Lexicogrammatical Realizations Research Articles

The Use of Metadiscourse Markers in the Spoken Discourse of Different EMI Disciplines

Abstract Metadiscourse (MD) allows instructors to organize classroom discourse and reflect their own style while delivering the content. MD has been studied for years, especially with a focus on written contexts even though the number of studies conducted on spoken contexts in different educational settings has a tendency to increase. With the increasing spread of English medium instruction (EMI) across the world, the role of MD in EMI classroom discourse has become a field of research that is worth investigating. Concerning the Turkish context, MD has recently been a popular research area, but there are limited number of studies conducted the examination of MD in spoken interactions in the Turkish context. To this end, the current study aims to investigate the distribution and lexicogrammatical realizations of metadiscourse markers employed by the lecturers in the spoken discourse of different EMI courses. A corpus-based discourse analysis was carried out by referring to Ädel’s (2010) framework of metadiscourse. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of the corpus collected from 36 hours of lesson observation have revealed some variations in both the distribution and realization of metadiscursive categories in different EMI courses.

Advice seekers’ legitimation strategies in online health communities

Previous studies of different online health communities have shown the importance of examining advice seekers’ legitimation strategies. However, most research has been based on the qualitative analysis of small samples from discussion threads. Using a specialized corpus comprising 1836 advice seekers’ initiating messages (317,540 words) and a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach, this paper first identifies the recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns that advice seekers use and then connects these patterns to particular legitimation strategies according to the specific pragmatic functions they serve across texts. In this way, three major legitimation strategies are structurally classified with the identification of their typical lexicogrammatical realizations: justification of presence, amplification of details and evocation of feelings and emotions. Empirically, this corpus-based investigation complements previous qualitative research, extending prior findings drawn from small samples. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the potential value of investigating lexicogrammatical realization patterns using a corpus approach for exploring (online) health discourse.

Local Grammar Approach to Investigating Advanced Chinese EFL Learners’ Development of Communicative Competence in Academic Writing: The Case of ‘Exemplification’

Abstract This study belongs to a larger project which aims to systematically explore advanced Chinese EFL learners’ developmental pattern of communicative competence in academic context, with the current investigation zooming in on their performance of exemplification in academic writing. It draws on insights from local grammar research, as local grammars have been shown to be able to reliably quantify the lexicogrammatical realisations of a given communicative or discourse act. Using L1 Chinese English-major students’ MA and PhD degree dissertations as the data, the investigation shows that, although their overall use of exemplification remained steady from MA to PhD levels of study, there are significant differences with regard to their preference of exemplifying strategies as well as their lexicogrammatical choices they used to realise exemplification. The study not only has implications for academic writing research, assessment and pedagogy, but also offers a useful methodological approach to longitudinal investigation into EFL learners’ development of communicative competence in academic context.

Expressive illocutionary acts and politeness in managerial responses to online hotel reviews

This paper explores expressive illocutionary acts in responses to hotel guests' reviews posted on Tripadvisor and aims to compare their occurrences and realizations in 320 managerial responses in English from English and Serbian hotels, with manifestations of linguistic politeness a focus of analysis. Drawing largely on Leech's (2014) framework, it has attempted to determine whether the acts which tend to come in the form of formulaic, routinized expressions occurring in the responses written by hotel representatives with different backgrounds exhibit some differences as a reflection of culture-specific politeness values. The analysis has revealed considerable similarity between the two data sets in the lexico-grammatical realization of expressives and the use of resources for politeness. However, some noteworthy points of dissimilarity have emerged which correlate closely with the differences in cultural value preferences of the two countries in Hofstede et al.'s (2010) dimensions of power distance and of individualism.

체계기능언어학의 ‘양태 표현’ 온라인 학습 가능성 탐색

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to propose an online teaching method to help learn “Modality” expressions of System Functional Linguistics (SFL).
 Methods We introduce the SFL terms “coherent realization,” “incongruent realization (grammatical metaphor),” and “systemic network of modality,” which is the entire system of modality. These three concepts from the SFL literature serve as the principles for analyzing and teaching the modality categories of Korean in this paper, and as the practical research methodology for constructing the online program manual in Chapters 4 and 5. Therefore, this paper takes the method of literature review, i.e., applying the principles of the literature to an online education program. “Out-of-video” learning is an essential factor in achieving learners' self-directed learning activities in online non-face-to-face classes. To be specific, the ‘out-of-video’ class is conducted in two stages. First, the ‘AI-tutor- preparation’ stage is subdivided into five sub-stages of activities. They are the knowledge activation stage, the interactive reading stage, the comprehension test stage, the dictation stage, and the role play stage. The paper is organized around the target sentences extracted from the masterpiece fairy tale. The “Review Activities and Feedback” stage is the stage where the students perform extended activities centered on the characters learned in this paper. To achieve this purpose, this paper uses Oscar Wilde's “The Happy Prince” as a teaching medium to make learners' basic knowledge and information more interesting.
 Results As a result of exploring teaching methods for advanced learners to learn ‘Modality expression’, it was confirmed that the lexico-grammatical realization of, Modality and the grammatical-metaphor of Modality can be distinguished and the Values (high, middle, and low) can be identified according to the type of Modality such as probability, usuality, obligation, and inclination. In addition, the online class system of repeatedly practicing target texts enables holistic learning in the areas of reading, listening, speaking, and writing necessary for language education, and online learning outcomes can usually be assessed immediately. However, in the case of writing activities, it was confirmed that the learning effect can be maximized only when the teacher's periodic feedback is actively conducted.
 Conclusions The significance of this paper is that we have proposed a practical teaching method that departs from the theory-infused teaching method of SFL. In other words, we have provided an alternative way for learners who are not SFL majors to engage with the SFL curriculum through the above online approach.

Direct Direct Apology Strategies and Their Lexicogrammatical Realizations in English Conversations

One of the most prevalent speech acts across languages and cultures is apologizing. It plays an important role in conversations which helps maintain social relationships. Many researchers in this field have proposed several apology strategies; however, this article aims to examine the direct apology strategies and the lexicogrammatical realizations of utterances, including apologies in English conversations. This is a descriptive qualitative study that gathered data from conversations extracted from romance and family film scripts. This study was also supported with quantitative information in order to seek the answers to three research questions. The findings show that expression of regret was the most prominent direct apology strategy, which the characters took advantage of in English-language conversations in film scripts. In terms of lexico-grammar, the utterances with the occurrence of sorry and its other realizations appeared most frequently.

A Lexicogrammar Approach to Analyze Response Strategies to Apology in English Conversations

The acts of apologizing and responding to apology are common activities in communication since using only either of these two crucial speech acts cannot itself establish fully effective communication. This article aims to examine response strategies to apology that are used in English romance and family films and find out the lexico-grammatical realizations of response utterances in English conversations. This article was qualitatively designed with the support of the researchers’ observation of the films' scripts extracted from English films, subsequently the researchers’ description of the data collection into separate categories. The results of this study revealed that English film characters were more likely to accept than reject apologies. Direct positive comments were favoured by the English, with indirect positive responses coming in second.

There may be differences: Analysing the use of hedges in English and Spanish research articles

Scholars currently need to publish their research results in English-medium high-impact publications. However, in some disciplines scholars undertake to publish in other languages as well as in the medium of English. In this context, it is interesting to analyze research articles (RAs) in two languages (English and Spanish) within a single discipline (Business Management). The study will present a corpus-based intercultural analysis of a particular interpersonal rhetorical strategy, hedging. Hedges are strategically employed in RAs to express meaning tentatively and tone down knowledge claims, and they have been found to be subject to generic, disciplinary and cultural and linguistic variation. The results from the corpus show differences in their extent of use overall, in the distribution of hedges across the sections of the RAs as well as in their lexico-grammatical realization and preferred rhetorical choices. The differences may be accounted for not only linguistically but also culturally, considering the different languages in which they are written and the contexts in which they are published. The findings can have significant implications for Languages for Academic Purposes and applications in the training of (novice) academic writers who may be aspiring to publish their research internationally in English, but also nationally in Spanish.

Lexico-grammatical Realization of Power in The Thorn Birds

Lexico-grammatical Realization of Power in The Thorn Birds

Is a meaning-based grammar of English possible?

Previous research on the grammar of English has led to the development of a number of useful reference books (e.g. Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1999; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Berry, 2012), which have substantially contributed to the teaching and learning of English language in EFL contexts. However, I found that from an (advanced) EFL learner's perspective, EFL learners are often left to our own choices when we want to express a specific meaning in spoken and/or written communication, such as acknowledgement-making for example (Hyland & Tse, 2004). One major reason for this is that these reference books have mainly focused on discussing issues such as word classes, types of clauses, tense and aspects, etc. They have not attempted to document systematically the lexicogrammatical means by which specific meanings can be expressed, though they do have selectively described some. This stimulated me to think whether it is possible to develop, what I tentatively call,a meaning-based grammar of English, i.e. a grammar which is primarily concerned with meanings and their typical lexicogrammatical realisations.

Interpersonal Realizations of Pedagogic Discourse in Indonesian EFL Classrooms

This paper describes the lexicogrammatical realizations of interpersonal meaning in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Indonesian university context. The realizational grammatical patterns are presented using MOOD system in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The data of this study were three EFL classrooms taken from three English departments in Indonesian universities in Semarang City. Data analyses were done by transcribing the lectures and then divided them into clauses from which the lexicogrammatical realizations of pedagogic MOOD were identified and classified based on MOOD System as suggested by Halliday & Matthiessen in SFL perspectives. The results of the study show that interpersonally, the clauses used in the EFL classrooms are predominated by declarative clause, interrogative clause, and imperative clause. The predominance of declarative clause is influenced by the teacher-centered teaching method used in the classrooms. This method poses lecturer as an expert and students as novice. In this situation, lecturer dominates in giving information about the learning materials. Besides, interrogative clause is also used by lecturer to know the students’ understanding of the learning materials. Finally, imperative clause is also used to ask students to do something relating to the understanding of the learning materials.

Hashtagging for Health Promotion: Constructing Meaning as an #AntibioticGuardian

This paper aims at investigating how the hashtag constructs meanings in public health campaigns in Twitter. These may have peculiar features due to the simultaneous influence of the character-constrained mode of Twitter, and of the conventional set of communication activities adopted to ensure their effectiveness. The research is based on a corpus of sample tweets (N=2,438) taken from #AntibioticGuardian, a campaign led by Public Health England to reduce Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). The lexicogrammatical realisations, evaluative language and predominant discourse functions are analysed to seek the meanings that the hashtag can construct in each of the four communication activities, namely increasing awareness and knowledge, providing cues for action, demonstrating simple skills, and changing and/or reinforcing attitudes and behaviours. The method of positive discourse analysis (PDA) used offers the advantage of highlighting how the positive change advocated takes place linguistically; micro and macro data findings reveal a significant user-generated content (UGC) pattern reflecting new ways of making meaning, which moves far beyond the more traditional tagging practices.

Quoting and reporting across languages: A system-based and text-based typology

This paper reports on a cross-linguistic corpus-based investigation of linguistic strategies of quoting and reporting of speech and thought across six genetically unrelated languages (Arabic, English, Dagaare, Hindi, Spanish and Japanese). Specifically, the study draws on Michael Halliday's concept of projection that covers the traditional categories of quoting and reporting as a type of logico-semantic relation. The study also examines projection “trinocularly”, by viewing quoting and reporting from three viewpoints, namely their semantics, their lexicogrammatical realizations and the structural configuration they display. The use of projection as a unified domain of inquiry and the trinocular perspective ensures a systematic accounting of the generality and specificity of projection across the languages. Section 1 specifies our investigation, relating it to the traditional account of quoting and reporting. Section 2 describes our corpus data. Section 3 introduces the theoretical and descriptive categories used to describe verbal and mental projection as a type of logico-semantic relation, using English for illustration. Section 4 presents a crosslinguistic discussion of the data from the six languages. Finally, Section 5 compares and contrasts the results of this study, discusses the general and language-specific features of projection and concludes by commenting on how our approach to quoting and reporting extends previous approaches.

An Appraisal Theory Approach to Point of View in Mansfield Park and its Translations

In order to achieve the goals of social commentary and moral judgement pursued in her novels, Jane Austen describes and evaluates different aspects of her characters’ personalities: social attitude, intellectual qualities and moral traits (Lodge 1966). Mansfield Park (1814) is one of her novels in which this moral awareness is most acute. In order to construct a community of shared values with her readers, Austen skilfully alternates different points of view as sources of evaluation. We propose an analysis of the first chapter of Mansfield Park that addresses this dialogic dimension by focusing on the resources of engagement, the subsystem of Appraisal Theory with which speakers/writers express their commitment to the truth of a proposition and their willingness to open the negotiation space to other voices (Martin & White 2005: 97).The linguistic subtlety and complexity of Jane Austen’s writing is a challenge to translators, who must try to identify all the concurrent interpretation possibilities and reproduce them in the target language. In this article we compare the English source text with various translations into Spanish, Catalan and German. Our analysis focuses on the lexicogrammatical realisations of engagement such as verba dicendi, epistemic expressions, lexical choices with a distinct attitudinal load, and also on the development of narration – as far as that is possible in a study centering on the first chapter –, since it is often the case that narrator stance is modified as the text unfolds.We discuss fragments of narrator discourse, direct speech and indirect/free indirect speech and consider the advantages of the framework to uncover changes in the evaluative dimension of meaning that affect the readings the translations will afford in their target society, from character building to the articulation of points of view.

FOSTERING STUDENTS’ CLAUSE AWARENESS ON READING: The Exploration on Transitivity System

The opportunity to help students easily read English texts by observing content of the texts, which are construed in students’ world experience into limited set of processes type: material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal and existential has confirmed the necessity of combating misunderstanding clause meanings (process, participant, circumstance). The notion of reading a text is manifested in the processes from a step-by-step lexico-grammatical analysis to contextual description, which are realised as a configuration of transitivity functions which represent the process, the participant situation, the attributes assigned to participant, and the circumstances associated with the process. These are typical patterns of lexico-grammatical realization. This study will examine the transitivity analysis, which provides the recognition of clause awareness on reading English texts. The implication of clause awareness on reading English texts based on the processes is to describe certain feeling, thought, and perception (perceiving through five senses) and creating an ordered technical vocabulary and way of classifying the world.

Theme in English and Spanish

This article offers a comparative view of a Systemic Functional (SF) account of Theme in English and Spanish declarative clauses. It considers the lexicogrammatical realization of Theme in both languages and shows how Themes across the clauses construe the method of development of a phase of discourse in the respective languages, unmarked Themes scaffolding textual continuity and marked Themes scaffolding transitions between discourse phases. The paper reviews the concept of Theme in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and analyzes texts in both languages, taking into account a trinocular perspective (Matthiessen & Halliday 2009): from above, considering textual discourse functions related to the lexicogrammatical function of Theme; from roundabout, considering other textual functions in the clause as New; and from below, paying attention to the role that different ranks may play in the realization of the function under focus. In addition, the paper argues for a re-interpretation of previous SFL accounts of Spanish Theme, on the assumptions of SFL language typology. Based on the analysis of fragments of Research Articles, the paper shows how English and Spanish texts perform similar strategies to maintain the method of development of a text, through the interaction between lexical strings and reference chains with the function of Theme (Fries 1981; Martin 1992). It is shown, however, that the lexicogrammatical realization of unmarked Theme differs between these languages.

A Comparative Study of Evidentiality in Abstracts of English and Chinese Research Articles

This paper is a comparative study of evidentiality in abstracts of English and Chinese research articles. This study chooses 50 English linguistics abstracts and 50 Chinese linguistics abstracts. This paper first describes the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality both in English and Chinese linguistics abstracts. Then, it specifically compares the use of reporting evidentials and inferring evidentials in English and Chinese abstracts. The findings are: the frequency of evidential use in English abstracts is higher than that in Chinese abstracts; the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts are much more various and complex than those in Chinese abstracts. Besides, the analysis and comparison of the use of reporting and inferring evidentials in English and Chinese abstracts shows that the objectivity of English abstracts is higher than that of Chinese abstracts, and accordingly, the Chinese writers may bear higher responsibility for the information than English writers do. This study may be beneficial to the learning and teaching of academic writing in China, and on the other hand, it will enrich the study of evidentiality in academic discourses.

Grammatical realizations of rhetorical relations in different registers

In this paper, we will report on our ongoing investigation of the realizations in the lexicogrammar of English of rhetorical relations in the semantic organization of texts belonging to a range of different registers. More specifically, we are concerned with different kinds of lexicogrammatical realizations of the rhetorical relations of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). In Section 1, we specify our research questions, relating them to complementary research activities. In Section 2, we introduce the theoretical and descriptive accounts that we need as background for the main account in our paper – RST, lexicogrammatical forms of realization, and a contextual classification of registers that we have used in sampling texts from different registers. In Section 3, we will analyze a few text exemplars of different registers, comparing them in terms of their RST structures – and also in terms of the patterns of lexicogrammatical realizations. In Section 4, we will then explore a sample of texts from a larger range of registers – all operating in written and monologic contexts but drawn from a number of fields of activity. In Section 5, we will discuss the results of our very exploratory investigation, and suggest how these results can inform future, larger-scale studies.

A Cross-Disciplinary Study of Evidentiality in Abstracts of English Research Articles

This paper is a cross-disciplinary study of evidentiality in English abstracts. The corpus consists of 200 abstracts of English RAs of four disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, computer and electronics. Firstly, our study presents the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts of four disciplines, and then it compares the cross-disciplinary use of evidentiality from the analyses of reporting evidentials and modal verbs in inferring evidentials. The analyses show significant differences in the distribution and frequency of four evidential types in abstracts of the four disciplines and also show that different disciplinary conventions of writers may influence their choice of evidentiality in their abstracts writing. It is hoped that this study may be helpful to enrich the study of evidentiality in academic discourses. Besides, it may give implications on the learning and teaching of academic writing.

Evidentiality in English Research Articles of Applied Linguistics: From the Perspective of Metadiscourse

This paper investigates, from the metadiscourse perspective, the linguistic phenomenon of evidentiality in English Research Articles (RAs) of applied linguistics. Based on a corpus of 100 RAs, the study first presents its own classification of evidentiality and their specific lexicogrammatical realizations. Then, following Hyland’s metadiscourse model (2005), it examines in detail how different evidential types and linguistic realizations can function as various metadiscourse devices and what roles they can play in the construction and attainment of persuation. The study has shown the multiple metadiscourse functions of evidentiality. It provides a new perspective to understand evidentiality.