Online peer support groups encourage individuals to tell their stories and to find validation and emotional comfort when reading about the stories of others. Coincidently, lived experiences are the kind of knowledge applied to solicit and to deliver peer advice. This study examines the relationship between storytelling and advice in an English speaking online forum that provides support for those with an eating disorder (ED). The results revealed a range of different types of narratives within the data, from more elaborate testimonials of the ED and the process of recovery to brief personal passages responding to the first poster. The Labovian narrative structure appeared in a number of the first stories, whereas two main configurations, contingent upon the kind of response offered, emerged in second stories: parallel assessments (or snapshots) and success stories. Parallel assessments constituted self-centred stories and did not include any advice provision. Success stories, instead, became an essential component of the advice-giving act since they were remedial. The solution proposed by responders to the problem posed by the first poster was organized either to offer tips (that is, a series of practical recommendations to address a specific ED or recovery issue) or to deliver thoughtful advice through a resolutive story that introduced the state of recovery as a real possibility. Both parallel assessments and resolutive stories included contrasting resonances in relation to the first story. Resolutive stories encompassed resonating elements whose meanings were transformed and (re)signified from the positioning of a subject moving towards recovery. However, snapshots echoed specific key expressions from the initiating post. The goal was to display alignment with the first teller by describing a similar I-perspective experience. Taken together, the individual small stories contributed to the co-construction of a multiple-lived story with regard to the ED in the online community.

This paper is a corpus-based study focusing on implicit evaluation expressed in newspaper discourse, namely, the semantic mapping of emotion and opinion. The corpus, compiled of online “front page” newspaper articles from both selected tabloids (The Sun, The Express, The Mirror) and broadsheets (The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent) was used to answer three research questions: 1) Is evaluation markedly expressed in newspaper discourse? 2) What linguistic means are typical for construing evaluation in newspaper discourse? 3) Is there a difference between the tabloids and the broadsheets regarding the way in which/how evaluation is conveyed/employed? To answer these questions, a pilot keyword study on only six articles was carried out (one article from each of the aforementioned newspapers). The findings confirmed the importance of adjectives in expressing evaluation. Following this, a large study was conducted to detect local grammar adjectival lexicogrammatical patterns, introduced by Hunston (2000) and further amended by Bednarek (2007, 2009). These patterns, which are known for carrying the evaluative load, were analyzed in terms of frequency and function. It was observed that there is a difference in expressing evaluation between the tabloids and the broadsheets. However, more significant differences were found between the broadsheet newspapers themselves.

The study focuses on the strategies of engagement employed by medical doctors in YouTube videos. The goal of the analysis is to investigate multimodal strategies used in selected videos on the most popular medical YouTube channels in Poland. The study is conducted against a theoretical background that considers previous research on engagement strategies in science and popularization discourse (Hyland 2010; Luzón 2015, 2019; Sokół 2018). Engagement strategies involving reader pronouns, directives, questions, shared knowledge as well as humour, expression of opinions and emotions are investigated, as well as headings, visuals and music. The analysis reveals that medical doctors employ a vast array of diverse engagement strategies which do not form a unified set of practices across the channels. The differences concern the frequency and type of strategies, such as the use of headings, visuals, special effects and music. The study also reveals considerable differences between the videos as to the degree to which the authors exploit the affordances of the audio-visual medium. The formats of the videos comprise both the more traditional, such as slides with a voice-over, as well as more novel approaches, such as presentation films. The strategies employed show that the authors attempt to form a distinctive and recognizable style of interaction with the audience.

* This research was funded by the programme Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Heritage Priority Research Area).

Expressions of epistemic stance in academic discourse reflect not only the authors’ commitment to the truth of what is being said, but also their awareness of other members of the discourse community, the current thinking within the discipline, and the established patterns of interaction. Stance-taking is strongly embedded in culture and language, as demonstrated in numerous studies that focus on L2 academic English (e.g. Hinkel 2002; Dontcheva-Navratilova 2018; Wu and Paltridge 2021) and, less often, academic communication in various linguistic contexts (e.g. Perez-Llantada 2010). This paper purues this latter line of inquiry and proposes a contrastive analysis of epistemic markers in conclusions to English- and Polish-language linguistics articles in an attempt to identify their epistemic profiles. Epistemic profile refers here to a combination of two features: the epistemic modal value (Halliday 1985/1994) which is marked more frequently than others across a text or text fragment, and the concurrence of modality markers with specific rhetorical moves (Swales 1990; Yang and Allison 2003). Thus, it provides information about the value of modalization and the type of content that tends to be modalized. The analysis was based on a two-part corpus of conclusions to 400 linguistics articles, with 200 English-language articles drawn from international databases and 200 Polish-language articles published in recognized national journals. In the first stage, the frequencies of epistemic markers in the two sub-corpora were calculated (Scott 2008) and a statistical analysis was applied to determine whether the differences were significant. In the second stage, 50 concluding sections from each sub-corpus were manually annotated for rhetorical moves to determine whether epistemic markers tended to occur within specific moves. The findings show statistically significant differences in the frequencies of high- and low-value epistemic markers in the sub-corpora and a tendency for epistemic markers to occur within moves that offer interpretive content.