afida mohd ali | UPM - Universiti Putra Malaysia (original) (raw)

Papers by afida mohd ali

GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2019

The presence and influence of complementary and alternative therapies have been increasingly felt... more The presence and influence of complementary and alternative therapies have been increasingly felt in recent years. One reason for this is the active promotion of its services and products through various media channels. The current study focused on information brochures that are placed on pharmacy counters and shelves, and examined how they function as persuasive texts in promoting products and persuading potential users to buy them. The study utilised genre analysis as a method for examining how language and information in texts are systematically selected and structured to perform particular actions and achieve particular communicative purposes. Genre hybridisation as a theoretical concept is drawn on to explain the inter-generic realisation of forms of discourse. One hundred brochures providing information on complementary and alternative health products produced by pharmaceutical companies were collected from pharmacies in Malaysia and analysed for their communicative content in terms of rhetorical moves used to promote the products. This paper describes the generic structure of the print content in the brochures and discusses how it functions to present a favourable view of complementary and alternative health products to the reader. The results show that across all the brochures, regardless of the type of product, a uniform set of moves that is comparable to the sales promotional genre is identified. The findings also reveal that such information brochures on pharmacy counters are in fact persuasive promotional literature. As these brochures are ubiquitous in pharmacies and drugstores in most countries, they are an important force in influencing consumer and patient knowledge, and beliefs about complementary and alternative medicine.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 2014

Management foreword is an unedited qualitative section of Corporate Annual Reports (CARs). It is ... more Management foreword is an unedited qualitative section of Corporate Annual Reports (CARs). It is also considered as the most widely read section of CARs which may reveal the financial condition of the company. So far, only few language studies have embarked on analysis of this section and they have mainly focused on the genre content of management foreword rather than its genre structure. Nevertheless, the few genre studies conducted had several shortcomings in the model proposed. Besides, none of the previously move analysis studies on management foreword have considered corpus analysis tools in their procedure of analysis. Accordingly, the present study is aimed to bridge the gap in previous studies by describing the genre structure of management forewords. To that aim, a qualitative genre analysis study was conducted on 64 samples of management forewords of Asian companies using AntConc software. The analysis revealed six moves and nineteen move-strategy combinations. Most of the identified moves and strategies were also identified in previous move analysis studies on management forewords and other types of business reports and hence verified. The proposed move analysis model defined move boundaries and provided the most frequent words and verbs that represent each move. Additionally, the proposed moves consist of predictable strategies which are bound to their moves and do not appear within the boundary of more than one move. The findings of the present study could be useful for ESP practitioners as teaching material and raise awareness among business ESP students about the genre conventions of this genre.

Malaysian Journal of Languages and Linguistics (MJLL), 2016

Iran is one of the few countries in the world with laws of compulsory hijab for women, regardless... more Iran is one of the few countries in the world with laws of compulsory hijab for women, regardless of their religion. In the last couple of years, Iranian women have formed online communities to resist such laws and voice their dissent. The role of online social networks in causing social change, and the extent to which these New Media can help the processes of emancipation and democratization has been a matter of increasing academic attention. However, there are not enough studies, particularly from a linguistics viewpoint, on the online resistance movement of Iranian women against compulsory hijab. This leaves a gap in our understanding of both the dynamics and strategies of such movements, and also the bigger question of whether or not New Media can be useful tools in advancing human rights, democracy, and equality. This study, employing the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, investigates a corpora of over 500 Facebook posts by the most popular pages created for the purpose of resisting compulsory hijab in Iran. In contrast to the dichotomization and Xenophobia reported in studies on similar discourses, our findings point to a trichotomized discourse, in which the Self is identified against a negatively represented domestic Other (Oikophobia), and a positively framed foreign Other (Xenophilia). The paper concludes that the use of New Media in this case has led to an illusion of resistance, and how the movement under study is self-destructive, reproducing the same ideologies it is resisting.

Malaysian Journal of Languages and Linguistics (MJLL), 2015

This paper investigates the range of theoretical and methodological challenges facing scholars at... more This paper investigates the range of theoretical and methodological challenges facing scholars attempting to do studies employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the context of New Media, such as participatory web platforms, social networking websites, or online forums. The rise and popularity of Web 2.0 has attracted researchers from diverse fields of academic inquiry to this area. However, CDA scholars had not paid attention to these domains until recently. The specific features of Web 2.0 spaces create a multitude of challenges for a (critical) discourse analyst, ranging from issues of language, to problems of data collection and applicable theoretical frameworks. Drawing from the existing literature, and also experiences gained through a CDA study on Facebook discourses, this article will discuss these challenges, the current state of affairs, and the limitations of doing discourse analytical studies in New Media.

Islamic perspectives relating to business, arts, culture and communication, 2015

Websites are another form of service provided to the public to help improve information sharing o... more Websites are another form of service provided to the public to help improve information sharing of a particular discourse community. Selection of a website is influenced by the persuasiveness of the website's content. As the power of the Internet grows, so do the opportunities for small businesses. In fact, the Internet is already contributing 4.1 % a year to Malaysia's economy, and that's set to rise even more over the next 3 years. With the upsurge of E-entrepreneurs in Malaysia, business websites demonstrate a variety of styles in web writing and design, indicating a creative yet bold sense of marketing and advertising of products and services. Hence, the purpose of this study was to establish the common moves and steps found in a corpus of selected Malaysian SME business websites. This study used Swales (Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990) CARS model and the two-dimensional genre model (Askehave and Nielsen, Proc 38th Hawaii Int Conf Syst Sci 00(C):1-8, 2005) to analyse the data. The study has revealed that there are obligatory and optional moves in the business web genre. The goal of this genre is to inform and to promote the company's product and services via its website. Findings from this study may be a good resource for students and practitioners to design and write for the web.

This study investigates the metaphorical linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphor, ma... more This study investigates the metaphorical linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphor, market movements are physical movements, using Charteris-Black and Ennis's (2001) notion of conceptual metaphors. Following a corpus linguistic approach for data collection purposes, it analysed 50 unique Business Times articles randomly identified from a total of 292 articles. An expert within the business context provided expertise in the interpretation of specific types of data derived from the corpus. The findings show that the metaphorical linguistic expressions generally concretise the abstract concept of the economy and market movements and mainly comprise of verbs and nouns. This paper illustrates some of the examples of the relevant metaphorical expressions and discusses how the domain of physical movements helps to structure the domain of market movements. The findings of this study, however, can only be generalised to the samples involved in this study.

Corpora, 2007

This paper reports on an LSP-based research project dealing with a contrastive analysis of busine... more This paper reports on an LSP-based research project dealing with a contrastive analysis of business and management texts taken from the Malaysian business magazine Malaysian Business (MB) and its British counterpart, Management Today (MT). The objective of the research was to study the semantic fields and linguistic signals of Problem patterns in order to determine whether they display specific differences which can be ascribed to their linguistic and cultural contexts. The study adopted a corpus-based approach based on a corpus containing fifty feature-articles from each magazine. The text corpus was analysed according to Hoey's Problem-Solution textual patterns and the corpus tool, Wmatrix, was used to identify the semantic fields in the Problem patterns. Key semantic fields were found for Problem in MB and MT compared with a normative corpus (the BNC Written Informative Sampler).

Malaysian Journal of Languages and Linguistics (MJLL), 2013

Journal of Media and Communication Studies, 2012

Political cartoons constitute a form of media text whose verbal and visual elements have made the... more Political cartoons constitute a form of media text whose verbal and visual elements have made them an interesting research field across academic disciplines. The 21st century has witnessed a considerable research on political cartoons. This increasing research interest indicates that political cartoons have successfully constituted a distinct multimodal genre within media discourses. Political cartoons are used to express opinions, construct valuable arguments and provide specific knowledge on contemporary social issues. However, the analysis of the cartoons from linguistic perspectives remains under-researched. This paper aims at contributing to the knowledge of political cartoon research by analyzing the linguistic elements used in the cartoon written texts to illustrate how Nigerian cartoonists specifically use language to construct satire as a means that could be used perhaps to initiating positive social and political reforms in Nigeria. The method of analysis used in this paper as its framework of analysis, comprises of perceptual theory of satire and linguistic analytical framework within the realm of critical discourse analysis. Semiotic discussion on semiotic modes of the cartoons has also been incorporated in the analysis. From the findings of the study, a distinct lexical topology for identifying lexical items and their distribution in the cartoon written texts has been developed. The topology comprises of five items as follows: loan word, coinage, word class, denotation and connotation. Additionally, Nigerian cartoonists use interjections frequently in the cartoon written texts to create satirical impressions about political leaders, because interjections are used to express a strong emotions or feelings. Given the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements contained in the cartoon texts, cartoons could be harnessed to provide additional insights on how language is specifically used in media discourse.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 2013

Corporate Annual Reports (CARs) are corporate communication tools which have been around for 75 y... more Corporate Annual Reports (CARs) are corporate communication tools which have been around for 75 years. They report company's progress, profits and losses. At first, reports were provided in English, because they were published in an English speaking context. After a while, non-English speaking companies started to publish CARs in English to attract international investments. So far studies on CARs considered themes in text and images of CARs, subgenres of CARs, rhetorical construction, discourse and genre structure. During the last two decade; however, not many studies have been conducted on CARs from a language perspective. We aim to evaluate those studies and provide insight for further research. Findings of previous studies revealed that CARs consist of various sections functioning as sub-genres that have features of their own. Researchers so far have been interested in management forewords section as it is considered to be the most widely read section of CAR, which are supposed to gain the trust of readers. Other sub-genres studied include: operational and financial performance, corporate history and mission statements. As modern CARs are considered to be multimodal, images that appear in CARs have also been studied.

Asian Social Science, 2012

In recent years, the cartoons genre has gained considerable research interest across disciplines;... more In recent years, the cartoons genre has gained considerable research interest across disciplines; for example, communication, media studies and health sciences. More so, cartoons serve as potent source of data used to study social phenomena. This paper aims at illustrating how political cartoons are used as a vehicle of setting social agenda in Nigerian newspapers to reorient and shape the public opinion through recurrent depictions mirroring current socio-political issues at a given period. The cartoons texts were excerpted from two major Nigerian newspapers, Daily Trust and Vanguard during the period 2007-2010. One-hundred cartoons were selected using purposive sampling technique. Fifty cartoons were taken from each newspaper magazine. Specifically, content analysis was used to identify the themes contained in the cartoons depictions. Qualitative method was used to analyze the cartoons through semiotic analysis. The analysis is mainly concerned with the interpretation of the sign system based on the connotation and denotation elements in the cartoons. The results indicated that 80% of the themes focused on substantive issues through which social agenda is set to reflect social practices in the Nigerian social political contexts. Also, the results showed that Nigerian political cartoons set social agenda by mainly encapsulating current and sensitive issues that people are much concerned about. Finally, the study has identified the lack of supportive and clearly defined theoretical background in analyzing political cartoons as a major problem in previous cartoons research. Thus, this paper contributes to the cartoon research by offering theoretical insight to the cartoon genre through agenda setting theory of media effect.

A meeting is a planned communicative event where the participants' role is to achieve the dis... more A meeting is a planned communicative event where the participants' role is to achieve the discussed objectives. Business English (BE) is often used as the lingua franca for meetings. Studies on BE are becoming a growing interest but there are still limited readily available studies on business meetings, especially on those in the Malaysian context, and even fewer that describe rapport management in meetings. In a meeting, rapport is established when there is a shift in formality in the management of face, sociality rights and interactional goals. This may be the result of the display of the chairperson's power. BE, on the other hand, is used to achieve the communicative purposes that help to promote rapport. By reviewing past studies, this paper explores how the chairperson in local and other cultures establishes rapport through the use of politeness and other communicative strategies in conversational turn-taking. Conversational Analysis (CA) has been used widely to analyse...