfit describing situation. In English, the frequency of these adjectives is two times as low. In both languages, negative size adjectives have the same frequency in describing clothes. In both languages, the size characteristic of shoes is extremely rare. It seems that there is no problem of discrepancies in shoe and foot sizes. Food is rarely characterized by size adjectives. In British National Corpus, the most common phrase is big mac. In Tatar adjective vak / small dominates when describing food parameters. In English phrases with human body, parameters also represent a large group. Phrases with the positive parameter adjective are distributed almost equally with respect to all parts of the face. British people are prone to a detailed description of the person's face. Additionally Tatar language speakers tend to appeal to complex adjectives to describe someone's appearance. It is clear that all the specified distinctive linguistic and cultural features that have come out due to modern digital linguistic methods should be taken into account in actual intercultural communication.

The subject of this article is the image and business reputation, which are largely determined by a huge corpus of various image and PR texts created daily within the framework of numerous mass media. The purpose of the work is to give definitions of the concepts of image and PR texts in the modern media space, to determine their similarities and differences through content and discourse analysis of materials of scientific periodicals. Socio-political, social and economic media texts in the Russian media space have many distinctive linguistic and non-linguistic features due to the national specifics and social development of our country. Reputation is often formed not only by image media texts, but also by a number of other types of texts represented in mass media with image potential. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that with the existing problem of typologization of media texts, the hypothesis is introduced that PR texts in their broad sense are nothing more than a subgroup of image media texts present in the media field of the main spheres – journalism, advertising and PR activities. The author comes to the conclusion that the instability and dynamism of the terminological apparatus gives a certain "freedom" of action when selecting research material. The ways in which image specialists work and the genre nature of image media texts themselves have become much more complicated. Image media texts can be considered as journalistic text, advertising text, PR text.

Introduction. A high level of political trust is an important element of stable and effective public administration. At the present stage, the topic of the study of political trust in Russia has gained additional relevance due to the significant changes taking place in all public spheres in connection with the growth of international tensions. The aim of this study is to determine the levels of trust of young people in the Kaliningrad Oblast towards domestic political actors representing the Russian authorities.Methodology and sources. The research is based on the works of Russian researchers devoted to the study of the peculiarities of political trust of Russian residents. On the basis of that there were put forward the hypotheses. The empirical base of the research was the data obtained in the course of a mass survey of young people in the Kaliningrad Oblast (n = 397). The indices of trust in the authorities and political leaders were calculated on their basis.Results and discussion. The results of the sociological research conducted by the method of online questionnaire are presented. Significant differences in assessments of trust of young people in the Kaliningrad region have been revealed and its levels in relation to the authorities and political leaders have been determined. The highest level of trust is recorded in relation to the Governor of the Kaliningrad Oblast, the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation and the President of the Russian Federation. The average level of trust is demonstrated by young people in relation to state security bodies, the governments of the Russian Federation and the Kaliningrad region, the court and the regional parliament. The State Duma, the Council of Federation, the head of the Kaliningrad administration and the head of the City of Kaliningrad have a low level of trust.Conclusion. It has been revealed that the political trust of young people in the Kaliningrad region is characterised by the features, which are typical for the Russian population as a whole, such as a high level of trust in the head of state, low trust in parliament and personalisation of trust. Among the specific features of the political trust of young people in the region we can single out a high degree of trust in the governor, as well as the absence of significant differences in trust in the authorities of the federal and regional levels.

ABSTRACTThis article explores public reactions to an event dubbed the ‘Sydney siege’, through an analysis of its media coverage. The event, where a Muslim man held 18 hostages in a Sydney café, was closely followed during its 22 hour duration and triggered an avalanche of public commentary. We analyse media articles, political leaders’ media statements and transcripts of press conferences published within the week of the siege. Using NVivo software, we code the key themes arising from the data and employ in-depth textual and discourse analyses of the most prominent themes: multiculturalism, Islam/Muslims and ‘community/solidarity’. Using the theoretical framework of the nation as an imagined community which needs its ‘Others’, we find that the ‘Sydney siege’ lead to emphasising hegemonic ideas of the Australian national identity and values that mark the boundaries of nationhood, community belonging and solidarity. Such ideas placed Muslims precariously at the national margin, applying a simplistic binary of the ‘good ones’ worthy of inclusion into the ‘good nation’ and the ‘bad ones’ to be excluded. We conclude that the public discourse following the Sydney siege affirmed Australian multiculturalism in a broad sense but also strongly implied the Otherness of Muslims.