Few medical journals specifically instruct authors to use the active voice and avoid the passive voice, but advice to that effect is common in the large number of stylebooks and blogs aimed at medical and scientific writers. Such advice typically revolves around arguments that the passive voice is less clear, less direct, and less concise than the active voice, that it conceals the identity of ...

In direct face-to-face communication, we use a variety of different means of expression with different degrees of consciousness and intentionality (Allwood 1976). Communication is multimodal and embodied. In parallel to verbally formulating our conscious message, we also convey information with our voice, mimics, gaze, gestures and body posture. The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of sp...

Abstract This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing speaking as sources empowerment identity. Marking a shift from dominant realistic historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments magical realism, carnivalesque, intertextuality, metafiction reconfigure novelisti...

An emerging feminist paradigm likens depression to silencing, as women disconnect from important aspects of their realities in an attempt to meet cultural standards of feminine goodness. While offering a provocative re-evaluation of hegemonic feminine norms and depressive episodes, little in this literature explores connections between silencing and depression within other, non-white constructi...

Is there ever a good reason to reissue a good story? In the case of The Double Helix, the answer is emphatically yes. Forty-four years after JamesWatson published his scientific memoir of the story behind the discovery of the structure of DNA, his voice is still vibrant. And now there is more context to enjoy. The new edition, The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix by James D. Watson, edite...

Better representations of plot structure could greatly improve computational methods for summarizing and generating stories. Current representations lack abstraction, focusing too closely on events. We present a kernel for comparing novelistic plots at a higher level, in terms of the cast of characters they depict and the social relationships between them. Our kernel compares the characters of ...

‘Languages are differently equipped to express different realworld relations, and they certainly do not express all aspects of meaning with equal ease” (Ivir, 1981:56). This paper is a case study that seeks to examine this statement through exploring the equivalence of passive voice in translation of English into Greek. The source text is ‘9/11’ by Chomsky, (2001) and its Greek translation by M...

We present a method of enhancing dialogue markup by mapping HPSG-based discourse category information into XML. The application scenario is crisis talk, specifically cockpit voice recording (CVR) transcripts of aviation disasters. This approach is new both as a source of richly annotated spoken language corpus resources for a little known scenario, and in grammatical theory and language documen...