Prediction is a central feature of mature language comprehension, but little is known about how and when it develops. This study investigates whether lexical prediction emerges before seven using a novel, naturalistic cloze task. Five and six-year-old children listened to a storybook and occasionally guessed which word might come next. We selected 180 words from the story that were shown to be more or less predictable in a prior cloze norming task with adults. We found that children frequently guessed the correct word or provided an alternative that was semantically related to the target, demonstrating an ability to use the context to explicitly predict upcoming words. Six-year-olds were more accurate than 5-year-olds. These findings show prediction is present (but still improving) in early childhood, motivating future work on the role of prediction in children’s comprehension and learning. Finally, we demonstrate that it is feasible to collect cloze values from children.

How do actors seek to modify international hierarchies and improve their position in international society? To answer this question, this article develops a novel analytical approach to study a phenomenon it calls ‘the middling of international hierarchies’. This phenomenon consists of actors attempting to produce, occupy, and claim the ‘middle’ position in international hierarchies. The article focuses on one pathway through which actors pursue this strategy: the invocation of ‘middle’ categories. Actors engaged in middling seek to transform binary hierarchies into trichotomous ones, producing and claiming the ‘middle’ position in such hierarchies in the process. In doing so, these actors distance themselves from those categorised in the lower rungs of the hierarchy without directly challenging those sitting atop international pecking orders. Making use of an ‘uncommon foundations strategy’, the paper develops its claims through two illustrative cases: the emergence of the ‘Dominions’ category in the early 20th-century British Empire and the re-popularisation of the label ‘Central Europe’ during the late Cold War. The paper presents a general and theoretically novel approach to how actors seek to modify international hierarchies, while also revealing unexpected commonalities between social categories in world politics that might otherwise appear unrelated.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic-driven nationalism surged in China, exemplified by widespread mockery and disparagement of India’s handling of the crisis in Chinese cyberspace. Adopting a linguistically grounded approach, this study scrutinizes how India is discursively constructed as an inferior Other amid COVID-19. It conducts a linguistically informed discourse analysis of a highly viewed text on Zhihu (China’s largest online Q&A platform). Drawing mainly on Halliday’s transitivity theory, this study unpacks the linguistic features in the chosen text, which, within a discourse of modern medicine, depicts the Indian people as trapped between hopelessly passive and absurdly overactive in the face of the pandemic. The text also casts the Indian government as an impotent foil to the Chinese government, a representation situated within a discourse of strong-state pandemic governance. By interrogating the non-official social media text through a linguistic lens, this study contributes to understanding China’s representational politics of Othering the non-West within the intertextual nexus between official and non-official spheres. It also contributes to making sense of the multidimensionality and ambivalence underlying Chinese national identity-making as well as “Orientalism within the ‘Orient’” in the Chinese context.

The article looks at the question of how property is constitutive of identity. Dominance over material resources and formation of markers of identity are often conjoint processes aided by constitutional processes. We frame the discursive construction of property and public space in India through the judicial discourse on the hijab ban in colleges in the state of Karnataka. Courts often look at space as an autonomously existing physical object rather than a socially constructed arena to which access is granted or denied depending on one’s socio-cultural location. We suggest that this is a natural consequence of over-emphasizing the ‘thingness’ of property as opposed to understanding the discursive and historically contingent nature of property rights. This has a direct relation with how certain identities are allowed the freedom to make public spaces their own while others, though occupying these ostensibly neutral spaces, are not allowed to ‘perform’ their identities.

Digital constitutionalism has been in vogue in recent years. A series of journal articles, edited collections and monographs that front the catch term have mushroomed. This has, in turn, inspired a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the normative and theoretical coherence as well as epistemic value of digital constitutionalism. Critics deplore the use of the age-old notion of constitutionalism to describe what they consider to be mere regulatory and self-regulatory initiatives which do not meet its well-established core normative minimums. In casting digital constitutionalism in this light, critics present it as a project driven primarily or hijacked by private sector actors, namely big digital platforms. This article seeks to challenge and bring some nuance to such recent sharp criticisms of digital constitutionalism. By positioning its origins and evolution in the digital bill of rights movement, it makes the case for reimagining digital constitutionalism as a discourse. The article thus hopes to rehabilitate and clarify the role and epistemic value of digital constitutionalism as a discourse that is an inchoate, gradualist and fundamentally hortatory. In a novel approach, it argues that framing digital constitutionalism as a discourse depicts accurately its ontological and normative dimensions but also attends to the concerns of its detractors.

Changes in narrative skills among Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) were examined following Bilingual Narrative Intervention. Eight children with DLD and nine typically developing children participated in two six-session intervention blocks, first in the home language HL/Russian and then in the societal language SL/Hebrew. Intervention sessions involved retelling single-episode stories accompanied by icons/gestures, repetition, and peer interaction. Narrative skills were assessed at four-time points. Results showed that while typically developing children performed better overall, both groups followed similar trajectories. Children performed better in HL/Russian across all assessments. Macrostructure improved in both groups after HL/Russian intervention, particularly for “Feeling” and “Goal” elements. Bilingual typical language development children showed higher lexical diversity, with significant improvement following HL/Russian intervention. Children with bilingual DLD made more errors in HL/Russian, but similar error rates emerged between groups for SL/Hebrew. Earlier age of onset of bilingualism correlated with better macrostructure in SL/Hebrew but not in HL/Russian. Findings underscore the need for tailored intervention in both languages which considers clinical status and bilingual children’s background.

The use of religious symbols has sparked heated debate and numerous judicial cases across Europe. Early case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been criticised for allegedly employing biased discourses. However, it remains unclear whether such biased discourses are present in recent ECtHR rulings or in comparable decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This article applies Critical Discourse Analysis, a linguistic and social science approach, to examine the narratives used by the ECtHR and ECJ in cases involving religious symbols. It argues that religious and gender biases are pervasive in ECtHR judgements. While the ECJ generally employs neutral language, biased discourses occasionally emerge in the ‘subtext’ of its decisions. These biases are not incidental but serve as strategic tools within judicial narratives, reinforcing the argumentative legitimacy of rulings for audiences influenced by societal prejudices.

Understanding and tracking societal discourse around essential governance challenges of our times is crucial. One possible heuristic is to conceptualize discourse as a network of actors and policy beliefs.

Here, we present an exemplary and widely applicable automated approach to extract discourse networks from large volumes of media data, as a bipartite graph of organizations and beliefs connected by stance edges. Our approach leverages various natural language processing techniques, alongside qualitative content analysis. We combine named entity recognition, named entity linking, supervised text classification informed by close reading, and a novel stance detection procedure based on large language models.

We demonstrate our approach in an empirical application tracing urban sustainable transport discourse networks in the Swiss urban area of Zürich over 12 years, based on more than one million paragraphs extracted from slightly less than two million newspaper articles.

We test the internal validity of our approach. Based on evaluations against manually automated data, we find support for what we call the window validity hypothesis of automated discourse network data gathering. The internal validity of automated discourse network data gathering increases if inferences are combined over sliding time windows.

Our results show that when leveraging data redundancy and stance inertia through windowed aggregation, automated methods can recover basic structure and higher-level structurally descriptive metrics of discourse networks well. Our results also demonstrate the necessity of creating high-quality test sets and close reading and that efforts invested in automation should be carefully considered.

This article explores the evolving rhetoric of commercial whaling advocates in Japan and Norway, who frame whaling as essential for global, national, and personal health. I show that proponents leverage sustainability discourse and health narratives to present whaling as beneficial for marine ecosystems, national food security, and individual well-being. By coopting the language of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and casting whaling as “healthy,” the whaling industry and its backers challenge the anti-whaling hegemony, portraying it as irrational and unscientific. While the alleged environmental benefits of whaling have been significant to the rhetorical arsenal of the industry since at least the 1990s, a growing emphasis on the personal health benefits of whalemeat suggests the opening of a new front in struggles to influence public opinion.