Metadiscourse in the Retrospective PhD by Publication: More or Less the Same?

The present study is a corpus-based comparative analysis of metadiscourse markers with reference to Pakistani and American Journals on English language, based upon Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse. Two corpora were constructed, including 464,349 characters from American journals and 469,399 characters from Pakistani journals along with metadata prepared in compliance with ethical conduct of research. The frequency and distribution of interactive and interactional metadiscourse categories, namely transitions, hedges, self-mentions, engagement markers, attitude markers evidential, endophoric markers and frame marker were analyzed using AntConc software. The findings reveal that metadiscourse is widely used in both corpora to shape reading perceptions and arguments, with some differences between them. American writers exhibited a reader-responsible and dialogic style using many hedging devices (American Journal: 561, Pakistani Journal: 319), engagement markers and corporate self-references, which was indicative of subtle stance-taking and inclusive communication. Pakistani writers showed writer- based and explicit style, with more additive transitions used and individual self-references present; clarity, authority and linear policy orientation. These features indicate culturally determined rhetorical conventions in academic discourse and also highlight the significance of metadiscourse in shaping scholarly identity. The study has implications for cross-cultural academic discourse, with practical insights for EAP teaching, writing and scholarly pedagogy and editorial practices. The results indicate that knowledge of metadiscourse can contribute to a pragmatic and intercultural perspective on academic writing.

Promotional booklets are central to how universities persuade prospective students. This study examines how textual metadiscourse realises persuasion in Malaysian universities’ digital promotional materials. We compiled two sub-corpora from official university websites: 10 booklets from Malaysian public universities and eight from Malaysian private universities. Textual content bearing persuasive intent (e.g., welcomes, institutional overview, “why choose us,” facilities, testimonials) was extracted and analysed in AntConc software. A functional, manual coding determined whether candidate items performed metadiscoursal work, and categories followed Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model (interactive vs. interactional). Frequencies were normalised per 1,000 words. Across the combined corpus, interactive resources slightly outnumbered interactional resources. For the interactive resources, transitions were the most frequent interactive device, followed by code glosses and frame markers, reflecting the need to connect dense promotional information coherently. Within interactional resources, attitude markers and self-mentions were most common, signalling institutional stance and persona, with engagement markers also prominent. Private-university materials displayed a higher overall density of metadiscourse and a smaller gap between interactive and interactional resources than public-university materials, suggesting a more balanced “guide + engage” approach. These patterns indicate a persuasive blend of logos (via text-organising resources) with pathos/ethos (via stance and reader alignment). The study contributes corpus-assisted evidence on promotional discourse and offers practical implications for crafting persuasive, reader-friendly university marketing texts. Keywords: Corpus-assisted analysis; Malaysian universities; metadiscourse; persuasion; promotional materials

The article considers the role of frontpage news items in creating a political or a social event, and with reliance on the BBC Web news bulletin seeks to prove that frontpage news items are a special type of multimodal text with recognizable generic characteristics: a headline, a picture and an abstract. Structurally, the present paper consists of three sections, each of which is devoted to a certain aspect of the problem in question. Firstly, the author looks into the history of scientific investigations of genres. Considering both fundamental works and the latest achievements in this field, the author stresses the social role of genres and maintains the view that different types of texts appear as a response to social expectations. Secondly, the issue of multimodality is brought up, and frontpage news items are described as texts written in two semiotic modes. The combination of a written text and a picture serves the purpose of constructing a social or a political event informing and influencing the reader at the same time. Thirdly, analysis of seven BBC frontpage news items is done to prove that frontpage form of news presentation is a special genre that has both technological and social roots. This genre has recently evolved from a traditional way of introducing news and has a number of distinctive features, like a short and meaningful headline provided with an abstract different from the headline of the linked article, an image that often conveys a meaning different from that of the headline. The contradictory meanings serve to construct events and form opinions; suggestion is made that the more meanings there are, the more politicized the event is.

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of Spaniards’ and Britons’ index of individualistic cultural values (Hofstede, 1991) on the type of engagement markers (Hyland and Tse, 2004) used in Peninsular-Spanish and British university websites along with the English translated version of the former. The cultural dimension of individualism is related to the way in which individuals from a particular culture define their own identity and their relationship with other people. As regards engagement markers, these are used to establish a social interaction in the online encounter held between universities and prospective students who may wish to study in these institutions. Following an observational and a quantitative analysis, the findings reveal important statistical differences in the three corpora analysed and show that culture and engagement markers may be considered intertwined concepts. The results obtained may be a valuable source of information for Peninsular-Spanish universities as they may help them not only to translate into English the Spanish version of their websites but also to adapt the appropriate engagement markers taking into account the British cultural framework.

Objectives The purpose of this study is to analyze the educational vocabulary grades of expository and narratives contained in the entire volume of middle school Korean textbooks of nine publishers of the 2015 curriculum to obtain implications for the development of Korean textbooks and vocabulary education in middle school.
 Methods To do this, the study built a corpus of expository and narrative texts in all Korean language textbooks for grades 1-3 in middle school, extracted 120 high-frequency content words from each text using the Mecab morphological analyzer in Python after preprocessing, and analyzed them according to the educational vocabulary grade presented in previous research. The study also calculated the vocabulary grade by text type and grade, extracting the top 50 high-frequency words from each text.
 Results In the corpus of expository texts, the vocabulary grade was 1st grade (80.9%) > 2nd grade (10.8%) > 3rd grade (6.7%) > 4th grade (0.8%) = 0th grade (0.8%) in descending order. In the corpus of narrative texts, the vocabulary grade was 1st grade (95.8%) > 2nd grade (3.3%) > 0th grade (0.9%) in descending order. There were no 3rd or 4th grade words in the narrative text corpus. When comparing by grade, in the corpus of expository texts, the 1st and 3rd grades had the order of 1st grade (84%) > 2nd grade (8%) = 3rd grade (8%) in descending order, and there were no 4th grade words extracted from either grade. In the 2nd grade, the order was 1st grade (84%) > 2nd grade (8%) > 3rd grade (4%) = 4th grade (4%) in descending order, and the proportion of 4th grade words was the highest among all grades. In the corpus of narrative texts, the 1st grade had only 1st grade words (100%), the 2nd grade had 1st grade words (96%) and 2nd grade words (4%), and the 3rd grade had 1st grade words (98%) and 0th grade words (2%). As with the corpus of expository texts, the 2nd grade had a higher grade of words than the 3rd grade in the narrative text corpus.
 Conclusions Based on the research results, the vocabulary grade of expository and narrative texts in middle school Korean language textbooks is appropriate and provided suggestions on how to utilize the results for the development of new textbooks and vocabulary education.

Until now, there has been no study which has systematically compared anaphoric procedures used by children in different text types. Studies concentrated on sentence level or analyzed only stories. The present article describes the anaphoric procedures used in four text types (argumentation, explanation, account of a recent personal experience, and story) written by children 10, 12, and 14 years old. It shows that each text type is characterized by specific means to create anaphoric cohesion. From an ontogenetic point of view, one can observe important changes in the explanation. For the other text types, no important differences appear.

The concept of metadiscourse, which refers to a range of interactional and organisational linguistic resources, has been increasingly used in studies that analyse professional and tertiary-level writing. Although studies tend to support the teaching of metadiscourse to tertiary-level students and have even promoted its potential value at the pre-tertiary level, the pool of studies that have investigated upper secondary pupil writing is relatively small. This study contributes to this research pool by investigating metadiscourse in 56 English essays belonging to five genres written at Norwegian and British upper secondary schools. By adapting a taxonomy based on several previous studies, the analysis accounts for the particular metadiscourse features in the corpus, and identifies which features characterise each of the five genres. For example, linguistic investigations, which were longer and more academic-like, used more topic and phoric markers to guide readers through the essay’s content. Opinion pieces, in contrast, contained more engagement markers and boosters as pupils were tasked with targeting a lay audience. The results have implications for future research that aims to investigate the use of metadiscourse in pre-tertiary writing.

This book breaks new ground in translation theory and practice. The central question is: In what ways are translations affected by text types? The two main areas of investigation are: A. What are the advantages of focusing on text types when trying to understand the process of translation? How do translators tackle different text types in their daily practice? B. To what extent and in what areas are text types identical across languages and cultures? What similarities and dissimilarities can be observed in text types of original and translated texts? Part I deals with methodological aspects and offers a typology of translations both as product and as process. Part II is devoted to domain-specific texts in a cross-cultural perspective, while Part III is concerned with terminology and lexicon as well as the constraints of mode and medium involving dubbing and subtitling as translation methods. Sonnets, sagas, fairy tales, novels and feature films, sermons, political speeches, international treaties, instruction leaflets, business letters, academic lectures, academic articles, medical research articles, technical brochures and legal documents are but some of the texts under investigation. In sum, this volume provides a theoretical overview of major problems and possibilities as well as investigations into a variety of text types with practical suggestions that deserve to be weighted by anyone considering the relation between text typology and translation. The volume is indispensable for the translator in his/her efforts to become a “competent text-aware professional”.

The paper studies the productivity of eight Greek verb-forming suffixes (-aro, -eno, -evo, -ino, -izo, -(i)azo, -jazo and -ono) in a corpus of 4,143,583 words. The corpus used comes from the Corpus of Greek Texts and includes all text types found in it in the same proportion. Our study follows similar research on other languages, investigating frequency and morphological productivity with a corpus-based methodology. The productivity of the suffixes was studied in the corpus as a whole, across its two subcorpora of written and spoken registers and across and within the text types included in the corpus. Three main sets of suffixes were identified: (a) the very productive -izo and -ono, (b) the moderately productive -evo and -aro and (c) the least productive or unproductive -iazo, -jazo, -eno and -ino. The results from the study of text types suggest that the degree of productivity of each suffix is influenced by the text type in which it occurs. Quantitative evidence drawn from the measurement of productivity, by means of vocabulary growth curves and related methods, was combined with qualitative evidence on the semantic and other properties of verb-forming suffixes. On the basis of our results it cannot be argued that there is a default suffix for verb derivation in Modern Greek; it is rather suggested that the two most productive suffixes, -izo and -ono, are used in Greek in a more or less complementary way, since they show a different preference for meanings and text types.

Engagement markers are linguistic devices through which academic writers pull their readers into their texts and negotiate with them. This particular form of negotiation is crucial for the acceptance of new academic knowledge claimed by academic writers in addition to meeting the expectations of readers who are highly proficient scholars, specifically in postgraduate genres. A great deal of research has concentrated on the use of engagement markers in research articles. Hence, this study presents a comparative analysis of engagement markers in master’s and doctorate theses written by native academic writers of English and Turkish academic writers of English. The corpus is constructed for the investigation includes 1.148.992 words of master’s and doctorate theses written between 2010 and 2019 in English language-related fields. The concordance software, AntConc version 3.5.8, was utilized to calculate the frequency counts of engagement markers. We ran Log-likelihood statistics to determine whether there was a statistical difference among four corpora regarding engagement marker usage. In addition to cross-cultural variations in the two academic communities, we observed identical strategies in master’s and doctorate theses by both groups of academic writers.

This study examines the significance of highly frequent adjectives in promoting Xi’an, China’s online tourism promotional materials. It specifically focuses on the frequency and functional impact of these adjectives. Adopting a corpus-driven approach, a specialised corpus of English-language promotional texts from Xi’an’s official tourism website was constructed and analysed using AntConc software. The findings reveal that descriptive adjectives dominate, emphasising Xi'an's geographical, historical, and cultural attributes, while experiential and positive evaluative adjectives enhance the emotional and qualitative aspects of the promotional discourse. These adjectives not only describe Xi’an’s historical and cultural significance but also create a sense of appeal and interest among potential tourists. The study further explores collocation patterns to understand how these adjectives function within promotional texts. The results offer insights into how adjectives in Xi’an online tourism promotional materials promote Xi’an and highlight the importance of using high-frequency, positive adjectives in tourism promotional materials.

The paper focuses on the potential of urban communicative space to transmit basic ideology paradigm and values of the current political regime in the course of interaction with city residents. Commemoration is regarded as one the key entities involved in transmitting ideologically charged information. The phenomenon of commemoration is understood as a collection of public practices aimed at creating government-approved values and behavioral models via regular reproduction schemes implemented on the basis of perception of past recognized in the society. The goal of the research was to examine verbalization of commemoration in urban space with regard to the historical-political context. The empirical basis of the study includes a corpus of commemorative texts collected by the authors. Commemorative texts were extracted from the open data portal developed and supported by the Government of Moscow. The total number of records registered in the corpus amounted to over 1700. The language data were processed via the AntConc software that allows obtaining information about word frequency and the contexts in which the relevant word occurs. In the next step conclusions about topical and conceptual dominants of commemorative texts were made. Further investigation allowed describing the structural scheme of commemorative texts, determining its zero variability in different temporal periods, identifying an obligatory structural element that displayed sensitiveness to political climate and specifying key discourse strategies correlated with the ideological paradigm of the current political regime.

Genre categories are determined on the basis of external criteria relating to the speaker's purpose and topic; they are assigned on the basis of use rather than on the basis of form. It is also possible to consider groupings of texts that are derived on the basis of linguistic form. In other work (Biber forthcoming) I distinguish ‘genres’ from ‘text types’: genres characterize texts on the basis of external criteria, while text types represent groupings of texts that are similar in their linguistic form, irrespective of genre. For example, an academic article on Asian history represents formal, academic exposition in terms of the author's purpose, but its linguistic form might be narrative-like and more similar to some types of fiction than to scientific or engineering academic articles. The genre of such a text would be academic exposition, but its text type might be academic narrative.

Metadiscourse was probably first introduced into applied linguistics in the 1980s and it has attracted continuous interest ever since, despite the fact that some researchers point out its theoretical and methodological shortcomings. Drawing on the model introduced by Hyland (Metadiscourse, Continuum, London/New York, 2005) which presents metadiscourse as one of the significant attempts to conceptualize the interpersonal aspects of language, this study aims to compare two academic genres, undergraduate textbook and research article, within one discipline – linguistics. It specifically focuses on one category, engagement markers, and compares their occurrence and use in the two genres. The results have shown that the most frequent engagement marker is inclusive we, which however plays a different role in both genres. The study also assesses the potential advantages and drawbacks of the integrative approach to metadiscourse.

A particular challenge in biomedical text mining is to find ways of handling ‘comprehensive’ or ‘associative’ queries such as ‘Find all genes associated with breast cancer’. Given that many queries in genomics, proteomics or metabolomics involve these kind of comprehensive searches we believe that a web-based tool that could support these searches would be quite useful. In response to this need, we have developed the PolySearch web server. PolySearch supports >50 different classes of queries against nearly a dozen different types of text, scientific abstract or bioinformatic databases. The typical query supported by PolySearch is ‘Given X, find all Y's’ where X or Y can be diseases, tissues, cell compartments, gene/protein names, SNPs, mutations, drugs and metabolites. PolySearch also exploits a variety of techniques in text mining and information retrieval to identify, highlight and rank informative abstracts, paragraphs or sentences. PolySearch's performance has been assessed in tasks such as gene synonym identification, protein–protein interaction identification and disease gene identification using a variety of manually assembled ‘gold standard’ text corpuses. Its f-measure on these tasks is 88, 81 and 79%, respectively. These values are between 5 and 50% better than other published tools. The server is freely available at http://wishart.biology.ualberta.ca/polysearch