The Tunisian Revolution has generated unprecedented attention in Arab and Western news. In many cases, these media intended not only to report on the events but to dominate people’s ideologies in order to favor a political outcome (Galal and Spielhaus 2012). The present study examines the development of the Tunisian Revolution through the lenses of Arab written media –Arabic and English reports – and Western written media in English. The objective of this longitudinal investigation is to elucidate, through a combination of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the ideological representations of the media coverage in the post-revolution era.
The present article discusses the pragmatic role of intonation in crosscultural interactions. It investigates whether the choice of tone and pitch accent in the spoken discourse produced by Spanish learners of English can lead to deficient appropriateness, a concept that can be defined as the choice of ''the most adequate element-where element is understood at any linguistic level-in the realization of a certain function in a specific context'' (Romero Trillo 2001: 531). The study analyzes short read-alouds and Spanish learners' spontaneous conversations and compares them to native English speakers' production in order to interpret the pragmatic meaning expressed by their intonation patterns (cf. Benson et al. 1988; Halliday 1994;Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). A cross-linguistic corpus was compiled by recording native and non-native speakers who performed short dialogues in English. The corpus data were analyzed and annotated in order to obtain detailed and quantitative comparable information on the two language user groups' prosodic characteristics. The results reveal the existence of significant di¤erences in the choice of the tone and pitch accent by nonnative and native English speakers in similar contexts. These di¤erences may cause communicative misunderstanding.
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